“Is the blush Matt related?” She popped a piece of popcorn into her mouth, and I swatted her hand away from the bowl. I needed every piece for my garland.
“It’s not at all Matt related.”
Kelsie narrowed her eyes. “Okay, so why did your cheeks immediately turn magenta as you said his name?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
She leaned closer and whispered. “Are you guys…?” She raised her eyebrows.
I didn’t even want to consider what my nineteen-year-old daughter had mentally added to the end of that sentence. Odds were, yes, Matt and I had done it. “No,” I said, “whatever you’re thinking, get it out of your head right now.”
“Good. It’s probably for the best.” Kelsie sat down and grabbed another piece of popcorn. “You’ve got to watch out for that one.”
“What are you talking about? What one?”
“M.C. Bradford,” she said. “He’s kind of the bad boy of literature these days.” She raised her eyebrows.
A pit developed deep in my gut. “Okay, will you stop playing coy and just tell me what you obviously want to tell me?”
She pulled out her phone and opened up a video. “Watch.”
I pressed play and watched as Matt sat on a dais, taking questions from an audience. “What is this?”
“Some Comic Con a few months ago,” she said. “Chicago, I think. Matt’s on the panel.”
“Obviously.” I waved to her to hush.
On the video, someone in the crowd stands up to ask a question. “Hi, M.C.”
Matt smiles. “Roger,” he says. “Good to see you.”
“You, too.” Roger glances down at his phone. “I was wondering if you had a comment about the video posted by FantasyFan4323 on Twitter last night?”
Matt shakes his head. “I don’t,” he says. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
Roger glances at someone off to the side. “Can we…? Can you pull that up?”
A video plays on a screen behind Matt. He cranes his head around to watch. It’s Matt in a bar, talking to a small group of people. He’s obviously had a bit to drink, and there are bottles lined up along the bar.
“You guys are great,” he says, clapping one of the men on the back.
“You’re great, M.C.,” says one of the men.
Matt points to him. “Thank you all for being so cool. I’m working hard to finish the book for you, because, you know what?” He cups his hands around his mouth. “The show sucks!”
The people around him burst out laughing.
“Tell us how you really feel, M.C.,” calls out one guy.
“Nah, I shouldn’t,” Matt says.
“Come on, M.C.,” another guy shouts. “You’re among friends.”
“That’s right.” Matt clamps a hand on some guy’s shoulder. “I am among friends. You guys are the best.”
“So what about the show people?” someone asks.
“They think they know fucking everything.” Matt picks up a bottle and downs it. “The producers, the directors, the cast, everybody. They know my books better than I do.”
“Not better than us,” one guy says.
“Not better than you,” Matt says. “You guys are the real fans, the book fans. The people who only watch the show are”—again he cups his hands around his mouth—“assholes!”
I handed the phone back to Kelsie. “I’ve seen enough.”
She pushed it back toward me. “Keep watching.”
The video cuts back to the Comic Con conference room, where the audience is laughing, and Matt looks like he wants to crawl under the table and die.
“What do you have to say about that?” Roger asks.
“I have to say the real asshole is whoever took that video and posted it,” Matt says. “I was having a fun night out with some fans—”
“Fans who’ve all retweeted the video,” Roger says. He looks down at his notes. “One of the people you were with last night tweeted, ‘Watch this. M.C. Bradford out drinking, complaining about the TV show that made him who he is. What a dick. Write the damn book, shithead!”
Matt sits silently as noise from the crowd starts to build. Eventually, they’re all chanting in unison: Write the damn book!
Matt calmly rises from his seat, and it looks like he’s about to leave quietly, but then he raises his middle fingers at the questioner and storms out.
Kelsie took the phone back from me. “That’s it.”
I let the video digest for a moment, taking in this new facet of the person who’d shown me so many sides of himself over the past few days. At last, I said, “Poor Matt.”
“Poor Matt?” Kelsie said. “He lost his cool and flipped off a fan.”
“That was not his best moment,” I said. Matt had opened up to me about his family. He didn’t have many—if any—close friends. He probably thought the fans he’d been partying with that night had his back. No wonder he told me he had a hard time trusting anyone. If I needed to vent or cry or laugh, I could go to, well, anyone in this house. I knew I’d find support from my mom, dad, Kelsie, Una, my niece, and nephew, heck, even Ralph. Who did Matt have? Jane, his employee?
“He’s dealing with a lot of pressure,” I told her. “He went from no one having a clue who he was, or even caring who he was, to the entire world waiting expectantly for him to finish this book. He was blowing off some steam, and some jerk took a video of him. How would you feel if someone did that to you?”
Kelsie started to say something, but I cut her off.
“Have a little compassion.” I picked up my popcorn garland and starting threading it again.
“Wow, for someone who says she doesn’t care about him…”
“I never said that,” I told her. “I do care about him, and I won’t have you treating him like a sideshow.” I nodded toward the front door. “Now either help me with this garland or go take Ralph for a walk.”
…
Matt
December 17th, three days before deadline
“Mom, you have to be there,” came a disembodied speaker voice from the kitchen as I headed downstairs from my office.
“I will be,” Dani said, more loudly than usual, raising her voice to communicate with her daughter on the other end of the line. I grinned as I walked through the hallway to the kitchen, where I found Dani elbow deep in sugar and surrounded by cookies. The snow gently falling outside the window added to the holiday magic of the moment.