Santi liked him best? Matt didn’t know if that was true, and if it was, it was probably because Matt was the best of the available options.
“Well,” Matt answered, kind of helplessly, “I wouldn’t be able to offer advice anyway.”
“He wouldn’t listen, so there’s no point offering any.” Bea glanced heavenward, praying over her son’s stubbornness. Then she sighed. “This is long enough to pretend I’m using the ladies’ room. I’ll get back before your mother kills me.”
“Is it the dessert course?” Matt wondered, idly, but also to gauge how much more time he had to be alone.
“It’s coffee and cookies. No dessert. We’re having cake with the champagne later,” Bea reminded him. She gave Matt’s knee a final pat before standing up. “You know how he is. Thank you, Matty.”
Mattdidknow how Santi was. Smooth and sarcastic and unruffled when he most wanted to run and hide. It didn’t make Matt feel much better, although it did let him breathe. The thing was, Matt was used to a certain amount of disdain from people, a certain, constant amount of being underestimated that he was normally fine with if it kept him from his family’s scrutiny. He should have been fine with this. And instead ithurt, visceral, bloody, and mean.
It made him feel like being mean in return, which he wasn’t used to either. He was restless and irritable, and didn’t think one drink would do anything but he didn’t want to drink more than that.
He stayed on the piano bench, first facing the empty bar, then turning around to poke at random keys to make a song vaguely like Heart and Soul, but without either of those things. In a minute or so, his parents were going to send one of his siblings to ask him to stop.
He tapped out the start of Chopsticks and someone sat on the bench beside him.
Matt pulled his hands off the keys, ready to be contrite, and Santi sighed heavily.
“Nice night,” he said quietly, leaving Matt to stare in utter disbelief.
Santi didn’t lean into him. His posture was slouched but stiff. Matt would have had to slouch too, to bring their shoulders together. He gaped for another few seconds, not to be mean, though he supposed he should have.
Matt answered at last, for the two of them. “You idiot.”
Santi caught his breath.
Then, as if that was too much of his real emotions showing, Santi slouched just that much more. “Your Nonna Louise is the same as ever. Fortunately, she had me there to entertain her.”
Thatwas something Matt would hear about tomorrow. Through his mother after Nonna Louise told her about it.
But that was tomorrow’s problem.
Tonight’s problem was gazing at Matt’s hands while Matt hesitated over picking out the only other song he knew on piano or folding down the keyboard cover and sitting in silence.
“Where did you run off to?” Santi gently and slowly went through his scales before slipping into The Entertainer then stopping abruptly. “The waitress seemed a smidge put out.”
Matt closed the cover. Santi barely snatched his hands away in time.
“I don’t see how me trying to help you find—let’s say romance, for the sake of our mothers’ burning ears—is such a problem for you.” Santi didn’t look at him.
Matt didn’t even know where to start with that. “You know, not at every one of these things, but at enough of them, I’m usually the one to drive you home, or get you into a car, or a guest room. I didn’t think you got blackout drunk, just too drunk to drive. But maybe you forgot that. Or maybe you assumed my mother told me to.”
“She didn’t?” Santi asked, in a very small voice for Santi.
Matt exhaled, rough and almost a growl. “No. I don’t have to be ordered to hang out with you or to help you, Santi.Jesus. You know what? Whatever. Fine. That’s me—general dogsbody and lackey. Your mother is confused.”
“Iam confused,” Santi said faintly, and pushed his hair from his face to look up at him. “Matt—”
“She says we’re not family and on that I guess we agree. Although she thinks you have a higher opinion of me than you do.” This would have been a great moment to play something stormy and exquisite on the piano to end this conversation. The clarinet was never so dignified, and never found on display in living rooms. “Not a brother. I’m maybe a weird cousin.” Matt’s chest hurt. “Or a friend of a friend.”
“Matthew,” Santi softly cut him off, “please.”
“Just realizing how differently our families see things,” Matt remarked almost sweetly. “Seeus.”
Santi’s attention hadn’t wavered, and after another few moments, Matt finally had to turn to look back at him.
Santi’s eyes met his, startled and open. “I’ve never thought of you as a brother,” he admitted, and then sat straight up as though someone had yanked on his spine.
