Chapter 8
Mason
Did I come on too strong?
I drove a woman I’ve known for less than a week to a high school and introduced her to the principal and showed her a music room and basically said “here’s a life, want it?
” That’s a lot. That’s the kind of move that sends people running.
I know because I spent ten years in real estate watching people panic when the deal moved faster than their comfort zone could handle.
But Paige didn’t run. Paige stood in a music room with tears in her eyes and said she’d love to try.
She gets in the truck. She’s smiling. The real one.
I’ve learned her smiles the way I’ve learned this land: by watching, by patience, by the slow accumulation of knowledge that comes from paying attention.
There’s the one she gives to groups, the one that covers everything.
There’s the polite one she gives to strangers, practiced and warm and designed to make them comfortable.
There’s the deflection one, the self-deprecating one that arrives when someone gets too close to something real.
And there’s this one. The quiet one. The one that starts below her ribs and rises to her face without permission. The one she can’t control and doesn’t try to. This smile is mine. I earned this one.
“Thank you,” she says. “For the school.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I do. Because nobody has ever done something like that for me.” She’s looking at her hands in her lap.
“Ryan used to tell me to be quieter when we went to his work events. He’d say ‘tone it down’ like I was a speaker with a volume knob.
And I’d try. I’d stand there with half a smile and half a laugh and half of everything because he wanted half.
And you just drove me to a school and said ‘here, be all of yourself, be loud.’”
“I didn’t say be loud.”
“You showed me a room designed for loud and said I’d be perfect in it. That’s the same thing.”
She’s right. It is the same thing.
I drive to the ranch. We sit on the porch. Lunch. Sandwiches and iced tea and the view and the quiet. The kind of quiet that doesn’t need filling because the two people in it are full enough.
She’s quiet. Not the practiced quiet she uses to make other people comfortable. Real quiet. Thinking quiet. I can see her turning something over the way I turn a property assessment: weighing the risk against the return, looking for the flaws, testing the structure.
“Can you share what you’re thinking?” I ask.
She looks at me. The quiet smile wavers. Underneath it is something raw and scared and real.
“I’ve never felt like this,” she says. “What I had with Ryan, I thought that was love. It wasn’t.
It was me being who he wanted me to be and calling it partnership.
I dimmed myself for two years and called it compromise.
And then I shook your hand on a road and felt more in three seconds than I felt in two years of being smaller. ”
“You’re not small, Paige.”
“I know. I’m starting to know.” She looks at the mountains. “I’m scared. I’m scared because this is fast and I don’t trust fast. Fast is how I ended up engaged to the wrong man. Fast is how I lost myself the first time.”
“This isn’t fast.” I lean forward. My elbows on my knees. “This is decisive. Those are different things. Fast is rushing past the warning signs because you don’t want to see them. Decisive is seeing everything, clearly, and choosing.”
“You see me clearly?”
“I see you. All of you. The singing in the kitchen and the laughing at your own jokes and the crying at commercials and the wolf-shooting at dusk. I see every piece and there isn’t a single one I’d change.”
Her eyes are wet. She looks at me. A tear runs. One. She wipes it fast, embarrassed, and I reach over and catch her hand.
“Don’t wipe that away,” I say. “Don’t hide from me. Not the tears, not the laugh, not the noise. I want all of it.”
“All of it is a lot, Mason.”
“I’m a big man, sweetheart. I can handle a lot.”
She laughs. Wet and real and messy and beautiful. She laughs and the tear joins it and she’s laughing and crying and it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever seen and I pull her into me and hold her on the porch with the mountains behind us.
“I love you,” I say. Into her hair. Against the top of her head.
Three words that I’ve never said to a woman and meant with my whole body and I’m saying them on a porch after five days because five days was enough.
Five days of watching her be and brave and scared and generous and extraordinary and five days was more than enough.
“I love you too,” she says. Into my chest. Her voice muffled by my shirt. “I love you and it terrifies me and I don’t care. I want to be here. I want the ranch and the school and the mountains and you. I want you.”
I tip her chin up. I kiss her. Soft. Slow.
“Come inside,” she says.
This time is different. Before was fire and adrenaline and need. This is something else. This is the after. The choice made, the words said, the ground beneath us solid.
I bring her to the bedroom. The afternoon light through the windows is warm and gold and it falls across the bed like it was placed there.
I undress her slowly. The sundress, lifted over her head.
Her bra, unclasped. Her panties, pulled down her legs.
Each piece removed like I’m unwrapping something valuable.
She stands in front of me, bare, and she doesn’t cover herself this time.
She lets me look and her chin is up and her eyes are on mine and she is the bravest woman I have ever known.
“Beautiful,” I say. I say it because it’s true and because she needs to hear it and because I will say it every day until the word loses all meaning except her. “You are so goddamn beautiful.”
I strip. She watches. Her eyes on my chest, my stomach, lower. The hunger on her face is open and unguarded and it makes me harder than anything she could do with her hands.
I lay her down. I climb over her. Our bodies aligned. Chest to chest. Hips to hips. I kiss her slowly. My tongue in her mouth, matching the rhythm I want to set between her legs.
I push into her. Watch her face as I fill her. Her eyes flutter. Her lips part. Her hands come up to my shoulders and grip.
I move. Slow and deep. Not with urgency. Today is thorough. Today is a man making love to a woman and telling her what she is with every stroke.
“You are extraordinary,” I say. My mouth by her ear. My hips rolling into hers. “You are the best thing I have ever found. I spent thirty-nine years building a life and you walked into it and made it real.”
“Mason.” Her voice breaks on my name. Her legs wrap around me. Her heels press into my lower back, pulling me deeper.
“I love your voice.” I thrust deeper. “I love the way you sing. I love the way you laugh at your own jokes before anyone else can.” I thrust again.
She moans. “I love the way you shot a wolf off me without thinking twice. I love that you grew up on a horse in Georgia and you can outshoot my ranch hands and you teach third graders to sing and you cry at commercials.”
“You’re going to make me cry right now.”
“Good. Cry. Laugh. Be as loud as you want.” I press my forehead against hers. “I want to hear everything.”
She pulls my face down and kisses me hard and her hips rise to meet mine and the rhythm changes from slow to something deeper and more insistent. My hand slides between us. My thumb finds her clit and she gasps against my mouth.
“That’s my good girl,” I say. “Come for me, sweetheart.”
She comes. Looking at me. Her eyes open, her hands on my face, her body contracting around me in waves. She comes saying my name and she doesn’t look away and I watch every second of it because this is what she looks like when she’s not holding anything back. This is Paige at full volume.
I follow her. Deep inside her. My face against her neck. Her name in my mouth. I come holding the woman I love and feeling her heartbeat against my chest and knowing with the certainty I’ve only felt twice in my life (the ranch, and her) that this is where I’m supposed to be.
After. Her head on my chest. My hand in her hair. The afternoon going gold outside.
“I need to call the school,” she says.
“The interview?”
“I want to schedule it this week. Before I lose my nerve.”
“You’re not going to lose your nerve.”
“I might. I lose my nerve about things.”
“Sweetheart, you shot a moving wolf from the back of a horse. You’re not going to lose your nerve over a job interview.”
She laughs. She presses her face into my chest and laughs and I feel the vibration in my ribs and it’s the best sound in the world. Better than quiet mornings. Better than rain on the ranch. Better than anything I’ve heard in thirty-nine years of listening.
“I want to stay,” she says. “On the mountain. At the school. With you.”
“Then stay.”
“It’s that simple?”
“It’s that simple.”
She lifts her head. She looks at me. Brown eyes. That smile. The quiet one that’s mine.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll stay.”
I pull her closer. The ranch is quiet. The mountains are outside. The bed is warm and she’s in it and she’s staying and the home that was empty for three years is finally full.