Page 113 of Dirty Ink

Rachel

Happy endings aren’t supposed to feel so shitty…are they?

Mason’s fingers played gently with mine in the little space between our crossed legs on the bedsheet. Lamplight cast over us softly like the glow of that Exit sign on the stage where we sat surrounded by half the takeout in Vegas. Our knees didn’t touch, but occasionally when one of us sighed deeply or reached for another biscuit, they brushed briefly.

The rain still pattered against the window in Mason’s bedroom, but it was gentler now. It had lost all its rage. It fell peacefully. Dripped down the windowpane instead of lashing it like a whip.

My fingers shook slightly as I took up my saucer and teacup. The lemon ginger tea had been diluted with so many refills from the pot resting beside us on a handwoven coaster that the lemon had lost its bite, the ginger its spice. Still I embraced the warmth as I raised it to my lips. I swirled it round my tongue, searching out what I knew had been there before.

“Well, that’s it then,” I said in the silence. Mason had been chasing crumbs along the rumpled sheets; he looked up at me. I said, “I mean, I forgive you. And…and you forgive me.”

I hadn’t meant for the words to come out like a question. Like I wasn’t at all certain of what I was saying. Just like I hadn’t meant for my fingers to shake. My lip to tremble. My heart to doubt. I wanted to be sure. To believe. To grab ahold of my happy ending with wide open arms and never let it go.

But I couldn’t.

Mason nodded in lieu of speaking.

I swallowed. I glanced down into my teacup. The teabag, stripped of its colour, hung limp in the hot water. Nothing left to give.

“Right?” I said when Mason’s pinkie hooked around mine. It should have felt like a key turning in a lock. It should have felt like safety, security. But I couldn’t help but feel that I was trapped on the wrong side of the door. That I was being locked out. That the waters were rising around my feet and the way out was being shut forever.

Mason smiled at me. I searched his smile. I searched it for any of the doubts I was feeling. Any of the sense of unease I felt. I searched to see if in his dimples I could see a shadow like the one over my heart. A foreboding that things weren’t over yet. That we weren’t past the storm. That we were smack dab in the goddamn middle of it.

But Mason’s smile was the smile I remembered. Full of life. Full of love. Eager and allusive, playful and seductive. It was the smile I saw at the bar that very first night. It was the smile I couldn’t remember from our wedding. It was the smile of my dreams.

“I forgive you,” Mason said. I think I would have felt better had he not added after a quick, harsh breath, “I mean, how could I not? Knowing what I know now.”

I’d told him everything. How I came back to find him gone. How I discovered his number disconnected. How in my mind there was nothing to wait for. Part of me wished that he had yelled. That he had screamed. That he had accused me of not believing in us. Of not trusting him. Part of me wished that he said that I took the first chance I got to get out of there. That he asked how long I waited before cleaning out my apartment and skipping town. That he insisted that I was always going to leave, that I was never going to stay with him, that if it hadn’t been then, it would have been some other time. Further down the road. But inevitable.

Part of me wanted him to break something. To put a fist through a wall. To shatter a lamp, overturn a dresser, tear a door from its hinges. Part of me wanted to cower beneath his rage, shiver in the trembling length of his towering shadow. I wanted the dam to break, to finally fucking break.

I wanted it to sweep me away. Maybe forever.

But it was my turn to smile. My turn to say, and believe it, really truly believe it, “And I forgive you.” I too added, after a second’s hesitation and an inhale like I’d forgotten something very important, “Really, how could I not?”

His nan was in the hospital. She raised him when his mother left. She was his rock in a world that kept knocking him off his feet. He’d had to go. Fear and panic throw thinking straight out the window. I believed him when he said he considered leaving a note but felt he didn’t have the time. My heart broke with him when he told me how he just missed an earlier flight that could have gotten him there in time to say goodbye. I felt his anguish over that hesitation, over those precious minutes lost. And I went through the same what ifs that he had: what if he had just run out the door with his passport and credit card? What if he’d thought just to send me a message in the cab instead of pausing there, anguishing there at the doorway? Or what if he’d never met me? What if he’d gone back with his friends? What if he was fifteen minutes away instead of fifteen hours?

How could I not forgive him breaking his phone? How could I not understand the grief and anger and devastation that had to escape somehow, that had to get out? How could I not pity him that moment? How could I not believe that given that same situation, I would shatter my phone in the exact same way?

If I’d had a parental figure in my life, ever, they would have been my everything. But I’d never had everything to lose. Not till Mason. I understood the pain of losing him. Maybe it would have been healthier shattering a cell phone. Maybe it would have been easier than shattering myself instead.

“I mean, you came back,” I said when Mason continued to look at me.

My fingers fidgeted almost nervously with the lip of the teacup beneath his gaze. I wondered if he was searching my face the way I had searched his. Was this little happy ending of ours failing him somehow, too? That probably would have been the thing to say. To say: “There’s still something missing. There’s still something we’ve left unsaid.”

“You came back for me,” I said, “and you built Dublin Ink for me and there’s nothing more you could have done.”

Mason’s fingers interlocked with mine. He twisted my hand back and forth. I smiled till he dropped his gaze. We’d bared our souls to one another. Opened up about everything. Been honest about everything. Held back nothing. Or maybe that was just what we told each other. Maybe that was still what we both just wanted to believe. What was simpler to believe, easier to believe.

“And so you forgive me?” Mason asked.

I had a smile ready for him when he lifted his eyes to mine once more. I squeezed his hand. I tried to connect to him, to speak to him where words failed, to make him believe my answer.

“Yes.”

Because I did. Something was wrong, something was off. But my forgiveness of Mason was not. My forgiveness of him was full and complete and real. Maybe the problem was he couldn’t believe me. Maybe the problem was that I couldn’t believe him.

But that was not the problem we were going to talk about. Everything but, it seemed.

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