28. Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-eight
Ace
I see the problem before anyone else does.
It’s fine at first. Perfectly safe and calm.
Nolan and Maison are in the kitchen, making dinner. It involves a lot of rinsing and chopping and seasoning. I watch on the monitor for a bit, trying to figure out what they’re doing, maybe even see if I can pick up some pointers in case I ever get the courage to attempt the endeavor again.
Then I’ve got an alert and my attention is pulled. Another loose-end mission is finished, a 22 year old woman and a 25 year old man saved. I download their photos and get them ready for the printer so I can add them to my collage of survivors on my wall.
The printer is just starting to warm up when I notice that Maison is alone in the kitchen.
Maison is alone in the kitchen and he’s pressing buttons on the oven, the food nowhere to be found.
I watch carefully, my stomach filling with unease.
Nolan shows up looking freshly showered, all smiles, and they head outside together.
Nothing bad happens.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Maison is learning. Maybe Nolan could teach me how-
Then I notice the smoke. It’s hard to see on the camera feed at first, looking more like the illusion of moving air than smoke, but I’ve seen fire on my video feeds. I’ve seen the way the smoke builds, just like this, always right before-
And, sure enough, the alarms are going off.
Fuck me.
Travis is at the oven before I reach it, the door already open and the fire extinguisher in hand.
I start to say, “Wait, is it actually-” but he sprays the food before I get the chance to see if it’s actually on fire, or just burning.
Burned food can be saved, sometimes. The burnt stuff can be scraped off. I think?
Who knows.
The meal isn’t salvageable anymore either way. I can’t even tell what it was supposed to be, beneath all that white foam.
I’m suddenly feeling very validated, remembering how judgemental Maison had been when I had attempted cooking. Smug bastard.
The alarm is still going off despite the source of the smoke being extinguished and Nolan and Maison having rushed inside to wave towels in the direction of the sensor. Maison looks at me and shouts, “Can’t we just unplug it?”
Ew. Unplug it? He knows I handled the tech of the house by myself and he thinks I’d fucking - “I didn’t install a system that can be unplugged. It’s the 21st century, Maison!”
“Make it stop!” Bryce shouts. I turn to find him standing in the opening of the kitchen, his arm around Matt by his side. Matt, who looks afraid. Or at least worried.
“We’re trying!” I tell him, hating that I have to yell to be heard. It feels too much like I’m yelling at them. At survivors. At Matt.
Jake is enjoying himself far too much, laughing harder than he’s working.
He at least gets the idea to open the sliding glass door to get some fresh air, though, so he wins points for that.
Even if Bryce shrieks at him to close it because the weather today is much closer to winter weather than fall.
“For fuck’s sake, Ace!” Maison yells. “Can’t you disable it with a fucking computer?”
Which - duh.
Yes.
Obviously.
“Oh yeah. Shit, I-” but my apology comes to a stop as the alarm does.
There’s blissful silence, only interrupted by Bryce’s, “Finally.”
Jake grumbles something to himself, something about how it actually is too cold to have the door open, and closes it. I’m more focused on Nolan, whose face has fallen, shoulders slumped, as he surveys the damaged meal and declares, “That’s… not fixable.”
Travis inches away from Nolan, looking guilty. “I’d say not.”
“I don’t know what happened,” Maison mumbles, looking guilty too, but also perplexed.
I want to tell him that just being near the food was probably the problem - not that I’m judging, I also conjure the same sort of cooking issues - but Nolan beats me to it with a nicer, though very exasperated, explanation. “It was two hundred for five hours, not five hundred for two hours!”
I glance over at the oven and wince when I see that the oven is in fact at five hundred. Also, the broiler is on. Been there before, buddy.
Any possibility for other comments is struck from the situation by the sound of a sharp burst of laughter. It stops as quickly as it starts, but I’m already turning toward the sound. Toward Matt.
He’s in the middle of taking a deep breath, but when our eyes meet and I arch an eyebrow, he breaks. He cracks right down the middle and bubbling laughter pours right out. It’s a full-on belly laugh, which he proves by doubling over to hold his stomach as it continues.
I can’t stop staring.
I can’t stop listening.
It’s not what I thought it’d sound like - Matt’s laughter. It’s not soft, not quiet. It’s loud and giddy and a little throaty - and who the hell would bother listening to music if they could just listen to this instead? Listen to this for the rest of their life.
It’s infectious, too. The others are laughing. I’m laughing. The whole room is filled with the sound of our collective happiness. My whole body buzzes with it. Warms with it.
Matt’s eyes meet mine again, his laughter dying down, his chest heaving as he sucks in precious lung-fulls of air, but he’s still grinning. He’s grinning so wide. Beautiful and bright, no more clouds to hide behind, just sunshine.
Endless, beautiful sunshine.
Despite the laughter and Nolan scrambling to come up with something else for us to eat, Matt isn’t at dinner. Bryce gives me a look, something a little sad, a little closer to camaraderie than I’d expect from him, before he brings a plate up to the bedroom.
A few hours later, when Maison and Nolan are sitting by the fireplace, Travis and Jake are both hiding away, and Bryce is beating the shit out of the heavy bag in the gym, Matt leaves the room with the plate in his hands.
The food hasn’t been touched.
He sneaks into the kitchen, glancing in the direction of the living room, and slides the food off his plate and into the trash.
It takes him nearly a minute to make it to the sink and carefully - so, so carefully - place down the plate on the counter beside it.
He slowly backs away like it’s a bomb. Or maybe like he’s worried someone may find him there before he can escape.
The moment he reaches the threshold between the kitchen and the hall, he turns and hurries off.
He doesn’t head to his room.
He doesn’t come my way.
He just turns a corner into the hall full of empty bedrooms and sort of folds in on himself, drawing his knees up to his chest, pressing his face against the doorframe of the second room on the right.
I wonder if he was trying to make it to the room, or any open room, and just couldn’t keep going long enough to get inside. I wonder what happened between all of that laughter and dinner. I wonder if he even got a chance to bask in the good feeling for a while before whatever ruined it came along.
Then his shoulders are shaking and all I’m wondering is if I should go to him.
He shouldn’t have to break down alone.
The last thing I want is for him to have to break down alone.
I hesitate, not sure if it’s my place.
Then I put on the blues, volume a little louder than where it usually sits when I’m alone, and head out.
He’s exactly where I saw him on the camera feed, his crying so quiet you’d think he can’t make any noise at all, like the laughter was just a thing I made up. Except I definitely didn’t make it up. No sound like that could be anything but real.
He flinches when he notices someone is near him, but his shoulders relax when his big eyes settle on me. I crouch down and offer him a half-smile. “Crying is always so much better when you’re listening to the blues, don’t you think?”
Matt sniffles and wipes his eyes with his sweatshirt sleeve. The tears seem to have slowed down, just lazily dripping out of his eyes and down his cheeks one at a time. They haven’t stopped, though. I’d give him anything he wanted if it’d make them stop.
“Come listen?” I ask, putting my hand out to him. I get the sudden thought that this might not be okay. We haven’t touched since he cried in my arms the night Mica died. I’ve never even asked him so blatantly to do something, especially not to come to my office.
I keep my hand out, not wanting to take the offer away from him, but I add, “No pressure,” as a reminder that he doesn’t have to do this.
I don’t ever want him to think he has to do something with me he doesn’t want to do, whether it’s taking my hand or spending time in my office or anything else in between.
His hand slips into mine, warm, the skin on the back of his hand nearly the same shade of brown as the lighter skin of my palm. He squeezes and shifts the rest of his body. I take it as a sign he’s willing to be pulled to his feet and guide him into doing so.
There’s a moment where we just hold onto each other before he pulls his hand from mine in what feels like slow-motion. When I start to walk to my office, he stays just a step behind me and to the left. It makes me itch, but if it’s where he’s most comfortable, I don’t mind.
He climbs straight into his hiding place when we get inside.
I turn both locks in case he forgot to, feeling confident enough that he’ll feel safe undoing them to leave if he wants later.
The music is still playing. I turn the volume up another two notches and say to the room, “Same rules as always. Soft things only. No disco - bar from ABBA - or shitty country. Help yourself to the snacks. Ya-da, ya-da.”
There’s no response, but after a while I hear the crinkle of packaging, him taking one of the snacks if I had to guess.
When he leaves hours later, he shoots me an almost-smile and a signed, thank you, before he’s turning the locks and slipping out the door.
By the time he reaches his room, I’m already thinking about what I can do to bring that beaming smile, that beautiful laughter, back.