Three for the City

June: Spirals

The kettle was on the back burner of the gas stove over low flame, and Matt parked himself in a kitchen chair, Mac plugged into the nearest outlet. He opened a new Word document, shuffled through his planning sheets on the table, and took a deep breath.

Where, exactly, should he start?

Matt had tried to open the romantic novel about Vincent and Drew after graduation, the result being about two thousand words he absolutely hated. It made more sense to start over rather than struggle through something he’d already decided he couldn’t work with.

But how to give a fresh idea a start that wasn’t cliché? The rough-around-the-edges-golden-hearted hottie was ridiculously overdone, and while Vincent’s past wasn’t stellar there were no big secrets for him to hide.

And not everybody carried around substantial skeletons in their closet.

He turned the idea of having a female narrator over in his head. It was possible, but Matt wasn’t sure if he could nail it without anyone reading it wanting to nail him to the wall.

Why the fuck was writing so complicated?

On a whim, he opened his collection. Maybe he could use something he already had as a base, possibly even a beginning. Then again, he’d gone ahead with a majority of those stories by having Vincent and Drew already together. The one he would write would establish their relationship.

Their families, their histories, a setting, and, hell, a title, too, would also be established.

Yeah, Matt had to admit he was going nowhere fast. And that didn’t include his continued search for a job.

It was the beginning of their third week in New York and none of his applications had panned out. He’d been turned down by a cookware store, four separate Starbucks locations, two restaurants, and an office assistant position. None of which had included the seven editorial internships he’d applied for and been denied even an interview.

He was frustrated, to say the least.

It wasn’t that he minded being stuck at home; it was a nice apartment, and once the cats were finished chasing each other from one end to the other for no reason it was relatively quiet. There wasn’t even much noise from the other units around them, or their neighbors below or above them.  It should have been perfect.

Key word ‘should have been’.

Matt’s morning routine had consisted of prodding Topher awake beside him and literally punting the other man into the shower, followed by making sure the coffee pot was on. Delia was usually in the kitchen shortly after that, looking for a small breakfast before she hopped in the shower, roughly at the time Topher finished. Not only not a morning person, Topher wasn’t big on breakfast, and usually sat in the kitchen with Matt while he drank his way through his first mug of coffee. Delia’s bathroom would open, and she’d wander into her bedroom to get dressed, while Matt convinced Topher to do the same and that no, they didn’t have five more minutes to stay in the kitchen let alone five minutes to crawl back into bed.

Travel mugs, Tupperware containers with dinner leftovers from the night before, and then Matt was shoving the Stanton cousins out the door to catch the six-forty ferry to Manhattan. He’d debated briefly about going back to bed for a little while, decided against it, and flinched as the cats began to raise hell in the living room.

None of it could stop the treacherous word housewife from flitting through his brain. It sure as shit didn’t help to think of the cats as his and Topher’s kids.

Maybe stay at home mom was more accurate, in that vein of thought.

Matt didn’t know what pissed him off more, that he was thinking in himself in those terms, or he was thinking of himself in women’s terms. He wasn’t the little woman. His relationship wasn’t like that with Topher, and it made him bristle to even have that sort of inkling.

So he was going to do his damndest to drown the unpleasant thoughts in tea and coffee while pounding out his frustrations into his Mac and hopefully coming out with an introduction to a novel that didn’t suck.

The kettle screamed, and he nearly tripped over the Mac’s power cord to shut the burner off. He found a clean mug in the dish rack, and, on a whim, brought down the teapot Topher had given him for his birthday. Two and half teaspoons of loose black tea went into the bottom, followed by water from the kettle, and Matt inhaled the steam before he put the lid on. It needed about five minutes to steep properly, and he waited will ill grace, palms on the countertop.

He needed a job. He’d had three fairly boring weeks in the apartment with random afternoon visits to Manhattan in hopes that someone would look at his resume and want him for a position, and he needed something more or he was going to go batshit crazy before the beginning of July.

Batshit crazy wasn’t a good look on him.

Matt fitted the strainer to the top of the mug, picked up the pot and held the lid while he poured. It smelled heavenly, and he filled the mug to the bottom of the strainer. The teapot went back on the counter, followed by the strainer with its caught tea leaves, and he mug went with him back to the table. He sat heavily, staring at the blinking cursor on his screen.

It had been a long time since he’d stared at a computer screen and had absolutely nothing come to mind. He had a name, of course, and a description. Vincent was a man with a deep personality, and Drew was more than enough to handle him, if Vincent would allow it.

He cracked his knuckles, sipped his tea, and began the painful process of opening a novel he wanted to write but didn’t have a clue how to.