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“Nick,” says Charlie, glancing up over the top of the car to look at Nick. He’s bent down into the car, rifling around in the driver’s seat, trying to gather all of his things. Charlie huffs and tries to blow a loose curl hanging down his forehead out of his eyesight, to no avail, as it flops right back to where it had fallen. He readjusts the box in his arms. It’s not particularly heavy, but, well, he’s certainly never been the strongest. “Are you sure that all of this is really…necessary?”
A flicker of doubt. Nick glances over at Charlie as he shuts the driver’s side door behind him, with another similar-sized cardboard box cradled in his arm. “You think it’s too much?” He asks, clicking the lock on the car remote twice to make sure and then dropping his keys into his coat pocket.
Charlie stifles a laugh as he rounds the back of the car, catching up to Nick as they make their way to the doors. “I mean…”
“I think, as the interior designer and photographer between the two of us, that you should just trust me. And—hey, whatever happened to respecting your elders?” Nick says, catty. Charlie just scrunches his nose in return. Well, he can’t exactly argue with that. “Plus, I don’t think it could ever be too much.”
“You’re hardly older than me.”
“Eighteen months!”
Charlie only rolls his eyes.
Their Sunday nights are typically spent curled up together in their conservatory, limbs and hearts and souls intertwined as they sip on their tea and watch the sunset over the horizon, with Daisy splayed across their laps and tests sitting on the coffee table, finally graded and set aside, but tonight is different. This evening, May 31st, Nick has tasked Charlie and himself to deck out his classroom for Pride—truthfully, he’s been looking forward to today all year. Since moving schools temporarily, he’s looked forward to this June since last September. While he loves teaching Year 1’s and 2’s and knows it's one of his truest passions in life—of course, besides rugby, and Marvel films, and dogs, and, perhaps most importantly, Charlie—getting the chance to teach older students this year has been a blessing in and of itself, too, even though they weren’t exactly in his wheelhouse. He’s decorated his classrooms for Pride in the past few years he’s been teaching, but he knows this year is special—he’s teaching year 7’s and 8’s, and they grasp the significance of Pride month far better than his younger students do. Not that six-year-olds don’t love their classroom being decked out in rainbows for the last month of school before the summer holidays, but they don’t really get it.
This year, though, when Nick hung up his own brand new pride flag in the back of his classroom on the first day of school, he had a handful of students hang around after class to let him know how much it meant to them to have a brand new teacher show “allyship” (which definitely got a reflexive chuckle out of him, and Charlie later, too, when he recounted the story when he got home that evening) to their students. Over the last year, Nick’s gotten the chance to slip in queer education into a couple of his lessons with his students, and he knows his classroom has been a safe haven for many of them—it’s his most dear passion to pass along the safety to younger students that his own queer teachers gave him and his friends growing up.
Sometimes, he thinks back to Mrs. Singh, and how she was unabashedly confident and endlessly proud to have a wife, to be a lesbian, to be queer but most importantly proud of it during a place and time where her queerness wasn’t widely accepted. How she’d hang up photos of them kissing in her office, or of their wedding, of their pets, the beautiful life they’d built together, or how she’d offhand talk about Jenny during their rugby practices or P.E. lessons to gaggles of casually homophobic teen boys. Through it all, she prospered.
And he thinks back to the way Mr. Ajayi was a shelter from the relentless storm his husband had to endure throughout early secondary school—how he didn’t have to, but he gave Charlie a place to rest, to breathe, to heal, anyway, just because he, himself, knew what it was like to feel as though the entire world is against your very being. Mr. Ajayi knew what it was like to have to get out of bed every morning, just to suffocate through schooldays and hold your breath as you drown in a sea of people who can’t bear the way you love, who want to make sure you know they despise it—with fists, and sneers, and dirty looks, when all you wanted to do was get to your next lesson in one piece...
Or to Mr. Farouk, who missed out on all of the innocent, messy, joyful experiences that he himself got to have, how he wasn’t as lucky as some of his peers. How Nick wants to change that for his own kids, so they don’t have to miss out too, because he knows how empowering and fulfilling and beautiful it is to know who you are as a teenager.
He hopes that if they’d know him now, they’d be proud of who he’s gotten to become today, who he’s grown into. Who he’s teaching new generations of students to become, to grow into themselves, to be proud of themselves. To give back to his own students what he was once given. Sometimes he thinks back to how Mr. Ajayi gave him the evils the first time he’d laid eyes on Nick because he wanted to make sure Charlie would be safe for once—it still makes him laugh to think about. How wrong he had been if he could see them now.
For what it’s worth, Nick’s proud of them all, too.
Nick bumps Charlie’s shoulder as he digs his keys back out of his pocket to unlock the front entrance of the school and stacks his box on top of Charlie’s as he opens the door. “Hey, how dare you?” Charlie quips, but Nick simply hums in response and takes back the box after shutting the door behind the two of them.
He can hear a few voices in the staff room, chatting together, laughing. He’s actually never officially introduced many of his colleagues to Charlie before, though he’s definitely mentioned him offhand over water fountain breaks a few times over the year—still, he’d be lying if he said coming out to his peers, colleagues, didn’t make him a bit nervous sometimes, even all of these years later. He figures that it likely always will—telling people, or the wrong person finding out, risking them looking at him differently with that glint in their eye, and sneers, and snide comments behind his back. Over the decade he’s been with Charlie, though, he’s learned to ignore it, to push through, and disregard whatever else anyone might have to say since the only person who matters at the end of the day is Charlie.
Usually, he doesn’t let the fear win, and he certainly won’t be today—especially not while he and his husband walked into school donning matching silver bands on their fourth fingers and are carrying two boxes filled with rainbow decorations.
“I didn’t realize I’d get to meet all of your coworkers today,” Charlie says, hushed. He’s not exactly sure why he’s whispering—he doesn’t think they can even hear them. “I could’ve at least done my hair!”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly planning on anyone else being here tonight,” Nick retorts. He peers around the corner of the office into the open staff room door. “But your hair looks great either way, okay?”
“It was a right mess when we left the house, and you know it,” Charlie shakes his head. He blows up on another loose, fallen curl on his forehead for extra measure.
“You’re always far too mean to yourself,” Nick nudges Charlie’s arm with his free elbow and motions as they continue down the hall. He really just wants to get decorating over with so they can maybe get home early enough to catch the tail end of the news on the tele tonight. “Well, they’ll probably keep us for ages if I go and introduce you; we should get started. They know where to find me if they really want to say hello.”
Charlie simply shrugs. “Some things never change,” he supposes.
“Oh, trust me,” Nick laughs, “I know. After a whole decade, I don’t think it ever will…though that just means I can compliment you over and over forever, yeah?”
Nick and Charlie continue down the long, buzzing hallways (for what feels like ages to Charlie but is probably nothing more than the back of a hand to Nick) until they finally arrive in front of a closed beige door with the shutters pulled down behind the window. There’s a plaque on the door underneath the rim of the window that reads Mr. Nelson, and an ever-so-slight smile pulls at Charlie’s lips as he lays eyes on it. Nick’s very own classroom. Sometimes it still surprises Charlie, all of the ways equally tiny and massive ways that Nick has grown since they first met. Nick doesn’t seem to notice Charlie’s smiles, though, because his back is turned on his husband as he pulls out his set of keys from his pocket once again and opens the door. He pushes the door open and flicks the light on, stepping out of the way so Charlie can come in behind him.
“I guess you’ve never been in here, huh?” Nick asks, setting his box down on the nearest desk and sliding the wooden wedged door stop underneath the door with his foot.
“Not this classroom, no,” Charlie confirms as he glances around and sets down his box right next to Nick’s. It’s a pretty basic classroom—tables scatter the floor, chalkboards on the walls, windows line an entire edge of the room, some filing cabinets are pushed away into a back corner, and Nick’s desk is pushed away in the opposite one. “Your desk is far cleaner than our desks at home, though, I see?”
Nick narrows his eyes at his husband. “This is an outrage, you know that?”
“Yeah, keep telling yourself that, love,” Charlie dismisses and glances up at the back wall. A big smile pulls onto his face—Nick’s iconic pride flag hangs proudly, pinned up to a bulletin board, with small posters underneath it establishing how his classroom is a “safe space.” What Charlie would’ve given to have had more teachers like Nick when he was growing up…
“You gave me that flag, do you remember?” Nick asks. His whole demeanour seems to change as he notices Charlie staring at the back wall. “The first year we began dating, you gave it to me during Pride month. You insisted to write our names on the back of it somewhere.”
“I really can’t believe you actually kept that,” Charlie says, navigating through the tables to make his way to the back of the room. Nick follows him closely behind and unpins one of the bottom corners when they do. He flips the corner up, and sure enough, in Sharpie is written clear-as-day, Nick and Charlie, with a handful of little hearts at the end. Charlie’s name is a bit smudged—Nick remembers bumping Charlie’s arm while he was writing it and Charlie getting annoyed with him, so he drew on Nick’s hand as payback. Charlie’s heart aches a bit, knowing that, even in some small capacity, he’s been a part of Nick’s classrooms over the handful of years he’s been teaching. “Why on earth didn’t you just get a new one?”
Nick sits down on the edge of the closest table to the wall after carefully re-pinning the corner back to the board. “Because you gave me this one,” Nick says quietly, “during my first Pride. A lot of my kids have told me I’m the first teacher of theirs they’ve seen have a flag in their classroom. This one’s just special, you know? It even has our names written in and smudged and everything.”
“You’re a bit of a dork, you know that?” Charlie says, but he can’t help earnest fondness from seeping into his voice. He leans against the table, too, right next to Nick.
“Proper little nerd,” Nick retorts. “That never changed, either.”
“Hm,” Charlie hums. “And yet, look how long you stayed.”
Nick just rolls his eyes and turns his head to look at Charlie, one of the corners of his mouth quirking up. Charlie sheepishly lowers his head at the affection, flustered. “Hey, what?” Nick asks, but Charlie just shakes his head. His cheeks grow pink. “What’s up?”
Met with silence, Nick reaches out a hand and rests it underneath Charlie’s chin, slowly lifting his head. “Nothing,” Charlie says, and he shakes his head quickly. Nick’s hand stays resting below his husband’s chin. The persistent curl falls in front of Charlie’s forehead again, and Charlie nearly rolls his eyes but flushes crimson as Nick reaches up with his free hand, brushing it out of his face.
“What?” Nick asks again. There’s an edge to his voice that says by now, he’s pretty sure he knows what—he just likes teasing Charlie, if he’s being honest—because it’s rather gratifying to know that he can still make Charlie fluster, all these years later, with nothing more needed than a little smile and a steady hand to guide.
“I’m just very lucky,” says Charlie, and he leans his head to the side, nestling into Nick’s hand, now resting benignly on the side of his face. “I never thought I’d get this lucky.”
Nick imitates Charlie, leaning his head the opposite way of Charlie, and laughs. “You’re cute.”
Charlie just shakes his head, but Nick leans in against Charlie on the table and presses a gentle kiss to his lips. A decade later, and yet every time still feels like the first time all over again. His stomach still does flips. Butterflies still rage. Sparks still fly.
Seconds—or minutes, or hours, because it’s kind of hard to tell how long it’s been kissing Charlie…and that apparently isn’t something that’s changed much, either—pass, and both men break away. Neither of them move a muscle—Nick rests his forehead against Charlie’s, and they sit still, holding one another as close as they can, donning massive, matching smiles on their faces as they catch their breaths.
“So, did you really just make out with me sitting on the table of some poor, unsuspecting Year 7 in your secondary school classroom?” Charlie finally breaks the silence, and Nick pulls away, swatting at Charlie’s shoulder, who tries to dodge it, but ends up losing his balance instead, which Nick begins to laugh at, too.
“I don’t think any of them will mind,” says Nick, though his face, from the tip of his nose to the ridges of his ears and all down his neck, are all flushed from Charlie’s ridiculous comment. Thank God none of his colleagues decided to walk in right about now— that’d have been mortifying. He’d have to move schools early for sure. He’s not even quite sure half of them know he’s married to Charlie—he’s not private about it, really, but they don’t exactly show it off, either, not like they did in uni. He’s learned over the years that keeping their relationship private to them, keeping it theirs, unequivocally, without letting others in on what’s theirs and theirs only, is far more gratifying than seeking other’s validation, especially from their straight peers.
Charlie interlaces his fingers with Nick’s as he readjusts himself on the table beside Nick, resting his head on his shoulder. “You’re doing a really good thing for them, you know?” Charlie says. His voice is hardly above a whisper as he’s leaning his head on Nick.
“What do you mean?”
“Just by being you. Your flag, and your decorations. You’re changing some of these kids’ lives.”
Pride swells in Nick’s chest. He thinks back to Mrs. Singh, to Mr. Ajayi, to Mr. Farouk. He glances briefly over at his husband. Of Darcy, Tara, Elle, how they all changed his life as a kid. Really, that’s all he’s ever wanted to do. Charlie reaches down, delicately interlacing his fingers between Nick’s, and squeezes tight. Nick bites down on the bottom of his lip. “I couldn’t have done it without all of our teachers in secondary school,” he says. “And our friends. And you. Especially you. It takes a village, right? A community.”
Charlie beams. “Well, that’s what pride is for, hey?”
Nick hums in agreement and squeezes Charlie’s hand a bit tighter. “Thank you,” he says, leaning his head down on Charlie’s. “You know I wouldn’t be half of who I am today without you.”
“Well, look who’s being sappy now,” Charlie teases, absentmindedly running his thumb over the back of Nick’s hand. “Same—though I’m not over here changing lots of kids lives or inspiring anyone or anything like you are, but…changing yours is enough for me.”
Nick’s heart swells again. He swallows down the evergrowing lump in his throat because he’s not sure if he can bear kissing his husband and crying over him in his own classroom within the same hour and hums back at Charlie. “We’re both saps.”
“Eh, I’ll take it,” Charlie says, bringing their interlocked hands up to his lips and pressing a chaste kiss to Nick’s knuckles. “I think I get it from you.”
“I completely resent that,” says Nick. “And I think we should get decorating if we want to get home before it begins raining, yeah?”
Charlie lifts his head and looks up at Nick. “Your absurd amount of rainbow decorations?”
“Do you want me to call you homophobic?”
“God, you hang out with Darcy way too much, Nick.”
Nick only rolls his eyes in response but squeezes Charlie’s hand one last time before getting up from the table and leading Charlie to follow him. “Come on, now, before it begins to pour.”