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Leo Fitz proposed to Jemma Simmons a few years into the new century. They were sitting next to a potted plant at a ball, angled in such a way as to be virtually invisible from most vantage points, and rather glumly regarding the plate of substandard petit-fours and cups of weak punch they had managed to pilfer from the refreshment table. After nearly ten years, they had perfected their ball routine. She was rapidly approaching spinsterdom and best known for sitting through the weddings of all four of her younger sisters with a smile that truly seemed genuine. He was a third son who had had the misfortune to neither go into the army or the clergy and had instead made a tidy fortune in trade substantial enough to lease a town home but not nearly appealing enough to attract any eligible debutantes. Both of them were intimately acquainted with the sidelines and so it had been the most natural thing in the world for them to throw their lot in with each other.
“Considering how very much on the shelf I am, you would think that I could leave off wearing quite so many ruffles,” Jemma said, tugging unhappily at the three layers of cream ruffles edging the bottom of her dress. She had caught one on the carriage door on purpose on the way here but unfortunately, her mother had commandeered a lady's maid to fix it immediately. She had thought a torn ruffle would be enough to get her out of at least three dances with gentlemen who owed her brothers-in-law a favor. (It was all terribly well intentioned and somehow that made it worse.)
“I think you look nice,” Fitz said loyally around a mouthful of petit-four.
“The ruffles aren't ideal,” he added when she cast a skeptical look his way. “But they're not terrible. Could be worse—it could have been feathers, like that time at the Xavier ball.”
They both shivered in remembered horror.
“One more season ought to do it, do you think? For me to retire from all of this,” she explained, waving one hand in a motion that encompassed her unfortunate ruffles, her empty dance card, and the plant fronds currently threatening to undo her coiffure. “Of course, I'll have to ask my father for an allowance and he'll be dreadfully stingy and I'll likely be banished to some drafty country manor where I'll have to make friends with cows but it must be better than sitting here trussed up like a prize goose hearing people be sympathetic about my plight. Why is it that men always get to be confirmed bachelors and set up comfortable establishments while women are shunted off to the countryside to be companions to the most convenient elderly relative?”
“ You're welcome to co-opt my comfortable establishment any time. Although I'm not sure my parlor could fit any more suffragist banners.” He paused a moment, considering. “My drawing room, however, certainly could.”
Jemma sighed. “I know and I do appreciate it. I just...I'm not sure whether to look forward to settling firmly into spinsterhood or to dread it. I don't know if I would have liked marriage but it might have nice to have had someone else to face all of this with.”
“Then marry me.”
He said it just as the waltz the orchestra was playing came to a halt and for a moment, she could have sworn that his words echoed throughout the room.
“Fitz?” She gaped at him.
“Marry me. It's the most practical solution. I can't believe I didn't think of it sooner.” He shook his head. “You can do whatever you like—hold suffragist meetings twice daily in the back garden, conduct experiments in the basement, fill the library with Gothic novels—and there'll be no drafty country manors and certainly no cows. Unless you want cows. We're excellent friends—surely we wouldn't do too badly at it.”
“You can't be serious,” she said weakly. But the thought had taken root in her mind now and she had to admit there was something appealing about it.
“As serious as I've ever been about anything.”
“But...I suppose I can see why me marrying you might make sense but I can't make out why you would want to marry me.”
“Because you're Jemma. You're one of my best friends,” he said frankly. “The thought of seeing you every day is much more pleasant than the thought of not. And I—I've thought that it might be nice to have someone else to face life with too.”
“Besides, you'd be doing my mother an immense favor,” he added, his tone growing lighter. “She worries constantly about my bachelordom and it's been her dearest hope for years that I would propose to you.”
“Years?” Jemma arched one eyebrow at him.
“Almost since we first met hiding at that terrible garden party. She said that I ought to snatch you up before someone else did. Not that I would propose to you because my mother thinks I should,” he said and grimaced. “I just...I thought that maybe I would have a chance at making you happier than you might be otherwise. And I like that chance.”
“You want to make me happy,” she echoed.
“Of course I do.”
She looked at his familiar features—the sandy hair that looked perpetually rumpled despite the best efforts of his valet, the eyes that were as blue as the ocean on its bluest day, the ink stains where he always held his pen, the elegant lines of his cheek and jaw that no one besides her ever bothered to notice—and felt an equally familiar wave of affection swell up. Fitz wanted to make her happy. She thought that she liked that chance too.
“Did you have a nice time tonight?” her mother asked hopefully as they crossed the threshold of the Simmons family's Mayfair townhouse, her coiffure somehow still perfect. (Jemma's had given up a long time ago, despite the fact that she'd spent much of the evening sitting perfectly still and doing nothing at all.)
“I suppose so. Fitz wants to marry me,” she said as she began to wearily make her way up the stairs. “He'll come by tomorrow morning to declare his intentions.”
Her mother fainted dead away and hit the ground with a thump. They had to liberally apply smelling salts.
Jemma had thought that nobody noticed her and Fitz. They sat in the corner at every ball and mainly talked to each other, they only grudgingly participated in games of croquet and usually wound up hitting the ball into the lake, and neither of them were known for their sparkling conversational skills. But everyone seemed to have suddenly taken notice of them upon their engagement. People thought it was romantic and younger wallflowers cast admiring glances her way and asked her in low tones when she'd fallen in love with him, no matter how frequently she attempted to explain to them that it was a practical solution to a mutual problem. Her father was quietly pleased, her mother was delighted, and her sisters were ecstatic and insisted on going dress shopping with her.
“I always knew he loved you,” her sister Emily announced as Jemma stood still and let ivory silk be pinned to her in uncomfortable places. “Just from the way he looked at you. There's half a dozen women who would have married him in a heartbeat but he was waiting for you.”
“Half a dozen women never wanted to marry Fitz,” she said, frowning. “He would have told me.”
“Plenty of third sons marry well, especially ones with money. He's still young and has all his teeth and is generally thought to be kind, even if he doesn't talk much,” Emily said practically. “If he had ever shown the slightest inclination of wanting to marry, more than a few women would have made a run at him.”
“Which ones?”
“I'm not telling. Really, Jemma, there's no need to lord it over them just because he happens to be madly in love with you,” her sister scolded.
Jemma sighed and resigned herself to being poked with an army of pins.
“Could you have married if you wanted to?” she asked him when he came to tea the next afternoon. They had been allowed to sit on the sofa in the drawing room together without a chaperone, although the door was wide open and a maid deputized by her mother bustled by every few minutes to ensure they were behaving properly. “My sister says that half a dozen women would have married you.”
“Well, I don't know any of those women. They never asked me directly,” he said, looking somewhat puzzled. “I suppose if I had decided to get married, I could have found someone. But I couldn't have married just anyone.”
“I'm flattered to rate higher than just anyone, then.”
“Much higher,” he assured her. “I wouldn't have married anyone if it hadn't been you.”
It made sense to Jemma when he said it. Fitz wouldn't have wanted to marry anyone who wasn't a friend. But she couldn't help examining it later that night, tossing and turning in her bed, and wondering if he had meant something else by it. She hadn't the slightest idea what that something else would be and yet, judging by the look in Fitz's eyes when he had said it, she had the suspicion that it was something important.
Their wedding was an elegant but quiet affair, apart from the photographers who insisted on hanging about the church. (Jemma had the uncomfortable feeling that she would be front page news the next day—she only hoped that they hadn't managed to capture the moment when her bouquet nearly blew away and she had had to lunge for it.) Her sisters cried and so did his mother. She didn't, although she came alarmingly close when they made their vows and Fitz slipped the wedding band on her finger. It was the occasion, she told herself, and the way his eyes caught hers and stayed there and the fact that his hands shook just as much as hers when she met him at the altar.
They had an excellent time on the train to Dover, where they traded novels in the railway carriage and ate chocolates they'd purchased at the station. The merriment came to an abrupt end on the ferry, where she spent the entire crossing clinging to the railing and trying not to vomit while Fitz rubbed her back and made soothing noises. The train from Calais to Paris was even worse and Jemma spent much of the time curled up in their compartment sipping weak tea and keeping her eyes carefully fixed on the horizon out the window. (Her one attempt to read a novel nearly ended in disaster.) By the time they arrived at their hotel in Paris, she wanted nothing more than to fall into the absolutely massive four-poster bed and sleep for a thousand years. Unfortunately, she had forgotten all about her corset.
“I can't get it off,” she moaned and toppled forward onto the bed, the whalebone digging into her ribs. Perhaps they could burn corsets at their next suffragette march in protest. “You'll have to untie it.”
“I don't know anything about corsets.”
“All you have to do is unhook it. I can't reach and I never want to move again,” she said over her shoulder and buried her face in the silk of the coverlet again, relishing the cool feel of it against her face. Things really were much more decadent in France. The covers in the Simmons family home were scratchy and always smelled faintly of camphor.
“You know, I worried for a moment that marriage might have put an end to you ordering me about,” he said as he came to sit beside her on the bed. “But I see that I worried in vain.”
“You don't mind,” she informed him. “And your parlor needed a new coat of paint anyway.”
“Very true.” His hands were light and careful on her back as he undid the row of tiny buttons along the back of her dress and then the hooks of her corset, his fingers barely skating over the bare skin of her back but still leaving trails of sensation everywhere they brushed. She shivered and felt Fitz draw in a breath in response. His hands paused, right in the middle of her back, palm briefly splayed flat against her bare skin, and she went very still. Jemma couldn't have said what she was waiting for and yet she was undeniably waiting for something. Then Fitz let his breath back in again and went back to undoing the last of her hooks, politely stepping away from the bed and turning his back the minute he slipped the last hook free. He only turned back around when she was securely underneath the covers of the bed, the sheets pulled all the way up her chest and a stack of pillows underneath her head.
“I thought Paris would be exciting,” he said ruefully. “You've always mentioned how much you wanted to go.”
“It'll still be exciting in the morning,” she mumbled into her pillow. “Especially because you'll be there.”
Fitz brought her perfectly brewed tea and pastries that smelled deliciously of butter and cinnamon the next morning. He looked at every painting and sculpture that she thought interesting in every museum Paris had to offer and fetched her volumes from high shelves in the bookshops of the Left Bank and even sat patiently on satin poufs in fitting rooms while she very daringly purchased a few items from the Poiret atelier, including the kimono coat she'd heard whispered about in scandalized tones in London's drawing rooms. He took her on picnics with a wicker basket stuffed full of all the different sorts of cheeses she'd mentioned wanting to try and on long walks where she pointed to details on the balconies and told him all about the book she'd read on Haussman. He laughed at her jokes and took her hand at dinner and looked at her even when he ought to have been looking elsewhere. He was everything that was attentive and dedicated and if she hadn't known better, she might have thought that he was in love with her.
It was horribly vain of her to think so, of course, and more than a little silly at an age when she had thought herself to be thoroughly disabused of romantic fantasies. But she couldn't help thinking it and, impossible and impractical as it was, she couldn't help hoping it from time to time.
Until she finally came to the only possible conclusion: she would have to kiss Fitz. If he kissed her back, it would suggest that the evidence was on the side of him being in love with her. If he didn't, he would have proposed merely out of friendship and deep-seated respect for her. If he kissed her back and she kissed him and it was the kind of life-changing event people were always writing about in novels...well, that was a possibility she didn't dare contemplate.
So she focused on formulating a plan instead. Unfortunately, one couldn't simply tip forward mouth first and hope that their mouths connected. She would have to choose her moment, setting, timing, and all; spring into action; and do her very best not to think of all the potential consequences while doing so. She would have a plan and having a plan would distract her from the swooping, incandescent feelings in her stomach whenever Fitz smiled at her. So Jemma arranged herself in fetching poses at sunset and took his hand during strolls through gardens and smiled and tried to make herself look like someone who would quite like to be kissed. She tried to make the best of sunsets and tried to sip her wine at dinner in a slow and alluring manner and batted her lashes in the way she'd seen more celebrated debutantes do. And all of it was quite spectacularly unsuccessful. Fetching poses made her spine ache and when she tried to arrange herself by his side at sunset, she ended up nearly toppling him into a hedge and when she batted her lashes, Fitz thought that she had something in her eye. It was inevitable that he would notice something was wrong, really.
“Is everything all right?” he asked with a small frown of concern one night at dinner, after she'd leaned slightly too far in during a toast and wound up nearly dropping her wine glass in the boeuf bourgignon. “You've been strange all week. Not strange as if it's a bad thing, I mean, not that—just different. You've been different and if there's anything I can do to--”
“I want to kiss you,” she blurted out and immediately felt a blush of mortification began to spread down her neck. “I have questions and I'm not sure what to think and I've never been kissed so I have no idea of where to begin and I only—I thought that kissing you would be the most practical solution.”
Fitz looked slightly dumbfounded. “The most practical solution to what?”
“To finding out why you married me.”
“Because I wanted to,” he said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
“But did you want to for the sake of our friendship or for something else? I do notice things, Fitz, and I can't help wondering what if...” she trailed off, the words hovering on the tip of her tongue. Do you love me? Have you loved me for years, like everyone says you have? Is it possible that I love you too?
“I suspect that it might have been both.” He smiled ruefully. “I—I have questions, too. I'm not entirely sure of what I feel. But I know that I feel something for you that's rather astonishing and I don't expect anything from you in return—feeling it is enough, somehow. When I said that I wanted to make you happy the night that I proposed, I meant every word of it and I always have but I--”
“But it changed for you,” she said. “I think it might be changing for me too.”
“I suspect there's always part of me that hoped you might. That we might...”
Fitz paused, then carefully slid his hand towards her across the table, palm up. After a moment, she took it.
“I think that we might—I don't know if it would look exactly like what other people have but I think it would be good. I don't think we've ever done exactly what other people have.” They could build something, she thought, something that would suit them perfectly no matter what anyone else thought. Perhaps they had already begun, constructing it out of the way her eyes met his as she walked down the aisle and his hand on her back as she clung to the railing of the ferry and long walks through the Parisian streets with the backs of their hands brushing not quite on accident. Perhaps they had begun even before that, with conversations behind potted plants and shared jokes and the attention they'd paid to each other when no one else had.
“We haven't. And it's been wonderful.” He smiled and it was glorious. And she leaned forward and he did too and in the end, it was so much simpler than all of the plans she had made.
Kissing Leo Fitz was the kind of life-changing event that people wrote about in novels. It was a marvel and a wonder and a feeling that set off fireworks under the surface of her skin. So she did it again.