Page 98 of Take Me Home

She shoved the remaining clothes into her bag. Just like last night, she forgot about the cut on her palm, and it stung when she lifted the strap. This pain was what finally made the tears spill over. She was so damn tired of crying.

She held out her uninjured hand, eyes cutting to her phone on the bed beside him.

He picked it up but didn’t give it to her. “Don’t leave. Not like this.”

“Please, give me my phone.”

He shook his head again, kept shaking it, like this was the only gesture, the only thought available to him—no.

Hazel pulled the phone from his grasp and shoved it into her back pocket. She turned to his door. “It hasn’t even been a week. We barely even started this.”

“So, what? Shit got a little uncomfortable, and now that’s it?” He came up behind her, pressed his hands flat to the door on each side of her shoulders, caging her in. He wasn’t touchingher, but she felt the warmth of his body behind her. How many times had she wanted him to press against her like this, wanted the relief of that contact? If he wrapped his arms around her again instead of just holding the door shut, she didn’t know if she had the strength to resist.

She felt his breath on her ear when he asked, “Last night you were falling for me, but now you’ll just turn it off?”

She shook her head, helpless.

“Hazel.” A plea. Her body wanted to stay, wanted to sink into his arms. Her heart begged her to turn around.

“Hazel, please.”

She grabbed the doorknob, willing him to unblock the door. Willing him not to.

“Fuck,” he said, voice brittle. He rocked his weight into his palms, making the door creak on its hinges. He stayed there for long seconds, trapping her.

Every moment that passed cemented her words.Take it back, she thought.Don’t let this happen.But she couldn’t speak. She neededout.

Finally, Ash pushed himself back. His bare feet shushed across the carpet, away from her.

“I just need some space,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” he bit out from somewhere behind her, bitterness in his voice. “I’m sure that’ll fix everything. Thousandth time’s a charm.”

“You know me so well,” she agreed, matching his cold tone. “I guess you should have seen this coming.”

Then she opened the door and walked out.

Chapter

Twenty-Three

In the minutes after Hazel left his room, Ash paced. He texted, knowing she wouldn’t respond. He paced some more.

The blazer Hazel had worn last night lay rumpled on his floor. He balled it up and threw it into his closet. The soft impact was completely unsatisfying. He threw his shoes in after it, and they smacked against the closet wall.

Then, he hoisted up the box of ornaments he’d taken back from her house and let it fly. It sailed into the wall above his nightstand, contents raining down onto the table, his bed, the floor. A plastic ball ornament rolled across the carpet and stopped at his feet, his ignorantly happy eight-year-old face on the inserted picture beaming up at him. He kicked it, and it shot straight at the water cup he’d filled for Hazel last night.

“Fucking great,” he muttered at the wet spot on the carpet. Destruction of his own belongings would not extinguish the burning anger in his chest. Some part of him knew this. But the tiny release of so much pent-up, suffocating tension promised more relief. He spotted the wooden baseball bat propped in the corner.

Ash hadn’t held one in years, hadn’t even played intramural softball in college. He lifted it, rotated it in a circle with a simple turn of his wrist, tucked it to his shoulder. It felt good. He was strangely ahead of himself, warning,Do not put a hole in awall, while also drunk on the weight of the bat, how it seemed to have been left there for this exact occasion.

And then he looked up at the Popsicle stick chandelier he’d made the year before he met Hazel, before his father got sick, before he’d ever really wanted something he couldn’t will into existence. He swung. The sticks burst from the impact, a candyless piñata raining splinters down over him, scattering across the carpet. For one heartbeat, it was deeply satisfying, this breaking.

In the next moment, however, on his reckless follow-through, the bat smashed into the model of Maggie’s house on the dresser, crunching through Cosette and Isabel’s meticulously rendered pink-and-purple bedroom and sending the whole thing onto the floor.

“Shit.” Anger flared again, this time at himself, at the bat, at Hazel, at the model for being in the wrong place. It was badly damaged. His first impulse was to obliterate it entirely, take out all the anger still pulsing in him. But the feeling waned, smothered by heavy regret. An ache pressed into his throat. He let the bat fall to the carpet.

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