Page 136 of Mason

I don’t take it back.

Not even when the fear creeps in. Not even when he doesn’t say anything right away. Because for the first time since I woke up in this sterile, unfamiliar room, I don’t feel like a prisoner.

I don’t feel like prey.

I feel like amatchin the palm of a man made of gasoline.

And I don’t know which one of us is going to burn first?—

But I know I’dletit happen.

If it’s him?

If it’sus?

I’d burn for that.

37

MASON

She falls asleep with the words still hanging in the air.

But I think I love you.

Jesus Christ.

I sit there, frozen, as her breathing evens out, her lashes fluttering once before her eyes drift closed again. It’s not the pain meds putting her under this time—it’s the exhaustion, the kind that crawls into your bones and shuts your body down after you’ve survived hell.

And she did survive.

Barely.

The machines beep softly in the background, an irritating, rhythmic reminder that she’s alive. That I didn’t lose her. That I got there in time.

Barely.

My elbows rest on my knees, hands hanging useless between them, and I stare at the tile floor like it’s got the answers I’m too much of a coward to say out loud.

Did she mean it?

Did Shelby actually mean that?

Or was it just the haze of trauma, the drugs in her bloodstream, the aftershock of waking up alive when she thought she was dead?

I can’t fucking tell.

She said it like it hurt. Like loving me was this terrifying thing she didn’t want to feel but couldn’t stop from happening.

And maybe that’s what guts me the most.

I’ve had women whisper they loved me before.

They didn’t mean it.

They loved the name. The danger. The lie.

Shelby doesn’t love lies. She hates them. She looks at the truth like it’s a blade she’s willing to fall on just to feel something real.

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