Page 9 of Arrested By the Deputy

Lucille Wagner:Knowing him, probably got scared and backed off. Men do that.

There's forty-some comments, most of them speculating, a few of them outright asking Hazel in the comments if everything's okay, which she hasn't answered. I hand the phone back to Deacon without a word.

"You gonna say anything?" he asks.

"Nope." I shake my head, and take another bite of the protein bar.

"Didn't figure." He shrugs, tucks his phone away, and doesn't bring it up again, which is the only reason I don't tell him to fuck off. But it sits in my chest the rest of my shift, low and heavy, the same way it's been sitting there for days.

I keep running through it in my head, trying to figure out where I went wrong. The date was good. The kiss was good, better than good, if I'm honest with myself. Lunch the next day was good too, right up until those women started filming us at the diner. I remember the way her face changed after that. Not mad, exactly. It just turned quiet, and guarded in a way she hadn’t been the night before.

I should've caught it then, but I didn't.

By the time my shift ends, I've made up my mind. I'm not doing this anymore, not the guessing, not the one-word texts,not scrolling through a Facebook group that seems to know more about my personal life than I do most days. Instead of going home to shower, I climb into my truck, and drive to Butter My Biscuit.

It's mid-afternoon when I walk in, the bell over the door announcing me the same way it did that first night I hauled Hazel out of Earl's grocery store. Tiffany's behind the counter, wiping down the display case, and her eyes go wide when she sees me.

"Oh," she says. "Hey, Cal."

"She in the back?"

"Yeah, but?—"

I don't wait for the rest of whatever she's about to say. I walk past the counter and through the swinging door into the kitchen, and that's where I find her.

Hazel's standing at the big steel table, piping something onto a sheet of cookies, her hands steady even though the rest of her looks like she's barely holding together. There are dark circles under her eyes that weren't there a week ago. Her hair's pulled back in a messy bun, flour smudged along her jaw, and she's got that look people get when they haven't slept right in days, that hollowed-out, running-on-empty look I recognize because I've worn it plenty of times myself. Fuck I’m wearing it now.

She glances up, sees me, and her hands still on the piping bag.

"Cal. I'm working."

"I know." I stand there in the doorway, feeling like I take up too much space in her kitchen. "I need to talk to you."

"I really don't have time right now, there's an order?—"

"Hazel." I say her name soft, but I don't move. "There’s always going to be an order, please, talk to me. Please."

Something in my voice must get through, because she sets the piping bag down, presses her palms flat against the steeltable, and finally looks at me straight on. Up close, it's worse than I thought. She looks exhausted, wrung out, like she's been running herself into the ground on purpose so she doesn't have time to think about anything else.

"You look like hell," I say, before I can stop myself.

She snorts, rolling her eyes. "Thanks, that's exactly what a girl wants to hear."

"You know what I mean." I close the distance between us, and she doesn't step back, which I take as a good sign. I reach up and brush my thumb along the smudge of flour on her jaw, just to have a reason to touch her. "Talk to me. What's going on? You've been ignoring me for a week."

"I haven't been ignoring you. I've been busy." She shrugs, crossing her arms over her chest in a protective gesture.

"Hazel." I’m losing my patience, but I keep my voice steady, because I really fucking like her.

She closes her eyes for a second, like she's bracing herself. "Fine. I've been avoiding you a little. Happy?"

"Not even close." I slide my hand from her jaw down to her shoulder, and I feel her exhale, like she's been waiting for somebody to touch her like this for days and didn't want to admit it. "Why?"

She's quiet for a long moment, long enough that I start to wonder if she's going to answer at all. Then she pulls back, just enough to put a little space between us, and wraps her arms around herself.

"I saw the posts," she says. "In the group. Everybody's got an opinion about us. Everybody's watching, waiting to see what happens next, like we're some kind of show they get to weigh in on. And I keep thinking about how this whole thing started because your boss told you to take me to dinner to fix your image. And I don't want—" Her voice cracks a little, and she stops, presses her lips together, tries again. "I don't want you tokeep being nice to me because the whole town's decided we're supposed to be together. I don't want to be your redemption story, Cal. I want to be wanted because you actually want me, not because Facebook does."

There it is. The thing she's been sitting with for a week, finally out in the open. I didn’t know for sure that she knew my boss asked me to apologize, but it makes sense. People gossip, and there are dozens of people that come through here every day. Hell, knowing my boss, he probably stopped in to make sure I did a good job.