“How what works?”
Gideon didn’t give him an answer and shook it off.
“Thanks for listening to me talk about this.” The warm smile on Gideon’s face sent goosebumps zipping through his body. “I needed to get it off my chest, and I think I also wanted an outside opinion.”
Mac could make out the blond stubble prickling his chin. He wanted to keep looking at it. “Yeah, thanks for the mac ‘n cheese.”
“My dad and I used to make it on late nights.” Gideon stared at his bowl, the memory clouding his face. “It would be our late night snack. Sometimes, if I was sleeping, the smell of the melting cheese and hot noodles would wake me up, and I’d join him.”
“I’m sorry. How long has he…”
“Eight years.” Gideon dipped his fork into the bottom of his bowl, getting the last bits. “How about for you?”
Mac looked up in confusion.
“Your parents,” Gideon said.
He looked on with even more confusion.
“You said you live with your aunt, and you talk about them in the past. I didn’t want to bring it up before, but since we were sharing, I just thought…”
“I’m sorry.” Mac felt himself turn red, dying of embarrassment. He didn’t talk about his parents much, even though they were the cause of his constant insomnia. But barriers had fallen tonight. He and Gideon were in the middle of one of those epic conversations where walls tumbled down and people dared to bare their true selves. “I moved out of my parents’ house four years ago, after my sophomore year of high school. I went to live with my Aunt Rita in Pittsburgh. They’re still in West Virginia. They own a hardware store.”
“A literal mom-and-pop shop. Cool.”
Mac nodded. “I don’t really speak to them, and they don’t really speak to me.” Saying it out loud made it sound ludicrous. These were his parents. And that was why Mac would rather people think what they want. It was better than the truth. “So I live with my Aunt Rita, and she’s the best.”
Mac could tell Gideon was waiting for more, but he wasn’t going to push. When somebody dropped a bombshell, you couldn’t ask follow-up questions. And like a tightly controlled press conference, that was all Mac was going to say about that.
He stood up and took their bowls and empty beer bottles from the coffee table. He looked at the time on his phone and dreaded his decision to take a 9 a.m. class. “I’ll wash these,” Mac said.
“No, I’ll get them.” Gideon reached for them, and their fingers touched for a split second, but one of those moments that defied categorization of time. Mac felt a warm rush cascade down his spine and the backs of his legs.
He wanted to gauge Gideon’s response, but Gideon was already walking into the kitchen and placing them in the sink. Gideon stared intently at the dishes. A little too intently, Mac thought. More like avoiding eye contact.
“You’re washing them before putting them in the dishwasher?” Mac asked from the doorway.
“Yeah. You don’t want large food particles in the…” Gideon checked Mac’s guilty face. He opened the dishwasher. It looked clean to Mac, but Gideon saw otherwise.
“Sorry,” Mac said.
“It’s okay. It’s a first step. Maybe next you can tackle the Jenga Tower of Junk on the sun porch.” Gideon said it with a laugh that obviously masked his strong desire for Mac to actually get his crap off the sun porch.
“I will. One thing at a time. Davis was the tidy one.” Mac pictured his ex-boyfriend and a wave of sadness crashed inside his chest. “He would clean up my dorm room whenever he came over. My roommate never minded getting sexiled from the room because he knew he would come back to a tidier place.”
These mourning moments hit Mac at the worst, most unexpected times. It was a reminder that things weren’t the same anymore. The break-up hit Mac especially hard for some reason. It chipped at the deep recesses that he didn’t want to disturb, somewhere in his mind where the memories of moving to Pittsburgh lived.
Gideon held out a paper towel. “I feel it, too. The sudden emptiness. Like just in case things are going well, bam! Here’s a Beth memory.”
“It sucks.”
“Yep. Sure does.”
They went to their separate rooms to get ready for bed a few minutes later. Mac stared at his reflection in the mirror as he brushed his teeth. He realized that he didn’t think Gideon was an asshole. He was that sweet, soulful guy he first met, before his stupid remarks.
But for the sake of his living situation, Mac would keep those ideas to himself.
Φ
