Page 53 of Desired

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The women came for him on Wednesday, and Mason stood in his own kitchen and took every word of it, because he had it coming and all of them knew it.

He heard the trucks and knew before he looked. Lara's, and behind it Remi's, and behind them both the one with the horses on the door, doors slamming in his yard hard enough to carry, and he opened the door before they could knock and stood back out of the way. Ainsley came through it last, went to his counter, and put her back against it with her arms crossed, apart from the other two, a one-woman jury who'd already voted. Remi was at full volume before her boots hit the kitchen floor.

"You want to know where I've been this morning? I've been at Pearl's, listening to this county chew on my family. Both halves of it. My brother's wedding is four days old, Mason. Four days, and the story going down the counter with the coffee is that my cousin ran a con on a grieving woman for her land, and I stood there and couldn't say one word back, because the one man who could tell me it isn't true has had his phone off for two days." She stopped in the middle of his kitchen and turned on him, and Remi Royston angry could fill a room, but anger wasn't what was in her face, and he saw it and it was worse. It was hurt. "So here I am. Asking. Tell me it isn't true."

He didn't say anything.

"Tell me it isn't true, Mason."

"Which part?" His own voice came out flat and worn. "The part where my father sent me, that part's true. The part where I ran his play, that part's not. And there's no way on God's earth for you to tell the difference from where you're standing, so go on and pick whichever one the evidence fits. Everybody else has."

"Don't you dare." Lara hadn't raised her voice at all, and the whole room bent toward her anyway. She stood just inside the door with her arms crossed, still in her coat, and she looked at him the way she must have looked at crooked books in another life, line by line, adding him up. "Don't you stand there being wounded at us. You don't get that today. I vouched for you. Do you understand me? She came to me in November, that careful woman, and she asked me, in my own kitchen, is he for real, tell me the truth, and I said yes. I said, I've known Mason since I came here, he's the best of the whole pack of them, you can trust him." Her voice stayed level and it was terrible. "She did our wedding flowers, Mason. As a gift. My bouquet, that I'm going to be looking at in photographs for the rest of my life, she built it with her own hands out of the first joy she'd let herself have in years, and four days later she stood in a bar and found out what this family was doing to her the whole time, and now she's packing boxes. So no. You don't get to be evasive with me. What happened?"

"Exactly what you said," Mason said. "Except one sentence of it, and the sentence doesn't matter anymore."

"Which sentence?"

"I told him no." He said it flat, with nothing riding on it. He was two days past putting any hope on it. "Day one, before I ever drove out there." He shrugged, and even the shrug hurt. "The rest of it happened just like the county says. I knew what he wanted the whole time and I courted her anyway and I never told her. Whatever you came here to say to me, say it. You're not going to land anywhere I haven't been living since Monday."

Ainsley made a small sharp sound from the counter. "I told you," she said, to the other two. "I told you both in the truck." Then she turned on Mason, and being right hadn't cooled her down any. "Don't look relieved. The no doesn't buy you anything with me. I got really close to her, Mason. And you've never been like that with anybody, not once in your life, so I thought..." Her voice caught, and she pushed through it. "I thought she was going to be family one day. I love her too, Mase."

That one got through. Everything Remi and Lara had thrown, he'd stood up under, because standing up under things was the one skill he had left, and then his little sister said I love her too and Mason had to turn around and put both hands on the edge of the sink and look out the window at nothing, because his eyes had filled without asking him and no woman in that kitchen needed the sight of it. The yard sat empty in the cold. Her truck used to park at the left of it, always the left, cocked at the angle of a woman who parked like she had somewhere to be.

"Yeah," he said, when he could. It came out gravel. "I know you do."

"Then you should know what I saw out there yesterday." Ainsley's voice had gone quiet, which was worse than any of the shouting. "She's packing the house, Mason. The whole house, every room, plates in newspaper, her mother's boxes going back on a truck still taped shut from Denver. And she's not crying and she's not yelling. She poured us coffee with steady hands and there was nothing behind her eyes at all. She's gutted. She's folding herself up small and getting gone, like a woman who's done it a dozen times and knows the drill, and whatever you saw on that porch Monday night, it's worse now, because Monday she was still angry, and angry means you still want something." She let that sit. "Broken doesn't."

Mason stood at the sink with his back to the room and took that the way you take a kick, all at once, trying not to let it move you off your feet, and the yard out the window swam and came back, and then it came out of him. All of it. He turned around on the three of them and it came up his throat like something tearing loose.

"Then what the fuck am I supposed to do?" His voice cracked going up and he didn't care. "Tell me. Any of you. She won't open her door. She won't pick up her phone. I stood on that porch Monday night and she looked at me like a stranger running a scam, and she was right to, that's the part I can't get around, she was right to. And now she's wrapping plates with nothing behind her eyes and you're all standing in my kitchen telling me about it like I don't know what I did." He had to stop. He made himself finish. "I love her. There. First time in my whole life I ever, and I said it in this kitchen instead of to her, which about sums me up. I love her and I've lost her. I've lost the only thing I ever wanted that I couldn't buy or charm or fix, and it's my own doing, every inch of it, so somebody tell me what a man does with that, because I've been sitting in this house for two days and I've got nothing."

"Why didn't you just tell her?" Remi's voice had gone small, all the fight out of it. An honest question. "Week one. Any week. Why?"

"Because I fell in love with her." It came out flat and worn, two days of digging behind it. "That's the whole stupid answer. At the start it was just a mess I didn't want to make. Then I was in love with her, deeper every day, and the truth quit being a mess and turned into a loaded gun. Tell her, and maybe she does the exact math this county just did. Maybe she looks at me and sees the play instead of the man, and walks, and I lose her." He shook his head slowly, at himself, at the whole architecture of it. "So I sat on it. I loved her too much to risk her. Listen to that sentence. And then she heard it anyway, in a bar, the worst version, the worst way, and now she looks at me and sees exactly what I was too much of a coward to risk her seeing." He laughed once, and there was nothing in it. "I was a fucking idiot. The hiding was the losing. I did the thing I was scared of to my own self, with my own silence, and I took her down with me."

Nobody answered him. Remi looked at the floor. Ainsley had both hands pressed flat to her mouth.

They stayed another half hour, and it did not get gentler. Remi paced his kitchen and took him apart the way only family can, with twenty years of ammunition, you were the one we all trusted, you were the good one, Levi asks where Lauren went and what am I supposed to tell him. Lara said less and cut deeper, and none of it was one degree more than fair, and Mason stood at his own counter and took all of it without once reaching for the charm, because the charm was what had gotten everybody here, and going without it was the only honest thing he had left to offer.

It was Lara who stopped first. She'd been winding up to something else, and she looked at him, and whatever she saw made her let the sentence go and frown instead.

"You're not defending yourself," Lara said, finally.

"No."

She looked at him a long moment, and whatever she was reading in him, the sum came out different than the one she'd walked in with. She buttoned her coat. "Fix it or don't, Mason. But don't you dare do it quietly. Quiet is what got everybody here."

Ainsley went last. She stopped in front of him, jaw set exactly like their mother's.

"Shave," she said. "Mom wants to see you at the house in the morning. First thing. Don't ask me what about, because I'm not telling you, and don't be late, because it's Mom." She pulled the door shut hard enough to rattle the glass.

The trucks rolled out of his yard, and the quiet came down again, and this time it had teeth.

Rock bottom turned out to have a look. It looked like his own kitchen table at two in the morning, one glass he'd quit refilling because the whiskey wasn't reaching anything, and a phone with eleven unsent texts in it, a museum of first sentences.

I know you won't believe. The night at Harvey's you only heard half of it. Lauren, the no was real and I can't prove it and.