I have to tell Lark what I found. I have to show her.
There is no other choice.
By the time I find the evidence I hoped didn’t exist, Lark has already left with Mason for their fifth date. I debate calling her and telling her the truth over the phone, but decide it isn’t right to spring something like that on her when she’s alone with Mason, miles from home, with no one there to back her up if things get messy.
So instead, I send a text, warning Lark that I have some bad news and that she should come home as soon as possible.
And then I stick my phone in my pocket and wait.
Felicity gets up from her nap and we play in the backyard with her toys for over an hour, and I wait. I put on Blue’s Clues and whip up a lemon meringue pie for desert, while Melody makes chicken stir-fry for supper, and wait. I feed Felicity and give her a bath and spread out toys for her on the floor of our room while I fold clothes, and wait.
I read my daughter a bedtime story and put her to bed and go downstairs to read until Lark gets home, but Felicity’s eleven thirty feeding comes and goes and still Lark doesn’t respond to my text.
She doesn’t respond, and she doesn’t come home.
By twelve-thirty, I realize she’s not coming home at all and make my way slowly to bed where I end my day the same way I began it, lying staring at the ceiling, certain something terrible is about to happen.
Chapter 20
Mason
Date Five
The musical—a dark comedy about competitive table tennis that somehow manages to be fun to watch—is much less torturous than I was expecting. The mojitos and appetizers at Damon’s afterward are amazing, and the walk through downtown Atlanta as the street musicians play and the restaurants light up for the night is completely atmospheric.
Not that we need atmosphere.
We’re creating our own atmosphere.
All day long, Lark and I have been drifting through the world in a protective bubble. Nothing bad can trouble or touch us. Not traffic, not the hellish parking situation that led to paying forty dollars to park in a hotel’s garage, not the four-year-old behind us at the play who kept kicking our seats, not even the thunderstorm that blows through around eight o’clock, turning the sky dark just as we’re about to head back to Bliss River.
We’re too happy, too tipsy on mojitos and drunk on each other to let anything bring us down.
“It’s getting pretty nasty out there. Could make the drive home dangerous,” Lark says, eyeing the leaking sky from beneath the parking garage’s overhang. “Think it’s going to keep it up for a while?”
I tighten my arm around her shoulders. “I don’t know. If it gets too bad we can always pull over somewhere between here and there. Get a coffee or something and wait it out.”
“We could.” She hums beneath her breath.
A thinking hum.
“Yes?” I ask, smiling as she turns to look up at me, a mischievous light in her eye.
“I was thinking…” She leans closer, until her lips are only inches from mine and it is hard to think about anything but how much I want to kiss her.
“Yes,” I prompt again, when she lets the silence trail on.
“I was thinking that we’ve already paid for parking at the hotel, so…” She purses her lips. “Well, maybe it would be a good idea if we just went ahead and…got a room.”
“Got a room,” I repeat, wanting to make one hundred percent sure I heard her correctly, that my hopeful ears aren’t playing tricks on me.
She nods. “I’m ready to get a room. Aren’t you?”
“I am completely ready to get a room,” I breathe. “I can’t think of anything I’ve ever wanted more than getting a room with you. Ever.”
“Ever?” She gins wider.
“Ever ever,” I promise as I take her hand and start toward the entrance to the lobby.
A few minutes later, we’re at the front desk being booked into a room on the top floor. Not long after, we’re in the hotel shop buying toothbrushes and toothpaste and condoms.
Condoms. Because we’re finally going to be together. After all the years of dating and waiting and even more years spent living apart from the girl I love, wondering if this dream was ever going to become a reality, wondering if I’d ever be with Lark like this, it’s finally going to happen.
The ride up to our room seems to last a thousand years, and the walk down the hall a second thousand. But then, I’m sliding the key card into the slot and the green light on the door flashes—a sign if I’ve ever seen one—and we’re alone in a beautiful room with a view of the city sparkling twenty stories below, and nothing to do but get our clothes off and our hands on each other.