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It started as a silly reminder of a night that Charlie never wanted to forget. It wasn't supposed to become a habit. It wasn't supposed to be anything but funny. It just wasn't supposed to run so deep. But somehow, as precious things in life often do, it slipped out of Charlie's control and blossomed on its own.
With a heavy sigh, Charlie sits down on the couch and opens his notebook.
It has been a while since he had the strength to touch this book. He thought he might have to wipe dust from the cover or that the pages would stick together from the lack of use, but neither happens. His and Nick's memories are spread out on his lap in blue ballpoint ink like they used to be.
He made the first entry a few weeks after Nick left for uni. It was the middle of a cold, lonely night, a time when the distance between Leeds and home seemed to stretch across galaxies. Charlie was listlessly scrolling through Tumblr when Nick called him, drunk off his ass.
"You're the most beautiful cat in the world." He slurred, going on for a whole minute about how gorgeous Charlie was. The thumping bass of a house party was audible behind him. "And I want to sleep on you. Like a pillow."
Charlie snickered. He imagined Nick sneaking away from his housemates to whine to Charlie about how much he missed him. The thought filled him with that aching sort of warmth that wove through every conversation he had had with Nick since the last days of their vacation drifted away. "Go to sleep."
Nick sniffled. "But I miss you."
"I miss you too."
"Nothing is the same without you." Charlie heard something rustle, and he thought of Nick climbing into his bed. He turned on his left side. Was Nick lying on his right? If he reached into the empty space, would Nick mirror him hundreds of miles away?
"You're my lucky cat."
"Oh God." Charlie chuckled again. He knew from experience that Nick's thought process could take some wild turns when he was drunk, but it never stopped being amusing. "Lucky cat?"
"Hm." Nick made some kind of noise that must have meant agreement. Then, his voice got lower, almost as though he thought he wasn't saying the words out loud. "And I'm going to marry you one day."
Charlie's eyes snapped open, and his heart began to race. It was too early to say anything like that - too early to even think it, maybe, aside from a few embarrassing daydreams - but it hung between them now, shimmering like a promise. "You would have to propose first."
"I have it all planned out." Nick said then. "I know that, like, tabby cats are the cutest and I'm not even a cat and you probably don't want what I want but I want you."
Charlie smiled and stroked his pillow. "You don't make any sense. Go to bed already."
"I'm in bed."
"Then sleep."
"Okay."
"Okay."
There was a pause. "Are you still here?"
"Yes."
"Okay."
Charlie stayed on the line until Nick's breathing evened out. When he hung up at last, he smiled up at the ceiling. Then, acting on a whim, he turned his dinosaur lamp on and grabbed the thick notebook he had left on his bedside table. He tore out the first few pages he had filled with random notes, and scribbled 'Things You Said Last Night'.
"You're going to be so embarrassed tomorrow…" He muttered, then wrote down Nick's cat monologue word for word. When he reached the part that made his heart skip way too many beats to be normal, he paused, then left it out. He wasn't going to bring it up the next day. What if Nick said it was a ludicrous idea?
Nick didn't though. When he read it out loud to a severely hungover but amused Nick the next evening, he laughed along with Charlie, then gave him a fond look through the video chat. "You left something out though."
Charlie blushed. "So you do remember!"
"Not everything!" Nick protested through a laugh, then sobered up. He gave Charlie a shy glance. "I did mean that part. I want to… you know. One day."
Charlie fiddled with the strings of the hoodie he had stolen from Nick. "Me too."
That night, after the call, he opened the notebook again, and wrote 'I want to. One day.'
It became a habit. Every time Nick said something silly or achingly sweet or just something that Charlie wanted to remember, he put it in the notebook.
'I hate working at the coffee shop. I accidentally hung up on my mum saying 'enjoy your coffee.''
'My card stopped working and I got locked out of my room after taking a shower - it's not funny, I had to walk up to the reception in my towel!'
'I didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I signed up, but you know how I never played water polo before… They just want me to show up to the game to scare the other team, but I don't think I'm very scary, Charlie…'
'You can't just say you miss my hands and not expect me to board the first train home.'
'Can you come visit this weekend? My flatmate spilled beer on the jumper I stole back from you, so I had to wash it and it doesn't smell like you anymore.'
After a while, Charlie started adding little notes to the entries, and the notebook's pristine white pages began to look like a cherished diary. As he reads through them again, he pauses and strokes the lines sometimes, remembering all those fond memories and the fearless love he used to feel those days. There’s a bittersweet taste in his mouth, but he focuses on the words instead of letting the present overwhelm him with all its exhaustion and unshed tears.
22nd Dec
'I love the sounds you make.'
*I can't believe you had the energy to do what we've just done. You looked exhausted.*
25th Dec
'She didn't need to buy me a new one, this isn't tight at all! I swear I'm comfortable.'
*Except, I may have ripped it trying to get it off you… Stop working out if you want to keep your old clothes.*
New Year's Eve
'Will you move in with me next year?'
*Wasn't that obvious, you dork?*
14th Feb
'I want to kiss you everywhere.'
*I'm glad you did.*
Charlie smiles as he follows the traces of that year of long-distance pining, then the white-hot summer it melted into, when they couldn’t get enough of one another and every moment spent together was about sating their starved bodies on each other’s fire. He doesn’t miss it exactly, not the desperation anyway, but they were so carefree back then. They seemed invincible.
18th Jul
‘Do you think we can go without? I kind of want to try it. I trust you.’
*I trust you too.*
It wasn't until he followed Nick to Leeds that Nick discovered his little secret. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? Because no matter how he tried, keeping the unassuming notebook hidden while living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with Nick didn't work for a long time. Charlie woke up one morning to Nick thumbing through a year's worth of quotes, eyes wide and cheeks pink.
"Fuck." Charlie swore and turned on his stomach to hide his flushed face in the pillow. It would have been futile to wrestle his diary out of Nick's hands at this point. It was obvious that he had seen Charlie's dorky collection of memories.
After a moment, Nick poked his arm. "You're such a nerd."
"Shut up." Charlie swatted his hand away.
"Why did you leave this in the bathroom?"
"Because I sneaked in there last night and I forgot to put it back in its place."
He heard the sound of pages turning. "Did you order the coconut pizzas?" Nick read aloud. "I didn't say that!"
Charlie turned his head to laugh. "Um, yes, you did." He put his hand on Nick's knee and wiggled his thumb under the hem of Nick's shorts. "You sat bolt upright at 1 a.m. and shook me awake to tell me that you're 'cringe' and to ask about the pizzas."
"Oh, no." Nick laughed, then covered his face with his hands. "I must have wanted to say I was hungry."
"Or you had a moment of self-reflection."
"Hey!" Nick pushed Charlie's shoulder, still chuckling, then threw a pillow at him when Charlie pushed back. He leaned over to the bedside table and picked up a pen.
"What are you doing?" Charlie smiled and climbed over Nick’s legs, trying to snatch the notebook out of his hand, but Nick didn't relent. He scribbled something on the page.
"What did you write?" He peered at the page, where Nick's blocky handwriting tilted in an uneven line. "Nick is the best boyfriend ever? That doesn't even sound like me."
Nick laughed and put the notebook and the pen aside to grab Charlie around the waist and pepper kisses all over his face. "Tell me I'm the best boyfriend ever."
Charlie pushed him half-heartedly away. "I don't know. Convince me."
It was one of the first times he and Nick had sex in broad daylight in their own space. Not at their parents’ houses, not in a tent while trying not to wake up everyone else at the campsite, and neither in a car like an illicit rendez-vous. In their own apartment. Charlie still shudders when he thinks of the nervous excitement of finally being able to be loud and to take their time, to just lie aroud naked after and to try new positions, new ways to connect.
27th Oct
'You're so embarrassing. I can't believe I'm dating you.'
* It's okay, Char. We're in love ;) *
The next year flies by quickly on the pages. He and Nick traded the notebook back and forth, writing down each other’s funniest moments with their own comments for narration. Charlie reads all of them, chuckling quietly in the dim living room while his cup of tea cools forgotten on the side table. When he reaches his birthday, he stops to stare at the single word Nick put there two years ago.
It was a rainy night, so he and Nick decided to celebrate at home. Nick baked him a crooked but delicious little cake and they cuddled under a blanket on the very same couch Charlie’s sitting on right now. They listened to a slow, jazzy radio station and shared random anecdotes from their childhoods.
“Charlie?” Nick murmured after a lull in their conversation. He was flat on his back, with one of his arms curled around Charlie’s back and the other holding on to the present he still hadn’t given to Charlie.
“Hm?” Charlie raised his head from Nick’s chest to look him in the eye. Nick’s heart sped up under his palm.
“Happy birthday.” Nick said and gave him their notebook, with a ribbon to bookmark this page.
Charlie opened it with a frown. Yes, the entry read. There was nothing else there, just the word and the date. “What?”
Nick swallowed. He reached into the gift bag again and pulled out a small jewelry box. “Will you marry me?”
Charlie smiles at the memory and rubs his thumb over the word.
'Yes.'
Nick drew hearts around it after Charlie actually said it, pink and curvy doodles. It was one of the happiest nights of their lives.
But perhaps they should have considered the gloomy rain a sign of foreboding.
7th May
‘I’m never going to Cardiff again, this is horrible, don’t laugh at me, Charlie!’
*I told you to take a raincoat!*
They thought it was a simple cold at first, but the fever wasn’t going away. Even filled to the gills with paracetamol, Nick’s fatigue persisted, and after two weeks, the look in their GP’s eyes shifted from boredom to puzzlement and a growing worry. Nick requested a medical leave from his uni because he couldn’t keep up.
They were referred to the immunology and allergy clinic, going through a month of testing and treatment without improvement. Then to the neurology department. CT, MRI, PET… Charlie can’t even remember all the diagnostics they put Nick through. All those ugly waiting rooms, the anxious disrobing, the gradually thinning muscles... When the diagnosis came, it should have been a relief, because that would mean a certain treatment plan, right? Except, there was no guarantee that anything they came up with would work on Nick’s condition.
“It’s very rare, especially in such a young man.” The lead expert told them, and Charlie resented her for the way he perceived professional interest in her tone. As though a future case study in the bloody Lancet was what she had in mind instead of the fact that Charlie’s love was slipping away like a withering flower and no one could give them a lifeline.
That’s when the entries in their old little notebook began to shift away from laughter and sweetness to pain.
3rd Jul
‘Come on, we’re not gonna get married when I can’t even stand on my feet. I know you want a spring wedding anyway, let’s just wait.’
*But I’m scared that*
20th Jul
‘I think it’s working. You haven’t lost as much weight this week.’
*I don’t know about that, Charlie…*
25th Jul
'What if I'm dying?'
Charlie stops there and wipes his eyes. The day Nick said that, Sarah asked them to move back home. So that she could help with… everything. So that she could be close. They knew what she thought, what they all did, but Charlie refused to consider it a possibility.
He shut her down. He told her Nick was going to get better before the new term anyway, that they didn’t need help and that the treatment was working. He almost wished they had had an old corded phone so that he could slam it down. But when he stomped back into the bedroom, he was surprised to find Nick awake, sitting up against the headboard and looking lucid and serious.
“What if I’m dying?”
“You’re not.” Charlie dismissed him reflexively.
“But what if I am?” Nick pressed again, his voice rising.
Charlie pressed a bunch of oversized pills into Nick’s hand, relieved that he wouldn’t have to feed them to him tonight like a pack of M&Ms. “You’re not. Take your meds.”
Nick dropped the tablets on the mattress. “I need to talk about this.”
“Well, I can’t!”
“But we need to!”
Charlie knows he stormed out of the flat then, but the details are hazy.
Although it must not have been a long time, the guilt he still feels about it makes it seem like whole hours had passed before he scraped himself together and went back to apologise. Nick was right. Charlie was selfish to deny him that conversation, he knew, but they were both stretched too thin with their own problems and each other’s that Charlie felt like he couldn’t take more pain. He had to stay hopeful.
Nick had fallen asleep again by the time he made it back. He was curled up on his side, his back to the empty half of the bed. If it hadn’t been for his sunken cheeks, Charlie would have thought everything was alright again. On Charlie’s pillow, their notebook lay open near the last page. Charlie picked it up and took it out to the kitchen to read what Nick wrote in it.
?? Jul
‘We're almost out of pages.’ *Sometimes it feels like I am too*
Charlie can still feel the shock of seeing that sentence as he looks at it now. He scratched it out so viciously that he wouldn’t be able to read it now, but the image of those words is burnt into his memory. As well as the smudged comment he wrote for Nick under it, after he called Sarah and apologized.
*Sometimes it feels like I am too**Please don't say that, sweetheart.*
“Fuck.” Charlie sniffles and roots around in the side table for a tissue. He hadn’t opened this notebook in a year. He should have known he would tear up if he did.
There aren’t all that many entries left. He’s almost on the last page, and the gaps between his notes are growing longer and longer. Nick didn’t write anything at that time, but sometimes, Charlie still wanted to continue the journal. He had to put Nick’s words on paper. Not because they were funny or sweet, but because… He had to. Whenever they cut him too deeply.
That’s why the second to last page is nothing but darkness - ‘everything hurts’ and ‘Charlie, I'm scared of going to sleep’ and ‘maybe you were right about that summer wedding’ - and then blank white paper.
At least, that’s what it should be.
But when Charlie turns to the last page, it’s not a void that greets him.
There’s a new entry from two days ago. Nick’s oversized letters and slanted sentences cover the page.
25th Apr
‘We can play rugby tomorrow if you feel up to it.’
And then, *I love you, I love you, I love you* all the way down to the bottom, stretching over the margins and covering every empty inch, just as it fills the healing cracks in Charlie’s heart.
So this is why Nick asked him to open this thing again. He heaves a wet chuckle and hugs the notebook to his chest, slowly making his way to the kitchen where Nick stands, happy and alive, covered in smudges of floor as he tries to make Charlie a cake that isn’t lopsided this time. When he looks up at Charlie and takes in the way he clutches at the diary, a fond smile lights up his face.
“Come here." He opens his arms and pulls Charlie close until Charlie’s face is buried in his chest. “Why are you crying?"
There are a thousand things that Charlie wants to say, about how much it means to him that he can suffer through playing sports with Nick again, about how happy it makes him that the circle of his fingers can’t close when he grabs Nick’s forearms nowadays, about how refreshing it is to complain about uni instead of drug side effects. But all he can manage is a hiccupy whisper. “That was the last page.”
“I know.” Nick presses a playful kiss to his cheek. "I bought us a new notebook."
~End~