Quietly, he rose to his feet and made his way through the house. He didn’t run into anyone on the way down, and when he was at the door, he paused for a moment and peeked through the peephole, not stupid enough just to open the door blindly.
The two last people that he would expect to see were there.
His sister hadn’t spoken to him since he’d told her about Matthew, and he had assumed that she blamed him for the whole thing, at least on some level. So it was weird enough to see her there on his doorstep, but to see Matthew beside her, that was something else entirely.
Slowly, Skyler pulled the door open. His sister had come all the way from Seattle to see him, and after everything that had happened, it seemed to him like the very least that he should do was see what she wanted. And as to why Matthew was there at all, he had absolutely no idea, but he wasn’t going to find out just standing there.
“Hey, big brother,” Hannah told him, with a surprisingly bright smile. Then again, it had been the better part of a year since she’d last talked to him, and it seemed like maybe she’d done some moving on.
“What are you doing here?” Skyler asked, the door open just a crack, like the wood could protect him from whatever was going on. This was all completely out of the ordinary, and he didn’t know quite how to deal with it. Especially not on top of everything that he’d heard today.
“Aren’t you going to invite us in?” This time, it wasn’t Hannah who spoke, but Matthew, after they exchanged looks.
Skyler frowned. He really, really didn’t want to do that. He really didn’t want Matthew in his house, with everything that had happened between them. But at the same time, this was his baby sister, and he wasn’t just going to stand there and keep her, at least, out of his house. He supposed it would be rude to keep Matthew out since he’d come just as far, so he sighed and stepped aside to let them in.
“What are you doing here?” he repeated, as they all made their way to the living room and sat down. He had the horrible feeling suddenly that they were here to tell him that they were together again, that they were going to get married after all, and then he’d have the tough situation of trying to figure out how big of a temper tantrum to throw about that. On the one hand, it was her choice to make, and he was inclined to allow people to make their own choices anyway. On the other, it wasMatthew.
“What, I can’t check in on my big brother without having some huge motivation?” Hannah teased. She had seated herself on the couch, and so had Skyler, but Matthew squeezed right between them so that he was pressed close against Skyler’s body.
It had been awhile. Something like nostalgia passed through him, and in a way, it surprised him that that was all that he felt. This man had once been important to him, but he really didn’t matter anymore. Not as anything other than a thing that had happened in the past.
“I’m here because I love you.”
The words hung between them, words that Matthew and Skyler had never said to each other even when they had been together. Words that Skyler had never looked for, not from Matthew, not from anyone. Not even from Craig, though they had been very welcome when Craig had said them.
So hearing them now from Matthew was more of a shock than anything else. Not a bad thing, but certainly not a good thing. At first, Skyler couldn’t even make sense of what he was saying at all like Matthew had just started spouting off gibberish words that didn’t seem to connect to much of anything.
“Skyler, listen to him. I’ve been talking to him about this a lot,” Hannah said, her voice earnest but with a hint of something like smug joy in it. She expected him to be happy about this, didn’t she? She really thought that he couldn’t wait to scramble back into a relationship with Matthew.
“I know I was going to marry your sister and that was wrong,” Matthew continued on earnestly, as Skyler just stared, incredulity stealing his ability to speak at all, to do more than look. “I was desperate.”
“And it took me a really long time to forgive him for that,” Hannah added, “But if it will make you happy, Sky, I can handle it. Not that it wasn’t a dick move, but at least we found out before we were married and it was too late, right?”
Skyler felt like for sure everyone around him had gone insane. Or this was a dream. As clichéd as it was, this being a dream made a hell of a lot more sense than that this could really happen, that his ex and his sister could show up on his door and say these things to him.
“But we can do this,” Matthew continued, and then, of all things, he was reaching for Skyler. His hand. And Skyler was so messed up about the things that Matthew was saying that he didn’t even realize it at first, not until Matthew’s hand was so close to his own that he could feel the warmth radiating off of it. “We can finally be together. I’ll even go with you to tell your mom that we’re together.”
“Stop it,” Skyler finally said. He meant to scream it, but it only came out as a whisper. So quiet that only Hannah and Matthew could hear him, and it didn’t seem like either of them wanted to listen.
“I know that you’re freaked out because of what Mom and Dad will say,” Hannah said, charging merrily right on with her assumptions. Because if Hannah was afraid, as she was, of her parents’ disapproval, then it must be how everyone was. “But it’s okay. They’ll have to accept it, and they already love Matthew.”
On the surface of it, it might even make sense. Matthew was, perhaps, the one man that Skyler’s parents could accept. And it would tie everything up into a neat bow. Skyler could be with someone who loved him, and who wasn’t afraid to come out anymore. He could even get some closure on a terrible thing that had happened to him when Matthew had turned his back on him.
But Skyler had never been one to be deceived by surface images. He saw beneath, to a place where, even if he did unthinkably turn his back on the man he loved, Craig, he could never trust Matthew. The betrayal was and had always been, too deep, too potent. It had shaken him right down to his very core.
It took a lot to make Skyler mad, but Matthew had managed and was, in fact, managing now. Time seemed to slow down to a crawl, each second stretching on for minutes so that Skyler could look at everything both inside himself and externally.
Matthew was wearing a little smirk, and his chin was tilted confidently up, his eyes bright with a victory that he already celebrated. He and Hannah both couldn’t see a world where Skyler could possibly resist Matthew.
Neither of them knew how easy it was. Even without Craig, Skyler would have had no problem with it. But when he thought of those sapphire blue eyes, the strong jaw, the wide mouth, it was the easiest thing in the world to turn this man down.
“I’m not going to …” he started, but then, with a snap that was almost audible to him, time started to move normally again. And in those few seconds, which suddenly sped by just as fast as they had crawled before, Matthew moved.
His hand closed on Skyler’s, and before he even had a chance to recoil back, Matthew was shifting forward. His body shifted the cushions of the couch so that Skyler fell into him, and he was being pulled into a tight embrace by one arm while the opposite hand closed around his wrist, trapping him, for just a few seconds, in place.
That was all the time Matthew needed. It all happened so quickly. One minute, Skyler was getting ready to turn Matthew down cold, and the next, he was being kissed by a man who never should have touched him again.
Twenty Two
