She pushes me back into her car, gets in on the other side and drives. She may talk. I don’t know. I don’t care. I just sit there and stare out the window at nothing. The sun’s going down when we start the long, steep climb to her house. My place is on the beach, but as Hazel can’t swim and prefers trees, she lives in a forest halfway up a mountain.
After Hazel marches into her house and I follow because she has the car keys and I have nowhere else to be, I discover that she has an enormous bottle of tequila from Mexican duty-free. Drinking it seems like an excellent plan. Although I haven’t gotten drunk since college, I haven’t forgotten how, which explains why at midnight I’m lying on Hazel’s bed. It’s sort of like sinking into an enormous cloud—if clouds were made from gray and purple fur. Or maybe that’s the tequila. I squint, trying to make out one pillow from the next, but give up.
“Here.” A bottle of water materializes in front of my face. Hazel’s bed obviously has superpowers. “Take these.”
Hazel unfolds a hand in front of my face, revealing two aspirin. As her one hand blurs into two, the room swims, but I manage to snag her offering. I swallow obediently and then take the trash can she holds out to me.
“Puke here,” she says.
Hazel’s always practical.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Hazel’s not much of a talker, not when it comes to feelings, so I appreciate the effort.
“I need to know why it happened,” I mumble into the pillow. “What I did wrong. Why I wasn’t enough.”
“Failure analysis.” I feel Hazel relax beside me. I’m asking for logic, not feelings. She’s back on solid ground. “Something to think about—maybe this isn’t about whether or not your marriage was good enough for Molly. Maybe this needs to be about whether or not your marriage was good enough for you.”
“We were supposed to love each other,” I whisper. “I was supposed to make her happy and keep her safe.”
I turn my head so I can see Hazel’s face. A little frown puckers her forehead as she thinks about what I’ve just said. She’s not the best talker, or so she argues. She looks for connections, finds patterns, breaks things down until they make sense. So I need to hear what she has to say about my marriage. If she thinks it’s over.
“Wrong,” she says. “You have to ask, was the marriage good enough for you? Where are you going to set the bar on your happiness? What works for you? Were you happy?”
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? I’ve had a plan my whole life. I’ve hustled, I’ve executed, I’ve proven every single day that not only am I hungry, but I’m also willing to work.
And yet it wasn’t enough.
Somehow my hand is tangled up in Hazel’s and it feels perfectly normal to tug her down onto the bed beside me. “You’re the best.”
Right. We’re almost-not-quite holding hands. I let go and try to pretend that didn’t happen. Whatever it was. Instead, I reach around and attempt a friendly slap on the back, but I’m a drunken elephant and she’s mouse-sized, so instead I face-plant her into the pillows.
Christ. Shoot me now.
“Fuck. Did I kill you?” I palm the back of her neck and tug her up. Brown eyes stare at me. Hazel has pretty eyes. Perhaps my new best friend, Tequila, has unearthed my inner poet?
Yeah. Unlikely.
Hazel’s hand curls around the back of my neck. Her fingers squeeze gently and then she shoves me ruthlessly down. “Pass out, you nut. Wake up tomorrow.”
CHAPTER TWO
Present day
MY NEIGHBOR IS hosting one hell of a party. The bass beat sets my bed to vibrating harder than the time I took a girlfriend to a Motel 6 and we tried out the Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed. Sadly, those beds don’t seem to be standard hotel-room issue anymore. I open my to-do app and make a quick note to track one down—that would make an awesome wedding gift for Dev and Lola.
That party next door is their engagement party, although they’re not actually hosting it at Dev’s house. Dev, Max and I bought houses in a row on the same beach in Santa Cruz. It sounds weirder than it is. We’ve known each other since freshman year at UC Santa Cruz. As the first to move into our dorm, Devlin King and I had been standing in the three-bedroom oceanfront suite wondering how a bunch of broke freshmen guys had scored the best digs in a dorm full of seniors when Max blazed in and explained the secret. He’d hacked into the campus housing software, rigged the lottery in our favor and then picked out this place. High-handed? Sure. Borderline felonious? Maybe. But Max had good intentions and I’d decided we could housebreak him and teach him a few moral values along the way. Win-win. The three of us had become best friends, then billionaires. We’re the kings of Silicon Valley, California. There’s nothing we can’t buy or hack.
Still.
Who would have thought Max, the king of kink, would be hosting a celebration of true love and happily-ever-after? Let’s get real—he earned a fortune coding an app that hooks up horny people for hot, meaningless, no-strings sex. Quite frankly, milestone celebration planning is usually my bailiwick, but the fact that I’m still reorganizing my life after my divorce means I’m not in the fiesta mood. Ergo, Max stepped in when Dev proposed a personal kind of merger to his CEO girlfriend, the kind that comes with a diamond ring and a church date.
When the noise next door swells to deafening proportions, I plug in my headset and turn up the volume on my playlist. Coleman and Reed is scheduled to close an important round of funding for Silicon
