28. Mason
MASON
Lilah was a hide-and-seek professional at this point. It should have been damn hard to pull off when we lived behind the same eight-foot stone wall, but her evasion skills knew no bounds.
Erik had helped shift a couple camera angles and erase our minutes in the hot tub. He’d tapped the keys with his hand slapped over his eyes.
First the hot tub, and then Lilah’d found out about the scholarship before I could celebrate with her. With the scholarship, we wouldn’t have to be apart next year. But it had all fallen apart.
Now, two days post-sewing-room blow-up, I’d finally found the newest spot where she’d been hiding all day. I hadn’t even caught her in the sewing room, and after school, hockey chewed up every minute of my time.
It had come down to either finding her at school or pulling the ultimate asshole move and banging on her door for as long as it took for her to finally give in.
Paige had clued me in to her whereabouts in the dining hall, maybe not realizing Lilah was hiding from me.
That gave me a glimmer of hope—she hadn’t gone full friend circle implosion by telling Paige how much she hated me.
Although Natalie definitely knew what happened.
I’d gotten daggered glares whenever we crossed paths in the hallway.
But I didn’t care about Natalie, only Lilah.
With no headaches for months, I hadn’t considered that she’d use her concussion as an excuse to escape to the nurse’s office.
The one place run by the one person unswayed by the Hawthorne hockey power. Yesterday, I’d tried to get in, but the nurse had locked the door in my face. So I’d had to resort to more extreme measures.
I shoved through one of the doors to stand in front of the nurse’s desk with a wad of toilet paper shoved up one nostril.
Calder had been all too happy to give me a bloody nose. He’d probably been itching for an opportunity.
“Mr. Shaw, I’ve told you—”
I fully faced her and she jumped up to go through the standard nosebleed protocol. There were three private rooms along with the three chairs in front of her desk. Two doors were opened and one was closed, but there wasn’t even light coming out from under it.
The nurse got me gauze and a cold compress, instructing me to hold it on the bridge of my nose. She tugged off her latex gloves and dropped them into the biohazard trash can. “It looks like it’s stopped, but you can go rest in that chair until the period ends. No more.”
She pointed to the open room with a small cot and single chair.
I stepped inside, sat and rested my head against the wall with one ankle crossed over the other—the picture of relaxation, not at all plotting to get into the room beside mine. The only one with a closed door.
I’d only had to plot for a few minutes before I got a break.
Erik walked in with a goose egg on his head. He snapped his head to the side, spotting me in the small room, a curious furrow to his brows, and looking 100 percent like a golden retriever confused by a magic trick.
A head nod and mouthed words from me and he got the gist.
“What’s with you hockey players in here today? Is someone going around with a vendetta?”
Erik shrugged and shifted so the nurse’s back was to me.
That was all it took for me to get out of my seat, partially close the door behind me and slip into the closed-door room beside mine. Lilah’s room.
Her head whipped toward the open doorway that flooded the space with light. Lilah fumbled, dropped her tablet to the cot and shot up.
“What are you doing here?” Her furious whisper sent ripples of pleasure through my chest. I welcomed her sharp words after another forty-eight hours of silence.
I closed the door behind me, holding the handle so the nurse didn’t hear snick of the latch catching. Then we were both in the almost absolute darkness broken only by the glow of Lilah’s tablet.
“Why are you hiding in here?”
She glanced down at her notebooks, tablet, pencils and highlighters spread on the bed, barely visible in the dim light. “I’m not. My head hurt.”
“Bullshit.”
She released a cute noise of outrage.
“You don’t get to tell me what the hell is going on inside my head.” The angry flare of her nostrils and livid march to face me thrummed a chord of longing in me. Two days without seeing Lilah was too much.
“I know you’re scared.”
She turned to pick up her things. “You don’t know anything. Leave.”
I crowded her from behind, with her legs pressed against the cot.
My hand cradled her face, and I tilted her head to one side, letting my lips whisper against her neck.
“You’re scared of what it would look like to follow your dreams. What it would be like to stay this close to me. To not have to be apart.”
Her body swayed for a second before a furious growl ripped from her lips. She shoved her hips back, throwing me off balance.
I stumbled, catching myself against the wall.
“What I might want? What my body might want? Even my heart?” She softened for a second before the straight-backed tension returned.
“Doesn’t matter, even if it’s you. I took my shirt off in the hot tub and you couldn’t even stand the sight of me.
” Her shoulders curled in on themselves.
“Why would I toss years of planning for that?”
The Mason Hate Train was back on track. Hate for myself. “It had nothing to do with you.”
She scoffed. “Whatever.”
I flexed my hands at my sides, not wanting to distress her but hating the way she’d pulled away from me. “I told you how I saw you and Ryker over the summer.”
“You said…” Her face blanched. “Cameras.” The word came out a whisper. “Why didn’t you tell me that night?”
“I didn’t want to freak you out. I don’t know if anyone was even watching them, but I didn’t want to risk it.
” I hated that I hadn’t thought about the cameras.
That I hadn’t protected her, but my father didn’t care about Lilah, it was only me he wanted to send this message to.
I didn’t need to freak her out more than she was already.
“And that would’ve been too hard to say, ‘Lilah, remember there are cameras out here,’ when I was half naked on your lap?”
“I could barely think. All the blood had rushed out of my head. And because I didn’t want to remind you and then maybe you’d figure out I’d used them before. To watch you.” I dropped my eyes, the shame burning me up from the inside.
Her mouth opened and closed. “I thought you didn’t want me.”
I grabbed on to her, holding her against my chest, arms barred up her back and hands braced on the tops of her shoulders. “I’ve never wanted anyone more. Never ever doubt I want you. And that’s why I applied for the award for you.” I rubbed my nose along her neck.
She shivered and then pushed at me.
“You don’t get to make that choice for me.”
“I was trying to give you even more choices.”
“You can only win one of those awards. There’s no choice allowed and I need to be smart, Mason. And taking my design book. I’ve shown almost no one that book and you stole it. Submitted my work without my permission.” She went back to angrily shoving her things into her bag.
“I fucked up. I didn’t know you could only get one of those awards. But you being a finalist shows how much talent you have. Can’t you at least see that?”
A headshake, then she paused and turned to look over her shoulder, but her hair hid her face. “Having talent isn’t enough.”
“Like hell.”
“My mother got into medical school. I found the acceptance letters after she died.” She plopped onto the cot, like saying the words while standing was too hard. Taking a pen, she rolled it along the front of her legs, not looking at me. “She’d kept those letters all that time.”
It would’ve been hard to go through med school with a little kid. Her mom must’ve been pretty impressive. Lilah had only told me about the dresses and the fact that her mom had died.
“She got in after she had you?”
“Before.”
“You never knew?”
“No, she never told me. I think she didn’t want me to feel guilty.” She glanced up at me before dropping her guilt-filled gaze away and huffed out a humorless laugh.
“Why do you feel guilty?”
“The acceptance letters were dated when she was only a few weeks along with me. So she had all these big plans, made it through premed in college, aced the MCATs—I found those scores too—and got into med school. A dream. Her dream. And she got pregnant with me and had to give it all up.”
Her mom had never mentioned it to Lilah. She hadn’t wanted her to feel guilty. Then I thought about the way my mother never spared a single gory detail of all she’d missed out on, real or imagined, because of me.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because I don’t want people to think I’m only doing this because of my mom.”
“Are you?”
“What? No. I spent months with her in the hospital. Everyone around her was amazing. The doctors, nurses, orderlies, a whole concert of people with only one goal—get her better or at least ease her pain. If I can be that for someone, or at least be in their corner so they know they’re not alone and someone’s looking after them, I think I owe it to all the people who were there for me. ”
“But you don’t know what I see when you’re working in the sewing lab or sketching in your book. You’re alive, creating, helping other people create. You don’t light up when you’re talking about peptides or covalent bonds. What about what you owe to yourself?”
“What I owe myself is a life where I have purpose and stability, not chasing a pipe dream.”
“Why can’t you have both?”
“Why can’t I grow wings and fly? I know you’re used to getting what you want in life, but I can’t follow you to Rhode Island. I won’t.”
I sat with the weight of what Lilah had just told me while the part of my story I’d kept from her gnawed at the back of my mind.
Fists clenched at my sides, I looked at the wall over Lilah’s shoulder.
“My mom’s an addict.” It stung to say out loud as the word “junkie” flashed in my mind.
Lilah paused with green sticky notes mid-shove into her pencil bag. “You said she was gone. I thought…”