
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/5496764.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M, M/M
  Fandom:
      Daredevil_(TV)
  Relationship:
      Matt_Murdock/Original_Character(s), Matt_Murdock/Franklin_"Foggy"_Nelson,
      Matt_Murdock_&_Franklin_"Foggy"_Nelson
  Character:
      Matt_Murdock, Franklin_"Foggy"_Nelson
  Additional Tags:
      Attempted_Rape/Non-Con, Unhealthy_Coping_Mechanisms, Self-Esteem_Issues,
      Explicit_Sexual_Content
  Collections:
      2015_Daredevil_Secret_Santa_Gift_Exchange, Daredevil_Kink_Meme
  Stats:
      Published: 2015-12-22 Chapters: 6/6 Words: 38530
****** I Need Company, I Need Human Heat ******
by Tam_Cranver
Summary
     Five times Matt had a hard time talking to Foggy about his
     experiences with sex, and one time he didn't.
Notes
     This story was written in response to the following prompt:
     "So Foggy assumes that Matt has a burner phone for ladies and that
     he's always hooking up with beautiful women.
     What if he is? What if Foggy is just speaking a truth and Matt
     Murdock is a sex addict. Foggy is frustrated by it but has learned to
     leave it alone. (He wanted a wingman but got a guy who cockblocks him
     every time even when multiple ladies are involved.) Matt hates it
     about himself but (like Daredevil) refuses to stop.
     Maybe it's related to the heightened senses. Maybe it relates to
     childhood sexual abuse or his own abandonment issues that he needs
     sex to validate himself and feel close to people but doesn't want
     relationships. We can likely assume that with his heightened senses
     he was exposed to a lot of sounds of sex, or sensed that people were
     having sex, from a very young age and so he may have lost his
     virginity very early.
     Ideas for how that could play out in a fic include:
      
     Matt drinks for free at Josie's but Foggy doesn't because Matt once
     rocked her world.
     Matt totally seeks out and hooks up with Vanessa after Fisk goes to
     jail, even though she's cries her way through it and clearly misses
     her fiancee. Or, if you want to make Vanessa particularly devious,
     Matt went back to talk to her again at the gallery intending to sleep
     with her and does.
     Nelson and Murdock actually got a cheaper deal on their lease for the
     office because Matt slept with the rental agent following what we saw
     of their meeting
     The reason Karen is so weird around Foggy at Mrs. Cardenas' and the
     reason she makes them the husband lasagna is because Matt already
     slept with her the night she stayed at his apartment (before she went
     to retrieve the files on Union Allied and had to be saved) and she
     has no clue where she stands with him but really likes him. Foggy
     either doesn't know or assumes it happened but knows that she has no
     shot with Matt and figures she'll eventually realize that and maybe
     he can ask her out when she's over Matt.
      
     I just need a fic where Matt hooks up with women constantly and
     recklessly, often to his own disadvantage. "
     In retrospect, I'm not sure I hit all the points here, but I did try
     to stick with the general idea of "constantly hooking up with people"
     and "self-destructive sexual behaviors." I hope it's still enjoyable!
     I checked "underage" under the warnings because the first chapter
     contains a seventeen-year-old having sex with an eighteen-year-old,
     which may or may not count as underage depending on location; the age
     of consent is seventeen in New York, where this story takes place,
     but better safe than sorry.
See the end of the work for more notes
***** If we've both got the same diseases, it's irrelevant *****
In later years, when he and Foggy were both more than a little tipsy and Foggy
would ask him how, in Foggy’s words, Matt had “punched his v-card,” Matt
demurred, laughed, said, “A gentleman never tells!” It wasn’t necessarily that
he thought Foggy would judge him, more that he didn’t know exactly how to tell
it in a way that made it clear that it wasn’t sad, that Foggy didn’t need to
feel sorry for him.
He never told the whole story.
The truth was, it was May of his junior year of high school and all his
classmates were excited, because juniors, unlike sophomores, could go to the
prom without being invited by a senior. Matt personally didn’t give a shit.
What was the point? It was just a school dance; it wasn’t like he could go back
and look at the pictures later, and from what he could understand, he’d
probably be embarrassed if he could.
At St. Agnes, the only other kids around his age were Courtney Saviano, who was
in and out of rehab and might or might not have been currently dating some
sketchy twenty-five-year-old she’d kept sneaking out to see last year, and Josh
McMillan, who had muscular dystrophy and probably wasn’t going to be doing a
lot of dancing. Matt suspected that they were all going to be sitting around
doing nothing on prom night.
The air conditioner was broken again, and it was unseasonably warm for May. It
made everything smell overripe and rotting, and the B.O. among the post-
pubescent kids at the orphanage was unbearable. Matt had taken to studying in
the basement, which was unfinished and full of gross old furniture the nuns
hadn’t been able to find a place for anywhere else, but which was also cool and
quiet and apparently creepy enough that most of the kids stayed away.
He sat on the rug and tapped on the smooth cement floor while the beat-up old
tablet the nuns had bought him readAnna Kareninato him. It was a reading
requirement for seniors, but Mrs. Callaghan, his English teacher, had suggested
that he take the AP Literature and Composition test without even taking the
class and grab a college credit with a more specialized class at CUNY. The
paperwork and disability accommodations were probably going to be a pain in the
ass, but anything that got him out of high school for a bit was worth the
effort. Matt couldn’t wait to graduate, and he was willing to do whatever extra
work it took to make sure he was going to a good school when he did.
“Yo.”
Matt perked his head up and took his headphones off. Josh McMillan—but Matt
hadn’t heard the elevator. Josh had had a rough few months, and was using his
wheelchair most of the time now. “Josh?” he asked.
“Top of the stairs, bro,” said Josh. “Sister Elizabeth took most of the kids
outside for a water balloon fight, so it’s actually kind of quiet for once up
here. She wanted to know if you wanted to go out and throw balloons.”
Matt made a face at his tablet. Sister Elizabeth was nice, but she still hadn’t
quite grasped the difference between “six years old” and “sixteen years old.”
Probably because she herself was the kind of person who had clearly liked being
a kid better than she liked being an adult, and was using her job in a
children’s home like a second childhood of her own. “Tell her no thanks,” he
yelled up the stairs.
“Already did,” said Josh. “She asked me, too. She’s fucking nuts, telling that
gang of little shits to throw stuff at each other. It’s gonna be a fucking
massacre.”
The profanity startled a laugh out of Matt. Sister Catherine, who was more or
less in charge of the teenagers at St. Agnes, took a “wash your mouth out with
soap” attitude toward cursing. Often literally. “Better watch it,” he said.
“Sister Catherine’s gonna kill you.”
“Eh.” Josh didn’t sound too concerned about the prospect. “She’s outside with
the water balloons, she’s not gonna hear. Come upstairs, I feel like an idiot
shouting down at you.”
Matt might have pointed out that he hadn’t been the one to start this awkward
conversation, or that he’d actually been busy, but though he wouldn’t have
called him and Josh friends, they were at least allies against the pricks at
school and the more oppressive nuns, so he closed his tablet case, grabbed his
cane, and made his way upstairs. Josh waited patiently, and then started moving
slowly and unevenly toward the first floor lounge. He didn’t bother to wait and
see if Matt was following him. That was something Matt had always liked about
Josh—he couldn’t possibly have cared less about Matt’s blindness. He had his
own problems.
Josh grabbed the couch in the lounge, leaving Matt with the love seat, which
still vaguely smelled of the cats who had torn it up before their owners had
donated the chair to the church. The smell was irritating, but at least the
chair was comfortable. Matt settled in and waited to see if Josh would talk. He
didn’t usually seek Matt out, unless it was to ask him to listen for nuns while
he and Courtney smoked weed outside. Now Josh’s eye was twitching worse than
usual—Matt could hear the eyelashes fluttering—and his breath, shallow after
his bout with pneumonia in February, was rapid. Clearly, he had something on
his mind.
Sure enough, after a minute, Josh asked, “You going to prom?”
Matt shrugged. It was stiflingly warm in the room, and he could feel sweat
running down his back with agonizing slowness. “No. I’m not into that kind of
stuff.”
“Yeah. It’s all pretty lame.” Josh shifted in the couch.
Matt let the silence stretch on for a long moment, feeling excruciatingly
uncomfortable. Sister Anne was nice enough to cut the tags off his clothes for
him, but he could feel the ragged edge of his tee-shirt’s tag against the back
of his neck, where the frayed threads tickled and scratched at him. He couldn’t
help but feel irritated that Josh had dragged him out of the basement to sit in
silence after one short exchange of words. “So,” he said finally. “You going?”
“No. Figured I’d take a load off Sister Catherine’s mind and stick around here.
Be a virtuous little Catholic boy like you.”
Josh had only been here a couple of years, so he’d missed the hospital visits
and psychiatrist visits and visits from the police, looking for Stick. He’d
missed the exorcisms. ‘Virtuous little Catholic boy.’ Josh didn’t know the half
of it. “The prom’ll probably suck anyway,” Matt offered.
“Yeah. Father Malone sticking his ass between all the kids dancing, like ‘Leave
room for Jesus!’”
“Censored versions of songs with all the cuss words beeped out.”
“Shitty crepe paper decorations.” Josh laughed, but it wasn’t happy. Matt
managed a laugh, too, all the while trying to work out what Josh’s pounding
heartbeat indicated. Stick’s training might have been helpful for identifying
when someone was about to attack, but it wasn’t all that useful managing a high
school social life. Matt was still working on figuring out how to match
physiological reactions with particular emotions, with mixed results.
Josh let out a sigh that sounded like air hissing from a soda bottle. “You and
me are never gonna get laid, you know that, right?”
Matt blinked, nonplussed. “I’m sorry?”
“You heard me,” said Josh, almost aggressive now. “You and me, we’re not the
kind of guys girls fuck. It’d be one thing to just be the weirdo living with
nuns, or just be poor as shit, or just be a cripple, but all three? Better join
the goddamned priesthood right now.”
“Good luck being a priest with a mouth like that,” shot Matt, stung.
“The nuns are outside, suck-up. You don’t get extra points for being a priss
when they’re not around.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t get extra badass points for cussing every five seconds.
And speak for yourself about not getting laid. You don’t know shit about me.”
“You ever do it?” asked Josh, suddenly eager, and then, all at once, he seemed
to deflate, the bones in his spine creaking as he curled into himself. “Never
mind. Whatever. I get it.”
Matt had been bluffing—he’d never been farther with a girl than holding
hands—and he suddenly felt guilty, not so much about the deception, but about
making Josh feel bad. “No,” he said, “I never did it.”
Josh sighed. “Me neither. I asked Bridget MacNamara to prom. You know her?”
Bridget, like Josh, was a senior, but Matt knew the name. She’d been in his
organic chemistry class for a hot second before dropping it because of a
conflict with fourth-year French. She always smelled like cheap body wash and
chlorine; he’d never asked, but he thought she was probably on the swim team.
“Sure,” he said.
“You wouldn’t know, but she’s so fucking hot. Just, her body, like....” Josh
did something with his hands, a kind of controlled flapping in arcs that sent
stagnant air over Matt’s face. Tracing the outline of her body or something?
“Okay,” said Matt. “So you asked her to prom.”
“Yeah. Figured since she didn’t have a boyfriend, I had as good a shot as
anybody.” Josh made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. “Eh. She’s
going with a group of friends, she said. They’re going out for dinner
beforehand and getting a limo. She said I could come if I wanted. Jesus.”
“But you’re not going?” Matt asked, trying to clarify.
“Fuck, no. Even if I had the money, which I don’t, it was pretty fucking clear
she didn’t actually want to go out with me. If I went, and she, like, even
talked to me, it’d just be a pity thing. Fuck that.”
“Fuck that,” Matt echoed, feeling cold inside. He knew how that went. What it
was like when people were nice to you because they were nice people and you
were pitiful, not because they actually liked you. He sometimes thought he
preferred it when people were assholes. At least then he could hate them
without feeling bad about it.
“It’s not even like I wanted to go to the stupid dance so much,” Josh went on.
“I mean, it’s not like I can actually dance, you know. And it’s probably gonna
be lame as fuck. I just thought, you know. I could be a regular guy, sort of?”
He trailed off at the end, like he wasn’t sure that was what he had meant to
say. “You know. Go out with a girl. Get dressed up. Maybe get to second base at
the end of the night. But no. I’m too fucking...I don’t know. Guess I got a
sign on my head that says ‘Feel sorry for this asshole.’”
“I know what you mean,” said Matt, thinking he probably did. “It’s like
everybody’s always collecting charity for you. Ugh. I hate even asking anybody
for help, I don’t want to remind them that I’m me.”
“Ugh, I know.” Josh sounded more animated now. “And like, Sister Catherine’s
‘sex is evil’ talks, where she pretty much says being disabled is a blessing
because it helps keep us pure? Jesus, do I want to smack her.”
“God yes,” said Matt with feeling. He couldn’t help but respect Sister
Catherine, who took after her namesake in not shrinking away from the grosser
things that went along with being sick or disabled, but her attitudes about sex
drove him nuts. “She doesn’t even give me the talks anymore. I think she’s
literally forgotten that I have a dick.”
“That’s what you get for being a teacher’s pet.” Josh huffed out a loud
breath—angry? Resigned? Matt tilted his head and listened to the air whistling
in and out of Josh’s lungs, wondering where this was going. Though Matt didn’t
make a habit of whining about his problems to other people, it had been kind of
nice commiserating.
“You ever think of—” Josh swallowed the end of the sentence, and Matt sat up
straighter. Josh’s heart rate was rocketing, his body temperature rising.
“I ever think of what?”
“You ever think, like, we could help each other out?”
Matt frowned. “Help each other do what?” Find prom dates? Piss off Sister
Catherine?
“You know.” Josh did something with his hand, something that involved a fist
moving up and down. “Like, uh. Help each other get off.”
Matt could honestly say that he had never thought that. That the idea had never
occurred to him. “I’m not gay,” he said.
“Fuck you, neither am I,” said Josh hotly. “I just thought, you know, since
nobody else is gonna sleep with us. But fine, you wanna die a virgin, have fun
with your sainthood.”
“I’m not gonna die a virgin,” Matt snapped. “Fuck you.”
“Fuck you times two.”
“I—I—fuck you in the zoo.”
That didn’t even make any sense.
It took about thirty seconds for them to realize that they’d been cussing each
other out Doctor Seuss-style, and they both burst out in laughter at the same
time. Matt felt his stomach cramping and his eyes watering up—it had been a
long time since he’d really laughed.
“Shh, shh,” said Josh between gasps. “The nuns are gonna hear us.”
“Nah,” said Matt confidently. “They’re all outside.” A good half of them
complaining about Sister Elizabeth’s foolishness in encouraging the water
balloon fight, and the other half enthusiastically participating in it. Sister
Mary Crispin was surprisingly spry for a 76-year-old.
“Yeah, you got those crazy ears,” Josh agreed. “You’d hear them coming, right?”
“I’d hear them coming.”
The silence that followed was companionable, much more pleasant than the
awkward tension of earlier, but also somehow full of significance in a way it
hadn’t been before. It gave Matt time to think about what Josh had said. He
didn’t think that Josh had a crush on him or anything. If anything, he would
have said that Josh had a crush on Courtney. And surely Josh couldn’t really be
so desperate about being a virgin as to hit up Matt. Matt didn’t actually think
about sex all that often, dreams and stuff he overheard aside, but when he did,
he always assumed that, when he got away from St. Agnes and Holy Cross High
School and all the terrible people he went to school with, he’d find a girl who
liked him for himself and whom he would like, too. They’d fall in love and
then, when the time was right, they’d have sex.
When he really contemplated the matter, though, he didn’t really know why he
thought that. Did he really think people would be that different in college? If
Stick were to be believed, everybody was more or less the same, lived their
lives according to the same basic lies, because they were too lazy and cowardly
to see through them. And love, according to Stick, was the biggest lie of all.
Matt swallowed. He hadn’t realized he’d had so much confidence in his future
love life until that confidence was shaken. Maybe Josh was right. Maybe this
really was their best shot. “So,” he found himself saying, “What exactly do you
mean by ‘help each other out’?”
Josh, who’d sort of fallen over during their laughing fit, sat up again,
propping himself on the arm of the couch so he could lean over toward Matt. “I
don’t know. How do you usually do it when you get off?”
Lately, Sister Teresa Benedicta had been on a classical movie jag, so for the
last month or so Matt had been getting off by imagining Marlene Dietrich or
Ingrid Bergman saying things to him. He suspected that Josh would think this
was lame, though, so he said, “I think about girls’ voices and just kind
of...do it.”
“Nothing fancy, though, right?” asked Josh, sounding almost anxious. “You just
jerk yourself off?”
“Mm-hmm,” agreed Matt, who wasn’t sure exactly what kind of “fancy” stuff Josh
had in mind. “What do you do?”
“Same, I guess, only with Courtney’sPeoplemagazines.”
Matt had never read aPeoplemagazine, but he had a general impression that they
were more gossip than porn. But, he supposed, it might have been a little
awkward asking Courtney’s drug-dealer boyfriend for actual porn. “So....” he
said, feeling like Sister Catherine was going to pop out of the ceiling at any
moment and shame him for even thinking about polluting his body this way, “did
you, I mean. Did you want to try...doing something?”
“Didn’t ask you up here to invite you to the prom, bro.” Josh shifted on the
couch, scooting away from Matt, and said, “Come over here, there’s more room.”
Matt stood up and took one step toward the couch before he stopped. He could
hear Josh unzipping his fly. Was he seriously going to do this?
Josh hesitated. “Dude,” he said. “If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. I
just thought it’d maybe be fun.”
It wasn’t his words but his tone that made Matt step closer. Josh sounded like
Matt felt sometimes, when he’d wanted to try something new and realized that he
couldn’t, that no matter what they said, the coach or the teacher or the other
kids didn’t want him there, didn’t want to deal with the accommodations it
would take for a blind kid to do ice skating or Mathletes or gymnastics. Matt
didn’t blame them, really. He didn’t know how he’d feel in their shoes. But he
did know that he wanted to be the kind of person who helped other people even
when it was hard, and jerking off Josh McMillan on a couch wasn’t exactly a
Herculean task.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Where is it?” He could have made a damned good educated
guess as to where Josh’s dick was, but given the givens, it seemed like a good
idea to ask.
There was the shifting sound of fabric against fabric and skin—probably Josh
sliding his pants down over his hips—and then Josh’s hand, callused and strong
from pushing his wheelchair, wrapped around Matt’s and pulled it toward him.
“Here,” he said, and there it was: smooth, curved, maybe a little bigger than
Matt’s. Matt could feel the veins in it pumping blood rapidly as it jerked
upward into his hand.
“Holy shit,” said Josh, sounding breathless, and Matt forced himself not to
jerk his hand away too fast and hurt Josh.
“Good holy shit or bad?”
“Good,” Josh said. “So fucking good. I didn’t know it felt so different when it
was someone else’s hand.”
Matt smiled—at least he wasn’t screwing up too badly yet—and moved his hand
slowly up and down, curling his fingers loosely around Josh’s dick the way he
would around his own. It was weird, doing it from this angle, but not
difficult. And Josh loved it.
“Oh, God, man, do—do that thing with your thumb again.”
“Oh—oh shit, your hands feel amazing.”
“Fuck, fuck fuck fuck, so good, so good.”
Even without the words, Matt could tell Josh felt good. His heart was racing,
but not in a nervous or angry way—in a way that seemed to make his body thrum
with pleasure. Matt could sense the heat rising from Josh’s skin, sense the
tiny changes in temperature and pressure that was probably his arteries and
veins expanding as he flushed. His—Jesus, those were Josh’s balls—were pulling
upward, and Matt could smell sweat on the air, feel either sweat or...or
something else making the movement of Matt’s hand smoother. It was so—so vivid,
so strong. Each part of it separately could have been gross, but together, it
was kind of amazing. He was doing this. He was making Josh make those excited
little pants, making his blood sing in his veins like this.
Matt didn’t think he’d made another human being this happy since his dad died.
Not that he wanted to think about his dad at a time like this.
Josh’s breath sped up, getting a little wheezy, and Matt could feel muscles
contracting along the dick. He was close. Matt’s own dick was hard now, pushing
uncomfortably against the inside of his jeans. As a general rule, Matt had
excellent control over his own body, but he couldn’t muster up the
concentration to make his erection go down. He was too focused on the warmth
emanating from Josh, the catch in his breath as he said, “Matt—Matt!”
And then Josh was coming. It got all over Matt’s hand, spattered on his jeans,
and he could smell it on Josh, too. It was disgusting. It was amazing. For what
felt like an eternity, neither of them moved or said anything. Matt felt like
he’d discovered some hitherto unknown mystery of the universe. This was
probably what Stick had meant when he said sex made people stupid, but Matt
didn’t care.
“Oh,shit, dude,” said Josh finally, trying and failing to sit up. “I’m like a
limp noodle over here. That was awesome. Step over, like, a foot to your right
so I can do you.”
Even in the haze of his bliss, Matt felt a bit of hesitation. He knew from
three years of sharing a bedroom with Josh that the guy’s fine motor control
wasn’t, well. It wasn’t great. On the other hand, his erection was actually
getting painful.
“I’m not gonna break it, man.” Josh’s voice was sharp, the post-orgasm
afterglow already seeming to wear off, which struck Matt as unfair. That was a
kind of moment that should have lasted forever.
“No, I know,” he said, making up his mind, and he pulled down his pants and
stepped over to Josh.
Josh didn’t break it, and though it took him longer to get Matt off than it
would have taken Matt to get himself off, there was still something wonderful
about knowing that somebody else was touching him like this, gently, with the
intention of making him happy, not out of pity or obligation but out of a kind
of determination that Matt could relate to.
Afterwards, Matt had to make his way over to the first-floor bathroom to wash
his hands and grab the Febreze under the sink. He hated the smell of Febreze,
but he couldn’t imagine that Sister Catherine wouldn’t notice that the lounge
smelled like—well, like sex. Josh was still tired and floppy from his own
orgasm, and they found reruns ofM*A*S*H*on the TV and just chilled until the
nuns and the rest of the kids came in from their water balloon fight.
It wasn’t a bad way to lose his virginity, all told. It made him and Josh
friends in a way they hadn’t been before, even after Josh graduated, moved to a
group home, started going out with a woman from one of his support groups, and
stopped “helping out” Matt. It was a secret the two of them shared, the
knowledge that even if nobody else saw it, their bodies weren’t useless, could
do good things for other people. Sister Catherine’s attitudes on gay sex and
premarital sex and disabled people having sex aside, Matt wasn’t ashamed of it.
He knew that God would understand.
He still didn’t tell Foggy about it, though. He wasn’t sure what to say.
***** I tremble because this fumble has become biblical *****
Chapter Summary
     Matt's first relationship goes really well, until it doesn't. Maybe
     long-term relationships just aren't his thing.
Foggy’s first girlfriend had been, literally, his high school sweetheart;
they’d started dating sophomore year, and broken up freshman year of college
when it became obvious that the strain of distance was more than their
relationship could bear. Her name was Tanya Hodgkins, and Foggy was still
friends with her on Facebook, and had a lot of happy or funny stories from
their relationship to share.
Matt shared stories sometimes, too, but he had a hard time mustering up the
fond detachment that Foggy seemed to feel when he talked about his exes.
His first girlfriend was named Naomi Franken, and she was wonderful, and it
still hurt to think about her sometimes.
They’d met the first semester of their freshman year. College was strange for
Matt. He’d always sort of thought that he’d make lots of friends in college,
once he was around people who hadn’t known him during that rough period after
his dad had died and before he got over wanting Stick to come back, but the
truth was, he was at sea among the other freshman at Empire State. Most of them
had parents who were bankers or lawyers or college professors; very few of them
were first-generation college students, and Matt didn’t know any of them who
were both poor and disabled, or both poor and an orphan, or both an orphan and
disabled, let alone all three. They talked about time they’d spent abroad, and
complained about not having the latest model of phone, and didn’t seem to give
a thought to how much it cost to eat at a restaurant every weekend, and Matt
had absolutely no idea what to say to any of them.
Naomi was different. Not—not in the basics, since her parents were still alive,
and had plenty of money from being a dentist (mother) and an architect
(father), and as far as Matt knew, she wasn’t disabled. But unlike most of his
classmates, Naomi knew that all that stuff made a difference. She thought about
things. She was in Matt’s freshman sociology course, and in just about every
class, she said something smart, insightful, compassionate—and in a class that
had a cluster of aspiring frat guys who subscribed to the theory that people
who couldn’t make it financially just weren’t trying hard enough, it meant a
lot to Matt to have an ally in the class who was willing to call them out on
their shit. She wanted to be a social worker, and was genuinely interested in
what Matt had to say about his own experiences. She didn’t tiptoe around him
because he was blind, but asked a lot of smart questions about how he did his
homework and what kind of accommodations helped him navigate New York and what
would be helpful for her to do when they were together. She made pasta and
canned soup in her dormitory lounge instead of going out on the weekends, and
she always smelled like Campbell’s and like the organic soap she used, glycerin
and plant oils and rose water.
They had lunch together at least a few times a week—they had class together on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it became a habit for them to go to her dorm lounge
and make sandwiches afterward, but sometimes they met on Wednesdays, too, since
Matt’s criminal justice class got out at the same time as Naomi’s biology
class. Matt basked in the warmth that radiated from her as she sat across from
him at the little table in the lounge, and cherished the moments when her curly
hair, tied back in a ponytail, brushed against him, and when, one day in
October, Naomi said, “Hey, Matt, would it be okay if I kissed you?” Matt smiled
like he couldn’t remember ever smiling before and said, “I wish you would.” And
she did, and it was hot and wet and tasted like spit and corned beef on rye,
and absolutely perfect.
And Matt, who had never been seriously interested in a girl before, fell head
over heels in love.
They had sex for the first time about a month into the relationship. They’d
been sitting in her dorm room, watching (or in Matt’s case, listening to)The
Daily Showon Naomi’s laptop, when Naomi had asked, “So, this is super awkward,
but have you ever, uh.”
“Ever what?” Matt had been slightly distracted by Lewis Black’s monologue, but
Naomi’s heart rate was picking up, and he turned his attention back toward her.
“Ugh,” said Naomi, but it seemed aimed more at herself than at Matt. “Ever had
sex with a girl. Sorry, I thought I’d be cooler talking about it.”
Ever had sex with a girl, she had specified. “No,” said Matt carefully. “Have
you? With a guy, I mean. Or with a girl. I don’t judge.”
“Well. I did a couple of times, my senior year of high school. With my
boyfriend at the time. It kind of sucked.”
The tightness in her voice told Matt that it had more than “kind of” sucked,
and he felt a terrible anger rising in him, ready to tear anybody who had ever
hurt her apart. “How come?” he asked.
She shrugged, knocking her shoulder against his. She did that all the time,
touched him casually, like it had never occurred to her that he would break. He
loved her for it. “It just. I don’t know, it was over really fast, and it hurt
more than I was expecting. It wasn’t romantic or anything. Not that I’m a super
romantic person or anything, but. I don’t know.”
“Well, we don’t have to...do anything, if you don’t want to. I like just doing
what we’ve been doing fine.”
“That’s the thing, though.” She blew out an exasperated breath through her
mouth, sending a stray curl of hair out of her eyes. “I really like the idea of
it, you know? And I really like you. And I was thinking maybe—I mean, I don’t
want to rush you or anything, this was just an idea—but maybe we could do stuff
other than just, you know, straight-up...intercourse.”
Matt straightened up, no longer paying any attention to Jon Stewart and
Samantha Bee chatting on the laptop. “What did you have in mind?”
“We could, um. I’ve never had someone eat me out, but my sister Esther says
it’s kind of amazing. I’d do you if you do me.”
“Wow.” The idea was kind of stunning. As a general rule, Matt didn’t fantasize
about oral sex. Hands were one thing, but the idea of other people’s...parts,
or fluids, or whatever, in his mouth made him gag, and the thought of trusting
his own parts to someone else’s mouth, a mouth presumably equipped with teeth
and filled with particles of chewed food and germs of all sorts, was genuinely
horrifying. He and Josh had never even discussed doing things with their
mouths.
But Naomi was different. Things that were gross with other people were
wonderful with her—Matt even liked her B.O., and the way her shoes smelled, and
the way she sniffled after she sneezed. Kissing Naomi was like...like they were
having a conversation without words, like they were learning stuff about each
other based on closeness and taste and how Naomi’s cheek felt under his hand.
Things that Matt wouldn’t even dream of doing with other people might actually
be nice with Naomi. But could he make it nice for her? He didn’t want to be
like her high school boyfriend, fast and painful and not at all romantic. He
wanted to make her happy.
“We don’t have to,” she said, and Matt realized that he’d been quiet for a long
time. “It was just an idea.”
“No,” said Matt. “I mean, I’d like to. I just, I don’t know how good I’ll be. I
mean, growing up with a bunch of nuns, I don’t have a clear idea of what
exactly you do during oral sex.”
“I’ve never done it either,” said Naomi, and Matt could hear the smile in her
voice. “I mean, I’ve given a blowjob before, a couple of times, but I’ve never
done it the other way. We can figure it out together.”
Matt liked the sound of that. “Is your roommate going to be gone for a while?”
“Her mom’s taking her to a hotel tonight and tomorrow for a ‘girls’ weekend.’”
Naomi reached up to take off Matt’s sunglasses and stroked the side of his
face. It sent a shiver up his spine and a jolt of sensation to his dick.
“Plenty of time.”
They tried cunnilingus first, since they were both new at it, and Matt liked to
think of himself as at least somewhat gentlemanly. They threw their clothes in
the hamper—one more thing to love about Naomi was that she was good about
keeping the floors in her room clear for Matt—and settled awkwardly on Naomi’s
bed.
“Do you want me to, you know....” Naomi grasped Matt’s hand and began directing
it toward her crotch. “Help you find it?”
“I think I can probably figure it out,” Matt started, but then his hand was on
her...well, the sex education at Catholic school hadn’t been great, so he
didn’t know what this part of her body was called, but he’d never felt anything
like it before. The hair here was thick, wiry, and curly, and as he moved his
fingers down, everything started to part, with a warm crevice in between. “On
the other hand,” he said, “a little help never hurt anybody.”
Naomi laughed and guided his hand to her clitoris, which was a strange little
bump surrounded by wrinkled skin, and then to the opening itself, with its
smooth, slick walls and tight, wrinkled mouth.
“Oh my God,” said Matt.
“Likewise,” said Naomi, her voice going a little pinched. There was—there was
blood flowing quickly to her breasts, he could hear tiny contractions in the
skin as her nipples hardened. “So what do you think? You want to try it with
your mouth?”
Matt swallowed. “Definitely.”
Downstairs, Naomi tasted salty, with a thicker consistency than sweat and a
stronger flavor behind it that Matt couldn’t identify. It didn’t feel like
regular skin, where he was licking, and he ran an exploratory tongue up and
down the length of the crevice between her legs.
“Holy shit,” Naomi gasped. “That’s amazing. Try the clit?”
Bringing his tongue up to the place he’d felt the clitoris earlier, he licked
it.
“Harder! Matt—”
He licked harder, and then tried to run his tongue in a circle around it. He
didn’t know how he was doing technique-wise, but Naomi liked it, the familiar
heat rising from her body and her heartbeat rapidly thrumming.
“Could—could you kind of—kind of stick it in? Your tongue, I mean?”
Matt was happy to oblige. This was the strangest, most wonderful sensation in
the world. He was buried in her down here, her smell overwhelming him with
every breath, the air in his mouth tasting only of her. The heat was
unbelievable, the increasing slickness sending unfamiliar but exciting signals
to Matt’s dick. He could feel her hands in his hair, sometimes tugging,
sometimes tangling her fingers in it, sometimes just laying them flat, and
having her on both sides of his head made him feel surrounded in a comforting
way, as if she were embracing him.
He didn’t know how long they stayed like that, Naomi lying flat on the bed,
Matt half kneeling, half crouching between her legs. He didn’t care. He would
have stayed there forever, in this perfect, endless moment. He wanted to spend
every second of the rest of his life making her happy like this.
At some point, he heard muscles contracting, felt them tense through Naomi’s
vagina, and she said, “Oh—Matt—I’m—Oh!” All of Matt’s world contracted into one
point, and he felt like his heart would beat right out of his chest. And then
she made a noise that was like a gasp and a breathless shriek, and more of that
curious thick slick substance came out in a gush, and Matt licked at it like he
could clean her with his mouth. He couldn’t imagine doing this with Josh, but
it seemed perfectly natural, right even, to do it with Naomi.
She pulled at his hair. “Matt—no, it’s, it’s too much.”
The bottom plummeted out of Matt’s world, and a cold fear stabbed him in the
heart, but before he could apologize, she was sliding to the edge of the bed
and pulling him into a kiss. “That was amazing,” she murmured into his cheek as
she pulled away. “The most amazing thing in the world. Thank you.”
Matt rediscovered a little of his equilibrium, and he managed to say, “Not bad
for a first time?”
“No.” She buried her face in his neck. “Amazing.” They sat like that for a
while, Matt listening as their pulses slowed, and then Naomi said, “Want me to
return the favor?”
It was at that moment that Matt realized that he had come on Naomi’s floor. It
smelled, and it was warmer than the floor and stood out like a sore thumb in
his general sense of the room’s temperature. His cheeks burned with
embarrassment. “Um. Not necessary.” The mind controls the body, my ass!
“Matt,” said Naomi, something like awe in her voice, “did you come from eating
me out?”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said, laying her head on his shoulder again. “I love you.”
I love you. Matt was living out the most wonderful dream, one he never wanted
to wake up from. “I love you, too,” he murmured into her hair.
They did it a lot after that, and eventually Naomi did get around to giving
Matt a blowjob—which was amazing—and after they got a pack of condoms from
Student Health and Matt got some practice putting them on, they tried full-on
sex, which was also amazing. And then, because the lady at Student Health had
given them a lecture about it, they tried cunnilingus and fellatio with dental
dams and condoms, which was weird and (in the case of the dental dams) left a
plasticky aftertaste in Matt’s mouth, but was also its own kind of amazing.
Matt knew it was stupid to think in terms of forever, that most of the time
someone’s first serious relationship didn’t last, but he couldn’t help but
think that he and Naomi were going to go the distance. Sure, he wasn’t going to
be bringing much into the marriage in terms of assets or familial support, but
at least Naomi would never have to deal with a nagging mother-in-law. She was
Jewish and he was Catholic, but whatever, she could convert, or he could
convert, or they could get a license at City Hall and raise their kids
Unitarian Universalist. Or not—they didn’t have to have kids, if Naomi didn’t
want them, it could just be the two of them, and that would be perfect, too.
All Matt’s long-term dreams aside, he hadn’t actually planned on inviting
himself along to Naomi’s parents’ for Thanksgiving. For starters, they lived
outside of Chicago, which was a hell of a trip, farther away from New York City
than Matt had ever been. Even if they’d lived in Manhattan, though, the last
thing on earth that Matt wanted either Naomi or her parents to think was that
Matt was a moocher, or some poor little waif who didn’t have anywhere to go
over the holidays. The dorms at ESU closed, but the emergency short-term
housing rooms at St. Agnes were open, and Sister Mary Crispin had told Matt
that he was free to spend his vacations there as long as he was a full-time
student.
And Matt was perfectly okay with that, but when the subject of holidays had
come up and he’d told Naomi about his plans, she’d said, “You know, the nuns
sound really nice and everything, but if you wanted, you could come home with
me over the break.”
Matt winced. “That’s okay, I wouldn’t want to impose.”
Naomi touched his hand, a silent request for permission, and when he nodded,
she reached up her hand to Matt’s cheek, gently brushing a thumb over the
stubble on his jaw. “You wouldn’t be,” she said. “You’re my boyfriend—my
parents would have to meet you sooner or later.”
That...was an aspect of dating Naomi that Matt hadn’t thought about as much as
he now realized he ought to have. “I, uh. I don’t know. It seems like kind of
short notice to invite myself over.”
“You wouldn’t be,” said Naomi, moving her hand down to Matt’s thigh. “I’d be
inviting you over. And my mom is great at finding cheap flights at short
notice, in case you were worried about that.”
Her voice was so great—low and warm and smooth. Matt could have listened to it
all day. “You don’t think your parents would mind?” he asked, his resolve
weakening.
“I think they’d be thrilled,” Naomi said. “You’re smart, dedicated, and want to
make the world a better place—they’ll probably like you better than me. And
plus, you and I get along really well. That already gives you a head start on
Dale with my parents. Dale was my boyfriend in high school,” she explained.
“You didn’t get along with Dale?” asked Matt, though he wasn’t surprised. From
what hints Naomi had let slip, Dale sounded like a douche.
“Not near the end we didn’t,” said Naomi. “We fought all the time. He said some
really shitty things to me in front of my parents, and I think my dad wanted to
kill him.” Matt gulped involuntarily, and she patted his thigh reassuringly.
“Like I said, though, they’re gonna love you. Just be yourself. I really want
them to get to know you the way I do.”
Well, Matt could hardly say no to that. And when Naomi told him two days later
that she’d talked to her parents about bringing Matt with her over
Thanksgiving, and they’d been totally okay with it, he couldn’t detect even a
hint of insincerity in her voice. He had the sense of being on a train going at
breakneck speed to someplace unknown but potentially wonderful—everything with
Naomi was going so well, and so fast, he could hardly catch his breath.
He loved it.
That wasn’t to say that there weren’t obstacles along the way. He was stunned
when Naomi told him how much a plane ticket from JFK to O’Hare cost, and she’d
been sheepish when he reminded her that he didn’t have a credit card. She’d
offered to pay for it herself, but that idea horrified Matt, and he broke into
the student loan money he was saving until next semester to pay her back in
cash.
Once the plane tickets were dealt with, there was the airport, which Matt was
convinced was some previously unheard-of circle of hell. The roaring of
engines—the smells of masses of people, sweating in their too-warm coats as
they lugged around their suitcases—the sounds of multiple announcements blaring
simultaneously over the PA system—Matt’s senses weren’t going to help him find
his way around the airport at all. The opposite, in fact. And the plane was
even worse. Naomi was sympathetic and understanding when Matt freaked out at
the pressure change as the plane took off, and when he found himself hurling
into a bag provided by the patient flight attendant, but the sense that Matt
was making a nuisance of himself filled his stomach with roiling nerves and
overpowered any feelings of excitement he might have been entertaining.
But when Naomi’s parents came to pick them up at the airport, Matt let himself
think that things would be okay.
“Mom, Dad,” said Naomi, “this is Matt, my boyfriend.” And she sounded...kind of
proud about it. Matt stood up straighter and tried to be worthy of it.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Franken. Dr. Franken.” He held out a hand, hoping one of
them would take it.
“Oh, please, Matt. Call me Daniel,” said Mr. Franken, taking Matt’s hand. “It’s
great to meet you. Gail and I have heard so much about you.”
Matt smiled and said, “Mostly good, I hope,” because that was what people said
in this kind of situation, wasn’t it?
Dr. Franken laughed and took his hand when Mr. Franken let go of it. “Of course
mostly good,” she said. “Should we head down to the baggage claim?”
Matt hadn’t checked any bags—what on earth would be the point in paying twenty-
five bucks for a five-day trip when just about all the clothes he owned fit
into a carry-on anyway?—but Naomi had, so they went down to the bag claim,
collected Naomi’s bag, and drove out into the suburbs.
When they stepped into the house, Matt blinked, paused, and clicked with his
tongue a few times just to verify what his senses were telling him. Yep. This
house was enormous.
“Here it is!” said Dr. Franken. “Home sweet home. Naomi can show you where to
put your bags, and we can come together in the living room for cheese and
crackers.”
“That sounds great,” said Matt, taking one step forward and promptly tripping
over a pair of shoes, too close by the door for him to have caught when
sweeping with his cane and too small for him to have noticed in his first
impression of the house.
“Matt!” Naomi grabbed his arm, saving him from face-planting into the hardwood
floor. “Are you okay?” Before waiting for an answer, she turned to her parents
and snapped, “You guys. I told you we had to keep the floors clear for Matt.”
“I’m fine, really,” Matt said, because he was, but he had to stand around
listening to apologies for a few minutes before he and Naomi could escape to go
put their bags in Naomi’s room.
Naomi’s room faced the east, with big windows that cast stretches of warmth
over the floor but let in small, cold drafts of fresh air. The air flow around
the furniture helped Matt identify the shapes of the bed, dresser, desk, and a
couple of bookshelves against one wall. It was a really nice room, and Matt
would have told Naomi so when she said, “Sorry again about my parents. I’ll be
better about keeping an eye out for crap they left laying around. I really did
tell them to pick up a little bit.”
“Naomi,” said Matt, grasping her hand, “I grew up in a home with dozens of
orphans with physical and behavioral issues. I promise you I have dealt with
way, way bigger messes than a pair of shoes on the floor.”
Sitting around eating cheese and crackers in the living room was...odd. The
living room itself was nothing like the dingy little den where Matt had watched
his father fighting on their old TV—more like the lobby at the visitors’ center
at ESU, all polished surfaces and expensive-feeling, uncomfortable furniture.
Mr. and Dr. Franken were nice, but in a way that made it clear they weren’t
exactly sure what to talk about. Or maybe it was more that they weren’t sure
what they were supposed to talk about, once they’d exhausted the subject of
Matt and Naomi’s classes and how they’d met. Mr. Franken mentioned that Naomi’s
sister Esther was spending Thanksgiving with her boyfriend and his family—no
rescue from that corner, it seemed—and then, apparently for lack of anything
better to talk about, expounded on the boyfriend, who worked in the music
industry, and the boyfriend’s parents, who were a banker and an interior
designer. No wonder Mr. Franken liked them, thought Matt—architects and
interior designers probably had a lot to discuss with each other.
“Dad!” said Naomi in a low voice, and Mr. Franken fell silent.
In the awkward pause that followed, Matt tried to untangle the undercurrent of
the exchange. The only conclusion he could draw was that Naomi was worried
about making Matt feel bad, talking about Esther’s boyfriend’s rich parents
when Matt’s dad was dead and had spent his whole life just trying to make ends
meet. Matt didn’t need to be protected that way, though. He wasn’t embarrassed
about being an orphan, or about who his dad had been, so he cleared his throat
and said, “My dad was a boxer.”
“Oh,” said Dr. Franken. “Like, Sylvester Stallone,Rocky, that kind of boxer?”
Well, he wasn’t a dog, thought Matt, wondering what other kind of boxer Dr.
Franken might have had in mind. “Yeah,” he said. “You guys probably would have
gotten along. He always needed a good dentist.”
“I can imagine,” said Dr. Franken, a little bit of humor warming her voice, but
again, the conversation seemed to die.
Matt...didn’t have a great feeling about how this trip was going.
That night, as he sat in the family room (as opposed to the living room)
watching the news with Mr. Franken, he could hear Dr. Franken and Naomi talking
in the kitchen on the other side of the first floor. The news anchor wouldn’t
stop speculating about the details of a shooting where they just didn’t know
enough to say anything worthwhile, so without really meaning to eavesdrop, Matt
zoned out and found himself overhearing Dr. Franken and Naomi’s conversation.
“I hope you’re going to get a haircut while you’re in town,” said Dr. Franken.
“It’s getting a little out of control.”
“Mom.” Naomi sounded irritated in a way Matt had never heard. “It’s fine, and
they actually do have hair stylists in New York. Stop nagging.”
“I’m a mom. That’s what I’m here for.”
Naomi set something down on the granite countertop—a plate, maybe? “I hope
you’re not gonna say that kind of stuff around Matt,” she said. “His mom left
his family when he was a baby. She didn’t even come to see him when he was
blinded, or when his dad died.”
There was a long silence. Dr. Franken’s heart was pounding, as was Naomi’s, but
it was hard to tell from across the house just what the cause of their stress
was. Matt felt a sick feeling in his stomach. Finally, Dr. Franken said, “I’m
sorry to hear that. I have to ask you, though, sweetheart, is there anything I
can say around Matt?”
Shit. Shit shit shit. Well, eavesdroppers never did hear good of themselves.
Matt pulled his attention away from their conversation and focused again on the
inane news anchor. He made a mental note to himself to be really understanding
if Mr. or Dr. Franken stuck their feet in their mouths at any point. He didn’t
want to come off as overly sensitive.
Thanksgiving dinner didn’t get any less awkward. The food was delicious, the
kind of high-quality turkey that St. Agnes had never had the money to provide
for its wards, and Mr. Franken was a great cook, but Naomi and her mother
seemed to be engaged in a full-on feud, and Mr. Franken didn’t seem to know
whose side to take.
“This turkey’s delicious, Mr. Franken,” Matt said.
Mr. Franken was so grateful for the chance to talk about something meaningless
that he didn’t even tell Matt again to call him “Daniel,” instead engaging in
an in-depth discourse about how to prepare a turkey so it didn’t dry out in the
oven. Mr. Franken was a big believer in fresh herbs and regularly checking your
oven’s temperature with a thermometer. Since Matt had never made a turkey in
his life, all he could comment on was what particular things he found
especially tasty.
The rest of the trip passed more or less like that, and on the plane ride back
to New York, Matt thought that Naomi was even more stressed-out than he was.
“Hey,” he said when it became obvious that Naomi wasn’t going to be proffering
a lot of conversation, “your parents were great.”
“Depends on your definition of ‘great,’” said Naomi, “but thanks.” She lay her
head on Matt’s shoulder, and despite the sense that he was going to pop like an
overfull balloon in the awful, oppressively loud plane, Matt felt himself begin
to relax.
“What were you and your mom fighting about?”
Naomi sighed. “It’s really hard to explain things to them, especially my mom.
We’ve always been really close, but—I don’t know. It’s like she’s on her own
little planet, and anything that doesn’t fit into her worldview, she just
doesn’t want to deal with it.”
“That’s not on you, though,” Matt pointed out. He’d suspected that he was part
of what they were fighting about, but it sounded like there was probably more
to it.
“I guess,” said Naomi, not sounding terribly convinced.
“I got along pretty well with your dad.” It was true, though they hadn’t really
talked about themselves so much as they’d talked about cooking, the weather,
and whether they thought the latest military actions in Sokovia were more about
unrest in the region or Tony Stark’s bottom line.
Naomi tapped her fingers against Matt’s chest, sending vibrations rattling
through him. He liked it a lot better than the vibrations coming up from the
floor of the plane against his feet. “That’s good,” she said. “I don’t know.
Everything just seemed simpler at school.”
He knew what she meant, he thought. At school, they could more or less do what
they wanted. But Naomi had a whole other world she had to fit into. And in a
sense, Matt supposed, he did, too.
When they got back, there was only a week and a half of classes before the
finals period began, and everybody was stressed out of their minds prepping for
tests and writing final papers. Two nights in a row, Naomi showed up at Matt’s
dorm room, crying because she’d had a fight with her mother. “I can’t deal with
this now,” she said on the second night. “It’s finals week.”
“We’ll get through it one day at a time,” said Matt, but he wasn’t sure how
comforting he was. He had his own stresses. His calculus teacher was being a
real dick about giving him study materials he could actually use, and Matt had
never been the world’s best math student to begin with. He was probably going
to have to go complain to Disability and Accessibility Services, and he hated
doing that.
He and Naomi clung to each other on Matt’s bed. Matt’s roommate Dustin was
AWOL, so they had the place to themselves. Matt wasn’t entirely sure Dustin was
going to finish the semester, much less his degree.
The day before Matt’s first final, for Spanish 301, Naomi wanted to meet in her
dorm lounge for lunch. Matt brought his laptop and headphones, so they could
look at each other’s papers for sociology if they had time after lunch. He
hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours since they’d gotten back from Chicago,
and he wasn’t even sure if what he’d written made any sense.
Naomi was oddly quiet as she heated up soup for them in the microwave. There
was something almost aggressive about her movements and posture, but Matt was
at a loss to interpret the signals he was getting. Maybe she’d had another
fight with her mom. He felt suddenly pissed at Dr. Franken. Couldn’t she lay
off whatever the deal was between her and Naomi long enough for Naomi to get
through her final exams? The end of someone’s first semester of college was
stressful enough without parents picking fights.
They ate their soup with plastic spoons, hot enough that it dulled Matt’s sense
of taste a little, and talked about their exam schedules. Wednesday was going
to be particularly brutal for Naomi—sociology in the morning, biology in the
afternoon, and she couldn’t even relax after that, because her history final
was Thursday morning. Matt made a mental note to get her coffee and a muffin
after she got out of the biology final.
“We need to talk.”
Matt set down his spoon. “Thought that’s what we were doing,” he pointed out.
“No, I know.” Naomi’s right hand was fidgeting, tapping the bowl of her spoon
repeatedly against the edge of the table. The noise was distracting, and Matt
forced himself to focus on what she was saying. “It’s about...us.”
“Okay,” said Matt slowly. That sounded...serious, and not necessarily in a good
way.
“Matt, I really—” Naomi sniffed and swallowed. “You’re a really great guy, and
I’ve really loved being with you, but I think maybe—maybe we need to take a
break.”
“Take a break,” Matt repeated. The words didn’t seem like real words to him,
just random sounds.
“I was talking to my mom again last night, and—I don’t know, I have so much
going on right now, college is such a big step up from high school, and I
really think I have to—”
“Hold on,” said Matt. “‘Take a break.’ That means break up, right? That’s like
a euphemism. You’re breaking up with me.” The words hurt coming out, like they
were physical things that didn’t want to make the journey up out of his throat.
“It’s not you,” said Naomi, which was both not an answer to the question and
not honest, if her pulse and the way she was holding herself were any
indication. “I have to, to spend more time on my schoolwork. I’m not doing
great in bio and I really need to be able to talk to my mom about it.”
“Why can’t you talk to your mom about it?” asked Matt. He could hear his voice
getting louder, but it seemed to be out of his control. “You’re fighting about
me? I get it, she doesn’t like me, but I don’t get why. What did I ever do to
her?”
“It’s not that she doesn’t like you. She just—she worries about me getting too
intense too fast, which I always do, and with you, it’s—I love you, I do, but
you’ve got so much going on. It’s a lot, you know? It’s too much.”
By It’s too much, she meant you’re too much. Too much trouble, too much time,
too much inconvenience. He always had been, Matt thought, half-disbelievingly.
A hundred dreams died sudden, brutal deaths. He knew it was going to hurt like
hell really soon, but at the moment, he just felt numb. “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
He could have pointed out that they were both at a really stressful point in
the semester, and that maybe it would be a good idea to table this discussion
until they’d made it through finals week, or at least until Naomi had gotten
past her history exam on Thursday, but he didn’t. What was the point? You
couldn’t change somebody’s mind for them, that wasn’t how the world worked. “I
guess I should go, then,” he said.
He went back to his room, threw his cane and laptop and headphones on Dustin’s
empty bed, and cried into his pillow until he fell asleep.
His Spanish exam the next morning came and went in a haze. He hadn’t studied
the previous day at all, but whatever, the grammar was all familiar to Matt,
and he could guess vocabulary from context. Vivian, the woman from Disability
and Accessibility Services who administered his test, touched his hand as he
was putting away his things. “Matt, are you okay? You don’t look so hot.”
Matt shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “Just tired.”
He went back to his dorm, edited his sociology paper and e-mailed it to the
professor, and went to sleep again. At least, he thought, there wasn’t a final
exam in sociology. He didn’t know if he could sit in the same room with Naomi
right now and calmly take an exam.
He didn’t have any finals the next day, so he stayed in his room and studied
all day, not even taking a break to eat. By the evening, Matt felt completely
empty and hollow inside, physically, mentally, emotionally. He couldn’t imagine
getting up and going to take Professor Douchebag’s calculus final the next day.
A few blocks away, Matt could hear the strains of a party. He vaguely
remembered a guy in his criminal justice class inviting him before the
break—some kind of end-of-the-semester frat party—but he’d never seriously
considered going. The kinds of parties he and Naomi went to were the kind where
there were never any more than ten people, there was never any alcohol
involved, and the main activities were things like movies, board games, and
discussing politics. Matt had never felt any urge to go to one of those loud,
crowded parties he overheard sometimes, where people played drinking games and
blasted the Beastie Boys and Smash Mouth at head-splitting volumes. In fact,
the idea had always been absolutely repellent to him.
Matt got out of bed and found some clothes to put on that smelled moderately
less disgusting than the ones he was wearing. He wanted to crawl out of his
skin. Maybe going to a party where he could drink himself out of his mind was
the next best thing.
“Hey, Matt,” said Jesse from Intro to Criminal Justice when Matt knocked on the
frat house door, sounding surprised. “You here for the party?”
Matt shrugged. “You said I should come by.”
“Yeah, I did. Come on in.” He ushered Matt in with a hand on his shoulder and
then grabbed Matt’s arm, practically dragging him over to a couch against the
wall in what Matt imagined was a living room of some sort. “Let me get you set
up over here,” said Jesse. “Sit down, it’s a couch.” Matt contemplated taking
his arm back and protesting this manhandling, but it didn’t matter. The place
was loud and crowded enough that finding his way without bumping into someone
would be a legitimate issue.
“Hey,” yelled Jesse over Matt’s head. “Joe! This is Matt from my criminal
justice class. You get him whatever he wants to drink, okay?” To Matt, he said,
“What’s your pleasure?”
Matt hadn’t drunk any alcohol in over a year, since the last time Courtney had
smuggled in some vodka from her drug-dealer boyfriend. “Scotch on the rocks?”
Was that the kind of thing they had at frat parties? Matt really couldn’t
stomach the idea of cheap beer right now.
“Shit, dude, I should have known you had classy taste,” said Jesse. “I love
this guy!” he shouted to Joe. “Scotch on the rocks for the future Supreme Court
Justice over here!”
Matt sat on the couch for a while, alternating scotch with screwdrivers. Joe
the bartender and his occasional replacement Rob seemed willing to give Matt
whatever he asked for. As Matt had suspected, the question of IDs or whether
Matt—or anyone else—was 21 or not never even came up. A couple of people came
by and said hello to him, but nobody stopped to talk; Matt imagined that a
blind guy in the corner would be a curiosity for a party, but one with short-
lived entertainment value. Around him was a perpetual game of beer pong,
rotating players in and out; a small cluster of guys played darts outside of
the kitchen; a large cluster of girls was trying to remember the lyrics to a
song by Rihanna, with a couple of guys shouting crude suggestions occasionally.
The music was loud enough to be physically painful, but Matt was drunk enough
that the pain actually took him to a kind of meditative place, half aware of
what was going on and half floating in his own head, breathing deeply and
sipping his drink without tasting it.
“Hey!”
Matt didn’t realize the woman was talking to him until she followed that up
with, “Hey, guy on the couch with the sunglasses!”
The voice was familiar, as was the perfume, but Matt couldn’t place it until
the woman added, “Aren’t you in my American poetry class?”
With effort, Matt lifted his heavy head and turned his head in the direction of
the voice. “I don’t know, am I?”
“Oh, sorry,” said the woman, but she didn’t sound overly apologetic or flush
warm with embarrassment, which was a point in her favor in Matt’s book. “My
name’s Holly—I usually sit, like, three people over from you.”
“Okay,” Matt said, not making an effort to sound too interested. “I’m Matt.”
“Right.” She sat down next to him on the couch, probably so she could be heard
over the noise of the party. It didn’t really matter to Matt, so he returned
his attention to his drink. He listened with half his mind as she said, “Didn’t
expect to see you here.”
Matt contemplated telling her that, contrary to popular belief, sometimes blind
people felt the need to get hammered just like sighted people did, but he
couldn’t figure out a way to make that both make sense and not come off like he
wanted to get into a fistfight with her, so he just said, “Oh?”
“Yeah. I mean, you’re super smart, right? I figured you were probably spending
this part of the semester in the library or something.”
“Mm.” That was sort of flattering, or would have been, had Matt been more sober
and less miserable. “Well. My girlfriend just broke up with me, so.”
“Ouch,” said Holly, wincing. “My boyfriend broke up with me last week. Said he
needed to focus on his classes going into finals. Whatever, that’s a lame
excuse. What is it with these assholes breaking up with us right before the
holidays?”
“She’s not an asshole,” Matt said, feeling obscurely offended on Naomi’s
behalf.
Holly shrugged and sipped her—vodka sour? No, amaretto sour—the alcohol was
messing with Matt’s senses, just a little bit. “If you say so,” she said. “Me,
I have a general rule of thumb when it comes to breakups—if I break up with
somebody, it’s because he’s an asshole, and if somebody breaks up with me, it’s
because he’s an asshole.”
That startled a laugh out of Matt. “You’ve got it all—got it all covered.”
“It’s worked for me so far,” said Holly. “Hey, whatcha drinking there?”
The change of subject threw Matt for a second, but after a moment he mustered
the presence of mind to say, “Scotch on the rocks.”
“Hey, Joe,” called Holly over to where one of the frat brothers was tending bar
in the corner, “when you get a chance, could you grab my friend here another
scotch on the rocks?”
“Sure thing, Hol! Hang tight, Matt.”
“Oh, I don’t—” Matt started—in spite of the alcohol, he was starting to come
out of the haze of self-involved sadness he’d been in for the last couple of
days and realized that, despite all expectations to the contrary, somebody was
actually trying to engage in social interaction with him. “I’m okay,” he said.
“Well, if you can’t drink it, God knows I can,” said Holly. “Come on, Matt,
let’s bitch about our exes and have a good time, huh?”
Matt took another sip of his drink, savoring it. Maybe—maybe Matt could be the
kind of guy who went to parties like this and had a good time. Maybe once he
got all his thoughts and feelings about Naomi out there, they wouldn’t hurt so
much. “Okay,” he said to Holly. “So what’s your pre-holiday breakup story?”
He and Holly talked for two hours, having started with their breakups and moved
on to their families and then to what they were studying. Holly was a math
major and was taking American Poetry to fulfill a requirement, which explained
why she disliked it so much; her parents were divorced, which Holly joked was
the ideal state of being for rich parents but which Matt could tell really
bothered her; her ex was an economics major named James who, in retrospect, she
thought she should never have dated in the first place. Having never been to a
loud party before, Matt had never thought of them as the kind of place where
any kind of intimacy could possibly be formed, but they seemed to have carved
out a little pocket for themselves on the couch, a little world where they
could talk about whatever they wanted and somehow be isolated both from the
rest of the party and the pressures of the rest of their lives.
By the time their voices were growing hoarse, the party had quieted down a
bit—not because people were going home, but because people were passing out or
hooking up in the bedrooms upstairs. Some people were still downstairs
drinking, but the beer pong table had been abandoned and the drinkers were
clustered around in small groups talking as Matt and Holly were. Upstairs, a
woman groaned as she orgasmed and someone, either her or her partner, muffled
it with a hand.
One of the other people downstairs laughed, and Matt realized that the woman
had been loud enough not just for him to hear, but for everyone else to hear,
too, and he flushed.
Holly made a considering noise. “Well, somebody’s having a good time.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Matt, forcing a laugh.
“Maybe she’s got the right idea. What do you think, dude?” she asked. “Rebound
sex? Get over our asshole exes?”
Matt was taken aback, but he didn’t know why. Holly clearly wasn’t stymied by
the usual obstacles of shyness and social convention when it came to things
like this, either because the party atmosphere broke down those kinds of
boundaries or just because she was a particularly bold person. On another day,
when Matt was 100% sober and hadn’t spent the last few days feeling about as
low as he could feel, he would have politely turned her down, told her that he
wasn’t into casual sex, but tonight—tonight—Matt thought about the warmth of
Naomi’s skin, the smell of her, the way it felt when she came and the
reverberations of it shook her whole body. He thought about what it felt like
to know that whatever else was going on, he could bring physical pleasure to
another human being. And, almost without his consciously intending it, he said,
“Okay.”
Holly’s heart jumped. “Seriously?” she said. “I was just kidding, I didn’t
expect you to go for it.”
That figured. Once again, Matt had failed to read the signs. “Okay,” he said
again. “Sorry.”
“No, no!” Holly grabbed his hand. “Don’t be! If you’re actually into the idea,
that would be awesome. I wasn’t looking forward to getting through finals
period with only my vibe and memories of sex with James to keep me company. You
have a condom?”
“Not on me,” said Matt, feeling as if he had walked for a moment into somebody
else’s life.
Holly made a dismissive noise and said, “Whatever, it’s a frat house, I know
they’ve got them around somewhere. Lemme go ask Nick over there and we’ll go
find a spot, huh?”
They ended up in the bedroom of some frat brother who was, according to Nick,
camped out in the library. Matt sure hoped he had an extra set of clean sheets
for when he was done studying.
Sex with Holly was...well, it was certainly different than with Naomi. Holly
was a lot louder, a lot more actively involved, rolling around on top of Matt,
leaving hickeys across his neck and chest, running her hands frantically over
him like she couldn’t figure out where to put them. But she was just as into
it, gave just as clear physical and verbal indications of what she wanted and
how well Matt was achieving it. Her orgasm—orgasms, Matt should have said,
because she came twice—were just as intense, if not more, than either Naomi’s
or Josh’s. Which kind of blew Matt’s mind. He loved Naomi, and if he and Josh
weren’t exactly friends, at least they’d known each other for years, and had
things in common that separated them from most other people. He honestly hadn’t
even remembered Holly from their poetry class, and she only remembered him as
the smart blind guy, and yet the sex was working just as well.
“Hey, bro,” she said, “you with me?”
“I’m with you,” said Matt. He stopped thinking so much and just went with it.
Matt met Holly once more after that, at the poetry final, but after he came
back from the short-term housing dorm at St. Agnes for the spring semester,
they didn’t have any classes together, and that was okay with Matt. Holly had
been great, but he didn’t think that what they were to each other was a long-
term thing—they’d both needed something at a particular moment, gotten it, and
moved on.
After a semester of singlehood, Matt started going out with Emma when he got
back to campus after the summer. This time, he didn’t go into it expecting true
love and forever. Emma had cerebral palsy; Matt had met her at a student
organization for students with disabilities. Emma, like Holly, was a math
major, and she spent a lot of time talking about things that went completely
over Matt’s head. She spent the rest of her time, though, talking about
accessibility issues on campus and disability theory, and that was an area
where Matt could talk as long and as passionately as she could. Sex with Emma
was interesting; she’d read a lot about ways for people whose bodies worked
differently to have fun in the bedroom, and so Matt learned a lot about sex
toys and different positions. It could be fun, and it was good training for
exercising control over his body. Out of the bedroom, though, they fought a
fair amount. Emma was an intense person, and Matt wasn’t entirely unhappy when
they broke up—they still saw each other regularly, but it was a lot less
stressful being Emma’s friend than her boyfriend.
Lucas was Matt’s first attempt at dating a guy, since he’d liked having sex
with Josh and he figured he might have better luck with men. It was weird at
first, and Matt felt a little guilty, but ultimately he reasoned that God had
given him impulses that were a lot more destructive than being attracted to
men, and by tending the more loving part of himself rather than the angry part,
he was committing no sin.
Lucas played intermural rugby, and his muscles made Matt tense with something
that was half lust and half envy—Matt really needed to get back into some kind
of exercise routine. He was majoring in Japanese literature, which Matt knew
absolutely nothing about, but he liked listening to Lucas talk about it.
Neither of them had ever tried anal before, but, figuring that college was a
good time for experimenting, they gave it a go, taking turns giving and
receiving. Anal, Matt decided, was something he really had to be in the right
mood for—the necessary preparations were kind of weird for him, both when it
was his ass involved and when it was Lucas’s, and the end result could either
be fantastic when Matt was really turned on or just kind of uncomfortable if he
wasn’t. Lucas had a harder time with the blind thing than either Naomi or Emma
had, so the relationship didn’t last long.
Clarissa, Diane, Will, Robin, Jennifer, Brian—Matt’s junior year was a
whirlwind of short-lived relationships, some of them more intense than others.
Matt didn’t know what was wrong with him, that he couldn’t make any of them
last. He liked to think that he had positive qualities to bring to the table;
he wasn’t the angry, helpless little kid that he had been. But somehow, things
never seemed to work out. Sometimes the problem was something he actually
did—Will, for instance, had been weirded out when the things Matt heard crept
into his sleep and he woke panting and fearful in the middle of the night, and
Jennifer thought he spent too much time studying and not enough time with her.
Sometimes, Matt being blind and poor was a problem—he couldn’t afford to eat
out as often as Clarissa liked to, and Robin got terribly embarrassed whenever
he asked for things like Braille menus or help reading price tags, especially
when he had to argue with people to get assistance. Sometimes Matt had to end
things because he didn’t have the time to throw himself into a relationship the
way the other person deserved. In every case, though, the common denominator
seemed to be him.
He went to the Catholic student center, which was kind of a first for him. He’d
been attending church irregularly and not doing much by way of confession,
feeling that he’d done more than his fair share of praying and confessing
during his time at St. Agnes, but talking to a priest was a more familiar, less
intimidating idea than finding a counselor at the Student Health Center.
“Hello,” the priest greeted when Matt walked in. “I’m Father Huff. If you’re
here for confessions, my hours officially start in about forty-five minutes,
but if you’re in a hurry, we can do something quick now and make an appointment
for later this week to talk more fully.”
“I, uh....” Matt fiddled with his cane. “I kind of just wanted to talk. Can I
make an appointment?”
Matt could tell the second that Father Huff realized he was blind. His posture
changed, became less businesslike and more confused. After a moment, he said,
“No, it’s...we can talk now if you’d like. Let’s go to my office. Would you
like me to help you?”
“That’d be nice,” said Matt, and he held out his hand.
Father Huff’s office was a cramped little room that smelled of dust and
incense. It felt very familiar to Matt, and he relaxed a little as he explained
his situation to Father Huff. He talked about where he was coming from, how
he’d ended up at ESU and what he was studying there. He talked a little about
his history with romantic relationships, carefully editing his stories to leave
out his relationships with men and just how sexually intimate he’d gotten
(though he had a sneaking suspicion Father Huff realized sex was involved). He
explained that he wanted marriage and a family, that he didn’t feel any calling
to celibacy, but that he was starting to think God was sending him a message,
that maybe he was meant to be alone.
Father Huff listened patiently; Matt imagined that on a college campus he
probably got a fair amount of young people talking to him about their love
lives. When Matt had finished talking, he said, “Well, I can’t tell you about
God’s plan for you, but I had a couple of thoughts while you were talking. You
say you don’t feel any call to celibacy, but it seems to me that you do feel a
call to the legal profession, to become a lawyer in order to make the world
more just and help the needy. Is that a fair assessment?”
Matt hesitated and then nodded. “I guess I didn’t think about it that way,” he
said, “but yeah. I’ve always been interested in the law. And with all the help
I’ve gotten from other people—and with my dad always wanting me to use my mind
to make something of myself—I guess I do feel obligated to do my best to use
the law to help people.”
“I think that’s admirable,” said Father Huff. “Listen, Matthew. I’m sure you
knew when you came to me that I couldn’t recommend your current habit of serial
monogamy—it’s not in line with the Church’s teachings about sex outside of the
marital bond, and it doesn’t seem to be doing you any good. You seem like a
very smart and principled young man. What I’m going to suggest is that you
focus less on your romantic life and more on using your gifts to succeed
academically and serve your community. When it comes to your love life, don’t
try so hard. If you’re meant to end up with one woman for the rest of your
life, God will help you find her, you don’t have to date every woman you meet
to look for her.”
That...made a lot of sense, actually. “Thank you, Father,” he said. “That
really helps.”
He suspected that Father Huff wouldn’t approve of how Matt applied his advice
over his senior year and the couple of years he spent working to save money for
law school, but it was working for him. Instead of jumping into relationships,
which he clearly sucked at, he spent most of his time working, studying, and
volunteering, and devoted the time spent on his love life to the only part of
it he was actually good at: sex. It seemed he’d hit upon the ideal solution. He
wasn’t opposed to dating, and if he met someone he liked enough and who liked
him enough to make it worth the effort of forming a longer relationship, he’d
give it a try, but in the meantime, he was careful, had regular check-ups to
test for STIs, and met a lot of interesting people he would never have gotten
to know if he had been following the Church’s teachings on premarital sex.
He didn’t know why he’d never thought of it before. A one-night stand was like
a perfectly-formed relationship in miniature. There was a lot he didn’t know
about the people he slept with, a lot they didn’t know about him, but there was
something amazing about the thought that he knew things about them that the
people they interacted with every day didn’t know, about the places on their
bodies they liked to be touched, the noises they made when they were pleased or
ecstatic, about the warmth and tenderness they could show to a relative
stranger. There was something amazing about the thought that they knew him,
too, that maybe they would remember him not as the blind law student that the
rest of the world saw but as somebody they had shared a kind of intimacy with,
if only for a little while.
Matt’s romantic history was one of repeated failure, but it had led him to a
place where he was happy. The one time he got drunk and tried to explain this
to Foggy, though, Foggy hadn’t understood. Instead, he’d just patted Matt’s
hair over and over again and said, “Man oh man, buddy, we are gonna find you
somebody great someday. ‘Cause you’re awesome, and people are dumb if they
don’t get that.”
“Thanks, Foggy,” said Matt, relaxing under Foggy’s hand and thinking that he
really didn’t need Foggy to understand about how Matt’s love life worked, as
long as he kept petting Matt’s head like that.
***** So twist and whisper the wrong name, I don't care nor do my ears *****
Chapter Summary
     For all Foggy's talk of wingmen and 'luscious co-eds,' he doesn't
     actually seem all that comfortable with casual sex.
It became apparent to Matt pretty early on in his friendship with Foggy that,
for all Foggy’s talk of wingmen and ‘luscious co-eds,’ he was averse to casual
sex and preferred to wait until he was in a romantic relationship to be
physically intimate. Matt could understand that—he’d felt the same way himself
when he was younger—and it was his opinion that anybody who wanted sex with
Foggy without the emotional intimacy was really missing out. Foggy was great,
open and kind and funny, and anyone would be lucky to be with him, whether sex
was in the picture or not. Foggy wanted a real, long-term romantic relationship
and deserved to have one.
Foggy, though, hadn’t seemed to figure that out about himself yet, and so he
insisted on dragging Matt out to bars in hopes of hooking up. Matt didn’t mind.
He became familiar with some of the bars around Columbia, got the entertainment
of listening to Foggy try to chat women up, and had a few delightfully dirty
quickies in men’s rooms or in the alleys behind the bars. As long as Foggy’s
quest for sex didn’t interfere with his and Matt’s ability to study for their
classes, Matt was willing to go along with it.
Tonight looked to be a particularly painful strikeout for Foggy. He was doing a
good job of picking up when the woman he was talking to—Hannah, her name
was—wasn’t interested in the topic of conversation, but his changes of subject
were too eager and clumsy, making him seem desperate. Having never been
anyone’s wingman before, Matt wasn’t sure exactly when and how often to insert
himself in the conversation, but this was getting ridiculous.
“Hey, Hannah,” he broke in to Foggy’s awkward ramble about NPR, “did you know
Foggy’s mom wanted him to be a butcher? He knows a lot about local meats.”
Hannah was obviously a foodie, one only had to listen to her talk about the
dinner she’d had last week or smell the morel soup and gourmet olive oil whose
scents clung to her hair in order to tell that.
“Um, yeah,” Foggy began, confused and sort of irritated at Matt, but Hannah
seemed taken aback and honestly interested at Matt’s weird nonsequitur.
“No kidding?” she asked. “Do you know a good place to get duck? I’ve got a
great recipe for duck à l’orange, but all my usual places have been letting me
down lately.”
Since Foggy’s aunt and her husband still ran an artisanal butcher shop, Foggy
did, in fact, know a good place to get duck. Matt smiled and quietly withdrew
himself from the conversation. He could keep one ear on Foggy’s progress and
still have some fun for himself tonight.
“Hey,” said the woman sitting next to Matt at the bar. “Is that guy talking
about meat a friend of yours?”
“Yeah, he’s my roommate. Why?” Foggy hadn’t been Matt’s friend for long, but he
was a good guy, and Matt wasn’t about to let strangers shit-talk him.
“Does he know his stuff?” she asked, which wouldn’t have been Matt’s first
guess for what she was going to say. “About serving duck medium-rare, I mean? I
always thought you had to serve poultry well-done.”
Matt laughed. “Well, his aunt and uncle run a butcher shop, so yeah, he does
know his stuff, but speaking as someone who just likes food, if you get the
bird from a reliable place, I think medium-rare’s fine. It’s the way you
usually get duck in restaurants, anyway.” Having been served duck at a couple
of admitted students’ weekends and receptions, Matt could speak with experience
on this subject, something teenaged Matt could never have imagined.
“Huh. You know, I’ve never made duck, but I’ll have to try that sometime. I’m
Charlotte, by the way.” She stuck out her hand, probably for a handshake;
though her elbow popped when she extended the hand, a normal blind person
probably still wouldn’t have known where to find it, so Matt sat and waited for
her to pick up on the sunglasses and the white cane. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said,
a moment after the rise in resting heart rate told Matt she’d noticed his
blindness. “That—that was rude of me.”
“What, introducing yourself?” Matt smiled at her. “We’re not in a Jane Austen
novel.”
“Oh—no, I just—um, do you want to shake hands?”
“Sure.” He stuck his hand out, and she took it. Smooth hands, with calluses on
the fingertips of the left hand—she probably played a string instrument, maybe
guitar. “I’m Matt,” he said.
Charlotte was a grad student in history who lived just a few blocks from the
bar, and she was, as she put it, between boyfriends at the moment. “Just so you
don’t get the wrong idea,” she told him as they left the bar and headed to her
place, “I don’t always do the casual hookup thing. It’s just, I’m studying for
my comps this year—my PhD exams, that is—and I don’t really have time for a
relationship right now.”
“No judgment here,” said Matt. “I’m in my first year of law school, I’ve got
the same problem.”
“You see?” Charlotte said, like she’d been arguing this very point. “We gotta
squeeze in some fun whenever we can.”
“That’s what she said,” he said, and Charlotte laughed.
“You’re a hoot.” Matt beamed at her. He’d gotten quite a few compliments over
the years, but rarely on how much fun he was.
Charlotte, it turned out, didn’t like penetrative sex at all. That was A-OK
with Matt—she gave amazing handjobs, and the noises she made when Matt’s mouth
was on her breast and his leg between her thighs for her to rub against—well,
they were beautiful. She was beautiful. She had soft skin, dotted with chicken
pox scars like freckles that Matt could actually appreciate, and thick curly
hair, and she smelled like old books.
When they were done, Charlotte lay her head on Matt’s shoulder and sighed,
mouthing the skin over his collarbone. “That was fun,” she said softly.
“It was,” Matt agreed. He laid a kiss on her hair. “Thanks for a great time.
I’m glad we met.”
“Me too.” There was something impish in her tone. “How else would I know how to
cook duck?”
Matt slept over at Charlotte’s; she didn’t have a roommate, and her bed, though
old and very squeaky, was reasonably comfortable. In the morning, he bought
coffee and pastries from the shop around the corner, since he had no idea how
her kitchen was laid out, and they ate around her little table.
Afterward, Charlotte said, “So, do you want to exchange numbers? Maybe do this
again sometime?”
Matt caught the hesitation in her tone and set down his napkin (the pain au
chocolat was a little messy). “We don’t have to if you don’t want,” he said.
“We’re both busy people. This could just be a one-off, your call.”
Charlotte let out a loud breath, and her whole body seemed to relax. “No, we
can totally do this again. I just—I didn’t want to give the impression that I
was looking for a boyfriend or something, because I’m really not.”
“I get it,” Matt assured her. “We can just, you know. Squeeze in some fun
whenever we can.”
Charlotte laughed, and they retrieved their phones from where they’d ended up
last night. Matt told Charlotte his phone number, but when he unlocked his
phone to enter hers, it announced, “Seven missed calls and ten missed text
messages from Foggy.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Matt with feeling. He’d turned the ringer off last night
without even really thinking about it, not wanting the sound it made when he
got e-mails to interrupt his time with Charlotte. It hadn’t even occurred to
him that Foggy might be trying to get a hold of him.
“Roommate?” Charlotte asked.
“Roommate,” Matt confirmed. He stood up and gestured towards where he thought
Charlotte’s front door was. “I better call him.”
Charlotte grabbed his cane and handed it to him. “Definitely,” she said. “Good
luck.”
Foggy picked up the phone on the first ring. “Matt!” he said. His voice sounded
breathless.
“Hey, Foggy,” said Matt sheepishly.
“Oh my God, dude, where have you been? Are you okay? Do you need me to come
someplace and get you? Why didn’t you answer your fucking phone?”
“Foggy, I’m fine.” Matt was really starting to feel embarrassed now. “I was,
uh. At a friend’s, and the ringer was off. I’m sorry I didn’t answer your
calls. What’s up?”
There was a silence at the other end; Matt would have thought the call had been
cut off if he couldn’t hear Foggy breathing on the other end. Finally, Foggy
shouted—actually shouted, Matt had to jerk his ear away from the phone—“What’s
up? My blind roommate fucking disappeared from a bar without a word and
wouldn’t answer his goddamned phone! I thought you’d been kidnapped by kidney
thieves or fallen down a manhole or something! And now it turns out you were
just hooking up with some girl while I was freaking the fuck out? Why the hell
didn’t you tell me?”
Matt swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I—it just didn’t occur to me. I
didn’t mean to worry you.”
Foggy let out a loud breath, and when he spoke again, he sounded a little
calmer. “Do you need help getting home?”
“No,” said Matt, halfway between contrite at worrying Foggy and irritated by
his own contrition. It was his life; Foggy wasn’t his mother or his keeper.
“I’ll be back in—” He quickly checked the time on his watch and ran through the
Saturday bus schedule in his head. “Forty-five minutes.”
“All right, dude, see you then.” Foggy hung up.
Matt slowly put his phone back in his pocket and went back into Charlotte’s
apartment. “I’ve gotta go,” he said.
“In the doghouse with the roomie?” she asked. When he nodded, she said, “Been
there. Living alone has its perks.”
When Matt got back to his room at student housing, Foggy spent a good ten
minutes reading him the riot act. Matt considered pointing out that they had
gone to the bar with the specific purpose of hooking up, but it seemed rude to
interrupt Foggy when he was on such a roll. Finally, Foggy ended with an
instruction to call him any time Matt was going to leave for the night to, as
Foggy put it, "do the deed."
Actually irritated now—being blind didn’t make Matt any less of an adult—he
snapped, “What, are you going to tell me every time you leave to meet up with a
girl?”
“Of course I will,” Foggy said, sounding completely honest. “It’s just common
courtesy, dude.”
This took the wind out of Matt’s sails, and he ended up looking in Foggy’s
direction with what he was sure was a ridiculous expression on his face. None
of Matt’s roommates had ever given a shit about him spending the night
elsewhere. “Seriously?” he said.
“Seriously,” said Foggy. “And maybe we need a code phrase, for when you have
emergencies. Like, okay, if you’re hooking up and the night’s going well, you
can say, ‘Hey, Foggy, having a good time, see you tomorrow.’ And if there’s a
problem and you need help, you can say, ‘Hey, Foggy, with friends, don’t let
the bedbugs bite.’”
“If I needed your help, why couldn’t I just say, ‘Hey, Foggy, I need your
help’?”
“I don’t know, dude, you don’t want to offend anybody? Somebody’s got a gun to
your head? Any reason, whatever.”
Matt raised an eyebrow. In his admittedly short acquaintance with Foggy, he
hadn’t yet been introduced to this fanciful streak. “You think somebody’s going
to put a gun to my head during sex but also let me make a phone call? That
would be a pretty generous sex kidnapper.”
“I don’t know, Matt,” said Foggy. His voice wasn’t angry, just kind
of—desperate, and tired. “I just—you’ve gotta let me know when you’re gonna be
out all night, okay? I mean, congrats on your obvious skill with the ladies,
but don’t leave me hanging like that again. I was really worried.”
It had been a long time since anybody worried about Matt like that, because
they cared about him. Matt felt a compunction of remorse in his heart. “All
right,” he said. “I will. And, uh, likewise, with the code phrases. I mean, you
could call me with those phrases if you had a sex emergency.”
Foggy snorted. “I’d have to actually be getting laid to be having sex
emergencies, but I appreciate the sentiment.”
“How’d it go with Hannah?” Matt asked, smiling now that the conversation had
turned less serious.
Foggy groaned. “Ugh. At the end of the night, she didn’t want my number, she
wanted my aunt Cheryl’s. I’m doomed to be her meat middleman. And get your mind
out of the gutter, Murdock,” he said when Matt laughed at this. “You know what
I mean.”
Over the next few months, Matt got a lot of use out of the “having a good time,
see you tomorrow” code phrase, but he didn’t need to use the emergency one
until one night, after some fantastic sex on the couch in the backroom of a
club, he realized that his wallet was gone. He didn’t know if the thief was
Sandy, the woman he’d been eating out, or if someone else had come in and he’d
been too out of it to pay attention, but either way, he was stuck a long way
from Columbia without money or his MetroCard. Thankfully, whoever had stolen
his wallet out of his jacket pocket had missed his phone, which Matt had kept
in his jeans pocket during the encounter with Sandy.
It was after midnight, but given that it was a Saturday, Foggy would probably
still be up catching up on all the TV he’d missed during the week. Matt sighed
and had his phone dial Foggy’s number.
After two rings, Foggy picked up. “Matt! What’s the story, morning glory?”
Matt rolled his eyes. “Um. Don’t let the bedbugs bite?”
“Whoa, seriously?” Matt could hear Foggy pausing what sounded likeLaw and Order
SVUin the background. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“I’m fine,” said Matt with a sigh. “Just, uh, stranded in Queens with no
wallet.”
“I knew it! Did I or did I not say that girl with the orange hair was trouble?”
“You did, but being blind, I had a hard time figuring out who you were talking
about.”
“Ha, ha, ha.” Foggy was putting on shoes now, squeezing the phone between his
ear and his shoulder. His voice always sounded much closer when he did that.
“You want me to give my folks a call? You’re actually closer to their place
than you are to campus.”
Matt shuddered in horror at the idea of meeting Foggy’s parents under these
circumstances. “I don’t want to inconvenience you,” he began.
“But you’d rather drop a bowling ball on your toes than call my parents,” Foggy
finished. “No worries, I totally get it. Will they let you stay at the club
until I get there? It might be a while.”
“I’ll work it out,” said Matt, and he would. The bartender seemed to have a
soft spot for him; if he told the guy what had happened, Matt was pretty sure
the bartender would help him explain things to the cops and let him hang out
even if he couldn’t buy anything. “Thanks, Fog.”
“Eh,” said Foggy, “What are friends for?”
Foggy could say what he liked, but in Matt’s book, a rescue like that was above
and beyond the call of duty of everyday friendship, and he tried to pay Foggy
back as best he could. He didn’t have much experience playing wingman, but he
certainly tried his best, and he thought that Foggy ended up with a few more
phone numbers than he might otherwise have had. Foggy had a tendency to eat
more fast food than was good for him, so Matt, who’d become something of a
master at preparing cheap, vaguely nutritious foods that could be made in a
microwave, tried to get a decent meal into him every now and then. And Matt
took pride in the fact that Foggy’s CV was going to look better, and his
conscience might be lighter, due to the many volunteer opportunities Matt had
become familiar with over the years and which he encouraged Foggy to join him
in taking advantage of.
It was kind of a perfect set-up, really. Matt could take care of his own sexual
desires, but pretty much anything else he might have gotten from a
relationship—companionship, affection, emotional intimacy—he got from his
friendship with Foggy, and he liked to think that he gave as good as he got.
Foggy at least seemed happy, if occasionally frustrated that Matt got laid more
often than he did. He never gave the impression that he was just putting up
with Matt, or that he thought Matt was overwhelming or stressful to be around.
None of this stopped Matt’s instincts from reacting with reflexive fear and
rejection when Foggy invited Matt back to his parents’ place in Long Island
City for Christmas.
Unlike the dorms at ESU, graduate and professional student housing at Columbia
stayed open over the holidays, so it wasn’t like Matt didn’t have anywhere to
go. He’d didn’t know why Foggy was so horrified that he’d stayed there over
Thanksgiving. “Foggy, I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll catch up on studying.”
“Okay, first, you don’t need to catch up on anything, you’re at the top of our
class. And second, if I leave you here alone, you’ll probably have orgies in
here over the break, and I’ll come back and find you’ve replaced my bed with
one of those giant vibrating beds they have in Vegas hotels.”
Matt blinked. “What are you talking about? I don’t have sex in here anymore.”
He’d only done it once or twice—after Foggy had walked in on him with Samantha
from Intro to Criminal Law and had fled with apologies that made Matt feel more
guilty than appeased, Matt had resolved, both to himself and to Foggy, to
handle sexual encounters elsewhere.
“Sorry, dude, I know, bad joke. I just really don’t like the idea of you being
alone in this crappy dorm over the break while I’m celebrating and eating home-
cooked food and opening presents and shit. Not to be all Ron Weasley about it,
but come on. There are always a ton of people there over Christmas, one more
isn’t going to be any trouble.”
Sincerity. Matt had no defenses against it. Instead of directly arguing, he
asked, “Ron Weasley? Is that a Harry Potter character?”
Foggy put a hand to his forehead and shook his head, his hair swishing over his
shoulders. “Matt, you sweet summer child, now it’s official. You have to come
home with me, and we will grab my Harry Potter movie collection, and when we
get back to the dorms, we will marathon those movies, with my patented Foggy
Nelson audio description. And then we’ll watch the first one again with the
‘Wizard People, Dear Reader’ audio track. I have obviously been failing you as
a roommate here.”
Matt smiled despite himself. Foggy was about as far away from failing as a
roommate as was humanly possible. But still, the memory of that Thanksgiving
trip with Naomi loomed large in his mind. “I don’t know, man,” he said.
“Traveling with someone can be an awful lot of forced togetherness. We don’t
want to, you know, get sick of each other or something.”
“Matt,” said Foggy with exaggerated patience, “my parents live in Queens. This
isn’t exactly a cross-country road trip we’re making here. And if we haven’t
gotten sick of each other after three months sharing this uber-classy dorm
room, what makes you think we’re gonna get sick of each other after a couple of
days with my family?”
For all that Matt was generally good at using his words to get the desired
result, somehow he still found himself sitting next to Foggy on the subway out
to Long Island City, where Foggy’s parents had moved after Foggy and his
siblings had graduated from high school, carrying a bottle of red wine (which
Foggy had assured him that Mrs. Nelson loved) as a Christmas gift. He still
wasn’t sure how Foggy had won this particular argument, but so far this trip
was beating the hell out of the plane ride to Chicago, so Matt supposed he
couldn’t complain too much. And when Foggy’s parents greeted him like he was
just one more welcome guest at a huge party they were throwing, neither talking
to him like he was stupid nor making a big deal out of his glasses and cane nor
showing signs that they resented having to help him navigate their crowded two-
bedroom, well. Then Matt thought that maybe, just maybe, this would all turn
out okay.
Matt had never met anyone like Foggy’s family. His dad’s hair was as long as
Foggy’s, and he built his own furniture with supplies from the hardware store
he still owned and managed. His mom had artistic endeavors scattered throughout
their apartment and was eager to show Matt her pottery and ceramics, letting
him run his hands over the glazed dishes and oddly-shaped vases. His uncle, who
apparently lived with his parents for most of the year, was a jazz bassist-
slash-plumber. Foggy had an older brother and sister—twins—called Daphne and
Shaggy. (“My parents really weren’t thinking of the Scooby Doo characters,”
Foggy insisted. “Shaggy’s real name is David. But he grew some really grody
facial hair, like, freshman year in high school, and the nickname stuck.”
“So now your parents have sons named Shaggy and Foggy.”
“What’s your point?”)
But was the most surprising to Matt, and also the most comforting, was that
everyone brought friends with them, straining the little apartment to bursting
but in a way that didn’t seem confining or claustrophobic at all. Shaggy
brought not only his wife Kelly but also Kelly’s brother Al; Daphne brought her
best friend Christie; Foggy’s little sister Candace, who was a sophomore in
college (“She was a surprise baby!”) brought her friend Sahar, who was from
Egypt and was, according to Candace, super-interested in Christmas in America
as a sociocultural phenomenon. Matt was perfectly willing to believe it after
Sahar followed up this introduction by saying, “You could write a really
interesting paper on ‘The War on Christmas’ alone. Hey, Matt, can I pick your
brain about American Catholicism sometime?”
“Um, sure,” said Matt.
The only one who didn’t bring a friend was Foggy’s cousin Tamara, Edgar the
jazz bassist’s daughter. Tamara held herself a little apart from the general
Nelson chaos like a National Geographic reporter observing from a distance; to
Matt, who was feeling a little overwhelmed (if in a pleasant way), her dry
commentary on things like “Aunt Anna’s drawer of misfit pots” and the “Nelson
tradition of death-metal hair” was funny in a distinct but familiarly Foggy-
like way, and he hung out in the living room with her while Foggy caught up on
everything that had been going on with the rest of his family.
Staying with the Nelsons couldn’t possibly have been more different from
staying with the Frankens. There was literally no extra space in their
apartment with thirteen people crammed into a two-bedroom, much less the vast
amounts of it Naomi’s family had had, and there was never any silence. Matt
didn’t think he heard a single gap in the conversation that wasn’t filled by
somebody; the Nelsons were talkers, and no two ways about it. Despite the
sensation of being a sardine in an extremely loud can, Matt found he didn’t
really mind. Nobody paid any particular attention to him, but they didn’t
exclude him either—as far as the Nelsons were concerned, Matt seemed to be on
par with their niece or their daughter-in-law or any of their children’s
friends, one more member of the large ensemble cast filling their busy lives.
It was a little like being back at St. Agnes, except that here, people actually
liked him and wanted him there.
On Christmas Eve, Foggy’s family traditionally bundled themselves onto the
subway to go back to the Methodist church in Manhattan the Nelson children had
been raised in. Candace was part of something called “The Christmas Choir,”
which, as far as Matt could tell, was like a sort of super-group of people who
had sung in the choir as children or teenagers and came back together in
various conformations every year to sing a couple of Christmas songs. Foggy,
who said he only ever went to church on Christmas anyway and could take or
leave it, offered to stay home with Matt and Sahar and help Matt find a
midnight mass if he wanted.
“Is it bad if I go, as a Muslimah?” Sahar asked. “I have an anthropological
interest.”
Mrs. Nelson laughed. “Of course you can go if you want, though I don’t know how
anthropologically interesting the sermon will be. Our pastor’s got a bad habit
of picking one punch line per sermon and repeating it over and over again.”
“But of course, I’m singing, and nobody wants to miss the musical event of the
year,” Candace put in, cheerfully ironic.
“Of course not,” said Matt, who liked Candace, as he liked pretty much all the
Nelsons. “I’m happy to come along too, Foggy, though I probably will take you
up on the midnight mass thing afterwards.”
“You sure?” Foggy asked. “Grandma O’Donoghue was mega-uncomfortable idea with
the idea of going to a Protestant church.”
“Foggy, I don’t know how to break this to you, but I’m not actually your
grandmother.” That got a laugh from everyone around the table, and Matt
grinned, pleased. “I probably won’t take communion, but that’s not gonna bother
anyone, right?”
“Dude, we don’t even do communion on Christmas Eve. That's at the 11:00
service.”
Matt shrugged. “Perfect, then. Let’s go enjoy the musical event of the year.”
The Methodist church was interesting. It smelled different, and the way the
service and the sanctuary were arranged gave Matt a kind of similar feeling to
when someone moved the furniture around in a familiar place. He didn’t mind it,
though. The pastor was just was repetitive as Foggy’s mother had claimed, but
he seemed like a nice enough guy, and the Christmas Choir, while perhaps not
the musical event of the year, were really very good, and did beautiful
versions of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “O Holy Night,” and “Joy to the
World.” It was also kind of nice to go as part of the Nelsons' extended clan;
even as a kid, it had just been him and his dad, and so going to church even as
the guest of a large family was an unfamiliar but pleasant experience. Foggy,
who sat next to him, nudged him when it was time to sit down or stand up during
the service, and whispered to him what was coming up next in the program, and
Daphne, on the other side, cued him when the offering plate was passed around.
He could hear people wondering who he was, but they also wondered about Sahar
and Christie and Kelly and Al, too, and not with anxiety or aggression, but
only because the Nelsons brought a crowd every year, and wondering who’d they’d
brought seemed to be a Christmas tradition for some.
Afterward, Foggy took him to a midnight mass at, strangely enough, the church
he’d gone to as a child, which was near the Nelsons’ church. Christmas at St.
Agnes had ended up being more of a religious than a fun holiday—Santa brought
only cheap donated toys to hard-to-adopt disabled kids, and having to be
grateful for them stuck in Matt’s craw—but sitting there with Foggy, Matt felt
some of the joy and wonder Christmas had held for him as a little kid. Jack
Murdock had never had a lot of money, but he’d always done his best by Matt
during the holidays. It was good to think about those days now and here,
whispering explanations to Foggy during the service as Foggy had earlier in the
evening.
Christmas morning was wild—everybody had at least a present or two, but nobody
even tried to buy a present for everyone, with the possible exception of
Foggy’s parents, so Matt felt better about only having things for Mr. and Mrs.
Nelson and Foggy. Mr. and Mrs. Nelson seemed to like the wine, and Foggy
exclaimed with pleasure when he opened the hat and scarf Matt had found for
him, and put them on immediately.
To Matt’s surprise, he got a couple of presents, too. Foggy got him a couple of
books on tape he had been meaning to read; Uncle Edgar, who was always looking
for a new audience, got Matt a record of his own band playing a bunch of old
jazz standards; and Foggy’s parents had gotten him one of those inexpensive
polyester fleece blankets they sold in department stores.
“Foggy said that you liked soft things,” Mr. Nelson explained. “These were
about the softest things we could find. Unless you wanted a cat.”
Matt ran his hand over the blanket. It was soft. If he didn’t pay attention,
all the fibers blurred together under his fingertips, making it feel
wonderfully smooth. “No,” he said. “This is great, you didn’t have to get me
anything.”
“Sure we did,” said Mrs. Nelson. “Playing Santa Claus is the best part of
hosting during Christmas.”
Foggy’s family usually went to see a movie on Christmas after they’d opened
gifts. Though they’d generally been great about Matt being blind, his admission
that he really didn’t like going to the movies left an awkward silence in the
room, most awkward of all from Foggy.
“Sorry, bud,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t even think of that. I can stay
here with you, no biggie.”
“We could stay and watch movies here,” Foggy’s mom offered, though she’d
clearly been excited about a trip to the movies with her family. Matt got the
impression she didn’t get all four of her children together all that often.
Matt shook his head. “No, you guys go and have fun. After all the excitement
last night, I could probably use a nap, anyway.”
“Matt, you party animal, you,” said Foggy, throwing an arm around Matt’s
shoulders. In a lower voice, he added, “Are you sure? I could stay here and we
could watchA Muppet Christmas Carolor something.”
“I’m sure,” said Matt with a smile. “We can watch the Muppets later; go out
with your family.”
“I’m staying, too,” Tamara said suddenly. “It’s Christmas, I don’t feel like
showering and putting on real clothes.”
Uncle Edgar said, “Come anyway, nobody cares if you shower or not.” Matt
privately thought that this made a lot of sense coming from Uncle Edgar, since
he didn’t seem to be all that big on showering himself, judging by his smell.
“Nah,” said Tamara. “You guys go, have fun. I’m gonna clean up some of this
disaster area.” The area around the Christmas tree was covered in crumpled
wrapping paper; Matt was keeping his distance so as not to slip.
“Well, that would be an amazing Christmas present, Tamara, thanks,” said Mrs.
Nelson cheerily.
It took a little more convincing, but finally, the Nelsons and company were off
to go watch...some action movie Matt had never even heard of. Matt sighed in
relief without really meaning to. The Nelsons were great, but it was nice to
have a little space and quiet again.
“Jesus H.,” said Tamara. “Listen to that.”
Matt cocked his head, listening to the refrigerator run, the electricity
humming in the lights on the Nelsons’ tree, the rumble of their heater. “To
what?”
“The quiet.”
Matt laughed, and after a moment Tamara joined him in laughter. “Don’t get me
wrong,” she said, “I love my family, but boy, I do not regret not living here
full-time.”
“I think it would get pretty crowded,” Matt agreed.
Tamara got up from the loveseat and went to sit next to Matt on the couch.
“What’s it like living with Foggy?” she asked. “I always imagined that would
involve a lot of loud music and smoking weed with skaters in the park, but that
might just be my impressions of him from when we were kids. We really haven’t
seen each other that much since I graduated high school.”
“So far, no weed or skaters, though there is the occasional loud music.” Matt
decided not to mention that the music came from Foggy’s headphones when he was
listening to his iPod; Foggy was trying to be considerate, it wasn’t his fault
Matt could hear his pounding metal music from across the room.
They talked for a while about Matt and Foggy’s living situation, and then about
Tamara’s and then, randomly, about politics, getting into a genuine raised-
voice argument over the role the government should play in monitoring and
governing groups like SHIELD and the Avengers. About twenty minutes into the
argument, Matt made what he felt was a particularly good point about the World
Security Council’s intransigence when it came to making transparent decisions,
and he realized that Tamara wasn’t actually angry at anything he was saying,
even if she disagreed. No, she was turned on.
That was...huh. Matt honestly hadn’t even been thinking about sex during his
time at the Nelsons’, being generally too busy trying to get the lay of the
land and respond appropriately to what people said to him. Maybe he was
misreading the situation here; God knew Matt was a bit overstimulated at the
moment. He himself might have been giving off signals of arousal, given how
involved he’d gotten in the conversation.
“Matt?”
He’d been quiet too long. “Mm, sorry, what were you saying?”
“I was saying that, when it comes to matters of international security, it
makes total sense to me that the WSC wouldn’t give much information about their
members or decisions.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Where’d you go just
then? You seemed to be a million miles away.”
Matt put a smile on his face. “Just thinking.” And then, just to see if his
original theory had been correct, he put a hand on her arm, the one that wasn’t
touching his shoulder. Under her sweater, her temperature was a little
elevated; her pulse jumped at the context.
Tamara made a considering noise. “Smooth operator, huh?” she asked, her voice
sounding a little strangled.
“I don’t think so,” said Matt with a shrug. “Just, uh. Open to possibilities.”
She was silent for a moment, during which Matt wondered if he was making a
catastrophic error. Tamara was smart, and smelled nice, and had a good sense of
humor, but the last thing on earth he wanted to do was to make Tamara or anyone
else uncomfortable, not when the Nelsons had been so good to him. “Sorry if I’m
making this really awkward,” he said. “Sometimes I misread things.”
“Ah, what the hell,” said Tamara, more to herself than to Matt. “It’s
Christmas, I’m single. I deserve nice things.”
Matt nodded. “Of course you do.”
It was very possible that Matt didn’t give Foggy enough credit for being
observant, because only a few hours after the rest of the Nelsons returned from
the movie, when the whole group was clustered in the living room watching a
James Bond marathon on TV, Foggy said, “Hey, Matt, can I talk to you for a
minute?”
There was something funny about his voice, and Matt managed to extract himself
from the over-soft couch, where he’d been sitting next to Tamara. “Sure, Fog,”
he said.
They went outside, where the air was cold but crisp and clear and dry, and
Foggy said, “Am I nuts, or did you hook up with my cousin while we were at the
movies?”
Matt frowned, trying to interpret Foggy’s tone. This might be a question whose
answer had serious repercussions. “Why do you ask?” he said, trying to buy time
and information.
“Uh, I don’t know, because you’re cuddling on the couch playing footsie with
her.” Matt wasn’t sure if this required a response, so he stayed quiet. After a
moment, Foggy groaned. “Oh my God, you did. Can you seriously not keep it in
your pants until we get back to the dorm?”
“Tamara and I are both adults,” Matt pointed out. “It’s not really any of your
business what we get up to.”
“So not the point, dude. Oh my God, you better not break her heart or anything,
my Uncle Edgar can be genuinely scary if people piss him off.”
Matt rolled his eyes. “Believe me, Foggy, no hearts are involved here. It was
just—we were arguing about current events, we were both getting pretty into it,
things went from there.”
“Things always go from there with you, Matt!” Foggy settled himself on the
doorstep of the Nelsons' building, resting his chin in his hands and letting
out a gusty sigh. “I know you’re like the Casanova of Columbia, but it’s
Christmas, and we’re at my parents’ house.”
“I’m sorry,” said Matt, cautiously sitting down next to Foggy on the doorstep.
“Do you want me to leave? I can take the subway back by myself, it’s not a
problem.” Matt thought he did a good job of sounding calm and in control,
considering his heart was in his throat. He was a moron. Matt Murdock, always a
champion when it came to ruining good things.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Some of the fight had left Foggy’s voice, and he nudged
Matt in the side with his elbow. “Of course I don’t want you to leave. Just—try
not to have an orgy with my sister and half the block before we leave, okay?”
“I’m pretty sure I can avoid that,” said Matt, his relief desperate and
uncertain.
Things were a little weird between Foggy and him for the next day or two, but
by the time they left the Nelsons’, Matt with a tin full of cookies Mrs. Nelson
had made and Tamara’s e-mail address so they could talk when the Avengers next
did something outrageous, things seemed more or less back to normal. They spent
the end of the break marathoning the Harry Potter movies, as Foggy had
promised, and Matt silently congratulated himself on making it through the
holidays without driving Foggy away.
The first week of the spring semester, Elektra Natchios asked Matt out, and the
rest of the semester was like a long downward slide into a place Matt hadn’t
been in a long time.
Oh, Elektra.
When she broke up with him, it was like when he and Naomi had broken up turned
up to ten. Matt fucked and studied and studied and fucked, trying his best not
to feel anything at all. Foggy was a constant, worried presence, and Matt let
Foggy force food into him or drag him to the park for fresh air because it made
Foggy feel better, not because it made Matt feel better. Matt knew he was
getting a reputation among their cohort for being some kind of sex maniac, but
he couldn’t bring himself to care. He was having a hard time caring about much
of anything.
He pulled himself out of it—or, to give credit where it was due, Foggy helped
pull him out of it—in time for the end of the semester, and Matt cut his
schedule of studying, sleeping, and sex to a schedule of studying, studying,
and more studying. It was like a flip had been switched in him, and he stopped
going out almost entirely. Foggy, who at first had said that Matt’s dick
probably needed the rest, quickly got bored with hanging around their room all
the time. For all that he wasn’t big on casual sex, Foggy was a lot more
inherently social than Matt was; he thrived on being around people, and his
schedule of working during the week and partying during the weekend worked so
well for him that he seemed to keep it up no matter what point of the semester
they were at.
Matt was happy for him, but wished he could find somebody else to go drinking
with, because Matt was busy trying to write his final term papers, even if it
was a Saturday night.
“Oh, come on, dude,” Foggy said, his voice wheedling. “The guy who hooked up
with two girls and a dude at that party two weeks ago is too busy to go out?”
Matt sighed, giving Foggy what he hoped was an irritated look. “Two weeks ago,
most of what Professor Spaulding was saying in class was review from first-
semester criminal law. Now she’s discussing important precedent cases for
determining what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, and I’m almost done
with my argument outline for the paper. I have to get this shit down so I’m
familiar enough with the case law to ask Professor Spaulding useful questions
in class on Monday. Seriously, Foggy, I can’t go out tonight.”
“Wow,” said Foggy after a minute. “I’ve heard of ‘work hard, play hard,’ but
you take the cake, buddy.” He clapped Matt on the shoulder. “All right, nerd,
we’ll stay in.”
“I didn’t say you had to stay in,” Matt added hurriedly, but Foggy barely let
him get it out.
“Like I’d have any fun without you there. Plus, my paper idea right now could
best be described as ‘nebulous.’ A night talking case law wouldn’t kill me.
What are you on now?”
“Roper v. Simmons,” said Matt, a slowly-dawning happiness warming him from the
inside out. A night of studying with Foggy wasn’t like work—it was more like a
small party where Matt learned a lot. Talking things through with Foggy would
be a hundred times more productive than studying by himself—he only hoped that
it was even remotely helpful for Foggy.
“Death penalty?” asked Foggy. “I thought you were doing solitary confinement.”
Matt nodded. “On juveniles, yeah, so the reasoning inRoper’s gonna be useful.”
“You think? I only read it once, but isn’t most of it death-penalty specific?
Comparing the U.S.’s policies with other countries?”
As they settled in to talk about psychological development among teenagers and
sentencing disparities and the disproportionately high rates of solitary
confinement use in New York compared with other states, Matt was grateful that
he didn’t have to explain to Foggy just why he’d gone from “playing hard” to
“working hard” so suddenly. He didn’t think he could explain it even to
himself.
***** My point of entry is the same way that I leave *****
Chapter Summary
     Matt's well-honed system for managing his personal life encounters a
     couple of problems.
In the weeks and months after Matt and Foggy passed the New York bar exam and
started the paperwork to open their own practice, it was a tossup which they
got more of: congratulations, or worries about their sanity from people who
knew that they had been offered the full-time positions at Landman & Zack.
Marci thought that they had literally lost their minds—well, correction, she
thought Foggy had lost his mind. She’d never, she told Matt, had much respect
for Matt’s sanity. Matt might have taken offense, but given that Marci and
Foggy’s relationship was crumbling under the stress of a decision Foggy might
never have made if it weren’t for Matt, he didn’t feel he had much room to
complain.
But not everybody thought the decision was nuts. Some of their law professors
from Columbia had thrown a party for the graduating law students who had passed
the bar, and a number of Matt’s professors came up to him to tell him that they
respected him for sticking to his guns. He hadn’t been shy about explaining his
reasons for going into the legal profession, his desire to represent people who
were often shortchanged by the system and couldn’t afford any defense but the
overburdened public defenders, and apparently even the professors who thought
he’d probably regret his decision in a couple of years and warned him about
burnout thought it was a worthwhile goal. Across the room, Matt could hear
Foggy receiving a similar mix of cynical warnings and proud congratulations.
Marci’s heart rate was through the roof. If she made it through the party
without breaking up with Foggy then and there, Matt thought, it would be a
miracle.
“Having a good time, Matt?”
Matt tilted his head toward the voice. Professor Spaulding. He hadn’t talked to
her yet, though he’d heard her talking to Beth and Anita from his 1L study
group.
“Sure, Professor,” he said. “Thanks for helping to throw this; it’s great.”
“We’re colleagues now,” Professor Spaulding said wryly. “I think you can
probably call me Stephanie.”
“Stephanie,” Matt repeated with a smile. “Either way, thanks.”
Professor Spaulding—Stephanie—shrugged. She didn’t have a food plate, but she’d
obviously been eating the little pastries with the smoked salmon; Matt could
smell it on her breath, even under the white wine she was drinking. “You’ve all
worked very hard,” she said. “I hear the folks at Landman and Zack were really
impressed by you and Foggy.”
It was Matt’s turn to shrug. “I know some people are disappointed in us for not
taking the positions there, but ultimately we decided it wouldn’t be a good
fit.”
“I wasn’t surprised.” She took another sip of her wine. “A lot of people go
into law as a profession; not so many go into it as a calling, and I’m pretty
sure you and Foggy are in the latter category. Keep your heads on straight, and
you might do a lot of good.”
“Here’s hoping,” said Matt. He was honestly flattered, despite his veneer of
casualness. Professor Spaulding—shit, Stephanie, that was going to take some
getting used to—was one of Matt’s favorite professors, and she’d been hugely
helpful both in helping Matt edit his term paper for her class into a
publishable article and in getting him an internship the summer after his first
year. She was smart, forthright, and not awkward at all about making
accommodations for Matt’s blindness. It meant a lot that she thought he might
do good in the world.
“Now, rumor has it that Marci Stahl and Tariq Khan are going to work at Landman
and Zack, since you two turned the jobs down. Any truth to that?”
They talked about Marci and Tariq, who were definitely taking the jobs at L &
Z, for a while, and then about Matt and Foggy’s adventures getting their own
firm set up, and then about Tony Stark’s project of rebuilding—or rather,
having shady subcontractors rebuild—Hell’s Kitchen. The party was ending around
them, but Matt and Stephanie were still deep in conversation. Matt was so glad
he and Foggy had decided to come to the party.
“You want to continue this conversation elsewhere?” asked Stephanie. “Peter
Toland’s giving me the evil eye; I’m pretty sure he wants to kick everyone out
so he can clean up.”
“Where would you want to go?”
“There’s a bar around the corner that does great cocktails, or, if that’s too
girly for you, I know they have some pretty excellent malt whiskey as well. My
treat; God knows you’ll be paying off student loans for the rest of your life,
working at a start-up firm for low-income clients.”
“My empty wallet thanks you,” said Matt with a laugh. “Let me just tell Foggy.”
“He’s over in the corner—just go forward and to your left.”
Matt thanked her and walked over to where Foggy was having a low, tense
conversation with Marci, their heads close together. “Hey, Fog,” he said.
Foggy straightened up. “Hey, Matt,” he said. “You ready to head out?”
“I’m actually heading over to a bar with Stephanie—Professor Spaulding. You and
Marci can come too, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
“Yeah, like I want to go on a double date with you and a professor, Casanova
Murdock,” Marci said with a snort.
Before Matt could comment, Foggy said, “Jesus, Marce, she’s like twice his age,
and a professor. Don’t be an asshole.” To Matt, he said, “I think Marci and I
are gonna head back to our place. We’ve got stuff to talk about. Gimme a call
if you need anything, okay?”
“Will do,” said Matt. “Bye, Foggy. Bye, Marci.”
“Bye, Matt,” said Marci. “Remember, no glove, no love.” Matt walked away to the
sound of Foggy asking Marci just what the hell was the matter with her.
Maybe Marci had a point, though, thought Matt, two hours into drinks with
Stephanie at the bar. Matt hadn’t talked with Stephanie that often since 1L,
but he knew enough about physiological responses and flirting more generally to
realize that she was attracted to him. It didn’t rise to the level of actual
flirting, but it was still pretty clear to anyone who’d spent the kind of time
picking other people up that Matt had. Maybe Matt should have been weirded out,
but he was actually kind of intrigued. He’d had sex with people who were older
than him before, but never with so big an age gap, and never with somebody he’d
had a platonic or professional relationship with first. And Matt genuinely
liked Stephanie, even if he’d never really thought of having sex with her
before.
“It’s getting late,” Stephanie said after a while. It was; Matt’s watch said
almost ten. Not late for a night partying, but late enough that Matt would have
had to give Foggy a call soon if they had still been living together.
“Yeah,” said Matt. “I should probably be getting home soon.”
“That’s one option,” Stephanie said.
“What’s the other?”
“Well, one option is that you could come back to my place.” Her pulse was a
little rapid, but her voice was steady. Matt imagined that she’d been around
long enough not to get overly nervous about the prospect of sleeping with a
younger guy.
“Are you, um.” Matt felt the need to clarify. “Are you, uh, inviting me up to
see your etchings, as it were?”
“Matt.” Stephanie’s hand was light and thin-boned as she laid it on Matt’s, but
somehow it felt like the center of gravity in the room. “We’re both adults.
You’re not my student anymore, and unless your thing with Foggy fails so
miserably it somehow ruins the rest of your CV, I don’t think you’re ever going
to need to come to me for a letter of recommendation again. I don’t know if
you’d be interested in an old woman like me, but—”
“You’re not old,” Matt said, cutting her off. “And I’ve always really liked
you. I just wanted to be sure what you’re asking.”
“Suggesting, I guess. If you don’t want to, it’s not a problem—I can call you a
cab, on me.”
“You don’t have to do that.” Matt turned his hand over so he could hold
Stephanie’s. “Your place sounds good to me.”
Stephanie’s place was amazing, a two-story townhouse with bay windows and high
ceilings. Matt guessed being a law professor at Columbia had its perks. There
were vague hints of masculine odors hovering in places like the bathroom or the
hall closet, but they were very old, just faint ghosts, and Matt guessed that
it had been quite a while, at least six months, since her last boyfriend. All
this space must have been lonely for just one person.
Her bed was a huge affair with a down comforter that Matt insisted they put on
the floor before they got started. He wasn’t going to be responsible for
ruining a comforter that felt as expensive as this one did. The room was warm
enough in the early summer that it wasn’t necessary, anyway.
Sex with Stephanie was amazing, a totally new experience. She wanted
penetrative sex, but needed a lot of preparation to get there—fingers, oral,
plenty of lubrication. But the way she ran her hands over Matt’s body, almost
reverently, the way she whispered things like, “My God, you’re beautiful,” and
“It’s been so long since I felt this good” made him want to spend all the time
in the world making her feel even better. He lavished attention on all the
places that seemed especially sensitive—her neck, her breasts, the soft skin
behind her ears, he gently opened her finger by finger, and when he was in her
and she came with a soft flutter around him, Matt knew that every minute of it
had been worth it.
In the morning, Matt sat around in yesterday’s clothes drinking coffee and
eating toast while Stephanie read the paper in her robe. It was...awkward, in a
way that morning afters usually weren’t. Stephanie was a professor, and clearly
had a lot of money, and Matt couldn’t help but feel like he’d accidentally
wandered into the teachers’ lounge.
“So,” he said after breakfast. “Thanks for everything. I guess I’ll catch a bus
home.”
“Just like that?” asked Stephanie. “I’m going to the symphony next weekend. Is
that the kind of thing that would hold any appeal for you?”
It was, actually. And so, with a symphony here and a restaurant dinner there,
it seemed, strangely enough, like Matt was actually dating Stephanie. Well.
Stranger things had happened.
Foggy, after he got over his stunned disbelief that Marci had actually been
right about Stephanie being into Matt, was not what Matt would call best
pleased.
“She’s old enough to be your mother, dude, and she was our teacher.”
“Yeah, in law school, not preschool.” Matt felt the knot in his tie, frowned,
and undid it to try again. He was generally pretty good with neck ties, but
this one seemed unusually tricky. It was probably just that the material, not
having any grosgrain ridges or texture to it, was more slippery than most of
Matt’s ties.
“And the opera, seriously? What is she, your sugar daddy?” Foggy paused. “Sugar
mommy? That sounds really weird, forget I said that.”
“Which part?” Foggy wasn’t an opera fan, but Matt was curious. It was the kind
of thing he never would have imagined himself going to when he was a kid, and
he’d be lying to himself if he said that the thought of going to the Met as the
escort of a well-respected legal scholar didn’t appeal to him. It made him feel
a funny kind of pride, somewhere in that part of himself that was still shocked
whenever someone called him “Mr. Murdock.”
“The sugar mommy part. I stand by my other remarks.”
Matt sighed and turned around to face Foggy. “Come on. Did you ever think of
Marci as your ‘sugar mommy’ when you guys went on that ski trip to her parents’
condo?”
Foggy made an irritated noise that meant he thought Matt had made a good point
and he wasn’t pleased about it. “Not the same, man. Marci wasn’t paying my way
or anything, I bought my own plane tickets, and it’s not like she was paying to
stay in that condo, either.”
“Yeah, well, Marci’s parents have millions of dollars in the bank and you’re a
broke lawyer paying off student loans, so if Marci wanted you on that trip, it
would only have been fair for her and her parents to bring more to the pot. And
it’s the same with me and Stephanie.”
“Except that Marci was never in a position of power over me.”
“Was?” Matt frowned. He didn’t think Foggy was just talking about the ski trip.
“Hey. That talk yesterday, did you guys....”
Foggy made an unhappy noise, the verbal equivalent of a sad shrug. “We’re, uh.
I guess we’re still technically together, but I think it’s safe to say we’re
pretty much over. Our lease is up at the end of July; I guess we’ll see if we
can make it until then and still be speaking to each other.”
“I’m sorry, Foggy.”
“It is what it is,” said Foggy, sounding as if he were trying to convince
himself more than Matt. “I don’t even really get why she’s so pissed—my leaving
Landman and Zack means they can offer her the job—but whatever, if she wants
some ambitious one-percenter who summers in the Hamptons or whatever the fuck
rich people do, I guess I’m not the right guy for her anyway.”
Matt took a step forward and reached out his hand, feeling around exaggeratedly
until he found Foggy’s arm. He gripped it in what he hoped was a comforting
way. “Sometimes people want different things out of life. It’s not anybody’s
fault.”
Foggy patted Matt’s hand condescendingly and said, “Thanks, buddy, but I’m not
sure I want relationship advice from a pick-up artist dating a sixty-year-old
woman.”
Ouch. “Okay, first of all, I am not a pick-up artist. Pick-up artists are gross
assholes who prey on women’s self-esteem and treat sex like a prize. And
second, Stephanie’s a generous, intelligent, accomplished woman. I really think
you’d like her if you got to know her. And third, I really wouldn’t say I’m
giving advice. I just—I’m just trying to help.”
“I know, man, and I appreciate it,” said Foggy, but he withdrew his arm as he
said it and neither his voice nor any change in pulse, posture, or chemical
odor indicated that he was any happier.
Matt aimed his eyes to where he estimated Foggy’s had to be. “Foggy, there’s
nothing wrong with you, you know? You’re awesome, and you’re gonna find
somebody who appreciates you for exactly who you are.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Foggy flapped a dismissive hand at Matt. “Go on your date with
Professor Cradlerobber, you’ll be late.” Matt was pleased to hear a genuinely
lighter, less self-deprecating undertone to his voice, and cheerfully flipped
him the bird.
“I’m twenty-nine, asshole, hardly cradle material. Do I look okay?”
“You look great, like always.” He sounded resigned but sincere, which Matt
decided to take as a win.
The opera was...interesting, as Matt told Foggy later. The singing was good,
but it was all in German, and since it wasn’t exactly the right setting for a
detailed description of what was happening on stage, Matt had a very difficult
time following the plot. “I don’t know,” he said, “I think Stephanie was hoping
I’d like it more than I actually did.”
“Dude, don’t feel bad about it. Lots of people don’t like the opera. In fact,
the only person I know who actually likes it is my mom.” Foggy paused. “No, I
take that back. Apparently Sahar likes the opera, too, Candace told me.” Sahar
and Candace had been dating for the last six months and, according to Foggy,
Candace wouldn’t shut up about it.
“Maybe Sahar can fill me in on the plot for this one, then,” said Matt. “It was
Wagner, I know that much.” He didn’t like feeling ignorant. “We ran into some
of Stephanie’s friends there, and I had to do a fair amount of bullshitting
when they asked how I liked it.”
“Oh?” Foggy’s voice was overly casual. “What friends were these?”
Matt looked down, feeling vaguely uncomfortable. “Well. One was a partner at
Pierce and Fitzgerald, and one was a business professor. I think they liked the
age difference thing even less than you do.”
“Let me tell you, pal, that would be pretty fucking difficult.”
Matt didn’t want to fight. He didn’t. So he just said, “Gotcha,” and went over
to Stephanie’s. Maybe he wasn’t great company at the opera, but in the bedroom,
he knew exactly what he was doing.
He tried to stay away from the topic of his relationship with Stephanie around
Foggy; getting their own law firm together was important, a life-changing
endeavor, and Matt knew enough about himself to know that if Foggy got
judgmental about him and Stephanie, Matt would respond instinctively: either
fight so viciously that their friendship might break under the strain of it, or
bend, go along with what Foggy said and resent him afterward. Neither of these
were acceptable options to Matt.
It was hard, though. Dating Stephanie was fantastic in so many ways. She was
frank about her respect for his intelligence and ambitions, and they could talk
in detail about Matt and Foggy’s plans for the firm, which was a rare
occurrence in Matt’s history of extremely short-term relationships. Sex with
him clearly thrilled her, which did wonders for Matt’s self-esteem. And, though
Matt would never have considered himself a kept man or let things progress to
that stage, it was nice to be able to eat at expensive restaurants and not
worry about the bill, or to have some help picking out some genuinely nice
clothing that would serve him well as an attorney. It was the first time in his
life he'd had anything so luxurious, food and clothes he could enjoy without
having to ignore or block out a large part of his sensory input, and he was
grateful to Stephanie for the opportunity to experience that kind of pleasure.
That wasn’t to say, however, that there weren’t issues. One of the plus sides
of Matt’s admittedly turbulent love life to date was that he had always felt
like he was on equal ground with his partners. To go out with someone who
clearly knew so much more than he did and had so much more than he did, and who
never hesitated to throw either her knowledge or her money around, made him
feel unmoored. It also had the uncomfortable side effect of making him feel
like a charity case again sometimes. And Stephanie clearly had the upper hand
in other ways, as well; she chose where they went on dates (not that Matt would
have taken her to Josie’s or the doughnut shop on the corner, anyway, but it
still felt weird), she more or less set the schedule of when they met, and when
they went out with friends, they were her friends, not Matt’s.
But Matt couldn’t talk to Foggy about it. Foggy would just tell him to break up
with her. So instead, Matt threw himself into their firm, and into helping
Foggy through his breakup with Marci. Matt could handle his own problems; he
always had.
He’d grown so used to sharing the ups and downs of his life with Foggy, though,
that sometimes things slipped out without his meaning to.
He was eating chips and salsa at Foggy’s apartment, fiddling with a yo-yo
(because of course Foggy had a yo-yo) while Foggy played Pokémon on his DS,
narrating every time he caught a Pokémon or fought another trainer. Matt had
never gotten into the whole Pokémon thing as a kid, and thought the game
sounded enormously unsatisfying, but whatever, Foggy seemed to like it.
“I think I’m going to get a haircut,” he announced.
“What for?” asked Foggy absently. “Your hair looks great.”
“I don’t know. Stephanie said something the other day....” It was hard to
explain the particular way Stephanie had of making remarks that weren’t quite
criticisms but nonetheless ended up giving Matt the impression that there was
something he needed to do. It was kind of like dating Stick, if Stick had been
a lot nicer, less violent, and a woman—frustrating, but it gave Matt a sense of
self-improvement that he liked. “Anyway,” he concluded, “I think it’s a good
idea.”
“Jesus,” Foggy murmured. “Stephanie says you should get your hair cut.”
His tone got under Matt’s skin. “Come on, I don’t even talk about her that
much. You’re going to have to get over this thing you have against Stephanie,
Foggy. She’s my girlfriend.”
“Correction: she’s not your girlfriend, you’re her boy toy, and for somebody as
smart as you are, Matt, it blows my mind that you haven’t figured that out yet.
Of course, that’s pretty much par for the course with you.”
Matt blinked. He and Foggy didn’t usually fight, and Foggy sniping at him like
this seemed wildly out of character. “What do you mean, par for the course?”
Foggy paused his game, closed the DS, and set it on the table. “What I mean is,
you seem to have a habit of either totally skipping the ‘relationship’ part of
‘sexual relationship,’ or you get in these intense, crazy unhealthy
relationships that completely fuck you up.”
“That’s not true,” said Matt, starting to get irritated. “And where do you get
off judging me? You and Marci fucked like bunnies on every flat surface you
could find, and the last time I was in a room with the two of you, your
conversation devolved into a screaming match.”
“Yeah, fine,” Foggy bit out, “me and Marci had sex. You got me there, I had sex
with my girlfriend. Lock me up and throw away the key. And that relationship
may have ended badly, but at least we knew each other. Weren’t you raised by
nuns? I thought Catholics were against extramarital sex.”
Matt couldn’t believe they were having this conversation. “Foggy, you’re a
United Methodist who goes to church once a year, when you remember. You’re
really going to tell me how to be a Catholic?”
“I’m not telling you what to do, I’m worried about you!” The last part was
almost a bellow, and, though none of his arguments with Foggy had ever gotten
physical, Matt instinctively braced himself for a fight. “This relationship
with Stephanie sucks! She’s using you for sex, and if that weren’t bad enough,
she makes you feel bad about yourself because you don’t have the kind of money
that she does.”
“That’s—that’s—” Matt could feel himself flushing, and he seemed to have a hard
time getting words out. “You are way off base.”
“Am I? When she dumps you—which she will, let’s get real, and sooner rather
than later—you’re gonna be crushed, and then you’re gonna spend a couple of
months fucking everything on legs, because that’s what you do. And then you
know what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna get mugged, or beaten up in some BDSM
scene gone wrong, or you’re gonna get the clap, and Foggy Nelson’s gonna get to
pick up the pieces again.”
“Fuck you,” said Matt, his voice trembling. There was more truth in what Foggy
was saying than he would have liked to admit. “Nobody asked you to do that.”
“No, but I do it anyway, because unlike you, I actually give a shit about your
well-being.” He worried his bottom lip with his teeth and then said, less
angry, “I don’t know what your deal is, but I really think you should talk to
somebody about it. Professionally, I mean.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Matt began, but Foggy didn’t let him finish.
“I’m serious. I am all for casual, strings-free sex, but what you do is
reckless, and stupid, and it makes you miserable half the time, and it is so
unlike everything else I know about you that it confuses the hell out of me. I
don’t want to pry, but I’ve been doing a little research on this
stuff—hypersexuality, I mean, and how it’s sometimes a response to—well, I
mean, Jesus, if you look at the rates of sexual abuse committed against
disabled people—”
“Okay.” Matt felt a sick, cold anger raging inside him, clawing at his chest to
be let out. But he couldn’t, not against Foggy, no matter what bullshit he was
saying. “I’m done with this conversation now.”
He went out, back to his apartment, and did pushups until his arms trembled
underneath him. And then he did sit-ups until he couldn’t anymore. He paced his
apartment until he got dizzy. And still, whatever was inside him wasn’t
satisfied. Lying in bed was a wasted effort; no sleep would come to him
tonight.
At about three in the morning, four local guys decided it was a great idea to
kick the shit out of a middle-aged tourist in a back alley a few blocks over
from Matt’s apartment. So Matt, who had never gone to sleep, got out of bed,
put on some black clothes and the mask he’d ordered online, and kicked the shit
out of them.
It didn’t feel real. It was like a dream, like something else had been
operating his body; not entirely unlike the way he felt when he had too much
sex in too short a span of time. But it did make that poisonous anger recede,
and when Stephanie called the next day, Matt felt like he could actually behave
like a normal person around her.
His optimism took a hit when she opened the door. Normally, Stephanie pulled
him into the house with a hand on his arm, drew him in with a kiss. Today, she
simply greeted him and turned to walk into the dining room. They never went
into the dining room. With a sense of foreboding, he followed her.
“Matt,” she said simply when they’d settled. “We need to end this.” She didn’t
need to say what ‘this’ was.
Matt swallowed. “We do?” He immediately wanted to kick himself for sounding
like a lost little kid. How embarrassing.
She tapped something on the table. It sounded like the edge of an envelope. “My
husband was supposed to be away until December, but it looks like this deal is
wrapping up a lot more efficiently than his company expected, so he’ll be back
next week.”
“You’re married?” Matt still sounded like a kid, but he couldn’t help it. This
was an unexpected blow. For all he hadn’t been terribly choosy when it came to
his sexual partners, he’d tried never to sleep with somebody who was already in
a committed relationship, much less date somebody who was married. People were
free to do with they wanted whether they were in a relationship or not, but
Matt didn’t like the idea of being the guy people cheated on their partners
with, and he always tried to avoid it.
“I am.” She sighed. “It’s hardly what you’d call the romance of the century. We
haven’t slept together in years—hell, he spends half the time out of the
country on trips—but I’d still like to avoid hurting his feelings.”
“But you can go ahead and hurt my feelings, I guess?”
Stephanie reached out to take his hand. “Matt. You knew from the beginning that
this relationship had an expiration date. You’re twenty-nine years old. I’m
sixty-one. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and you’ll go on to date
more people. A lot more people, if I hear correctly. I’ve been married for
forty years, and we’ve built a life together. It hasn’t always been a happy
one, but it’s what I’ve got. I’ve really enjoyed the time you and I have had
together, but all good things come to an end. It is what it is.” She handed
Matt the thing she’d been holding in her other hand. “This is for you,” she
said. It was, in fact, an envelope. When Matt opened it, it held a small,
rectangular piece of paper, maybe two or three inches by six inches.
“What is this?” he asked, though he had a sickening feeling that he already
knew.
“It’s a check for ten thousand dollars.”
Matt made a noise that, if he had heard it coming from someone else, he would
have described as a cross between a bark of laughter and the sound of choking.
“Are you—are you paying me for sex?” This was unreal.
“Of course not,” said Stephanie tartly. “Think of it as a belated graduation
gift, if you want, or a show of faith in your firm. The kind of work you and
Foggy want to do, your budget is always going to be strained to breaking. It’s
important work, making sure that impoverished people still have quality legal
representation, but it’s never going to make you rich, and I’d hate to see you
and Foggy crash before you even get off the ground.”
Though Matt wanted to tear the check in half, though he wanted to shout and
throw it across the room, he closed his fingers around it gently. “Thanks, I
guess,” he said, though not very graciously.
“You’re welcome.” There was a pause, and then she said, “I don’t think we’ll be
seeing a whole lot of each other after this—no pun intended—but if we do, I
would appreciate it if you could simply treat me as a former professor and a
friend. Particularly if my husband is accompanying me.”
Matt swallowed the sudden, howling rage that burned in his chest. “I’m not a
blackmailer,” he said, as calmly as he could.
“I know that, Matt. But you are a very passionate person, and not a
particularly good liar. I’d just as soon avoid any unpleasantness in the
future.”
“Well.” Matt stood up. “If you want to avoid unpleasantness, I’d better leave,
because I’m feeling really unpleasant right now.” As he faced her, his breath
heaving, he thought that, despite her compliments, he’d never felt so small, so
stupid, so unimportant, not since he’d started law school, anyway. He took off
his glasses for a moment, massaging the bridge of his nose, and then he
replaced them. “Thanks for the money and everything. Professor Spaulding,” he
added after a moment.
She stood up as well, wrapping her arms around herself as if she were cold.
“Likewise, Matt.”
Matt left her house and walked and walked and walked. He walked until night
fell and the temperature dropped, but he hardly felt the cold. Somebody thought
a blind guy walking at night made an appealing target and tried to pickpocket
him, and Matt slammed the man face-first into a brick wall and kept walking.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t known it was an unequal relationship. He’d always
known that. He just hadn’t known that he was so small a blip on her radar, that
she could end it with the snap of a finger and go back to her husband the next
week like nothing had happened. That she could hand him a ten-thousand-dollar
check like it was a one-dollar bill, like it didn’t even faze her as long as it
made Matt go away.
He went back to his apartment and slept for twelve hours straight. When he got
up, he dug the check out of his pants pockets from the previous day, got
dressed, and went to go see Foggy.
Foggy was clearly surprised when he opened the door of his apartment. “Hey,” he
said.
“Hey. Can I come in?”
“Of course.” Foggy stepped aside, and Matt walked in. He’d helped Foggy move
into this place not so long ago, but he wasn’t used to it yet, and he had to
take a moment to orient himself before he felt comfortable setting his cane
against the wall.
They stood awkwardly around while Matt tried to work out his opening gambit. As
usual, Foggy made the first move.
“Matt—”
Foggy’s voice sounded hoarse, like he’d maybe been—but Matt couldn’t let
himself think about that now. Business. He had to keep the conversation focused
on their law firm, or he’d fall apart. “We should set up a business checking
account. For firm expenses.”
“Oh, uh, okay,” said Foggy, a little confused. After a moment, he added, “Those
have a pretty high minimum balance, though, we’re gonna need something to put
in it.”
“How about this?” Matt dug the check out of his pocket, a little crumpled up,
and held it out to Foggy.
Foggy took it, unfolded it, and stared at it for a long time. “Matt? Where did
you get ten grand?” He sounded alarmed, like he thought Matt had robbed a bank
or something. Well. At least now Matt had confirmation that Stephanie had told
the truth about how much the check was for.
“Your BFF Stephanie,” said Matt. His throat hurt. “A parting gift.”
“Oh.” Matt waited for him to offer some consolation, or an ‘I told you so.’
Instead, he sniffed loudly and said, “You sure you want to put this in a
business account for the firm? This is real money here. Maybe you should keep
it for yourself.”
“What the hell am I going to do with it?” Not go to the opera, that was for
damn sure. “Besides, we’re partners, right? Nelson and Murdock.”
“Nelson and Murdock,” Foggy echoed, faintly but firmly.
“Then I can’t think of a better place for the money to be.”
Having a business account did make everything seem more official, more real.
They began scouting out office space, talking about what kind of advertising
materials they wanted. They didn’t talk about Matt’s breakup with Stephanie, or
Matt’s sex life in general. Foggy even began joking about it again. Matt,
though, despite the temptation to lose himself a haze of casual sex with
strangers, couldn’t get Foggy’s words from their fight out of his head. He
decided to take things more slowly this time, to go about things smarter. He
wasn’t a desperate student anymore; he was an adult, an intelligent, reasonably
good-looking (or so he’d been told) attorney with his own practice. He didn’t
have to just sleep with whoever would have him. He could take the time to find
people who weren’t sketchy, to make sure that it was clear what both parties
wanted up front. He could find people who were honest with him.
It wasn’t as if he had the time to go on a real bender, anyway. Something
unnerving was happening in Hell’s Kitchen. Matt knew that the neighborhood had
an organized crime presence—it had when he was a kid, and when his dad was a
kid, and despite the efforts of gentrifiers to ‘clean things up’ and of the
NYPD to be ‘tough on crime,’ you could never erase a place’s past completely.
But the crime families of Matt’s day had operated in their own spheres, and
those areas of influence had had limits. They sure as hell hadn’t been
trafficking in kidnapped women over state lines.
Matt didn’t know what had changed, when something bigger and more sinister than
the old crime families had moved in, but whatever had happened, somebody had to
do something about it.
What, though, he wasn’t sure.
He and Foggy started talking with realtors and visiting potential office
spaces; now that they had the business account, which was earning a respectable
(if still absurdly low) amount of interest, and had been approved for a loan,
they had enough for a deposit. It was harder than they’d anticipated, though,
to find a place they could afford, given that a lot of Foggy’s money was
currently going toward the higher rent he had to pay now that he wasn’t sharing
an apartment with Marci anymore. Matt would have invited Foggy to stay with
him, but the flashing billboard outside the window gave Foggy headaches, and
besides...well, Matt was going to try to minimize the time he spent out
fighting in the mask, but he felt certain that it was still going to happen,
and he didn’t know how he could possibly hide that from Foggy if they were
living together.
Essentially, then, they were limited to looking at fairly low-end places. Some
of the real estate agents took this to mean that they weren’t serious renters,
that they really weren’t worth the effort of talking to to find a workable
deal.
Matt was relieved to find out that Susan Harris of Midtown Property Solutions
did not fall into this category. Relieved, and pleased. She dealt with his and
Foggy’s bickering with equanimity, she wasn’t discouraged by their dubious
ability to pay for the office she’d shown them and said she had other possible
locations she’d be willing to discuss, and she curtsied. As Foggy had said,
adorable. Matt liked her.
Susan, as it turned out, had a couch in her office. It wasn’t what Matt would
call comfortable, but it got the job done.
Afterward, when Susan was lying half on top of Matt, both of them covered with
cooling sweat under the makeshift blanket provided by Matt’s jacket, she said,
“I have to say, this was not at all what I was expecting when I made the
appointment with your friend to show you guys that office space.”
“Me neither,” said Matt, wrapping his arm around her more closely. “If I’d
known I got to meet such lovely people, I’d have gotten into this whole
‘looking for real estate’ thing much sooner.”
“Flatterer,” she said, but she was smiling as she said it, Matt could tell.
“I call ‘em like I see ‘em. Or don’t see ‘em, as it were.”
She laughed. “You know, your friend might have had a point about the price on
the place,” she said, sounding contented. “Maybe I could talk to the rental
office about giving you guys a bit of a break.”
Matt twitched. The sated tone of her voice had an almost Pavlovian effect on
him, a conditioned relaxation borne of the knowledge that she’d enjoyed their
time together, but the idea of getting a discount on the rent because they’d
had sex...well, it didn’t sit right with him. “You don’t have to do that,” he
said.
She propped herself up on one elbow and traced patterns of aimless swirls and
zig-zags on his chest. “It sounds like you’d be great for the neighborhood,”
she said. “Local boys providing affordable legal services for the good people
of Hell’s Kitchen? It’s practically community service. And we really want to
rent that place.” She stroked a line with one finger up from his chest to the
side of his neck. “Let me talk to Alice over at the rental office, okay? I
think we can really help each other out.”
The proud side of Matt, the one that bristled at being treated like an idiot
and hated pity, rebelled against the idea of taking favors from somebody he’d
slept with. The side of Matt that wanted to help low-income clients and still
keep his firm from failing, though, that side wondered if he even had a right
to turn her down, for Foggy’s sake if not his own. He thought about his dad,
who’d done a lot of things he wasn’t proud of to put food on the table for
Matt. It was his pride and his principles that had gotten him killed. Matt bit
his lip, hoped that his father , wherever he was in the afterlife, would
understand, and said, “Okay, Susan. That would be great.”
After he and Susan talked exact numbers and parted ways, Matt went to Fogwell’s
and beat the crap out of a punching bag for a while. It didn’t make him
happier, but it did let some of the angry energy that had been building up leak
out, and he was able to get to sleep after only a few hours of listening to the
sirens and hating himself for letting them pass without going out to help.
Soon, he told himself. Once we get Nelson and Murdock off the ground, we’ll be
doing something about all this.
Just hold on a little while longer.
He met Foggy for lunch and a rousing talk about the finances of their nascent
firm. Foggy’s cousin Emily, Aunt Cheryl the butcher’s daughter, was an
accountant, and she’d given Foggy a candid assessment on the state of their
finances once the loan money from the bank came in.
“The number one expense is gonna be rent.” Foggy was matter-of-fact, but the
financial situation was clearly worrying him a little. “None of the places we
looked at yesterday is gonna be in our price range. We can head back to the
classifieds to check out some other spaces, but I’m worried that if we go too
low, we’re gonna end up losing any rent money we save doing repairs.”
Matt took a bite of his omelet. The eggs were those liquid ones restaurants
often used for quick omelets, and they’d clearly been in the fridge too long.
The eggs and onions and cheese sat heavy in his stomach. “The Midtown Property
Solutions office,” he mumbled. “The one with the view of the Hudson.”
Foggy sighed. “The one where you were hitting on the real estate agent? Yeah,
that one was pretty close, but still a little outside our budget, unless we can
talk them down a little.”
The orange juice was too sour. Matt took a sip of water and cleared his throat.
“Um. Yeah, don’t worry about the rent on that one, Fog. We’re good.”
Matt thought he could sense the weight of Foggy’s eyes on him; the silence
seemed particularly heavy. “We’re good, huh?”
“Can we not talk about this?” Matt asked. He knew he was being overly snippy,
that Foggy hadn’t done anything to deserve his anger, but some dark, unnamable
emotion was pressing on his chest, and there was only so much he could do to
hide it.
“Sure thing, Matt,” said Foggy quietly. “We don’t have to talk about it if you
don’t want to.” He pulled up his cousin’s e-mail on his phone and started
talking about maybe getting his dad out to help them with painting and minor
repairs. Matt ate his crappy omelet and listened.
***** Because that limb which I have lost, it was the only thing holding me up
*****
Chapter Summary
     Matt never thought he had that much of his ego wrapped up in looking
     attractive, but when his scars from being Daredevil start to
     interfere with his love life, he starts to think he might have been
     wrong. (CN: This chapter contains sexual assault. Matt uses physical
     violence to prevent it from going further than unwanted biting and
     touching, but he still finds the experience traumatizing.)
Matt had a tendency to divide his life into befores and afters—before his
accident and after, before his dad’s death and after, before Stick and after,
before his first hookup with Josh and after. Before he had first given in to
the devilish rage inside him and after. The before and after of being
Daredevil, though, was proving to be more complicated than he could have
guessed, even after all the soul-searching he’d done on the subject.
In some ways, he was more relaxed than he’d ever been. His nights were busier,
obviously, but he was sleeping better than he had since he was a child, freed
of the constant pressure of having to stop himself from interfering when he
heard violent crimes being committed around him. Trying to kill Fisk had
obviously been a mistake, on a number of levels, some that occasionally kept
him up at nights. He realized now just what a huge mistake it had been. For the
most part, though, Matt could feel good about the work he did as Daredevil.
Exigent circumstances were a thing, and Good Samaritan laws, and with Matt’s
senses and ability to fight, doing nothing was practically aiding and abetting
in the commission of a criminal act. No, he wasn’t ashamed of what he was
doing, and having an outlet for his anger made it easier to be patient in other
areas of his life.
Which...was good, actually, since it seemed like Foggy was never actually going
to forgive him.
Sure, they were talking again, even falling into the same patterns of banter
and discussion they’d developed over the years. But the...the quality, or the
feeling, or whatever you wanted to call that aspect of their friendship, well,
it, too, was clearly divided into Before Daredevil and After Daredevil. Before
Daredevil, Foggy touched Matt all the time—a hand on his elbow to help guide
him, a pat on his shoulder for encouragement when they were encountering
problems, a hug whenever the spirit moved Foggy, which was often. After
Daredevil, it was Matt who had to seek Foggy out for contact, and then only
under circumstances where he thought he could get away with it, namely, when
they were in a situation where Foggy would have guided Matt Before Daredevil.
And even then, the contact wasn’t like it had been before, easy and careless.
Now, there were calculations to be made, balancing how irritated Foggy seemed
to be with Matt at any given moment against how much of a pain in the ass it
would be to navigate a particular street or crowded courtroom, and when Matt
was holding onto Foggy’s arm, he knew from the tenseness of the muscles that
both he and Foggy were thinking about it the whole time.
Karen, who was overcompensating for her own secrets, whatever they were, went
some way toward filling the moments in the office when Matt and Foggy had
nothing to say to each other. But Matt still felt a desperate yearning inside,
for affection, for happiness, for contact with another person that didn’t hurt,
either physically or emotionally.
And so, after months of spending all his energy on the law or on Daredevil,
Matt started looking for sex again.
This meant wandering out to unfamiliar bars again, surrounding himself with
loud music and the smells of strangers. It was nice, in an odd way, like seeing
an old friend after a long time. Matt was a little out of practice—there had
been too many emotions involved with Claire to deliberately direct their
interactions that way, and Claire herself had been clear in drawing her
boundaries after a while. But that was okay. Matt could ease himself back into
the game. He was fine just trying the bartenders’ specialties wherever he went,
observing the kinds of people who frequented each bar, and, when the
opportunity arose, flirting.
It was a Tuesday in February when the flirting paid off, and he found himself
in the apartment building of a woman named Tina. Tina was a graphic designer
for an advertising firm, more matter-of-fact than apologetic about the fact
that Matt obviously had never seen any of her work. She’d married young,
divorced a few years ago , and was still happily single, unwilling to entangle
herself in more serious relationships after the hassle that her marriage had
turned out to be. She smelled like honey and oatmeal and the bagels and lox
that somebody brought to her office all the time, and she sang in her church’s
choir. Matt wasn’t surprised when she told him that; he could hear it in her
voice.
“Make yourself at home,” she told him, leaving him on the couch while she went
to the kitchen to pour them drinks.
“You have a nice place,” he called from the living room. “Well, you have a nice
couch, at least. Guess I’m not the best judge about the rest.” Though it was,
for the record, a nice apartment. Clearly the ad business paid well.
Tina laughed. “Thanks,” she said. “That couch you’re sitting on is my first
grown-up couch—you know, like I actually bought it at a furniture store instead
of off Craigslist.”
“It was an excellent purchase.”
After verifying that red wine was okay, Tina came out from the kitchen with the
drinks, and they sipped them slowly while they made out on the couch like
teenagers. It was nice—relaxing, low-pressure. Tina’s building was quiet,
relatively speaking, just people sitting around watching TV or sleeping, which
made it easier to block out noises from beyond the building. Her couch was
genuinely comfortable, and her soft, undemanding hands on Matt’s back or
shoulder or face made the soreness of stress leak away under their warmth.
“This is a nice shirt,” Tina mumbled into the side of Matt’s face.
He laughed. “Thanks,” he said. “Picked it because it was soft.”
“Mmm. Well, it worked out for you.” She ran a hand up his ribcage, her touch
light and sending pleasurable shivers up Matt’s spine. “Maybe, um. Maybe take
it off, and we can get to...what counts as second base these days?”
“It’s been a long time since I watched baseball,” Matt murmured, helping Tina
pull her sweater off before unbuttoning his own shirt and laying it over the
arm of the couch. Behind him, Tina blinked, and suddenly everything about her
ramped up—her heart rate, her breath, the smell of adrenaline in her sweat. A
stress response. He turned back to her. “Tina, are you all right?”
“Am I all right? What about you, are you all right? What happened to you?”
Shit. Matt hadn’t even thought about that, that what was under his shirt would
be visible once he took it off. He’d gotten in a fight with a gang of
aggressive drug dealers two nights ago, and while the new armor gave a good
amount of protection from blades and bullets, it didn’t stop him from getting
bruised when he was slammed into a wall. “Oh, uh, I tripped taking out the
garbage,” he said. It had worked with Foggy, after all.
“Taking out the garbage gave you all those scars?” asked Tina skeptically.
Oh. Oh, damn it. Of course, even the healed remnants of his pre-armor exploits
would be visible. God knew they were noticeable enough when he washed himself
in the shower, and they really weren’t the kind of thing that could be
explained by a fall taking out the garbage. He could have said “accident when I
was a kid,” which would, in a certain sense, have technically been true, but
some of them probably looked too fresh for that. Urgh. He put on a sheepish
smile and shrugged. “Bad BDSM scene,” he said.
She let out a shocked little puff of air. “Seriously?”
Matt nodded, feeling guilty about the dishonesty but unwilling to come up with
an explanation for why a blind guy got into a lot of fights that would seem
even remotely plausible to a sensible person. “Word to the wise,” he said,
“Never let someone tie you up and hit you when you’re both drunk. It just
doesn’t end well.”
“No, I would guess not.” Her voice was faint. Dammit, he’d been hoping to not
freak her out, trying to be a little lighthearted about the whole thing. He was
an idiot.
“Hey,” he said, “we don’t have to do anything like that. We don’t have to do
anything at all, if you don’t want to.”
Tina swallowed, not sounding all that calmed. “You’re really into that kind of
stuff?”
“I’m not into getting so seriously injured I need stitches, no,” said Matt
wryly. God, he was such an idiot. The scars from getting more or less
disemboweled obviously didn’t look the same as the kind of scars someone might
get from a night even of the most careless and unsafe kink. “This is all pretty
much healed up, though,” he added, trying to remedy the situation. “The risk of
anything tearing again is really low at this point.”
“Oh my God,” said Tina.
Such an idiot.
So that was pretty much the end of that encounter. Matt put his shirt back on,
they made a little awkward small talk, and then Matt left, feeling...well, he
wasn’t sure how he’d put it. A little cold, maybe. He’d really been looking
forward to spending some time with Tina—not even the sex so much, but the heavy
petting, the touching, had felt like the perfect cure to Matt’s current state
of twitchy melancholy.
Clearly, he needed a better way of handling the way his body looked now. He
waited a couple of weeks, being as cautious as he could be with his
Daredeviling and taking particular care of all his injuries, until he was sure
that nothing but the older scars showed. He prepared a story carefully, using
the car accident excuse Foggy had come up with for Karen, and then he tried
again.
Sophie was an administrator in the city’s department of transportation who
liked video games and cats. She kind of sounded like Cyndi Lauper when she
talked, which Matt thought was cute, and she made great margaritas in her Magic
Bullet. Matt’s car accident story didn’t turn her off the way his BDSM story
had turned off Tina, but the overly sympathetic way she touched him after he
got the story out made Matt call off the sex. He had never liked being treated
like he was made of glass.
Two nights later, Matt went out to a gay bar. He’d historically had better luck
having physically pleasurable but emotionally uninvolved sex with guys, and
maybe that streak would hold true tonight.
“Hey, Matt,” said Trey, the bartender. “Haven’t seen you around in a while.”
Matt shrugged. “Running your own law firm turns out to be pretty time-
consuming. Who’d have thunk it?”
“You at least making the big bucks?”
“Not so much.”
“Well, lucky for you, the booze here is still cheap. What’s your pleasure?”
Matt ordered a bourbon and ginger—light on the bourbon and heavy on the ginger,
so as to keep a clear head—and listened to the other bar patrons. The Lucky
Clover, Trey’s bar, wasn’t trendy, serving mostly middle- to low-income locals
and a few hometown boys made good who came back for visits, so it was seldom
crowded. It was doing pretty good business tonight, though; Matt ran into a few
regulars he knew, which was nice. He exchanged hand jobs with a furnace
repairman he knew named Victor, both of them unzipping their flies without
taking off any clothing, and went home in a good mood but strangely
unsatisfied. It was like he’d fulfilled his most urgent desires without
figuring out a way to deal with the larger, deeper ones.
Next he tried a trendier, more expensive bar where he was unlikely to run into
anyone he knew. It only took about a half an hour and an overpriced
microbrewery beer before he was heading to a car with a guy who worked in
corporate real estate. He hadn’t actually mentioned his name, but Matt didn’t
really care.
“You know how much this car cost?” asked Corporate Real Estate when they were
in the back seat.
“No,” said Matt shortly, focusing on getting the guy’s shirt off. He was really
looking forward to the part where Corporate Real Estate stopped talking and
started making sex noises.
“Two hundred grand,” Corporate Real Estate said proudly. “Bought it with my
Christmas bonus. I know you can’t see it, but it’s a beaut.”
Matt rolled his eyes before taking his sunglasses off and putting them in his
pocket. “I’ll try not to mess it up, then,” he said as he unbuttoned his own
shirt.
“Holy shit,” said the guy when he saw Matt’s scars, though he sounded more
surprised than horrified. Good.
“Yeah,” Matt started to say, “Car accident—,” but before he could get further
than that, the guy’s hands were on him, rubbing over the scars. Matt cocked his
head, listening. Apparently, scars turned Corporate Real Estate on. Matt wasn’t
sure whether he’d hit the jackpot or not.
“You have been a bad boy, haven’t you?” asked the guy, putting his mouth to one
of the scars.
The skin there was still sensitive, and the guy’s tongue felt great, which was
probably why Matt humored him instead of bursting out into laughter. “You could
say that,” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” said Corporate Real Estate, “you fags are just gluttons for
punishment.”
“Hey,” Matt said sharply. He didn’t mind dirty talk, but he didn’t care for
slurs. The guy wasn’t listening, though, still moving his way up Matt’s torso
until he latched onto his neck and bit sharply.
“Hey,” Matt repeated, pushing the guy’s head away. “What are you, Dracula? No
teeth, okay?”
Corporate Real Estate laughed, shifting their weights so that he was pressing
Matt down into the seat. His fingers were probably going to leave new bruises
on Matt’s ribs. “What, you gonna tell me what to do? Sounds like you need
someone to show you who’s boss. I’m gonna fuck you so hard you can’t walk
tomorrow, see if you’re telling me what to do then.”
Under other circumstances, in a scene that had been more carefully negotiated,
Matt wouldn’t have minded someone saying that to him, but there was something
in this guy’s voice—entitlement, maybe, self-satisfaction—that told Matt that
this wasn’t dirty talk to him. He was serious about it. And probably a sexual
predator. “Get off me,” he said, shoving. He wasn’t using all his strength, not
yet, but he could feel the adrenaline course through him. If Corporate Real
Estate wanted a fight, he was going to get one.
“Oh, please,” said the guy. “You know you want this.” He leaned his weight on
Matt again and reached his hand down to grab Matt’s ass.
Matt brought his leg up to knee the guy in the stomach and flipped them so that
Matt was on top. “No, I don’t,” he growled.
“What the fuck, bitch, you don’t hit me,” said Corporate Real Estate, and he
threw a sloppy punch at Matt. That was a mistake.
Matt clocked him in the nose, breaking it. He could smell blood splattering the
seats of the two-hundred-thousand-dollar car, and he grinned with vicious
pleasure. “I’m gonna give you a free lesson here,” he said. “If you want to
keep all your teeth, listen when people say no. I know a lot of people in this
city who don’t look kindly on rapists.”
“Call the cops if you want, asshole.” The guy’s voice was muffled, the broken
nose making his consonants sound weird. “See who they believe—you’re the one
who attacked me.”
Matt really, really wanted to beat the shit out of him. But he’d actually
introduced himself as “Matthew” to this guy, and there were only so many blind
white guys named “Matthew” in the city of New York who had a reputation for
casual hookups with both men and women. He had no mask to hide behind. Matt
knew enough about the world to know that men, even or maybe especially disabled
men, had a hard time pressing sexual assault charges, and the idea of
explaining to local police, many of whom he knew, about how he had ended up in
Corporate Real Estate’s car—well, it made his skin crawl. But Daredevil could
watch where Matt Murdock couldn’t, could make sure that this guy paid the price
if he assaulted anyone else.
“You’re a prick,” he said finally. “And I dare you to tell the police a blind
guy punched you after you grabbed his ass in the back of your car.” He spat on
the floor, pulled his glasses and cane out of his pockets, and walked away in
only his suit jacket, leaving his shirt in Corporate Real Estate’s car. He was
still jumpy with adrenaline. If the guy tried to follow Matt, he was going to
get a lot worse than a broken nose.
He didn’t.
Matt took rooftops and back alleys home, not wanting to explain to anyone why
he was walking home without a shirt. By the time he got back, he was shivering,
and he made himself a hot cup of coffee.
The caffeine was a bad idea. He couldn’t seem to sit still. He paced his
apartment, sorted through his record collection, took a shower. He tried to
sleep but couldn’t keep his eyes closed long enough. He couldn’t get himself
under control enough to meditate, and the sounds of the city pressed on him.
Without letting himself think about it too much, he dug out his phone. “Call
Foggy,” he said.
The phone rang five times, giving Matt time to second-guess his impulse. He
didn’t have the right to bother Foggy about stuff like this, not anymore. But
he didn’t have time to hang up before Foggy’s voice on the other end was
saying, “Matt? What is it?” His voice sounded urgent. He probably thought Matt
had been hurt as Daredevil, even if he wasn’t using the burner phone.
Matt swallowed. “Um. Don’t let the bedbugs bite?”
He had half expected Foggy to tell him to deal with his own shit, but he
didn’t. “Shit,” he said. Matt could hear him moving around on the other end,
casting aside sheets and covers, his bed creaking as he stood up. “What
happened? Do you need me to come get you?”
“No,” Matt said. “I’m at my apartment.” There was a sudden lump in his throat
and he cleared it. “Could you, um. Could you come over?”
“There in fifteen,” said Foggy. “Hang in there, buddy.” Then he hung up. Unsure
what else to do, Matt made another pot of coffee.
True to his word, Foggy appeared at Matt’s door after fourteen and a half
minutes. “Hey, are you okay?” were his first words as he stepped in, and Matt,
whose adrenaline had long since drained away, felt like crying again. God, he
loved Foggy.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Coffee?”
They went to Matt’s couch and sipped coffee together quietly for a while, the
silence awkward and pregnant with feeling. The last time Foggy had been at
Matt’s apartment, it had been when he found Matt dying on the floor, months
ago.
After a while, Matt couldn’t take it anymore. “Sorry for dragging you out
here,” he said.
“Not a problem,” Foggy said. “You feel like telling me what happened?”
Actually, Matt wasn’t sure what he felt like. Looking back, he wondered if he
was making too big a deal out of what had happened. It wasn’t as if the guy had
posed any actual threat, not to someone with Matt’s training. Maybe he should
have just come home and gone to bed and forgotten the whole thing.
Foggy sighed. “Okay, we’ll play twenty questions. Do you need medical
attention?”
“No,” said Matt, starting to feel embarrassed.
“Did you...do something you didn’t mean to while out Daredeviling?”
He wondered what Foggy meant by that. “No. Daredevil didn’t go out tonight.”
“Okay,” Foggy said patiently.
There wasn’t any point in keeping it a secret—Matt was just wasting Foggy’s
time. “I was—I was out at a bar. I was gonna—I mean, I went with this guy back
to his car. We were, uh. We were getting undressed, and he started—. Hmm. He
started doing things I didn’t like. I told him to stop, and. Um.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Foggy.
“He didn’t stop, so I, um.”
“Did you kill him?” asked Foggy.
Matt blinked, hurt. Did Foggy really think that Matt went around killing people
right and left? “No, of course not. I punched him in the nose and left.”
“That’s a shame,” said Foggy. “I was really hoping this story ended with him a
smear on the pavement.” Before Matt could respond, Foggy shook his head.
“Sorry, sorry, that’s probably not what you need to hear right now. Are you
okay?”
Foggy had already asked that. Usually, repeated questions about whether he was
all right really irritated Matt, but under the circumstances, he found himself
relaxing a little. “I’m okay. He didn’t—I mean, he just bit me a little and
grabbed my ass.”
“He bit you? Let me see.”
Matt pulled down the collar of his tee-shirt, and Foggy winced audibly. “Shit,
dude. You’re bleeding a little.”
“No, I’m not,” said Matt. There had been a little blood, earlier, but not much.
Matt had disinfected it and it was already scabbing over.
“Semantics. The fucker drew blood.” Foggy leaned back and swallowed. “Matt, is
it okay if I hug you right now?”
Matt felt tears pricking at his eyes again. Jesus, what was wrong with him
tonight? “I really wish you would,” he said, managing to keep his voice steady.
Foggy scooted over and enfolded Matt in his arms, at first hesitantly and then,
when Matt leaned into it, more firmly. A patented Foggy Nelson hug, warm,
comforting, guaranteed to make its recipient feel safe and loved. “I know you
know this already,” Foggy murmured, “but nothing that happened with this
asshole is your fault. You did everything right.”
Foggy couldn’t know that, Matt hadn’t given him all the details, but it felt
good to hear anyway, and he nodded into Foggy’s shoulder.
“You want to press charges?”
“I can’t,” Matt mumbled. “I didn’t get his name. I’d probably recognize him if
I heard him again, but.”
“Oh, Matty.” Matt prepared himself for a lecture on unsafe sexual practices,
but instead, Foggy just held him. Matt reveled in it. Getting hugged by Foggy
was a gift he hadn’t enjoyed in what felt like a very long time.
“Strong arms you’ve got there,” he said after a while, trying to lighten the
mood. “You still working out?”
“Yeah,” said Foggy casually. “The lawyer workout. Lifting my briefcase,
carrying around my laptop, making big arm motions when I make arguments in
court. It’s very rigorous.”
“It’s paying off,” said Matt. “I bet Marci digs it.” One thing Matt had to give
Marci credit for, she was super attracted to Foggy and made no effort to hide
it. Foggy deserved that, and Matt appreciated her good taste.
Foggy was silent for a long moment before pulling back slightly. “Matt, dude,
Marci and I aren’t together anymore. We broke up a long time ago. You were
there.”
Thrown, Matt sniffed Foggy, and then winced when he heard Foggy raise his
eyebrows. “I thought you guys were getting back together,” he said. “You smell
like her.”
“Yeah, ‘cause we ate lunch together today and you have a nose like a
bloodhound.” Foggy drummed his fingers awkwardly on the couch. “I mean, we’re
friends and all, but getting back together...given the givens, that just wasn’t
in the cards.”
Matt was Foggy’s best friend. Or he had been, anyway. He was supposed to know
stuff like that. Even if Foggy didn’t tell him, Matt had strong senses and knew
Foggy well enough to interpret what he picked up. The distance between them had
somehow become a gulf. Matt felt cold, despite the warmth of Foggy next to him
on the couch.
“Hey,” Foggy broke in, obviously trying to change the subject, “You get any new
records lately? I’ve been jonesing for some new tunes.”
Matt didn’t try to go out for sex for a while after that. He needed a new game
plan for dealing with people who were too into his scars, and the idea of
letting people see him without his clothes made him feel...vulnerable.
It was okay, though. It was better, anyway. It would have been totally
inaccurate to say that he and Foggy were back to where they were pre-Daredevil,
but that night on Matt’s couch, drinking coffee and catching each other up on
things like new restaurants tried and new albums listened to, seemed to give
their post-Daredevil friendship a second wind. Foggy was touching Matt again, a
hand on his back now and again, a fist bump when they had success in court. He
didn’t get twitchy when Matt wanted to take his arm for a little extra
guidance. They started talking again about things other than work. Their new
ease around each other made Karen relax, and she started spending less time
filling the office with nervous chatter and more time having actual
conversations. It made Matt happy; it should have been enough to make him
content.
It wasn’t.
A month after the incident with Corporate Real Estate, Matt got back on the
horse and picked up a woman named Amy in a bar. Amy ran her own start-up, a
social media site for musical artists she was hoping could compete with sites
like Bandcamp or Facebook for bands looking to sell and advertise their music.
She liked talking about politics, and though she and Matt didn’t agree on
everything, they had a discussion on foreign policy that was interesting
without getting unpleasant. She kept her apartment very clean, which Matt could
appreciate.
When clothes started to come off, Matt forestalled her questions by saying,
“The scars are from a car accident when I was a kid. I know they look bad, but
they don’t hurt, and they don’t restrict my range of motion. Are they going to
be a problem?”
“Oh, uh, no,” said Amy. But her heart thudded the lie, and the smell of arousal
was cut off at its source, left to grow stale in the air, and Matt felt himself
getting depressed. He made his excuses to a relieved Amy and went home.
Matt didn’t think of himself as a vain man, but when he thought back on it, he
really did like it when people found him good-looking. Even though he didn’t
have much to do with it, his looks being more a combination of genetics,
haircuts and clothes that other people helped him pick out, and personal taste
in the eye of the beholder, it still felt like a victory whenever someone was
attracted to him. It was like the ugly duckling he’d been, a weird blind orphan
in hand-me-down clothes, had grown up to be a swan.
Except now he had apparently been demoted back down to ugly duck.
“Hey, buddy,” said Foggy the next day. “You seemed bummed, what’s up?”
What was Matt supposed to say, I feel disgusting, you know anyone who likes
having sex with their clothes on? He smiled at Foggy and said, “Eh. Nothing.
I’m just a little tired.”
***** So will you come back to my corner? Spent too long alone tonight *****
Chapter Summary
     Matt's dry spell is bumming him out. Foggy notices, and at long last,
     they talk through some of their issues.
Matt had gone the first seventeen years of his life without any sex other than
a few furtive late-night jerk-off sessions; it wasn’t something he couldn’t do
without. Plus, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough to occupy his time,
between getting Nelson and Murdock off the ground, dealing with the ambitious
crooks who’d sprung up in Wilson Fisk’s absence, and slowly tending to his
recovering relationship with Foggy. There really wasn’t any reason to get bent
out of shape if easy sex had become a little less easy these days.
But he did. He felt twitchy and awkward all the time, like there was something
under his skin that wanted to get out. It wasn’t anger—a few particularly
vigorous nights of Daredeviling had made it clear that whatever Matt’s
subconscious wanted, it wasn’t beating the crap out of muggers and rapists. But
he couldn’t stand to sit around his apartment alone at night, either. More than
once, he had to stop himself from calling Foggy at some ungodly hour of the
morning, when sleep wouldn’t come and he was desperate to hear someone else’s
voice.
He thought he was doing a pretty good job covering it at work. And it wasn’t as
if the work didn’t occupy his mind. They were dealing with a couple of wrongful
murder convictions, and those cases were complicated; both clients had been
convicted over ten years ago, and tracking down witnesses from the time of the
original crimes and evidence that had long ago been relegated to a storeroom in
a basement somewhere wasn’t easy. There was a nonzero chance in one of the
cases that the police who worked the original investigation had planted
evidence, and that was its own logistical and political tangle. Matt had always
done well in his workaholic mode at covering up or casting aside whatever
emotional bullshit he was feeling, so he thought this latest development in his
personal life would be okay at least as far as Foggy and Karen were concerned.
Apparently not.
Matt was going through witness statements from one of the old cases—not the one
where the police had planted evidence, but one where Matt was pretty sure
racism played the single biggest part in the original witness
identifications—when Foggy knocked on his office door. “Hey,” he said, “you
busy?”
“Nah,” said Matt, pausing the electronic voice that was reading the witness
statements for him, “come on in.” Brushing Foggy off just made him suspicious
and pissy, and besides, chances were that he had only come in to ask a question
about one of the cases.
Foggy stepped in and closed the door behind him, his heartbeat rapid and
anxious, and Matt sat up straighter. Maybe the question wasn’t about a case
after all. “Are there any big criminal operations going on I should know
about?” he said in a low voice. “Some major crime boss doing disgusting stuff
that you’ve decided to take on single-handedly?”
“Um.” Matt considered pointing out that the way Foggy had worded that sentence
made it unclear whether he thought Matt was taking on the crime boss or the
disgusting stuff, but Foggy didn’t seem in the mood for a grammatical quibble.
“No?”
“You don’t sound sure,” said Foggy.
“I mean, nothing Fisk-level. The usual stuff you get in a big city, violent
drug dealers, spousal abusers, a lot of muggers and armed robbery. Why?”
Foggy let out a gust of a sigh. “Well, you look like you haven’t slept in a
week, and I’m starting to wonder if you’ve totally forgotten how smiling
works.”
So much for Matt’s ability to cover up how lousy he felt. “I’m fine,” he said,
putting on what he hoped was a convincing smile.
Foggy’s heart sped up, and his voice was a little louder as he said, “You’re
clearly not. My best guess was, you know....” He mouthed “Daredevil stuff” so
exaggeratedly that Matt wasn’t sure it was less noticeable than if he’d said it
out loud. “But if that’s not it, well, then, you’re just gonna have to tell me
what the problem is. Seriously, dude. Just tell me what it is, maybe I can
help.”
“There isn’t a problem,” Matt said. “Really, Foggy. I’m fine.”
“Come on,” said Foggy. His voice was light, but his posture was shifting, his
footing becoming more solidly grounded and his muscles tensing. He was
preparing for an argument. “I thought we were past this secrets bullshit now.”
Matt swallowed. Was there a way to explain this that didn’t make him sound
completely pathetic? Probably not. Ugh. But Foggy clearly wasn’t going to
accept a brush-off, and Matt didn’t know if he could take a return to the days
of no physical contact. “Okay,” he said finally, aiming for a casual, airy
tone. Maybe humor was his way out of this one. “You know that cliché about
chicks digging scars?”
“Um, yeah.” Foggy sounded confused—which was miles better than angry or
pitying, anyway.
“Turns out, not so much. Or maybe there’s, like, a twelve-scar maximum. Anyway,
I’m going through a dry spell right now, and....” Matt swallowed. He didn’t
know how to finish this, and it was getting harder to keep up his cheerful
facade. “I don’t know. I guess I’m a little lonely.”
“Are you kidding me?” Foggy said, sounding incredulous. “You’ve been moping
around like a kicked puppy because you’re not getting laid? Welcome to the
average guy’s life, buddy.”
Matt had suspected that Foggy would think he was being stupid, but to have it
confirmed hurt more than he had anticipated. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said
shortly. He was done putting on a happy face. “Anyway. I ought to finish going
over these witness statements and see if there are any inconsistencies.” He
pulled the flash drive out of his work computer without ejecting it properly,
shoved it in his pocket, grabbed his cane, and pushed past Foggy to step out of
the office. He could hear Foggy’s voice saying, “Wait, Matt—” but whether he
was about to keep making fun of Matt, apologize, or explain to him that sex
wasn’t that big a deal, Matt didn’t think he could face him, so he kept
walking.
The next day was a little awkward in the office. Foggy’s general demeanor was
that of someone gingerly avoiding a feral dog, and Matt couldn’t decide whether
his attitude here should be of one waiting for an apology or one trying to
figure out how to apologize. Untangling who was in the right and who in the
wrong when it came to this emotional stuff wasn’t exactly Matt’s forte, and he
distracted himself by throwing himself into his work so hard that he barely
noticed when Karen and Foggy headed out for lunch, and then when Karen headed
out for the day.
“Hey, Matt,” she said, and Matt jumped—he really was distracted, he thought,
chiding himself. “I’m going home.”
“Okay,” he said. “Be careful.” One of their current, non-convicted-of-murder
clients was suing the NYPD for false arrest and police brutality, and frankly,
between that and the case with the planted evidence, Matt was getting a little
nervous about unscrupulous police officers targeting their firm. Brett was
great, but even he couldn’t keep the entire NYPD in line.
“Will do.” She stepped closer, closing the door of Matt’s office behind her,
and asked, “Hey, can I ask you something?”
Matt took his earbuds out and grinned at her. “You just did.”
“Ha, ha.” Her eye-roll was practically audible. “Seriously, though, are you and
Foggy fighting again?”
He felt his face forming into a frown. “Just a slight difference of opinion,”
he said. He was giving Karen his “client” voice, the polite but not terribly
friendly one he used when talking with strangers. He knew she hated it, but it
was the best and fastest way he could think of to put on a good face when he
was feeling overemotional about something. “We’re fine. Why?”
“I don’t know, the Cold War in here today?” Karen gave an exaggerated shiver.
“Plus, you’ve seemed really down lately, and it reminds me a lot of when you
two were fighting before, when we were going after Fisk.” She sighed and added,
“I know it’s none of my business, but come on, you guys love each other. Would
it kill you to work this out so we can have a pleasant working environment
again?”
Great. If Matt hadn’t been sure whether to feel guilty before, he was sure now.
“Sorry, Karen,” he said. “We’ll work it out.”
“That’s all I ask,” said Karen, wrapping her scarf around her neck. “All right,
I’m off. Don’t work too late, okay?”
“All right,” said Matt. “I’ll bring coffee tomorrow, okay?” It had become his
traditional 'sorry I’m such a fuck-up of a coworker' apology.
Karen laughed. “I should probably say no, given how much you’ve brought the
coffee in the last month, but my taste buds won’t let me. You’re like the
Coffee Whisperer. Surprise me, okay?”
“Will do,” he said, and he waved goodbye as she walked out of the office. He
tracked her footsteps until they faded into the haze of noise in the
distance—Karen could take care of herself, of course she could, but he liked to
think that if she needed help, at least he’d be paying attention. When he could
no longer distinguish Karen’s sounds from those around her, he reached for his
earbuds, and then stopped. In his effort to focus on Karen, he hadn’t picked up
on Foggy walking toward his office. His heartbeat was fast, nervous, and he was
shuffling foot to foot outside Matt’s door.
Matt took a deep breath. “Come in.”
Foggy pushed the door open softly and stepped in, coming to a stop in front of
Matt’s desk. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” said Matt, feeling awkward.
“Look, I just wanted to say—”
Foggy was going to apologize, which was stupid—Matt had just been overreacting.
“No,” he said, “I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s stupid to get worked up about not
having sex. I was just being dramatic.”
“Hmm.” That was a frowny kind of ‘hmm,’ and Matt felt his own pulse hum with
nerves as Foggy sat down in the chair Matt kept in the office for clients.
“Well, I’m not gonna dispute you being dramatic, because, you know, you kind of
are sometimes, but I, um. You were clearly pretty upset, and I just made fun of
you. I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, but I’m pretty sure I did, so,
sorry for being a jerk.”
Matt shrugged, swallowing the complicated knot of feelings in his throat. “Like
I said. It was stupid, anyway.”
“I don’t know,” said Foggy. “I guess if I were the kind of ladykiller you are
and I couldn’t work my magic anymore, I’d be freaking out.”
“I’m not—that’s not—” His face was heating up, and he was tripping over his
words. How did Foggy always do this, make an idiot out of him? “You don’t
understand.”
Foggy tapped on the arm of the chair three times, rat-tat-tat. It seemed
unbelievably loud to Matt in the relative quiet of the office at night. “You
say that a lot, man,” he said. “Why don’t you explain it to me? Using actual
words.”
“What, exactly, do you want me to explain?”
“Well.” Foggy sat up straighter, a joint popping in his back. Matt winced. “I
guess, why it makes you so unhappy not to be having completely insane amounts
of sex. I mean, I like sex as much as the next person, but I don’t need to be
having it every night.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t have sex every night, and I never have. I have
too much going on.”
A rush of warmth hit Matt’s face as Foggy huffed out a frustrated breath.
“Yeah, okay, my point is, you have way more sex with strangers than the average
person, and you take it really personally whenever we talk about it. And now
you’re not having it, and it’s bumming you out. Is it just a matter of having a
really high sex drive, or what? Because if so, I’ve got a fantastic thing
called ‘masturbating’ you might want to look into.”
Matt took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes, feeling, as he often did
these days, that he and Foggy were communicating on completely different
wavelengths. “No. No, it’s not like that.”
“What’s it like then, Matt? Because you’ve never struck me as the kind of guy
who has a ton of ego wrapped up in being attractive to people, but I’m having a
hard time coming up with reasons for why people not wanting to have sex with
you because of your scars—which sucks, by the way, don’t get me wrong—is
hitting you like this.”
“It’s not—I mean, I guess it is ego, in a sense. But it’s not that I think I’m
so great or anything. And I know how to masturbate, jackass. Me and sex, well,
it’s not physical.”
“What isn’t, sex? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure it is, actually.”
“God, Foggy,” said Matt, frustrated, “do you want me to explain this or not?”
Foggy paused, swallowed, and said. “Sorry, yeah, I do.”
“Okay.” Matt found a pen on his desk to fidget with, twisting the cap on and
off while he thought of how to phrase what he wanted to say. “I, uh. I was kind
of a lot of trouble, as a kid.”
“As a kid?”
Matt set the pen down. “Really? Really?”
“I’m sorry. Go on.”
“Like I said,” said Matt, trying to let go of his irritation and recapture the
line of thought he had been developing, “I was—I was kind of fucked up after my
dad died. I couldn’t get a grip on my senses enough to go to school or do
anything, really—hell, I could hardly keep food down. The nuns were at their
wits’ end. And—and then Stick happened when I was ten, and that helped with the
senses, but it brought this whole other set of problems.”
“Stick didn’t....” said Foggy suspiciously, and Matt shook his head vigorously.
“God no. Stick thought sex was basically like doing crystal meth. He talked
about love like it was a disease. He never would have touched me like that. No,
I just mean that when he was there, I had a lot of mysterious injuries to
explain to the sisters and my teachers, and when he left, he stole all the
money my dad left me, and there was this whole police investigation, and it was
just a mess all around.”
“Jesus, I guess so.” Foggy’s voice was low, with an undercurrent of anger. Matt
knew he was being roundabout, but he didn’t think the anger was aimed at him.
Foggy had always been protective.
“It was fine,” Matt hastened to reassure him. “I got over it, I went back to
school and pulled my grades up, it was just....” He picked up the pen again.
He’d gotten it at a bar association conference—there were letters stamped into
the plastic, and running his fingers over them was just distracting enough to
let him continue. “I felt like the best I could achieve was minimizing the
amount of trouble I was. There really wasn’t any chance of my actually making
anyone happy.”
“That’s not....” Foggy started, but he didn’t seem to know how to finish the
sentence. He couldn’t deny it, Matt thought grimly. He couldn’t deny that,
historically speaking, Matt didn’t have a great track record making anybody
happy.
“And then I had sex for the first time. I was seventeen, he was eighteen,” he
said, before Foggy could ask and assume that it had been some horrible child
molestation situation. “And it was...it was amazing. I could really, genuinely
make somebody happy. And I knew I was making him happy—the things he said were
clear, and his physical reactions were even clearer. I was actually good at it.
And it just kept being like that. When I’m having sex, I can be a normal
guy—better than normal, because I know when something isn’t working and I can
change it. When I’m having sex, I’m not somebody to, to pity, or to fear.”
He could sense Foggy getting ready to interrupt him, but if Matt stopped
talking now, he was never going to finish, so he hurried on. “My body can—can
do things other than hurt people, or be a problem for me. It’s—it’s like a
miracle, every time, when people relax around me and have fun and I can be
close to them, even if it’s only for a little while. And now—I guess the scars
just make people uncomfortable. Instead of making them happy, I just weird them
out. It’s not their fault, they can’t help how they feel, and I know nobody
owes me anything, it just....” He shrugged, the flood of words coming to an
end. “I’m going to miss it.”
Foggy was quiet for a moment, except for the pounding of his heart. Matt
guessed he was waiting to see if Matt was finished. Finally, he said, “I don’t
even know where to start.”
Matt felt like he’d been jabbed in the chest with something sharp, and he
turned his face toward his desk. “I told you you wouldn’t understand.”
“No. I mean, I think I do. Question, do you even get any physical pleasure out
of sex?”
Of all the questions Foggy could have asked, that wasn’t one that had even been
on Matt’s radar. “Of course I do.”
“Hey, no, no ‘of course’ about it. Because what you’re describing sounds like
you’re having sex as some kind of public service to give other people a pick-
me-up when you get lonely and feel bad about yourself. If you like sex, great.
But you know you don’t have to do the nasty with people to make them happy,
right? You’re not, like, a medieval courtier.”
Despite himself, Matt felt himself smiling. “I think you mean ‘courtesan.’
Unless I really misunderstood something in my European history classes.”
“Whatever,” said Foggy dismissively. “The point is, you make people happy all
the time, and I’m not even counting your amateur heroics. Are you forgetting
Mrs. Moskowicz bringing us a shitload of pies last week because we got her out
of that hideous parking ticket payment plan? She called us ‘handsome young
angels.’ She made the crusts from scratch. Does that sound like somebody who
needs to be seduced into finding you awesome? No wait, don’t answer that, I
don’t want to know.”
Matt hadn’t even opened his mouth, but at that, he had to respond, “That was
just me doing my job. Mrs. Moskowicz was being exploited, and we’re her
lawyers—representing her interests is literally the bare minimum of what we’re
supposed to be doing.”
“Yeah, okay, but award us some points for doing it well, dude.” Foggy sighed.
“You don’t like that one? How about all the people we helped for free when we
were interning at the legal aid clinic? Or Josie, when we helped her avoid
losing her bar? Or Tom Belkin—did he or did he not call us MVPs for going above
and beyond volunteering at the food drive last year? You think Clint Peterson’s
not happy about us getting his kids into a decent day care?”
Matt couldn’t say much to that, except that it proved something that he’d
actually suspected for a long time—that the part of him that was just Foggy’s
friend was the best part of him, the part he never had to be ashamed of. Almost
never.
He hadn’t been paying attention, so Foggy’s hand, when it came down to grip his
shoulder, felt like it came out of nowhere. “Not doing it for you, huh?” asked
Foggy softly. “Let me run this one by you, then. You make me and Karen happy a
lot, by being our friend. In fact—I think I may have mentioned this once or
twice, actually—you’re kind of the best friend I’ve ever had. And I’m not gonna
lie, you drive me absolutely crazy, and piss me off, like, at least three times
a day—and that was even before the Daredevil thing—but since you make me happy,
like, seventy-five times a day, you’re still coming out on top with me, and you
always have, without any sex in the picture.”
“Foggy,” said Matt, too overwhelmed to say more than that. He took a deep
breath, counted to seven, and then slowly let it out. Then he did it one more
time, before saying, “Thank you. That means a lot to me. It really does. And
you make me really happy too, happier than anyone. It just—”
“I’m not gonna fix your self-esteem problems with a Hallmark moment, I get it,”
said Foggy. “Have you ever talked to somebody? Somebody professional, I mean?”
“My priest,” said Matt with a shrug, not feeling as defensive as he usually did
when the conversation came around to this point. “Not about sex, of course. I
had to talk to a counselor when I was a kid, but I don’t know how productive it
was. I was never upset about what she thought I should be upset about, and way
too upset about other things. I obviously wasn’t having sex then, though.”
“Okay, fair enough,” said Foggy. “And I’m not an expert, but from what I
understand about Catholicism, talking about your sex addiction to your priest
would be mega awkward.”
“It’s not an addiction, Foggy,” Matt interrupted.
“Eh. Close enough.” Foggy grabbed a peppermint out of his pocket, unwrapped it
with a sound Matt was pretty sure people could hear in New Jersey, and started
crunching on it, releasing waves of powerful scent. Matt wrinkled his nose.
“Oh, shit,” said Foggy around his mint. “You’re making the face again. Is my
eating a peppermint seriously bothering you this much?”
“It’s fine,” said Matt, and Foggy shook his head.
“Living with me must have been a nightmare.” Before Matt could protest that it
hadn’t been a nightmare at all—at least, after Matt got used to the snoring, it
hadn’t been—Foggy said, “Sorry, dude. You gotta tell me this stuff. Anyway,
that was a thinking peppermint. I’m totally done thinking now.” And then he
swallowed the semi-chewed chunks of peppermint whole. Matt shuddered.
“You’re gonna choke to death doing that.”
“I could point out the hypocrisy of Daredevil giving me warnings about my
reckless habits, but I’m taking the high horse tonight. I’ve got a couple of
ideas for dealing with your sex thing. You ready for this?”
Matt sighed. “Sure. Why not.”
“Okay. Idea one—you go to a therapist. I could help you find one on Yelp or
something, it wouldn’t be any trouble. But I’ve been suggesting that for years
and you never take me up on it, so idea two—you go volunteer at the animal
shelter with me. A, you’d be serving the community, which is like your reason
for being, B, you’d be hanging out with me, so obviously awesome, and C, there
is no way that even you could be miserable covered in a pile of kittens and
puppies.”
“I didn’t know you volunteered at an animal shelter,” said Matt with a frown.
It was the kind of thing he felt like he’d pick up on.
“I don’t,” said Foggy airily, “but I’ve always meant to. Anyway, idea three is
sort of a variant of idea two, only instead of volunteering somewhere, you just
hang out with me and Karen more and we have good, clean, family-friendly fun.
And then when you’re ready, you get back out there, and I’m not talking about
sexing up total strangers, I’m talking about actually getting to know somebody
first, so when the clothes come off, they’re already familiar with whatever
bullshit explanation you’ve come up with about your scars and they’ll be so in
love with you that it won’t make a difference.”
“I think you’re wildly overestimating my ability to make someone fall in love
with me,” Matt said dryly.
“Bet I’m not,” Foggy muttered. Matt tilted his head, confused. Foggy cleared
his throat and said, “Come on, dude, that’s your childhood abandonment issues
talking. You know perfectly well you can charm the pants off people when you
try.”
Matt appreciated the sentiment, but honestly, he was still confused. Foggy’s
heart was beating in a way that indicated nerves, but none of the other usual
signs of lying—breathing changes, rapid head movement, modulations of his
voice, shuffling feet—suggested that he didn’t mean what he was saying. More
likely, he was getting emotional. Was he...angry? Did he think Matt manipulated
the people he slept with—was that what he meant by ‘charm’? “Foggy?”
“What?” Foggy’s voice was bright, but not with its usual, open brightness—this
was brassy, fake. Matt felt something sour in his stomach.
“Are you mad at me?”
“No!” The answer came instantly, and, Matt thought, honestly. “Why do you even
think that?”
“I can hear flies crawling on the trash in the dumpster outside,” Matt pointed
out. “I could hear what you said a second ago. And besides....” Matt formed a
mental list of what he was picking up from Foggy, the better to present it in a
coherent fashion: the rapid heartbeat, the raised body temperature, the tense
stance. And then he had a sudden, sharp memory of sitting in a park with Stick,
learning how to read people.
Is she sick?
Worse, she’s in love.
“Are you....” Matt started to ask, but it seemed too absurd, really. It was
more likely that Foggy’d had a crush, back when they’d first met, and still
felt embarrassed about it, or that Matt had ended up sleeping with a woman that
Foggy was interested in. But that would be the kind of thing to be irritated
about, not nervous about, wouldn’t it? Why did personal interactions have to be
so damned complicated? Matt decided to play it off as a joke and say what he
was thinking; if it turned out to be bullshit, then, at least it would be
easier to pull this conversation back from some kind of emotional edge. “Are
you confessing your undying love for me, Foggy?” he asked, in the tone he’d use
to ask about Foggy’s plans to start a skiffle band or his fantasies about
filling the office with bean-bag chairs.
Despite his suspicions, Matt hadn’t seriously entertained the possibility of an
affirmative answer to this question. He’d anticipated a swift denial, a joking
admonition to get over himself. Instead what he got was a gasp and a stutter in
Foggy’s heartbeat.
“Wait,” Matt said slowly, processing what this meant. “What?”
Foggy stood up, looming over Matt’s desk. “Oh, Jesus, dude, are we really
talking about this now?” His voice was exasperated, like he thought Matt was
being slow on purpose to annoy him. Now he was annoyed.
“I think we kind of have to,” said Matt, beginning to feel a little irritated
himself. “Aren’t you the one who said yesterday that we were past this secrets
bullshit? Pretty sure that’s a direct quote, by the way.”
Foggy huffed in irritation. “How is this even a secret? I’m pretty sure
everyone who’s met us in the last five years knows, and that’s without your
ninja superpower senses.”
“Ninja superpower—what—I’m not a mind reader, Foggy, you’re telling me this
whole time, you, you—” Loved me, Matt couldn’t say, now that it was serious and
not a wild, half-joking guess.
“Wait, are you telling me you seriously didn’t know?” Foggy sat down again,
sagging like a puppet whose strings had been cut. “Seriously? You can tell when
people are lying but you can’t tell when someone’s in love with you?”
“I can make an educated guess when people are lying,” said Matt. “It’s not like
there’s a one-to-one correlation between bodily responses and emotions, Foggy.
And love’s, I mean, it can be a big, complicated thing.” A thought occurred to
him and he frowned. “Wait—all the people I’ve hooked up with over the years,
and you never....”
“No,” said Foggy firmly, though Matt hadn’t even been sure how he was going to
finish the sentence. “I’m not interested in a pity fuck any more than you are.”
Matt swallowed. Had Foggy been jealous, knowing about all the sex Matt had been
having? Had he been hurt? Jealousy might have been a big part of Foggy’s
interventions and advice about sex, and Matt would never have been the wiser,
if Foggy was covering it up with genuine worry. “Foggy,” he said, “That’s
not...why would I ever pity you? You’re great. You’re the most important person
in the world to me.”
Foggy sighed, and when he spoke again, the irritation in his voice was gone. “I
know, bud,” he said. “But let’s get real, the last thing on earth you need is
more confirmation that sex is the best way to make people like you, and the
last thing on earth that I need is to be another notch on your bedpost, which I
mean in the nicest possible way. Plus,” he added in a more normal tone of
voice, “if this partnership goes up in flames because we’re fucking, I think
Karen will actually murder us.”
Matt had to chuckle at that. “Yeah, probably.” More seriously, he said, “Can
we—can we put a pin in this conversation, or something? I mean, the last thing
on earth that I want to do is to—to use you, or hurt your feelings. You know
that, right?”
“Yeah,” said Foggy, who was good enough not to remind Matt that regardless of
his intentions, he’d apparently done just that all the time. “I know.”
“I just, I just don’t know if we can put that cat back in the bag, now that I
know.”
“You can’t just ignore it?” Foggy muttered. “That’s what I thought you were
doing anyway.” Matt’s face must have done something, because Foggy said,
“Sorry, I get it, you didn’t know. I’m just, uh, I’m just having my worldview
blown a little bit here.”
“Seriously,” said Matt. His voice was cracking now. “I didn’t know, and I
really don’t like the idea of just ignoring how you feel. I love you, Foggy,
and I want you to be happy. I’m just—I’m so fucked up right now, man. I feel
like I could spend the rest of my life giving you the best sex either of us has
ever had, and you’d still be getting the raw end of the deal, because neither
of us would ever know exactly what the connection was between how I felt about
you and what we were doing in the bedroom.”
Foggy stood up again, this time moving around to Matt’s side of the desk. “Come
here, Matt,” he said softly, his arms open, and Matt hugged him, breathing in
the scent of Foggy’s cheap shampoo and letting his heartbeat slow. “Come on,
man,” Foggy said into Matt’s hair. “You don’t have to have sex with me or date
me or anything for us to do this, okay? I’ve got plenty of hugs to go around.”
“I know,” said Matt. He pulled back, readjusted his glasses, and said, “Okay, I
made a decision.”
“Um, okay.” Foggy sounded surprised, kind of confused. “About what?”
“About your ideas. Maybe, um. Can I pick more than one?”
“Sure,” said Foggy, still taken aback.
“Maybe, uh. Ideas one and three. One was the one where I talk to a professional
about the sex stuff, and three was the one where you and me and Karen hang out
more.”
“Are you kidding me, Matt?” Foggy didn’t sound confused anymore, he sounded
thrilled. “Yes, definitely, those are great choices. I am awesome at Googling,
we will find you an amazeballs counselor to talk to, and I have so many ideas
for stuff we can all do together, fun stuff. For instance, did you know that
Karen hasn’t seenThe Room?”
“Ha ha ha, that’s quite a story, Mark,” said Matt, doing his best Tommy Wiseau
impression, and he was rewarded with one of Foggy’s happiest laughs.
“You can say that again.”
Matt took a deep breath and said, “I’m not gonna forget about the whole, um.
The whole love thing, though. I couldn’t, not if I tried. Maybe if we hang out
more, kind of—rebuild things between us, we could...I don’t know, we could come
back to this in six months or a year and see how we’re both feeling then. Maybe
you’ll feel the same, maybe we’ll want to give dating a try, or hell, maybe by
then you’ll have met somebody else who turns out to be the love of your life.”
“Very possible,” Foggy said. “I am actually a very attractive man, you know.”
“I do know,” said Matt with a smile.
Foggy’s hand gripped Matt’s shoulder. Matt felt every place where the threads
in his shirt were pressed against his skin, and he cherished the sensation.
“All right, Matty,” Foggy said. “This is probably the first time I’ve ever said
this about an idea of yours, but that sounds like a pretty good plan.”
“Excuse you, I’ve had good ideas before,” Matt said, faux-indignant. “Whose
idea was it to call this firm Nelson and Murdock?”
Foggy’s laugh echoed again, loud and cheerful, in Matt’s office. “I’ll give you
that one,” he said. “Though we’re probably gonna have to start calling it
‘Nelson, Murdock, and Page’ before too long.”
“Fair enough,” said Matt. “As long as the Nelson and Murdock part stays
together.”
“You don’t have to worry about that. The Nelson and Murdock part is definitely
staying together.”
Matt had been telling the truth earlier; detecting a lie was more a matter of
guesswork than it was some miraculous skill. That being said, he knew that
Foggy was telling the truth. He felt it with every part of him.
For the first time in a long time, Matt didn’t want anything at all. He didn’t
want to be anywhere else but where he was. He had everything he needed.
End Notes
     This story brought to you by Frightened Rabbit: the story title and
     title for Chapter 3 come from their song “The Twist”; the titles for
     Chapter 1 and Chapter 4 come from “Keep Yourself Warm”; the title for
     Chapter 2 comes from “Fast Blood”; the title for Chapter 5 comes from
     “The Modern Leper”; and the title for Chapter 6 comes from “The
     Woodpile”. Those songs were more or less my soundtrack while writing.
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