Chapter 7
Paige
My body feels like a song I just finished singing.
Tender in places. Warm in others. The good kind of sore, the kind that comes from being held by a man who meant every word he said and backed them up with his body.
My thighs. My hips where his fingers gripped.
The place on my neck where his mouth stayed long enough to leave a mark I’ll have to cover with my hair.
I don’t want to cover it.
I get dressed. My clothes from last night, wrinkled but wearable.
I walk to the kitchen and he’s at the stove in jeans and no shirt and the morning light through the window is on his back and his shoulders and I stand in the doorway for a full five seconds just looking at him because I can.
Because last night happened and this morning is real and a man is making me eggs without a shirt and I don’t have to pretend this isn’t the best morning I’ve had in years.
He turns. He sees me. The grin starts.
“Morning, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. He said it last night. He’s saying it now over a frying pan and it still makes my stomach flip.
“Morning.”
He puts the spatula down. He crosses the kitchen. He puts his hands on my face and kisses me slow and thorough and tasting like coffee and when he pulls back he looks at me like he’s checking to make sure I’m real.
“Sleep okay?” he asks.
“I slept amazing.”
“Not too sore?”
I blush. He grins wider.
He drives me back to Marissa and Levi’s after breakfast. At the door he kisses me again, slowly, his hand on the back of my neck, and says “I’ll see you soon” like soon means hours, not days.
~~~
Wylde Beans. The girls. I’ve been dreading this in the best possible way.
They’re all there. Marissa with her latte, Jenna with her camera bag, Tori with her clinical gaze, Claire with her sunscreen-and-organization energy. They watch me walk in and I know, before I even sit down, that my face is telling them everything my mouth hasn’t.
“How was dinner?” Marissa asks. Neutral. Professional. The question of a woman who already knows the answer and is asking for the group’s benefit.
“The steaks were great.”
“Mm-hm. And after the steaks?”
I press my lips together. I feel the blush climb my neck. My hand involuntarily goes to the spot on my neck where Mason’s mouth was and Jenna’s eyes track the motion like a hawk.
“Is that a hickey?” Jenna says.
“It’s a. It was. He.”
“She’s broken,” Tori says. “Paige Mitchell is nonverbal. This has never happened.”
“I’m not nonverbal. I’m processing.”
“You are RED,” Claire says. “You are the color of my face when Leo carried me down the mountain. I know that color. That is the color of a woman whose plans got rearranged.”
I tell them about the wolf. Their faces go through a series of reactions that would make an excellent time-lapse.
Concern (Tori), alarm (Marissa), fascination (Jenna), analysis (Claire).
But nobody is surprised that I shot it. They know me.
They know I grew up in Georgia with a rifle in one hand and a hymnal in the other.
“And then?” Jenna asks.
I smile. The real one. The one I’ve been wearing since 7 AM. “And then he kissed me.”
They don’t squeal. We’re not those friends. What they do is worse. They look at each other. One by one. The look that passes around the table is the look of four women who have all stood exactly where I’m standing and know exactly what comes next.
“He’s a good man, Paige,” Tori says. Simple. Quiet. The same thing she said about Leo to Claire.
The door to Wylde Beans opens. I look up.
Mason walks in.
He scans the room. He sees me. He sees my friends. He sees five women at a table watching him with varying degrees of assessment and he doesn’t flinch. He walks toward us.
There are two women at a table near the door fully done up: makeup, hair, the kind of effort that’s aimed at being noticed. They see Mason and they sit up straighter and they smile and they whisper to each other and they angle their bodies like flowers toward the sun.
He walks past them. Doesn’t slow. Doesn’t look. He walks past them like they’re furniture and comes straight to my table and bends down and kisses me.
Not a polite kiss. Not a cheek kiss. A real kiss.
His hand on the side of my face, his mouth on mine, warm and certain and unhurried.
In front of everyone. In front of my friends.
In front of the two women whose jaws are on the floor.
In front of the barista and the morning crowd and the entire population of Wylde Beans.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he says when he pulls back. “Thought you might be here.”
I am going to faint. I’m not going to faint. I’m going to sit in this chair and act like a man I spent the night with just kissed me in public and I’m going to be a normal human being about it.
“Hi,” I say. My voice is an octave higher than usual and every woman at this table notices.
He straightens. He nods to my friends. “Ladies. Sorry to interrupt. Mind if I steal her for the day?”
Four faces try to remain composed. Marissa manages. Claire almost manages. Jenna grins behind her coffee cup. Tori says “She’s all yours” with the calm authority of a medical professional signing a discharge form.
He takes my hand. I stand up. I follow him out of the coffee shop grinning so wide it hurts my face and behind me I hear the eruption beginning, the four-voice chorus of women who just witnessed something glorious and have opinions about it.
~~~
Main Street. We walk. His hand in mine, his stride adjusted to my shorter legs, the morning sun warm on the sidewalk.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” he says.
“Okay.”
“One of the things that made me successful in business is that I don’t hesitate when it’s time to make a decision.
I spent ten years building something because I could see what other people couldn’t, and when the moment was right, I moved.
I didn’t wait. I didn’t run the numbers a third time. I trusted my gut.”
He stops. We’re on the sidewalk, people moving around us, the morning going about its business. He turns to face me.
“I know,” he says. “I know you’re the one. I know it sounds crazy. We’ve known each other for less than a week. But I’ve spent a lifetime waiting for you, Paige. I just didn’t realize it until you shook my hand on a mountain road and the whole world rearranged itself.”
I stare at him. My hand is in his and my heart is in my throat and a man is standing on Main Street in a small Montana town telling me I’m the one for him and he’s not putting on confidence.
He’s not making a speech. He’s stating a fact the way he’d state the acreage of his ranch or the number of cattle in his herd. A thing he knows because he knows it.
“I don’t want to wait a minute longer,” he says. “Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”
We get in his truck. We drive. I’m looking at his hand on the wheel and his jaw in profile and I’m not asking where we’re going because for the first time in my life I don’t need to know. I trust the driver.
We pull up to the high school.
It’s a small building, brick and windows, the Montana mountains behind it like a backdrop someone designed. There’s a sign out front. WYLDE MOUNTAIN HIGH SCHOOL. My confusion must show on my face because Mason squeezes my hand and says, “come on.”
Inside, a man is waiting. He’s the principal. Mid-fifties, kind face, the energy of a man who runs a small school and cares about every kid in it. He shakes Mason’s hand and then mine and he says, “so you’re Paige. Mason tells me you’re the best music teacher he’s ever seen.”
“He’s never seen me teach,” I say.
“He doesn’t need to,” the principal says. “He’s a man who knows quality when he finds it. And we are desperately looking for a music teacher.”
The principal walks me through the school. The music room. The small auditorium. The practice space with a piano that needs tuning and a collection of instruments that need organizing and a room that needs a person who believes music matters and can make teenagers believe it too.
It’s perfect. It’s small and worn and underfunded and perfect. The kind of room I could fill. The kind of room that’s been waiting for someone who sings so loudly she can’t help it.
“Would you consider an interview?” the principal asks. “Whenever you’re ready. No pressure.”
“Yes,” I say. “I’d love to.”
We walk outside. Mason is quiet. Waiting. His hands in his pockets. He’s not watching me for a reaction. He’s giving me space to have one.
“You set this up,” I say.
“I made a call. The position was already open. I just connected two things that should have been connected.”
“You did this for me.”
“I did this because I don’t want you to feel trapped. I want you to have options. I want you to have something that’s yours, here, that isn’t about me. If you stay, I want you to stay because you chose it. Not because you had nowhere else to go.”
My eyes are hot. My throat is tight. A man just drove me to a school and showed me a music room and told me he wants me to have something that’s mine.
He’s standing on a sidewalk with his hands in his pockets looking at me like my answer to a question he hasn’t asked is the most important thing he’ll hear all year.
No one has ever done this for me. No one has ever looked at the thing I love (the music, the teaching, the part of me that Ryan said was too much) and instead of asking me to turn it down, built a room for it.
“Mason.”
“Yeah?”
“I’d love to give this thing between us a try.”
His face changes. The steady, patient expression cracks open and underneath it is a man who has been holding his breath all day and just started breathing again.
“Yeah?”
“I’m scared of what I feel for you. It’s too fast and too big. But I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to go back to Nashville and sing songs about being tired on a kitchen floor. I want to be here. I want to try.”
He pulls me against him. His arms around me and my face against his chest and his heart slamming under my ear. He holds me and the sidewalk is quiet and the mountains are behind us.
“You’re safe with me,” he says. Then he stops. Corrects himself. “No. You’ve got yourself. I’m just going to be right here next to you.”
I look up at him. This man. This steady, patient, decisive man who saw a woman on a mountain road and chose her in three seconds and has spent every moment since making sure she knows she’s worth choosing.
“Take me home,” I say.
He grins. He picks me up. Right there on the sidewalk. I wrap my arms around his neck and he carries me to the truck and people watch and I don’t care. I don’t care who’s watching.