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“Uh, no. I’m just meeting up with Murphy and the guys later. Do you want me to give you a ride somewhere?”
“Oh, no thanks. Mason is picking me up.”
“Mason,” Trevor said and frowned as he glanced out the window.
“Do you remember him?”
“Yeah.” He looked at me briefly and then focused somewhere off in the distance, thinking. “I thought he moved away.”
“Sort of. Not really. He was just travelling abroad for work.”
“Oh.”
An unusually sleek silver sports car pulled up in front of the Inn. Mason got out of the car and Granddad came back into the lobby as if he’d been waiting around the corner, listening. Mason opened the front door and said hello to me, then shook hands with Granddad as he introduced himself. He made eye contact with Trevor, who was standing beside me. He lifted his chin in a guy nod, and said, “Maverty.”
“Cartwright.” Trevor did the guy nod back.
There was a bit of an awkward silence before Granddad told us to have a good time and excused himself. It was pouring out, so I moved next to the door and waited for Mason.
“Keep that McLaren close to the speed limit,” Trevor told Mason. “She gets uncomfortable driving on the highway.”
Mason nodded, then ran out into the rain to open the passenger door for me. Trevor didn’t look impressed that Mason was my date, but he really had no right to have an opinion. “I don’t need you to tell him how to drive. You’re not my dad.”
“Be safe.” His voice was genuine, and it made me feel guilty for snapping at him.
I pushed my palm against the front door, then hesitated. “The muffin I saved for you is in the Tupperware container on the counter in the kitchen.” I swung the door open and ran out into the storm.
Mason’s car wasn’t like any car I’d ever seen before. The vertical air vents on the side looked like shark gills and the door opened upwards instead of to the side. I slid down into the leather seats. It felt like I was getting into the cockpit of a fighter jet or the Batmobile. Mason ran around the back, opened his door, and slid in behind the steering wheel. He turned the heat up and the music down. “You look beautiful,” he said.
“Thanks, you do, too. I mean not beautiful—handsome, or good. You look nice,” I finally spat out. He had on a long-sleeved, charcoal-coloured, V-neck shirt and dark dress pants. He did look nice, classy, like the guys in Europe. I glanced back at the window to the lobby. Trevor was gone. He must have left through the kitchen. “What’s a McLaren?” I asked.
Mason smiled and said, “It’s just a fast car. Trevor ruined all the fun, though. I’ll have to show you what it can do someday when the weather’s better, which is okay with me because it guarantees a second date.”
I did suddenly feel nervous, but it had nothing to do with driving too fast. We hadn’t even left the parking lot.
Mason drove a little faster than the speed limit, but it didn’t bother me because his car handled smoothly and clung to the curves of the highway. He kept looking at me, probably to make sure I wasn’t going to have a meltdown on him.
Eventually, he cleared his throat and said, “Uh, I heard you weren’t dating anyone right now, but if that’s not the case I—”
“I’m single.”
“So, there’s nothing going on between you and Trevor?”
“No.”
He glanced at me briefly before focusing back on the road. “I don’t want to get in the middle of anything.”
“Don’t worry. You’re not.”
He nodded but didn’t seem entirely convinced. “He said you’re uncomfortable driving on the highway. Does that have something to do with how your dad died?”
I took in a deep breath and stared out the side window at the rock face passing by, trying to decide how much I wanted to share with him. I took another breath and said, “Yeah. The car accident happened about a kilometre away from the Inn.”
Mason’s eyebrows angled with concern. Although it had gotten a little easier over the years to tell people about my dad, it was still painful to go into details about the accident, so I mastered avoidance techniques.
“Anyway, I just get a little weird about driving fast on the highway. Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s understandable.” He eased the pressure off the accelerator and we slowed to the speed limit.
Neither of us spoke, and it made me hyper-aware of everything—the tremble in my hands, how loud I was breathing, how little I actually knew about him. To distract myself from the anxious thinking that was inevitably going to snowball, I racked my brain for something to talk about. Anything. “So, where have you been travelling for the last year?”
“Pretty much everywhere—Milan, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Tokyo, Berlin, London, Paris, and New York. My dad threw me into the deep end to see if I would sink or swim.”
“And?”
He laughed. “I’m doing more of a dog paddle, but he hasn’t fired me yet.”
“What do you do, exactly?”
“Basically, I find out what other people are willing to pay a lot of money for and get it for them.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“Not really. I’m either on an airplane, in meetings, or on the phone in a hotel room most of the time.”
I turned in the seat to face him. “You’ve been living out of hotels for a year?”
“You make it sound horrible.” He pointed at me to tease. “You technically live in a hotel.”
“Right.” I chuckled and shrugged to concede the point. “I guess it’s not so bad. Will you always have to travel that much?”
“For a while, but once I learn about every part of the business, I’ll probably just go on a couple of big trips a year. That’s what my dad does now.” He down-shifted through the curves in the road and the engine rumbled. I really wasn’t into fancy things, but it was undeniably an impressive car.
“Did your dad travel a lot when you were growing up?”
“Yeah. He was gone most of the time. One time, when I was about four, he tried to hug me after he’d been away for two months and I cried because I thought he was a stranger.” He chuckled, but there was something else in the tone of his voice that made it seem like it was a painful memory. “My mom likes to tell everyone that story. It’s her way of complaining that he wasn’t around.”
“Are you closer to your dad now that you work together?”
“It’s getting better.” He nodded pensively. “I think I’ve figured out how to impress him.”
“Has he figured out how to impress you?”
Mason licked his bottom lip and seemed uncomfortable with the question. He finally said, “I don’t know,” and accelerated to pass a row of slow-moving cars. The engine revved as we sped effortlessly along the twists of the highway. Once we had left the other traffic behind, the engine quieted and we slowed down. “Sorry,” he said.
At first I wondered why he apologized but then I realized I’d had my eyes clenched shut and my fingers clamping my knees. “Oh. No. I’m fine.” I relaxed and exhaled. “Actually, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked such personal questions about