Page 8 of The Match Faker
Instead, I fall onto my unmade bed.
I should sleep first. Sleep is critical for me, a guy no longer in his twenties. I dragged my own ass out of bed after midnight, bartended for two and a half hours, then got up at seven to avoid the inevitablewho the fuck closed last night?text I’d get from Rocco this afternoon.
Vibrations from my butt pull me from the almost immediate sleep I’ve drifted into. I fumble for a minute, digging my phone out of my pocket, then answer without even lifting my head from the pillow. “Bernie, I promise everything is fine. Just worry about Adam.”
“Who is Bernie?”
Life leaves me in a single slow breath at the sound of my father’s voice.
“And who is Adam?”
Chest tight, I roll onto my back and blink up at the bright February sky through the angled skylight above my bed. “Dad. What’s up?”
“I am fine, Nicholas. How are you?”
It’s Nicholas today. That can’t be good.
I clear my throat, tamping down my unease. “Tired.”
“That’s what a party lifestyle will do to a thirty-year-old man.”
God, he is condescending as fuck. Does it come naturally to him or did he take classes in how to sound disdainful? I’ve always wondered.
“Excuse me,” I say with all the huffiness of a twenty-one-year-old girl who thinks I don’t know how to make a cosmopolitan. “I’m thirty-one and a half. And I wasn’t partying. I was working.”
To Dad, they might as well be the same thing. He’s the kind of person who is polite to his servers, friendly with his garbage collector, and tips his cab drivers, but can’t abide any of his children stooping to such work.
The horror.
“What do you need, Dad?”
“It’s our fortieth wedding anniversary in a few weeks. Are you and Carrie coming?”
I throw my arm over my eyes. Instantly, I gag and drop it again. Apparently, I stink. “Carrie and I broke up.”
Carrie dumped me. She said I have Peter Pan syndrome and she’s honestly not wrong. Not that I’ll tell my father that. The breakup wasn’t a total surprise; I liked Carrie, maybe even could have loved her, but she wants to be with a guy who works a nine-to-five job. She’s ready to move into a house in the suburbs with four bedrooms, three and a half baths, and a two-car garage with a man who’ll take her for brunch on weekends. She deserves that. She deserves all the things she wants.
But I work nights and weekends, and I hate brunch on principle alone. I know how difficult the shift can be for service workers. And I was always too tired from working the night before to take her anyway. I’m a guy who lives above a bar in an apartment with one bathroom. I don’t even know what half a bath would look like?
Dad’s quiet for a long moment. Finally, he says “I’m sorry to hear that” in a tone that makes me think he’s about to add something fatherlike.
Instead, he says, “Your mother will be devastated, as you know.” Yeah, that’s more like it. He’s more interested in making a fool of me. “She really liked Carrie.”
Well, Old Man, devastating my mother is my favorite pastime. “Do you want me to see if Carrie can make it? I can stay here.”
“There’s no reason to be snarky.” He sounds legitimately surprised by my reaction, because what it really comes down to is this: my father and I don’tgeteach other. “We just want you to achieve the same success as your siblings.”
“To be clear, in this scenario, I’m only successful if I’m dating someone?” I feel like the child of one of Jane Austen’s mother characters.
“Maintaining a long-term relationship would be the first step toward marriage and starting a family, yes.”
Joke’s on Mom. Being an uncle is more my jam. I can’t say that to her, though. Her desire for grandkids comes from a good place. The only thing she loves more than being surrounded by her family is being surrounded bymoreof us.
“By the time he was your age, Alex was already…”
Here we go. Dad launches into an explanation of all of my perfect eldest brother’s achievements starting with marriage to his high school sweetheart, Robert, then moving on to their two and half children, if you count the dog—which I do—and Alex’s job working at the only truly acceptable company in my father’s opinion, his own: Scott & Sons Furniture Solutions.
An airplane works its way across the sky above me as Dad moves down the list of his other successful children.