Chapter Eighteen

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

LOUNGERIE – The undeniable intimacy of seeing a person in loungewear for the first time; see also gray sweatpants.

I t hadn’t been snowing this hard when Mason left his apartment. Fat globs of snow clung half melted to the sidewalk, his gym shoes struggling to find purchase. The pristine white powder would be covered in city grime in a matter of hours, but for now, the world was quiet—as quiet as the city ever got. There was a stillness to a snowstorm that Mason loved. He leaned into that stillness, a blissful calm after the roller coaster of the past few days.

There were still no texts from Sawyer when he retrieved his phone from the gym locker, but he was trying to make his peace with that. As he strolled down the slushy sidewalk, he drank in the skyline that had been his home the past few years. It was finally beginning to hit him. It was all happening. A big, wide future awaited him in LA, but amid the excitement was a tinge of panic. His time in Chicago was drawing to a close, and he didn’t quite feel done with it.

His hair was still wet from his gym shower, and he was freezing, but he decided to walk the long way home so he could stop at his favorite pho spot. How many more chances would he get to eat there? He hoped a stomach full of rich broth would drown out his anxiety about the city—and the woman within it—that he didn’t want to leave yet.

It might have worked, too, had Sawyer not chosen that moment to text him back.

hey, sorry, finally came up for air, buttttttt 37,000 words, baby!!

He grinned down at his phone. He had no clue how many words were in a novel, but that sounded like a lot. Either way, she was writing and that warmed him more than a shot of whiskey.

AMAZING.

Before he could compose a second response, three dots appeared, and he froze in the middle of the sidewalk, waiting.

thanks, i’m stuck now but i’m gonna take the night off, refuel, eat?? i’ve heard feeding your flesh prison is necessary to function, apparently.

He laughed. He loved the way she texted. No capitalization, run-on sentences, either no punctuation or a plethora of it. He could hear her voice when he read them, the exact tone she’d say it in.

Who knew?! How do you feel about pho?

VERY positive feelings

Excellent.

He pulled up the menu on his phone and texted it to her. She responded in a matter of seconds with her order.

P3, B17, and split A6 with me pleaseeeee!!! you are an ANGEL i’d say you don’t have to but i fucking love that place and now nothing else will do

He would drive to Australia to grab her a snack if that’s what it took to see her. He’d been hoping for a text back, something to let him know they were okay after what happened on Christmas, and it seemed like they were, maybe? As the comfort of that thought sank in, a new fear unlocked inside his mind. Were they pretending it didn’t happen? Just like their all-night-and-the-next-morning stand? Though they hadn’t ever pretended that didn’t happen. They both had made plenty of jokes about it. So what, exactly, the fuck was happening?

He still hadn’t decided by the time their food was ready, nor had he decided on the short drive to Sawyer’s, or the walk up to her apartment. So he did what he did when he forgot lines on set—improvised and prayed he didn’t stray too far from the script.

He exhaled heavily as he removed his beanie, shaking off the layer of ice that had formed, the snow really coming down now. He knocked, and she answered in a flash.

Her face lit up at the sight of the large paper bag in his hands, and he was grateful she wasn’t looking at him while he was looking at her.

Jesus Christ. She was wearing the tiniest shorts he’d ever seen. Not sleeping with her again would be a hell of a lot easier if his body didn’t react to her so readily. The joggers he’d changed into before grabbing his car did little to conceal, well, anything.

“How much do I owe you?” she asked, stepping aside to let him in.

“Nothing. We’re celebrating!” He hoped he didn’t notice the slight panic in his voice as he hastily adjusted himself, pointedly keeping his attention on the top half of her body and not those goddamn shorts.

Sawyer glanced over her shoulder, eyes widening in excitement. “Oooh! What are we celebrating?”

He blinked at her back as he kicked off his shoes. “You? Writing?”

She froze in the middle of opening a drawer, something unreadable crossing her face. “Oh.” She flushed, turning away from him and rifling through the drawer. “It’s not a big deal. It’s literally my job.”

Crossing over to her, he set down the giant bag of takeout before taking her gently by the shoulders. Placing a finger under her chin, he guided her to look at him. “It is a big deal. And we’re celebrating.”

A smile spread across her face, but it didn’t fully chase away whatever emotion clouded her normally bright eyes. “Alright. Well, if you insist—I’ll even let you pick the mugs.”

He placed a hand over his heart. “I’m honored.”

Crossing over to the hutch, he smiled fondly at the Christmas tree in the corner. He paused, doing a double take. “Sawyer?”

“Hmm?” she answered distractedly, using her arm to scoop the contents scattered on her kitchen table into the garbage in one fell swoop.

“Why is there a dildo atop our tree?”

She stilled, her gaze darting between him and the pearlescent sex toy cresting the tree. “Well, so, the porcelain angel fell off. Her face cracked and I tried to fix it, but I’m not exactly Martha Stewart here, alright? And the tree looked so sad without a topper, and I thought the glitter gave it a festive vibe,” she finished with jazz hands.

“It’s a vibe, alright,” he agreed with an astonished laugh. “I love it, for the record.”

She beamed. “Thanks.”

Abandoning her cleaning of the kitchen table, she moved a stack of books off the coffee table and spread the food out on it instead.

Perusing her extensive mug collection, he selected one with a swooning Victorian woman for himself. From the back of the hutch, he unearthed a mug with a bold western font that declared, “Damn, I’m good.” Pouring a shot of whiskey for them both, he handed her the latter.

She grinned at his choices, nodding in approval. “Thank you,” she said softly, tapping her mug against his and taking a sip.

He studied her over the rim of his mug as he drank. There was something to her voice, the unnamable thing still shadowing her expressions. Was it because of what they’d done the other night in his car? Before he could make sense of it, she sank down onto the couch, letting out a beleaguered sigh before pulling a steaming bowl of pho broth toward her.

“Is it okay—that I’m here?” he asked.

She glanced up at him in the middle of tearing basil leaves into her soup. “Mason. I invited you.”

He nodded once, sinking onto the couch cushion next to her. He stole glances at her as he added jalapenos and bean sprouts to his own broth, trying to take solace in the routine of preparing his comfort meal.

She caught him staring again as he stirred sriracha into his broth. “What?” She managed to pack more emotion into that singular syllable than most of his costars did in a page-long monologue.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I just—you seem different. Is it because of… the other night?”

Sawyer took a deep breath, her eyes fluttering shut. “No. I’m just tired. This is what I’m like when I’m drafting. It takes me a while to get my head back after spending so long in another world. I don’t usually—” She gestured between the two of them. “Socialize after a writing binge. It’s like I spend so much time crafting their personalities that it kinda drains mine. So, I’m sorry. I might not be very entertaining. Oh—I’ll ruin romance writers for you, how about that?”

“Sawyer,” he said softly. “You don’t have to ‘be’ anything. Not everything we do has to be for the list. I just wanted to know you’re okay—we’re okay.”

She nodded. “We’re good. It’s not you, it’s me,” she said with a half-hearted sly grin that he could tell even she didn’t buy. She blew out a breath, her bangs fluttering with the force of it. “I also…” Averting her gaze to her soup, she stirred it absentmindedly, and he waited. “I haven’t written like this in a while, but I also haven’t had someone be excited for me that wasn’t someone who got paid when I wrote.”

He thought of Lily, her friend that he’d met at the mall.

She met his eyes, and as if his thoughts were written on his face, she nodded. “I met Lily while I was editing Why We’re Not Together , so she missed this phase.” She gestured around her messy apartment. She tapped her spoon against the side of the bowl, staring at the wall as if deciding whether or not to keep talking. He hoped she kept talking. Every piece of her that she chose to share felt like both a gift and a hard-won battle. “I’m sure you’ve realized my parents and I aren’t close—not like you and yours. Even with the awkwardness, that Christmas dinner was the best family meal I think I can remember. My family and I…” She ran her thumb along her bottom lip, still staring at the wall across from them. “Well, I wasn’t exactly the ideal preacher’s kid, but it still stung when I sent them an advance copy of my first book and they sent it back without even cracking the spine.”

Mason scrubbed his hands over his face, unsure what to say. Their experiences couldn’t be more different. His mother had nearly suffocated him with support.

“It’s okay,” she mumbled. “You don’t have to say anything.”

He wanted to tell her it wasn’t okay, but he could tell she already knew that, that she’d made her peace with it and nothing he said was going to assuage that hurt. What he couldn’t wrap his mind around was how someone could know Sawyer, had some hand in shaping her, see the wily, wistful wonder that she was—and walk away. In the Venn diagram of “knowing Sawyer” and “loving Sawyer,” for Mason, it was a circle.

A memory played out in his mind’s eye—not a memory. A scene from the Almost Lovers movie, where the main character reconciles with her estranged family. A scene that hadn’t been in the book. Mason suddenly felt hollowed out. He hadn’t understood why Sawyer hated her book’s adaptation so much. Until now. She’d given a delicate piece of herself to her character, and the studio had bastardized it, as if the only way to be happily ever after is to have everything tied up in a glossy bow where, for Sawyer, there would always be a severed thread.

“Anyway.” Sawyer sipped her broth before continuing. “I took that copy and made a new family. I brought it to every signing I did for Almost Lovers , and let my readers sign it. It was so battered by the last one that I had to tape the spine.”

“Could I see it?” he asked tentatively.

The soft smile on her face fell, and she stared down at her soup like she wanted to drown in it. “I don’t have it anymore. Sadie and I broke up right before the launch, but I still thought we’d get back together, once everything calmed down. But when I got back from tour, Sadie sent her brother to grab the last of her things, and I left because I couldn’t watch. It was weeks before I realized the book was gone.”

Anger speared through him, white-hot. “They took it?”

Sawyer shrugged with false nonchalance, taking a large bite of noodles before answering. “It’s possible I lost it.”

“You don’t believe that.”

She exhaled heavily. “No. But getting it back would require talking to her.” She took another bite, chewing thoughtfully. “Is it pathetic that even after all this time I’m scared to do it?”

“No,” Mason said adamantly. He still hadn’t mustered the nerve to call Kara or any of his other exes.

“I think what I’m most scared of,” she admitted quietly, staring at her pho as if it were easier to confess this to a bowl of noodles. “Is that they did something to it. At least this way, I can pretend it’s still out there, bursting at the seams with messages of love.”

Sawyer Greene had the biggest heart, and she didn’t even know it. He envied the person who one day got to hold it, to fill in the cracks left by those who hadn’t recognized it for the gift that it was.

“I’m sure it is,” he said, squeezing her knee reassuringly.

She smiled weakly, nodding once.

They ate in silence after that. Mason’s conversation with Luis swam through his head, and he finally understood what Luis meant about waiting it out. Mason was no stranger to showing up unannounced and professing feelings. He believed that if you cared about someone, you should tell them. But Sawyer was opening up to him, slowly, and while she may never be ready for a relationship—the thought gutted him—the thought of having no relationship with her at all hurt worse. So Mason bit back any grand confessions that dared to surface. But he couldn’t shake the need to share something personal with her, to let her know that he appreciated the full weight of her sharing things with him. He had a suspicion it wasn’t a thing she did often. Truthfully, it wasn’t something he did often either.

She tipped her bowl to drain the last of the broth before dropping her chopsticks and spoon back into it and pushing it away. Lying back on the couch, she wormed her feet over his lap, through the circle created by his elbows propped on his knees. “Make yourself comfortable,” he laughed, adjusting his position so she could stretch out.

“I always do,” she said with a smile.

The memory of them in his car two nights ago flashed before his eyes, the bra she’d taken off to get “comfortable.” He shoved that down. He wasn’t sure what that had been. She didn’t seem keen to discuss it, and it definitely wasn’t the vibe tonight, so he would take her cue.

Draining the last of his soup, he stacked their empty bowls before sinking into the couch, absentmindedly massaging her calves. “I’m really happy you’re writing again,” he admitted quietly.

“Me, too,” she said softly, a light sparking in her eyes. She glanced away, smiling bigger, before turning back to him and nudging his ribs with her toe. “I feel like this is all working out unfairly in my favor. Put me to work.” She twisted around, grabbing the remote off the coffee table. Netflix gong ed loudly as she queued it up. “Pick a rom-com and I’ll ruin it for you.”

He squeezed her knee. “Not everything we do has to be about the list.”

She made a face. “Favorite rom-com: go.” When he didn’t immediately answer, she nudged him in the ribs impatiently.

“ 10 Things .”

She stiffened. “No. Pick another one.”

He laughed. “You asked for my favorite. That’s my favorite.”

She groaned dramatically, tossing her head back against the couch cushions. “Yeah, but it’s my favorite. I can’t ruin it. It’s perfect.”

He threw his hands up in defeat. “Just put something on.”

“No,” Sawyer insisted, propping herself up on her elbows. “I want to hold up my end of the bargain, but I don’t know how. Maybe… I don’t know, I don’t know that I totally get you.”

He blinked in surprise. He’d already told her more than he’d ever told anyone.

Oblivious to his shock, she continued, “Tell me: How did you become such a romantic?”

“My parents,” he said automatically. Sawyer settled in deeper, listening. “They had a meet-cute for the ages.”

She patted the space on the couch next to her, scooting over slightly to make room for him to lie down, too. He settled in next to her, his arm around her back to keep her from falling off the couch that was far too small for two people to lie down without being practically on top of each other. Maybe their weird mission was working for him, too, because he didn’t immediately overthink what it meant that she was lying with him like this.

“Tell me more about this meet-cute,” she said. It took Mason a moment to clock that this was exactly what he’d said to her when he was panicking in the elevator. The fact that she remembered… He hoped she couldn’t feel the way his heart stuttered from where she was perched on his chest.

“They met on set of In the Hills .”

Sawyer scrunched up her face in concentration. “Wasn’t that the movie Lynn was mocking at dinner?”

Mason nodded. “Yep. The movie’s god-awful,” he laughed. “But it’s where my parents met. My mom was just starting out. I think she was, like, twenty-one? Twenty-two? My dad was a few years older and a stuntman—” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively, and Sawyer giggled. “They’d blocked his fight scene multiple times, and everything had been perfect—until the cameras actually started rolling and the film’s lead threw my dad across the room—in the wrong direction. My mom grabbed him half a second before he went through the window. Only, he was moving so fast that they toppled to the ground—”

“Stop,” Sawyer breathed.

Mason laughed as he nodded.

“They landed on top of each other, didn’t they?” she asked breathlessly.

“Yep,” he confirmed.

Sawyer groaned as if in pain from how cute it was. “I bet the media had a field day.”

Mason shook his head. “They didn’t go public for a long time. She was faking a relationship with the film’s lead at the time, so my dad courted her in secret. Everything for the media has always been fake with my mom. ‘Give them something to talk about so you can keep the real stuff for yourself,’” he parroted.

Sawyer grinned up at him. “Puh-lease make all my romance writer dreams come true and tell me you’ve faked a relationship for PR.”

Mason couldn’t help but return her smile, bopping her on the tip of her adorably scrunched nose. “With the amount of costars I’ve dated, you would think, right? But, other than my first relationship where everyone knew it was fake but me, no. They’ve all been real.”

Sawyer’s jaw dropped before she promptly mimed zipping it shut. He knew it was taking all her self-control not to ask for details, but he was opting for rose-colored glasses tonight where his mother was concerned. He didn’t want to get into all that.

He shrugged the shoulder her head wasn’t propped on. “In any other industry, dating a coworker is taboo, but sets are such a microcosm. There’s not really anyone else to date except your coworkers. The media loves it and it’s great press, and it’s easier to give them their photo op, the sound bite, than to sneak around and get caught unawares. I’ve never kept it a secret that I want what my parents have. They’re so solid. I want to find that. I like going all out. I love love.”

There was that word again. But using it to describe his past relationships didn’t fit quite right. He’d loved some of them, but he was no longer so sure he’d been fully in love. Like he’d been in the shallow end of the pool all along and was only just now learning how to swim in the deep end. The depth was both thrilling and terrifying.

He didn’t need to keep talking, but he found himself wanting to anyway, even if it went against all his instincts to let his internal mess unspool. He leaned into Sawyer’s touch, leaned into the feeling of trusting someone with his whole self, even the parts that wouldn’t make for a titillating late-night talk show bit.

“But… despite all that, no matter how hard I tried to get everything right, my relationships never lasted longer than the production schedule. So, when I got the Diagnostics offer, it felt like the answer to all my problems. My relationship with my mom had been strained ever since I fired her as my manager—yes, I’m that child actor cliché—but I wasn’t a kid anymore. I knew who I was outside of just being Moira West’s son. And I was lonely. I wanted to come home. But, as with all things that seem too good to be true… the Diagnostics showrunner makes our lives hell. It—”

As if sensing him shutting down, Sawyer threaded her fingers through his hair, scratching his scalp comfortingly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d let it all out like this, if he’d ever let it all out at once like this. Now that he’d started, he needed to see it through, from both a need for Sawyer to understand, and a need to understand himself.

“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you all the toxic shit we put up with, I just don’t want to ruin the rest of our night,” he said, laughing darkly. “When filming resumes next month, you’ll be sick of me complaining about it. But, for now, let’s just say it’s no coincidence that I’m leaving this show to start my own production company. It doesn’t have to be that way. We convince ourselves that the bad days on set are okay because they’re big names, that these out-of-touch old white dudes can make or break our career, but—” He shook his head. “There’s a new generation of actors and directors and producers, and we can choose not to perpetuate that.” Glancing down at her, he gave her a crooked grin. “This is where you tell me that in addition to being an incurable romantic, I’m also a hopeless dreamer.”

Sawyer shook her head. “I wasn’t going to say that at all,” she said softly. “I love your dream.”

Mason wasn’t sure why that made him want to cry. He squeezed his eyes shut, inhaling deeply and holding it for a moment before releasing it. He’d had this conversation with his family multiple times over the past two days, explaining the vision for Guiding Light, why he had to move to LA, but he’d been on the defensive. Now, for the first time in days, he was excited. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “That was a lot.”

Sawyer’s hands stilled in his hair, and she shifted, curling into his side so she could look up at him, studying his expression. “álvarez,” she scolded him. “Why are you apologizing?”

She had a point. He wished he could be more like her, to not feel the need to apologize for going after what he wanted. But he’d grown up under the thumb of Moira West, where you kept the messy thoughts shoved under the rug. Mason had been pretending everything was fine, always putting his best foot forward, never letting the bad thoughts out, been masking his expressions for so long, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d talked without tailoring it for his audience.

“I’m not very good at keeping things surface level with you.”

Sawyer shrugged, waving away his comment. “Fuck that rule. We’re friends.”

Friends didn’t feel like a big enough word for what she was to him. It scared him how easy it was for him to drop all of his acts around her. With her, he wasn’t Dr. Santiago or Moira West’s son or the media’s favorite doting boyfriend. With her, he could just be Mason álvarez. “Thank you for listening,” he said sincerely.

“Of course,” she breathed. “What do you need in this moment?”

He exhaled heavily. “It’s been a long two days. I just want to lie here and go back to not thinking about it.”

She smiled softly, nudging his chest with her nose. “I am great at avoiding things, but thank you for telling me,” she said with a soft smile. “I know sometimes simply talking about it helps.”

He nodded distractedly. He did feel better, lighter.

Sensing that he wasn’t going to say anything else, she resumed her scroll through Netflix.

He sank deeper into the couch, dragging an incredibly soft blanket off the back and draping it over them.

Rolling onto his side, he kept his arm around her tight, not wanting her to move. He was so full, his head mercifully empty for the first time in days, and her couch was comfortable. She was comfortable—and not just her body, her back now pressed into his front—but her presence was like a weighted blanket, soothing him and dragging him under. Seeing her again after two days of worrying felt like an immense weight had been lifted off his shoulders, a contented warmth taking its place.

He felt rather than saw her twist her head, momentarily pausing her perusal of movie options. He had a vague inclination that she’d asked him something. “What?” he mumbled.

“Are you about to fall asleep on me?”

The last thing he remembered was uttering an adamant “No” before sleep dragged him under.

“Mason.”

He blinked awake, the dull light from the street barely illuminating Sawyer’s apartment. A few inches of snow had accumulated on the narrow window ledge, and more poured steadily down. He was still on Sawyer’s couch, a thin blanket thrown haphazardly over him. He laughed to himself. Of course she hadn’t woken him up and offered to share her bed. She’d probably say she was ruining “only one bed” for him. Though maybe she had tried to wake him up. He was so goddamn tired after not sleeping for two days that he had no sense of how long he’d been out. It could have been minutes or days.

“Mason.”

He tensed, eyes straining in the darkness. Sawyer’s door was slightly ajar, the sound of rustling bedsheets coming from the other room. Had she heard him wake up? Maybe she would share her bed after all. The couch was far too small for him to stretch out comfortably, and his muscles ached from the gym and the cramped position he’d passed out in. His feet had barely hit the cold hardwood when he heard Sawyer moan.

The realization hit him like a brick wall. Sawyer was touching herself, and it was his name on her lips while she did it.

He brought his fist to his mouth, clamping down. This woman was going to be his undoing. Every muscle in his body went stiff as he willed himself not to move.

A vibrating noise joined the soft moans coming from the next room, and Mason was so turned on he was seeing spots. Listening seemed wrong. Interrupting seemed worse. Joining her sounded best, but Luis’s cake-milk metaphor rang in his head. He’d already broken Rule #1: No feelings. Rule #2 had to stay in place.

He tried not to eavesdrop, but there was no mistaking the little gasp Sawyer made when she came. He gripped the edge of the couch so hard, he wouldn’t have been surprised if stuffing oozed out the seams.

It was an effort to control his ragged breathing, almost missing Sawyer’s quiet murmur.

“Thank you, Mason.”

A drawer opened and closed, and he heard her sheets rustle as she settled in for the night.

He shook with silent laughter.

Was her vibrator named Mason?

Half-delirious with lust, he felt hope bloom in his chest. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who was too far gone.