She didn’t need to turn around to know it was him. She’d always been able to feel when he was near. And her heart, which had already been pounding a mile a minute, somehow found a way to lay on more speed. So much so, she was dizzy by the time he sat beside her, his big shoulder brushing hers.
She breathed in his scent, that wonderful combination that was uniquely Mason. But she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She knew the answer to her question would be in his eyes, and she wasn’t ready to see it. For a moment more, she wanted to live in the wonderful gray area of not knowing. Of having hope.
“Welcome home,” she whispered quietly, her eyes trained on the hammock as it gently swayed with the wind.
“Thanks. It’s good to be home.”
She closed her eyes when his deep voice slid through her, warm and welcome as the memory of a hot island night.
“Gellman?” she asked after opening her eyes, but still not looking at him.
“Getting his just deserts even as we speak.”
She nodded. “Good. I’m glad. And your wound?”
“Healing up. Yours?”
“Same.”
For a while after that, they sat in silence. She would swear she could hear the solidthudof his heart. Or perhaps that was simply the rush of blood between her own ears.
“You should keep this, Alex,” he finally said.
She glanced over to see the Big Papi baseball in its brand-spanking-new display case. She’d had her parents ship both items to Chrissy’s house, and then had brought them to Wayfarer Island to place on Mason’s bed.
She’d wanted him to see them first thing so he’d know she was a woman of her word. So he’d know that, no matter what his answer, shewouldcontinue to be his friend.
“It means more to you than it will ever mean to me,” she told him. “I want you to have it.”
A sigh whooshed from the depths of his chest. “You make it impossible. You know that, right?”
She studied her bare feet. Water had sluiced off her bathing suit and down her legs to create wet marks on the wooden tread. “Make what impossible?”
“Everything!”
That had her glancing into his eyes. Those bluer-than-blue eyes that could be ice cold or as hot as blue flames.
He looked awful. As Doc would say,Like ten miles of bad road. And yet she thought him the most beautiful man she’d ever laid eyes on.
“I’m not good with words,” he said quietly. “I never know what to say or how to say it. And the truth is, I didn’t have any great epiphanies or sweeping changes to my personality while I was gone.” Alex felt the first tingles of warning. This wasn’t going to go the way she’d dreamed it might. “But I did think about you all the time.”
And just like that, the warning tingles turned into sparkles of hope.
“No.” He frowned. “That’s not right. ’Cause that would imply I was actively doing something. I wasn’t. You were justthere.”
“Like an annoying gnat,” she supplied helpfully.
“More like the air in my lungs or the heart in my chest.”
Okay, and it was official. Hope. Sparkles and sparkles and sparkles of hope.
“Then Doc said something to me that made me start to wonder if it’s possible I could have the life I want for myself.”
Sparkles and sparkles andsparklesof hope!
“I do love Doc,” she managed, even though her breath had strangled in her lungs. “He’s great at cutting through the crap. What did he say?”
“That I’m not as fucked up as I thought I was.” Mason shook his head as if that wasn’t quite right. “Or that maybe I am, but it’s normal given all I’ve been through.”
