A Smile as Sweet as Poison Read online

  “No,” Hazel agreed. Those had to come from her, as a prelude to the inevitable end. She toed her sneakers on as best she could. “Well… no point delaying.”

  Ward caught her by the elbow as she made to wobble out of the room. “If it goes badly…” He couldn’t seem to finish the thought.

  Hazel waited and waited, hoping to hear him say something sweet or forgiving. Nothing came. “If it goes badly,” she echoed, “we’ll figure it out.”

  Ward might have helped her keep the secret, but she was its architect. This whole mess began and ended with her.

  The floorboards creaked underfoot with every shambling step. Hazel didn’t spur her feet. She would’ve stayed in her room and wallowed quite gladly if not for the knowledge that she owed Dylan an explanation. She had done enough harm in Dunby, anyway. Maybe there was some poetic justice in ending whatever they had in this town, a way to somehow contain the blast radius of her numerous bad calls.

  She saw Dylan through the kitchen window, which had been left slightly ajar. His broad shoulders were slumped beneath a white shirt, smoke billowing into the cold night air from the glowing red point of his cigarette.

  Hazel shivered as she stepped onto the back porch. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “Old habits,” Dylan replied, noncommittal. After a moment’s hesitation, he held out the cigarette, filter first.

  She took it wordlessly and filled her lungs with nicotine. It helped. Nothing was eased, nothing was made any better by the tangy flavor lingering in the back of her throat, but somehow it helped.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Hazel looked out onto the darkened garden, tilting her head back as her gaze found the old, gnarled elm at the rear and traveled beyond it. In LA, there would’ve been too many lights from cars, and billboards, and street lamps to see the stars, but out here in the middle of small town America, the sky was perforated with millions of beacons streaming through the pitch dark canvas.

  “I was afraid you’d judge me,” she confessed.

  “Is that how little you think of me?” Dylan asked softly. It would’ve been better if he raged and shouted. “You told Ward.”

  “She didn’t,” Ward said, equally low.

  Hazel turned. He was standing on the threshold, hands in his pockets, lovely and cold, just like Dylan. And just like Dylan, she couldn’t hook her hands in his flesh and make him stay. She wanted to believe she had enough pride left to abstain from that degree of desperation.

  “Think I heard Buddy moving upstairs,” Ward added. “You still want to get breakfast?”

  “Yeah. I know a place that’s open twenty-four-seven.” Besides, this wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have with her brother present.

  Dylan sighed, a far cry from enthusiastic. “Then let’s go.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The roadside bar was mostly empty so early in the morning, so late at night. The regulars, beer-bellied and exhausted after a hard night’s drinking, had all drifted home to their beds. A couple of late night stragglers remained—one dozing over a glass of bourbon under a busted spotlight, another adding and subtracting with a pocket calculator and a paper ledger.

  Hazel flexed her sneakered toes as she rested her weight against the bar, waiting for their breakfast to be assembled. The most she could say about the quality was that she’d never been sick the few dozen times she’d come here.

  She thanked the barkeep once she’d finished loading a tray with coffee and milk, a measly assortment of toast and little plastic packets of butter. “I can take it from here.”

  “You sure?”

  Hazel nodded. “Brings back memories.” She shook her head when the barkeep arched her pierced eyebrows. The tray weighed and the coffee threatened to list in its plastic pot. Hazel adjusted, balancing the lot in the palm of one hand as she swung the other out. “Here you go…” Just like old times.

  It was a far cry from freshly grilled sausages or blueberry pancakes at Maud’s, never mind Marco’s generous fare, but it ticked the one box that mattered—they had privacy. And coffee.

  Hazel filled all three cups before she sat down into the wooden booth beside Ward and pulled her knees up to her chest. The first sip nearly scalded her tongue. No matter. The coffee was bitter and dark, precisely what she needed to shake off the drowsy afterglow of the Xanax.

  “Been a while since Mom had to drug me into obedience,” she mused. “Guess I’ve lost the habit.”

  Dylan met her eyes, his gaze intense. “You were hyperventilating.”

  “I know.”

  “She was trying to help.”

  “Please don’t defend her to me,” Hazel said, wishing her voice didn’t quake so pathetically. She didn’t mean to beg. “You don’t know her like I do.”

  “Seems there’s a lot I don’t know about you.”

  “It would seem that way.”

  Dylan slid his coffee closer to himself and drummed his fingers against the chipped edge. “So enlighten me.”

  When they’d first met, after he and Sadie had their one and only tryst, Hazel had fought hard to convince herself that his deep dark eyes did nothing to set her heart beating a little faster. In the months since, she had grown lax and lazy. She had stopped trying to inoculate herself against his magnetic pull.

  It was going to hurt so much more to be cast aside.

  “My first boyfriend filmed us having sex,” she blurted out. “We broke up shortly after. Our short film wound up online almost immediately.”

  “He uploaded it.”

  Hazel shook her head. “His laptop was stolen.”

  Beside her, Ward made no effort to disguise an incredulous snort.

  “In the interests of full disclosure, you should probably know it wasn’t just sex,” Hazel went on. “He’s the one who introduced me to all the kinky stuff you two know and love.” She made herself hold Dylan’s gaze no matter how much she might have wanted to look away.

  “I see.”

  I bet you do. “Yeah.” Hazel took a sip of coffee and tried not to think about Sadie, or Sadie-and-Dylan, or Sadie-Dylan-and-Ward, the three of them like a picture-perfect ad for a multicultural, polyamorous dating site. “The movie’s still out there if you look for it,” she added. “I can probably find you a link.”

  “Actually, it’s not.” Ward studiously avoided their eyes. “I may have strong-armed the webmaster into taking down the material and had the posting account suspended.”

  Hazel swallowed hard, her throat tight with a mixture of relief and gratitude. “Thank you.”

  Ward shrugged. “I can’t promise it won’t come out again. It’s the Internet. There may be copies, downloads.

  “The original,” Dylan put in, drumming his knuckles against the table. “Malcolm…that’s the guy who filmed you?”

  Hazel nodded.

  “And where could we find this Malcolm?”

  “He’s in business with my dad now. Whitley family values, you know…” Hazel exhaled in a rush. It took her a moment to notice she was the only one laughing. “Why, planning to bust a cap in his ass?” she scoffed. “You’re not a thug, Dylan.”

  “You don’t know what I am.”

  The steel in his voice cut her off. He didn’t look as if he was teasing. If anything, he reminded her of the Dylan who sometimes materialized into being in the playroom—the same one who could bring her to her knees with a single word.

  There was surely something wrong with Hazel for experiencing a flicker of arousal at the similarities. Here Dylan was, offering to defend her honor like some caveman, and she actually found that exciting. It was wrong and regressive.

  It was also undoubtedly hot.

  “I wouldn’t dismiss our boy here too fast,” Ward murmured, low but not so low that Dylan wouldn’t overhear. “Wasn’t so long ago he did all his talking with his fists.”

  Dylan thinned his lips as though he was struggling to resist a smile. He reined in the impulse a moment later. “I can
’t believe you knew about this and didn’t say anything.”

  “I made him promise,” Hazel said. “That’s on me.”

  Dylan cocked an eyebrow as if to say, you think? If he’d been anything like Malcolm, he would’ve followed that up with a sigh, a headshake, some reminder of how disappointed he was in Hazel. But he wasn’t, so he merely sat back against the wooden booth and played with a milk capsule. “I don’t know how you’re still into—the stuff we do. After that. If someone betrayed me like that…”

  Hazel pretended she didn’t feel Ward stiffen beside her.

  “There were others,” she replied instead, keeping his focus squarely on her. “We had this little group…like a not-so-secret society of kinksters. It was pretty cool for a while. We’d wear leather and corsets, and boast about how extreme we were, all while playing at subservience to our boyfriends.” Something she hadn’t thought to question at the time because Malcolm and the other self-confessed, so-called Dominants had spoken so eloquently about why their girlfriends belonged on their knees. Why they needed to be kept in line. “You should’ve seen us—Catholic school uniforms paired with studded collars.” Hazel rolled her eyes. “We thought we were so edgy.”

  “Was Sadie part of it, too?”

  “Yeah. For a while. But routine and Sadie don’t mix. I think she got bored. She quit not long after I did.” Sadie just didn’t give up her studies by the same token.

  Then again, she didn’t have a Malcolm to run from.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” This, from Ward, sounded more bewildered than judgmental. It was the only way Hazel could stomach the question.

  “No point,” she answered breezily. “I mean, sure, there’s a lot of talk about consent in the community. Even back then, with all the weird philosophical circle-jerk bullshit, they trotted out the safe words and the aftercare…”

  “They read a website and they thought they knew,” Dylan scoffed.

  Hazel didn’t bother contradicting him. “You know what else they talked about? Drama. Especially how it’s tacky to create it. Say, by going to Student Services. Or the police.”

  “Not sure this qualifies as drama,” Ward said grimly.

  “Doesn’t it?” Hazel looked down at her cup. “What could I do? Expose everyone to public ridicule because I couldn’t take what my boyfriend was dishing out? Everyone who knew us, everyone I’d played with knew I’d consented,” Hazel pointed out. “They’d heard me say it again and again… It’s not like I stumbled headfirst into the lifestyle and couldn’t get out. This was—is—on me. I had a responsibility to state my limits and protect myself.”

  Pretending otherwise would soothe her wounded ego, but Hazel had no illusions. She’d made her bed.

  “And the video?” Dylan blew lightly over his coffee. He must not have noticed that the eddies of steam had long stopped wafting from its surface. “Was that your responsibility, too?”

  “I could’ve refused.”

  “But you couldn’t stop him using it once it was out there,” Ward observed tersely. “Actually, I’m with Dylan. Where did you say we can find this guy?”

  Hazel chuckled, more tired than amused. She downed the dregs of her coffee, grimacing at the taste. “So now you know. What happens next?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you fly off to LA and leave me here? Do we all go together…?” Hazel shrugged. “The possibilities aren’t exactly endless. You’re still angry with me, I can tell. And I get it, you know? I get—not wanting to mess around with a basket case like me. I’m not entirely sure why I like the things I do, either.” But if you’re going to rip off the Band-Aid, do it quick. She squeezed her hands around the cup, leaching its fast fading heat. “The reason I’ve all but moved in with you guys? I was scared. When the video surfaced again and I couldn’t get it deleted, someone posted my address online—”

  Dylan frowned. “Why would they do that?” Then, to Ward, “Did you know about this?”

  “To intimidate me?” Hazel suggested, before Ward could take another bullet on her behalf. “Turns out they don’t think much of women who pose naked for them to fap to.”

  “We’ll have to see what we can do about that,” Ward muttered, confident in his ability to move mountains.

  Hazel shook her head. “Why would you even bother? There’s a chance I’ll wake up one of these days and go all vanilla on you…”

  “Okay,” Dylan replied.

  “What?”

  “I’m okay with that.”

  Hazel frowned. Her gaze bounced to Ward, but his expression was unreadable, no help at all.

  Dylan forced her attention back to him when he placed a warm hand over her wrist. “I’m okay with not knowing, with maybe stopping… I want you, Hazel. Don’t much care how. I just wish you’d trusted me with…all this.” A wave of his hand comprised her sordid history, the home movie, and all the lies she’d told to keep them hidden from Dylan.

  “You’ll change your mind,” Hazel insisted. “One of you.”

  She included Ward in whatever it was they were doing because this didn’t work with two. Not anymore. Ever since Dylan had returned from Shanghai—with wounds of his own—the scales had shifted. Ward had protected her privacy while he could. He’d revealed things that Dylan might not have wanted her to know.

  No one around the scored wooden table was blameless.

  Hazel turned her hand in Dylan’s grip, lacing their fingers. “You can’t let me off the hook as if…as if it doesn’t matter. If you knew what was on that video, you’d be out of here in a heartbeat.”

  Dylan looked across to where Ward was lodged between the wall and the backrest of the seat he shared with Hazel. “You’ve seen it.”

  “I have.”

  “What do you think? She right?”

  Ward didn’t so much as hesitate. “We’ve done worse.”

  “Not the same thing,” Hazel insisted. It couldn’t be, because Dylan and Ward were nothing like Malcolm, because they’d never made her feel as if she had to please them or else face consequences.

  “No,” Dylan agreed, “it’s not. But if you think I’m going to dump you because some idiot kid treated you badly, you’re wrong.” He squeezed her hand. “You want to end this out of some misguided sense of doing the right thing, be my guest. Walk out. We won’t chase you.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Ward quipped, his voice strained, as though he didn’t trust Dylan to walk out onto this ledge with her.

  Hazel rested a hand on his knee before she realized what she was doing. She shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that her mind was already made up.

  * * * *

  “You’re leaving?” Mrs. Whitley stood in the doorway of Hazel’s childhood bedroom, her arms crossed over her chest.

  Her back turned, Hazel hummed in acquiescence. She didn’t bother folding her clothes, stuffing them into the rucksack instead however they fit. She expected her mother to object to her packing technique, to demand she stop and start over.

  No such complaint came.

  “The keys are on the dresser,” Hazel replied obliquely. “Dylan and Ward are waiting downstairs. Buddy agreed to drive us to the airstrip.” Then it would be goodbye, Missouri, hopefully for the last time.

  Her heart constricted when she thought of little Bea and Rhonda, but they could always come visit Hazel in California. It would be easier for everyone.

  “What happened to St. Louis?” her mother wanted to know.

  “I’m not really in the mood to relive my misspent youth.” After last night, I think you know why.

  “Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

  The walls of Hazel’s bedroom were too close, the fluffy carpet too thick for a volley like that to echo. She ignored the stab of hurt in her chest. “If you can’t see that I’m happy with Dylan and Ward, that’s your problem. I won’t try to convince you.” That had always been a lost cause. It was about time Hazel accepted defeat and moved on.

  She b
alled up her white dress and punched it into the overflowing backpack. “I’ll call you when we land—”

  “Is running away how you want to spend the rest of your life?” Mrs. Whitley asked sharply.

  Hazel rounded on her. “Why do you keep saying that?” She didn’t raise her voice, the energy for a shouting match sapped to nothing by only handful of days of playing pretend. “Running away…when we both know that’s not what I did.”

  “Do you prefer dropping out?”

  “I prefer…” Hazel mirrored her mother’s stance almost without noticing. It wasn’t until she shifted her weight to one foot and cocked her hip that she realized they were near perfect copies of each other. “I would’ve preferred going back,” she confessed. “Or going somewhere else. Plenty of good schools in the Midwest… But you made it very clear that wasn’t about to happen.”

  “We don’t raise quitters in this family.”

  “So you threw me out.” After years of clinging to the comfortable lie that she, like Sadie, was the one who elected to leave Dunby, it was a relief to put the truth into words.

  Mrs. Whitley pursed her lips, the lines around her mouth deepening like scratches on a windowpane. “I gave you a choice.”

  “Yes, go back to your abusive boyfriend or get out of my house.”

  “That’s not—”

  “I paraphrased.” Hazel looked down at her feet. “You know what the sick part is? I actually considered it. Maybe Malcolm was right. Maybe I needed to be taught a lesson, you know?”

  Her mother scoffed, turning her white-blonde head. “Don’t be crude.”

  “Oh, that’s crude? The part where he told me I didn’t love him enough if I didn’t gag on his dick—that’s just fine with you? What about him spanking me until I couldn’t sit down and laughing when I said I couldn’t take any more?”

  “I don’t want to hear it! Whatever disgusting—”

  “That’s the point, Ma.” Hazel smiled. “You don’t want to hear it. Because if you did, how could you stand inviting him into your home? How can Daddy work with him, right? So it’s best if you think I’m lying or I led him astray or something…” A startled laugh tore free from her throat as the penny finally dropped. “I’m disposable.”