Chapter Nineteen

Mason

Ella let out an exasperated sound and I could see that she wanted to just get up and leave the restaurant. I reached across the table toward her.

“Please,” I said imploringly. “Just give me a minute.”

She settled back down into the chair.

“Fine,” she said.

“Thank you.” I drew in a breath. “First, I’m sorry for the way that I talked to Edmond. I had no right to do that. I never should have raised my voice at him. I hope that someday I’ll have a chance to apologize to him myself. It’s just that after thinking that the frame was gone, seeing such a little child touching it scared me. I completely overreacted.”

“But it’s just a frame,” she said. “It doesn’t even have a picture in it.”

“I know,” I said. “It doesn’t. Not now, anyway. But it used to. Years ago it had a picture in it.”

“Of who?” Ella asked, some of the harsh edge in her voice softened with her curiosity.

“My fiancée.”

The revelation obviously took her aback and she straightened.

“Oh,” she said, filling the tense silence. “I didn’t know.”

I nodded.

“It’s alright. Not a lot of people did. She was an extremely private person. She hated being in the spotlight, so she stayed out of it. This was before I bought the team, so it was easier for me to keep my personal life to myself. Only those closest to me knew her. We were planning on publicly announcing our engagement in a few weeks when it happened.”

“What happened?”

I drew in a breath and swallowed, trying to force down the painful ball of emotion that was forming in my throat. I hadn’t talked about this in years and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to find the words or if I had shoved them to the back of my mind for so long that I could no longer even say them.

“There was an accident. A car crash. Someone hit her when she was on the way to see her parents to talk about the wedding. I tried to get to her but…by the time I got to the hospital she was already gone.”

“Mason, I am so sorry.”

I could hear tears in Ella’s voice and when I looked up at her I saw them slipping down her cheeks.

“That frame was an engagement gift from her to me. I kept her picture in it for as long as I could, but after a while it was just too much. I couldn’t bear to look at her anymore. It was like every time that I saw her, I found out that she was dead all over again. So, I took the picture out and put it away, but I kept the frame out so that at least I had that. Since Danielle died, I haven’t felt anything for a woman. It was easy to just bring them home and then have them gone the next morning because none of them meant anything to me. They were all the same. Until you.”

I saw Ella’s eyes widen slightly.

“Me?” she asked.

“You. When I saw you…I don’t even know how to describe it. It was like something lit up inside me, a part of me that I haven’t felt or even known existed for so many years. I wanted to be near you. I wanted to know more about you. I wanted to spend time with you. It was exciting, but it was also terrifying.” I shook my head and looked down at the table. “I don’t know how to put it into words so that you can understand it.”

“You don’t need to.”

I looked up at her again.

“What?”

“You don’t have to try to make me understand. I already do. My husband, Edmond’s father, was my high school sweetheart. We were together since our freshman year and then broke up for a couple of years after graduation. When we found each other again, it was like coming home, like we were always supposed to be together and that time apart was all that we needed to just prove to us that in each other’s arms was where we were supposed to be. We were together for a few more years and then we got married. We were only married for about a year and a half when we found out that he was sick. Right after that, we found out that I was pregnant. Branden didn’t even live long enough to see his son.”

I felt like my heart was tearing in two. The pain in Ella’s eyes was so fresh, so real, as if all of that had just happened. It was exactly the way that I had felt for so long about Danielle.

“Ella, I don’t know what to say.”

She shook her head, forcing a teary smile.

“That’s alright,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything. It’s all been said before. You know what I went through just like I know what you did.” She glanced down and then back at me. “I also understand what you meant about not having feelings toward anyone. When Branden died, I thought that that part of me died with him. It destroyed me. The only thing that kept me going was Edmond. I couldn’t even imagine ever having feelings for someone else. It was just so outside of the realm of possibility for me. I thought that it was going to be a betrayal to Branden if I ever felt like that again.”

“Like you would be saying that he wasn’t a part of your life anymore,” I said, understanding into the depths of my soul what she meant.

It was exactly what I had felt, exactly what I had experienced every time that I made my way through the disposable women who found themselves in my bedroom. It wasn’t difficult because I had never even begun to have those feelings again, but then Ella changed everything.

She nodded.

“Then I met you. I couldn’t believe what I was feeling for you even after such a short time of being near you, and it scared me. I had to get away.”

“But I found you.”

“You found me.”

I stood up and took Ella’s hand helping her to her feet. I drew her closer to me so that our faces were within inches of each other, our breath lingering and mingling between us. I could feel my heart beating in my chest, pounding against my ribs as though it hadn’t beat in years, as though it were coming to life again. I brushed the tip of her nose with mine and leaned in to softly kiss her lips. They trembled slightly beneath mine and I pressed slightly further to deepen the kiss. Despite all that had already happened between us, I suddenly felt as though this were all new, like we were exploring each other in a new way now.

I stepped away from Ella and took her hand, leading her gently out of the restaurant and toward the elevator in the lobby. We rode it wrapped in each other’s arms, the rhythm of our bodies meeting each other so that soon our breath was synchronized and our heartbeats calling out to and answering each other. We didn’t speak a word as I led her into the apartment and into my bedroom. Our hands moved across each other’s bodies with reverence as we undressed and then tenderly outlined the other with our fingertips. I could feel her touch tracing each of my muscles as if memorizing them and I let mine travel into the dip of her waist and along the soft valley between her hip bones.

Later that night I called down to the Café to have the dinner that had been prepared for us delivered up to my apartment. Ella was still naked when I threw on pajama pants and a t-shirt to go to the door and get the food, ethereally beautiful in the glow of the lights from outside, her hair tousled and her lips slightly swollen. She remained that way even after I brought our dinner into the room and started to spread it out across the bed. I stripped out of my clothes again and slipped under the covers with her, wrapping one arm around her waist so I could pull close to her and kiss her. I felt deeply satisfied, my body and soul soothed by the soft, gentle way that I had made love to her that night. She had submitted to me with everything in her, offering me not just her body, but something that went far beyond it to a place that I felt only we could understand.

As we ate, I looked across the room at the window that overlooked Fifth Avenue. I knew that the nightlife was just heating up down there in the city, just beyond the glass. But I didn’t care. I didn’t need it. There was nowhere that I would rather be than right here in this room, in this bed, with Ella.