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The hubbub of the restaurant makes conversation easy.
We don’t have to focus on each other, we can focus oneverything else. Including our waitress, a probably forty-something woman with blue eyeliner who keeps touching Mason’s shoulder before she walks away.
“She likes you.” I watch her saunter toward the kitchen window and begin an argument with the chef who looks like he’s the Incredible Hulk as a fry cook, burly muscles, and a hamburger flipper to boot.
“I can tell.” Mason sips his strawberry shake.
A man unafraid of pink.
I like that about him. “You should ask her out.”
Mason snorts. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Am I?” I quirk an eyebrow.
A lopsided smile creeps onto his lips.
Damn his lips. So kissable to look at. And tokiss. If I was…allowing myself to consider that possibility.
“She’s a little old for me, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. If women can go after older men, why can’t men go after older women?”
“Fair point. Although I’m not sure if the blue eyeliner is really doing anything for me.”
“Who said she put it on to do something foryou?”
Mason laughs. “Fair. I know she didn’t. She’s pulling it off, it’s just…” His eyes settle on me. “Not mything.”
Don’t look at me like that,I want to say. But can’t.
I know what his “thing” is. He likes fresh-faced and glowy. He always liked it most when I had no makeup on. Not that he wanted me to amend my face to his liking.
I could tell in the way he responded to me.
Mason was always passionate, always made it known how much he wanted me.
But it was when I had my makeup off, behind closed doors, in those private moments that Mason really gave me his all.
I almost want to lick my lip gloss off and remind him what it was like.
We finish up our lunch and start to window shop.
The small town of Pollard has all sorts of weird, niche shops that I’m sure are bustling with tourists and vacationers in the summer months. A store for candles, one for leather goods, one that specializes in jams and jellies, where Mason and I partake in taste testing all the options, agreeing that rhubarb jam is absolutely abhorrent to the taste buds.
“Oooh. A bookshop!” I point at one of the signs shaped like an open book.
“Books. Ugh.” Mason rolls his eyes.
We’ve been in this exact position before. Me, wanting to go into a bookstore, him, resisting.
I grab him by the arm. “Just because you can’t read doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a bookshop.”
He gawps at me. “I resent that remark!”
With a laugh, I pull him toward the shop.
Mason has a master’s degree. He can, at the very least,read. But he’s never been a reader for fun, unlike me. He prefers to throw on the television or play some video games to unwind.
