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Fiancé, n. a man engaged to be married
~
He’d tried to prepare himself, but really nothing could have prepared Patrick for the incongruity of David Rose standing in the middle of the living room he’d grown up in, examining the pictures on the mantel with a crooked smile.
David was in an outfit that, for him, was toned down — a white sweatshirt and a simple pair of black jeans. Patrick wondered if his fiancé was consciously trying to round off his edges in front of Patrick’s family. After all, the last item of clothing he’d seen David buy off the internet was a skirt that looked like someone had partially disassembled a pair of jeans and called it a day, so in comparison, this ensemble was positively dull. It made Patrick sad, if that’s what was in David’s head. He didn’t want David to feel like he had to hide who he was. He wanted David to be as comfortable with the Brewers as he was at home.
Not that Patrick was feeling especially comfortable either. At least his skin was back to its normal pallid colour after the engagement picture debacle the previous week, but the whole thing had left him feeling a little off. On top of that, he and David had agreed to this weekend trip under duress. Patrick had a lot of family, some of whom wouldn’t be able to make it to the wedding, so Patrick’s parents had convinced them to squeeze in a weekend trip in spite of all the other things they were juggling: visits to caterers and florists and taking care of the store, plus they had the joint bachelor party that Stevie was planning for them coming up soon. It was a lot.
Not to mention, Patrick’s one request for the weekend — that a few members of the family do an escape room together, a recent family tradition that Patrick really adored — had been nixed by his parents because they couldn’t include everyone. He’d complained to Stevie about it until she got fed up and left the store while he was mid-rant.
So here they were, and in a few hours the entire extended Brewer clan would be congregated in the backyard, scarfing down hot dogs and judging his choice of a life partner.
“You were very cute,” David said, pointing to a picture of Patrick at around seven years old. “Look at those curls.”
“Yeah, my hair still does that if I let it grow too long,” Patrick said, joining him next to the fireplace.
David looked at the top of his head. “I’d like to see that. I bet it would be devastatingly sexy if you let it grow out a little bit.”
“It’s not, trust me.”
David pressed his lips together, visibly holding in his argument. “Okay.”
Patrick raised his eyebrows. “Okay? You’re not going to insist I grow it out before the wedding?”
“No,” David said, reaching out and petting Patrick’s hair a few times. “I was going to wait until after we’re married and then insist on it.”
“Hmm.” Patrick closed his eyes, David’s touch soothing as always. They’d driven all day yesterday, arriving at Patrick’s parents’ house too late to do more than say their hellos before collapsing into exhausted sleep in the guest bedroom, the room that used to be his. It was only upon waking that Patrick had given some thought to the teenage boy he’d been, and what he’d think to see Patrick now, in bed with a man in his childhood bedroom. He’d curled around David under the thick blankets and for several minutes just savored the fact that he was allowed to have this: a family who loved him and a man who wanted to share his life.
“Boys? Breakfast is ready!” his mother called, and David’s eyes lit up.
While they were eating, David and Marcy talked wedding details, and Patrick couldn’t help but remember similar conversations between his mother and Rachel. At least this time, listening to these discussions wasn’t giving him an anxiety stomach ache.
Patrick’s phone chimed, and he pulled it out to see a text from Stevie with a link to the spreadsheet where they were tracking RSVPs for the wedding. while you’re there can u get a final y/n from the rest of ur relatives? her accompanying message read. Patrick clicked to open the Google sheets app on his phone, scrolling through to see which names still didn’t have a reply marked.
“Hey, Mom? It looks like we haven’t gotten a reply for the wedding from Aunt Chrissy,” Patrick said.
His mother’s eyes widened a little, and then she looked down at his kitchen table. “Oh, I… I don’t think she’s feeling well enough to travel.”
Patrick frowned. “What do you mean, well enough? Is she sick?” It wouldn’t be the first time one of his relatives got seriously ill and his mother didn’t tell him right away. When he’d been at college, he’d gone days without being told that his grandfather was in hospice. To this day, he wondered how long his parents would have gone without telling him if one of his cousins hadn’t mentioned it in an email. Would they have kept it a secret through his death, and beyond, so that Patrick would have come home for Christmas and asked about granddad, with no idea that he was dead?
“Oh! No, she’s… um…” Marcy was looking anywhere but at Patrick. “She just can’t make it.”
“Will she be at the party today?” he asked, frowning at his mother’s demeanor.
“No. She won’t be here today,” Clint said, and there was something dark in his voice. Patrick sensed David tense up at his side.
“I mean, we didn’t even get an RSVP card from her, and she used to send me a birthday card every year without fail. It’s not like…” And then it dawned on him, and his stomach plummeted to the floor. He felt like an idiot. “This is about about me being gay, isn’t it?”
Marcy gave him a pained expression, and that was all he needed to know the truth.
Patrick picked up his breakfast plate and stood, his chair scraping the floor and making Marcy jump.
“The thing is,” Marcy said, “she’s gotten even more religious as she’s gotten older, and—”
“Uh huh.” He didn’t want to talk about this. “It’s fine.”
“Honey—” David started.
“It’s not fine. Believe me, we had a very heated discussion with her,” Marcy said.
The last thing Patrick wanted to think about was his mom defending him to her sister in a ‘heated discussion,’ but he couldn’t help picking at it a little more, like a scab before it had healed. “What did she say when she got the wedding invitation?” he asked, facing the sink. David came over and put a hand on his back, a hovering presence at his side.
“I don’t know. We haven’t spoken since before your invitations went out,” Marcy said.
Patrick spun around and gaped at his mother. “You haven’t spoken.” He could remember them talking on the phone constantly when he was a little boy, his mother with the house cordless phone pressed between her ear and her shoulder as she cooked, and then later, the little flip phone with the pull-out antenna that was his mom’s first cell phone. She talked to Chrissy all the time, and his father used to gently rib her about it. Marcy and Chrissy, two sisters only a year apart in age who had grown up thick as thieves in a house with two brothers.
“If she isn’t going to accept my son and his partner, then I can’t have a relationship with her,” Marcy said, suddenly fierce, a mother bear protecting her cub. “It’s as simple as that.”
“What did she say about us?” he asked, and he didn’t want to know, except he desperately did want to know what could have made his mother so angry.
She shook her head. “Just some ugly things. I don’t want to say any more about it.”
Ugly things, Patrick thought. He could imagine the gist of it. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Clint said.
“Nothing,” his mother confirmed.
Clint slapped his own knees and stood up from the table, an obvious ploy to pull the ripcord on this conversation. “I’m going to start getting things set up out back. David, can you give me a hand?”
David grimaced, looking to Patrick to see what he needed. “Go ahead,” Patrick said. “I’m fine.” David squeezed his arm, his eyes filled with worry and sympathy. “I’m fine,” Patrick assured him.
“Are you sure?” David asked, visibly torn between being a model son-in-law and doing as Clint asked, and staying by Patrick’s side.
“I’m sure.” Patrick forced a smile. “I know you want some input into the whole backyard barbecue aesthetic.”
“Okay.” David hesitated another second, then kissed his cheek and followed Clint outside.
At a loss for what else to do, Patrick started washing the breakfast dishes, but his mind was like a dog with a bone. This was exactly what he’d feared, what had kept him from coming out to his family for so long. He wasn’t that close with his aunt, but she and his mother had been two peas in a pod. Was it really possible that they’d diverged so completely in their thinking? Or was his mother just doing a really good job of pretending she accepted him and David together?
When he turned around and grabbed his mother’s plate, she took hold of his arm. “Patrick, you know we support you a hundred percent, right?”
“Yeah.” But something made him add, “I mean, I’m sure a part of you wishes that I’d stayed in town and married a nice girl and had a couple of kids.”
The hurt look in his mother’s eyes stabbed him in the heart. “Of course we don’t wish that. It’s your happiness that matters.”
Patrick knew he should drop it. He knew it. His engagement party was today; now was not the time to air out the effect of his upbringing on his sexuality. But it was like now that he’d cracked the door open, or maybe now that his Aunt Chrissy had cracked the door open, everything was going to spill out and he had no power to stop it.
“Do you remember my friend Karen from high school?” Patrick asked, looking at the plate in his hand without really seeing it.
“I… your lab partner in biology?” Marcy asked.
“Yeah. She came out as bisexual that year, and when I told you that her parents were giving her a hard time about it, do you remember what you said?”
Marcy’s eyes were wide. “What did I say?”
“You said, ‘surely it would be easier for her just to date boys.’”
His mother opened and closed her mouth a couple of times. “I don’t remember saying that.”
“I never forgot it,” Patrick said. He remembered questioning his sexuality at one point in college and then deciding it would be easier not to go down that road. That road led somewhere difficult.
“Sweetheart—”
“And look, you said plenty of tolerant things too. You watched Will & Grace, and you shook your head disapprovingly at hatred from others. But there was always a layer of what-a-shame, isn’t-that-sad… I don’t know, tragedy to it. Like being gay was an unfortunate disease that needed our support. Like it was cancer.”
Marcy looked positively stricken. “Patrick, I didn’t feel that way. Why would you think I felt that way?”
“Because you never said anything to make me think otherwise.”
Tears slid down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry. I never meant… Patrick, I’m so sorry. If I indicated any sadness about someone being gay, it was just because the world was such a hard place for gay people. But things have changed. I’ve changed.”
“I know.” He set the plate back on the table and rubbed his hands over his face. “God, I didn’t mean to stir all of this up now.” He swallowed around a lump in his throat, hoping David and his father wouldn’t come back inside to find them here like this.
“No, I’m glad you told me,” Marcy said, reaching out and squeezing his hand. “I know we made mistakes, that we didn’t give you the space to be who you are, and I’ve spent so many nights lying awake thinking about that—”
“I don’t want that. And I don’t want you to sever your relationship with your sister on my behalf. You don’t have to do that.”
“I do, sweetheart. Chrissy knows she’s welcome to reopen communication with me if she accepts my son for who he is.” She plucked up a napkin from the napkin holder in the center of the table, dabbing at her eyes. “Until then, I can’t have her in my life.” She took a deep breath. “Now,” she said, clapping her hands as if to dismiss their heavy conversation, “let’s get this kitchen cleaned up. I’ve got a million things to do to get ready for the party.”
Patrick nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
~~~
When he was sufficiently motivated, David Rose was quite capable of turning on the charm, Patrick thought, watching him presiding over a table of Patrick’s cousins.
He was already aware of that, of course. David was impolite when he didn’t care what people thought of him, but Patrick had seen this version of David emerge before, particularly with vendors. He imagined this must’ve been what David was like when he ran an art gallery in New York, full of sparkling conversation. Everyone seemed to adore David, but it bothered him that it was this fake version of David they adored, not the one Patrick knew.
Picking up his tongs, Patrick opened the grill and nudged all the sausages to flip over.
“Hey, Pat,” his cousin Dennis said, bumping his shoulder. “Want another beer?”
Draining the bottle he’d been holding, Patrick tossed it into a recycling bin. “Sure.”
He watched Dennis pull two bottles from a cooler and open them. Patrick and Dennis were the same age, same grade in school, played on the same hockey team growing up. There was a time when Dennis was the closest friend Patrick had. He felt a sudden pang of regret that he’d let the family gossip tree and a couple of Instagram posts do the job of coming out to the rest of his family, even to Dennis. It had just been too exhausting, after finally telling his parents, to think about having to do it all over again with everyone else. Now he wondered if that had been a mistake, at least in the case of his former best friend.
Dennis handed him one of the bottles and then clinked their bottles together. “Working the grill at your own party, huh?”
“Dad needed a break,” Patrick explained.
“How are you doing? You look good, man.”
Patrick glanced down at himself, at his ordinary jeans and t-shirt, wondering what Dennis was seeing. Well, perhaps he was in a tighter t-shirt than he used to wear, now that he thought about it. And he knew he was in the best shape of his life — David’s appreciation of his arms was a powerful motivator. Patrick adjusted the ballcap on his head. “Thanks. You too.”
“You still playing hockey?” Dennis asked.
“Yeah, there’s a league I play in,” Patrick said. “And baseball too.”
“Oh, cool. That’s cool.”
An awkward silence settled, and Patrick couldn’t help but notice that Dennis hadn’t congratulated him, or mentioned David at all. Maybe Dennis also wasn’t okay with who he was, and was just being polite and trying his best to ignore it. Maybe Dennis was looking at Patrick’s cosmopolitan, effeminate fiancé with his demonstrative hand movements, and thinking how tragic it all was. Their poor little Pat, being regularly sodomized. Patrick wasn’t going to delude himself into thinking that there weren’t other bigots among his aunts and uncles and cousins. That there wasn’t judgement hiding behind their polite smiles.
“You know, if you’d told me when we were kids that you were gay,” Dennis said, “I would’ve been in your corner.” Patrick’s eyes snapped to his cousin, and he was awkwardly scratching the back of his head. “I hope you know that.”
The hulking homophobic creature Patrick had been conjuring in his mind dissipated into smoke. “Dennis, I didn’t know I was gay when we were kids. It was a… much more recent discovery.”
Dennis looked relieved. “Oh. Okay, I was kind of imagining you suffering in silence all that time. I felt really bad about it, man.”
“I mean, I guess I was suffering, but I couldn’t have articulated why.” He opened the grill and stuck a probe thermometer in one of the sausages, then started putting them on a clean platter.
“Yeah.” He put a hand on Patrick’s shoulder. “I’m really glad you’re happy now.”
Patrick smiled his first genuine smile all day. “Thanks. I really am.”
“I mean, you should be. Your fiancé is… how’d you pull a guy that hot, Pat? He’s way out of your league.”
“Okay,” Patrick grumbled, taking the platter over to the food table. “He’s not that far out of my league.”
~~~
“Your family is very nice,” David said as he returned from the bathroom, his face freshly scrubbed and moisturized, his coziest pajamas on.
Patrick looked up from where he was sitting at the foot of the bed, staring down at his hands, and he offered David a small smile. “Yeah.”
“Hey, are you okay?” David sat down at his side, and then wrinkled his nose. “You probably should go shower the charcoal smell off.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna…” Patrick took a shaky breath. His heart was racing for some reason. He couldn’t understand why. And why he couldn’t seem to haul enough air into his lungs. “I’m…” He heaved another breath, and a weird noise came out of his mouth along with it. Almost like a sob. “I…”
“Oh, honey,” David said, and Patrick felt his large, comforting hands on his shoulders, smoothing down his arms, his back. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Patrick managed, a tear splashing onto his jeans. Then another. “I don’t… I don’t cry.”
“No, I think we’ve established that I’m the crier in this relationship,” David said, his hands pulling Patrick into his chest. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“It’s just…” Patrick heaved another breath, shaky. “It’s all of it, the stress of the wedding planning and this trip… I’m just tired. I’m really tired. And the thing with my aunt, and it made me wonder… who else in the family thinks… thinks I’m…” More tears were falling, running down his cheeks and soaking into David’s sleep shirt.
“I don’t know the answer to that, but I know that I met a lot of people today who adore you and are genuinely happy for you.” David was rubbing comforting circles on his back. “And also, fuck your aunt.”
Patrick hiccuped out a small laugh. “Yeah.”
They sat there for a while, David rocking him and rubbing his back and it was so good, it was exactly what he needed, to have someone to lean on, to shoulder all of this because he just couldn’t fucking carry it all anymore.
“My mom and her sister aren’t speaking, and it’s because of me. Because of what I am,” Patrick whispered. His darkest thought. If he couldn’t say it to David, then he couldn’t say it to anyone.
“But you know that’s not your fault. It’s hers.”
“I know that intellectually, but deep down it still feels like… it feels like my fault.”
“Yeah, you should have just worked harder to not be gay,” David said.
“I know. It’s stupid.”
“No, it’s not stupid. It’s human to feel that way. You just have to keep telling yourself that you are who you are and that anyone who doesn’t like it can fuck off.”
“I’m not used to feeling this way. At home, it feels good, being gay. Like I know who I am, and that I can… I can be proud.” Patrick’s stomach twisted, uncertain if he should say the next part. “I think it’s why the spray tan thing bothered me so much. It made me feel like you weren’t…” Patrick sighed and pulled out of David’s arms.
“Honey—”
“Like you weren’t proud to be marrying me. That you wanted me to be someone I’m not.”
“Patrick.” David’s face was stricken. “You think I’m not proud to be marrying you?”
“I mean, my cousin Dennis did say you’re way out of my league,” Patrick said with a smile, trying to lighten things up with a joke.
“Patrick. I couldn’t be more proud to be marrying you. Look at you! You’re so fucking smart and talented at literally everything and you’re just stupid hot—”
“Okay, David.”
“I literally tripped over my own feet the other day because I was distracted by your arms, and… and you sing and play multiple instruments, and sports—”
“You don’t care about sports.”
“I don’t, but I love that you’re good at them. You’re the one that’s out of my league. Patrick. I want to shove you in the faces of everyone who ever thought I wasn’t good enough.” David’s eyes turned glassy, and he blinked rapidly. “I want to say, look, if this amazing man thinks I’m worthy of spending his life with, then I’m… then I’m not nothing.”
“David. You’re not—”
“I couldn’t be more proud that you want to marry me.” A tear slid down David’s cheek.
Patrick leaned in and kissed him softly on the lips. “Me too.” David put his arms around Patrick’s neck, and Patrick dragged his lips over to kiss his favorite spot on David’s neck before sinking more deeply into the hug.
After an amount of time that Patrick couldn’t quantify, they finally pulled apart. Patrick picked up David’s left hand, his fingers running over the gold rings.
“I figured planning a wedding with you would be better than planning one with Rachel and it is, but there are parts of it that are still stressful.”
David laughed. “Yes.”
“It’ll be a relief to just get to the part where we’re married already.”
David pulled his hand back. “You aren’t… looking forward to the wedding?”
“No, I am. I mean, not the stressful mad dash of it, not the logistics. Not whatever disaster we can’t predict that’s going to throw everything into chaos.” He took David’s hand again and looked up and smiled at the grimace on David’s face. “But standing up there and putting a ring on your finger? Saying our vows to each other? That part I’m looking forward to. And do you know why?”
“Why?”
Patrick squeezed David’s hand in his own. “Because I’m proud.”