Ava
I was going to tell him. I had it all rehearsed in my head, the exact words that could destroy us. And then he went and pulled the most perfect date out of his hat, and my confession had slid back into my heart. I was just as gutted I had forgotten it was our anniversary, too. I’d almost told him I’d make it up to him in the bedroom, and then reality had slapped me in the face, and those words had also climbed back inside.
My spirit soared though when our driver pulled into the cottage driveway. It had been a few years since we’d last been, and the sight of it still filled me with as much happiness as it always had.
“I can’t believe you bought it!”
“I can’t believe it was on the market,” Mason said as he slid the key in the lock and opened the front door. “Talk about a stroke of luck.”
“A stroke of luck we needed at exactly the right time.”
Mason blinked at me, a little perplexed with my statement. I clamped my mouth shut, wishing my tongue would stop slipping up, and made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t spoil his gift, and that I would tell him the moment we arrived home.
“It still smells the same,” Mason remarked as he found the thermostat and turned the heating up.
“Are you sure Greg won’t know it’s you who bought it from his parents?”
He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “I’m not that daft! I used an agency. Stop worrying.”
Looking around the room, I was filled with the ghosts of our past. At least twice a year, we’d all come together here, and now there was only Mason and me it seemed eerily quiet.
“We’ll fill it with new memories, I promise, Ava,” Mason whispered as he caught me reminiscing and slid his arms around my waist. “This is our time now. No threats, no danger, and no drama. Just me and you, enjoying our lives at long last.”
No drama!
I shuddered with the thought of what drama my admission would cause when we were back home.
Shaking off my dark thoughts, I turned into the comfort of my glorious bastard and allowed the serenity of the place to wash over me. “I love you so much, Mason. You know that, don’t you?”
Kissing my forehead, he held me tighter. “Of course, I know that. There’s not just any woman who would put up with me this long, and you’re definitely not just any woman.”
I nodded against him, unable to speak with the lump that had formed in my throat.
“We’ll be okay, Ava. I know things are hard at the moment, but as long as we have each other, our trust and love, then we can fight anything bad.”
Trust!
The words were clawing at my conscious, digging their talons into my throat and scrambling for freedom. I couldn’t let them out. Mustn’t. They were so sharp that their jagged edges would rip us both to bits. The right tussled with the wrong, and the truth wrestled with the lies until my mind thought it was going crazy.
Without looking up at his face, keeping the deceit in my eyes hidden from him, I whispered. “Why did you forgive me all those years ago?”
He tensed for the slightest second, and if I hadn’t been so close to him, I would have missed it. “Forgive you for what?”
“For Kade.”
“I can’t answer that because I don’t know. I suppose it’s the same when you found me with that blonde just after the twins were born. Or how you found it in yourself to forgive me for Rebecca. Forgiveness comes from within us, we don’t question where it comes from, and we have to accept it. Otherwise, it would only be our mistakes that define us.”
I prayed he was right, because if he wasn’t, then we were all fucked.
♡
Mason passed me a glass of wine and settled beside me on the sofa. Letting the back of his head drop against the sofa, he lifted my feet onto his lap and sighed contentedly. “This is definitely what we needed.”
I murmured an agreement and closed my eyes. It was hard to believe that we now owned this place. I had always loved it here, and I allowed the memories to roll over me. As children, the twins had also enjoyed the open space of the gardens in the summer, and the hills for sledging in the winters. Christmases and so many birthdays had been spent here with our friends. Mason had explored his bisexuality here, with Connor and me on his fortieth birthday.
“I know what you’re thinking about,” Mason whispered when I squirmed.
Opening my eyes, I stared at him. What I would give to be able to pleasure him, to sink my mouth down his hard cock, to push my fingers into his arse and fuck him until he came all over my chest.
“I’m trying, Ava.”
My heart clenched with the pain in his voice. Looking from the outside, my glorious bastard still appeared to be the strong, determined man that I had met and fallen in love with over twenty years ago. Yet, on the inside, resided the ugly self-loathing of a broken and damaged man. He was as fractured and as ravaged as I had been the day that I walked into his office all those years ago. His soul as cracked and as hideous as mine had been. How time had changed us both, and time was so very cruel.
Shaking my head, dismissing his worry, I placed my hand over his where it rested on my thigh. “I know. And it doesn’t matter. I love you for your heart. Not your cock.” I’d hoped the lightness in my voice, and the small wink I gave him would have pushed his distress aside, but the way he looked at me with such sadness had me snuggling closer to him and kissing his cheek tenderly. “I mean it, Mason. It doesn’t matter if we can’t have sex. It won’t kill me. But losing you would. I couldn’t survive without you.”
“You’re the breath in my lungs, my little warrior. The love that keeps my heart beating, and the strength in this weak soul of mine. I’m nothing without you.” He shook his head, angry with himself, and cold hands of agony squeezed my heart at the sight of tears shimmering in his beautiful eyes. “I want to be more for you. So much more, Ava. I miss seeing the wildness in your eyes when you come. I miss hearing the ecstasy in each of your soft little moans. The sound of my name tumbling desperately from you when you beg me for more. I miss feeling the heat of you around my cock, your fingers on my bare skin. You and me, we always connected through sex, shared our most intimate moments when we were buried in one another. We completed each other, baby, and now I’m incomplete. Unfinished.”
“I don’t want you to be finished, Mason. I rather like that you’re unfinished. I want to hope that we have so many more moments before you’re finished. Being unfinished means that you can still encounter all the little things that make you complete and discover the imperfections in what you once thought perfect.” Manoeuvring around until I was sat on his lap, I framed his face with my hands. “You’re my unfinished symphony, Mason Fox. But, now, you must write a new concerto. With a few exploratory notes scribbled haphazardly onto the page, a chance key change in the most unlikely of places, and a few awkward trial performances, then you can be the most breath-taking symphony. My perfect masterpiece.”
The truth was, I had done this to us. I had pushed George into a corner. I’d given him no choice but to end his own life and doing that had taken away the only chance Mason had of slaying his demons.
His lips were warm on mine, his breath hot in my mouth as his tongue wrestled with mine. He became greedy, kissing me harder. His teeth caught my lips and the taste of blood mingled with the sour tang of the whisky he’d drank and the mild sweetness of the pot he’d smoked. He fisted my hair as if he was angry with me, twisting my curls around his fingers until the pain on my scalp made me wince. But his desperation only heightened the need powering through me, and I gripped his upper arms like they were the scaffolding supporting my weak body. I became spellbound, entranced by his kiss. The rawness as he grew more and more absorbed in me, in us, was heady and I forgot all the kisses that had come before. For those long seconds that my glorious bastard came back to me, nothing else existed, and for the first time in so very long we slotted together and completed us. Our symphony became finished, even if only for that brief moment.
Losing all clarity, his lips kissed over my jaw and down my neck, his teeth nipping at me as his hunger became insatiable. His hands tugged at my hair, yanking my head back so he could feast easier on the flesh of my neck. My heartbeat grew energetic, pounding furiously in my chest like I was riding the most thrilling ride in the fairground. Every fibre of me felt electrified, every muscle inside me bursting with a blazing fire only I could feel.
“Mason.”
I shouldn’t have spoken. I should have allowed us to be shielded in the vibrancy of the moment. But, as with everything I did, I fucked it all up, merely by saying his name. The simple sound of my voice shattered the fantasy and allowed reality to smash Mason back into the now.
He reared back like I had scolded him. His eyes were wide, startled. The past few minutes suddenly seemed like a hallucination, that my needy heart had only imagined the intensity of that kiss, the power of his need.
“I…” Practically pushing me off his knee, he scrambled up.
“Mason, please. It doesn’t matter.”
“Ava, I…”
Slumped on the sofa, I watched my husband rush from the room. The slam of the front door sounded oddly like my heart barricading itself in, each wall it constructed another bit of hope that became lost beneath.