“Excellent question. I don’t happen to know at the moment, but if you will kindly step back, I have a forty-five-minute drive to think about it. I’ll let you know.”
Matt sighed, shook his head. “That’s all I can ask for, I guess. But I gotta tell you, Rebecca, this yo-yo thing is not good. Let’s agree that the ball is officially in your court. I’ve made it clear that I’d really like to explore this thing between us, take it deeper. You’ve made it clear that you don’t know what you want—but I won’t press you. It’s up to you.”
“Great. Maybe we can start with you not telling me how to participate in this campaign.”
“Are you serious?” he asked, and leaned over, propped his arms on the window to better gape at her. “Come on, Rebecca, that is a whole different issue—”
“No, it’s not—”
“Of course it is! That’s my role in his campaign. It’s nothing personal, it’s just politics.”
“It’s bullshit,” she said evenly. “You know what, Matt? I think I know what the problem is here. I think you are jealous of my relationship with Tom.”
Matt just snorted like that was the most absurd thing in the world. “Get real!”
“Good night, Matt,” she said, and pressed the gas again and headed for the street. And as she drove away, she saw Matt still standing there, one hand on his waist, staring after her in bewilderment.
He couldn’t possibly be as bewildered as she was starting to feel.
Chapter Twenty-One
Women! Ya can’t live with ‘em and ya can’t get ‘em to wear skimpy little Nazi outfits . . .
EMO PHILLIPS
From almost the moment she had called him cheap, Rebecca Lear had managed to turn Matt Parish, formerly known as the most unflappable guy in the world, upside down and inside out. He did not know which way was up. He was confused about many things, but he knew one thing beyond certainty—he was not jealous of her relationship with Tom. Preposterous.
Jealousy would imply there was something to be jealous about, which there was not. If Tom chose to spend all his time in the company of a beautiful woman, more power to him. Matt had a job to do, and he could not care less that every other time he came to the offices, Grayson was there with Pat or Angie while his mom was off playing the beauty queen role with Tom.
Okay, maybe he didn’t give a shit where she was—sort of—but it was beginning to piss him off that the kid had to suffer through her little ego trip. “It’s not all the time,” Angie had said one day when Matt complained about it. “But would you mind watching him? I’ve got to get to the post office again.” Funny how often Angie had to get to the post office. She was out the door before Matt could say anything, so he shouted after her, “It is so all the time!” as she disappeared into the parking lot.
He and Grayson had stood, side by side, watching Angie take off. “Got any candy?” Grayson had asked once she had pulled into the street.
Oh yeah, he and the kid were spending a lot of quality time together. Enough that Matt knew that Grayson’s favorite cartoon was SpongeBob SquarePants, and Grayson knew who Kelly Kiker was. Matt had even visited the children’s section of a bookstore to get more suitable reading material than My Pal the Dog, or whatever it was (his pick, The Day My Butt Went Psycho, was hilarious, thank you), so that Gray would have something to do while Matt tried to work on Tom’s campaign. He knew which were Gray’s favorite pants (the cargo ones with the hole in the knee), his favorite food (mac and cheese, hello), and what time he had to go to bed (eight). He knew what Grayson wanted to be when he grew up (a fireman. Or a policeman. Or an astronaut. Or a nanny, for Chrissakes), knew that he missed his nanny Lucy like crazy, and even penned her a touching I-heart-Lucy letter with fangs and dogs and a man who looked a little like Matt. Well, okay, looked like him and about five million other guys. But still.
Matt also knew that Grayson loved his mom, but thought she was sort of weird sometimes. The kid was very perceptive that way. “Mom has a lot of shoes, like five or six thousand!” he had confided in Matt one day, all wide-eyed.
“Yeah,” Matt had sighed. “The sad news is, she’ll get five thousand more, and so will your wife, which you’ll have one day if you go the astronaut path instead of the nanny path like I’m telling you. This is something you might as well learn early on, pal. Women really like their shoes.”
That obviously horrified the boy, and he had asked in a whisper, “But where will we put them?”
“You might have to build a barn.”
Grayson had considered that for a moment, and then asked, “How come you don’t have a barn for your wife?”