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“Ah—”
“Shit, sorry—cold foot?”
“Yes, but—”
“Sorry. I lost my sock.”
“It’s perfectly all right. If the sock doesn’t make its way home in good time, we’ll get you another one.”
“You sure we can afford that on your measly salary?”
“Oh, hush. We have your measly salary, too. Somehow I dare to hope we’ll scrape by.”
“Is this okay?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. Good. G’night, Roy.”
“Goodnight, dear.”
“No.”
“Goodnight, darling.”
“No.”
“Goodnight, cupcake.”
“Mustang, I swear to—”
“Snugglemuffin?”
“That’s the same thing as ‘cupcake’.”
“You say that with such confidence that I can only conclude that you’ve been cuddling baked goods when I’m not around, and I must say that I am wounded, Edward.”
“Oh, hey. You do know my name.”
“I thought that was rather self-evident after Saturday night. I’m fairly sure that most of our neighbors now know it, too.”
“Shut up. And go to sleep.”
“Yes, d… whoever you are.”
“You’re crap at following simple instructions.”
“I believe that’s mandatory for working in government.”
“Here, let me help—shut your mouth, and then your eyes. The rest is pretty easy after that.”
“Yes, yes; I’m a delinquent—come here, and then I promise I’ll stop talking.”
“Mmmm, toothpaste.”
“Spearmint is my favorite flavor of snugglemuffin.”
“What happened to not talking?”
“Forgive me. I was overcome by your prowess in the art of the goodnight kiss.”
“Uh huh. All right—for real this time. G’night, Mustang.”
“Goodnight, my love.”
“Sweet dreams or whatever.”
“And you.”
“…um. Hey. Roy?”
“Yes?”
“I—shit. Nah. Never mind.”
“No, what is it?”
“I just told you to sleep.”
“As you know, I derive great pleasure from ignoring your directives.”
“And from eating the damn dictionary.”
“It’s delicious. And delectable. And scrumptious. And a great many other synonyms thereof. What is it?”
“I just—I don’t know. I think stupid shit.”
“You do no such thing.”
“I just—do you ever—with… this. Us. Do you ever… wish it’d been different?”
“…how honest would you like me to be?”
“Holy crap. I’m putting that one right near the top of the list called ‘Stuff You Said That Really Doesn’t Inspire Me with Fucking Confidence’. It’s a long list. You should get a certificate.”
“I don’t mean—not in a bad way; I just… what’s the context? What even brought this on?”
“Nothing.”
“Obviously it’s something if—”
“It’s not a big deal. Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
“I think you and I both know that that’s now rather impossible.”
“You—okay. Sorry. I’m sorry. Just—can we go to sleep? Never mind. I shouldn’t’ve asked. I—”
“I also think we’ll both sleep better if we hash it out now. I’m not… Ed, relax. Please. I just want to know where that thought originated in the first place.”
“So that you can tailor your answer.”
“So that I can understand why you felt the need to ask.”
“You never—you don’t talk about stuff like that voluntarily. That’s why. If I don’t ask you, I’ll never know.”
“But—”
“Look, I was just—I was thinking about my stupid birthday, okay? And then that got me thinking about Elysia’s birthday—which is less stupid, for the record—and then that got me thinking about Gracia, and that got me thinking about Lieutenant-Colonel Hughes, and that got me thinking that… you know. You were the same fucking age. And look at… where you ended up.”
“Hmm. In a very, very nice bed with a very, very attractive blond fourteen years my junior. I’m sure the world weeps for me.”
“Shut up, you know what I—”
“So ‘Would you change anything’ comes from a context of ‘Does a part of you wish that you’d settled down and started a family instead of choosing me’?”
“I—just. Shit. I mean—sure. I guess. Yeah. Okay. Fine, yeah. I mean—look at—everybody, practically. Everybody but us.”
“We are definitively not ‘everybody’. Most of the time you take a slightly unsettling amount of pride in that.”
“Sure, whatever, but—you’re the one who makes sure I know I’m not always right about that, you asshole. Just—sometimes everybody does the same thing because it’s… good. Because it’s important. You know? And by now you could’ve… I’ve seen the way you get with other people’s kids. It’s even worse than how you get with puppies and shit. And it—it fucking—kills me. Just—you look so—I don’t know. Comfortable. At-home. Happy, like—like it’s something you didn’t even know you wanted, and it’s this big, beautiful surprise—”
“I know what I want.”
“You could’ve had anything. You could’ve had the whole damn world, Mustang, like—shit, you could’ve had a pretty blonde wife fourteen years your damn junior if you wanted; you could have six kids and three dogs and a big house with a yard and—”
“Ed. I know what I want.”
“How do you know? If you haven’t even tried it, how do you know?”
“Because I’m happy.”
“You—”
“Here. Now. With exactly what we’ve got. I have what I want. I don’t want anything else, or anything different.”
“That’s just bad science. No control group. You don’t have any basis for comparison.”
“I’ve been in relationships that offered me that—or would have, if they’d lasted. And I don’t miss them. I don’t miss that. I don’t miss the concept of children. I don’t miss someone else’s definition of domesticity. I don’t miss anything, because there’s nothing missing.”
“Except the thing you want to change. No! I mean—it’s fine. It’d better be fine; I asked the question, and I should’ve been prepared for an answer I didn’t like. You should… I mean, you should be able to be upfront about stuff like that without me flyin’ off the handle.”
“It’s not… Let me approach it another… All right. This… may not make sense to you. It may never make sense to you, because of who you fundamentally are—”
“Fuckin’ try me.”
“No, Ed—listen. This isn’t an attack. Quite the opposite. You’re… used to doing things because they’re the right thing to do, or the best thing to do, or the fairest thing to do. Because they’re good for other people, or because they’re just… generally good. You’re used to compromising—on the big things, anyway. The important ones. When it counts. Because you’ve lived your whole life convinced that your happiness doesn’t matter, and pursuing it aggressively is inherently wrong.”
“Wh—so fucking what? I mean—you don’t—we’re not even having the same fucking conversation; I asked if—”
“I know, Ed. And what I’m trying to tell you is that… you… Well, hell. You’re a better person than I am.”
“I’m not. And that doesn’t have anything to do with anything, and you fucking know I hate it when you talk circles around the question to try to make me forget what I originally a—”
“I do. Intimately. But that’s not what I’m doing—just this once. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t operate like that, Ed. Not the way you do. I wouldn’t sustain a relationship for multiple years running because I felt like it was good for someone else, or because I felt like it was the nice thing to do, or because I felt obligated, or… anything like that. I wouldn’t. I am with you because I want to be. I am with you because I looked at all of my available choices and picked the single most selfish one. I want you. I want to be here. And if the ‘nice’ things and the ‘good’ things and the ‘right’ things and someone else’s conception of an appropriate kind of life sometimes fall by the wayside—I can live with that. To hell with them. This is where I want to be.”
“…is that your way of saying that if I fuck up enough, and you don’t want me anymore, you’re gonna kick me to the curb?”
“No, Edward, because the thing I would change—the one thing I would change—is that I wish… I wish that we’d found each other sooner. I wish we hadn’t circled around each other as long as we did. And I know that that was… habit, and history, and a very logical abundance of caution, and both of us being unsure if the other was setting up an extremely elaborate prank, but… I wish we hadn’t waited. Not so long. I wish I’d had a hundred-million more moments with you.”
“Great. I finally get a straight fucking answer out of you, and it’s completely delusional. I probably should’ve seen that coming.”
“I mean it.”
“You’re just tryin’ to make me forget what—”
“I’m not. I am speaking directly from the heart, with minimal interventions from the many swallowed dictionaries.”
“Like hell. Why would you want more? I’ve never been anything other than a pain in the ass—your ass, Al’s ass, my own ass sometimes. Half the time I don’t know what you’re saying, and the other half, I don’t know why you’re saying it, and it’s—what about that is so fucking special that you couldn’t get it a million other places and have the kids and the puppies too?”
“Ed… even when you don’t understand me, you accept me, and that… that, from you, has been my saving grace for years. For most of my life, at this point. Certainly for the best parts of it.”
“I—shut up.”
“I mean it. It’s something that comes naturally to you, and as with all things that are easy for you, you can’t imagine it being extraordinary—but it is, Ed. You are.”
“I’m not.”
“You know what happens when you argue a point upon which I refuse to move.”
“One of us ends up sleeping on the couch, and then morning coffee’s real awkward because we know we’re both shitheads?”
“…that was once.”
“But you admit that we’re both shitheads.”
“I have never argued against that point. However, you are rather transparently trying to avoid accepting the compliment, which is not even so much a compliment as a distillation of an incontrovertible truth—”
“Someday I want a list of all the dictionaries you’ve killed and consumed.”
“That number defies estimation. Ed.”
“What?”
“I love you.”
“I—but that’s not—”
“Enough? The point? A reason? It’s all three. I don’t dole out devotion where it isn’t deserved, and I have never met anyone worthier of love than you. Not in my life.”
“Bullshit.”
“I swear. On everything we’ve seen and everywhere we’ve been. On every day we have left.”
“Can I swear?”
“I have never once managed to stop you, including on the memorable occasion where General Weitz said you had—what was it?”
“‘A mouth like a broken sewage line in a heatwave’.”
“Is that verbatim?”
“I wrote it down so I could show it to Al later. He laughed until he cried.”
“I will confess I was slightly surprised that he didn’t retire on the spot when he saw how pleased you looked.”
“What the hell did he think I was gonna do? Shed a tragic little tear and promise not to drop an F-bomb ever again?”
“You have to remember that he’d never met you before.”
“I don’t have to do jackshit. Why are you laughing? That wasn’t funny!”
“I’m laughing for the same reason I’m happy, you hellion.”
“Tomorrow I’m going to look that up, and if it’s not as cool as it sounds, I’m gonna kick your sorry ass.”
“It’s a good thing. Well—it is in your case.”
“I don’t know if I believe you.”
“You know the idiom.”
“Don’t even say i—”
“‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’?”
“You are so fucking lucky you’re so hot.”
“Thank you.”
“That was not a compliment.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“I wasn’t trying to.”
“I know, darling.”
“Holy shit. Here we go again.”
“I’m sorry. I mean it. It—slipped out. I didn’t—”
“I’m calling you Snugglemustang from here on out. That’s your only name. It’s the only way I’m gonna address you in public, and when you’re at work, and when we fu—”
“Mercy, Edward. Please. I am but a poor, weary, dictionary-eating paper-pusher who mixes up his words sometimes—”
“You think your neighbors’re gonna like that one? Snugglemustang. Nice ring to it. Ooh, yeah, Snugglemustang; right there. Love it.”
“I can’t believe it’s come to this.”
“You need to work on your hopeless despair face or whatever that’s supposed to be. This one’s too cute.”
“Thank you.”
“Still not a compliment.”
“I’m trying to be very polite in the hopes that you might relent in your unspeakable cruelty. Surely we can cut a pet-name deal. Surely—”
“How about this? If you shut up and go to sleep right now, and you don’t call me ‘darling’ for a week, I’ll… reconsider.”
“You drive a hard bargain.”
“I’ll show you a hard bargain.”
“That’s more like it.”
“Go to sleep, Roy.”
“May I say one more thing?”
“Fine.”
“I love you. I mean that. I do.”
“You—eugh. Okay. I—okay. I love you, too. A lot. A fuck-ton of a lot. Now will you go to sleep?”
“Yes. Goodnight, Ed.”
“G’night, Roy.”
“Mmm.”
“…or, y’know. G’night, Snugglemustang.”
“Edward.”