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Mason:I think I’ll need you for the rest of my life. But I’m afraid you won’t stay.
“Fuck.” Boner gone, I pressed the call button.
“Hi,” Mason murmured, sounding miserable as fuck.
“Thank you for sharing your feelings with me,” I said, hoping he would be encouraged to continue doing so. “It means a lot to me that you trust me with what’s going on right now.”
“I-I haven’t told you everything. I’m not sure I can.”
“There’s nothing you could say that will change this magnetic pull between us—I can promise you that.”
He didn’t reply, so I settled in to occupy his mind and help ease whatever continued to bother him over the decision he had to make about pressing charges—if he hadn’t already.
But I believed he’d have shared with me straightaway if he’d set his mind on either course.
“Are you in bed?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Naked?” I added a hint of teasing to my tone.
He chuckled lightly, a beautiful sound that lightened the heaviness in my chest. “Yes.”
“While I’d love to get all nasty over the phone with you, we both need some serious rest. How about you tell me a favorite memory of yours?” I suggested while closing my eyes to imagine I lay beside him rather than on my couch without extra body heat to snuggle into.
He gave me one of his. I returned in kind.
After sharing my third story about spending a weekend at Ogunquit, Maine as a teenager, I realized Mason had fallen asleep. His puffed exhales over the line made me smile. “Goodnight, precious man,” I whispered. “You make my heart so happy, and I can’t wait to see where this path we’re on leads us.”
I just hoped he allowed us a chance to walk together.
Chapter11
Mason
Ican’t stop.
I blinked at the text from an unknown number, far from fully awake. The pinged alert had woken me up since my cell lay on the pillow beside my head. I’d fallen asleep to Jasper’s soothing voice.
Rather than replying to what must be a wrong number, I rolled from bed and shuffled into the bathroom, my brain fuzzy from sleep. While emptying my bladder, I looked around the small room, actually taking note of the clutter. The filth on the mirror and faucet. When had things gotten so out of hand?
A frown dented my forehead as I realized Jasper had seen my apartment at its worst. While I’d never been super anal about keeping a clean home, I wasn’t a damn pig.
My bathroom suggested otherwise.
So did the kitchen.
I had a pile of dirty dishes to wash. My coffee pot had been sitting…far too long with that inch of liquid in the bottom. Grimacing, I glanced around, realizing too many plates and bowls filled the sink to make cleanup easy. The countertops were a mess as well, leaving no room to shuffle dirty shit from the sink so I could even run the damn water and wash them.
Tension coiled in my stomach, the onset of crippling anxiety. I was going to shut down…
I spun on my heel and collapsed onto the couch, gently cradling my pounding head in my hands.
Coffee. A walk.
I needed to focus on putting one foot in front of the other.
My disaster of an apartment could wait.
