ChapterThirty-Nine
Mason
“Do you feel like you’ve failed the team recently?”
His phone buzzed in his pocket, vibrating next to his thigh, but it was the exact wrong time for him to pull it out and look at it.
Sometimes, Mason pulled his team members in for a talk in his office, but often, it was better to have these kinds of talks outside of it.A lot of them became more talkative when they had something to focus on outside of themselves.And with the amount of time Drew had been spending in the gym or training lately, that was where Mason knew he could catch them.
The question was direct because Mason wanted to see Drew’s reaction more than he wanted to hear the other man’s response—the wince, the way his gaze averted, the way he hunched in for a moment.
Yeah.He felt like he’d failed them.
“No, I’ve done everything I was supposed to do,” Drew said, as if repeating the words by rote.He’d certainly heard them enough times from Lincoln, David, and Mason.He cast his gaze around the weights in front of him, as though he was focused on trying to decide which he was going to use.
Picking up two of the hand weights, Drew grunted, rolling his shoulders.
Mason felt his phone vibrate in his pocket but ignored it.Drew had been putting this conversation off for a long time now, and Mason wasn’t going to let it keep happening.
“You don’t sound very convincing when you say that,” Mason pointed out, picking up two lighter weights.There was a reason Drew’s call sign was ‘Sporty’, and that was before he’d started his aggressive workout sessions after David was shot.
“What do you want me to say, Mason?”Drew started doing bicep curls, glaring at the wall rather than looking in the mirror.Probably because if he looked in the mirror, Mason would have been able to meet his gaze.“Do you want me to say I fucked up with Cassidy?That I should have reported her flat tire earlier?Stayed on her ass for every second after that, even though we thought her ex couldn’t possibly know where she was since we found the trackers?And then maybe David wouldn’t have been shot?”
He rolled his shoulders, shaking his head, as his pace picked up.He had perfect form, but he was moving too quickly.
“Do you want me to say that I let some asshole get the drop on me, and now we don’t know if we can trust one of our own team members because he might have been the one to knock me out?And we still don’t know what Devlin was doing in our office?”
Mason remained silent because he knew if he spoke, Drew would shut down again.Probably for good this time.Right now, he was getting up some steam, the words coming fast and furious and probably without too much thought.His guilt had been pent up for a while now.It was no surprise to Mason that Drew blamed himself for Cassidy almost getting kidnapped and David being shot, even though no one else did.It didn’t surprise him that Drew was pissed off and feeling guilty about being knocked out in the office and not even having a glimpse of who his attacker was.
“Do you want me to admit that I’ve fucked up, over and over and over again now, and that I haven’t been able to make it up to the team?”
Puffing, Drew growled as he put the weights back on the rack with a loud clang.
“What do you want me to say, Posh?I fucked up.I failed the team.I can’t be relied on.Is that what you want to hear?”He looked away, his mouth shutting, jaw clenching, as he cut himself off from saying anything more.
“I would like to hear you say that you did do everything right and mean it,” Mason said gently.“And that it could have happened to anyone, and maybe we were lucky because if not for you, we might not have even known someone was in the office.”
“Sure.I did everything right.And it could have happened to anyone.But it happened to me.”Grabbing his towel from the side of the rack, Drew flipped it over his shoulder and stalked out of the room without looking at Mason again.
Mason sighed.That could have gone better.Could have gone worse, too.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his phone.One missed call from Audrey.A smile crept across his face, unbidden, which was odd.He wasn’t the type of person to smile just because he was getting a call from someone.Especially when he wasn’t sure how she was going to feel about the voice message he’d left her.
He’d realized this morning that he wanted Yasmine to hear about him and Audrey from him before the gossip train caught up with her.He didn’t have anything to hide, not really, and he was pretty sure she wasn’t going to be surprised by the news, but it seemed courteous.But he’d also wanted to let Audrey know he was doing that.Unfortunately, she hadn’t answered any of his calls or texts—probably too busy at the bakery—so he’d left her a voicemail about what he was doing.
As much as he’d wanted to wait to be able to hold back from Yasmine, he knew how quickly word of him and Audrey was going to spread after last night.The whole team knew.If Drew didn’t go home and tell Naomi, and David didn’t go home and tell Cassidy, and Lincoln didn’t go home and tell Ashley, Mason would eat the barbells in front of him.There was no way to put the cat back in the bag after last night, and someone was going to say something to Yasmine, probably sooner rather than later.
He’d wanted to be the one to do it, and once he’d had the thought, he hadn’t been able to wait.
Hopefully, Audrey would understand.If not, he would apologize and explain why.
She hadn’t left a voicemail, so Mason was about to call her back to do exactly that when David came into the gym, closing the door behind him.Raising his eyebrows, Mason put his phone back in his pocket as David faced him and cleared his throat.
“Can we talk?”
“Of course.What did you want to talk about?”
Considering Drew had just left, it could be about him.Or possibly Zeus.But most likely it was about…
