Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

“JUST FRIENDS” – The ancient romance myth that you—a mere mortal—can be platonic acquaintances with the sex god who blew your back out a fortnight ago.

E ven with the help of the tiny wine corkscrew knife Sawyer kept in her bag for emergencies—Mason gracefully not questioning the validity of a wine emergency—Sawyer’s fingers were frozen by the time they managed to free the tree from the top of her car. She’d managed to find parking around the block from her apartment, and was immensely grateful Mason’s ridiculous physique was good for more than just ogling as he hefted the tree overhead and followed behind her on the gray, slush-covered sidewalk.

Regardless, she couldn’t help but ask, “Is it really necessary for a doctor to be that in shape?” Glancing back, she caught the cocksure smile he flashed her.

“Oh yes, Dr. Santiago does all his surgeries shirtless.”

“As one does,” she quipped, opening the door to her building for him. When they reached the tight corner of the stairs and Mason paused to reposition the tree, she unbuttoned his peacoat to reveal the red plaid flannel straining at the buttons. “Better?”

Mason shook his head down at her. “You’re shameless.”

She winked at him before flouncing up the stairs and gesturing for him to follow her down the hall. As she unlocked her door, she panicked. Her place wasn’t nearly as nice as Mason’s. Her only view was of the gore special effects artists across the street, dismembered body parts casually resting on their windowsills. Well, that’s the story she’d made up for them. She had stories for all her neighbors.

At least all of her time spent Not Writing meant her apartment was clean. Swinging the door wide, she followed him inside. Unlacing her boots, she watched him take in her space while kicking off his own shoes. His eyes scanned over her cerulean velvet couch, the emerald, leaf-shaped pillows that were the closest Sawyer would ever get to keeping a plant alive, the gallery wall overhead of framed stick figure drawings and watercolors from Lily.

Her TV stand was still sans television, all the cubbies bursting at the seams with books. Even with her monthly donations to Alex, there were some she could never part with. She kept them close by so she could thumb back through them, reliving highlights of her favorite characters’ lives or revisiting perfect turns of phrase that had left her breathless.

Mason’s gaze lingered on the mustard-yellow hutch where she stored her extensive mug collection. His mouth quirked up as he spotted her favorite, a white mug with a pattern of tits of all shapes and sizes.

“In the corner?” he asked, gesturing to the tree stand she’d dragged out of her storage locker earlier that morning.

She nodded, following him over and holding the tree steady as he tightened the screws into the base. As he worked, she was hit with how strange this was. This was Elevator Guy . He was the one-night stand she was never supposed to see ever again. Yet, here he was, in her apartment that was a quarter the size of his, on his knees, screwing in her tree.

Glancing down, she could see Mason’s red flannel had ridden up, revealing two dimples on his lower back that she wanted to dip her fingers into. Before her mind could wander further, she cleared her throat.

“What did you do before?”

“Before what?” he asked distractedly. He gave the tree a jostle to assess his handiwork, grinning softly when it stayed upright.

Backing up to check that the tree was straight, she smiled to herself. It was slightly crooked, but Mason seemed so proud of himself that she couldn’t bring herself to have him fix it.

“Before resuscitating coma patients with your hotness on Diagnostics .”

He straightened, nearly too tall for her low ceilings. “A bunch of indie movies with my friend Alissa. We met on the set of The Heir Apparent(ly) , but after Disney we both wanted to prove ourselves as ‘serious artists.’” Mason made a mock gagging noise. “So we moved into the indie space and ended up falling in love with it—her with directing, me with acting. There was more freedom there, and everyone I worked with was invested and passionate. The creative process was so different and collaborative—sorry, I’m rambling,” he mumbled.

Sawyer shook her head. “No, I—that sounds amazing, but YOU WERE IN THE HEIR APPARENT(LY) ?”

Mason’s eyes fluttered shut as he nodded in resignation. “Yes.”

“Who?!” Sawyer exclaimed. Preteen Sawyer had loved that movie, yet she couldn’t place Mason anywhere in the cast. His friend Alissa, on the other hand, she knew immediately. She’d only been Sawyer’s bi awakening, after all.

“I was the quirky older brother. I had green hair.”

She gasped. “Oh my God! That was you!” She resisted the urge to ask more about his Disney days. “So, why the switch to TV?”

“I was tired. When you live on location, you form these intense relationships with the cast and crew—” She had a hunch Mason was skirting around mentioning a specific type of relationship. “These people become your family, and when it’s done, you all just move on to the next thing. And then Margot had Max, and even though my family exhausts me, all I wanted was to be closer to them.” He blinked, as if not meaning to say so much. “And the pay’s not bad either.”

Sawyer couldn’t understand wanting to be close to family, but money, she understood. It’s why she sold her first book’s film rights. Yeah, she’d wanted to see her characters brought to life, but she was also a broke college student. A blindly trusting college student that hadn’t asked enough questions, too blindsided by the zeros on the check they cut her for handing over her debut characters.

Had it allowed her to write full-time? Yes.

Would she do it again? No.

She couldn’t think about that book, the characters she’d spent years crafting, pouring the parts of herself she couldn’t talk about into them, only to see them mangled by Hollywood. She couldn’t change it now, but she had learned from it. Her characters belonged to her and her readers, and she would happily stay in her book lane with no more detours to La-La Land.

There was something in the set of Mason’s mouth that made her heart pang with familiarity. The way he lit up when talking about working with Alissa, and how quickly that light fizzled out when talking about his present. “But you don’t love it?”

“I did—I do,” he corrected himself hastily. He shrugged, rubbing the back of his neck subconsciously. “It’s complicated.”

She met his gaze. He was bullshitting her, and they both knew it. She let it drop. He didn’t owe her an explanation. They’d agreed to keep things surface level, but Sawyer couldn’t help but read between the lines of Mason’s tiny admissions and careful omissions. Their situations were wildly different, yet she felt like she got him—or was beginning to, at least.

Silence fell between them, and she wondered if he, too, was trying to figure out how to backpedal out of the conversational deep waters they’d waded into.

“So,” Mason said brusquely, clearing his throat. “How did I do? Are you feeling inspired?”

Sawyer scoffed, but she couldn’t quite shake the image of the couple nuzzling noses by the mistletoe. “Did I ruin romance for you yet?”

He fixed her with a look, confirming what she knew: neither of them had really succeeded in their mission. “Maybe,” he hedged. “We should do a few more items from the list. For science.”

To be fair, if today was a test run, it wasn’t a complete loss. She had a lot of ideas she was itching to write down. She wanted to see this through.

“For science,” she agreed. Wandering over to her hutch, she grabbed a bottle of whiskey and put a healthy pour into two mugs. The mug she handed Mason read “BDE” in bold letters, and in a smaller font underneath, “(bisexual disaster energy).”

Mason laughed under his breath as he read the mug, raising it to clink against her titty mug before taking a sip.

“For the record,” she said quietly, not sure how to tactfully broach this subject. She considered herself to be a master of many things, but tact had never been one of them. “I know this—” She gestured between the two of them. “Is an unusual venture that we’re on, but anything you say to me is in confidence. I don’t really have anyone to tell.” Fuck, that was an embarrassingly honest thing to admit. She cleared her throat and avoided Mason’s overly soft expression. “I just meant, I don’t have TMZ on speed dial.”

The corner of Mason’s mouth quirked up. “Thank you. I didn’t mean to change the subject—well, yes I did. But not because I don’t trust you. It’s just…” He stared down into his mug as if it were alphabet soup, praying it would spell out the perfect nonanswer. When it didn’t, he shrugged. “I love the cast, the crew, my character, but—” He scrunched up his nose. “Let’s just say, if it were my show, I’d run things very differently. But…” He shrugged in defeat. “It feels really fucking shitty to complain when I have something most people would kill for.”

Even without saying much, he’d still managed to speak volumes.

Sawyer nodded in understanding. “I get that. My editor is begging me for my next book, and I can’t even write one. Meanwhile, there are tons of brilliant writers waiting for that shot, and here I am, squandering mine.” She took a large gulp of whiskey, wincing at the burn. She’d drafted multiple messages to her writer friends to talk about this very thing and deleted every single one, not wanting to seem ungrateful, and here she was word vomiting it all out to Elevator Guy.

The nickname stung worse than the whiskey. Mason wasn’t just One-Night Stand Elevator Guy. Not anymore. What did you call your friends with benefits when “benefits” were against the rules?

A… friend?

Sawyer didn’t want to think too hard about how long it took for that word to bubble to the surface. A new friend. Clearly, Mason was already rubbing off on her, because the mere concept of friendship had her heart racing.

They were supposed to be keeping things superficial, but she supposed they could still be friends, in a way. Like the classmates you did a group project with and then never spoke to again once the semester was over.

It was nice, having someone to talk to about these things. Outside of Lily, she hadn’t made many new friends since losing her college friends in the breakup with Sadie. She had writer friends, but she’d been beating the same, sad writer’s block drum for so long now that where they’d once been supportive, their condolences and words of affirmation had now gone stale, a refrain repeated too many times.

But she was trying. What she was doing with Mason would sound ridiculous if she tried to explain it, but the fact was, she was feeling more inspired in the past few weeks than she had in years.

At this point, her editor, Emily, would take anything, but every time they agreed on a new pitch for her next book, the harder she pushed herself, the more “The End” eluded her. She needed to create, the outlet it provided, but it remained out of reach. And it was slowly suffocating her. Writing had always been her safe space, something that was wholly hers, and in her yearslong writer’s block, it was like the very foundation of her life was crumbling beneath her feet. She’d already sacrificed so much for her career, and there was nothing she wouldn’t sacrifice to get it back.

“So,” Mason said softly, cutting through her downward spiral. “Are we going to decorate this tree or what?”

Sawyer’s eyes widened. “Oh, I wasn’t going to force you to sit through all my decorating traditions. I already took up enough of your time, but thank you. Seriously. I wouldn’t have been able to get a real tree without you.”

Mason’s face fell, but he hastily replaced it with a practiced smile.

“What?” she asked suspiciously.

He shrugged, boyishly bashful and adorable in a way that had Sawyer’s insides melting. “I was kinda hoping to help. We never really did the whole decorating thing as a kid. Ours was always professionally decorated and picture perfect. Besides,” he said with a roguish grin that made a very specific part of her melt. “I’m dead curious to see if your ornament collection is half as interesting as your mugs.” He raised the BDE mug in demonstration.

She laughed. She’d planned to ask Lily to come over and decorate with her, but she didn’t want to wait for her to get back from snowbirding with the in-laws.

Her Bluetooth speakers beeped loudly as she flipped them on, and she queued up Ariana Grande. The tree farm excursion had fanned the embers of inspiration that the Christkindlmarket had sparked, and she wanted to keep this feeling going. “Well, if you’re going to be here for a while, take off your pants.”

“Miss Greene,” he admonished, placing a scandalized hand over his heart. “Rule number two.”

“You’re covered in mud, sweetheart,” she reminded him smarmily.

Mason grunted, tossing back his whiskey with one hand and unbuttoning his jeans with the other. He hesitated before lowering his fly, brows raising in question.

“What?” Sawyer laughed.

“Turn around,” he requested.

Sawyer choked on her own spit. “I’ve already seen you naked!”

“Seeing me in my boxers is not a surface-level privilege.”

Sawyer pressed her lips together, shaking her head as she turned around. “There’s a robe on the back of my bathroom door that might cover—” She gestured vaguely in the air. “Something.”

“My modesty thanks you,” Mason sniffed, pressing his muddy jeans into her waiting palm.

She started the laundry and had begun decorating before he reappeared. But when he did—

Sawyer nearly swallowed her tongue.

“Shirt was dirty, too,” he called from the kitchen, adding the flannel to the wash.

Sawyer tittered softly. She opted not to point out that the brightly patterned chiffon robe was barely long enough to cover his ass, his modesty still in dire straits. Still, she was grateful he’d done it. Mason in a red flannel and boxers would be hard to resist, and it would be all too easy to throw Rule #2 out the window and fill the void with him. Hanging out with him like this, as friends, was already pushing the limits of their “surface level” rule. The robe added a much-needed air of silliness.

This wasn’t on their list, but the boyish joy on Mason’s face when he asked to help decorate, the same joy now on his face as he inspected each ornament curiously, carefully selecting the ideal branch to hang it from—she couldn’t deny him this. She’d allow this deviation from their mission, but it was better, safer, if they kept to the list—and their rules—from now on.

They decorated in silence for a bit, dancing around each other in the cramped corner of her apartment, their limbs occasionally brushing as they sought the perfect spot for each ornament. When Sawyer unwrapped the Polaroid ornament of her and Sadie hosting their first Queermas dinner, she surreptitiously hid it between two books on the nearby shelf, a hollow feeling in her gut. She hadn’t decorated with anyone since Sadie, the traditions they’d crafted together now the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Mason placed a hand on her shoulder to keep her still as he reached around to hang a particularly heavy reindeer ornament on a top bough. The heat of him as he pressed up against her… She coughed to conceal an involuntary hnng .

“So what’s wrong with you?” she blurted.

Mason laughed. “What?”

Spinning around, she tilted her head back to take him in. “You’re attractive, employed, tolerable to be around, and want to settle down. You’re, like, the ideal partner, for people who are into that sort of thing.”

His mouth quirked up at the corner. “So why can’t I keep a girl?”

Sawyer shrugged. “I mean, I’m all for ruining romance for you. I’m grateful for the opportunity, truly. But eventually, once all this tabloid nonsense blows over, you’re going to date again, right?”

He nodded slowly. “And even if you successfully shatter my rose-colored glasses and I pick the right person, will I still fuck it up?”

She tried to look sympathetic, but she was fairly certain it looked more like a grimace. “I mean…” She frowned. “Have you ever thought about it? Or asked?”

“Like, track down my exes High Fidelity –style?” He did that sexy one-eyebrow-quirked thing before leaning down and whispering in her ear, “Like Why We’re Not Together ?”

Sawyer shivered. Her books were so incredibly personal—and so incredibly steamy—that she normally wanted to crawl into a hole and die when people she knew read her books. But there was something endearing about Mason reading hers after they met, with no expectation they’d ever see each other again. “Yes, like that.” She cleared her throat to rid her voice of the odd strain it’d taken on. “It’s a solid cliché–plot device–trope thing. We could add it to the list and then cross it off?”

Mason leaned back, twisting his mouth off to the side, thinking. Tugging his phone from his pocket, he tapped through a series of screens.

“I—oh, I didn’t mean now ,” she stammered. Why was she nervous? This had nothing to do with her, but the mere idea of reaching out to any of her exes made her want to break out in hives. She hovered her hand over his screen to stop him from hitting dial. “Maybe you should tackle this one on your own? I’m supposed to be spoiling your hopeless romanticism, not—” She gestured to the phone. “Whatever that’s going to be.”

He nodded, sliding his phone back into his pocket.

Sawyer exhaled slowly, heart hammering in her ears. Taking a sip of her whiskey, she banished the vision of calling up Sadie and hearing all the reasons why they hadn’t worked. She already knew the answer to that question.

Mason grabbed her phone from the hutch, holding it out to her so she could enter her passcode. Once unlocked, she watched as he interrupted Ariana’s rendition of “Last Christmas” in favor of “Thank U, Next.”

Humming along with Ariana’s gratefulness for her exes, they shoved the ugliest of her ornament collection into the hole in the tree’s boughs, and hid it from view.