The Marriage Contract

didn’t think I should be thinking about.
The idea was enticing, at least conceptually. It would be good to use to get Mom and Dad to maybe lighten up a little and have some return to a relationship with them without them trying to force Adam on me. It would help Matt out with his mom. Plus, I liked being around him, and if we decided to have me stay with him while we were carrying on our charade, at least I would be staying with someone that had a big apartment, was fun to be around, and I wouldn’t feel like I was intruding on the lives of new parents.
But it also came with a ton of potential worries, too. What if we were doing really well right now, but a couple of weeks into our situation, we ended up hating each other? Being in close quarters with someone did that often, and if it happened with us, it would cause me problems with the job that I needed to survive and might even cause problems between Hannah and Jordan.
And what if one of us caught feelings and the other didn’t? He mentioned possibly seeing other people. What if he brought a girl home and I reacted poorly to it? There were so many situations and scenarios to think and worry about that it almost seemed overwhelming.
But then, he picked up little Claire and zoomed her around like she was flying while he lay on his back on the carpet. She giggled and drooled, and he laughed. I smiled at how silly he was and how cute it was to see him with his niece.
“I think, maybe, I still need a little more time,” I said. “It’s just a lot to think about, and I don’t want to rush into it if I’m not a hundred percent comfortable.”
He looked over at me and smiled, his niece still at arm’s length above him, giggling away as if it were the best thing in the world.
“I get it,” he said. “Absolutely no problem. You take as much time as you need.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you. Now, I think the little one might have had enough excitement for now. Her mama said she is supposed to be in bed at seven-thirty.”
“Aww,” he said, pulling Claire to his chest. “But we were having so much fun.”

11


Matt
I was up pretty early and proud of myself. Tooling around the apartment would have been my normal routine, playing video games or scrolling through social media. But today, I felt productive. And in a good mood. Maybe it was actually getting eight hours of sleep or possibly that I had gone a couple of days without alcohol or carbs completely by accident that did it. Regardless, I was feeling alright and spent much of the day cleaning and rearranging things in my apartment.
The bachelor pad motif in the living room was old. Not just that I was getting older and it was more suited for guys in their early twenties, but it was actually old. Quite a few pieces of the furniture were things I’d brought from my place in Astoria and were at least a decade old. The neon beer sign was older than that. I’d had that in my bedroom at Mom’s house when I was a teen.
So, I spent much of the remainder of the morning at a furniture store, picking out bookcases and a desk and other things to replace the cheap particle board stuff that I was using currently. Some of the pieces I picked were designed for me to build them, which meant I had something to do in the afternoon before work. The others were loaded onto a truck and sent to my place within thirty minutes of me arriving there.
I didn’t bother trying to list and sell the old stuff, dragging them out into the hallway with the intent to stick them by the dumpster. Instead, the college-aged neighbor across from me saw the transition and asked if he could have them. So, things just moved from one apartment to the other with little fuss. He was a good kid and had barely any furniture other than a love seat, so I was happy to give them to him for free, even when he tried to pay me. In return, he offered for me to come over and watch a wrestling pay-per-view in a few weeks, which was more than enough.
Feeling like I had updated my life, done a good deed, and made an actual friendship out of an acquaintance in one morning, I happily sat down in my living room with a couple of heavy boxes and Swiss instructions. I was knee-deep in translating words with lots of umlauts with my phone when I heard a knock on the door. Figuring it was my neighbor, I just called for them to come in.
“Matt?” Jordan called back from the doorway. He was sticking his head in and seeing the chaos, but I was on the floor, blocked by the couch. I could just barely see him over the top of it, and he hadn’t gotten a glimpse of me yet.
“Down here,” I called, and he walked up, instantly bursting into laughter.
“Okay, so should I just assume you aren’t coming in tonight?”
“No, no, I’ll be there,” I said. “I thought I’d be done with all this before then, but I will settle with just having one of them done.”
“So, you’ll be late, then,” Jordan said.
“Someone has jokes today,” I teased.
“All this aside,” Jordan said, “I actually had a kind of proposition for you.”
“I told you, I am not going to strip, no matter how well it would improve our clientele.”
“Well, there goes my dreams of having the worst strip club in America,” he retorted. “No, banana brains, I was going to ask if you wanted to go in together for a gift for Mom.”
I stopped screwing in the klungerhousen or whatever the hell it was and turned to him.
“That