Letters to the Baumgartners

Dear Carrie and Doc,

You aren’t going to believe who’s showed up on my doorstep. I can barely believe it myself. Mason! That’s right, I found my ex-husband sitting on my stoop, waiting for me after class, with just a suitcase and an English-Italian translation dictionary in his hands. I think I was too much in shock to do anything else but invite him inside.

And I swear to God, it’s really not my fault he spent the night. He bought a one-way ticket and he didn’t even book a room! What was I supposed to do, send him out onto the streets alone? He doesn’t know a word of Italian—you should hear his accent, or lack thereof. Eek! But nothing happened. Well, mostly nothing.

Okay, okay, I admit, we, uh… we reconciled a little bit. Part of it was the wine. That was my fault. And, you guys, he brought me Ho-Hos! (No jokes, I mean it!) It’s one of those weird, occasional indulgences of mine that I really miss. He knows me so well. It’s hard to say no to a man who does something like that—not to mention the whole International flight to see me thing. But I think it was mostly the wine.

Of course, now this complicates things with Nico a bit. To say the least. I’m not sure what to say to him, if anything. And Mason says he wants to stay for a while, but I don’t know what that means exactly. “Let’s just see where things go,” is what he said. I should have been mad at him, to tell you the truth. I should have slammed the door in his face and told him to go home. I mean, that’s what I should have done, right? Isn’t that what you would want me to do?

But I just couldn’t. So now he’s here, and I’m not quite sure what to do about that…

“Dani?” Mason’s voice beckoned me back from the siren-call of Ho-Ho’s in my little kitchen. I licked the chocolate off my fingers, tucking my letter to the Baumgartners away, and padded back into the bedroom, still nude. “What time is it?”

“Midnight.” I sat on the edge of the bed, the little lamp on the night stand illuminating his sleepy face, eyes still half-closed—but his gaze was on my body, already hungry. Still hungry. “You’re still on American time.”

“Come back to bed.” His hand moved, warm, over my hip, still familiar, even though it had been so long. I couldn’t believe how easily I had fallen into bed with him, how easily I was falling... Maybe that thing about absence making the heart growing fonder really was true. Not that I had ever really stopped loving Mason. I’d divorced him knowing I would probably continue to love him for the rest of my life—but love didn’t always solve everything.

“What are you doing here?” I murmured the question, running my hand through the soft, sandy bristle of his short-cut hair, so different from Nico’s thick, dark curls. Thinking of Nico made my stomach lurch with guilt. I didn’t want to think about what my actions tonight might be doing to him, to our budding relationship. It hurt my head—and my heart—too much.

“This.” He reached for me and I went to him, relieved, without any more thought at all.