Chapter 24
chapter twenty-four
Mateo
“Yes, I understand how dire this is, Stephen. But it’s a Saturday, and I’m at my bachelor party in Las Vegas. This isn’t exactly a remote job, especially if you’re telling me the service is hacked.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, inhaling an unsteady breath as I paced the bedroom in a circle. “Trust me, I would have a direct notification, and there are several firewalls in place to keep that type of thing from happening. Unless for some reason you have Edward Snowden on your case, I’m fairly confident what you’re experiencing isn’t a breach of security. Have you checked with your service provider? Outages happen this time of year, especially in a storm.”
The crackling voice of the elderly man who owned a family-run hardware store in Coconut Creek berated me on the other line. He was one of my newer clients, and so far had me doing pro bono computer tech work for him despite that not being the job I was hired for. Guy was a Korean War veteran, though, and you could call me a sucker but I couldn’t tell him no—no matter how ridiculous the request got. My email was set to be out of office for the weekend but it hadn’t kept him from dialing my personal cellphone number for office-related issues.
He likely didn’t even check his email, and the address he’d given me was for the sake of completing my onboarding.
“No, no, no, I can’t help you with a wireless outage. I know we were due for a tropical storm, that could be it.”
A beat passed.
“Well if it’s raining cats and dogs like you say, there ought to be a whole block of internet out. Trust me, Stephen, you are not being hacked. Your security is perfectly fine. No one is gathering your personal information to sell to the government.”
There was a knock on the bedroom door and I dropped the phone to my chest, covering the receiver. “Yeah?” I called out.
“It’s me.” Angelo pushed inside the room.
I lifted a finger toward him and put the cell back to my ear. “Okay, yes. Yes, definitely check in with the ladies at the coffee shop next door, or use the landline and call the cable company. I’ll be back Monday if this is still giving you a problem. Great, perfect, I will tell my fiancée you said so. Okay, Stephen, right, thanks, bye. Oh, don’t you worry about that, thank you, I’ll behave…bye now.”
I tossed my phone onto the bed and squeezed my eyes shut until I saw shapes.
“Work?” Angelo walked over to the large window and leaned against the sill.
“I can’t catch a break.” I sighed.
My brother crossed his arms and twisted his lips. “You know, I was thinking… Maybe I could be the one to help you out.”
“How so?”
“You haven’t hired anyone because you want a guy you know and trust, you said it yourself. Frankie was that partner for you, and now you don’t have him, but I’m willing to give it a go if you’re looking to fill that spot. I’ll put in the work. Dad had enough faith in me to let me tie off loose ends for D it had no bearing on anything. You were keeping a fucking prenup from me, Tally. That is between us, very much so between us. You can’t possibly compare the two.”
“Does your parents moving into our backyard have no bearing on our relationship?” she spat back. “Because you had plenty of chances between rounds fucking me last night to tell me that, and you didn’t. So I’m going to assume it was another thing I didn’t need to know, according to you.”
“I’m gonna…” Angelo gestured to the doorway and slipped quietly from the room, shooting me a sorry empathetic expression on his way out.
“That’s not fair,” I scoffed, leaning my hip against the wooden dresser. “Everything I do has a purpose, Natalia. All the decisions I make, the things I keep to myself, it’s for a reason. You didn’t need to know about my parents yet, because I was trying to save the weekend from crashing and burning. But I should have fucking known it would anyway.”
“You don’t get to decide what I need to know, Matty. And lying about actively interviewing is a pretty big fucking deal, regardless of if it affects me or not. And it did, by the way. It affected everything. You’ve been missing from our life, stressed, working late, abandoning me with your parents…” She squeezed her little fists together and closed her eyes. “I know it was my idea to have them stay, but we agreed to take it on together . We made a fucking promise. We made a lot of promises that I am the only one honoring.”
I bit my cheek so hard I tasted iron. We were both angry, and hurt, twisted too tightly to communicate, and I was a stubborn yank who wanted her to trust me, blindly, because I loved her and I would never hurt her purposely and I couldn’t see why she wasn’t understanding that. My chest was so tight it felt like I was choking on air, clawing my way to a surface that was farther and farther away with each reach. I had to clench my palms to keep my fingers from shaking.
“Why did you lie?” she asked. “What is the purpose you’re so adamant about?”
“To protect you,” I said sternly.
“Protect me from what, Mateo?”
“Me! To protect you from me. From all this shit going on in my head I didn’t want you worrying about. You have enough going on.” I sighed out a long breath and several shorter, more stilted ones followed. I swallowed a wave of nausea and focused on a crack in the wooden floorboards trying to ground myself.
“I want to worry about you,” Tally stressed. She was too far away and my hands ached to grab her and pull her to me, shake her into seeing where I was coming from. “I want to get through things with you. I want you to look to me for fucking support.” Her voice caught and my eyes darted from the floor to her face.
“I do.” I took an urgent step forward and she took one back that stopped me in my tracks.
“We’re supposed to be partners, Mateo. Partners in this, in life. Figuring it out together. We are getting married in less than a month, and you’re still worried I might not be able to handle parts of you. When I said yes, it wasn’t to a ring, it was to you. Everything that comes with you. Everything you haven’t dealt with yet. I didn’t realize there were caveats and exceptions.”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t back away. Don’t try to hurt me when the pain you're feeling was unintentional.”
“It was mediated!” she snarled. “You knew I would react this way eventually, and you were putting it off. You were trying to save your precious bachelor party from Natalia getting angry and losing her shit again.”
“I found out about my parents yesterday,” I reasoned. “If I knew trying to save this weekend from turning to shit would make me the bad guy I wouldn’t have done it. I would have told you everything instead of letting you enjoy Vegas with your sisters and your girlfriend.”
Natalia put both hands on her hips and threw her head back, staring at the ceiling. “You know what, you’re right. I am going to enjoy my weekend in Vegas. I’m not going to let this get to me, because I deserve it. I’m going to win a fucking scavenger hunt, too.”
She stormed past me toward the bathroom like a gust of wind, setting me off balance. Before I could argue with her the door slid closed and the lock latched.
I knew I fucked up. When Natalia was in her moods she was deep in them. We butted heads over ridiculous things like laundry and watching a show while the other was at work, but this was more real than that. We didn’t fight like this. We’d never had grounds to more than disagree with each other; it was one of the reasons we were so compatible.
Maybe this was inevitable, like she’d said. I still wasn’t convinced that my intentions were all misguided. She was making me second-guess everything I’d done in the last six months while trying to save us from this exact thing happening. I’d sabotaged myself worrying about everyone else.
Approaching the bathroom door gently, I rapped my knuckles against it. “Tal, I’m sorry.”
There was silence, and I held my breath hoping she might come meet me on the other side. Leaning in, I pressed my ear to the wood. She was thinking about it. I knew she was. We were stronger than this.
A moment later the hair dryer thrummed to life and snapped my hopefulness in half. It was a tight fist squeezing around my lungs.
If she needed the space I would give it to her. Unhappily, but understandably. This wouldn’t last forever, but we would. I held onto that as I left her to get ready for the day, and slipped back downstairs alone.