Hot Boss - Anne Marsh Page 0,10
her hair is always a well-trimmed, ruthlessly flat-ironed cap. The only thing more meticulous is her makeup. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen Hazel look like a mess. Frat parties, college bars, beach trips, house moves—Hazel’s hair and makeup is always on point.
“Three weeks ago.” She stretches her arms over her head in some kind of yoga pose. I mimic the move. It’s not bad at all for working the kinks out of my shoulder.
“And?”
She flops forward, stretching like a cat. “He wasn’t second date material.”
Her voice is muffled by the duvet.
“Did you introduce him to your family?”
She turns her face to look at me. “Do I look crazy?”
Three years younger than me, Hazel is twenty-nine, staring down the big three-zero. And while she’s made it perfectly clear that she doesn’t care about this milestone date, her mother, her aunties and her three sisters care. She’s their baby, the maverick and the only one who wasn’t either an English major or a liberal-studies major. The Coleman clan live crammed into a series of small cottages five blocks from the Santa Cruz beach on family land, and in every single one of my encounters with them, they’ve reiterated their desire for Hazel to move home, preferably with a husband and multiple mini-Hazels in tow.
Once a week like clockwork, someone emails her a link to a small house on Amazon or a caravan that “doesn’t count as a house because it’s on wheels”—think taco truck with curtains. Her mother is a poet, one sister teaches English at the local high school, and another is homeschooling her two kids and leading prison writing workshops. Hazel, on the other hand, doesn’t get nuances, poetry or metaphors and her fridge-poetry-magnet set is used to make shapes. They’re fun, they live life loud and even though Hazel’s a bit of a cuckoo in the nest, they love her back even if they don’t get her. They love me, too, which Hazel claims isn’t at all unexpected as she’s yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like me.
“If I’d introduced him, they’d have had us engaged by the time we’d finished discussing the weather. If he didn’t sprint for his car by that point, my mom would have booked a nice beach for the wedding. They don’t get that I could just be using the guy for sex.”
“For a bunch of free spirits, they do have some hard limits,” I admit.
“There is no casual hookup sex.” She waves a hand dramatically. “They just want me married and settled and that’s the last thing I want.”
“I miss marriage,” I admit quietly.
“Molly?”
“No, not her specifically, not anymore. It’s just...”
“Having someone?”
“That,” I agree. “I miss the closeness, the intimacy, the sex.”
This earns me another snort-chuckle. “You goof. You have two out of three with me. We just don’t have sex.”
Before I can stop myself, my brain gleefully goes there. To the land of Hazel-and-Jack-having-sex. I don’t care if pundits claim all guys imagine having sex with their best friends if those friends are girls. This is the first time I’ve ever imagined naked Hazel and I don’t like it. Not really. Or maybe I like it too much. I need to be able to work with her.
Hazel dangles my phone in front of my face. “Pick someone and get laid.”
“Not a chance.”
She laughs as I shove the phone under my pillow because I’m not taking chances. Hazel is fully capable of choosing a date for me.
“We both suck,” she announces. “How can we make so much money but be so bad at meeting people?”
I don’t budge from the pillow. Hazel plays dirty. “It’s a gift.”
Hazel, who’s never still to begin with—unless she’s reading, in which case she might be mistaken for dead except for the frantic flick-flick of the pages—bounces to her feet. The mattress shakes. I rescue the champagne just in time.
“List time!” she cries.
She produces a black Sharpie from somewhere and writes Jack’s List of Requirements across my bedroom wall.
“Describe your dream girl. Five adjectives. Go.”
I take a pull from the bottle. It’s not as cold as it once was.
“No way.”
“Don’t make me pick for you, mister.”
Fine. “Loyal. Trustworthy. Strong. Happy. Honest.”
Hazel scrawls my words on the wall and then frowns. “Are you looking for a girlfriend or a pet?”
Holy fuck, I am boring.
From the way Hazel eyes my bedroom wall, she’s done the same math.
“You should try something different,” Hazel says. “But we can work on that later. Let’s talk about what