Page 39 of Come Back to Bed
9
Matt
“It’s work,” she says.
Fucking millionaire artists and their Saturday night work calls.
The cell phone reception down here is terrible, of course, so I back away from her and she runs out of the laundry room in her sexy black boots, leaving me with the heavenly scent of her shampoo and a dick that’s about to start doing jumping jacks in these sweat pants.
I’m glad she left.
This would have been a bad idea, anyway.
Coming down here to do my laundry was a dumb idea. Normally I’d have my laundry picked up and delivered, like my aunt does. Instead, I decided to hang out in a basement on a Saturday night in the off-chance I’d run into my neighbor.
There’s about twenty minutes left on my dryer cycle and half an hour for the load in the washing machine. No point waiting around.
I count to twenty and then go up to my apartment. Bernadette left a scent trail along the stairwell and in the hall outside our units. I can hear her talking just inside her door, in a calm soothing voice. Her boss is probably having one of those “it’s so hard to be a rich famous painter that people expect brilliant things from” kind of breakdowns, and it’s her job to remind him that he’s a genius and everything’s fine.
He just better not ask her to do any actual work for him now.
Daisy doesn’t even run to the door when I come in. She’s all curled up on the dog bed on the living room floor with her chew toy. I am not having much luck with the ladies tonight. Some days the magic works, and some days it doesn’t.
I go to the guest room, to change into a pair of jeans. Jeans that are better at keeping my body’s secrets from beautiful, fragrant, sassy young women who happen to be doing laundry within a few feet of me in revealing little sweaters and tight jeans and sexy black boots. I can hear her through the vent now, still talking in that soothing voice. I don’t like that she’s talking to him while she’s in her bedroom, but at least she’s still at home.
I also don’t like that I care so much that she’s talking to her boss, when she could be talking to me…when she could benottalking to me.
I pull my phone out of the pocket of my sweatpants and toss it onto the bed while I change. There’s another unread text from Vanessa on there that I’m going to have to look at eventually. I didn’t hear from her at all after running into her a few weeks ago, but two hours after seeing her and that Todd guy this morning I got a “Great to see you!” text. I didn’t respond to it, because what would I say? “Not very great seeing you with your new boyfriend and oh by the way SINCE WHEN DO YOU HAVE A NEW BOYFRIEND?!”
Then I got another text from her that said:You look like you’re doing great. That girl seems nice…
I didn’t reply to that one either.
That girlisnice.
But I’m not going to get into a text conversation with Vanessa about what kind of relationship I have with her, because I don’t have a relationship with her.
I can hear Bernadette laughing in her bedroom. Sounds pretty fake to me. There is no way that Sebastian Smith is funny. I’ve seen pictures of him. He looks like an interesting guy, he looks like a charismatic guy, but there’s no way he makes her laugh for real. I could make her laugh. I could make her feel all kinds of good things.
I zip up my jeans and pick up my phone to open the message from Vanessa, the one she sent four hours ago:Glad you’re happy, Matthew. You deserve it.
Well, isn’t that swell of her to say so. What a great ex-girlfriend she is. I don’t even care if she’s trying to alleviate her own guilt about moving on so quickly, or if she’s trying to leave the door open a crack for me to tell her I’m not happy. I just know that when Bernadette Farmer put her arm around me this morning and rested her head on my arm in front of Vanessa and her Todd guy, all I could think about was how sad it is that I spent so many months of my life trying to convince myself that I had to make things work with Vanessa when she never once did anything like that for me. It was a small thing, but it was an act of kindness. And I’d been trying to keep that wall between us for a month.
Fuck that wall.
Fuck our differences.
Fuck Sebastian Smith.
I do deserve to be happy.
It doesn’t have to be complicated.
It doesn’t have to be messy.
I’m tired of wondering what Bernadette Farmer is like in bed.
I’m going to find out.
