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“Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried.” - Megan Devine
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It’s late afternoon when they arrive at the safe house outside of Holt. It’s a cottage that sits at the end of a steep lane, surrounded by unkempt farmland and overgrown hedges. The sign on the gate reads “Folie Maison” , a detail courtesy of Booker, and it hangs on for dear life in the wind. To say that the place has seen better days would be an understatement. They haven’t been back to this particular safe house as a family since the end of the last world war, and in that time the property has sunken into itself, weather-beaten and bruised. There are slate tiles embedded in the front lawn, and when opened the front door creaks in protest.
It’s the kind of place local teenagers probably call haunted, and the image of them daring one another to go knock on the door makes Joe smile.
Back during the war, Booker had managed to convince a weary conveyancer that he was the long-lost relative of the farmer who actually owned the place, who had gone missing in action. To this day it’s still the most masterful performance of utter bullshit Joe has ever seen. Booker has always had a strange attachment to the place, hence the sign, and he’s the reason the pipes still run clean water and the electrics haven’t given up on themselves.
Joe can’t bring himself to tell the story of the house to Nile. She’s driven into town with Andy, to locate a pharmacy and the other bits and pieces they couldn’t find at the supermarket earlier, leaving Nicky and Joe alone to make dinner.
They keep the curtains facing the driveway closed, so it’s lucky that the kitchen is at the back of the house. Joe has his sketchbook open on the kitchen table, the early evening light perfect for drawing, but he’s mostly using it as an excuse to have something to do with his hands while he watches Nicky cook.
He’s stood over the stove, preparing kosksi bil ghalmi with the kind of attention one might dedicate to defusing a bomb. Nicky always gets like this when he’s stressed, striving for culinary perfection so he doesn’t have to think so hard about whatever he doesn’t want to think about.
Joe watches as he adds sliced courgette, potatoes and canned chickpeas to the frying pan one after the other. He stirs them in so they’re coated in the sauce, then lowers the heat, and Joe can’t see Nicky’s face, but he bets that he’s frowning. The prospect of eating lamb stew with couscous from a packet is a little depressing. It’s just not the same as homemade, Joe.
Cooking was the first thing besides languages that they learned together, figuring out how to make scraps over a campfire not just edible but enjoyable. Food, Joe thinks, is the first way they learned to say ‘I love you.’
All of a sudden it feels like Nicky is miles away, all the way across the kitchen.
“I can hear you thinking,” Nicky says, not looking up from the stove. “You’re restless.”
Joe smiles to himself. “I’m okay,” he lies.
“We’ll go out after dinner if you like, walk somewhere,” Nicky offers.
Joe stands up, his chair creaking as he does so, and crosses the room to Nicky’s side. He leans back against the counter, so they’re pressed shoulder to shoulder, and tucks his hands into his pockets. Nicky gives him a small, private smile, the kind that both grounds Joe and makes him feel like he’s falling.
“Here,” Nicky says, picking up the spoon he was using earlier to make his own harissa paste. He spoons up some of the sauce from the pan and blows on it to cool it, then holds it up for Joe to taste.
It’s Joe’s favourite kind of spice, bright and burning but not too sharp, perfect for lamb. Due to the limitations of British supermarkets, the stew isn't exactly authentic, but it still tastes like home. “Very good,” he praises.
“Not more salt?”
“No.”
Nicky drops the spoon back into the empty harissa bowl with a clatter, then stirs the contents of the pan to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom. “Tell me what’s wrong,” He prompts.
“I’m fine.”
“And I’m Nicolò di Sampdoria,” Nicky dismisses gently, and Joe snorts a laugh. “Come, tell me.”
Joe gives a slow exhale. “Sometimes,” He begins, and he speaks quietly, like it's a secret only for them, not to be shared with the stove or the sink or the kitchen cabinets. “It’s like I feel too much for my body to contain.”
Nicky invites him with his eyes to continue. He has very inviting eyes.
“For example, sometimes I’m so in love with you that I have to do something about it. I can’t just sit with it,” Joe admits.
Nicky’s face cracks into a hesitant smile. “Yes, I understand that.”
They stand in silence for a moment, Nicky watching the food, Joe watching Nicky.
“I think I like that feeling,” Nicky says. “I like to be overwhelmed with you.”
Joe finds himself at a loss for words. He’s trying to be patient with himself about it, don’t get him wrong. He knows he’s in some kind of shock, still reeling from the whole Merrick situation. It’s unusual though, to feel so much and not know what to do about it. He almost always knows what to do, what to say and how to go about saying it. The last time he felt like this was after they lost Quynh, where words felt like sand running through his fingers.
They’re all going through it in their own ways. It’s the reason Nicky is paying so much attention to a dish he can cook with his eyes closed, the reason Joe is letting him cook by himself.
Joe sighs. “I just wish there was a way to actually express the...enormity of what I feel for you.”
The words come out heavier than intended, but Nicky smiles anyway. He wraps an arm around Joe’s waist and pulls him close into a sideways hug. Joe melts into the warmth of his side, cups his elbow in the palm of his hand
“It’s like Jane Austen said,” Nicky says, voice warm in Joe’s ear, ”If I loved you any less I might be able to talk about it more.”
“My dearest Emma,” Joe quotes, putting on a terrible British accent, “For dearest you will always be, whatever the event of this hours conversation.”
Nicky’s laughing before Joe finishes his sentence, and he turns so their noses almost brush, so they’re sharing the same breath. “It’s madness, isn’t it?” He jests, fond, “That we keep trying to talk about it.”
“Trying the same thing over and over and expecting the result to be different. Yes,” Joe laughs, “Maybe. Well, I don’t know about madness-” and Nicky kisses him before he can decide what to say next.
He cups Joe’s face with his hand, and his mouth is warm and sweet and patient, and he’s right, whatever this is, it’s madness. He drives Joe absolutely mad. Insane. Bonkers, as the locals would say.
Joe first heard the word ‘bonkers’ in the ‘60s, at the airport waiting on a connecting flight to the DRC. He took to calling Booker ‘Bonker’ for three days straight until Booker tackled him into a ditch on the side of the road, and through raucous laughter made him swear to stop. Joe swallows around the lump in his throat and kisses Nicky harder. He doesn’t want to think about Sébastien.
Nicky leans back to look at him. He gives him a sad smile, like he knows Joe’s mind is elsewhere. “Do you know, I was thinking about Copley’s little history project,” he says.
“Oh, what about it?” Joe asks.
He hadn’t taken much reassurance in Copley’s sociogram. He likes to think that he protects people because it's the right thing to do, no matter who they become. After four straight days of killing one another, he had offered Nicky his hand and pulled him up out of the dirt and the death because it was the right thing to do. It would have been cruel not to offer a truce to someone suffering the same fate as him, even a Frank. Joe wasn’t under any illusion that Nicky might become a better man, just that he shouldn’t suffer more than was necessary.
“I think out of all the things we’ve done,” Nicky answers, caressing Joe’s cheekbone absentmindedly as he speaks. “All the wars and the crises, and, you know, situations we’ve been involved in, people we’ve helped, I’m most proud of this. Of us. That we figured it out, that we’re still together.”
Joe’s breath catches in the back of his throat. He doesn’t know what to say. Why the fuck doesn’t he know what to say? He always knows what to say.
“Loving you is as easy as breathing,” he settles on, but it’s not enough, doesn’t even scratch the surface of what he feels for this man.
“It’s not always easy to breathe,” Nicky counters, “All the more worth taking pride in that we kept at it.”
They are not always easy to love.
Mostly, they are kind and they take good care of one another, but sometimes not. They are human, and they were both very different people when they first met. They’ve been lucky that they fit so well together despite their idiosyncrasies. Sometimes they are too selfless, less often they are too selfish. Sometimes, rarely but sometimes, when he’s angry at the world and all its preventable corruption, Nicky will go days without saying a word. When Joe is very sad he will refuse to sleep and stay up for nights on end. They raise their voices at one another, if they’re exhausted enough or starving enough or hurting enough. They both have nightmares, sometimes, and spar to chase them away, fight dirty until one of them hits an adrenaline crash. Ever since he went to culinary college in the ‘90s, Nicky insists that Joe doesn’t dice onions the right way, and in Joe’s opinion, Nicky folds laundry all wrong.
It’s not always easy to love one another. It hurts, sometimes, the way good love does. It aches like biting into a tart fruit when you’re starving. It also heals the way good love does, like a cool flannel on a forehead. They are themselves together in a way they can’t be around anybody else, for better and for worse.
Joe can’t help but think Booker did what he did out of jealousy. It’s a thought that’s been stuck in the back of his mind like a knife the past week, too serrated to dismiss.
“You’re-” the antithesis of loneliness, he wants to tell Nicky, but his eyes burn with tears and all of a sudden he can’t speak for fear of choking on his words.
Nicky frowns, but his eyes are kind. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I feel like he’s all I think about,” Joe grits out. “What he did to us- it’s all I can fucking think about, and I hate it.”
Nicky knows who he means, and Joe knows he knows by the way his jaw clenches.
“I don’t hate him, though,” Joe continues, “Part of me wishes I did, it would be easier if I did, but I-” His breath hitches and he shuts his eyes as a tear spills down his face.
Nicky wipes it away with the pad of his thumb. “You love him,” he says softly.
Joe nods.
“Me too,” Nicky says, understanding, and Joe appreciates him so much it makes his chest ache. “It is hard to care about someone but no longer trust them to do the same.”
Joe turns his face into Nicky’s palm, takes a second to collect himself. “We made the right decision,” he says after a beat.
“We did,” Nicky agrees, and it sounds more certain coming from him. “I just wish we hadn’t had to decide in the first place.”
Joe shuffles closer and rests his forehead on Nicky’s shoulder, and Nicky curls a protective hand around the nape of his neck to keep him there.
People say love and hate are two sides of the same coin, but it’s easier to say that than it is to live with the contradiction inside you every beating second. Joe both misses Booker and wishes he didn’t exist, loves him like a brother and loathes him just the same. In his mind, he forgives him over and over and resents him over and over, and Joe has felt heartbreak before, but not like this. He’s never been so angry at someone and so sorry for them at the same time. It feels like the last few weeks have aged him the way a hundred years might.
With Nicky he can at least love him, he can do something about it even if the love he feels for him is so vast that he’ll never convey it in its entirety. With the grief he feels over Booker he has no choice but to sit and bear it, be overwhelmed by it, carry it with him everywhere he goes.
The lamb stew simmers on the stove, and the seconds tick by. In time the pain will become easier to digest. For now, though, it’s just raw.
At least he doesn’t have to carry it alone, he thinks, and kisses Nicky’s shoulder through his shirt.