Chapter 16 #3
The faintest flush rose high on Matt’s cheekbones. He ducked his head, smiling, and something in me went quietly soft. He looked more like himself here than he ever had coming off the ice to cameras and noise. Happier. More alive.
Gorgeous.
He’d always been, from the moment we’d met. But this, here? This was him.
“Okay,” Naomi said loudly. “What’s a girl gotta do to get a drink around here?”
“Well.” Reid tilted his head. “You might want to be nice to me, for a start.”
She made a face. “No, thanks. I’m not that thirsty.”
Cole huffed out another laugh, and Marlis smiled in a way that hinted at her son’s dry humor. Even Ronan’s mouth twitched. “I like her,” Rob muttered.
“Hey.” Matt—angling slightly closer to me, and it was only now that I noticed him wearing one of the sweaters I’d picked for him. Emerald green, nicely fitted without showing off. His voice dipped private. “I know it’s a lot. You okay?”
Was I?
He’d rented a house and filled it with family and friends as some kind of private statement that didn’t feel loud, just… true. As if right here, next to a brick fireplace with trees outside the window and a creek whispering, he was allowed to be fully comfortable in his own skin.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Just processing.”
His mouth tugged up. “So no fight-or-flight reflex kicking in?”
“Not just yet.”
“Good.”
The evening moved after that. Less in a line and more in little swirls and eddies, slightly chaotic and warm.
Wine for everyone except Matt, who initially stuck with sparkling water, until Reid informed him that he didn’t get to skip the booze at his own coming-out party.
That led to Cole shooting me a brief, slightly apologetic look before he joked about how he’d at least gotten things half-right at the charity event.
“That means you’re emotionally more intelligent than roughly eighty percent of the heterosexual male population,” Naomi informed him, and he grinned, eyes crinkling up.
“Please tell my wife. She’ll laugh you out of the room.”
We gathered around the island for the aperitif.
Bread got passed. Ronan doused his three slices in olive oil like a man bulking up for war.
Matt took a sip of his wine, right next to me and smiling like he simply couldn’t stop.
Reid perched on a stool, all expensive sweater and strong opinions, with an expression that suggested he found us all charmingly inadequate.
The oven beeped, and everyone got moving—plates, cutlery, glasses, wait, is that yours or mine? In the commotion, I shifted to catch Naomi slightly off to the side, right by one of the windows framing the shadowed shift of trees and leaves.
“Well?” she murmured, low enough not to carry.
I glanced toward Reid. “Is there… something there?”
“Between me and the tailored nightmare?” A smile twitched around her mouth. “No, babe. Maybe one explosive night, and then never speaking again without legal mediation. Long-term? No chance.”
“Too similar?” I asked.
“Exactly.” She patted my arm. “Much more fun from a safe distance.”
“Sounds like you’re talking about me,” Reid commented, drifting by with nothing but his own wine glass in hand, as if plates were beneath him.
“Only in flattering adjectives,” Naomi said. “Like ‘predatory.’”
“Appreciate the compliment,” he said.
I laughed, and Matt’s gaze found me across the room, easy and obvious, not even trying to hide his smile, while his father set dishes on the table and his mother told Cole to pass the wine.
The table itself was long and simple, no special napkins or rainbow confetti because, as Reid had put it earlier, “Matt’s gay, not suddenly without taste.
” Chairs scraped over the concrete. The creek hummed somewhere outside, firelight breathing low and orange in the living area.
Nothing staged about it—the rented house, yes, but not the rest.
“See if that could be a life.”
We sat. I ended up between Matt and Ronan, with Naomi across from us, Reid at one end of the table, Cole somewhere near the middle, and Matt’s parents moving back and forth between the kitchen like they’d done family dinners a hundred times and this was just one more.
“It’s nothing fancy,” Marlis said, waving a hand at the spread. “Just cheesy potatoes and chicken with some roasted broccoli. Athlete diet plans, you know?”
“It looks amazing,” I said. It did—the food, the people glowing under warm light, the wood and clear lines and brick fireplace.
She smiled. “Well, good. For the record, Matt tried to help.”
“I did help,” Matt protested. “I chopped things.”
“You maimed one carrot, then cursed at how the onions wouldn’t peel right,” she said, and turned to me. “He was never home enough when he was young to really teach him. Always on the road or at some ungodly practice slot.”
“Five thirty in the morning,” Rob said. “And game days could be worse.”
That would’ve been hell on a teenager.
“Ah.” Cole sounded almost nostalgic. “I remember those days.”
Matt made a face. “Yeah, same. Kind of hard to stay on top of homework, so in my defense, cooking didn’t top the list.”
“A child who could outskate grown men but not fry an egg,” Marlis said, voice fond.
I smiled into my wine, not sure why it hit me quite like this, warmth behind my ribs at that glimpse into his childhood.
Not the hockey star yet, not the captain on a billboard.
Just a teenager with too many practices and too little space for the small, ordinary things, all those years built around the game before he’d even figured himself out.
When Matt caught me looking, he lifted one shoulder, sheepish but somehow still open, like someone had turned on a light inside him and now it shone through all the cracks in his usual composure. “I do make very good coffee,” he said.
“He does,” I agreed before I could think better of it. “Better than half the coffee places in the city.”
No one paused. No one asked me how I knew.
Rob nodded, mustache not fully hiding the amused quirk to his mouth. “I guess we didn’t raise him entirely wrong.”
“Wow,” Matt said, and I could tell he was biting his cheek against a laugh. “Thanks. Such praise.”
I thought about touching his hand, bumping our knees under the table. Then didn’t.
Dinner went on like that—never one long meaningful conversation, but pieces of them.
Topics, food, more wine. When Cole vented about toddler logistics, Ronan listened as if to file it away for his future family plans, then got drawn into some debate with Rob about whether old houses had character or just costly problems. Naomi announced that if this was your standard coming-out dinner, people should do them more often.
Reid raised his glass. “Absolutely not, thank you.”
Cole took the bait. “And why’s that?”
“Because then I’d have to deal with too many feelings,” Reid said, mouth gone flat in distaste and eyes glinting with humor.
“Perish the thought,” Naomi said, deadpan.
At some point, Marlis asked us about Suit Up Wednesdays—not like she was trying to interview me for a role by her son’s side, but genuinely curious, as if Matt had told her just enough that she wanted to learn more.
How it started. What the kids were like.
Whether the clothes really made that much difference.
“Yeah,” I said, face a little warm with wine, my body loose even as I was aware of Matt watching me, so close it would take just a small shift of my weight and we’d be touching.
“Not because the right suit works like magic or whatever. It’s more…
people treat you differently when you look like you belong.
And then that makes you stand a little straighter, and sometimes, that’s enough to get your foot in the door. ”
“That makes sense,” Rob said, nodding.
“It’s concrete,” Matt said. “Practical. And Stellan and Naomi—they’ve built something really good there. Meaningful.”
I glanced at him, and for a moment, I felt almost dizzy with the weight of his attention. It wasn’t new, but now he wasn’t even trying to hide it. No half-life—just him, at a dinner table, openly looking at me like I mattered.
It… God.
“You’re not the only one who fell.”
Now, here—I could see that. And it settled low in my body, bright like sunshine.
Could this be a life?
After we ate, the table got cleared in a loose, overlapping way, everyone but Reid carrying one thing or another, Marlis telling Matt not to just stand there if he had hands.
He took a stack of plates from her with mock offense.
Cole helped Rob clean the pans. Ronan wound up rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, which made me blink and ask who he was and what he’d done with the body.
“I was raised right,” he informed me, all haughty tone and proud chin tilt.
“By whom?” I asked.
“By you, asshole,” he said, and Marlis laughed even as her eyes went a little misty.
I drifted toward the fireplace a minute later, wine in hand and body humming. Matt followed—not too close, stopping next to me as we both faced the fire. “You still okay?” he asked.
I exhaled a quiet laugh. “You keep asking me that like you think I might implode.”
“Wouldn’t rule it out.” It sounded careful, hope just underneath, and I turned my head to look at him.
“No,” I said. “I’m still catching up to it, I think. But in a good way.”
“Yeah?” He angled himself to face me, soft and steady, no hiding. And that was it. Right there. Not the house by itself, or the dinner, or Reid and Naomi snarking at each other while everyone else was laughing. It was this. Matt, exactly himself—quiet, intense, a little awkward when it mattered.