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I blinked, unsure if the air that escaped from my lips was a sigh of relief or disappointment. Maybe both. “Probably not.” Though I meant those words, it pained me to say them. His eyes were still laser-focused on mine, reading me, so I added, “That kills me a little, to tell you that, but it’s probably for the best if we just… don’t.”
Mason nodded slowly. “Yeah. I know.” He glanced down at the bat in his hands before taping it to the door. “Things just got really tough with Finley, too, and I need to focus on that.”
“They did? What do you mean?”
He sighed. “She had a rough weekend.” He paused, glancing over his shoulder at Elijah, who had gone back to coloring. He could have still been listening, though, so Mason lowered his voice when he said, “She had a little bit of a mental breakdown Saturday night when I got back. So I called her old therapist this morning—she’s going to start seeing her regularly again.”
“Oh, that’s good. The therapist part. Not the mental breakdown part.” I held my hand over my heart. “What prompted this to happen?”
“I wasn’t home, and she panicked. She started talking about her mom and she even brought up my mortality and—” He shook his head. “It was rough, Kendall.”
“I’m sure it was. What about you—are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine.” He shrugged and pulled his eyes away, turning back to our project. But I grabbed his arm and made him look at me again.
“Just saying that you’re fine doesn’t make it true.”
“I know.” He stared down at my fingers wrapped around his muscular forearm. Feeling awkward about this gesture now, I slid my hand down to his wrist and squeezed him there before letting go.
“Maybe you should talk to someone, too,” I said.
“Maybe.” He held up the bat in his hands—this one had particularly large pupils, much bigger than all the other bats. “Look, this one has seen some shit.”
“Mason.” I waited for him to look at me again before I continued. “Promise me you’ll talk to someone.”
He could have made another joke. And I could tell from the way his lips parted before closing again that he almost did. Instead, he turned away and said, “Okay. I promise.”
We continued taping bats for a few more minutes without speaking to each other. Mason talked to Elijah, cracking jokes at him in an attempt to get the kid to laugh the way he did at the festival, but he had no luck. “I’m onto you, mister,” Mason warned him. Finally, a tiny giggle.
When it was almost time for the rest of the children to return from PE, Mason and I sat down by my desk and drank our coffee. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “So, are we going to be able to bounce back from this? I can keep volunteering and it won’t be weird?”
I slowly shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’ll be that weird. I don’t want you to stop.” There. An honest answer.
“Okay. Can I still bring you coffee?”
“Absolutely.”
He rubbed his beard. “Do you want me to return that—thing—you gave me?”
“No, Mason. Those are yours to keep.”
“Like a… fall festival souvenir.”
“Sure,” I said with a laugh.
We smiled at each other as the hallway outside my door filled with the kids’ excited voices. Maybe we really could go back to normal. We got all of that sexual frustration and tension out of our systems and we could leave it in the past. Do the responsible thing and move on.
It would be fine.
chapter twenty-seven
mason
All I could think about was how badly I wanted to bend that woman over her desk and fuck her from behind.
But that was probably frowned upon.
Especially after the conversation we’d just had. We’d reached a mutual agreement—what happened between us was a one-time thing, never to occur again. We both had our reasons. I understood hers, and she seemed to accept mine.
