⚠️ Trigger Warning: Infidelity. Reference to off-page physical abuse.
Recap: Elizabeth and Mason talk on the ride to the cabin. We learn that Mason is dating someone else. He asks Elizabeth about her recent fight with her boyfriend Liam and senses she’s keeping something from him.
Mason’s dad’s cabin was an actual log cabin. Not the new kind that came in a kit—a really old building with big squared-off logs and narrow rows of chinking and a huge stone fireplace that threw serious heat.
There was no sofa and no bedroom, to speak of. Just a big open space with a bunch of mismatched chairs, a tiny galley-style kitchen and another even smaller room with four narrow built-in bunk beds.
Elizabeth stood in the middle of the main room and hugged herself while Mason started a fire.
The paper and kindling burned high and bright and orange. He watched it for a moment to be sure it would catch, then pulled an old quilt off one of the chairs and tossed it on the floor in front of the fireplace.
“Sit,” he said. “And I’ll get you a blanket.”
He left, and Elizabeth spread out the quilt. Then she knelt in front of the fire, swept her long brown hair over one shoulder, and posed. Mason would walk back in, and she would look up and smile. He might not tell her she was pretty, but his eyes would light up, and she’d know he was thinking it.
He was in the kitchen, on the phone with Theresa, and Elizabeth could hear every word. It took him a while to make everything was right in Theresa’s world. By the time he came back in and saw Elizabeth, her folded legs were crawly with sweat.
He tossed the blanket down on the floor. “Warmer?” he asked.
“Yeah.” She’d forgotten to look up and smile, and she didn’t really feel like it anymore, anyway. “I don’t need the blanket.”
Mason folded it up to use as a pillow and stretched out on the quilt.
Elizabeth knew that the sooner she lay down beside him, the sooner she’d be getting up again and going home and missing him for another week or maybe even two. So she just sat there on top of her sweaty thighs and watched him watch the fire.
It wasn’t like Mason was some romance book heartthrob. He didn’t have piercing blue eyes or a Roman nose or windswept curls.
Instead, he had a guy next door kind of look.
His eyes were brown, and his wheat-blond hair was soft and straight. But there was something undeniably beautiful about the cut of his jaw and the smooth, strong planes of face.
He put one arm behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. “What happened after you got in Liam’s car?”
“Nothing,” she said, repeating the lie. He was stuck on her and Liam. “Why do you keep asking me?”
“You’ve got a little bruise at the edge of your left eye,” he said. “The makeup just calls attention to it.”
Elizabeth resisted the urge to get up and look. She’d thought the concealer had worked. At home in the bathroom mirror, the mark had been completely undiscernible. “Do you think anyone noticed?”
“Did my sister say anything?”
“No.”
“Probably not, then. Jordan doesn’t miss much.”
It was true, or mostly true. Jordan was sharp. But she had still missed Mason and Elizabeth.
“So he hit you,” Mason said. “Once? Twice?”
“Just once.” She looked at him, and her dark hair slipped forward to brush his chest. “And I hit him first.”
“Don’t do it again.” He pulled her down next to him. “Don’t give him an excuse.”
“I won’t.”
He was holding her a little to tight. Which wasn’t like Mason at all.
“You need to stop seeing him,” he said into her hair. “If you’re afraid to tell him. I’ll tell him for you.”
“I don’t want you to tell him anything.” Because if Mason talked to Liam things might get out of hand. Just like the thing with Sammy Perrone. “And you don’t have to. It’s over.”
“You broke up?”
Not really but Liam was done with her. He’d made that clear at the game and she was glad. Mostly. Though she wasn’t sure how Mason would feel about her new single status.
He kissed her under the eye, over the tiny, almost invisible bruise that nobody had noticed but him. “If he bothers you again, you need to tell me.”
“Okay,” she said, even though there was absolutely no chance. The last thing she wanted was Mason getting in trouble—like her dad had.
Elizabeth rested her head in the perfect little valley just under Mason’s shoulder and let herself drift.
It was a weird thing. She had sex with other guys, but she never wanted to be close to them. Not like this, anyway.
“I never do this with anyone but you,” she said, wanting him to understand what it meant.
“Do what?”
She wasn’t sure what to call it. “Stretch out like this.”
“That must make sex kind of hard.”
“Not really.”
He was quiet. They were both picturing the same thing, probably. Elizabeth doing it sitting up in Liam’s car or up against the wall on the far side of the bleachers with some other guy. No stretching out. No hugging. No nothing really.
Just going through the motions.
“Maybe it’s a sensory thing,” Mason said.
It was easier for him to think that—easier to think it was just some kind of quirk, instead of real emotion the way other people felt it. “You mean maybe it’s an autism thing.”
“I mean, there are certain ways you like to be touched and certain ways you don’t. Not everybody is going to just pick up on that.”
“You did.”
Because they were made for each other, even if he didn’t see it.
She waited for him to explain it away, and she was prepared to argue it, but he just watched the fire. And they stayed like that for what seemed like a long time, not saying anything.
“I know the fight wasn’t about some party you were at two weeks ago,” he said at last.
Elizabeth sighed.
“I don’t know why you’re lying about it,” he said. “We’ll deal with it, whatever it is.”
And that was what did it. The idea of her and Mason facing things together, taking on the world like a real couple.
She held out as long as humanly possible, while Mason watched her with still, dark eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last, and then she started to cry.
This short story is the inspiration for my upcoming second-chance neurodivergent romance Madison Revisited. You can sign up for my newsletter to get publishing updates and related content.
© 2026 Barbara Graver. All rights reserved. This is an original creative work. Do not reproduce or redistribute without the written permission of the author.
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