“Matt, honey, it’s Sunday.” Did he really think that it was still Saturday? How long had it been since he slept? I had been concerned before, but it had nothing on what I felt now. And here I’d been worried that I’d messed something up while he was just across town, struggling to keep his head afloat with whatever project he was working on.
Matt looked shocked at the news that it was Saturday. He grabbed his cell phone, which was attached to his laptop by a neon green cable. I wasn’t sure if it was to test the code he’d been working on or to make sure that his phone didn’t lose its charge while he lost track of time. It didn’t matter. He pressed a button on the side of his phone, waking it up. His expression changed from shock to horror when he realized that I was telling the truth. It was Sunday.
“Fuck,” he groaned. I had to fight to keep my mind from traveling back to the last time I’d heard him groan that word. Now was not the time for my brain to be filled with lust bunnies prancing through it. “How is it Sunday? The first phase of this project is due Friday, and it’s a mess.”
I reached out and took the laptop from him. “Okay, no, babe, you need a break.” My nose crinkled. “And a shower. I’m going to make you something to eat and clean up all of these.”
“No!” he exclaimed. His dark eyes were wild as he looked at the ducks placed around the room. “You don’t know which bins each of them belong in, and some of the ducks are better at skills than others. If you put them in the wrong bins, then I’m going to have to spend a ton of time finding the right duck when I need it.”
I nodded slowly. “Okay, we can pick up the ducks together and you can tell me where they belong. Then, you’re going to take a shower, and I’m going to make you something to eat. I’m going to guess you haven’t eaten since yesterday?” He looked at the bags of chips on the ground and then back up at me. “More than chips,” I amended.
“You would be right. In my defense, I was planning on getting pizza.”
“Yesterday,” I reminded him. “You were planning on getting pizzayesterday. Not a great defense, Matt.” I offered a hand to him. He looked at it like it was going to bite him. “Up. Ducks. Shower. Food. Now.”
And then I was going to find a way to distract him. It couldn’t be good for him to focus for that long on his project. No wonder he looked like the walking dead.
He disconnected his phone from the computer, and I took the laptop over to the small table beside his couch. I started gathering ducks while he pulled out a few bins. He instructed me on which ducks went where while he gathered others with expert precision. Before long, the living room looked almost normal. I started to pick up the chip bags and soda cans. He took the half-empty ones from me into the kitchen. Once we had his living room back in order, I reminded him that his next step was shower and went to his kitchen to sort out dinner.
For some reason, I’d expected to find ingredients in his kitchen. Back in high school, Matt and I had loved cooking together. He’d always been a damn good cook, and I’d had agreat time teaching him how to make homemade pasta and sauces. I spotted the ingredients for homemade pasta at least, and no boxes of the store bought stuff, but that was about it in terms of ingredients. His freezer was full of frozen dinners, and there was a stack of Lunchables in his fridge. His pantry had a ton of different cans in it. All food that could be made quickly and for one.
For a foodie like me, it was depressing.
Luckily, he also had a pack of defrosted chicken breasts in his fridge. I pulled it out and checked the ‘best by’ date. It still had a few days left before it went bad, and I could do a lot with some chicken breasts. I heard his shower turn on while I started working on a simple chicken and rice dish. Sure, the rice was instant rice, but you had to make do with what was available. I moved around the kitchen with expert precision, and by the time he came back, his dark hair dripping wet and in clean clothes, the apartment was filled with the smells of seasoned chicken.
“That smells amazing,” he muttered as he came up behind me, peeking into the skillet. His arms wrapped around my waist, and I relaxed into his embrace. Clearly, his distance had nothing to do with Thursday night. “I’m sorry if I freaked you out.”
“You did,” I told him simply, reaching for the tongs to flip the chicken in the pan. The sear was almost perfect. “Do you have any wine? I can make a great wine sauce to go with the rice. Red would be preferred.”
He took a step back from me and went to the fridge. He pulled a dusty bottle of cooking wine from behind the toaster. “Will this work?”
I took the dark bottle and read it over. “Perfect.”
Fifteen minutes later, I had Matt on the couch with a plate of hot food. It was heavier than I’d usually go for lunch, but he clearly needed it. He was practically inhaling the food from his plate. When we finished, I told him to stay seated while I clearedour lunch mess up. I cleaned as I went, so there were only a few dishes to wash. When I got back to the couch, Matt had dozed off. I sat down beside him, turned on the TV, and decided to let him nap.
“You stayed,” he muttered an hour later, when he woke up from his nap.
“I did.” I’d waited all weekend to talk to him. I wasn’t going to disappear while he napped. Besides, I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t wake up and immediately grab his laptop again. “You know, I really thought you were mad at me when you weren’t chatty all weekend.”
He shifted on the couch, moving closer until his body was pressed against mine. I draped my arm around his shoulder, and it felt as natural as breathing. “I wasn’t mad at you. I was just…” His voice trailed off, like he was searching for the right words. “I got deep into the coding hole.”
“Yeah, I saw that. That’s all it was?”
He didn’t answer right away, and I just knew that wasn’t it. There was something else, something that had been eating at him. Maybe it was the reason he’d fallen into the coding hole in the first place. “I thought… I don’t know.” He let out a heavy sigh and reached for my hand. Our fingers laced together, and he began rubbing his thumb over mine. “Thursday night. We… It was a good time, right?”
“It was amazing,” I assured him. Crap. It had been amazing for both of us, right? He’d said that he’d regretted hookups in the past. “You regretted it, didn’t you?”
His head bolted up, and he turned to look at me. His eyes were wide and frantic, and I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have said anything at all. “No! I mean, no. I didn’t regret it. I thought that maybe you did. Because I mean, when we were kissing in the parking lot, you were all for heading upstairs, but then when wegot off in the club, it wasn’t even talked about. I thought maybe you didn’t want to—”
“I wanted to,” I cut him off. “I wanted to in the club, and if you would’ve suggested I come upstairs with you, I would’ve been up those stairs in a heartbeat, but I didn’t want to rush you. I didn’t want to mess anything up by going too fast with the physical stuff.”
“Oh. So, it wasn’t that it was bad or anything?”
I laughed before kissing him on top of his head. “It was amazing, Matt. Jacked off thinking about it more than a few times.” It and a few more things, but I didn’t need to scare him off with just how much lust I had directed his way. “I just thought you wanted to take it slow.”
He sat with the words for a few minutes. He laid his head back down on my chest, his ear over my heart. “I’m okay with the pace we’re going physically,” he answered after a few minutes. “In fact, I think I’d be okay with it moving a little more physical. But I know that sometimes, I link the physical and the emotional. I don’t want to move too fast for you on that either.”
“So, we take it slow?” I asked him softly.
