Page 39 of Matteo's Mettle
His thick, stocky fingers tickle my sides. I’m not all that ticklish, but he knows exactly which spot to hit in order to make me flinch away with as manly a squeal as I can muster.
I love these moments with him. I can’t actually recall ever being this silly or carefree with Trent, which almost makes me sad because I spent ten years with him. Ten years without this kind of freedom and joy. I can’t say I regret the relationship because, without it, I doubt I would have made the choices that eventually brought me to this moment, but I do mourn for the man I might have been under different circumstances.
“Hey,” London’s hand is smoothing up and down my back. “Where’d you just go, sweetheart?”
I shake off the melancholy my hypothetical musings have induced and lean back against my lover’s chest. “I was just thinking about how lucky I am to have you as my Daddy.”
“We’re both lucky,” he insists, cuddling me closer. “And it doesn’t matter which steps we take, or when. We’re in this together for the long haul, okay?”
I nod, feeling suddenly, unexpectedly choked up. “Yes, Daddy.”
God, I love this man.
Chapter Fourteen – London
We don’t revisit the diaper conversation again. At least, not over the course of the next week. Instead, Stan sits me down on Wednesday to tell me that he and his business partners have gone over their options, which gives me something else to focus on.
“If you’re willing to spend every second week at the new site for the next six months, the job’s yours,” he says with a toothy grin. “If all goes as well as I think it will, and you train your people up to be nice and autonomous, we can look at minimizing the schedule after that and have you working remotely from here with maybe a monthly visit to the new site from there on out.”
Stan’s leaning back in his cushy, high-backed leather office chair, his fingers interlaced behind his head. He looks like the cat who caught the damn canary.
My heart thumps in my chest. It’s a better compromise than I had anticipated they’d come up with, but I’ll still be away from Matt for entire weeks at a time.
But I’ll also be here for entire weeks, too.
The fact that the company is willing to spend money on return airfares every two weeks is mind boggling. But…where would I stay? If I let up the lease on my apartment, I could probably afford to stay in a motel or something every other week. Something low budget. I’d only need a place to sleep and shower, really. But, if I did that, would Matt mind me moving into his place on the weeks when I’m here? I know I’ve basically moved in as it is, but even I know that I’m being presumptuous to think I could just spend every other week living in his house without discussing this all first.
“Can I discuss this with Matt, first?” I ask my boss. “My partner, I mean.” We haven’t really spoken about the potential promotion since I first brought it up. With the idea of flexibility in limbo, there was nothing to really talk about. But now there is, and I won’t make this decision without his input. “I told him that you were looking into options, but we didn’t really want to guess what that might mean.”
Stan smiles indulgently because he can tell that I’m interested in the offer. As far as he’s concerned, my talking it over with Matt is a formality at best, I’m sure. But if Matt isn’t on board, I’m still turning Stan down.
* * *
“I think you have to take the job,” Matt tells me over dinner. I’ve explained Stan’s offer and, even though I tried to remain neutral, I’m pretty sure he can see straight through me. He doesn’t seem upset or worried, though, and that goes a long way to settling my anxieties about accepting the promotion.
“Yeah?” I ask, wanting to be absolutely certain this won’t hurt us as a couple. “You’d be okay with that? Even though it means me being gone half the time?”
With his grilled chicken breast half-eaten, Matt carefully puts his cutlery down on the table and looks me in the eye. “It’s for six months, and it’s better than the alternative where you could have taken the original job offer and moved across the country permanently.” When I move to say something -to argue, or to reassure him, or some mixture of both- he holds up a hand to stop me. “But, more than that, we’re solid. We can Facetime or whatever while you’re over there, and we’ll just have to make up for lost time when you’re back home.”
Home.
The word warms me from the inside. “We can do that,” I nod, waggling my eyebrows at him suggestively.
Matt shakes his head with a soft smile. He reaches for my hand across the timber tabletop and squeezes it. “Move in with me. Make this your home for real.”
Even though I’d had the same thought earlier today, it blows my mind to hear him asking me. He hasn’t had to make many big decisions (or even smaller ones) since we met, since I became his Daddy…and this ishuge.
“Are you sure?” I ask him, my eyes not leaving his. “I won’t lie; I want that more than anything right now. But I don’t want you to feel pressured here.”
If I squint, I can see parallels to my parents’ relationship and I’m still terrified of repeating my dad’s mistakes.
Matt needs to know what he’s getting himself into. Even though I know I’m not my father, that my situation with Matt is different to the resentful aspiring artist who knocked his girlfriend up, I still share that guy’s genetic makeup.
Holding up a hand before Matt can dive all the way in, I confess, “I really need you to be sure, baby. Because I don’t want either of us becoming resentful or bitter or-”
“Hey,” usually it’s me calming him, but right now the tables are turned. As if our roles really are reversed, Matt looks every bit his age when he gently cups my cheek and asks, “where’d that come from?”
Then I tell him everything. Obviously, he knew the basics of my baggage before now, but now I fill in the blanks. My parents were young -in their early twenties- and had a whirlwind romance which resulted in me. My dad felt pressured to stick around. To move my mother in. To play happy families when all he’d wanted to do was see the world as a free spirit. He took a job which involved a lot of traveling, and ultimately a lot of infidelity. Then, after mom found out and they had a huge fight, he walked out completely, leaving her heartbroken.
