Page 4 of Take Me Home

“Sure,” he said before rounding the counter with a turkey and Swiss sandwich and a carafe of decaf. And then he morphed into the kind, gentle café barista he was with everyone else, squeezing Frank’s shoulder. The old man blinked up at him, coming out of his crossword daze, and took his dinner with a grateful smile.

Frank tucked his napkin into his collar so it hung like a bib and bowed his head in private prayer. He looked like a father at the head of the empty table. Though he rarely seemed approachable, engrossed in his word puzzles, he camehereto do them. He chose that big farm table for a reason. She’d never wondered about it before, but now, her heart squeezed for him. Did he have no family or friends? Didn’t he ever want a hot meal, especially on a chilly night like this?

More often than not, Hazel also ate a sandwich for lunch or dinner, but that was merely a convenience because she was already here studying. It wasn’t really eating alone when eating wasn’t the main thing you were doing.

“You want one, too?” Ash returned, distractedly thumbing his phone.

“No,” she said. Swear to God, if her stomach growled…

“Got a date tonight or something?”

“What?”

“Do you have a date later?” He enunciated every word slowly, eyes still glued to his phone. “You usually eat around now.”

This was the weirdest part of their dynamic. When he was on the clock, it was like the whole chair feud and that party freshman year and their tense orbiting of each other the last semester of high school didn’t exist. He served her attentively, knew her usual orders like he did everyone else’s. Sometimes, he even stripped back a few layers of snark and attempted to make normal conversation. If she was feeling particularly starved for human interaction, she let it play out.

Though maybe this wasn’t one of those times. He didn’t look up from his phone.

Hazel chewed her lip and contemplated heading back to her apartment. After her scramble to finish her paper, a restless, buzzy exhaustion had set in. Just last year, she’d have thrown on a short dress and boots and gone to sweat it out at the Fox with her roommate and all the other students drinking and grinding away their stress. But she’d already learned her lesson about going to undergrad bars.

Anyway, dancing wasn’t in the cards. Stress had cinched her shoulders up to her ears, and her back and butt protested all the sitting she’d done in the last week to knock out her final projects. She arched to stretch out some of the tension and mused, through a pitiful groan, every vertebra popping, “I think Frank needs a pet.”

Ash’s gaze lifted to hers then dipped. He stopped scrolling.

Her cheeks heated. Casually tugging her shirt hem back down, she pushed on. “I’m serious. A cat maybe. Or an older dog.”

“Because…”

“He’s obviously lonely. Why else would he come here every day? For your company?”

He flashed her a quick, winning smile and dropped it just as quickly. “Why doyoucome here every day?”

“This is the only place I can get any work done.”

“I’ve been here for three years. You had other places before now.”

“That was in undergrad.”

He waited for her to explain, but when she tried to put into words how working with Dr. Sheffield had overtaken her life, she felt pathetic.

His phone dinged. He muttered, tapped out a message, sighed, and stuck it back in his pocket. Then, placing both forearms on the counter, he leaned in, giving her his full attention.

And Ash’s full attention was…a lot. Somewhere between studious and serial killer-y. She couldn’t look right at him, opting instead to wonder at the marvel of his hair, which she suspected would hold a curl if she twirled it around her finger. She could smell his fresh, citrusy laundry detergent under all the plants and coffee beans.

“Can’t work at home?” he asked.

“You’re one to talk.”

“I’ve already said I don’t like the quiet. What’s your excuse?”

Between her wannabe rockstar neighbor and the train that rattled her windows several times a day, her apartment could serve as an enhanced interrogation site for all the noise she had to put up with. It was all she could afford on her graduate stipend now that her old roommate, Sylvia, had moved to Houston. Ash would probably understand the constraints of thrifty living, considering his own place, his old car, but he at leastlookedput together. He projected a self-possessed ease that was foreign to her, seemed to genuinely enjoy his job here at the café. And if the floor plans she sometimes glimpsed on his laptop were any indication, despite his slacker ways in high school, he’d apparently managed to stick with architecture, which was a challenging five-year program. Whereas for Hazel, school, once straightforward and simple, felt more like a fun housemaze lately. In her rawest moments, she questioned whether she was cut out for a PhD at all.

Not that she would admit any of that to Ash. She decided to treat his question—why did she come here every day—like it was just another of the small, inconsequential ways they needled each other and dismissed it with an eye roll. Her indifference was helped by his phone dinging yet again. He frowned at the screen.

“More bad news?” she asked.

“Eavesdrop much?”

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