Free Betting on You by Jessie Evans

blindfold from his eyes.
    “Three hours,” a voice said from a few feet away, making him flinch with surprise.
    “Lark?” He blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he saw Lark sitting in a lawn chair a few feet away, holding a book with a reading light clipped to the top of it on her lap.
    “What the hell is going on?” he asked, standing as he threw the blindfold into the dirt at his feet. They were parked on a blanket of pine needles about fifty feet from a campsite where a campfire burned. Looking around, he expected to see other campsites, but they were alone. Wherever she had taken him, it wasn’t a public campground.
    “You made it three hours,” Lark repeated in a calm voice. “I made it thirty thousand.”
    Mason shook his head, unable to hide his frustration. “What?”
    “Four years. That’s over a thousand days, over thirty thousand hours.” Lark closed her book but kept the light on. It illuminated just enough of her face for Mason to see the tightness in her jaw and the emotion in her eyes.
    It wasn’t an emotion he could easily place. It lived somewhere between anger and misery and hope, in the no man’s land of feelings where people so often found themselves when relationships went terribly wrong. It was a hard emotion to name, but not a hard one to empathize with. It was the same way he’d felt sitting in that car—a mix of angry and miserable and abandoned, with a tiny voice beneath it all praying in a whisper for a miracle, for Lark to come back and make everything all right.
    Mason’s bunched shoulders dropped away from his ears. His hands unfisted at his sides.
    He understood now. He should have understood all along.
    “You wanted me to know how you felt,” he said, staring at the ground near Lark’s feet, not quite ready to look her in the eye.
    “No, there’s no way you could know how I felt,” Lark said. “Three hours can’t teach you everything there is to know about thirty thousand hours, but I was hoping it would at least give you a taste.”
    Mason nodded. “It did.”
    “You were angry.”
    “I was,” he whispered.
    “And miserable.”
    “And pretty sure I’d been abandoned,” he finished, a fresh wave of shame washing over him. He thought of the misery he had felt and multiplied it times ten thousand.
    That was what he had done to her. He’d known he was an ass, but it wasn’t until this exact moment that he understood it in a visceral way that cut through him the way he’d cut through bones and tissue in Gross Anatomy.
    “You can’t ever forgive me,” Mason said, fighting to speak past the tightness in his throat. That had to be the reason for this. Lark was trying to penetrate his stubborn resolve and make him see that she was never going to give him a second chance, no matter what.
    And now he did, he understood, and he was shattered, so shattered the ground felt like it was tilting beneath his feet.
    “No,” Lark whispered. “I think I can. I think maybe I already have.”
    Mason’s head jerked up in surprise. This time, when he met Lark’s eyes they were gentle, hopeful.
    “You have?” he asked, voice cracking.
    “I didn’t think you’d last an hour,” Lark said. “But you did and the longer I sat here watching you wait for me, the more I realized…” She licked her lips, pressing them together for a moment before she continued with a deep breath. “I care about you, Mason. I want to give this a chance. A real chance.”
    “You do?” Mason’s relief was so profound, his hands shook with it.
    “I do,” Lark said with a shy grin. “Are you still up for four more dates after a night like this?”
    “I’m up for as many dates as you’ll give me,” Mason said, the center of his bones still feeling unsteady. He felt like a man who’d been rescued from a burning building seconds before it collapsed. Lark had pulled him from the fire and he was going to make the most of the chance she’d given him.
    “Then let’s