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Kendall reacted appropriately—her mouth dropping open, eyes blinking. “Wait—what?”
“Yeah, you heard me right.” I ran my fingers through my hair and crossed my arms. “She was just not going to tell me. And I don’t think she ever would have if this other guy she was seeing hadn’t demanded a paternity test.”
“So you… you weren’t there when she was born?”
“By no choice of my own, no. And after that, it became an intentional choice. I—”
I chewed on my bottom lip, knowing this next part would be difficult. And I wasn’t entirely sure how she’d take it or that she’d even signed up to hear all of this. She merely wanted to get me talking about my exes so I’d stop pestering her about hers. But her eyes were still locked on my face. Concentrating. Waiting.
So I hoisted myself up onto the stage, and I continued, leaning back onto my hands.
“I was young and stupid when she was an infant. I loved that girl from the first second I finally held her in my hands. But for the first year, I didn’t exactly fight to see her as much as I should have. I didn’t know what the hell to do with a baby. Whitney had her the majority of the time back then.
“I still had a year of college left, and as much as I’d like to blame my absence on that, it’s not an excuse. I missed out on a lot of firsts. And then, when Finley was almost two, there was… an incident.”
“What happened?”
I inhaled. “Whitney was taking a nap, and Finley wandered over to the neighbor’s house wearing nothing but a soggy diaper. And it took—” I swallowed, struggling to find my voice. “It took the police three hours to figure out who she was, where she lived. And I guess their home was in such disarray that they decided to remove Finley, temporarily.
“She came to me in the middle of the night. They took her from her mother and brought her to my clueless ass. I was not prepared for that.”
“What did you do?”
I rolled my eyes at myself. “Called my mom, what else?” Kendall smiled warmly as I continued. “She stayed with us for the first week. Helped me pick out everything Finley would need. Helped me… console her. She tried to convince me to move back to Woodvale then, but I’d just gotten hired at the publishing house and couldn’t leave.
“I had Finley full-time for ten weeks while Whitney got her shit together. In the meantime, Traci—Whitney’s mom—had her a couple days out of the week while I worked. I had a girlfriend watch her the other days.”
Kendall pulled herself onto the stage with a grunt to sit beside me. “Well. It sounds like you had a big support system.”
“I did. Still do. Minus the girlfriend,” I said with a small chuckle. “But after that incident, after my brief time being Finley’s full-time dad, it was hard to go back to the way things were—to barely seeing her. So that’s when I stepped the fuck up and fought to see her more often. With my dad’s help—he’s a lawyer—I was able to get the courts to agree to let me have her every other weekend. And then Whitney actually wanted me to take her more and more, so I did. I finally did what I should have done in the first place, and I became the dad she needed me to be. A year and a half too late.”
“But look at all you’ve done for her now,” Kendall said. I felt her hand on my arm, her fingers curling around my elbow. “She is so lucky to have you, Mason.”
“Maybe. But I will never forgive myself for not being there for her. Sometimes I’m grateful she was too young to remember that I wasn’t there—she doesn’t know. But I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to her.”
I folded my hands between my legs and looked down, deciding I’d said enough now. I became aware of just how dark it had become in that gym now that the sun was beginning to set—there was an almost-eerie, orange glow cast on the gym floor at center court. I could still feel Kendall’s hand touching my arm through the flannel fabric, her fingers tucked between my bicep and torso.
I turned to face her, my heart skipping a beat when I saw her face. The corners of her eyebrows lifted in a sad expression, and her eyes were welling up with tears. “Fuck, I’m sorry,” I said, my words coming out in an involuntary whisper. I pulled my elbow back, the one she’d been clinging to, and placed my palm against her back. “I didn’t mean to unload all of that on you right now.”
“No, Mason, I’m glad you did.”
A single tear dropped from her eye, and it took everything in me to keep my hands exactly where they were—one still on her back, the other fidgeting with the frayed denim around my knee.
Kendall lifted her hand to her face to wipe the tear away herself, a faint smile gradually spreading across her lips. With the sweetest chuckle, she said, “Think you could call my dad and teach him a thing or two?”
I held her gaze, wanting to ask her to open up to me like I just had with her—but I didn’t want to cause her tears to flow any more than they already had. As Kendall stared back at me in silence, my heart threatened to pound right out of my chest. All I could think about was how good she smelled, how soft her lips looked—and how much I wanted to kiss her and put my hands in her hair.
So I leaned in, closing the distance between us, and did exactly that.
chapter fifteen
kendall
Mason Reed is kissing me.
Those were the words repeating in my head again and again—the only thought I was capable of producing as Mason’s mouth met mine and his palm rested against my cheek. I let out a soft gasp against his lips, parting mine for him as his hand made its way to the back of my neck. His fingers were entangled in my hair, his other hand sliding lower down my back. Mason Reed is kissing me.
I reached out for something to hold onto, settling for the open front of his flannel shirt to pull his body closer. An involuntary moan escaped from somewhere in the back of my throat when he slipped his tongue into my mouth. I’m kissing Mason Reed.
