Where We Left Off (17 page)

Chapter 29

He didn’t have to look up to see what Jackson was doing or thinking.  From the sound of the ball-point pen rolling against his oak desk, he knew Jackson was signing the authorization papers. 

Jackson put the cap back on his pen, slid it into his pocket, and handed Mason the papers.  “Next time just talk to me, Mason.  You don’t always have to carry things by yourself.”  

Mason took the papers from his hand and nodded in agreement.  “Thanks,” he said.

“This is what we do; we take care of each other.”

Mason worked the rest of the day and into most of the evening, which became less unusual for him as the days passed.  He never had much to do after work, so he made his time count towards being productive as much as he could.  Jackson, who had also stayed late, finally called it a night. 

He peeked into Mason’s office on his way out. “Have fun tonight,” he mentioned.

“Ok?” Mason responded, clueless to what he meant.

It was almost eleven; he had no idea what kind of fun Jackson was talking about.  His only plans were to go home and get some sleep.  He went back to signing the papers on his desk, and laughed it off as Jackson faded from his sight and onto the elevator.  Moments later, not even a minute after Jackson had left, his attention was drawn to a light tapping on his office window.  Given the state of all that had been weighing on his mind, he couldn’t tell whether it was a dream or not.  At first sight the pen he was holding fell from his hand, as if his inability to exhale caused him to lose his grip. 

As he slowly rose from his chair, filling his longing eyes, there she was.  And he wasn’t dreaming. “Sydney!”

She walked into his office, not really sure of what to say to him.  Clenching the purse she held in front of her, she answered him.  “Jackson called me.  I wasn’t’ going to come but ...well…I’m here.”

He fumbled to get around the desk, apologetic and nervous with his every move.  “Sydney, I am so sorry –” he stuttered.

She raised her hand and said, “No,” stopping him. “Let me talk.  There a few things that I need to say to you,” she firmly instructed. 

He was insistent on saying something first, “Sydney, I am really, really sorry about –”

             
“About what?” she cut him off.

             
He pursed his lips, standing in silence.

             
“About what?” she asked again. 

She shook her head.  Her disappointment was obvious, as was his realization that he was at fault.

             
“For the first couple of weeks, regardless of how crazy it sounded, I figured you’d show up one day as if nothing had ever happened.  And despite how angry I would have been,” she gasped, “I would have been happy to see you.  But you never showed up, and the more and more I thought about it, it just didn’t make sense.”  She walked towards him. “You surprised me with a gift to see my parents on Christmas, and that meant so much to me.  It was unexpected and so thoughtful,” she stressed, “but the best part about it was they were going to get the opportunity to meet the man who had come into my life and breathed a love into me that made my heart beat to the very sound of his voice.”

“Sydney –”

“Shhh,” she placed her finger in front of her lips.  “In one day, you made me hate you.  You. Made. Me. Hate you!” 

“…Sydney, I –”

She shhh’d him again, followed by a light chuckle to hold back the emotions that had rushed to her face.

“But here I am,” she said, stopping a single tear from falling.  “I couldn’t hate you enough to stop loving you.”

Mason’s head fell to his chest, embarrassed and ashamed.  She walked towards the door as if she were leaving and turned to look at him.

“Get up”, she said, regaining her composure.  “Get your coat and let’s go.”

Mason grabbed his suit jacket from the chair and followed Sydney to the elevator, out of the lobby, and into her car.  Although he was extremely curious and very confused, he neither asked nor said a word; he just went with her.  She stared through the tinted windows, not looking at him or even giving him the complete satisfaction of her presence.  Mason, growing more nervous by the second, just waited.  They pulled up to the front entrance of a hotel, stepped into the elevator, and went to the top floor.  By the time they got off the elevator, beads of sweat had formed above his brow.  He followed her to one of their suites, where she handed him the key card to open the door.  He was hesitant, but eventually slid it into the door.  He didn’t know what was on the other side and he had no clue what Jackson may have told her.  She didn’t seem angry, but she didn’t seem happy, either. He couldn’t read her. 

“What did Jackson tell you?” he asked with his hand on the doorknob.

“Enough,” she responded. “He told me…enough.  Open the door.”

Not knowing what to expect, he opened the door.  What he saw as it slowly opened into the foyer of the suite was nothing he would have ever expected. Not from Sydney, not after what he’d done to her.  His eyes softened behind restrained tears to the sounds of songs that would otherwise be out of season.  For that moment, however, it was perfect in every way imaginable. 

“Merry Christmas,” she whispered over his shoulder, sliding her hand into his.

The blending scents of pine and cinnamon, and the flicking glow of the fireplace in an already warmly dimmed room, were breathtaking.  What made it so much more was the blue spruce Christmas tree draped with bright white lights in the corner.  Beneath it were even gifts wrapped in gold and silver wrapping paper, laced with bows and his name beside them. 

“Sydney…”

“Wait,” she stopped him. 

“Before you say anything, Jacks asked me to give this to you first.” She pulled an envelope from of her pocket.  “Go ahead and get comfortable.  I’ll be right back.”

He stepped into the living room and sat on the sofa, tearing open the envelope. There was a plain post card inside it, with no pictures or other markings aside from Jackson’s handwriting. 

“
Yes, I did call her,”
he wrote, causing Mason to laugh as soon as he read it.  He leaned against the sofa and continued reading.

“At some point you have to realize that what you have with a person is worth more than the fear of them becoming the one that once hurt you.  You have to realize that what you feel in your heart about a person is genuine, and is worth trusting them enough to let them in.  Don’t let where you’ve been hurt dictate where you can be happy.   I’ve never seen you happier than you were with Sydney, and I’ve never seen you sadder than you were without her.  All she wants to do is love you and she isn’t asking any more of you than that in return.  So be that to her…be that
for
her…be that for you. 

P.S. In case you were wondering, I didn’t tell her.”

Chapter 30

Sydney walked into the living room just as he folded the card and slid it back into the envelope.   She sat down beside him, placing her hand on top of his.

“Thank you,” he said humbly, “for everything.”

He couldn’t think of anything else to say in that moment, knowing that no words could express all of what he was feeling.  He didn’t deserve this; in a way, he felt he didn’t deserve her.  There she was, though, sitting beside him and resting her head on his shoulder like nothing had happened in the past months. 

The snaps of the flames from the fireplace accented their night of sometimes silence and sometimes laughter.  They hadn’t moved an inch from the sofa, or from each other.  He missed the softness of her touch so much and how even when she lay still she was like a smooth stroke to a painted masterpiece. 

She had missed his scent, and his thick strong arms that made her feel like nothing in the world could touch her when she was held within them. 

“I almost forgot!” Sydney quickly jumped out of his arms.

“What?” Mason asked.

“You have to open your presents!”

“Those are real?” He had assumed they were just decoration.

“Of course they are real!”

She moved box after box until she found the one she want to give him first. “Here, open this one.”

He stared at her, embarrassed that he didn’t have anything for her.

“Just open it,” she charismatically insisted.

The both slid onto the floor from the sofa.  Like a child on Christmas morning, Mason opened the first present.  In it was the puppy he had won her at the carnival; she had gotten both of their names and the date stitched on it with a message beneath that read, ‘
You make everything special.’
.  He went on and opened the second, then the third, fourth, and so on.  The smile on Mason’s face as he opened each gift was priceless.  Ties, shirts, engraved cufflinks - she had really gone the extra mile. 

“What is it?” she asked, noticing the look on his face.

“I have a gift for you, but it’s at my house.  I wanted to give it to you on Christmas, but-”

“But you left,” she joked. 

She interlaced his hand with hers and lightly nudged him with her shoulder. “It’s okay, there’s always tomorrow,” she smiled.

He had almost forgotten how beautiful her laugh was. For hours they found themselves sitting around, talking about the few months they had spent apart, about his new motorcycle and her new job.  They seemed to talk about everything, except the one thing that led to them spending months apart: the day he left, and why.  Mason rested his head on Sydney’s lap and his body stretched across the floor in front of the fireplace as she lightly stroked his forehead.  The music still played and the fire still burned, but in the silence questions she hadn’t asked began to surface in her mind.  She had thought a lot about that day in Charleston - about her father, about Mason.  She had started to remember old conversations she had with him about how he grew up, and realized that parts of his life were still a mystery to her.  Somehow piecing the two together, she wondered if there were things that he wasn’t telling her that made him feel and act the way he did.  She was almost sure there was something in his past he was either hiding from her or afraid to talk about.

Sydney slowed her hands from caressing his forehead until they stopped moving altogether.  “I have to ask you something.”

“Okay,” he responded.

Mason lifted his head from her lap to sit beside her.

“No, don’t get up,” she urged him. “Lay back down.”

He returned his head to her lap, where he had been lying for the past few minutes sensing that something was wrong by her silence.

Sydney took a deep breath, staring down at him as he rested on her thighs.  “What happened to you?” she asked.

It was the way she said it that caused his eyes to thrust open, as if she’d seen clearly through to something he’d kept hidden and locked away.  Mason’s heart beat so hard he feared she could tell he’d stopped breathing for a moment.  No one had ever asked him what happened before.  No one knew.  As he lay still in his thoughts, ‘
what happened to you’
resonated in his mind.  On one hand he felt like she knew something that he hadn’t told her.  On the other hand, he’d shown her something somewhere in the process of them dating that he’d been waiting for her to ask all this time. 

He attempted to pretend as if her question had stuck him in confusion.  “What do you mean ‘what happened to me’?” He rhetorically asked, as if to seem like he had no idea where she was coming from.

She didn’t want to ask again.  Sydney saw the level of discomfort he was feeling from his tense response.  “Nothing…never mind,” she responded as she began to rub his head again.

But it wasn’t nothing, and it was too late to say never mind. 
Some things are just private,
he thought. 
My life…my life before her…is private,
he repeated to himself.  The longer he lay beneath her hands, gently and lovingly caressing his brow, he started to realize that his life slowly stopped being only his the day he’d fallen for her. 

Mason closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and before he could think of the right words to say they started to fall from his mouth.  “Where do you want me to start?” he whispered.

Sydney smiled.  “Wherever you feel comfortable.”

She had so many questions, but she kept from speaking a single word as he spoke and instead just listened.  Mason talked in circles for a while, telling her things she’d heard before, making it obvious that he was trying to get to the one part of the conversation he’d be avoiding but just didn’t know how.  He talked until his words were merely sound to the thoughts in his head.  He danced along the line of,
tell her or not
, keeping himself from saying anything that he wouldn’t be able to take back.  He could have just kept talking and let her draw her own conclusions, but then again he couldn’t.  Sydney deserved more than him pretending.  She deserved more than his fear of trust.

After what seemed like almost fifteen minutes of him talking, he quickly grew quiet.  Mason lifted his head from Sydney’s lap and sat beside her, shoulder to shoulder against the sofa.  As he nervously clenched and unclenched his hands, he felt the race of his pulse grow with the words that readied on his lips.  She hadn’t said a word, sensing he was only moments from truly letting her in for the first time.  His face deepened into the crisp collar of his white shirt. He put his hands together, making a tight fist, and slightly lifted his head before resting it on the sofa cushion behind him.  She started to wonder in the silence if he was going to say anything at all, but with his exhale came his story.

“My dad passed away when I was nine.” He smiled, thinking briefly before he continued.   “He was the most caring, compassionate, hardworking man I ever knew.  When we were kids he would come into our room right before we went to bed with a handful of candy he’d picked up on the way home.  Regardless of how late it was, he would sit with the both of us and tell us the craziest stories about new buildings he was developing and his crazy clients.  Jackson would always drift off to sleep but I’d be wide awake, hanging on his every word.  He always made me feel like I was his favorite, even though Jackson was the oldest.  And I honestly think I was…his favorite.”  Mason’s smile lined with the stillness of his expression.  “When I was seven we found out he had cancer.  Shortly after that, the stories grew fewer and fewer until they stopped all together.  He hadn’t been back to work in over a year.  Because my dad was the boss we didn’t struggle financially, but emotionally we were all a mess.  My mom had to be in church praying what felt like every night for him to get better, believing that God would heal him.  I believed God would heal him…I hoped he would.” His voice trailed off in sorrow. “But he didn’t; God didn’t show up at all.”

Mason remembered everything about that day as he rubbed his hands across his arms.  It had been cold.  Like the cold after a freezing rain had chilled the air and the winds still carried specs of raindrops that hit your skin like tiny little needles. 

“I remember how grey the sky was,” he said.  “I was bundled in a wool jacket with my gloves and hat on, my scarf around my neck just like he’d shown me.  He hadn’t been home for months.  They kept him in the hospital then, though no one ever told me why; mom just said it would be better for him.  I walked in, passed the nurse at the first station who never really noticed me anyway, and headed to his room.  He was smaller a lot smaller.  But I never really saw him that way, you know, frail and as fragile as he actually was.  My dad was a big man, strong; his shoulders were big enough to carry my mom, me,
and
Jackson on them.  I went into his room excited to tell him about my day and pulled up the chair next to the door beside his bed.  I said ‘
hey daddy’
, but he didn’t say anything.  I hadn’t noticed the long beep in the background, or that he wasn’t moving.  I went on to tell him about my day and what happened at school when a nurse rushed in, followed by another, and another. 

“Mason…I’m so sorry.”

He chuckled, as if to conceal his feelings. “Life happens, right?” he responded.

There were a few seconds of silence before he continued. 

“A little over two years after he passed away, Mr. Kevin started showing up.  He was practicing to become an ordained minister, and he and my mother had become close friends at church.  As the months passed he came around more often and would take Jackson and me out to games and do things with us that a father would do.  He was great in the beginning.  He was what my mother needed and everything I thought I would have missed, not having my dad around.  Kevin and my mother dated for almost two years before he proposed to her.  I remember the night she came home and told us – we were so happy for her.  They got married in June, only a few days before Jackson went off to college.  What was strange was that they came straight home after the wedding.  They weren’t leaving for the honeymoon until the morning.  Kevin had set it up that way.  They walked in the house and Mom was exhausted. Everyone was, except me of course; I was full of energy.  As soon as I went in the house I ran into the living room and turned on the television.  Jackson had actually stayed out late that night and mom had gone upstairs to get out of her dress and lay down.  But Kevin, he stood at the bottom of the steps until the bedroom door closed and then he came into the living room.  I’ll never forget that feeling when he sat down beside me.  Something wasn’t right… I just didn’t feel right.  He slid his hand over mine to take the remote, but it felt strange and I froze.  He changed the channel as I sat still with his hand resting on my leg, inching up close and closer with every movement.  I didn’t know what to do or think.  He looked at me like nothing was wrong and being so close to me like that was normal.  ‘
Relax, Son,’
he told me
, ‘you seem tense.’” 

Sydney hoped with everything in her that he wasn’t about to say what she thought, although the picture he was painting slowly became clearer.  Tears built up in his eyes, threatening at any moment to fall onto his cheeks, but he wouldn’t let them.  Mason wouldn’t let himself feel anything more than he already had.  Not knowing what else to do, she reached across and pulled his hand towards her and just held onto it.

“The first time,” he continued, “was a Sunday night, two weeks after the wedding.  He was already ordained and preaching in his father’s church by then.”

Please, God, please,
Sydney pleaded to herself as Mason continued.

“We had just gotten home from church.  He walked into my room while I was changing, sat on my bed, and asked me what I learned in service.  He told me to come and sit next to him, so I did; I didn’t have any reason not to, not yet anyway.  Besides, he was like a father to me by then, right? Before I sat down I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around my waist because I was only in my underwear. 

“He looked at me and did this little chuckle and asked me, ‘
Why do you cover up so much?  Only people who are ashamed of their bodies do that.  You’re a man; you should feel comfortable without covering up as much. And you should feel secure enough around other men to do it as well.’ 

“
I sat on the bed and he told me to take my towel off, so I did.  He convinced me that there was nothing wrong with walking around in my underwear.  Then he asked me the most random question.”  Mason paused.  “‘
Do you love me?’
he said.  I told him of course.  Then he asked me,
‘How much do you love me?’ 
I didn’t know how to respond or what to say, so I said a lot.  He started telling me about how God loved his children and how his love was beyond words, but that he always showed us how much he loved us through his actions.  He looked at me said, ‘
Son, show me how much you love me.’ 
I gave him a hug.  He laughed and said, ‘
You don’t love me at all,’
trying to make a joke out of it.  Then he asked, ‘
How do show your mom you love her?’
and I told him I hug and kiss my mom.  He looked at me with a stare that I can’t even describe and said
‘Well?’”