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.
How had I missed this? Of course this was his family’s dynamic.
His twin sisters were Matt’s dad’s doppelgangers – all sharp features, accounting degrees and not a hint of a sense of humour.
(They never missed a mistake on a bill in a restaurant, but wouldn’t recognise sarcasm if it hit them in their faces.) Whereas Matt, all softness (with the exception of his body) and charm, was their antithesis.
I guess I’d just assumed that Matt knew that he’d won the genetic lottery.
But my perspective was that of an outsider.
I could see that from the inside, it had felt like he’d been sidelined his whole life.
He finally turned to look at me, his eyes wide and apologetic.
I wrapped my arms around him, wishing I could absorb his pain.
Our hug felt like home. Finally, we pulled away from each other, but I reached for his hands, not wanting any distance between us.
This space felt important – a place to say the vulnerable things that we were afraid weren’t likeable, safe in the knowledge that we’d love each other anyway.
‘You are the best person I know. You’re funny and you don’t take yourself too seriously. But you’re not a clown, Matt. Or a joke,’ I said. ‘And your sisters got themed names. So, I think that just might be a your-parent thing.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, his face relaxing, the golden specks in his eyes glinting again. ‘Haven’t we spoken about this before?’
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head.
Matt took a deep breath, gathering unspoken thoughts.
‘I’d always felt like everything I’d got in life was because I was easy to have around, that I could get on with people.
And I was just happy to go with the flow.
I sort of stumbled into my major and then fell into my first job,’ he said.
‘Then, on one of our first dates, I mentioned that I thought I might like to do a more challenging job one day. And the next time we met up you brought along a list of jobs you thought I might enjoy – ones you’d come across on your cases.
And another list of people I might want to have coffees with to find out more. ’
‘I think most people would have run screaming from the girl who turned up to a date with a career-focused list,’ I said.
He smiled but not broadly enough to disguise that this conversation was simultaneously uncomfortable and cathartic for him.
‘And of course I wanted to help,’ I added. ‘It was nothing. You were the one to follow through on everything.’ Matt had done the real work of networking and hustling to get his current job, which he was brilliant at.
‘It wasn’t nothing. You inspired me to... take the steering wheel of my own life,’ he said. ‘It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me.’
‘I guess I’ll return that red lingerie set,’ I said in a teasing voice with what I hoped was a coy smile.
‘Please never return that red lingerie set,’ Matt said, with one of his deep laughs that made me melt.
‘You know that if there’s anything you want to do, I’ll do everything I can to help you make it happen,’ I said, wanting to make sure that he knew that I meant it.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve always known that. And I’ll always do the same. We’re a team.’
I swallowed hard. ‘I’m really sorry I didn’t give you the heads-up about Alex that first time I ran into him,’ I said. ‘That was a bad judgement call. The promotion had just been put on the table and I think I... short-circuited or something.’
‘You want it, right?’ Matt asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you want to be a principal at Stern?’
‘I mean, yeah. Of course.’
‘Why?’ He looked surprised that he’d asked this question.
‘Umm... You know, I really like my job. It feels...’ I searched for the right word.
‘Safe?’ he offered up in a neutral tone.
I nodded. ‘That and... I just really love Excel.’
Matt laughed.
‘And I do feel like I’m helping people,’ I continued. ‘With this case, when we get the technology into hospitals, it will save a lot of lives.’
Matt turned away for a moment then looked back at me. ‘You didn’t need to get my approval to work with Alex,’ he said. ‘I didn’t need to meet him. Thanks for thinking of me. Of course you can work with whoever you want. Of course you can go after any job you want. Of course I trust you.’
We began to walk again, still holding hands, in no particular direction.
‘Lily told me that the ring that went down the drain yesterday is called a trinity ring because the three pieces of metal represent the present and future and past combined,’ I said.
‘And I think that’s perfect. Because the best part of my life is living in the moment with you.
Not the big stuff but the random lunches and meandering walks and the conversations in bed when we’re both too tired to be awake but we keep talking anyway.
And I’m so excited for our future together.
I know sometimes we’ll want different things but because we believe the same things matter, we’ll always work it out. ’
I paused for a moment.
‘But maybe the thing we haven’t talked enough about is the past. Our family stuff. And our exes,’ I said, after a few footsteps of easy silence.
‘Okay, we’re doing this,’ he said.
‘We’re doing this.’
‘For me, it’s only one really serious one,’ he said. ‘Jess. We met here, actually.’
‘So, she was your uni girlfriend?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. And then after that,’ he said.
‘How long were you together?’ I asked.
‘About six years,’ he said. I took a short, sharp breath and felt a sting of jealousy at the idea of Matt being in a substantial relationship with someone else.
Though I guess time wasn’t always an indicator of depth.
But still, six years wasn’t nothing. I quickly did the maths – Matt would have been single for a few years before we met.
‘What about you?’ he asked.
‘No one serious, really,’ I said. ‘I didn’t date much in my twenties.’
Why? I waited for the inevitable question, but it didn’t come.
‘Why did you agree to go on a date with me?’ he asked instead.
‘I almost didn’t,’ I said. I’d never told him this. ‘But then I changed my mind. I think I... I don’t know... I think I instinctively knew you were a good guy or something,’ I said.
Matt looked thoughtful as he led us down a long path through manicured lawns.
‘Alex and I were together for less than two months. The word “boyfriend” or “relationship” hardly feels legitimate. Maybe “situationship” is better,’ I said.
‘He promised he wouldn’t hurt me, and then he did.
But we were kids – well, Alex was thirty – but I was pretty young.
It was forever ago.’ The words tumbled out.
‘Short relationships can still be heartbreaking,’ Matt said.
‘Yeah, I guess. There was no clear beginning and no clear end. I guess... I don’t thrive in the land of uncertainty.
And because it was such a short amount of time, everything was heightened.
I didn’t know what was real or what was just a fantasy,’ I said.
I’d wanted to tell him about Alex, but now I’d started I couldn’t seem to stop talking.
Luckily I was saved from myself by people streaming into the quad in cocktail dresses and dark suits. And at the back of the group were a bride and groom.
‘Oh wow,’ I said. I always loved stumbling across a wedding in the wild. Though this wasn’t exactly a public garden – we’d sort of barged our way into this college, and it was clearly a private event. Though we were far enough away from the crowd that they wouldn’t notice us.
As if we’d both had the same thought, we turned towards each other.
Our lips met and I shivered in the best way – feeling ripples as his fingers ran down my neck and my back.
His lips were soft, the kiss slow and gentle.
There was no urgency. We had time – we had our whole lives to kiss each other.
So, right then, we could kiss like we were students.
I wound my arms around Matt and held him tightly.
The kiss stopped my mind from whirring. I stopped thinking about all the mistakes I’d made the day before.
I stopped thinking about everything on our wedding todo list. I stopped thinking about the email I needed to send to Miranda to tell her that I was more than happy to stay on the case.
I tried to stop thinking about tomorrow, when I’d be at an offsite with Alex.
And I especially stopped thinking about the night Alex and I had spent in a quadrangle almost identical to this one.