Crashed (Mason Brothers 2)

He’d never answered me, so I didn’t know if he cared if I said yes or not. Maybe he didn’t. Did I want him to care?

Why was I overthinking this? We were friends, right? Friends shared things that happened to them. I’d had friends before, even male friends. Why was it so hard to be friends with Andrew Mason?

I was too confused to go to his house after my shift, to sleep in his bed as if we hadn’t had that awkward conversation. Being in his house at night, alone with him, felt too intimate.

And here was the truth: I wasn’t intimate with people. Friendly, yes. Sociable, even flirty—yes. But my parents had treated me more like a friend than as their child, and I’d been on my own early in life. I’d never had a best friend or a long-term boyfriend. Relationships like that didn’t happen when you were trying to make it in L.A., where all relationships were shallow and a little bit selfish.

Even when I dated guys in L.A., there was a question of what that guy could do for me—or what I could do for him. If one of us had ever actually seen real success, the other would have been gone in a heartbeat. The relationships I had were never the kind that could withstand any sort of test. And, I realized, I had kept it that way on purpose.

It was easier. You didn’t get hurt if it didn’t really matter.

But now, I realized the truth: Andrew mattered. Whether he was my friend or something else, he mattered. And by not texting him, by not talking to him, I’d been an asshole. No friend would act the way I had.

So—after a long, sweaty night in which I tried vainly to sleep in my grandmother’s bedroom, next to a fan—I got up my courage and decided to try and fix it. The phone wasn’t going to cut it, either. I needed to go over there.

I put on my Get the fuck out of my business shirt, because that shirt always gave me courage. I put on jeans and flip-flops. And I walked over to Andrew’s house.

I did not expect to see the woman in the front window.

Too late, I realized there was a car in Andrew’s driveway. He had a guest, and she was watching me with a surprised look on her face. She said something, probably to Andrew, and then she vanished from the window. The front door opened as I stepped up onto the porch, my steps reluctant now.

The woman who stood in the doorway was in her mid-fifties, strikingly beautiful, and obviously Andrew’s mother. The resemblance couldn’t have been more clear. She smiled at me politely, and I knew how Andrew had been so blessed in the genetics department.

“Hi there,” she said. “You must be Andrew’s neighbor.”

“I’m Tessa,” I said, shaking her hand. I was sweating hard under my T-shirt, both from the heat and from nerves. “I live across the street.”

“I’m Rita, Andrew’s mother.” The woman’s gaze dropped briefly to my chest, then back up again. “How nice of you to visit. Come in.”

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I’d just met Andrew’s mother while wearing a T-shirt that said Get the fuck out of my business on it. Way to go, Tessa. I followed her into the living room, where Andrew was sitting in his wheelchair. He was wearing nylon workout pants and a gray T-shirt that fitted his torso and showed off his chest and his tightly muscled arms. His dark hair was a bit mussed and he had that trim dark beard on his jaw, as if he hadn’t shaved in a few days. His eyes when he looked at me were dark and tired and filled with some kind of pain I couldn’t quite read. I felt my heart squeeze hard in my chest.

“Hey,” I said.

He was fighting it. Whatever it was, the mood that was dragging him down, he was fighting it. I watched his face go hard and his gaze go intentionally cold, the walls going up. “You met my mother, I see,” he said.

There was none of his usual humor, the back-and-forth, the teasing. Had I done this to him? Or had she?

“Would you like something to drink?” Rita asked. “There’s juice in the fridge. And ginger ale, though I didn’t think Andrew liked ginger ale.”

I looked at him. He didn’t like ginger ale. I did. “I’m fine, thanks,” I said.

“Have a seat,” Rita said.

I dropped onto the sofa. I probably shouldn’t ignore Rita—she seemed like a perfectly nice woman—but I couldn’t help it. The only person I wanted to look at was Andrew. “Can we talk?” I asked him.

“Not really,” he said.

“I got a call this morning,” I said. “From the casting agency. They say I got the job.”

His expression got even harder, if that was possible, his jaw twitching. “That’s great.”

It was. It was great. I was going to model bras for a catalog and make a few thousand dollars just to stand there with my breasts barely covered. It was the thing I did, the thing I was good at. It was easy, much-needed money. “They want me to start tomorrow.”

His voice was flat. “That’s great, Tessa. Is that it?”

“Should I leave?” Rita asked.

“I have to be on set for nine o’clock tomorrow,” I said to Andrew. “It’s my day off from the bar, so that works out. The problem is that the air conditioner repairman comes tomorrow, and when I booked the appointment, I thought I would be home.”