Page 49 of Fun and Games

"I don't know if I would call it traveling, exactly," I said. "I've been moving around pretty regularly. Never staying in one place more than a few months. I like to experience everything a city has to offer before moving on to a new place."

Mason looked surprised.

"How long have you been here?" he asked.

"It's been a few months now," I replied.

His lips twitched down into a frown.

"So I guess you'll be moving on soon?" he asked.

"I'm thinking about it," I said. "I'm doing some research on where I might go next."

Mason went quiet. He came over to the bookshelf and picked up one of the camera lenses, turning it over in his hand.

"I don't have any concrete plans yet," I continued. "I'm still on contract at my temp job for a while."

"Right." He put the lens back down. "You want to see something cool?"

"Always," I said.

Mason took down a book from the end of the shelf. It was a leather bound notebook. He opened it to the middle, and I saw it was full of tidy handwriting.

"Is that…?" I asked, my heart beginning to beat faster. "Are those your travel notes?"

"I always jotted down what I wanted to say in my blog posts before typing them up." Mason gestured to the other handful of leather bound notebooks on the shelf. "I guess you could say these notebooks are the draft versions."

I started to reach out with grabby hands before I stopped myself.

"Can I see them?" I asked.

Mason held one out to me. I took it with reverent hands and carefully flipped through the notebook, making sure not to smudge the ink or crease the pages. All of Mason's thoughts and feelings had been written down here, unfiltered and raw. I wanted to soak in every word.

"You're acting like it's some kind of holy text," he chuckled.

"To me it is," I said.

"There's not much new in there," he replied. "If you've been reading my blog, it's the same content."

"It's still really cool to see." I stopped on a random page and scanned the first sentence. "I've read this one before. You talked about artistic freedom in that post."

"I think I wrote that a few days after Connor had an argument with a music exec," Mason said thoughtfully. "They didn't see eye to eye on certain song choices."

"I really liked what you had to say," I told him. "About artists being allowed the freedom to create art that was authentic. About being able to take their experiences and turn it into something they could share with the world."

"I did get a bit philosophical sometimes, didn't I?" Mason said. "I probably should have stuck to writing about food and stuff."

"No," I shook my head. "I liked when you wrote things like that. It wasn't the same kind of content all the others were writing about. It felt real." I turned to him with a smile. "It feltauthentic."

"I just wrote what I was feeling at the time," he said. "Honestly, it was more like a personal journal than anything. A way to get out all my thoughts. Connor had his music as a way to express himself. I guess my blog was my own way of doing that."

"The things you had to say really resonated with people," I told him. "It resonated with me."

I wished I could do something nice for him. To do something that gave him as much happiness and comfort that his words had given to me. He'd had such a fun time walking the dogs with me. Maybe…

"I have an idea," I said. "Something we can do that both of us can use for our blogs."

"What is it?" he asked.