Page 52 of I Heart Mason Cartwright
Mason
We spendsome serious cash on tools and essentials at the hardware store. A few we are able to take with us in my small rental car, the rest they will deliver later today so we can start work tomorrow. I feel terrible about how much money it is, but she keeps saying that it’s fine, so I go along with it. By the time we finish its mid-afternoon and I’m starving. She’s in the passenger seat glued to her phone, typing away furiously.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“AshLynn,” she says rolling her eyes. “Look at this atrocity.” She holds her phone out to me, then immediately pulls it back. “Sorry, I forgot for a minute she’s your fiancée and not just my sister. Well, half sister. Anyway, for all I know, you’ll like this and then I’ll feel bad for hurting your feelings by already hating it. And that’s a terrible way to start out our new sister/brother-in-law relationship.”
The thought of being Willow's brother-in-law makes me queasy. I like her. She’s fun to be around, smart and an easy conversationalist, plus she has a dry sense of humor that is rare in women and makes me belly laugh.
I can’t help it. She’s gorgeous. And you don’t notice it at first. She’s not overtly beautiful the way that AshLynn is, it’s subtler with Willow. And it really shines through when she smiles. And not to continue to compare the two sisters, but when I combine that with how this has all gone down and how pissed I am about it. It’s really easy to favor Willow over AshLynn right now.
Like it would ever be hard.
I can’t believe her dad tried to get me a job. Who does that? The corporate job, not the one working on Willow’s house. I’ll totally take the one on the house. Not because I need the money, but because of the house. The architecture is stunning, and Willow wants to restore a lot of it to its original glory while bringing in certain modernity. I’ve not done that before with a house like this and I’d like to be a part of it. I’m sure spending every day with that amazing view won’t hurt either.
The view of the sound not Willow.
I think.
“Just show me the picture,” I tell her. She holds her phone back out to me. I laugh. Hard.
“Thank god,” she says, laughing with me. “I mean, who puts a zebra print headboard in a beach house?”
“Who puts a zebra-print headboard in anything?” I ask.
“Well, we are from Texas,” Willow says. “Animal prints have their place.” She smiles. Seeing it makes me feel warm inside. I smile back as my stomach growls.
“You hungry?” I ask.
“Starving,” she says. “Oh my god. There’s a great Mexican place about two blocks over.” She points to her right; I turn at the corner. “Wait, you do like Mexican, don’t you? Of course you do. Who doesn’t? Wait, you do, right?”
“Is the salsa spicy?”
She nods.
“Is the beer cold? Are the margaritas big?”
“They sure are, sir.” Her smile grows bigger.
“Count me in.”
We pull into a place calledTacos Amigos. The server tells us to seat ourselves, we agree on a booth in the back. We order drinks and entrees, her a margarita and me a beer; I eat half a basket of chips, Willow the other half.
“Oh god, I’m already full and we haven’t even gotten our food. I can’t knock down a wall after this. I won’t be able to move.” She rubs her stomach and lets out a small burp. “Excuse me. Oh, P-Tink isn’t here to catch it.”
“You know she’s a really cool dog, right?”
She sighs. “Yeah, she’s the best. I lucked out.”
“You’re also lucking out because we don’t knock down walls after we’ve been drinking.”
“Oh, thank god.” She laughs. “Not that I don’t want to do it, just after this morning, and all this stuff with AshLynn, no offense—”
“None taken. This morning was a new kind of exhausting.”
“I just want to spend the rest of the day playing in the sand with Princess Tinkerbell.”
“That sounds amazing,” I say.
