“After Ma passed, I know I got… a little obsessed with school.”
“Don’t I know it?”
“Because I knew she wouldn’t have wanted me sitting around, wasting what God gave me. Because she told me that all the fucking time. That’s why I applied to the best schools and worked my ass off. She wouldn’t have wanted me to settle or sell myself short. Hell, it felt like a miracle that I was even accepted to fucking NYU. And being on my own for three years in New York was scary, and I did want you out there. You don’t know how bad I wanted you out there—”
“I told you that I would come.”
“You threatened to leave this place to be with me. That was the problem, Mason. I couldn’t ask you to uproot your life—the life you loved—and live with me because I was afraid. That would have defeated the whole purpose of me being out there. I had something to prove. To Ma, to my parents, to you, to me. I needed to know I could do it on my own and didn’t need my big strong Mason to come and rescue me every time I was scared. How could I be a whole person if I was always relying on you to be there for me? Ma wouldn’t have been proud of that man. I wouldn’t have been proud of him. And you sure as fuck wouldn’t have been. NYU taught me that I could do it on my own…and that I had to do it on my own.”
It was something Mason had always known, and in a way, something he feared when Chase first left the dairy. Chase was a scared, mousy kid, and Mason would have moved heaven and earth to keep him safe. But what had seemed like such a romantic gesture when they were kids was clearly problematic as adults and in Chase becoming his own person.
“It was my fault,” Mason said. “I just was so protective of you… and I wanted to keep you safe.”
“And that was great, and I loved you for it, but I couldn’t be a whole person if Ineededyou to be there.”
“I understand that, Chase. More so now than I could have back then, and in the same way, I needed you, too. You were my rock through Ma, and I needed to have time to find my own strength again. And I have since you left.”
Mason was surprised by his own admission, but it brought him relief to acknowledge that Chase’s leaving hadn’t been all bad for either of them, and that in some ways, it had helped them both heal.
Chase frowned. “I’d never really thought about it until I was all alone in my little dormitory, thinking about how easy it would be to call you and beg. Knowing you would have been there in just a few hours, as quickly as you could. But I knew that wasn’t the answer… and how horribly wrong it would have been if I asked you to be with me for no other reason than that I was a coward. That’s why I was drawn to law school. It was this scary, intimidating challenge, but it was an achievable one. And it felt like I would have been shitting on everything good that had happened to me if I didn’t go for it. And I knew Ma couldn’t have been proud of me if I didn’t.”
“I get that. And my Feisty always liked a challenge,” Mason said wryly.
“I just wanted to be someone who could offer something of value to the world. To know that I wasn’t just some naïve kid who you had to spend your life protecting. Or the worthless kid my parents always acted like I was.”
“You were never a worthless kid.” Mason’s tone was filled with rage. It wasn’t directed at Chase, but at those bastard parents of his. “You offered a lot to me… to this family.”
Cold silence.
“I fought for us,” Mason pressed. “When Pa was trying to talk us out of getting married, saying we needed more time, to wait until after college, I stood up to him because I believed nothing could ever tear us apart. We’d been together for so long, and if Ma showed us anything, it was that we had to cling on to the things in this world that mattered to us. For me, that was you. And when you walked away from us, I had a very hard time… for a long time after. I’d be lying if I tried to pretend that I’ve ever gotten over it.”
Chase nodded, his face trembling as his eyes watered.
“I thought you wanted me to be honest,” Mason said as he approached him.
“I do want you to be honest. But do you think what I did was wrong? Still? Even after all these years?”
“Am I supposed to be happy that my husband left me?”
“I did what was right for both of us… because you wouldn’t do it.”
“Of course I wouldn’t have done it. I was in love with you.”
Chase turned away from him, but Mason put his hand to Chase’s face and urged him to look at him. “And I don’t care how much you don’t want to hear that right now because I’m not ashamed of how I felt. I’m not ashamed for how much I wanted to be with you.”
“But you remember how we got. We were at each other’s throats. You were talking about leaving the dairy and—”
“—and starting a life with you.”
Chase shook his head. “You would have been miserable.”
“Not as long as I had you.”
“That’s easy to say now, but look at the life you have. It’s so much better than anything you could have had if you were with me. This is where you belong. I always knew that, and you did too. That’s why we were always fighting. I wanted to go to law school, and you wanted to be on the dairy. When we talked about forever, we were young and thought we were invincible… that we could make it work. But there came a point when we both realized the world wasn’t that easy to control.”
“We could have worked it out long-distance.”
“You were the one who said you couldn’t do that. That you had to leave the dairy. That you were going to come and live with me because you couldn’t stand to be apart any longer.”
