Page 29 of Unromance

“Are you sure? You seemed distracted when you got here.”

“It’s not that,” he dodged.

“Then what is it?”

The exit drew near, and Mason raised a brow in question.

“One more,” she said with quiet defiance. “Besides, you can’t avoid my question if you’re trapped on here with me.”

“Trickster,” he teased. They skated in silence for a moment, Mason waiting until they were past the group of teenage girls taking selfies before relaying the latest tabloid headlines to her.

“She couldn’t have kept it under wraps until after the New Year?” Sawyer said vehemently when he was done. “She broke up with you, like, a few weeks ago!”

Her protectiveness made him smile, the knot in his stomach from reliving the story loosening. Not that it meant anything. With Sawyer, it could never mean anything. “I already knew there was someone else. It’s not that. It’s—”

He probably shouldn’t talk about this here, in public, but hewantedto tell her. He hadn’t told anyone because his family was too invested and would find a way to make this about them. Talking about it with Alissa was fine, but she was also his business partner and thus also very invested. He just wanted totalkand have someone listen without an agenda.

“I’m leaving,” he said quietly. He waited, half expecting everyperson on the rink to stop and stare, to start taking photos and clamor for the exclusive. But no one paid them any mind. No one had any idea that in his two-word admission, Mason felt a million times lighter.

“I’m leaving the show.” He couldn’t resist saying it again. He’d been keeping so many secrets to protect the feelings of everyone around him, he hadn’t realized how suffocating it was until confessing one to Sawyer made breathing feel a thousand times easier. This was definitely breaking their surface-level rule, but he needed to talk about this. More than that, he wanted to talk about this withher. “I’m moving to LA to start a production company with Alissa. We were supposed to announce it earlier this month, but with the tabloids making me out like a womanizer one day and a heartbroken fool the next, it’s—”

He sighed. It was a mess, is what it was. He finally felt like he was doing something in his career that wasn’t chosen by his mother or in spite of his mother. This change was 100 percent for him, a way to reclaim the joy of acting and creating. He hated keeping it to himself like a dirty little secret, not being able to celebrate this giant leap forward.

“Hence our mission,” Sawyer said wisely. “To keep you single and out of the tabloids, so the focus is on your new company and not your love life.”

Mason nodded. “No one wants to trust a guy with their money if they think he’s just chasing skirts. I need to show them thatthisis my priority.”

Sawyer frowned. “Breakups suck. I can’t imagine going through one publicly.”

He could tell she meant it. For all her talk of a Grinch heart, shefelt more than she let on. “Can I ask you something?” As soon as the words left his mouth, he wanted to shove them back in.

“Sure,” she said guardedly.

He could feel his cheeks burning, fully aware he was breaking their rules by asking, but they’d spent three laps discussing Kara, so… “Breakups do suck, but do you ever think that maybe your breakup was just a bad experience—the exception, not the rule?”

Silence fell between them, an apology for pushing too far on the tip of his tongue, when she spoke first.

“Of course I’ve thought that,” she answered quietly, her meek words like a blow to his gut. “But it’s more than that.” She chewed on the inside of her cheek, eyes fixed straight ahead as she and Mason continued to skate. “My entire life imploded when Sadie and I broke up. I lost my girlfriend, my apartment, my entire friend group. And you—you should be shouting your news from the rooftops. Instead, your breakup is holding your joy prisoner. As if getting your heart broken isn’t bad enough, they get to hold the things we love hostage, too? It’s bullshit, and it’s not fair.” Quietly, under her breath she admitted, “I can’t risk that again.”

She rolled her lips inward, and he waited. If she wanted to keep talking, he wanted to hear it.

She glanced at him sidelong. “This is where you try to change my mind by extolling your grand philosophies on—” She lowered her voice like even saying the word would risk summoning it. “Romance.”

Mason barked out a laugh. “Why do you say that like it’s dangerous?”

“Isn’t it?” she asked, voice pitched high. “It’s not that I had one bad breakup and gave up,” she said slowly, her voice faraway. “It’s like this: I was on this writing panel once, and someone asked afellow author how she juggled being a mom and a writer. And she explained that it really is juggling, and you have to know which balls are glass and which are plastic. If you drop a plastic ball, it bounces. If you drop a glass ball, it shatters.

“Over the past few years, I’ve dropped a lot of glass balls thinking they were plastic, sacrificing them for plastic balls that I thought were glass. And even though I’m juggling a lot less now, I’m struggling. I can’t juggle any more balls—do not laugh at that,” she said, despite laughing herself. “I knew I was dropping the ball with Sadie, but I thought our relationship was plastic, and would bounce back. I don’t know if my career is glass or plastic. My life is this incredibly sad circus of me trying to keep this one ball up in the air because if I drop it—I don’t know if it will bounce back, ifIwill bounce back.” She swallowed thickly. “So, yeah, romance is dangerous. One more ball to juggle when I’m already barely coping? That’s not fair to the person trusting me to keep them up in the air.”

Her eyes were glassy, an edge of panic to her voice that always appeared when she talked about writing. He didn’t press for more, tucking the information away to mull over later. For now, he said, “Could you say ‘balls’ one more time?”

Sawyer laughed—though that wasn’t exactly the right word for it. More like a honk. Once she composed herself, she glanced sidelong at him. “Balls,” she whispered.

“Balls,” he said, marginally louder.

“Balls.”

“Balls.”

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