“You shouldn’t be near me, Mason,” I said, my eyes watering and my body shaking. “I’m broken. I thought I was over this, but…”
I cried. Mason held me tight, saying and doing nothing, but I didn’t know why he did. He was just holding an empty husk of a body, a worn-out shell of a woman that had lost everything within her on that cruel night a decade ago.
No, Mason deserved better. I tried to pull away, but Mason held me in place.
“Why?” I said.
“Because…”
Mason didn’t say anything else. But it was oddly reassuring. Not enough to change my mind, but at least things weren’t being made any worse.
“It’s not going to get any better, Mason,” I said. “And if it does, it will be so slow that we’d practically be saving ourselves for marriage before we had sex.”
Mason just kissed me on the top of the head. Damn him seemingly knowing exactly what to do right now.
“That’s OK,” he said. “You take all the time you need. I’m going to fucking kill Eduardo when I see him. I’m going to get you the justice you deserve. And I promise you’ll be safe.”
“And then what?” I said. My words may not have suggested it, but I was actually feeling better. “Are you going to be patient? Are you going to accept me? That takes time, Mason. Even if you kill him tomorrow, I—”
He stopped me, gently turned my head, and kissed me on the cheeks and pulled me in for a tight hug.
“You take all the time you need,” he said, “as I know what it’s like to take time to get over something. You never really get over it. But eventually, you learn to embrace it, to accept it, and to let it be.”
I pulled back, put my hands on Mason’s shoulders, and looked into his eyes. I knew he was telling the truth. I didn’t know what the truth was—even our date hadn’t said as much—but I knew there was a truth to him that suggested he knew what he was talking about. I did not think that meant he’d been gang-raped, butsomethingawful had happened.
“OK,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t,” he said, “don’t ever say that when it comes to something like this.”
“But—”
“Apologize if you deliberately hurt me or do something wrong,” he said. “This is not something you have control over. I can tell, Rachel, and I know your past. You don’t just snap your fingers and move forward.”
I nodded.
“I don’t ever expect you to bullshit your way through sex,” he said. “As good as I know it will be, I don’t want it half-assed. I only want you to do it if you want to. You got it?”
I grimaced and nodded.
“So don’t ever apologize again if something like this happens,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
I had to laugh at that. Why the hell would I, half-naked and having gone through a traumatic flashback, be hungry?
But I got the point. He wasn’t asking if I wanted to get food to fill my stomach. He was asking if I wanted to get food to fill the space.
“I could use a good home-cooked meal,” I said, “maybe a Mason specialty?”
“Well, I’ll have to see what you have here, and I’m not a top chef by any means, but I think we can try.”
I smiled. I felt myself leaning into him, and just as we had an hour or so before, we shared an intimate kiss. It was a gentle passion, but right now, that was all I could trust myself to offer him without breaking down and losing myself.
And maybe that was just good enough.
“I’ll go into the kitchen and start preparing whatever I can find,” he said. “I’ll call you when the food’s ready, or you can come out whenever you want.”
He stood up, kissed me on the forehead, and walked out of the room, wisely giving me some space to have to myself. I felt kind of embarrassed that this had happened. It was my worst fear that we’d start to get intimate, only for something embarrassing and awful like this to happen.
But Mason hadn’t just handled it well. He’d handled it perfectly. I would not have had an ounce of blame for him if he’d said, “I understand, but I can’t do this,” and walked out, never to see me again. Hell, I expected him to. I certainly would have anticipated it from any other guy.
