Page 31 of A Smart Girl's Guide to Second Chances
‘He’s here!’ she said. ‘Jesus, he’s gorgeous. How did I miss him? Poor form from me.’
I giggled, bathing in her performative jealousy. I raced over to the window and kneeled next to Lily. God, he did look good in formalwear. Did men know how gorgeous they looked in a tux? Surely not or they’d wear them all day, every day. The suit didn’t quite fit, his shirt was creased, and his bow tie was totally lopsided. But it didn’t matter at all.
My jangling nerves, temporarily quelled by our conversation, kicked back in.
Chapter 15
NOW
‘Matt, we have a million things to do today. We need to do the seating chart. We need to buy thank-you presents for our wedding party. We need to check all the honeymoon details. And next weekend we’ve got stuff on. And the one after, we’ve got our hen’s and buck’s.’
I looked up from our shared document (saved as ‘Wedding McWedding’). ‘But first of all, we need to work out what to do with these...’ I tried to keep a straight face as I held up one of the two hundred sculptural candles we’d ordered. We’d seen the idea on Pinterest – we would attach a tag with each person’s name on it, and it would be a cute place card and a memento to take home. But when we’d opened the box earlier that week, we’d discovered they were less pastel pink and more flesh coloured than they’d appeared online. And the shape was slightly – well, very – phallic.
‘I know we have to deal with the wedding favours that look like penises,’ Matt said. ‘But we also need a day off.’
I slowly shut my laptop. I owed Matt a day of doing whatever he wanted after the start of the weekend. He hadn’t said anything when we’d got home from Stella and Nick’s place the day before. But he’d been quieter than usual. He’d gone to bed early. We hadn’t watched a movie together.
‘’Course,’ I said.
We went for lunch at our favourite spot on Lygon Street, mopping up enormous bowls of pasta with spongy white bread. After we’d braved the queue for Pidapipó ice creams, we decided to go for a walk, and without ever discussing exactly where we were going, we walked towards the Melbourne University campus.
The academic year hadn’t yet begun so the campus was almost empty – a set without the players. Flyers, sticky-taped to noticeboards and bollards, all belonged to the year before. In a few weeks’ time, everyone would return from pub jobs, internships, backpacking trips around Asia. But today it was ours.
‘Can we have a look at Queen’s?’ I asked Matt. This was his alma mater but not mine. And while occasionally we walked around the university campus, he’d never taken me into the residential college where he’d lived for the first two years of his degree.
‘Okay,’ he said, and smiled. He led me across a quad framed with dripping pale purple wisteria. We walked past the student union, advertising protests and Bubble Tea, and down a narrow path until we reached Queen’s College.
I stared up at the impressive sandstone facade. I’d never really noticed that it looked exactly like an Oxford college. It wasn’t a coincidence – the oldest uni in the city, in what had once been a colonial outpost, had been modelled on Oxford.
‘What were you like when you were here?’ I asked as we walked through the entrance – a heavy wooden door under the stone tower.
He considered the question for a moment. ‘I had a lot of fun, but I think I was... lost,’ he said.
‘In what way?’
‘I didn’t know what I wanted to study. Or what I wanted to do with my career,’ he said. ‘I felt like that for a long time... like I was floating through life. Like it was happening to me.’
‘What changed?’ I asked.
He stopped walking and took my hand. ‘I met you,’ he said, his eyes softening.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, confused.
‘You were the first person who thought I was someone... serious, or with any depth, I guess,’ he said. He raced over the words ‘serious’ and ‘depth’, as though they were still descriptors he struggled to say out loud about himself.
He paused, as if he was deciding whether to keep speaking, how much he was willing to reveal.
I squeezed his hand, but didn’t say anything.
‘The wall behind the piano in my parents’ living room – have you ever noticed it?’ he asked then looked away from me.
‘No,’ I answered. Matt’s family home looked like it belonged to one of Beatrix Potter’s animals. And when we visited, we were mostly in Jane’s cosy kitchen, being continually fed.
‘There’s a whole wall of Holly’s and Ivy’s certificates – every gymnastics and piano and horse-riding award, spanning their whole lives. Their degrees. Graduation photos,’ he said. ‘And that’s great! I think it’s important to celebrate the things. Except I’ve only got two frames on the wall, to their dozens. God, that sounds petty. But one is my degree, which is basically next to the piano stool, and the other is a photo that appeared in our council newspaper, and I’m a toddler in a clown outfit.’
He paused for a moment, still looking straight ahead. ‘I mean, my parents named me Matt. Not even Matthew. What hope did I have? I’m a nickname of a person.’
His tone was still light but there was an edge of pain to his voice, as if it was almost killing him to even veer towards territory where he was critical of his family. I knew that this hurt was coming from someplace deep and raw.
