Julia and Mason did fall asleep, without noticing that, and when they woke up, the day was already dawning.

Mason got up, took a shower and dressed. Julia still couldn’t make herself do that, so she was lying there, comfortable under the warm blanket. Mason sat down by her bedside.

“I need to go home, check on Matt and change before I go to the office,” he said.

She nodded. “Uh huh.”

“Julia.” He bent down and kissed the tip of her nose. “You’re so desirable, you can’t even imagine. I could stay all day long...”

“You need to go,” she argued.

“Right. Everything okay?”

“Fine.”

There was a pause. Mason caressed Julia’s hair thoughtfully, and she was keeping silent. Well, as he had already noticed once, she was not too comfortable with silence, so soon she demanded, “What are you thinking about? Any regrets?”

He shook his head. “Of course not. Just trying to recall that verse… as far as I remember it goes like this:

Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not true and not unkind.

“It’s titled Talking In Bed, you see.”

Julia nodded. “Beautiful. And true. I guess. Who is it?”

“Stephen Spender.”

“You know Mason,” she said sitting up, “what I love about you is that you always keep surprising me.”

“What, are you surprised I actually know something besides Shakespeare?”

They both laughed.

“No,” Julia said then. “I just think there would hardly be another man who’d recite this to a woman after a night of love-ma…”

She bit her tongue.

“Of love-making, you can say it,” Mason reassured her. “I wouldn’t find a better word for what it was, Julia.”

She stared at him. And then, she said softly, “For me it definitely was love-making, Mason. And the best night in my life, too.”

He smiled and kissed the top of her head. “I’m happy. I must run now. Can I come again?”

“Oh… okay. When?”

“The lunch break?”

“Mason!”

He frowned. “Hmm – you think too long to wait? Me too. But you know Julia, there’s work at the firm that also needs to get done!”

She giggled.

“I want you. What if we meet again tonight?” he suggested.

*
The nights that followed were somewhat different. The first time Julia and Mason both were apprehensive, vulnerable and courteous. Gradually, they were opening up to each other, re-discovering each other at this new level, and establishing a relationship similar to the one that they had already had in other spheres of their life. Now they dared to be teasing each other even in bed, at first tentatively, then more easily.

In a word, Mason and Julia were learning to trust each other with intimacy – both physically and emotionally.

Two weeks flew by. Julia tried her hardest not to lose her head, which was not easy, with Mason following her with his gaze and using every moment tete-a-tete to say something that’d make her blush. He loved to do that. She was forgetting he could be treacherous; well, she was reminded of that in a most cruel way, and pretty soon.


:-P


/Olga Lisenkova/

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