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The morning Dan gets the news, he wakes up to the same frigid silence that’s plagued his flat for the past three years. Nothing has moved while he slept, no one came home in the middle of the night like he’d hoped. It’s still him, in his half-empty bed, in his half-empty home. The thermostat still sits at 20 degrees, and even if his toes are numb from walking across the chilled wooden floors, he can’t bring himself to change it. Not yet.
He makes his coffee too strong like usual. He never quite understood how he used to get the perfect balance of sweet and bitter, or how he poured just enough milk to make it have that silky texture he’s been missing. He’ll drink it anyway, with one hand on the handle of the mug and the other scrolling through his Twitter feed. He doesn’t really read any of it at this point, just goes through the motions of what his mornings used to be and hoping one morning, it'll actually be like that again.
The postman brings the usual stack of letters and bills and notices around noon, like he does every day (except Sundays.) He smiles at Dan, says something about the weather, walks off with a nod that roughly translates to ‘you’re still alone?’
Dan flips through the envelopes, reciting the order in his head.
Electric bill, water bill, invitation, lease notice, hospital bill-
Invitation. That’s a new one.
He looks at it for a while, turns it over in his hands and places his thumb over the stamp in the corner. No return address. Hm.
It hurts in the deepest way physically possible, what he reads on that silly square invitation.
You’re invited! It says. We welcome you to the joining of two hearts, the celebration of eternal love! Philip M. Lester and-
He leaves it on the kitchen counter, next to his half-empty mug, in his half-empty flat, in an existence that seems to only get emptier and emptier as time goes by.
And it keeps going by.
-
Dan has spent hours wondering how he could’ve saved the unsaveable. He’s gone over thousands of pointless scenarios, corrected himself in conversations that didn’t and will never actually happen. He’s fixed and un-fixed the same hour of the same day in the same linear timeline but it hasn’t changed anything. It hasn’t brought anyone back. It hasn’t turned the thermostat down a single degree.
Ironic, he thinks, that the only thing changing was the promise of forever.
-
“Forever,” Dan echoes into the stillness of his living room later that night, when lack of sleep isn’t the only thing making his eyes burn at the vein.
Forever echoes back at him.
-
He eventually reads the rest of the invitation, drunk for the third time this week. Drunk still.
Philip M. Lester and Donahue F. Prince invite you to join them as they celebrate the beginning of a flourishing life together! After two years of undeniable love and commitment-
Then there’s dates, times. An address for a church somewhere up North.
“Donahue,” Dan slurs, a stupid smile on his face, “what a fuckin’ twat.”
-
Phil calls. Of course he does.
Dan sends it to voicemail within the first three rings.
“Hey, Dan. I’m...I don’t know if-” there’s some shuffling, maybe even a door closing, “I don’t know if you got the invitation or not. Me and Donny, you know. We’re getting hitched.”
Dan smirks. Hitched.
“I know you aren’t, like, his biggest fan or whatever, but it’d mean a lot if you came. You’re still…” In a world not so far away, Dan would have finished that sentence for him. You’re still the love of my life. You’re still my everything. You’re still my first choice. “You’re still my best friend, right? I guess, I don’t know, I’m hoping you still feel like I’m yours too. I miss you. It’s been two years, you know? Not even a hello.”
The pictures on the wall are dusty and caked in age but Dan still looks at Phil from the past, stupidly long hair hanging on his forehead and his stupidly enamoured boyfriend hanging on his arm.
“Call me back, if you want. Please. I’m worried.”
Then the line goes dead, long buzz not loud enough to deafen Dan completely.
What a shame.
-
Dan calls back. Bitter, yeah, and somehow not drunk but still talking like he is. When he gets sent to voicemail, he only giggles a little.
Three beats of silence pass before he can muster up a word.
“Hello,” he says, damning himself already. “There, happy? There’s a hello.”
He planned on giving Phil an earful, a solid fuck you and get fucked.
He hangs up instead.
-
“I guess I am. Happy, like you said. I missed your voice.”
Not even a hello. Dan sips his coffee.
“Did you answer just to give me the cold shoulder?”
Dan shrugs.
“This isn’t fair. It’s been too long. You can’t keep guilting me like this.”
Anger. Vicious, biting anger.
“You’re the one who called. Fuck you.”
He hangs up.
There’s a dictionary next to him, under stacks of old novels he swore he’d read once Phil left. Guilt, verb, it reads, to make someone feel guilty, especially in order to induce them to do something.
Dan isn’t asking for him to do anything. He isn’t trying to get him to do anything. He would’ve stayed away if Phil hadn’t called.
Guilt, he scribbles next to the definition, the feeling after a total fuck-up.
-
“I deserved that,” Phil says, a little too honest to sit well in Dan’s analytical mind. “I get it. I...I left. It was wrong of me to ask in the first place.”
His voice sounds different now, a little deeper. Dan wonders if his hair is still that shiny shade of black-brown, or if the silver strands he sprouted three years ago have dusted more than just his temple. He wonders if Phil has wrinkles like Dan, ones that aren’t necessarily deep but are spreading from his mouth to his eyes like wildfire. He wonders if Phil is getting older.
“It wasn’t wrong,” Dan mutters, looking at himself in the mirror. He’s getting older too. “I don’t know what to say aside from that.”
Phil breathes loud enough that it tickles Dan ear, like a ghost sensation he isn’t sure he ever felt in the first place. “Will you come? It’s only a few months away, Donny is getting a little nervous that no one is going to show up.”
There's a snort hiding somewhere in Dan's throat. Donny can get fucked too.
“I'll go,” he says, “if you two make it that long.”
-
Phil doesn't call him for two weeks.
The thermostat sits at 20 degrees.
His coffee is bitter and thick.
And time keeps going by.
-
“It was rude,” Bryony tells him over the car radio. “Even if it was true. It was rude.”
Dan shrugs. It feels different when someone can actually see him do it. “Yeah, well. Someone had to say it.”
“Does that someone always have to be you? It’s been years, Dan. Years. How long are you going to pull the bitter ex-boyfriend card?”
Dan pulls into the club parking lot, shrugs again. “Until it stops working.”
-
He finds a bloke within the first ten minutes.
“Aren't you that YouTube guy?” He asks, handing Dan a shot.
“One of them,” Dan replies after the whiskey slides down his throat with just as much leisure.
“You fucked the other one, didn't you? The hair one?”
Dan laughs. Full-on laughs. “More than that, mate,” he says, before pulling the bloke in for a snog.
-
They fuck in the toilets, with Dan’s hand in unfamiliar hair and his mouth on an unfamiliar pulse point.
“Will you marry me?” He asks halfway through, delirious and high-strung and too fucking depressed to say much else.
“Yes, fuck, yes, harder,” the bloke moans, and Dan comes in seconds.
-
“He keeps changing the color scheme,” Phil mumbles on the phone, after the initial awkwardness of calling again wears off, “red and green. What a bloody mess.”
“Santa wouldn’t mind, I suppose.”
Phil laughs, short and sweet. “At first, I wanted to do blue and white. You know, like…” Like we planned. “Yeah. It didn’t feel right.”
Dan doesn’t smile. “I asked someone to marry me last night.”
Silence. A different kind. One that Dan hasn’t grown accustomed to in the years of nothing but silence.
“Who?” Phil asks, like he deserves to know.
“I don’t know. We were fucking. It just slipped out.”
“The proposal or your dick?”
For a second, Dan wonders if he can hear jealousy.
“Proposal. When did Donahue propose?”
There’s a pause, then a throat being cleared. “He didn’t.”
Then the puzzle pieces fall into place and Dan has to hang up before he starts asking more questions.
-
The invitation sits on the counter until Bryony comes over and demands he throw it out.
“We both know you won’t go to it,” she says, tossing it in the bin, “you’ll drive yourself mad if you keep it out like that.”
When she leaves, Dan fishes it out again. He sticks it to the fridge and takes a step back to see how it looks.
Donahue. Philip.
It still makes him ache in a very real way.
-
“Drunk, to be honest.”
It’s an interesting switch in roles, Phil calling him pissed as ever.
“Are you safe?” Dan asks first, then, “are you okay?”
He can hear Phil giggle. “I didn’t want to ask him to marry me. I didn’t even know I did it until the next morning.”
Dan doesn’t respond.
“And it’s funny, because I always wanted to marry you, right? Planned it all out. Then you had to start that fight, and I had to keep fighting back, and now I don’t even know where to go in my own house to get away from my fiance. I don’t even love him. He doesn’t like any of our shows, and he doesn’t make me laugh anymore. Dan?”
“Yeah?” He croaks, broken.
“Will you marry me? And make me laugh again?”
Yes, Dan screams, yes, forever, yes! Please!
“Ask me in the morning,” he says instead.
-
Phil doesn’t call in the morning.
Or the morning after, or the morning after that.
Dan keeps saying yes, though, even if it’s to a picture of Phil from what feels like decades ago. Even if Phil didn’t want to marry him when he woke up.
The invitation stares at him now, mocking his every move. Mocking every wrong cup of coffee and every cold toe stubbed on the sofa.
Dan throws it away.
Dan takes the trash out.
He sets it in the firepit, and burns it to ashes.
-
The day arrives, eventually. As all days do. Time doesn’t care if you still love someone, it’ll keep on passing. Dan resents that just a little bit.
“I can’t go,” he tells his reflection. His tie is too long. His hair is a mess. His tux has a teardrop stain on the collar. “I can’t go.”
So he doesn’t.
-
At two in the afternoon, almost an hour after the ceremony was supposed to begin, there’s a knock at his door.
Bryony said she’d stop by. Dan is still crying. He doesn’t answer the door.
“Dan, it’s me.”
Forever echoes back. Forever echoes back.
Forever sounds like another knock at the door.
“I’m not drunk, I promise.”
The thermostat clicks off. The coffee pot is empty.
“I couldn’t do it. I tried. I couldn’t fucking do it, Dan.”
The couch is soft under him, too soft to let him stand.
“He said it’s over. He’s kicking me out. I left my fiance at the altar. How dramatic is that?” There’s a crack in his voice, like his actions are getting caught in his tone. “What if you’re not home? What if you’re…”
Dan stands up. He turns the coffee pot on. He wipes a finger over the dust on the pictures. The thermostat stays at 20 degrees.
The doorknob clicks when he unlocks it.
And Phil stands there, forever running down his face.
“Will you marry me?” Dan asks, stone sober with fingertips gripping this reality. “And plan the blue and white centerpieces? And make me coffee that isn’t just a cup of shit? And I'll make you laugh again, everyday, forever?”
Phil nods, and nods and nods, arms opening and eyes closing and kissing Dan so hard it makes the door creak when they lean against it.
“It’ll be forever,” Phil promises, “as long as forever lasts.”
Dan looks at him, with his cold feet and coffee breath, and thinks forever sounds just fine.
-
(In two more years, they’ll have their own wedding. Dan will ask him the morning of, “will you marry me, Phil? Forever and ever?”
Phil will look at him, the gray hair grown far past his temples and wrinkles getting deeper with time, and he’ll smile. He’ll give Dan a cup of coffee that’s just right, with the perfect amount of milk and sugar, and kiss him sound in the middle of their 20 degree living room.
“I’ll marry you everyday, Dan,” he’ll say, and it’ll be the truth.)