Page 169 of Deacon

“No, I didn’t.” He answered too quickly to sound calculated. Color had drained around his mouth, and the change in him looked real.

Rage came fast because believing him was worse. “Do not lie to me.” If Mason hadn’t sent those messages, then I had obeyed somebody else all the way to his door.

“I’m not.” Both hands came up. “I swear to God, I’m not. I never texted Jade’s phone.” He looked pale now, almost as if he had just realized he was standing inside someone else’s plan.

“Then how the hell did I end up here?”

Mason opened his mouth, stopped, then tried again. “I thought...” He shook his head. “I thought you were coming because you finally wanted to talk. Because you were ready to listen.” Something wounded crossed his face. “I thought Jude said you were coming.”

Cold slid over my skin. “Jude,” I repeated, every convenient run-in suddenly crowding into my head. “What does Jude have to do with this?”

Mason looked toward the front window, then the hall. That hesitation told me enough to push harder. “How do you know him?” His jaw flexed. “Mason.”

I stepped closer. “How do you know him?” He still wouldn’t answer, and the silence between us stretched until I could hear the house humming around us. “Mason.”

He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “It wasn’t like that at first.”

My whole body went rigid. “At first what? You need to start making sense!”

“He found me online,” Mason said, backing farther into the room. “Or... not exactly found me. We sort of found each other.”

“What does that even mean?” The house suddenly felt too warm, and I became aware of how far inside I had drifted while following his pacing with my eyes.

He looked away. “I was posting.” Shame touched his face too late to reassure me.

“Posting what?” His hesitation stretched until my skin crawled. I let the silence sit instead of filling it for him. “Mason.”

“There’s this forum. Men talking about women who make you think you matter, make you think it’s becoming something real, then act like you’re crazy when they decide they’re done with you.”

Disgust rolled through me. “You were on some sad little forum talking about women?” The absurdity would have been pathetic anywhere else.

“It wasn’t like that.” His defensiveness sounded practiced, worn smooth from repetition. He had clearly needed that sentence before tonight.

“No? Because from where I’m standing, it sounds exactly like that.”

Mason’s shoulders tightened. “I was angry, alright? I needed somewhere to say things I couldn’t say out loud. I didn’t use names. I didn’t give details. I just...” He looked down. “I wrote about a woman I couldn’t let go of. A woman who said one thing with her body and another with her mouth.”

My face went still. “You were writing about me.” His silence answered. “Online,” I said quietly. “You were venting about me online.”

“I didn’t use your name.” He offered it like that made the violation smaller, as though anonymity could turn betrayal into harmless venting.

“Wow,” I said. “How noble.” My skin felt too tight.

Now that he had started confessing, the rest came easier. “Jude reached out after one of the posts. Said he understood. Said he’d known women like that, women who made you think you mattered and then cut you loose like it was nothing.” His jaw tightened. “We kept talking. Met in person. I told him more after that. About you. About us. Not your name.”

“And you believed him.” I thought of Jude in the grocery store, the coffee shop, always with another reason to be near me.

“Not all at once.” Mason swallowed. “But he sounded like he knew things. About how you were. About how you pulled men in and pushed them away the second they got serious. About how you always ran toward the worst possible choice and then acted shocked when it blew up your life.”

There was no point defending myself against a woman two men had invented. “You really built a whole fantasy life around me,” I said quietly. Then bitterness broke through. “So you two bonded over me being a manipulative tease?”

His face tightened. “That’s not fair.”

Fair. Somehow that was still the wound he cared about. “No? What would be fair, Mason? You and my stalker swapping notes about what a manipulative tease I am?”

He flinched at stalker, but kept trying to salvage the story. “We started meeting to talk,” he said quietly. “At first that’s all it was. Coffee. Drinks. Venting. He understood things about me I didn’t have to explain. I understood things about him too.” His expression softened. “After a while... it turned into more.”

The last few months rearranged themselves. The grocery store and coffee shop. Jude’s vague explanations about someone he was seeing in Bay of Saints, every convenient appearance I had dismissed. My mouth went dry. “Are you…” I swallowed. “Are you the person he has been ‘seeing’ here?”