Page 6 of Indulgence
“Oh?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. Matteo didn’t typically make plans for the children without checking with me first. Not that I required him to check with me, but we worked as a team and kept each other in the loop. “But Jackson has a lacrosse game tomorrow.”
“I know.” That was all he said. No elaboration as to why plans had changed or how Jackson was getting to his game. He just turned back to the stove and turned off the burner as though his making us dinner with no kids was an everyday occurrence.
He was acting super weird. I didn’t know whether to be frightened or intrigued.
“Why the change in plans?”
He grabbed the skillet from the stove and made his way to the kitchen table. “I have plans with you,” he answered ominously as he plated what looks like shrimp scampi. My favorite.
Hmm. Dinner. No kids. My favorite meal. It almost felt as though he was buttering me up for something—or apologizing, but nothing had happened. At least, nothing that I was aware of.
“Plans with me?” I asked like a dolt because I had no damn clue what was going on.
“Yes.” He nodded. He was being succinct, not giving anything more than the bare minimum of information. As if he held a secret he was protecting. Nothing like Matteo usually was.
The golden-brown flecks in his green eyes melted a bit as he pinned me with a stare. “Now, sit, please. Dinner is ready.”
Was I in the damn twilight zone? Matteo, who was always easygoing and soft-spoken, was ordering me around with a bit of bite in his tone? What the hell was going on?
I sat, mostly because the deep timber of his voice had me following his orders as if I were conditioned to obey his command. “Shouldn’t I be aware of the plans too?”
He heaped a generous helping of pasta and shrimp onto my plate. His eyes zeroed in on mine as if he was trying to convey some kind of message, but I wasn’t getting it. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Matteo, what’s going on?” I was starting to get a bit worried. Everything was so out of the ordinary. “What’s this all about?”
Moving from my plate to his, he filled it before answering. “I said”—his voice was rugged and authoritative—“you’ll find out soon enough.”
That was unsettling and appealing at the same time.
Matteo and I had been together since our sophomore year of college. I’d never been a math person. Okay, I hated it, so I put off starting my requirements until second year. After I miserably failed the first test of statistics, I bit the bullet and got a tutor. Taking the class once was bad enough, having to retake it wasn’t something I wanted to do. The school assigned Matteo as my stats tutor. He was patient and calm. He never laughed at my dumb mistakes or batted an eyelash when I threw a fit as I tried to figure out the odds of certain outcomes at the roulette table. Who asked questions like that anyway? Bookies and gambling addicts.
He had this way of settling me from the very beginning. He’d done it during our study sessions and then again eleven months after barely passing stats when the second line appeared on the pregnancy test I took in the bathroom of his college apartment he shared with two of his friends Adam and Trevor. It was the spring semester of our junior year. Then he kept me sane, again, when the doctor told us we were expecting not one but two children. His ability to soothe me continued through summer courses and online fall courses, all so I could graduate with my art history degree before the babies came in January. It was there and stronger than ever when we threw the shotgun wedding into that crazy mix.
Matteo had always been the calm to my storm.
So, seeing this gruff, short, and commanding side of him was new. While I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it, it made something flutter deep in my belly.
“How was work?” he asked as he picked up the bottle of wine, poured me a glass, and then one for himself.
I followed his every move as he took the seat across from me. “TheEmergenceexhibition finished today. The crew was working on getting everything ready to be shipped out as I left. Oh, and Bastien has decided that he will use the Portland Gallery opening as a platform to reveal his newest collection.”
“That doesn’t sound all too surprising.” He sipped his wine. “It’s been about two years since his last show, hasn’t it? The new location makes the perfect setting.”
“It has, and yes, it does,” I replied, spinning linguine around my fork. It smelled so good; my mouth watered in anticipation. “But the collection isn’t finished yet. He just started working on it and wants it to be a ten-piece collection on life in reverse. We open in August, which is only five months away. What if the main show piece isn’t ready? We know that Bastien works in his own off the wall way, but it doesn’t always result in rapid productivity.”
“Bastien loves the pressure. He thrives on it. He’ll have it all ready.” Matteo watched me chew with a tilt of his head as he gripped his wine glass by the stem. “Good?” he asked over the rim.
With my mouth full, I nodded.
His lips pursed as he tipped the glass up to sip the wine. As soon as he swallowed, he grinned with a certain something extra I couldn’t quite put my finger on. “Fantastic.”
The entire setup felt like something I would read in one of my romance novels. The alpha-ish behavior. The stares. The dinner. The no kids.
What the hell was happening?
He clearly had something up his sleeve that he didn’t want to tell me about, so I just rolled with it.
We finished dinner with a bit of light conversation, ignoring the giant elephant of Matteo’s behavior. He filled me in on Jackson’s lacrosse practice and Emma’s progress on her group project she was working on at the library. As soon as I ate the last piece of shrimp from my plate, Matteo stood and removed it from the table.
