“Aww,” he said, pulling Claire to his chest. “But we were having so much fun.”
11
Matt
I was up pretty early and proud of myself. Tooling around the apartment would have been my normal routine, playing video games or scrolling through social media. But today, I felt productive. And in a good mood. Maybe it was actually getting eight hours of sleep or possibly that I had gone a couple of days without alcohol or carbs completely by accident that did it. Regardless, I was feeling alright and spent much of the day cleaning and rearranging things in my apartment.
The bachelor pad motif in the living room was old. Not just that I was getting older and it was more suited for guys in their early twenties, but it was actually old. Quite a few pieces of the furniture were things I’d brought from my place in Astoria and were at least a decade old. The neon beer sign was older than that. I’d had that in my bedroom at Mom’s house when I was a teen.
So, I spent much of the remainder of the morning at a furniture store, picking out bookcases and a desk and other things to replace the cheap particle board stuff that I was using currently. Some of the pieces I picked were designed for me to build them, which meant I had something to do in the afternoon before work. The others were loaded onto a truck and sent to my place within thirty minutes of me arriving there.
I didn’t bother trying to list and sell the old stuff, dragging them out into the hallway with the intent to stick them by the dumpster. Instead, the college-aged neighbor across from me saw the transition and asked if he could have them. So, things just moved from one apartment to the other with little fuss. He was a good kid and had barely any furniture other than a love seat, so I was happy to give them to him for free, even when he tried to pay me. In return, he offered for me to come over and watch a wrestling pay-per-view in a few weeks, which was more than enough.
Feeling like I had updated my life, done a good deed, and made an actual friendship out of an acquaintance in one morning, I happily sat down in my living room with a couple of heavy boxes and Swiss instructions. I was knee-deep in translating words with lots of umlauts with my phone when I heard a knock on the door. Figuring it was my neighbor, I just called for them to come in.
“Matt?” Jordan called back from the doorway. He was sticking his head in and seeing the chaos, but I was on the floor, blocked by the couch. I could just barely see him over the top of it, and he hadn’t gotten a glimpse of me yet.
“Down here,” I called, and he walked up, instantly bursting into laughter.
“Okay, so should I just assume you aren’t coming in tonight?”
“No, no, I’ll be there,” I said. “I thought I’d be done with all this before then, but I will settle with just having one of them done.”
“So, you’ll be late, then,” Jordan said.
“Someone has jokes today,” I teased.
“All this aside,” Jordan said, “I actually had a kind of proposition for you.”
“I told you, I am not going to strip, no matter how well it would improve our clientele.”
“Well, there goes my dreams of having the worst strip club in America,” he retorted. “No, banana brains, I was going to ask if you wanted to go in together for a gift for Mom.”
I stopped screwing in the klungerhousen or whatever the hell it was and turned to him.
“That would be awesome,” I said. “I haven’t been able to think of anything to get her.”
“Same here. I’ve got nothing yet,” he said, sitting down and picking up my instruction sheet, flipping it over in his hands.
“Well, not one of these,” I said. “They are beautiful when they are put together, but I have no idea what I’m doing right now.”
“Good to know,” he said. “But no, if you have an idea, let me know. We will figure it out.”
There was a moment of silence as I concentrated on holding one screw in place on one side and twirling it tighter on the other. I grumbled a curse when I dropped it, but Jordan got down to help me keep it in place, and I got it on.
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem,” Jordan said, sitting with his back on the base of the couch. “So, it looks like you and Chloe seem to be hitting it off.”
And there it was. I wasn’t going to get out of it. He knew Chloe and I had been seeing each other outside of work. What he didn’t know was our ruse. I felt bad deceiving my brother, but I knew he would tattle if I told him what was going on. If he was going to know something, it had to be in the story. I could tell him the whole thing later.