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She sipped the hot cocoa. “I’d love that. Actually, do you have a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt I could borrow, too, maybe?
I loved the thought of her wearing my clothes. “Yeah, of course.”
Digging into my luggage, I searched for something clean. I’d gone through most of my stuff by now, but I still had a fresh pair of socks and an unworn pair of sweats. I was out of clean T-shirts, but I held up one I’d only worn for a few hours the other day.
“This is all I have left. I wore it, but just for a few hours. It wasn’t to the gym or anything.”
Hazel smiled and took the clothes from my hands. “Pretty sure I’d wear your smelly gym clothes if it meant I got to change into something comfortable and sit down and enjoy this hot chocolate.”
While she went into the bathroom to get changed, I poured myself a cup of hot cocoa and clicked off the TV. Hazel emerged a few minutes later, looking freaking adorable. The first smile I’d had in days spread across my cheeks. “You look really cute.”
She glanced down. My sweatpants were rolled at the bottom and top. The T-shirt was so big that she didn’t even really need the pants to cover herself. It hung down to her knees.
“You’re sweet. But I think I could’ve worn this with my mud mask as a deterrent.”
I grinned. “Trust me. You wearing my clothes is the exact opposite of a deterrent.”
She smiled.
I looked around the room. It was nothing but bed and a lone chair stuck in the corner. And the chair held my luggage, because otherwise there wasn’t even enough space for me to walk to the window.
“Do you want me to move my luggage so you can sit on the chair?”
She shook her head. “Can we just sit on the bed together? Maybe I can put my feet under the covers? They’re still freezing.”
“Yeah, of course. Let’s get you into bed and warmed up.”
Hazel climbed up onto the bed and sat with her back against the headboard. She snuggled under the covers and patted the bed next to her. “Come sit.”
I took a seat, but toward the foot end of the bed, and I lifted the blanket from the bottom. “Give me your dogs. I’ll warm them up.”
Taking one of her little feet in my hand, I could feel the cold radiating through the socks. So I rubbed like I was trying to start a fire with a stick through friction.
“How’s that?”
“That really works!”
After a while, I put down the first foot and picked up the other. “So talk to me. Did something happen between you and Brady tonight?”
Hazel sipped her hot chocolate and nodded.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Not really. He just…” She looked down at her hands. “I don’t think I was doing either of us a favor by spending time with him. He apparently thought my head was in a different place than it was and... Well, I told him I couldn’t see him anymore. Not until I figured some things out.”
It was like I’d been carrying around a boulder on my shoulders and someone had lifted it for the first time. She wasn’t saying she’d ended things for good, but at least I didn’t have to sit around wondering what the hell the two of them were doing anymore. That had been tearing me up inside, particularly today. Though I couldn’t imagine Brady took that news well, especially on his birthday. It hit me for the first time that Hazel would never have gone over there on Brady’s birthday to break things off, so something big had to have gone down between them.
She was still avoiding my eyes, so I leaned forward, put two fingers under her chin, and gently lifted. “What did he do?”
Hazel frowned. “How do you know he did something?”
“Because I know you. You weren’t going to hand him his walking papers on his birthday unless he fucked up royally.” The muscle in my jaw flexed. “Did he…hurt you in any way?”
She looked down again. “No, I’m fine.”
We sat there quiet for a few long moments. A hundred different things spun through my head. He had to have done something pretty shitty. The longer she kept quiet, the worse the shit I imagined became. If he laid one hand on her…
Hazel reached over and covered my hands. I looked down to find them in fists. I watched as she gently unfurled my fingers and laced her hand with mine.
“Matteo?”
I looked up.
She smiled, looking into my eyes. “Could I come home with you?”
“Home with me? You mean to Seattle?”
She nodded.
“I’d love that. When?”
Her smile was sheepish. “I’m free tomorrow night. If that’s not being too forward.”
“What about your work?”
“I only have one more shoot tomorrow. Then things are always dead for me until after the holidays. That’s the way the schedule runs in my business. Since I do mostly school photography, I’m really busy at certain times, like the beginning of the year and the spring. Then I get a lot of downtime when the schools go on break.”
