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“What would have happened?”
“Hmm?” Patrick shifts his head on the pillow, nosing through David’s hair, but doesn’t stop his right hand from fiddling with the rings on David’s left.
David presses a kiss to Patrick’s chest, to his t-shirt just over his heart.
“Had we turned back. Today. What would have happened?”
Patrick tenses in that subtle way he does. Like he did when David asked, “Like, they know about us - right?”
He presses another kiss to Patrick’s chest, feeling the steady thump of the heart beneath his lips kick up a notch.
“I would have come up with a new plan, I suppose,” Patrick eventually murmurs.
David closes his eyes and tightens his hold on Patrick’s hand, stopping the ring fiddling and threading their fingers together.
“But you still would have asked?”
He feels Patrick raise his head and he knows that the look he’s being leveled with is probably somewhere in the vicinity of ‘incredulous.’
“Of course I would have asked.”
David nods, but his throat is tight for reasons he can’t identify. He’s marrying the best man in the world. The best man who is actively choosing to spend his life with him. Everything is perfect.
So why does he feel like he’s going to cry?
“Hey,” Patrick murmurs, gently rolling David off his chest and settling his weight on top of him, forearms bracketing his head on the pillow. “Of course I would have asked.” He brushes their noses together, before pulling away so he can look him in the eye. “That was - that was a foregone conclusion. If it hadn’t been today, then maybe it would have been tonight. Right now, just like this. Because, David,” and then his voice hitches and he stops, licking his lips before carefully running his thumb over David’s eyebrow, smoothing out the lines, “I’m not sure I would have been able to keep it inside for much longer.”
A tear escapes from the corner of David’s eye and he can feel it track down his temple into his hairline. Patrick offers that small smile, the one that’s holding so much back, and simply tilts his head, like he isn’t about to rock David’s world.
“Sure the story was nice - ”
“It was beautiful,” David interrupts and Patrick smiles at him fully.
“But at the end of the day, the ‘how’ doesn’t matter. All I cared about was the answer.”
Sometimes David overwhelms himself with doubts and fears and ghosts of relationships past. Sometimes he thinks that, yes, this is the moment that sends the best thing that’s ever happened to him running down the mountain they’re trying to climb together. After all, everyone else did.
But then there’s Patrick above him and around him, cocooning him in warmth and love and safety and surety, looking at him like he’s not something to tolerate. He’s something to treasure.
David swallows thickly, nodding his head against the pillow as he cups Patrick’s face, letting him feel the cool gold on his warm skin.
“And at the end of the day, the answer was always going to be ‘yes.”