Page 86 of Letting Go at 40

“How about just new beginnings?”

Everything in me wants to know what she wants to start.

“To new beginnings then.” I clink my glass against hers and drink.

Anna sips hers and leans back on the couch. She glances around the room. “You know, I hardly came up here. This space was all Archer’s until you.” Her observation of the space stops on me.

“My home away from home,” I jest.

“It’s your home, Mason.” Her brows lower, her head tipping to emphasize her words. “There’s no rush for you to move.”

“Not sick of me yet?” My voice teases while I’m holding my breath for her answer.

With her eyes directed at her glass, she shakes her head and takes another drink of her wine. When she finishes, she sets the glass on the table and turns toward me, bending her knee and placing her leg on the cushions. Her elbow rests on the back of the couch.

“You know, it’s been a few weeks. You never talk about her.” Her directness surprises me.

“Who? Samantha?”

Anna lifts a brow.

“What’s there to say?”

“You weren’t in love with her but how are you doing?”

I sigh as I slouch into the cushions at my back. “I just feel numb. Not empty like from Ben’s death.” I glance at her. “But just numb, like nothing. I don’t feel any particular way.”

I focus on her eyes. “Doesn’t that make me a bad person?”

Anna swipes fingers through her long hair. She’s dressed casually in jeans and a loose-fitting sweater. Cute ankle socks with pencils on them cover her feet, hidden when she was wearing booties earlier.

“I don’t think it makes you bad, Mason. You had a relationship with this person, though. For good or bad.”

“Seems like every relationship I’ve ever had has been negative.” My father. My mother.

“Not your friendships,” she reminds me.

“No, but my parents. Women.” I tip my head back and stare up at the ceilings.

“You’ve never been in love?” Her voice softens, tiptoeing into a topic we probably shouldn’t discuss.

“Only been one perfect woman in my life and she wouldn’t ever be mine.”

I feel the weight of Anna’s stare on the side of my face and finally give into the pressure to roll my head and look at her.

“Mason,” she whispers. “Why me?”

I can’t say where or when or even how it happened. I just saw this shy teenage girl with deep set eyes and wanted her. Did I become a little obsessed when she didn’t come to me? When she didn’t become mine? Maybe. Did I resent her presence when she was all Ben could talk about and then she was always around, torturing me with her pure laugh and easy smile? Sure.

But was there a specific reason, an exact moment? I couldn’t pinpoint it.

The attraction just happened.

“I don’t really know. Maybe I just measure every woman up against you. How you open your heart easily to others.”

“Except you,” she murmurs.

My lips crook up on one side. “Except me.” I stare at her. “Maybe it was the way you were with Ben. So loving. So affectionate. So easily his other half. And I just wanted that for me.”