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David switches one of his rings from his pointer finger to his pinky, then back again.
He pulls his phone out, presses down on his home screen to show a tasteful black and white candid of him and Patrick from their wedding reception, confirms there’s no new messages from his parents or Stevie, and tucks it back in his pocket.
He looks down at his shoulder where his husband’s head rests, presses a soft, silent kiss to his hairline, and brushes some imaginary lint off of his sweatshirt.
He breathes in and out slowly, making an effort to keep his body as still as possible for Patrick.
It’s a moot point - a second later the opening notes of a Little Mix song disturb their silent vigil. Patrick jolts awake at only the second Sha La La La and they both look around for the source of the noise. After checking both their phones, looking towards the door of Alexis’s hospital room to see if it’s coming from the nurses station, and even glancing out the window to see if some strange British pop themed flash mob is starting up (hey, New York is weird). Patrick says, “Hey, David,” and points to the table by Alexis’s hospital bed. There, her Fossil crossbody bag is vibrating in time with the music.
David strides over to it, unzips the bag, and the music gets louder, then stops all together. He pulls out Alexis’s phone, fumbling around her weird little phone-charm to check her notifications.
He doesn’t really know why he’s bothering to see who called her. He’s already contacted all of their mutual friends. His parents are on a red-eye flying in from L.A.. Stevie is wrapping up some loose ends at the motel and then going to the Apothecary to put up a Closed for a Family Emergency sign, then she’ll catch a flight around noon to meet them in New York. They’ve promised to call Twyla with an update as soon as they get one. And that’s it. Anyone Alexis has met in New York will have to wait until she’s awake, because no way in hell is he going to try to play middle man between Alexis and whatever D list reality TV stars and influencers she’s chosen to surround herself with these days. He learned his lesson that time in Cabo, thanks so much.
So, more for something to distract himself than for any other reason, David peers down at her phone and examines the name next to the Missed Call notification...and instantly wishes he hadn’t.
Ted Mullens
Of course. Of fucking course. He groans and, okay, maybe mutters some profanity under his breath but, in his defense, it’s been a long night and there’s nothing he hates more in the entire world than dealing with his sister’s love life. No, scratch that, he hates exactly one thing more than that, and it’s dealing with her emergency medical situations.
Now he has to deal with both at the same time and he is ridiculously out of practice. Not to mention sleep deprived. A midnight call from Presbytarian’s emergency department asking if he was Alexis Rose’s emergency contact effectively put a damper on his and Patrick’s plans to sleep in on their one day off from the store. Now that they’re sure Alexis is out of the woods, David was looking forward to napping until she wakes up, yelling at her for taking a sketchy New York cab instead of using the subway or walking like a normal New Yorker, eating greasy, perfect, American pizza as a reward for a highly stressful 24 hours, and catching a flight back to Schitt’s Creek later this week after Alexis is discharged into the care of whatever frenemy she hates the least this week.
But now, before he can execute that pretty decent plan, he must deal with a very awkward situation involving Ted Mullens.
He hasn’t talked to Ted since before they broke up. Ted sent them a cheese grater as a wedding present with a card that read, Congratulations, you two are GRATE together! But that had been it. Knowing Ted, he and Patrick had theorized that he’d selected that present solely for its pun potential.
(They hadn’t talked about how, the night they got engaged, David had suggested that Patrick include Ted as one of his groomsmen because you know he’d look great in the photos and it would make Alexis happy enough to at least consider not ruining the wedding in some other way. They hadn’t talked about how they hadn’t considered, even for a second, that Ted and Alexis wouldn’t still be together at the wedding.)
He gets depressed if he thinks too hard about all of the ways his and Patrick’s relationship grew alongside Ted and Alexis’s - only for them to sharply diverge at a certain point. Since their breakup he’s tried to avoid thinking about Ted, an instinct he’s never had to work at with any of his sister’s previous loser exes. Well, except for Chace Crawford, but that was just because they both had punch cards at 16 Handles. Ted’s different though. He’d hoped he would be out of sight, out of mind, but now that pun-happy veterinarian has gotten under his skin even from the other side of the equator.
Having noticed his obvious turmoil, Patrick prompts him, “David? Who -”
Wordlessly, he walks back over to his husband and drops the phone in his lap.
Patrick lets out a sigh when he sees the name under the missed call notification. “David -” He begins to say, but he cuts his husband off, knowing exactly where he’s going.
“Can’t we just...you know... not? ”
Patrick looks at him with those big, innocent, imploring, infuriating eyes of his and continues, “We have to call him back. We have to.”
Normally this kind of no nonsense tone is David’s kryptonite but the past 12 hours have been far from normal and he digs his heels in. Standing up and pacing to the other end of the room, David suggests, “We can just wait for her to wake up once the anesthesia wears off and have her call him herself! It’s not like they’re - they broke up ages ago! What time is it in the Galapagos anyways? It’s probably just a drunk pocket dial and it would be inappropriate to tell him something that she might not want him to know -”
Patrick interrupts David’s rant with a sharp inhale - David turns around and sees his husband look up from Alexis’s phone with a shocked look on his face. He beckons David over and he reluctantly returns to the chairs they’ve been camped out in for the past 4 hours. “What now?”
He shows David the screen and right above the notification reading Missed Call - Ted Mullens is a text.
Hey babe, thought I might be able to catch you before you got to work. Are we still on for our skype date tonight? Call me back when you get a chance, I want you to let minnow what you’re thinking about Christmas.
Immediately after reading the message, he reads it again, hoping he somehow misinterpreted it the first time. But nope. There’s no way to spin that text as platonic.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Alexis is back with Ted.
Alexis is back with Ted and didn’t tell anyone.
Alexis is back with Ted and is now in the hospital recovering from surgery for a collapsed lung, a couple of fractured ribs, and a broken arm.
Alexis is in the hospital recovering from all of the above injuries and Ted doesn’t know.
Alexis is in the hospital and David is her emergency contact which means it is now, inarguably, his responsibility to relay that information to her ex boyfriend who she is now back with and -
“She didn’t tell me,” David says dumbly.
“David…” Patrick says, not without sympathy. Still, David is pretty fluent in Patrick-speak by now, and when he says David in that particular tone, it typically means he’s about to be guilted into doing something he has zero interest in doing. Reluctantly meeting his husband’s eyes, he knows exactly what tactic Patrick is about to use. He braces himself when Patrick says, “If it was me, wouldn’t you want to know?”
David doesn’t want to think about hypothetical universes where he and Patrick didn’t have such complementary career paths and had to separate like his sister and her pun-loving ex did. He especially doesn’t like thinking about hypothetical universes where he and Patrick break up and he moves to a fire-ant infested hellhole and Patrick gets injured.
His husband - who he’s really starting to wish he left back in Schitt’s Creek - doesn’t let him off the hook though. Patrick says, “Let’s pretend that you broke up with me to go to the Galapagos, ignoring the fact that you refuse to travel south of the equator -”
“I don’t do well in humidity -”
“It’s not all humid - there are diverse climates just like -” he sighs, already giving up, “moving on - I get into a car accident and my injuries are serious but I’m stable -”
“You drive like a grandma and there are exactly 2 traffic lights in our town, how are you getting into an accident?”
“- You would want to know right?”
“I -” he tries to think of another way of distracting his husband, who really missed his calling as a lawyer, but comes up short. “Of course, I would want - I would need to know.”
“And in this hypothetical, we’re still broken up. But, David, it’s - it’s really obvious that they’re back together. He needs to know; she’ll want to talk to him when she wakes up. We shouldn’t make her be the one to tell him. He’s probably gonna lose it when he hears she’s been hurt. I know I would.” He sees a shadow of fear in Patrick’s eyes and knows that his husband doesn’t like the hypothetical universe they just created any more than he does. He can’t blame him. He just wishes there was another way of dealing with this that didn’t involve...dealing with it.
“Hold on,” He replies, not ready to give in quite yet. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, focusing on Alexis and trying to will her into wakefulness, channelling all of the tips about manifestation that Twyla taught him that one weird night back home. Wake up now, he voices inside of his head, feeling a little bit ridiculous, but willing to try anything. Silently, he communicates to his sister If you wake up now and stop me from having to make this phone call, I’ll consider not yelling at you quite as much as I was going to for not telling me that you’re back with Steve Irwin.
“David?” His annoyingly practical husband cuts off his efforts. “What are you doing?”
Ignoring him, he tries to reopen his pathway, only for Patrick to cut him off again, “Whatever this is, I don’t think it’s working. Now, c’mon. We don’t know how long he’ll be around his phone, we might miss him if he’s gotta...I don’t know, feed a turtle or something,” Patrick says with a shrug. God. If they really were back together, they were going to have to hear about bugs, weren’t they?
He forces himself to remember that Ted Mullens is far and away David’s favorite of Alexis’s exes, which says a lot considering all the fun he and James Marsden used to have teaming up against her in Cards Against Humanity. Horrible puns aside, Ted is a good guy. It’s always been nauseatingly obvious how much he cares about her. When they broke up, he’d had little hope that two people as gorgeous as they are would stay single long enough for Ted to finish up his research in the Galapagos and travel to New York to win her back in a way that would make Nora Ephron proud, but clearly they’re giving long distance another shot. Which is fine. Great, even. Now maybe he won’t have to put up with quite as many of his mom’s increasingly obvious hints about her biological timepiece making the ever steady march towards the threshold of senescence without the comfort of knowing the familial name will outlast her. He doesn’t know if Ted and Alexis are serious enough to tempt his mother away from nagging him and Patrick for a grandchild that is definitely never coming...and truthfully he isn’t entirely sure that Moira will remember Ted’s name, but he thinks there might be hope there.
So he’s not strongly against the idea of them being back together.
But why wouldn’t she just tell him?
He can feel the weight of Patrick’s stare and reluctantly looks his husband’s way. “I can make the call or you can, but it’s gotta be now, David. And I think it’d be better coming from you.”
He hates to admit it, but his husband is definitely right. Patrick and Ted got along just fine in a “let’s roll our eyes and shake our heads while Alexis and David scream at each other” kind of way, but as far as David knows, they’d never had a conversation more serious than how do you think the Blue Rays are gonna do this season?
Admitting defeat, David glances over at Alexis one last time before taking her phone from Patrick and calling Ted back.
It rings once, twice, and when the third set begins, Patrick looks over at him with an I told you so expression on his face before - “Hey, babe, hang on one second, I’m just in the middle of - well, you don’t really want to know, but I’ll have my hands free in three, two, - okay, there we go! Sorry about that, how are you?”
David clears his throat, and that must be enough for Ted to catch on that it isn’t his girlfriend (is that what they are?) on the phone. “Alexis?” Ted says, already concerned, and boy is he in for a doozy if that is enough to worry him. Shit. Why couldn’t she be back with Stavros? Stavros would’ve hung up by now and been halfway to Bali and David could go back to caring for his sister alone.
“It’s me, Ted.” David says carefully, “It’s David.”
A pause and then, “Oh, hey man! How’s it going? I didn’t know you were visiting, I guess, uh, your sister told you then...about us?”
“Not exactly,” then, panicking for a moment, David asks, “You aren’t, like, doing surgery right now, right? Are you operating any dangerous medical equipment at the moment?” He glances over at his husband to see Patrick roll his eyes at him and mouth quit stalling at him.
“Uh, no, not right now, why do you - is everything okay?”
“Look, I just want to start by saying she’s fine, or the doctors at least say she is and this is the best hospital in New York which is basically the best hospital in the world so I’m sure it’s true, and in my own vast Grey’s Anatomy watching experience, I’ve never seen her injuries shown in the show so that’s probably a good sign, and -”
He tries valiantly to keep rambling so he doesn’t have to hear Ted’s initial reaction, but he doesn’t miss the sharp inhale his sister’s boyfriend takes, nor the heavy crash that echoes through the phone. He crosses his fingers and hopes no animals get hurt in the process of this phone call.
“What happened? What are her injuries?”
“Okay, she was in a car accident, they said that the cab she was in ran a red light. She got the worst of it, everyone else is fine - and she is too!” He says quickly when Patrick kicks his foot.
“Can I talk to her?” Ted asks in a voice far too shaky for David’s comfort. His dad had told him about the time Ted cried on his shoulder after their first breakup, but he prefers to chalk that up to Johnny being dramatic and go on thinking of Ted as your average pun loving veterinarian with very few emotionally vulnerable moments.
David must be silent for a beat too long because Patrick wordlessly takes the phone from him and puts it on speaker. “Hey, man, I’ve got you on speaker, it’s just me and David here. Alexis is fine, she’s out of surgery, she just hasn’t woken up yet but the doctors say it’ll be any time in the next few hours.”
“Surgery? What the - what was her surgery for, I thought she was fine?”
“She is, man, she definitely is. She had her surgery for a collapsed lung when she first got here last night but the doctor said it went really well and she’s in the clear. She’s got a couple of bumps and bruises, but she was really lucky, she said,” Patrick shoots him a say something nice look, so David jumps in with, “If it helps, Alexis bounced back really fast the time Rihanna’s yacht capsized.”
Thanks to the sharp kick from Patrick’s foot and his own common sense clicking in a second too late, he knows immediately that isn’t quite what his husband had in mind. Luckily, Ted’s mind seems to be elsewhere. Less ideally, he follows up with a handful of medical questions that even 16 years of faithful Grey’s Anatomy viewing have not prepared him for. He’s completely lost when it comes to the difference between a tension pneumothorax and trauma induced one and no, he doesn’t remember if Alexis’s doctor said anything about blood clots and Ted’s anxiety is starting to chip away at his own confidence. He finds himself tapping Patrick’s knee in a wordless save me gesture.
Nodding, his husband jumps in, cutting off Ted’s rant on the potential pros and cons of blood thinners with, “Ted, we’re gonna see if we can track down her doctor or a nurse for you, they might be more helpful than we are. You want us to call you back or -”
“No!” Ted’s voice cuts sharply through the phone. “I’m...Jeez, I’m sorry, guys, I’m just going a little crazy here. God, the last thing you need right now is to be talking me down off the ledge. I’m going to catch the next boat off of the island, then it looks like I can get to you guys if I take a flight with a few connections in - wow - Dallas and Chicago. I’ll be in the city tomorrow. What hospital is she at?”
“Presbytarian,” Patrick answers, David still a little shocked by Ted’s recovery and subsequent flight plans.
“Okay. Yeah, you’re right, Presbytarian is good. Great, even. Um. Okay. Could you, uh, send me a text with the doctor’s name, and if she comes back to the room have her call me, if she can. I know how busy those guys are. Mention that I’m a doctor, it’s sad but that makes a difference to some of them. And...if Alexis wakes up before I get there, get her up and moving as soon as you can, if the nurses say it’s okay. She’s gonna hate it, but it’ll help a lot in the long run. I think I’ll be there before they take her off bed rest, but just in case.” Ted’s voice levels out and he begins to sound more like the controlled, calm medical professional they’ve known the past few years.
“Yeah,” and “Of course, we will,” echo David and Patrick, still a little shell-shocked at the events of the last few minutes, let alone the last twelve hours.
“Okay. I love her, tell her I’ll be there soon.” Ted lets out a heavy breath; David realizes this might be the longest they’ve ever talked without him having to listen to a cringeworthy animal-related pun. He’ll never, in a million years, admit that he misses them a bit.
Alexis wakes up two hours later, and it’s saying something that he’s been with her through so many different types of crises but he’s never actually witnessed her waking up from surgery. His most recent experience with patient care was taking Patrick home after his wisdom teeth removal and trying to salvage his Uber rating while his husband shouted “NORTHWEST! Drive NORTHWEST!” at the befuddled driver.
He knows immediately that his sister is going to be a different type of patient.
His first clue that she’s waking up is the change in her breathing. There’s a hitch in her previously slow, steady inhales, then a sharp gasp. He stands up immediately and strides over to her bed, keeping a careful distance so as not to overwhelm her.
Whether he’s failed at that or whether she would’ve been overwhelmed either way is a toss-up, but when he reaches her bed, he immediately notices the steady tears coming down his sister’s cheeks. He wordlessly gestures for Patrick to sit back down and slowly walks closer to Alexis.
“Hey...you’re okay,” he says softly. He carefully takes hold of her hand and gestures to their surroundings, “I know it doesn’t look like it, but you’re fine. The doctor said there’s nothing to worry about, you had a few bumps and bruises that they had to go in to fix, but you’re just coming off the anesthesia now and you’re gonna get some happy pills for a couple weeks and...you’ll be fine, Alexis. Just get some rest, okay?”
“Wha’ happened?” She murmurs with a grimace, the lines in her forehead deepening.
“What happened is we’re going to sue the New York Taxi system, that’s what happened,” he states firmly.
“Mm hm,” she agrees, soothed for a moment before saying, quite inexplicably, “Ted.”
David sighs, decides now isn’t the time to yell at her for withholding information from him, and generously placates her, “We called him. Or, he called us. I don’t know. Don’t worry. Your secret boyfriend is coming. He’s on his way now.”
Not picking up on his slightly irritated tone, Alexis sinks further into her pillows and closes her eyes again. She appears to be completely unbothered by the tears that are still slipping down her cheeks. “I want Teddy,” she mumbles, and god, the most tragic moment of this entire ordeal might be that he now has to live with the fact that, when all of her defenses are down, his sister actually calls her boyfriend Teddy and ugh he wants to shower for a million years. After wiping her cheeks hastily with a tissue and pulling the crap paper that the hospital generously calls “blankets” over her, he practically runs back to Patrick before he has to hear any other horrifying terms of endearment come out of her mouth. By the time he sits down, she’s asleep again.
He pulls out his phone to text Ted an update.
The last message in their thread was Ted asking him about their seats for the opening night of Cabaret.
By the time Ted arrives, Alexis has woken up seeming much more like herself, sweet-talked a nurse into giving her two extra jello cups, demolished those and a bottle of Fiji water David smuggled in, fallen asleep, and woken up again to whine about her cast.
Ugh, whatever, David, it’s bad enough that my whole side is, like, throbbing, but I’ve got to deal with this stupid cast on my arm too? This is gonna make curling my hair literally impossible!
Her hospital room has exceeded its capacity for visitors; Patrick returned a few minutes earlier from a trip to Alexis’s apartment to gather some of her essentials. Now they’re sitting in the chairs just outside Alexis’s room, letting his parents and Stevie have a turn inside while counting the number of times they hear Moira momsplain Alexis’s symptoms while referencing outlandish Sunrise Bay patient cases to Johnny and a few unfortunate nurses.
It’s into this scene that Ted enters, carrying a bouquet of flowers that look far better than their owner. David can’t say with certainty whether Ted’s state of disarray is due to having spent the past year on an island where the turtles outnumber the people (he thinks? He wasn’t paying that much attention when Alexis was describing their planned adventures in the Galapagos) or because of the three plane rides he’d taken to travel over the equator over the last twenty four hours.
It could be a mixture of both of those things, plus a bit of concern over his girlfriend’s health. David has fielded no less than eighteen inquiries from her long distance lover, and would be slightly less bitter about that if she hadn’t been awake when the latter half of them arrived and, theoretically, able to answer them herself. But no, Ted had insisted Alexis get her rest and spend time with her family, and that he’d talk with her when he arrived.
David does know that Ted has travelled 3000 miles in less time than it took his family to drive half an hour to pick him up from an Amish farm.
He’s reluctantly impressed.
Ted doesn’t seem eager to stop and recap his cross-continent travel experiences, though. David and Patrick jump to their feet when he jogs up to them, but he barely pauses for a “she’s in there?” and skips the pleasantries in favor of bursting into Alexis’s room.
In hindsight, he probably should’ve told his parents ahead of time about Ted’s imminent arrival. And/or about Ted and Alexis’s reconciliation. He wasn’t quite sure how to weave that into the conversation in between his mother’s hysterical rants about the high likelihood that her daughter would soon succumb to a myriad of medical disasters and his father’s slightly-less-hysterical-rants about the dangers of New York City transportation. And, honestly, he’d kind of assumed it was his sister’s responsibility to tell her parents about her secret lover.
But he was clearly wrong to think that, judging by the look of complete shock on Alexis’s face at the sight of Ted, who stands frozen a few steps past the doorway.
After a solid beat where everyone’s gaze is locked on either Ted - who is somehow still dressed in scrubs and a lab coat that has a small Charles Darwin Research Center label on the breast pocket - or Alexis, who looks like she’s seen a ghost.
Moira recovers first, and says in a voice loud enough to jar everyone else from their stupors, “Well, if it isn’t Theodore Millstone, come to win back his fair maiden in distress!”
Johnny, in a voice that he thinks is under his breath, “I think it’s Mueller, sweetheart.”
“Mullens,” Alexis corrects in a wet voice, her eyes still glued to Ted’s.
The man in question seems to come back to himself at the sound of her voice, striding over to her bed in four steps and causing Stevie, Moira, and Johnny to scatter away like mice. He folds her into a gentle hug that somehow appears natural despite his clear intention to avoid her ribs, arm, and chest. While Ted leans over to press a kiss into her hair, David tries looking anywhere else and has the misfortune to make eye contact with Stevie.
What the fuck? She mouths at him with wide, amused eyes.
“So I take it that you didn’t tell them about Ted while I was gone, David?” Patrick asks, his eyebrows raised.
“You knew, David?” a chorus of voices rings out, including Alexis’s. Ted has kept a hand on her shoulder while inspecting the labels on her IV bags, muttering quietly to himself.
“Did I know that he was coming or did I know that they were back together?” He asks in an attempt to buy time to defend himself from this highly unwarranted assault on his character.
“Um, both?” Stevie asks at the same time as his dad says, indignant, “Take your pick!”
“Okay, technically, I knew as of yesterday morning that they were back together and yes, I knew he was coming, but I was still processing the information myself! Why aren’t you yelling at Patrick? He knew everything I did!”
To his further affront, his family’s reaction to this is a mixed bag of amusement and confusion, as though the idea of being angry at Patrick is simply preposterous.
“Well, you could’ve at least told me that my boyfriend was coming,” Alexis says, though her indignation is slightly muted by the cozy tableau she and Ted now make. Ted has now shed his lab coat and is sitting perched on the edge of her bed, a muscular arm wrapped loosely around her shoulders. “I’ve been in distress, David!” She whines, pouting and hooking a foot around Ted’s ankle.
“You knew!” He cries out, “I told you when you woke up! You asked for Ted and I told you he was coming! Then you went back to sleep and didn’t bring it back up and I just figured that you didn’t want anyone else to know yet!”
“Okay, but I have, like, no memory of that. Do I have amnesia or something, oh my god, Ted?!” She checks to see what her veterinarian boyfriend, who’s probably never treated an amnesiatic case in his entire life, thinks.
“No way. I talked with Dr. Yu on my way here, she said your CT results from when you first got here were completely clear, you’ve got no neurological complications. A lot of people are groggy after surgery, sometimes information doesn’t quite stick. It’s okay, babe, I’m just sorry if I surprised you.”
“It was a good one,” Alexis says, pressing a kiss to the curve of his bicep.
“Mm,” Ted sighs contentedly and seems to be on the verge of sleep before he suddenly jumps up and declares, “I’m going to go see if I can speak with someone about your post-op care plan. What have you eaten since you woke up? Do you want a muffin? Or a fruit cup?”
“How about we try to take care of that and let you guys spend some time together?” Johnny jumps in, already heading for the door with Moira following shortly after.
“Yeah, and if mom is going anywhere near a doctor she needs the supervision of at least two sane people,” Alexis warns, shooing the rest of them out the door. Stevie and Patrick walk out before he does; as he reaches back to give Alexis just a little more crap about hiding her secret, turtle-obsessed boyfriend from them, he sees Ted settle back down next to her and inspect her cast before letting out an audible breath.
As Alexis closes her eyes and relaxes into her pillows, Ted brings the bottom of her ponytail over her shoulder and fingers its end for a moment. David sees him look up at her IV bag one last time to track the fluid’s pathway from the bag to her hand. Seemingly satisfied, he makes a visible effort to lie down as close to the edge of her bed as possible before maneuvering closer when she crooks open one amused eye.
David turns away and shuts off the light.
He and Alexis aren’t alone again until after his parents and Stevie depart, leaving behind some very generous Rosebud Motel memorabilia to hasten the healing process, as Moira graciously declared while hugging her daughter goodbye. Patrick and Ted are off on a mission to buy Ted a change of clothes from the gift shop, which doesn’t seem like a two person job but when you take into account that it’s the two of them, it might kind of make sense.
Or it’s a ploy to give David time to talk with his sister. Either way. He didn’t love the idea of his husband and Ted being in cahoots.
Alexis is in the middle of recounting her plan for Interflix ’s live action adaptation of Shrek and normally he’d be morbidly fascinated by this, but he has to take this chance before Patrick comes back and guilts him into keeping his mouth shut.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” He interrupts her unceremoniously.
She doesn’t ask for clarification, but also doesn’t answer immediately.
Half joking, he asks, “Is this another Jared Leto situation? Did he ask you to keep it quiet?”
A small smile, then, “No. He didn’t...it was all me. If it was up to him, we’d have been insta official 6 months ago.”
“6 months? That’s how long you’ve been back together?” That was half of the time that had elapsed since their breakup.
“Yeah. Just about.” Alexis looks down, biting her lip. “We’ve been talking since your wedding, though. Just little stuff at first. I didn’t stop myself anymore from texting him anymore. Once we started texting about random things, it was pretty easy to text about...other stuff too. And then one night he called me, because he had a story for me that was too long for text. He told me later that he just wanted an excuse to hear my voice again. And before we knew it, it was morning and we were back together.
“I didn’t tell you or Twyla or anyone because - because I was embarrassed.” Alexis says softly, running her free hand through the ends of her hair. “I made this big deal out of doing what was right for me and striking out on my own and not needing him but it turns out that I really, really do. Or at least, I want him enough to make the hard stuff worth it. But I liked the idea of you guys thinking I was kicking ass all on my own before telling you about him. It all sounds so stupid now.”
“It’s not stupid,” David says, who knows all too well the need to be perceived as independent. “I do think, though, that you should give us all a little bit more credit. I mean, if you can’t confide in me about giving an on-again, off-again relationship just one more chance, who can you really count on?”
Alexis lets out a wet laugh at that, and he keeps going before she’s tempted to make the inevitable Anderson Cooper reference. “But hey. We all saw how you and Ted were together. I’ve been rooting for you guys from the start.”
The skeptical look Alexis gives him only makes him double down. “Seriously, wasn’t my panic attack what brought you guys together in the first place?”
She purses her lips together in mock concentration, “Nope,” she says, drawing out the p. “Pretty sure that almost ruined his appeal for me. No, we met thanks to Twyla’s godawful smoothies. Ughh, I can, like, still practically taste it, ew, David, why did you have to remind me?” She shudders just as Ted and Patrick walk back in, now wearing matching Presbytarian baseball hats. He takes a deep breath and reminds himself of all of the non-fashion related assets these men have.
“You okay, babe?” Ted asks as David clears the chair closest to Alexis, offering it to her boyfriend wordlessly. Ted eschews his offer and stands by the side of her bed instead. “Did that last muffin not sit right? I can go get you some ginger ale? It also could be your pain meds, some people -”
“Sh, babe, it’s fine, it’s definitely not the meds or the muffin, I was just telling David about how we first met.”
Ted barely has to think for a second before he chuckles, “Yeah, I did try to warn you, Alexis.”
“Okay, but babe, I just thought you were trying to hit on me.”
“Yeah, I was obviously trying to do that too, but I would’ve warned anyone about that smoothie, not just a berry beautiful woman I was trying to ask out.”
Patrick nudges David and they start to walk towards the door. Just as David is reaching up to pull off his husband’s insultingly ugly baseball hat, Ted clears his throat.
“Hey, thanks guys,” he says with a small smile. And even though it’s probably the fifteenth time he’s thanked them in the past thirty six hours, it’s the first time he’s done so with Alexis nestled under his arm and looks of contentment on both of their faces.
He nods back at Ted in understanding and heads out the door, finally ready to crash at a hotel for a few hours before heading home. He wraps an arm around Patrick’s waist and lets his husband take some of his weight as they head towards the exit.