coffee: matt and steve
[The Clary house lacked privacy, or a comfortable place to talk aside from Matt's small room on the second floor. The Carriage House? Well, PJ was there, and Matt was still trying to sort things out with her. Going over to talk to someone else would be well past rude. He'd been cruel enough to her already.
So the diner it was - the diner and its sludgy coffee, the diner and its pasty pancakes. The smudged windows, smells, and the quality of the food were comforting bone deep. He didn't realize until he sat down that he needed the familiar surroundings
It wasn't that he was afraid of seeing Steve face to face again. That wasn't the problem at all. It wasn't that he couldn't meet his eye, or that he didn't think he'd know what to say. The trouble was the letters.
It wasn't as if Matt knew how to shut Steve out - he'd never really tried, not hard. Still, after Steve left Repose, he'd given himself some leeway to feel a little angry and a little down. Their conversations while he was around had mostly gone in circles, and Matt knew he was part to blame for that. He was doing better these days, but it was hard not to feel like he's disappointed Steve after decades of being dead. He knew that he didn't live up to his memory of Owen. When he left without warning, it just brought it home in a new way.
The letters didn't change his mind, exactly, but they opened the door again. He read them under the butter-yellow spread of light from a low table-lamp in his room, the window open to the cool night breeze of a wet spring, and read them again. They didn't feel like they were written to somebody dead, even if they were addressed to a corpse. They were written to him, and in a voice he recognized better than his own. It was easy to get picked up by that, and easy to think he might be a disappointment, compared to whatever vision Steve had conjured to write those letters to.
He looked cleaner and better put together than he had been the last time Steve was in town. He wore a soft gray henley and comfortable jeans, hair pulled back into a ponytail, and fuck anybody who didn't like how it looked, it was convenient. It called to mind a samurai more than a greasy castoff of the sixties. He cupped his hands around his coffee mug, one gloved, and he gave the waitress a winning smile when she came back around for a refill. He got her to tell him about all the pies on offer in detail, and promised to have a slice since she had such nice things to say. He got her to blush. That was a good feeling. She slipped away with his order, and he glanced out the window at clouds threatening rain.]