Page 25 of Hypnotized By Love

“Good question. I have no idea.” Because there was nothing he could say to undo what he’d done.

“Mom said something about him maybe moving back to Playa Placida. Maybe he wants to apologize in order to make sure the next forty Sinclair/Beckett Christmases won’t be awkward.”

Mason might be moving back home permanently? That was entirely unexpected and an unwelcome thought. I had been operating under the assumption that this move was temporary and he’d be flying back to New York in the not-too-distant future. “We’re not going to be spending the next forty Christmases with Mason. He’s going to meet someone, I’m going to meet someone, and there will at least be buffers if we do all get together.”

“Are you, though? Going to meet someone?”

Now I turned to stare at my sister. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Let’s just say I’ve never seen you as worked up about a guy as you are about Mason Beckett.”

I read her subtext loud and clear, but I wasn’t interested in traveling down this twisted road with her, so instead I just got mad. “I can’t believe you just implied that I like Mason. Do you know what he said to me today?”

“What did he say?”

“He said hypnosis was a cult and that I’m a fraud.”

“Well, you showed him, didn’t you?”

That made me pause. “I guess I did. And I did a really good job of it! You should have seen him out there saying yes to everyone after my ‘fake’ hypnosis convinced him it was a good idea. Yes to the silent auction! Yes to Bridget! Yes to petting alligators!”

“You should have asked him for some money,” she said jokingly. “And he shouldn’t have said the cult thing, because that wasn’t nice, but he’s not the first person who’s said something like that to you, andusually you don’t get this upset. Which means something else is going on. What is it?”

Having someone know you so well was both a blessing and a curse. It made it very hard to hide things from them.

“He also said ...” I was trying to think of what I could share with her, what he’d said outside the confines of the actual session. “He said I was pretty!”

It was such a stupid thing to repeat that I was mortified as soon as I’d said it. Obviously, that wasn’t a bad thing, but it had bothered me.

Sierra confirmed how idiotic it was when she said sarcastically, “What a jerk! Want me to beat him up for you?”

She didn’t have the whole context, so she wouldn’t be able to understand why it made me mad. I couldn’t tell her about the other things he’d said that had left me floundering. Like when he’d said that he loved me. Because I’d been obsessing over that pretty extensively for the last few hours and had tried to come to a logical conclusion about it.

Mason hadn’t said that he wasinlove with the girl next to him on the dock, just that he loved her. And there were so many other kinds of love besides romantic love. He could have loved me as a friend. Or in a platonic you’re-a-pseudo-sister-to-me kind of way.

I had initially assumed he meant romantic love, but that was because I was just projecting, using my own past feelings and emotions to explain his. I couldn’t jump to conclusions and most definitely couldn’t tell Sierra about it, because I had to keep it confidential.

It wasn’t until Sierra spoke that I realized I’d just been standing there, running all of these things through my head. “Did you at least get any good gossip?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Did you ask him why he made up that rumor?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

That made me pause and consider why I wasn’t going to ask Mason about the rumor. There was the fact that I had decided long ago that what he had done was unforgivable and it wasn’t my job to let him relieve his guilty conscience by confessing and apologizing. But it was more than that.

I’d given him so much power over me, over my heart, that I was terrified to ever let that happen again. What if he had some reasonable explanation? Not that I could think of one, but what if? I’d seen today just how easy it would be to fall back into something familiar but exciting with him.

There was no way I was going to let that happen. He’d already ripped my heart out of my chest once—there was zero chance that I’d let him destroy me again. I wouldn’t go down that road a second time. I didn’t think I could handle it.

But I couldn’t share any of that with my sister. So instead I opened my closet door and pulled out a bin from the top shelf to find the purse that would match with this dress. “So he could just lie about it more? No thanks. I’m full up on lying men at the moment. He can spin his sob stories somewhere else and leave me alone.”

My sister had her gaze pointed down at my bedspread, tracing a flower shape with her finger. It briefly occurred to me that her finger probably had grease on it from the chips when I realized that there was a reason she wasn’t making eye contact with me, and it made me feel anxious.

“What?” I asked.

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