Not a Reunion

Chapter 49

Mason

Waking up next to Thea is not a common occurrence, but when I open my eyes to find her next to me the next morning, I'm not shocked. The way I feel about suddenly being beside her when waking up doesn't make me feel as though this is something new. This feels old. There is familiarity in the way I feel about waking up beside her.

There is a simple word that could sum up the way I feel about being in her apartment, on her bed, with my arm loosely around her waist. I feel happy. That's it. I can easily smile at the sight of her.

I move closer to her, wrapping my hand around her waist tighter. We had spent the last night eating dinner and then spending a great chunk of time on the living room couch talking. It wasn't until late last night when we got to the bedroom, and so now here we are. The aftermath of last night makes me smile. It makes me think that the both of us could really have something. Something promised. One that we would be able to keep this time around.

I press a kiss on her shoulder and then rest my head on it. Then I move my lips close to her ears, because Thea liked it when I whispered things to her, and say, "Good morning, baby." It was funny how we had gotten into the habit of being romantic with each other. It was as if, as soon as we discussed what had gone down between us, we hit the unpause button on our relationship shop.

This is new, and yet it doesn't feel new. It feels as though we are continuing on with the relationship that he once had at the age of seventeen or eighteen. That was why we were so close to each other and why I felt like we could move fast in this relationship. Not that I thought we should move quickly because we had all the time in the world. But if there were things that we could skip right now, I wouldn't hesitate to say yes.

The thing was that I felt confident in our relationship. I felt that we were strong.

Thea groans awake, her eyelashes fluttering as she opens her eyes. She squints against the sun shining on her face, and I do her the honor of moving a hand to shield the direct ray from her face. I look past my hand and at the way the sun is shining into the apartment. Then a memory comes back to me.

"Thea," I say to her softly, not knowing if she is fully awake. She hums, moves her hand to the one I have holding up for her, and interlaces our fingers together. I try not to smile at that movement and then focus on what I want to say to her. "Do you remember what I used to call you?"

"Um," Thea says, and then clears her throat. Then tilts her head to the side to look at me, and I see the confusion drawn all over her. She shakes her head and says, "Other than your pet names, what else was there?"

I look at the ray of the sun coming in directly toward us and then down to the face that it was making golden. Then I say, "Ray. Remember?"

Thea moves her head to the side, no longer looking at me. Then she moves our hands to her face, where she covers it fully. My eyebrows knit together from the confusion of her sudden movements. I bop my chin on her shoulder twice and then ask, "Baby, what's wrong?"

She takes our hands away from her face, and then she lets the hands fall down at her side. She places her head back against the pillow and then stares up at the ceiling. I watch as she blinks a lot of times, her lips quivering. She places her other hand on the side of her face and then says, "No one has called me that in six long years."

Her dad.

He was gone, and with him no longer here, there was no one else to call her by that. And I was gone. I hadn't called her the name often, but I did occasionally. When I felt it fit what we were doing, we walked along the beach with our hands in each other, eating ice cream while we sat at the park watching her siblings, tanning in her backyard while her siblings swam. Anything that reminded me of the definition of the nickname.