“You scare the shit out of me when you don’t tell me everything that’s going on,” Matt said, pacing in at the bottom of the front stairs. “We’re getting a visitor. Okay, that I can deal with. Who is this visitor? Well, that’s a secret. Really? Really, Barnaby?”
Topher pushed his glasses further up his nose with a smirk. “You’ll like this one. I promise.”
He stopped and stared. “The last surprise you had for me involved us proposing to each other at the same time.”
“You liked that one, too, if I remember correctly,” Topher pointed out. “We didn’t even make it all the way upstairs before you had your hand in my pants after I said yes when you asked me again.”
“Putting a ring on it was hot, okay? Sue me,” Matt muttered, a blush highlighting his cheeks.
Rolling his eyes, Topher checked his watch and debated whether he could pass off looking out the curtains as though he was hoping for the ice cream truck instead of impatiently waiting for one of his future sisters-in-law.
The thought straightened his spine and temporarily blanked his mind.
“You gonna get that, babe?”
Topher startled out of his stupor and opened the door a crack to see Effie’s beaming face. “Ready?”
She nodded enthusiastically.
“You totally won’t believe me if I say the line ‘look what I found’ but really,” Topher said as he opened the door wider and Effie stepped across the threshold, “look what I found on the porch.”
“Effie?” Matt said incredulously. “Ef?”
She held her arms out wide. “Surprise, Matty.”
He put his long legs to good use, crossing the space in a minimum of strides to wrap her in a bear hug, lifting her off her feet. She giggled, thumping his back until he set her down wherein she grabbed at Topher. Winchesters were tactile, and he’d learned a long time ago not to fight it, allowing himself to be squeezed tightly. Effie smelled like country air, and he breathed in deep, a picture of the Winchester house flashing across his mind.
Home. Much like the house he was standing in.
“How did you get here?” Matt asked when she separated from Topher.
“I drove the Sunfire,” she said. She dragged her duffel bag into the house and shut the door against the chilly autumn breeze. “Which is kind of the other part of the surprise. Dad got an Oldsmobile for cheap off somebody he works with, and when it gets back from being inspected I’ll start driving that. Which explain why he didn’t want me to buy a parking pass for Williamston,” she added, holding out his car keys. “So you have the Sunfire down here, in case anything happens and you need a vehicle.”
Matt took his key ring numbly. Sure they used public transportation more often than not getting where they needed to go, but he didn’t want to wind up walking to the Ferry in the middle of December, and he felt a little awkward sometimes about having Topher drive them places. He didn’t mind being behind the wheel of the Cherokee, and he had no issues when it came to Topher driving the Sunfire. It was weird, and he couldn’t explain, but something eased a little at the thought of having his own car back.
“Thanks,” he said, tossing the keys in the bowl. “How are you getting back?”
“I have a one way ticket for the bus back to campus on Sunday.” Effie pushed her bangs away from her eyes. “I split it with a friend, who used it to get down here, and she’s taking a car back with her, so I took her bus ticket.”
Something slammed into his lower leg, and Topher looked down to see Fidget literally shouldering him aside – as best a twenty-five pound cat larger than most small dogs could – in order to get to Effie.
“Holy shit,” she said, reaching down and scratching him between his ears. “This is Fidget? He was a tiny little bastard the last time I saw him.”
“Kids,” Topher said dryly, “they grow so fast.”
“And where one is…” Matt trailed off as Monster rocketed from the living room, sliding across the hardwood and careening into his brother.
Effie laughed. “They’re huge. I thought you said they were the runts of the litter?”
“They were.” Topher peeled Fidget off Monster, his tail flicking continuously. “They got bigger.” He ignored the closed-paw swipes to the chin, tucking the animal to his chest and scratching its belly. Fidget nosed around Topher’s neck before settling in, purring loudly. “The big babies.”
“You hungry or anything? Want something to drink?” Matt asked.
“Please. It was a long-ass drive.” She left her bag near the doorway to the laundry room and followed her brother to the kitchen. “Mom said your house was really nice but she said the same thing about your tiny apartment in Geneva, too, so I wasn’t sure.” She trailed her fingertips along the wall in the short hallway between front entranceway and kitchen, stopping completely when she entered the space. “Wow.”
“That was my first impression, too,” Topher whispered in her ear on his way by, dumping Fidget into one of the chairs at the kitchen island. He hunted for clean glasses while she perused the space, hovering the longest at the side of the refrigerator.
The stainless steel, double-door monstrosity with the pull-out freezer had been damn near brand-spankin’ new when they’d moved in a few months prior, according to the paperwork at the realty office. What drew her attention the most was the collection of magnets and papers on the side. Most of them were things found on the Winchester fridge in Rochester: a list of contact numbers for the three of them – four, including Beau, who had been written in with loopy handwriting at the bottom under the number for Delia’s studio – and a number of printed photographs, the quality suggesting they’d come from someone’s iPhone. Matt and Topher in their tux’s from the Baincroft butted up against Delia, Beau, and someone she didn’t quite recognize on the living room couch.
What Effie didn’t know what to do with were the coloring book pages carefully torn on the dotted line, and the photos of a toddler snuggled against Topher’s chest. There was one of who she assumed the mother to be, a woman in her late twenties and heavily pregnant sitting in the turret seat, the little girl standing next to her while they looked out the window.
She opened the doors to the fridge and peeked inside. Half gallons of skim and one percent milk were nestled side by side with containers of apple and white grape juice. Her brother hated apple juice, and while she didn’t know about Topher’s preferences, she had more than an inkling the juices were for the little girl clearly in their lives.
“Matty?” she asked, closing the doors gently.
He leaned his elbows on the kitchen island, the corners of his mouth twitching upward.
Effie looked helplessly at Topher where he relaxed back against the counter.
“Just ask, Effie. You’re not subtle,” Matt added, not bothering to stifle his growing smile.
“Did you two somehow acquire a toddler and a pregnant woman since the last time I saw you or what?” she blurted.
“Eh, depends on what you mean by acquire.” Topher shrugged. “They live next door. Kelly and Cameron, the little one, live on this side of us.” He pointed over his shoulder to the house sitting to their right when looked at from the front. “The Fulkersons live on the other side of us.”
“She trusts you to watch her kid?” Effie opened the fridge and snagged the white grape juice. “And her husband is okay with it, too?”
“Michael Coseretti was an NYPD officer who died in the line of duty in May,” Matt said quietly. “Kelly’s due in January. Doctor’s pretty sure it’s a boy.”
Topher glanced at Matt, suppressing a shudder and clenching his fist to feel the cool of his ring against his palm. There are been a time when he hadn’t been able to fathom waking up next to Matt every morning as something he’d be able to have, and to have it taken from him damn near made his brain short circuit. He couldn’t imagine how Kelly had gotten up every morning, alone, those first few months. Cameron was probably her driving force, but he could see every once in a while the way her smile frayed at the edges when she looked at him and Matt.
Sweet baby Jesus, he hoped he never had to experience such a pain. Topher didn’t think he’d be able to take it.
“She’s beautiful,” Effie whispered, fingertips tracing the edges of the photo where Cameron lay on Topher’s chest. “They trust you two.”
“The line between friend and family is a little blurry,” Topher admitted. “We have chicken nuggets in the freezer and juice in the fridge. We get crayon drawings and cookies.”
Effie looked like she wanted to say something further and was interrupted by the shutting of the front door reverberating through the downstairs. She looked at Topher when Delia’s voice floated through the hallway; he shrugged, and the pair of them turned to Matt.
“I might have texted your cousin,” he said lamely.
“Seriously?” Effie squeaked. She pushed stray strands of hair from her face, checking the front of clothes for any spots or stains. She poked at her hips with a frown, looking up with wide eyes as Delia’s footsteps grew closer.
“Matty? Topher? You guys home?” Delia appeared in the doorway, rocking bright blue leg warmers over her pale pink footless tights. “Effie?”
She fiddled with the edge of her top. “Yeah. Hi.”
Matt glanced at Topher. Effie had been, in the opinion of her siblings, born without a social fear gene. This sudden nervousness with Delia was so uncharacteristic Matt was half-tempted to check for some sort of fever or other illness.
“Are you staying the weekend?” Delia asked.
“Until Sunday afternoon.”
Delia squealed loudly, rushing across the kitchen and throwing her arms around Effie’s shoulders. She put her arms tentatively around the slightly smaller woman, squeezing when Delia began babbling about the shenanigans they were bound to get up to in the next two days.
Topher rubbed his chest as he looked on a with a smile, not brave enough to do more than glance in Matt’s direction to see the way his expression softened, the easy acceptance in his eyes.
No, he couldn’t imagine how Kelly had gotten through the hours since burying her husband in May. The half-assed Catholic in him reared its head as he prayed he’d never find out.
Matt thumped down the stairs into the kitchen later that night with an index card-sized piece of something in his hand. “I think I’ve got it.” He padded across the hardwood and handed it to Topher.
“Got what, Matty?” Effie asked, nodding to Beau as he held the wine bottle over her glass.
“Our wedding invitations,” Topher said, holding the printout carefully. “Some of these are from the engagement session Cadie did, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.” Matt pointed to the top photo on the left hand side of the five by eight invite. “That one of our rings and this one,” he added, pointing to the one in the lower right corner of them kissing. The pictures in the other two corners were photo booth-like candid shots, outtakes from Cadie’s project over the summer.
In the middle in as official-looking type as Matt could stand without thinking it looked pompous and not at all like them, was the following:
Barnaby Christopher Stanton
&
Matthew James Winchester
Invite you to celebrate their friendship and love as they tie the knot
Saturday, October 5, 2013 at 2:00 pm
“I just sorta picked a time,” Matt said quickly, before stealing a mouthful from Topher’s wine glass and swallowing hard. “And we don’t have a place for the ceremony yet because we haven’t talked about it, or a reception, and we haven’t figured out who in hell is actually going to marry us - ”
“Breathe, Matty,” Topher reminded him. “Breathe.” He replaced his wine glass with an open bottle of Sam Adams within Matt’s reach. Pinot grigio was an acquired taste, and Matt was a little too stressed to fully heed his taste buds. It wouldn’t be pretty when he did. “I like them. And we can add that stuff when we know about it.”
“Can I see?” Effie asked, leaning her elbows on the island.
Topher handed her the invite, raised his glass to his fiancé, and drained the last of his wine. He reached for the bottle to his left – the pinot was his alone, the others preferring something sweeter with less after bite – and gave himself a refill.
Beau leaned over Delia’s shoulder as she crowded in close to Effie to see.
“You made this?” Beau asked.
“Yeah?” Matt said, unsure whether to be defensive or not. He was also desperately trying to get the taste of pinot grigio out of his mouth, and failing miserably.
“It looks really good,” Effie said. “Really. You just need to add some more details like where the ceremony is actually going to be, but it looks really good.”
“Well done, Matty,” Delia added, handing the invitation back to her cousin to hand to his fiancé. “The black and white pictures are really you guys, too. Cadie takes such good photos.” She raised her glass to the pair of them. “Doesn’t hurt that you two are a bit easy on the eyes.”
Matt scrubbed a hand over his face while he figured out what to do with such a comment. It didn’t help when Topher spouted off a long, rambling sentence in French accompanied by a rather lewd wink, and he decided his best course of action was to polish off the rest of his beer in record time.
“Thank you. I think.” He retreated to the kitchen table rather than the island, as it had more chairs. “We should do something.”
“Like what?” Topher asked, carefully setting the invitation on the counter where it wouldn’t accidentally encounter any stray alcohol.
Effie leaned forward to look at her brother. “Do you have any games? Like we used to play on Friday nights?”
“There’s Jenga, Battleship, Yahtzee, and a really old game of Sorry in the closet in the laundry room,” Delia said. “But I’ve got Uno, Skip-Bo, and a couple of decks of cards upstairs.” She shared an odd look with Beau; Topher didn’t want to read too much into the idea of his cousin playing strip poker with her boyfriend.
He really didn’t need the accompanying visuals.
“Can I vote for semi-drunk Uno?” Effie asked, raising her hand. “Because it’s fun and my brother sucks at it, for some reason.”
“Says the girl who can’t ever get out of phase one when we play Phase Ten,” Matt shot back. “I’m good with Uno.”
Delia grinned, draining the last of the wine from her glass as she slid off her chair. “I’ll be right back.” She practically flounced through the doorway, her steps echoing in the quiet of the kitchen.
Beau took the opportunity to fetch another bottle of Hazlitt’s Cabin Fever from the fridge – a gift from Effie, though no one had the courage to ask how she’d acquired it, since she’d was only nineteen – and hand it to her along with Topher’s stainless steel corkscrew. She’d opened hundreds of wine bottles since becoming a waitress, and this was one was no exception.
Topher snagged another two beers for Matt, looked pointedly at his bottle of white wine, and wondered if he couldn’t somehow manufacture himself another hand.
“Here, friend, let me help you.” Effie snagged his bottle for him after handing the Cabin Fever back to Beau – once he topped up her glass – and followed him around the island to the table. She left the chair next to Matt for Topher, and slid into the one that allowed her to face the stairs.
Stairs Delia nearly tripped at the bottom of.
Beau snorted; Topher stared wide-eyed, and Matt gave her a little golf clap followed by holding up six fingers.
“Only a six, Matty? You Russian or some shit?” she asked, slapping the game in the middle of the table.
“You took a couple extra steps on the landing,” he said, fake Russian accent atrocious enough to make Topher shudder. “And it was distinctly lacking artistry.”
Effie giggled into her wine glass. Delia sat herself down with a humph, pushing her hair back and reaching for the Uno game.
“Y’all are assholes,” she muttered, shuffling the cards together with enough dexterity to give Topher a run for his money.
Beau poured more wine into her glass and moved it discreetly in front of her. “You still love us.”
“I am playing a wild draw four on you the first chance I get,” she said, grinning evilly.
“We expect nothing less,” Topher remarked as he picked up his cards, wincing. How in hell had he wound up with mostly yellow and one lonely little blue? Things didn’t look up when Matt flipped the top card over and revealed a green. Judging from the wince next to him, Matt wasn’t faring any better.
“Can I pretend to be color blind?” Matt asked, taking a healthy swig of his beer and hoping for a miracle before it was his turn to draw until he found something he could play.
“No,” Effie and Topher said together.
“Let’s go this way,” Beau muttered as he put a reverse card down.
Delia positively chortled as she made Matt draw two.
“Damn it,” Matt said. Now he had a red and yellow to go with his blues. “Delia, you shuffle as well as you fall down the stairs.”
She flipped him the bird and he couldn’t say he didn’t have it coming to him when she slapped another draw two on him when it was her turn. At this rate he was going to have half the deck by the time someone called Uno, and he honestly didn’t give a damn.
The in between stage was always fun, though Matt couldn’t remember the time he hadn’t seen Topher at one end of the spectrum or the other. He was either only just buzzed or totally drunk off his ass – usually occurring every time his mother called him out of the blue – and Matt certainly hadn’t seen Topher as downright giggly as he was, pressed back against their bedroom door with one of Matt’s thighs wedged between his own and kissing him like his life depended on it.
“Goddamn buttons,” Matt muttered, fingers slipping against the material of Topher’s shirt in his haste. His own tee was rucked halfway up his back, Topher’s fingers kneading the muscle at the base of his spine. “How much do you like this shirt?”
“It’s not mine, it’s yours,” he said, stretching to slide one hand into Matt’s back pocket, giving his ass a generous squeeze.
Matt grunted, finally getting the last button and shoving the material off Topher’s shoulders only to encounter an under shirt. “How many layers did you put on this morning?”
“It was cold, okay?” Topher’s head thumped against the door, pushing his belt buckle into Matt’s lower abdomen. As predicted, Matt attacked the offending wardrobe accessory instantly, then worked his hand down the front of Topher’s boxers.
He might have muttered something ridiculously cheesy, and Topher groaned on principle. It was sort of true, though, in a way. Matt would warm him up. He just wouldn’t do it conventionally.
“Big Bird’s my favorite,” Delia said, barely refraining from touching the glass wall in front of Eleni’s.
“Cookie Monster’s the best,” Effie said, pointing to the blue cupcake designed as a Sesame Street character. “He comes with a cookie, too.”
She snorted. “Like the amount of frosting on one of those isn’t enough to send you into a diabetic coma to begin with.”
“I wouldn’t wanna eat it.” Digging into her messenger bag, Effie came up with her phone and quickly snapped a picture. “I’d just wanna look at it.”
Delia snuck a quick glance over her shoulder – the boys were busy perusing the shelves of The Chelsea Wine Vault, Matt oddly complacent with his fingers firmly tanled with Topher’s – and pulled Effie into the bakery, closer to the display cases. It put another layer of protection between her and the boys, and she didn’t want nosy and nosier to overhear anything.
“Just looking, for now,” she said casually to the girl behind the counter, clearly on her way to assist. Still, it didn’t keep her from wandering down to where the selection of chocolate was – she’d want a big heaping, cocoa-smothered confection later when her Midol wore off and she was at the mercy of her womanly time.
If she hadn’t recently taken a pregnancy test she might have been a little more pissed off about it. She was more relieved than anything, and she could tell Beau had been, too. Not at the prospect of no sex for a week, but because he wasn’t about to be a daddy anytime soon.
“Your parents have a big yard, right?” Delia asked.
“Yeah. Kind of. I mean, it’s bigger than yours on Staten Island.” Effie looked longingly at the oatmeal raisin cookies. “And there’s the path to the picnic space by the lake, which isn’t big, but it’s a good place to go when it gets dark to see the stars.” She gave in to temptation and waved at the girl before digging for her wallet. “Why?”
“I’ve never been there, and the pictures you and your brother have on Facebook don’t really do it justice, according to Topher. One of those, please,” she added, motioning to a frosted brownie roughly the size of her hand. “They haven’t picked someplace for the wedding yet, and neither of them seem like they’re very into finding a church. Topher’s a half-assed Catholic who hasn’t been to Mass on his own since he was confirmed, and Matt just doesn’t seem like the type.” She handed over some money to cover both her brownie and Effie’s cookie.
“But they both love Mom and Dad’s, and it’s a home for Topher,” Effie said, catching on. “I don’t think it’ll be a problem, they just need to sort of give them the heads up or ask.”
“Or if someone gives them a nudge.” Delia looked through the glass; Topher was telling Beau something, gesturing grandly with his free hand while the other remained safely tucked in Matt’s, a paper bag with reinforced handles on Matt’s other side. Lord only knew what kind of wine he’d be inflicting on them – specifically her – in the near future.
“That can be arranged,” Effie said, taking the little paper bag with her oatmeal raisin cookie in it. “Thank you. For the cookie.”
There was something off about Effie’s tone, and Delia looked at her, head cocked slightly to the side.
“And for Topher,” she said quietly. “He asked me if he could marry my brother the day after Mary and Pete’s. He asked Dena and Kelso for a favor, and they basically kidnapped him to go do something, and he sat us all down in the kitchen and asked us if he could marry Matty.” She laughed softly. “He was so nervous. Like we were gonna say no and run him outta the house or something. He said he wanted to do it right, and right was asking his parents and family.”
“Did Pete ask your parents?” Delia asked.
“He did. Mom gave us a little heads up on it, but Topher…he asked Matty’s sisters, too.”
Through the glass, Matt shuffled a little further behind Topher to make more room for the people walking by them, resting his chin gently on Topher’s head. Topher leaned a little further into the warmth behind him, carrying on his conversation with Beau like they weren’t in the middle of Chelsea Market and indulging in more PDA outside their house in this moment than they had in their entire established relationship.
“I hope whoever I find who wants to get married asks my brothers and sisters along with Mom and Dad,” Effie murmured, barely loud enough for Delia to hear.
Delia reached over and squeezed her hand before tugging her through the door to the boys. There was a lot more New York to show Effie, and not nearly enough time to do it.