Matt thought he had her. Nothing ruffled Lydia like the implication that she thought about him when he wasn’t around, on mission or otherwise. Taking this line had been an easy target back before they finally got together, when both of them knew there was something between them that wasn’t just Han and Leia but one of them (mostly Lydia) didn’t want to admit it. It was still an easy target now. Too easy, almost. Implications were one thing, but the likelihood of rekindling anything between them shrank with every idiot word he shot at her. He was too far gone to realize it, his mouth way ahead of his brain. With that faint blush and escalating volume, he really thought he’d hit the jackpot and won this round.
He was wrong.
Mateo.
The smirk fell, smacked away by the force of his full name. He went rigid, unable to think, unable to do anything while the rarely spoken word echoed through the Falcon and rang in his ears. It was like she’d dumped a bucket of ice water on him in the middle of his victory lap. It was like she slapped him and actually meant it this time. The Solo swagger evaporated, because who was he kidding? With Lydia, he never stood a chance.
How could he possibly recover quickly from the one blow he was never prepared for and undid him so utterly? It didn’t make sense. Never made sense. Matt liked his name. He wasn’t ashamed of it or embarrassed by its non-Englishness or any of the usual nonsense that led other people like him to exclusively use their white-sounding nicknames. Still, though… it was, technically, a secret. Very few people knew his real name — never seemed worth the effort to explain when no one called him anything but Matt — and fewer still had a tendency to weaponize it against him.
And that number was just one, actually. His own mother had never once mustered up the nerve to call him Mateo.
Something about Lydia calling him by his full name pulled him outside of himself. Always had. Was it the way the syllables rolled off her tongue so effortlessly, the warning in the undertone that almost sounded like a growl? She’d never used it lightly, and this certainly wasn’t the first time she’d used it in anger. But this time was different, and he couldn’t for the life of him wrap his brain around why she said it now. Except that, maybe, he’d gone too far.
A pathetic thought broke through his bewilderment: Too far? But I haven’t even tried to kiss her yet.
Yet. Because, of course, that was his real goal all along. Not pissing her off until she left, not talking this through like adults, but to kiss her again like they’d kissed at the party. The part of him that always wanted to kiss Lydia, when she was near but especially when she wasn’t, had been dormant for a long time. Dormant but never dead, and awake with a vengeance ever since that damn closet. No, before that — since the day he ran into her in the hallways of Camelot and saw the way she changed her hair while he was gone. Such a small thing, but the new style took his breath away. He loved it immediately, the way he always loved her. Still loved her.
All he wanted to do since that moment was kiss her. Why couldn’t he just say that? Why did he have to keep acting like — like Han goddamn Solo?
“This is…” Matt rubbed a hand over his face and mumbled into it. “This is stupid.” He brushed past Lydia without looking at her and sank into the dejarik booth, defeated by an answer he didn’t have. His eyes landed on his sad little Christmas cactus because that was easier than looking anywhere else. Easier to take in the forced cheer than whatever he’d see reflected back at him in Lydia.
“You win, pr—” He caught himself and blew out a clipped sigh. “Lydia. Lydia. I’m sorry, okay? But this is stupid.” Slouching, the hand went back to his chin, and he looked at her from under a heavy brow. “We used to be able to talk, right? Just… talk.”
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. A small snort escaped him, and Matt shook his head. “... I miss that.”