Maybe Matt's Miracle(14)

Matt



I wake up the next morning knowing that I have to apologize to Paul. I was way out of line last night, and I can’t just let it go. I wait around for him to wake up. He usually goes to the tattoo parlor before I do, but his bedroom door is still closed. He doesn’t have Hayley, his five-year-old daughter, this week. She’s with Kelly, her mom. He sometimes sleeps in when he doesn’t have to get up with her. She rises with the sun, and although it’s a-f*cking-dorable to see her padding around in her jammies, a man needs some sleep sometimes. We work really late at the shop, so we don’t always get eight hours.

Looks like Paul is making up for lost time.

Logan lives with Emily, Pete lives with Reagan, and Sam went back to college late last night on the bus, so it’s just Paul and me in the apartment now. It seems quiet. Too quiet sometimes. I’m used to the TV blaring because Logan doesn’t know it’s turned up too loud—he’s deaf—and Sam and Pete, the twins, throwing one another all over the furniture. Now it’s just me and Paul, two old guys, and a whole lot of quiet. I don’t think I like it.

I hear Paul’s door open and then the splash of him going to the bathroom. We’re guys. We don’t have to close the door when there are no girls here. He comes into the kitchen then, his blond hair sticking out in one hundred different directions, and he scratches his belly, his flannel pajama bottoms showing off the tattoo of Kelly’s name. I am well acquainted with it since I put it on him. And it’s a damn fine tattoo, if I do say so myself. Me, I don’t have any women’s names on me anywhere, and I’m pretty sure I never will.

“’Morning,” Paul mutters, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“’Morning,” I say back. I open the paper and stare down at it, but I can’t see the words on the page. I can feel Paul’s need to dump his bowl of Honey Graham Oh’s over my head. Hell, I deserve it.

“Sorry about last night,” I mutter.

He doesn’t look up from his cereal. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I was an ass.”

“I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“I should have agreed with you. You were right. It’s not done.”

He talks around a mouthful of food. “If it was done, you wouldn’t have been acting like that dickwad punched you in the gut.”

“Yeah.”

“What does she see in him?” he asks.

“He wasn’t dying?” I guess.

He finally looks up at me. “No excuse.”

No, there’s no excuse to cheat.

“And you were right about me and Kelly.” He keeps eating, not looking up at me.

“I don’t want to be right about that.”

“Too bad. I didn’t know you guys knew that we still do that.”

I shake my head. “Nobody knows but me.”

“I hope we aren’t too obvious.” He winces.

“No, I saw you two together when Logan was in the hospital. The way she looks at you…” I watch his face. “And the way you look at her.”

He finally lifts his gaze. “We just keep falling into bed together. That’s all.” He shrugs. He looks really uncomfortable, and that’s not usually how I think of Paul. “It’s easy. And comfortable.”

I wouldn’t know what that’s like. I laugh to myself.

“What?” he asks.

“You talk about sex with Kelly like it’s your foot sliding into an old shoe.”

He snuffles.

“But just like an old shoe, exes can be comfortable but fail to support you the way you need.”

“Ding, ding, ding,” he cries, like he’s ringing a bell in the air.

“Huh?” I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“Did I ever tell you why we split up?”

He never did, but I have a pretty good idea. I shake my head anyway.

“She didn’t want you guys.”

“What?” Now that was the last thing I expected.

“She was pregnant with Hayley, and I was almost twenty-one. Mom and Dad were gone, and she didn’t want you guys. I wanted to marry her. But she didn’t want my family.”

“She made you choose?”

He gets up and slams his bowl into the sink a little too hard. “There wasn’t a f*cking choice. You guys were my life, and I was all you had. No choice.”

Paul stepped into fatherhood the way some people step into college, into a job after school. He gave it everything he had. We’re only a year apart, but I never could have done what he did. He gave up everything, even his own happily ever after, for us. God. Now I feel awful. We ruined his life.

“I couldn’t have raised them without you,” he says. “Where I was weak, you were strong. And where I was strong, you were weak.” He’s right. We did complement each other.

“You gave up full time with Hayley for us.” Now I’m pissed.

“I am Hayley’s father, and I always will be. I have her half the time, and it works out well for the two of us.”

It does. It really does.

“What about now that they’re all out of the house?”

“What about it?”

“Now that everyone is taken care of, why don’t you take care of yourself? Go get yourself a real life. You and Kelly keep falling together. Why not make it permanent?”