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I opted for a whispered, “See you tomorrow, Mason,” before I turned and walked away.
When I got home, I looked for Jamie, knowing she’d want the details. However, I only found Daya, curled up on the couch with Titus and in the middle of an episode of The Office. She paused it when I came in.
“Where’s Jamie?”
“Working a late shift at the Walgreens in Indy,” Daya answered, scratching a growling Titus between his ears. “She said she might stay there another night depending on how tired she feels after.” Daya barely opened her mouth as she spoke, and I considered sitting down beside her to ask if she wanted to talk about it. But she unpaused her show, giving it her full attention—so I bid her goodnight.
After a shower, I slipped into some silk pajamas and got under my covers—but not to sleep. I opened my text conversation with Mason, scrolling through the flirty messages he’d sent and lingered on some of my favorites—like the one in which he’d ask me to sit on his face and the text assuring me he’d know how to handle my ass. I slid my hand down the front of my underwear. My anxiety medication often made it difficult for me to get myself off manually, but when I imagined it was Mason’s fingers touching me instead, I came in record time.
chapter sixteen
mason
Kissing Kendall felt like an out-of-body experience. My senses were overwhelmed—the sweet taste of her lips, the way her hands fisted the front of my shirt to pull me closer, and the soft moan that escaped from her mouth when my tongue found hers—it was dizzying. Intoxicating. She made me feel like a teenager kissing his first love.
But knowing I could never do it again—it was like being abruptly awoken from the most delightful dream. It wasn’t fair.
Finley was coloring at the dining room table with my mom when I got home—and when I pulled a handful of acorns out of my pocket and placed them in front of her, she insisted on painting them immediately.
“Mason.” My mom watched Finley drag out her little containers of acrylics from the cabinet in the dining room, humming as she laid everything out for us. “Shouldn’t she get a bath and get ready for bed?”
I shrugged. “She had a bath last night. She’s fine.”
“Isn’t it part of her bedtime routine, though? She needs a more consistent nighttime ritual to set the tone for bedtime, don’t you think?”
“Kids don’t need a bath every night. It’s not good for their skin.” I thought I’d read that somewhere once, at least.
My mother sighed as she pushed in her chair. “You always had a bath every single night growing up.”
I wasn’t in the mood for a debate, so I decided ignoring her was the better option. I sat in the chair next to Finley and crossed my arms, watching her get to work. She knew to lay out newspaper beneath her work area after we’d learned the hard way that summer just how irate my mom could get when a speck of paint tarnished her table.
She should’ve seen our kitchen table in our apartment in Indy—we’d turned it into a mini artist’s studio.
I allowed Finley to paint for about twenty minutes, knowing my mom was half-right and she’d need to start getting ready for bed soon. Otherwise, it’d be impossible to get her out of bed on time in the morning. She showed me her favorite painted acorns—one of them represented her with blushing pink cheeks, and another one was meant to look like me, with a blond beard, delicately painted on with the finest, most precise paintbrush we owned.
There was a third acorn sitting on the newspaper alongside the other two—and this one had well-defined eyelashes. I turned it to face me, careful not to smear Finley’s paint job. “So if that’s me and you, is this one grandma?”
“Nope!” Finley snapped her paint set closed with one hand, swirling her paint brush around in a little jar of water with the other. “That’s the mommy one.”
Oh.
It felt like something heavy had been placed upon my chest, forcing every bit of air from my lungs with an exhale. The mommy one. She’d said it so casually, too, like I was a complete idiot for not understanding it right away. She whistled as she hopped down from the table to put her paint set away in the cabinet, leaving me to sit there staring at her little family of acorns with my chin in my hand.
Was she imagining it was Whitney?
The question was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t make myself say her name out loud. Not now. Not when Finley was literally skipping as she put away her art supplies.
“Uh oh, Dad,” she said, twisting her arm around so I could see she was covered in purple and yellow splotches. “Looks like I’m gonna need a bath.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Let’s make it a quick one, okay?”
She just raised an eyebrow at me, a gesture I returned. We both knew there was no such thing as a “quick” bath.
By the time Finley was tucked in, it was forty-five minutes past her usual bedtime. As for me, I tossed and turned all night, my mind swirling with thoughts of kissing Kendall—by 3:00 a.m., I almost had myself convinced I’d dreamt the entire thing. Imagined it.
And when I finally shook her out of my mind, I kept hearing Finley’s words again and again. The mommy one. Those three little words were just another painful reminder of what was missing from our lives.
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