Sixteen
Message from
***
I found him at the outskirts of his pack’s property, on the hill where we had parted ways the night of our families’ meeting. Mason sat at the crest in the shade of an oak tree wearing a well-loved zip-up jacket.
“This is among your worst ideas,” I said as I approached. “Which is saying something.”
“You’ll be fine,” he insisted, just like he’d insisted over and over on the phone that morning. “We’re going that way, see? No one will ever know you were here.”
I’d have to take his word for it. I didn’t feel any werewolves nearby, but the thought made me antsy.
“Right. Here, in your ‘supersecret shed.’ ”
“It’s secluded,” Mason whined. “Nowhere near the house or the farm. The old owners must have abandoned it when they reorganized the property.” He stood as I reached him, kicking the trunk behind him with his heel. “I’m sorry it’s not, like, ultraromantic. I just want to be alone with you.”
Embarrassed, I looked down. “I didn’t really expect ultraromantic, considering our track record.”
We walked a few minutes just inside the tree line, speaking only when Mason asked how Cella was doing (all right, except she had burned the skin of her tongue from eating too many sour candies).
I was too anxious to say much else. The shed was nestled at the edge of the trees, mostly shaded like the forest had crept forward to swallow it.
“Charming,” I said, taking in gray-brown wood that seemed to sag to one side.
Inside was the size of a narrow bedroom, much of it taken up by wooden crates.
Cracks in the ceiling let in sunlight, and cracks in the floor were stuffed with weeds.
The workbench at the center was so caked with dust it resembled a big ashtray.
A bike and shovel leaned against it, rusted completely brown.
In place of a window, there was a jagged hole in the wall next to the door.
The whole shed seemed to creak and groan with our every step.
It sounded like it was struggling to breathe around us.
Glaringly out of place were the bright-yellow broom and two red buckets on the workbench. Inside of the buckets, I found water and cleaning supplies.
“You brought me here to work,” I said, betrayed.
“Think of it as a team-building exercise to pregame the inevitable talk,” said Mason, tossing me a yellow rag. “We’ve been at each other’s throats for a while. Gotta break the ice.”
Here I was thinking the ice had been broken somewhere between the third and fourth time he put his mouth on me.
“You just didn’t want to do it all yourself.”
“I almost did,” he admitted. “But I got impatient. I wanted to see you.”
I looked away again. He wore his wants so brazenly.
“You don’t really need me to work, then.” I strolled past him to lean against the workbench, hoping I looked more leisurely than I felt.
“Yeah? You prefer to watch?” Mason approached with an asshole grin, playing with the hem of his T-shirt. “Should I make it entertaining?”
“Keep your clothes on,” I said, reaching out to counter his pull.
“Boo,” said Mason, but he looked perfectly happy now that he was in line with my knees.
He let go of his shirt, but I held on, hopping onto the table, and his smile turned hungry.
He was leaning forward before I started to pull him in.
My other hand dipped into the water bucket and grasped the massive sponge inside it.
I lifted the sponge over his head and squeezed.
Mason gasped and sputtered. He tried to jump backward, but I crossed my ankles behind his thighs to cage him in as I wrung the sponge for all it was worth.
He accepted his fate, laughing disbelievingly beneath the stream.
When it was over, he blinked droplets from his eyelashes.
I set the sponge aside, grinning devilishly down at him.
The tension I had carried here, unsure of how to exist around Mason now that our axis had shifted, melted off my shoulders like the water dripping from his chin.
“Already making a mess,” Mason scolded. “We make a terrible team.”
He kissed me just like that, mouth slick with water. What had I even been worried about? Mason kissed me, and I sighed, and this was bigger than a shifting axis. This was the world turning upside down, reversing every rule until this, he and I, made sense.
“Get to work,” I said. Mason nipped as he pulled away. He stepped out from my legs, my wet hand slipping off his face, and shook out his hair as he grabbed the broom. I took out a trash bag.
A ’90s hip-hop mix played from Mason’s phone as I picked up big debris, logs and moth-eaten hats, with rubber gloves. Mason swept every new inch of floor, clearing away dirt and hay. The former was done with strategic efficiency. The latter was done with much moaning and griping.
I didn’t know any of the songs, but I liked watching Mason unconsciously nodding his head, muttering his favorite lines under his breath. Every now and then, he pointed out where one song had sampled from another. I never recognized the sample but nodded as if I did so he wouldn’t stop.
Mason hit me with the broom “by accident” more than once.
I took the bait every time, grabbing the handle as a threat but going along when he used it to pull me into him and steal a kiss.
I sprayed him with disinfectant when he tried to clean the dust off my butt with a polka-dotted rag.
We scrubbed. We fought. Mason flexed his arm and winked over his bicep every time he smacked away a high-up cobweb with his broom, and I couldn’t believe I liked him.
I also couldn’t believe I’d held out against him for so long.
At the end, the crates were empty and lined up against the far wall.
We pushed the workbench against the other wall, beneath the hole.
The rest of the floor was clear. Outside waited multiple heavy trash bags, soiled rags, and a bucket of brown water, but in here was .
. . Well, not clean, but a different place than the one we had walked into.
“Oh, we did good,” Mason said. He raised a fist at me. “Go Team Love Shack.”
“I’m serious, you have to stop with the team names.” I didn’t bump his fist. “I did well. You were useless.”
“You are not taking credit for my epic brooming.”
“Your sweeping was okay.”
“Tell me how well I broomed.” He crowded me against the workbench, holding the table on either side of my hip. “Tell me you’ve never seen a floor so clean.”
Lifting a brow, I said, “That do it for you?”
Mason’s put-on glare dissolved. He laughed once, the sound of it startlingly honest, and said, “Probably. I think you could say anything, and it’d work on me.”
My face went a little lax. “Stop saying stuff like that.”
“Can’t. It just happens.” He tapped my chin. “And I like the way your face opens up. I like that you think looking away will hide it.”
Stubbornly, I met his eyes, even as they slid closed. I kept mine cracked just long enough to watch the shadow of his lashes, until I felt his mouth against mine. I noticed faint freckles across the bridge of his nose and thought, I want to see those in summer.
Mason’s lips were cool from the weather, but his tongue was hot.
There were so many sides of him, and he moved between them so quickly, mean to flirty to childish to effusive to staring-into-my-soul to this.
He made a drafty shed in Oregon almost-November seem filled with steam.
Every small sigh from him made me feel vicious.
I eased away, overwhelmed by how much of him I couldn’t fit in my hands. It was different, kissing him during the day. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what this is.”
Mason’s forehead bumped mine when he nodded.
“I . . .” He cleared the gravel from his voice, moving to lean on the table beside me.
“I figured this could be, I don’t know, a start.
Since we can’t hang out in our rooms with the doors open like most teens, I thought we could, um.
” He disguised his embarrassment by surveying the shed.
“I have some extra stuff in my room, you know? Like, posters and old action figures, and the two hundred cushions my mom won’t let me get rid of even though I knock them off my bed every night anyway.
I can bring some stuff down here, and you can, too, if you want? And we can pretend it’s normal.
“Or not,” he rushed to say when I didn’t respond right away. “Sorry, that was lame.”
“No,” I said, slowly, trying to find the words. “No. It’s . . . But most of the things I keep in my room were my mom’s, so . . .”
I tried for casual, like there was any casual way to say that, hoping Mason would get the hint and skip over it.
He did the opposite. “You mom . . . How did she die?”
I told him in as few words as possible. “She was killed when I was little. A lone werewolf attacked me and my brother, and she protected us.”
Mason reacted visibly, with his whole body. After a pause, he asked, “And how did she live?”
That one was easy. “In the sun.”
He smiled but tilted his head questioningly. “You do too. I’ve got a lot of questions about that, by the way.”
“Not like her.” My mom had soaked up the sun unlike any other vampire I’d ever known. Unlike any human, either.
“What do you have of hers in your room?”
I told him about the pots from her garden and the pages from her books. Mason hummed.
“So that’s why you’re always drawing flowers. You’re more like her than you think.”
I bristled reflexively. “You didn’t know her.”
“No. But I hope I’ll get to, a little, through you.” He turned and pushed aside the cleaning supplies on the workbench, clearing a space in the patch of light. “How about this: I’ll buy a little pot to mimic your room if you’ll plant something in it.”
“I told you. The pots are empty.”
“Different pots, different rules,” said Mason. “It’ll be fun. Plants love me.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means I want to start something with you. And I’m cool with starting small.”
I winced, feeling like I’d been read. I admitted, “I didn’t even know I liked guys before this.”
“Does that weird you out?”
“This whole thing weirds me out.”
“Well, relax.” Mason grinned. “You don’t need to put a label on yourself. Or on this. We’ll be whatever you want.”
I didn’t know what I wanted it to be.
“My brother can’t find out.”
Mason looked taken aback. “Um, yeah. That’s a given.”
“No, I mean, he really can’t find out. Cedric hates you guys. Obsessively. Since your pack moved in he’s been . . . angry. If he catches wind of it somehow . . .” My stomach rolled at the thought. I would have to be careful at every turn.
“He’ll what?” asked Mason. “Narc to your dad?”
That would be simple. That would be an average teenage spectacle.
“Come on,” Mason pressed. “He wouldn’t actually do anything serious.”
“You don’t get it.”
There had been a short time, in the months after Mom’s death but before I joined the Solars, when Cedric and I were closer than we ever had been or ever would be again.
I was frightened, and he was angry, so we fit together and filled each other’s empty spaces.
He used to talk about the ways he would take revenge.
The death machines he’d build, the fantastical battles he would lead—a child’s imagination fed by very adult anger.
His plans had been ridiculous, impossible, but they’d made me feel safe.
“He’s the one who set the trap.”
Mason touched his side. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“He wouldn’t hurt his own brother, though.”
“I . . . don’t think so.” I couldn’t be sure. Eventually, Cedric’s stories had stopped coming. I didn’t know if he’d stopped daydreaming or if he’d simply stopped wanting to share his dreams with me after I became a Solar. I knew he hadn’t seen me the same way since. “He’s temperamental.”
“So it runs in the family,” Mason joked. He leaned back on his palms. “Is that everything out of the way?”
It wasn’t even close, and we both knew it.
“I’m tired of talking,” I said. “Your turn, stranger.”
“What do you want to know about me?”
I deliberated.
“Tell me about your day.”
Mason laughed. “That’s it? That’s your burning question?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay. After breakfast, I did some work around the farm with—”
“Slower.”
Mason considered the ceiling as if retracing his steps in the lines in the wood.
“My alarm went off at six-thirty. I was dreaming that I had webbed fingers, and it was awesome. Someone had already collected the eggs, so I ate those. With toast. Then I went out to the pasture with my sisters, and we fed the sheep and cleaned up the barn for a while—”
“Slower,” I said. Mason began to smile.
“I got pretty worried ’cause Godzilla seemed kind of lethargic—Godzilla is this big-ass lamb, named him myself—but turns out he was dragging his feet because he saw Lia sneak his mom a leftover biscuit from breakfast. He’s way too smart for a sheep; he’s going to be trouble for sure.
My sisters and I are the youngest, so we were stuck on cleaning duty while the others worked on repairing some of the barn doors, and I found this nasty clump of . . .”
I listened greedily, stealing the pictures out of his words to keep for myself. I filed away these sides of him I’d never seen with a hunger I didn’t know.