Page 25 of Honeybees and Sexy Tees
“That’s kind of the point, honeybee.” He laughed and it ramped up my aggravation even more.
I swung my head sadly and brushed at a tear, my breath coming in shaky gasps. “I can’t do it,” I said through trembling lips. “I can’t live there with you knowing one day I’m going to walk into my kitchen and be faced with one of your hotties sitting at my breakfast table.”
“One of my hotties?” he asked, his head cocked in confusion.
“Girlfriend. Hookup. One-night stand. Whatever you call them these days,” I said, turning back to stare at the wreckage of my apartment.
He turned me right back to face him. “No, I don’t do that anymore, honeybee. I haven’t dated since last July. The only face at your breakfast table will be mine. That I promise you right now. I don’t want you to worry about that.”
“I don’t have a choice, do I?” I asked on a sob. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“You always have a choice,” he said, though I could hear in his voice that he was upset with me. “If you really don’t want to live in the house, we’ll figure something out. If you don’t want to live in the house because I’ll be living there, then I’ll buy that travel trailer and put it in the side yard. I will do whatever makes you comfortable. I just have to make sure you’re safe.” He pounded his chest twice with his fist. “I should have been the one looking after you so you didn’t have to use paper signs in a window!”
I held onto his arm until he calmed down. “You were looking after me, Mathias. I know if I hadn’t shown up to work, you would have checked on me just like you did last week. I guess I knew something was amiss with my head, so I agreed to the signs as soon as Lucy suggested them. It was a way to be sure that if nothing else, they were checking on the weekends and at night.”
Mathias put the SUV into drive and pulled away from the curb. “I still feel like an ass. Sometimes . . .” He shrugged and fell silent.
We drove five more minutes before I finally prodded him. “Sometimes?”
“Sometimes I don’t know how to balance giving you independence while still looking out for you. I can’t just stop looking out for you. That’s not ever going to happen.”
“Mathias, you know I’ll always need someone to check on me. My brain has some pathways that work perfectly, some that misfire, and some that don’t work at all. Right now, I have simple partial seizures. You know that could change on a dime. My history has borne that out since childhood.”
“That’s what scares me,” he said on a nod. “It changing on a dime and I’m not there. God. I don’t want to smother you, but it terrifies me to think about.”
Who is this man?I didn’t know the guy sitting next to me. It terrified him to think about me needing him, and him not being there? That had certainly changed since last July. My thoughts paused. Last July. The letter came to light last July. Could that letter have affected him more than he let on? Then it hit me.
I did know this man.
The man sitting next to me was my Mattie. He was the boy I met in the park who wanted to make sure I was okay. He was the one who held my hand when I was in pain. He was the one who punched the bullies when they made fun of me for my name. This was the man I knew better than anyone. My heart gave a happy thump against my sternum. Mattie was still in there. He was trying to break through and take control of his life again.
I grasped his shoulder and held tight. “Don’t think about it then, Mattie,” I whispered, letting his childhood nickname slip out. “Let’s just trust in Dr. Newsome and give the new medication time to do its job.”
“Okay, we’re headed to the pharmacy now for more medication.” He blew out a breath and nodded once. “You can explain the situation, and they can call Dr. Newsome with questions. Then, while they’re working on it, we’ll pick you up some clothes. Is that all okay with you?”
He was asking, not telling. That was new. Mathias had always been a take-charge kind of guy, but today, it was Mattie coming through and he just wanted to help in any way he could.
“That’s all okay with me,” I promised with a smile.
His phone rang, and he answered it through the SUV’s radio system. “This is Mathias,” he said, his gaze shifting to mine immediately. I recognized the number as the private investigator he’d hired to find Milas. “Do you have good news for me, Nathan?”
“I’m afraid not, Mathias. I’d like to say I had found something, anything, but it’s like this guy doesn’t even exist.”
“You weren’t able to find a trace of him since he left Florida?”
“Well, that is something I can give you,” he said, rustling some papers. “He wasn’t in Florida for the winter. Once I got down there, I canvassed everyone in the area about the boat, and no one had seen it. I suspected he hadn’t been there, so I took one of the marina guys out for drinks. I showed him Milas’s picture, and he confirmed that Milas asked them to say they did the work, but they never did the work.”
“Was the guy drunk?” Mathias asked in confusion.
“He was relaxed, let’s put it that way,” he answered with a chuckle. “Regardless, the information I gathered down there tells me Milas wasn’t docked there for the winter. Do you want me to keep looking?”
Mathias raised a brow and glanced at me. I gave a nod, and his brow lowered in relief. For some reason, he wanted my permission for something he already wanted to do. Weird.
“Yeah, keep going. I’d rather find him and learn it was all a misunderstanding than give up and find out he was in danger and needed help.”
“Respectable,” Nathan agreed. “I’ll keep looking for a few more days. After that, I think it’s going to be up to the big boats because, as I said, it’s almost like he never existed.”
“Understood,” Mathias said. “Thanks, and keep me posted.”
