Chapter Sixteen

Mason

I stood outside the gate looking down at my phone and trying to figure out why Chris had called me so many times. He knew I was going to be on this flight but probably didn’t remember when I got in. It kind of made me nervous that he had called so much since I had asked him to go by the apartment and make sure I turned the coffee maker off. The last thing I needed was for him to be calling me telling me that I blew up the penthouse because I was too foggy to make sure everything was off. I now understood why my mother had a list of things she would check off anytime we would leave one house to go to the other. I was starting to think I needed the same kind of list—not that it would matter much if I blew up my apartment. Before I could even press the button to listen to the voice mail, Chris called again. I sighed and picked up the call.

“Please don’t tell me I blew up the apartment,” I said.

“No, but someone else might,” he said.

“What?”

“I went to your place to check on the coffeepot like you asked,” he started to explain. “When I got there, I saw Sarah standing in the lobby talking to some other woman.”

“Yeah,” I said, remembering. “I told Sarah she could drop off my stuff upstairs.”

“Yeah, well, she took that kind of far,” he scoffed. “I stood by listening to the conversation. Luckily Sarah didn’t recognize me. She was pretty much telling this other woman that you were upstairs but weren’t going to come down to talk to her. She made it sound like you had her up there with you. She even came down barefoot like it was no big deal.”

“What?” I was completely confused and livid at the same time. “Who was the other woman?”

“I didn’t know until they started talking about yoga,” he said. “I think it was Missy, the girl you’ve been dating.”

“Holy shit.” I panicked. “Did she have short black hair with straight across bangs?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “I tried to stop her, but she ran out of the place in tears. I made sure the front-desk guy kicked Sarah out and gave strict instructions not to let her back in.”

“Man, this is beyond terrible,” I said, shaking my head. “I gotta get a flight back.”

“All right man,” he replied. “Let me know if there is anything I can do.”

“Thanks, Chris,” I replied before hanging up.

Immediately I dialed Missy’s cell phone number, but she kicked it to voice mail. I sent her a text and then dialed the studio, hoping someone would put me in touch with her. I had to tell her what happened. She needed to know that I was in no way, shape, or form seeing Sarah. I shook my head, completely not understanding how the hell I got myself into this mess.

“Hello, Zen Studios, how can I help you?”

“Oh, Eliza, thank God,” I said breathlessly. “I need…”

“To stop calling,” she said angrily before slamming the phone down in my ear.

I pulled the phone away from my face with frustration and dialed Missy’s number again, but like before, she sent me to voice mail. I turned and walked over to the desk, smiling kindly at the stewardess. She looked up at me with raised eyebrows.

“I need to get to New York, like as fast as possible,” I said.

As she typed on the computer, I looked down at my phone, hoping Missy would text back, but there was nothing. I closed my phone and tapped it against my forehead, waiting for the stewardess to finish checking the system. I couldn’t believe all of this was going on. This was definitely not in my plans.

“It looks like the next flight we have is at three,” she said happily.

“That’s the soonest I can leave?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but the rest of the flights are completely booked,” she replied.

“Okay, I’ll take it.” I handed over my card.

I didn’t care how much it cost or for how long I had to wait—I needed to be on a flight back to New York as soon as humanly possible. I could only imagine what Missy was feeling right now. She had some serious issues with her parents’ deaths, and now it looked like I had abandoned her as well. This poor girl was going to develop a serious complex.

With several hours to wait for my flight, I found a café and grabbed some breakfast and a cup of coffee. I was trying to keep myself calm since there was absolutely nothing I could do about the fact that I couldn’t get an earlier flight. I pulled out my phone and texted Missy again, setting it down in front of me and staring at the screen. I sipped my coffee and really thought about Missy. She was the first girl I had ever had these kinds of feelings for, and I had even found myself chasing this girl all over the place. The difference was when I finally caught this one, I wasn’t planning on letting her go.

Ever since the first time I met Missy, she had been stuck in my brain. I couldn’t even begin to think about what I would feel like if she didn’t forgive me for this. I felt like I was in some kind of nightmare that I had unexpectedly created for myself. I had been such a playboy for so many years that now it was coming back to haunt me. Sarah never meant anything to me, and I had broken it off with her because she was a stage-five clinger and absolutely batshit crazy. I didn’t even understand what I was thinking when I said it would be okay for her to go into my apartment alone. There was a reason I left stuff at her place and never went back and got it; I didn’t want to be around her.

Missy had come into my life at a time that I knew I needed change. I didn’t realize that she was going to be the change that I needed, but after it got going, there was no way I could look back. She was funny, kind, and ambitious, not to mention extremely sexy. She had every quality I had been looking for in a girl, and immediately I was hooked. When she met my parents, it was like she sealed the deal, winning them over immediately. I knew she had her own skeletons, but feeling the knot in my stomach at the knowledge that she was hurting made me completely aware that there was nothing in the world that I wouldn’t do to take that feeling away. Yes, Sarah acted of her own accord, but if I hadn’t been such a horn ball, and thought about her feelings when I broke up with her, she would have never been put in that situation in the first place. Sure, I was livid with Sarah, but I wasn’t going to take it out on her. This was my mess to clean up.

I sat at that café for hours, buying coffee after coffee, contemplating exactly what I would say when I saw Missy. I wanted to talk to her about her parents, but I wanted her to tell me on her own. Now that she was brokenhearted—and probably in man-hating mode—that seemed like a harder challenge than it did before. Getting Missy to talk about her past was hard enough under good circumstances, but now I was expecting her to talk to me and forgive me for this whole mess at the same time. Everything seemed like it was just completely impossible, but then again, so did everything else in my life and I had made it work. This, though, was more important to me than anything else in my life up to that point, so I knew I had to really give it my all.

I looked down at my watch and realized it was time to go back to the boarding gate. By the time all of this was over, I was never going to want to get on another plane again. I felt really helpless knowing that the hours were ticking by, and for every moment I wasn’t in front of Missy explaining everything and bringing her back to my arms, the harder it was going to be. It was already apparent that Eliza knew what happened, and that meant Missy had to have been really upset. She never leaned on other people to help her through things, and if she was in this circumstance, it had really taken a toll on her.

When I got to the gate, I stood by the window watching the planes pull in and out of the loading dock. For the first time in years, I watched storm clouds roll through the San Diego sky, and I wondered if I wasn’t the one conjuring them through my mood. When the onboarding procedure began, I was at the front of the line, ready to scan my ticket and get on board. I had been lucky enough to snag a first-class ticket again, and though I had a person sitting next to me, they didn’t seem interested in talking at all.

I sat calmly watching as we pulled away from the gate and started down the runway. The rain hit the windows and streaked back toward the wings. Slowly we rose into the air and made our way higher and higher until we were above the clouds and out of the storm. The attendees immediately began taking our drink orders, and I definitely took advantage of the whiskey. I needed something to calm my mind and make the flight go by just a little quicker. By the time we were making our descent, I felt quite a bit better and my nerves were floating around in a glass of Jack Daniels.

I didn’t waste any time getting through the airport and jumped into a cab, since calling a car would take way too long. I gave the driver the address and sat back, clutching my bag in front of me. I pulled out my phone and checked for messages, but Missy hadn’t written me back at all. My heart was doing flip-flops in my chest the entire drive, and as we pulled through the Art District, I almost felt like I was going to puke. I was so nervous I could barely stand it, and immediately I regretted all the alcohol I drank on the plane. I needed to have a clear mind.

“I brought a young woman to this address earlier today,” the driver said looking into the mirror. “She looked very upset.”

I looked up in surprise, realizing that Missy and I had taken the same taxi to her apartment. I grinned kindly at the man and looked down at my hands, feeling ashamed that he saw my bad deeds at work on one of the most beautiful women I had ever met, inside and out. When we arrived, I paid the cab driver and thanked him for getting her home earlier, sliding him an extra fifty as a tip. He tipped his hat and drove off. As I turned and began walking toward her door, I glanced down at my watch. It was ten o’clock at night. Hopefully, she wouldn’t be asleep.