Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
I take off work the last week in January with plans to fly to LA on the Tuesday of Grammy week. I've been buzzing around the city on a current of nervous energy in the hours leading up to my red-eye flight out of JFK. Matt insists on sending a private plane for me, but that seems completely unnecessary, so I book myself a domestic flight. But Matt being Matt, he upgrades me to first class, which I find out when I check in for my flight.
“I want you to be comfortable,” he tells me when I call him from the Centurion lounge.
"I'm fine, Matt, truly."
He's been extra attentive in the past few days, which is saying something, since his baseline is very attentive. I wonder if he senses the nerves I am trying to ignore from across the country.
This will be my first time in LA, and I'm staying with Matt at his house. The week is full of events and meeting the remaining important people in his life, all of whom seem to reside in the City of Angels. I can’t yet bring myself to imagine the magnitude of what is about to happen: me going to the Grammys with Matt. As his date. On his arm. It is a public coming out of epic proportions. A hard launch. No turning back. After more than five years of complete radio silence on his dating life, we are willingly walking into the lion's den.
Matt seems calm about the entire endeavor, at least on the surface. But I know the fears he has that lurk underneath, that threaten to boil over at the first sign of trouble. The history of anxiety, the thought that somehow this could be a Return to Start roll for him in the game of life, that he’ll be opening himself up for scrutiny and criticism—things he's worked very hard to avoid for the past decade.
He asks if his management team can search through my online presence to see if there is anything I might not want discovered. I can’t imagine what they’ll find besides a few outstanding parking tickets and likely some hugely unflattering, but not illegal, photos of me bonging beers or dancing on a bar somewhere in my early twenties. I say okay.
Matt also suggests I give the important people in my life a little notice about us before they find out by way of mainstream media. I spend the week before my departure making phone calls to my closest friends and a handful of people at work. All are very surprised but happy for me. I feel slightly more confident going into the week knowing that my people are all on board.
* * *
Landed
I text him as my plane touches down at LAX.
I cannot wait to get my hands on you. I will be back as soon as humanly possible. Make yourself at home.
By the time I get my bags loaded into Matt’s waiting car and snake along the 405 to his house, my bones are heavy with exhaustion. After passing through several gates, I walk up the front steps and enter a code into the keypad. His wide front door clicks open, and I walk in. The house is exactly as he described it: bright, modern, with some very cool exposed beams and walls of windows, all meticulously organized.
I quickly find my way to his bedroom and en suite bathroom. I peel my disgusting airplane clothes off and step into the steamy shower. I use his shampoo, conditioner, and body wash, all of which make me smile as they smell so distinctly like Matt. Masculine. Earthy. Delicious.
Once I'm done, I dry myself with a giant fluffy towel from the linen closet, throw on a clean T-shirt I swipe from his drawer and a pair of satin panties, and climb into his bed. The sheets feel decadent against my clean skin, and before I know it, I fall fast asleep.
* * *
I sense him in the room before I'm fully awake—a shift in the energy. The particles in the air feel charged. I open my eyes and see him sitting on the bed next to me.
“You are a sight for sore eyes.” He leans down to give me a slow, sultry kiss, with that now familiar and beloved brooding smile.
“Come under here with me.” I lift the blankets for him.
“As much as I would love to, and I plan to, there are a few time-sensitive things to discuss.”
I sit up.
“I want to show you something, but I don’t want you to be worried.”
“Ah, yes, that sentence always puts me at ease.” I laugh. “What is it?” I rub my eyes open.
“The online stuff came back. Nothing bad, at least from my publicist’s perspective, but I want to share it all with you to see if you want anything scrubbed before Sunday night.”
He hands me a folder with a packet of paper inside. On top are printouts of my private Instagram profile picture: a tiny circle of me and Murphy on a hike in upstate NY. Decidedly harmless. After that are pages of tweets from a Twitter account I didn’t even know I still had. There are a total of eleven tweets, almost all of which are reposts of fundraising requests from my alma maters. Slightly embarrassing, but certainly nothing to scrub. I don’t have Facebook, TikTok, or Snapchat accounts. So that's easy. My LinkedIn profile picture is the same photo and info that could easily be found on the hospital’s website, nothing but basic information about my education and professional experience. Somehow, his team found an old online photo album from my freshman year of college, full of me and my friends in matching jean skirts, tube tops, and orange Sun-In dyed hair.
“How did they even find these? I thought that website shut down,” I wonder aloud.
“They’re very thorough.”
The last few pages in the packet make my stomach drop.
I thumb through them slowly.
My wedding photos. Me and Nick smiling in the church I grew up in. Me in an off-the-shoulder lace A-line gown. My grandmother’s sapphire necklace twinkling around my neck. Too much hairspray. Nick in a tux, rented from Jos. A. Bank, looking handsome but nervous. Us kissing outside the hotel lobby where the reception was held. Dancing to our first song, “You Are the Reason” by Calum Scott. Me hugging my mom after her toast. A sparkler exit. All of it, right there.
It's then I remember my wedding photographer shared all her photos on a blog linked to her website. It would likely be one of the first hits on a Google search if someone ever figures out what my married last name was. I guess I can hope they won’t, since I switched back to my maiden name after the divorce. I look up to find Matt staring intently at the photos.
“Do you want to keep these out there?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “This, these pictures, my marriage to Nick, it was a part of my life. A huge part. A beautiful part, until it wasn’t. It doesn’t feel right to have that erased. But I don’t want to subject myself to judgment. Certainly not Nick. Or you. What do you think?”
“I’m okay with whatever you want,” he offers. “But I think, if you feel like it’s right, we just leave them and say fuck it. Every person on earth has a past. Lord knows mine is out there for the all the world to see. Leave it. You just might want to give him a heads-up,” he cautions.
“Okay,” I agree, feeling a little on edge at the sight of my old wedding photos.
“What's he like?” Matt asks softly, nodding toward the picture of Nick.
“Nick? He’s a good man. Confident, ambitious, gregarious.”
“What happened?”
This is the question I've been waiting for. We’ve danced around it for a while, basically since the night we almost burned down my apartment, my own insecurities preventing me from disclosing too much. He knows the gist of my divorce, but I've never felt fully comfortable sharing the intimate details of it all, and Matt's never asked outright. Until now.
“That’s the million-dollar question. I don’t know. The not knowing was the hardest part to navigate,” I answer plainly. “Ultimately, I felt like one day we both woke up and realized we were different people. Like we’d been on this same path together for years, and it suddenly became glaring that at some point we’d gone in separate directions. But I wasn't even sure if we had ever been heading in the same direction in the first place. Our relationship felt hollow, a shell of what it was. I was lonely. And sad. I felt like I didn’t recognize myself anymore. Or him. I didn’t want to resign myself to feeling like that, living like that for the rest of my life. I tried hard to make it all better, and I failed. Pretty miserably. All of that and the fact that Nick told me he wasn’t in love with me anymore—that had a lot to do with it.” I choke out a sad laugh. “That part definitely stung.”
Matt looks at me pensively. I continue.
“I think had we not been married, if our relationship had just petered out and we went our separate ways, it would’ve been much easier for me. The fact that we’d promised each other our love and made vows in front of everyone we knew made it much harder to stomach. I felt the overwhelming urge to call every guest who came to our wedding and apologize to them personally. I know how absurd that sounds, but it’s how I felt. I felt like a fraud. I never realized how important marriage was to me, like the big picture of it, the institution, the sanctity of it, until mine had already imploded. I felt like part of the reason I tried so hard to revive it was out of my own guilt and worry of what other people might think, not necessarily because I genuinely wanted to be with Nick.” I sigh and lean back against the headboard.
Matt nods but says nothing.
He grabs the solo wedding portrait of me from the packet. It’s in black and white. I'm looking at myself in a mirror, putting my earrings on. My dark hair is long, well past my shoulders, longer than it is now, and thick with soft waves. My brown eyes are big, emphasized by thick lashes. I have fewer laugh lines than I do now. My full lips are painted a light pink and are slightly puckered with concentration. My dress is on—we went through three rounds of fittings to make it fit like a glove. The tops of my breasts peek out from the fabric, full and round. Matt runs his finger along the photo, a contemplative look on his face.
“You are so beautiful. I wish I could’ve seen you that day." He traces the outline of my face, my neck, my breasts in the picture. I feel a shift in energy.
“A part of me hates that someone else got to love you like this. That someone else got to have you like this. I know that isn’t fair, and I have my own history. But I want you, all of you, all to myself. Does that make sense?” he asks seriously.
“Yes. It does.” I reach for his hand, not missing his use of the word love . I also think about the number of his exes, ghosts from his past, that I could potentially run into over the course of this week. And I wish I could have had all of him, too. I have him right now, in this moment. But I can’t have his past or guarantee our future.
It's an unsettling thought.
Before either of us says anything else, Matt tosses the packet aside and dives on top of me. We spend the next hour making up for the time we’ve spent apart, using our bodies to say all the things we can’t quite speak.