The door cracked open, revealing Mason on the other side. “Kaz is picking up dinner. I wanted to see how you’re doing.
I raised my hands up before dropping them back on the bed. “Honestly? I’m drained. I don’t even have the energy to pretend otherwise.”
His soft smile conveyed his understanding. He approached the bed. “I hear you. You know you don’t need to pretend around us, right? It’s okay to not be okay.”
A bitter smile graced my lips. “I feel really goddamn stupid. And embarrassed.”
Mason pointed to a spot on the edge of the bed. “May I?”
I motioned for him to sit down, shifting my legs over to make space.
His brows pulled together as he studied me. “You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about. This wasn’t your fault.”
“But wasn’t it?” When he opened his mouth to argue, I lifted my hand. “Hear me out. I know it wasn’t my fault Cory attacked me. Clearly, he’s seriously disturbed and could have done what he did to me to anyone. But it’s not like I didn’t know he was dangerous. There were enough red flags to put me on my guard, and yet I didn’t do anything smart to protect myself. You’re probably thinking why didn’t I?”
It was a question I hadn’t stopped asking myself since I woke up today, and now, I needed to get the answer off my chest.
“Because I was too fucking proud. Too proud to ask for help or tell my sister anything. She would have solved the situation like this,” I said, snapping my fingers to emphasize my point. “Too proud to admit to anyone, even myself, that I didn’t have it all under control.” I sagged forward and covered my face with my hands. “It’s pathetic. I let my ego get the best of me.”
Mason released a pent-up breath. I could feel him shifting on the bed beside me, but I couldn’t bring myself to meet his eyes. He wasn’t even trying to argue with my self-assessment. Jesus. What must he think of me after that admission?
“Molly, I get why you did what you did,” he said gently, pulling my hands away from my face. “And I don’t judge you for it.”
My heart skipped a beat. His expression was soft with understanding—the intimate kind. The kind that said he’d been there before.
He released my wrists. “I never told you the truth about why I dropped out. I think it’s time I did.”
He turned to face the last bit of afternoon light streaming through the window. It bounced off his blond locks, making them look like spun gold. There was tension in his jaw, extending down to the tendons in his neck, as if getting his next words out required serious physical effort.
I waited with bated breath. I studied the man I’d been hopelessly in love with for the better part of five years and imagined for a moment what we could have been if he hadn’t left me behind in Northeastern.
“I didn’t actually drop out. I was kicked out.”
The words punctured the quiet of the room and echoed inside my head.Kicked out. Kicked out. Out. Out.
The choice he’d made…wasn’t achoice. He’d been forced out.
“I’d failed more than half of my classes. But it wasn’t because I slacked off or didn’t take it seriously.” He looked at me. “I know you thought I didn’t put in any effort, but in reality, I spent most of my days and nights studying as much as I could. It just wasn’t enough for someone like me. I—” He pulled at the collar of his shirt, unease radiating off him. “I’m dyslexic.”
Shock cascaded through me. Mason,dyslexic? There’s no way. There’d been a dyslexic kid in my tenth-grade class. All I could remember was him writing his tests in a different room from the rest of us. He was quiet, very shy, and he hated to draw attention to himself. He’d been nothing like Mason.
“I don’t understand,” I said with a shake of my head.
Mason’s lips pressed into a thin line.
“But…” I needed to check myself before I said something stupid. Besides my limited experience with the boy in tenth grade, I didn’t know a lot about the condition. “What does it mean? Why didn’t you say?”
“I didn’t ever talk about it. My parents never got me tested as a child. They couldn’t live with the thought of their suspicions being confirmed. It would ruin the perfect image they’d built.” A bitter note had snuck into his voice. “Every dyslexic is different. My learning problems weren’t that obvious at first. I did okay in math, physics—pretty much everything but English, where I scraped by with Bs and the occasional C. But that changed when I started high school. The material got harder across the board and when I read things—long paragraphs, essays, prompts—it was a huge struggle to understand them. I had to decode each sentence, word by word. It took hours for me to get through an assignment that should have taken no more than thirty minutes.”
That’s why he didn’t want to read the contracts I shoved in his face. Not because he was uninterested, but because he couldn’t understand them. How did he manage to hide this for so long? I was certain even Adeline didn’t know, otherwise it would have slipped out eventually.
“My dad was convinced it was all a matter of hard work and discipline,” he continued. “He wouldn’t let my mom hire any specialized tutors, because that would be admitting I had a problem, so he personally tutored me. It was…” Mason swallowed. “He wasn’t a patient teacher, let’s just say that. For years, I spent most of my time studying, on my own or with him, on a schedule that few kids my age could adhere to. It got me through high school but it also took everything out of me.”
I could see it was hard for him to relive these memories, so I reached for his hand and clasped it inside my own.
“The only thing that kept me going through that time was music, playing with Through Azure Skies, and developing my drumming ability,” he said, looking down at our hands. “Drumming came to me easily. It felt like second nature. Getting good at it and getting praise from my bandmates gave me confidence. It allowed me to see myself as more than just an academic failure, but those feelings lasted only until the next time my dad and I sat down at his desk, him ready to remind me just how inadequate I was. One late evening, after we’d spent the entire weekend studying for a test, only for me to get a fifty on the practice test he gave me, he lost his temper. He said, I’d better grow out of this, because no one could possibly love an idiot like me. Those words stayed with me. How could they not?”
I couldn’t hold back my horrified gasp. Who could say something so cruel to their kid? Now, I saw his decision to force Mason to go to college in an entirely new light. “I’m so sorry, Mase.”
