Hazel in the Demon's Den

Will had been going crazy ever since Hazel started avoiding him. How angry would she be when she discovered she had rejected him in favor of him?

Maybe this whole thing was a bad idea. He should have come clean in the very beginning, whether she believed him or not. He still needed to come up with a solid explanation for his sixteen year absence though…

After so much hard work he couldn't blow this by saying the wrong thing now. He had been in love with Hazel for the past twenty years and finally had his chance to be with her forever.

Treading lightly had never been Will's strong suit but he had forced himself to be as gentle and nonthreatening as possible around her since the day they officially met. He couldn't push his luck with such a fragile creature.

He would never hurt her but he didn't want her to fear him the way everyone else always had. People told him there was something wrong with him long before he ended up in the mental hospital. His teachers used to whisper about how there was something weird about the look in his eyes.

Will couldn't help it if his true thoughts reflected on his face once in a while. Did regular people have any idea how hard it was to control facial expressions? It had taken him years of practice and he still occasionally slipped up.

In all the time they spent together, Hazel never seemed to notice. Either now or way back when.

Was she simply unobservant or did she not care? He wasn't sure. She was such a lively, curious person. Someone like that should be able to spot that sort of thing. But she had never said a word.

Granted, he was a lot better about it now. He was pretty sure he hadn't made any sort of scary faces when she was around since they got married.

Maintaining her boundaries and not showing his true self was crucial. Will didn't ever want her to find out the whole truth. About his job, his past, or his deep, obsessive love for her. She would almost certainly leave him if she knew and that was the one thing he could never allow.

Hazel could do whatever she wanted as long as she stayed by his side. He would support anything she felt like doing if he could do it with her.

He would act as unobtrusive and friendly as possible, continuing to spoil her and help her dreams come true, until he was able to worm his way into her heart as Will instead of Billy. He was certain she wouldn't leave him if he managed to make her fall in love with him twice.

===

Hazel accomplished an awful lot of drawing in the weeks leading up to the trip to Mexico. She was about halfway through her commissions and had drawn several chapters of Muffincake's comic.

She was far too busy to work on her paintings for the cabin but found herself longing for time to do that instead of draw on her tablet. Painting was by far her favorite facet of art.

When Will came home in the evenings she usually still had to work, stopping only to give her wrist a break. On those occasions they would talk or play pool like before. While she worked, he would sit in the recliner and read a book.

He had long since finished that giant fantasy novel and was reading a nonfiction account of the Civil War. Hazel was amazed how quickly he burned through books. In the time she had lived with him, he had read at least two dozen.

"You really like to read, don't you?" she asked conversationally as she sent a partially completed draft to one of her comic assistants to finish up.

Muffincake had chosen Hazel to be the primary artist, as was her right according to her contract, but the app she was contracted through chose the assistants. They hadn't been hired on until after the original concepts were done but they had formed a group chat on Discord right after that.

elf_off_the_shelf and iheartboybands were better at dealing with Muffincake's mood swings and ever changing demands better than Hazel could ever dream to be. She supposed they had more experience working with authors whose babies got turned into comics.

Elfie and BB, as they went by for short, were indispensable. They didn't joke around with Hazel the way Muffincake did though so they seemed much more professional as colleagues. Regardless, Hazel was getting more used to the eccentric author's ways.

Will answered her question, breaking her free from thoughts of her colleagues. "It's probably my favorite thing to do."

She could respect that. She read a lot too, though she typically did it for the purpose of learning new information than for pleasure. As much time as her husband spent reading, she had the impression he wasn't passionate about it the way she was about art. It was simply something he did to pass the time.

He said one of the things he liked about her was that she was passionate…was Will passionate about anything? Apathetic people and passionate people typically didn't get along since they had nothing to talk about. There had to be something or he wouldn't be so interested in her passion.

He shrugged. "I love to learn but didn't always have the chance to. I was out of school for a while when I was younger. Didn't you say something similar about why you like sugar so much?"

She vaguely recalled saying something about that on their wedding night. He actually remembered something so insignificant?

That wasn't terribly important though. Why had he been out of school? Did he have a serious illness as a child? One of her classmates when she finally got to go to elementary school had been gone for over a year due to cancer.

"I did," Hazel admitted, her head still swimming with possibilities about why he would have missed so much school.

People really did tend to appreciate things they were deprived of more than they appreciated things they hadn't. She could still remember tearing up the first time she had been able to draw with anything other than low quality crayons after getting out of the mental hospital.