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Martin’s not entirely sure at what point he becomes aware that they’re planning their wedding.
Put like that, it sounds stupid, even to himself – who doesn’t notice an oncoming marriage, especially one where even the thought of it makes his palms prickle and his heart race in a sweet kind of thrill, where he’s as much as said already to Jon that it’s what he wants. But nevertheless, it’s happening to him. By him. The gears turning towards matrimony, in bits and pieces over weeks and months.
The beginning of it: the suits now hanging in their wardrobe, bought in a fleet of fancy with Jon’s first teaching paycheque, after ducking into a shop on a whim in Inverness on a free afternoon. Martin can’t tell Jon why he wants them to have them – he can’t really justify it to himself, especially when he has both a perfectly serviceable suit and a barong, if he’d been so inclined, somewhere in storage in London.
In the end, the best he can say is that it’d be nice just to have, build up a wider collection of clothes for the two of them back at the cottage, make it feel more like home. Or perhaps – for an occasion, Jon signs, but his hands falter on the final sign, and he doesn’t say much else through the fitting.
For all of the nonchalance of it, they don’t look at each other when they leave the shop.
But he catches Jon once, opening the small oak wardrobe just for a peek one quiet evening, the two dust-jackets hanging close together like gentle ghosts on the back of the door. It sets butterflies in Martin’s stomach, watching Jon lay a hand against the pale fabric. After a moment, he steps silently back outside, avoiding the noisy floorboard. He carefully doesn’t think about it any more than that.
Then some silly discussion about their favourite flowers. They’ve settled together into a fairly comfortable rhythm of useless bickering at this point: in fact, watching Jon’s eyes light up as he realises he has an opposing viewpoint he’s going to barrage Martin with is one of Martin’s top ten favourite Jon-centric experiences. This particular argument as stupid and baseless for any others; Jon, for some unintelligible reason, loves the deep purple thistles of the rolling hills. Unlike any plants he’s seen before, he tells Martin. Martin, for his part, finds himself more traditional. As he tells Jon in return: he likes roses. Jon thinks they lack character. Martin argues that thistles have too much character. And on it goes.
“We could have both,” Martin finally says exasperatedly, leaning lightly on the stone wall and looking at the thistle patch Jon’s just been furiously gesturing to. “I mean, I don’t know much about flowers, but. White roses, I think they look, like. Traditional, you know. And they’d look nice with the purple.”
Jon falls quiet, all animation gone from his limbs. It’s not until that moment that Martin realises what he’s said – what it sounds like he’s thinking of, if someone else might also be thinking of events where people have flowers.
In the moment, he’s not entirely sure why he said it like that at all.
We – we could, I suppose – I – Jon signs, haltingly, and then he waves all that away. Yes, actually. That sounds – nice.
The final nail in the proverbial coffin – so to speak – is when Martin catches Jon in his tiny poetry library. It’s not much of a collection: just small, carved bookshelf over the bed filled with the few books he’s been buying occasionally from the small bookshop the town over. This far into the Highlands, Robert Burns features heavily.
But the one that has Jon so absorbed is currently Martin’s slim William Carlos Williams anthology. He’s engrossed in it enough that Martin gets close enough behind him that he could reach out and touch, and Jon still hasn’t noticed.
“Aha,” Martin says in deep triumph, right behind him, and Jon jumps and slams the book closed. “A-ha.”
“This doesn’t mean what you think it means,” Jon says immediately, sliding the volume back onto Martin’s shelf and turning to face him.
“I knew The Red Wheelbarrow would get you in the end,” Martin says wistfully, reaching up to lay a palm flat atop Jon’s head, in the way Jon pretends to hate.
Jon scowls, and he doesn’t duck away.
“I didn’t actually like it,” he says, almost petulantly. “It didn’t even rhyme.”
Martin is, on every account, delighted by this.
“Oh, it didn’t rhyme,” he says wickedly. “I mean, we’re gonna set aside your William Carlos Williams slander for you to apologise for later, but. I didn’t realise you had such exacting standards.”
“If it’s going to be poetry,” Jon says stubbornly, “it might at least stick to being poetry, and not be just prose chopped up into sentences. If I wanted to think about a rainy wheelbarrow, I’d just go outside and look at one.”
“You’re a heathen, but go on then,” Martin tells him, grinning. “What do you think good poetry is? “Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub?””
A weird, bullheaded look crosses Jon’s face. In a clear voice, he recites, “ It’s all I have to bring today— this, and my heart beside— this, and my heart, and all the fields— and all the meadows wide— be sure you count—should I forget– some one the sum could tell— this, and my heart, and all the bees, which in the clover dwell. ”
There is an extended, ringing silence, where Jon seems to shrink back into himself with every passing second.
“You – Dickinson? You memorised that?” Martin says when he catches his breath, too surprised and touched to tease. Or maybe it’s something about the way Jon looks as soon right now – not just embarrassed, but sensitive. Like he’s worried what Martin might say about it. And before he can stop himself – “Why?”
“I just,” Jon says immediately, in the lyingest tones of anyone who has ever lied, “I just like it. I suppose. I wanted it – I wanted to know it off by heart, just f-for me. Since I liked it.” And then, bolstered by the sudden strength of someone who has hit on a feasible excuse in their panicked floundering, “Or, you know, so I could q-quote it to you. Randomly. Like I just did. Except I was going to save it for you, for a more romantic moment. But I didn’t. So. Yes.”
At this point, he seems to decide it might be prudent to stop talking.
Martin opens his mouth to point out how Jon’s astonishing inability to lie makes such a perfectly reasonable excuse sound like the falsehood of the century. And how bizarre it is that Jon would lie about something like this – what else, he is planning to say, could he possibly be memorising poetry for that’s more personal or sensitive than that?
When the thought finally hits him, he closes his mouth again before he can say a word.
Because that’s when Martin realises what this might be. Or at least, what he wants it to be: hopes it to be. God knows he’s done enough of that by himself: idly earmarking passages as he reads, wondering how the words would sound coming out of his own mouth. What Jon, standing across from him by the altar, might think of it too.
And Jon, nervously fiddling at his fingers, not meeting his eye, shoulders still hunched against Martin’s judgement: what Jon might want it to be, too.
He still looks too embarrassed. Martin doesn’t want that. Silently, he puts his hand over Jon’s, and waits until it stills.
Then he says, in a quiet voice, “Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens to the fall of the ancient leafless rain, to feathers, to whatever the night imprisoned. ”
Jon, staring at him, takes a little, shuddery breath. It is very loud, in the warm quietness of the house around them.
“So,” Martin continues, “I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache. Uh – hm. Sorry. Maybe I should have made it rhyme for you.”
“Oh, shut up,” Jon says in a hoarse voice, and thoroughly kisses him.
As the weeks roll on and they dance around more details, it becomes increasingly difficult to pass off as a foolish presumption: just another one of stupid Martin’s silly romantic fantasies. There is no convincing reason that Martin can think of for Jon to know offhand the Scottish Presbyterian stance on marriage between men – or at least, to be so defensive and awkward about knowing it – nor can Martin justify why he’s developed an opinion on processional songs all of a sudden.
He isn’t sure why they still haven’t talked about it out loud, if it is what he’s becoming increasingly convinced it is. Jon’s awkwardness, perhaps. Martin knows intimately now that it’s difficult for Jon to prepare and sit down and say something he really wants to say. Instead, it’s customary for him to ride the ebbs and tides of his own emotions to wait for the right moment, which clearly hasn’t come yet. Or maybe it’s respect for Martin himself, he thinks: Jon trying not to push him, another thing on the list of all of the things Martin’s still learning to say out loud.
He doesn’t think this reticence between them is intentional, at least. Jon’s not the type to keep something from him just because. But he is deeply, achingly aware that they are both the kind of sweetly stupid to keep their silences on whatever it is that they don’t know exactly how to say, even if it’s important. Especially now, after they’ve been flirting with this quietly for so long. Maybe in the beginning after the suits, or their laden discussion about the flowers – but it’s been a few months now. Even the thought of just sitting down, brazenly saying so – is it marriage, then, makes his insides twist.
But the thing is that it’s not something he knows how to ignore once he’s realised. He can’t reclose this box: especially not when every time he opens the wardrobe, there they are – the two suits, nestled together in the dark, waiting like a promise.
And if he’s being honest with himself, there’s more than a little bit of him that finds it all sort of thrilling. Like a second chance at the kind of pre-relationship flirtations they’d missed while trying to save the world, all hints and glances and things unspoken. Because after all this time there’s still nothing outright to show that it is marriage at the heart of all this: it could be a dozen coincidences for a dozen different things. But, Martin thinks, but for the ache of it. Jon’s glances, Jon’s inferences, Jon’s half-spoken sentences, trailing off whenever it seems he might be getting too close to something he doesn’t want to talk about yet. There is a thrilling, gravitational shape in the middle of everything they’re not speaking about at the moment and there is nothing that fits it so well as a wedding, and it makes Martin’s heart leap every time they come close to touching it.
What eats at him through it, though, is this: Jon deserves a proposal.
This is another thing that strikes him hard as soon as he thinks it. Because it is, he realises, profoundly and deeply true to him. He wants that moment for Jon: and not just because they’ve missed so many other milestones that other people don’t even notice, of choosing when to move in or confess to their friends or have that first fumbling date. But quite simply because he thinks that Jon would like being proposed to, and he can’t stop thinking about that.
Martin, however, is self-aware enough to know at least this: spontaneity in romance has never been his strong suit, especially out of the two of them. He’s still not quite sure how much of that is naturally him, or how much is the difficulty of bearing his own thoughts long enough to do something truly emotional with them. But he is, he thinks, at least willing to try to put aside his discomfort and neuroses and do this. For Jon, he thinks, and the thought makes him smile in the way it usually does.
Over the course of a few weeks, he imagines and discards what feels like a million different scenarios: a weekend in Edinburgh. A trip back to London. A romantic night at some upscale restaurant, a message from a plane in the sky, some elaborate treasure hunt that will lead Jon to the final, extravagant clue. It has to be perfect, he tells himself. It can’t be anything less.
Because he is who he is, he begins to stress over it to the point of losing sleep.
It doesn’t take long before Jon can tell something is wrong. Martin watches the knowledge of it grow on him over the course of a few days: the way he gets quieter and more careful around Martin, the same way he did a year ago when they still weren’t talking about Martin’s eating or Jon’s frozen panic attacks.
He doesn’t tell Jon about it, not directly. Even if the point of a proposal weren’t a surprise, he’s well aware that Jon would hate the thought of him stressing so much over something for him, and the last thing he wants is for Jon to think of himself as the cause. But he tries as best he can to keep the same day-to-day closeness and openness that they’ve found themselves building over their time here, despite the way that stress and anxiety has always kept pushing him to fold in on himself, to fog himself up and disappear from view.
And that seems to makes it easy for Jon to ask, in Jon’s usual roundabout way, whether there’s anything much the matter or anything Martin wants to talk about.
Martin’s simple refutation that it’s nothing really to worry about is earnest enough that Jon doesn’t push. And that, in the end, helps more than he expects – that there really is space for it to be fine, that he can talk about it if he wants or leave it if he wants, it really is up to him – makes it easier to tell Jon again that it’s nothing to worry about, and honestly mean it this time.
Almost without thinking, he slips a hand into Jon’s to underline his words. And the way Jon looks so immediately, stupidly happy at that, just that simple touch: somehow it makes everything quite easy, after that.
Some candles. Some thistles from the grassy hill to the north in a little clay vase, and he even asks Eilidh who owns the land for permission to take them even though he’s sure she wouldn’t notice, because he thinks Jon would like that touch. Jon’s favourite wine, Jon’s favourite music turned down low, the ingredients for Jon’s favourite meal.
And the final thing. A ring. It’s easy enough: he’d taken an afternoon off work and caught the bus to Inverness, and a helpful jeweller had picked it out with him. It’s a simple silver band, nothing more elaborate, but it burns a hole in his pocket for days as if aflame until the next clear evening rolls in.
Because nothing is ever simple, Jon’s home early from the school, so it’s an afternoon of sneaking around and keeping Jon out of the kitchen, away from the porch and clueless to all of Martin’s efforts. Running him a long bath helps some, as does forcibly turning him out of the kitchen every time he wanders in for a snack. It is, Martin thinks, handy that Jon’s used to his food idiosyncrasies and doesn’t question this: as long as Martin’s told him they’ll eat together, he’s perfectly happy to collapse damply in front of the fire with a book, and wait for Martin to tell him it’s ready.
By the time that the sun is setting over the western hills, everything is just about ready to go. Martin fondly nags Jon into a nice shirt just because – as much as he loves Jon’s soft, worn “Meow’s it going” t-shirt and fluffy slippers, he doesn’t think Jon would appreciate getting engaged in them. If he says yes, Martin thinks, and has to rest his head against a nearby wall for a second while Jon’s not looking so he doesn’t lose his head from fretting.
When he leads Jon outside, it looks almost exactly the way he wanted it to – just a few errant clouds and the high bright moon over the rough wooden table. The food, the wine, the candles, the vases. It’s warm enough that they’ll be fine for the moment, although Martin’s carried out a few carefully-folded blankets just in case. And Jon, of course, who is looking out across what Martin’s prepared with an inscrutable look on his face.
For a moment, when Jon looks back at him, Martin’s worried Jon’s cottoned on – Jon’s a terrifyingly smart man, and he’s regarding him with such intensity. But he just leans forward towards Martin, lays his hands against Martin’s lapels and kisses him on the mouth. Just once, just gently.
“This is nice,” is all he says, almost self-consciously, and then he steps away again. At the bashful look on his face, Martin is reminded all over again, briefly but violently, of the sheer absence of nice things that Jon has been subjected to over the past couple of years, Martin’s privilege and his duty in trying to rectify that, and how fucking much he loves the man standing only a few feet away from him, absent-mindedly touching the thistles’ spiny leaves. To bits, to pieces, to distraction, to the moon and back.
He clears his throat.
“Let’s eat,” he says, and is grateful his voice stays steady.
By the time they’re cleaning their dessert plates, Martin thinks Jon can tell something’s up, though. Probably from the way Martin’s nerves have been clearly and steadily growing visible through the meal, he supposes. The quietness between them that’s been feeding into itself, more laden than the usual companionable silences they hold together.
Martin stands in a lurch to collect the dishes, and then he kind of just keeps standing. This is it, he tells himself. The irony of this situation doesn’t escape him; that he’s been thrown into worlds of fog and hunted by worms and attacked by flesh monsters, and he can still drum up fear enough to be afraid of something so simple as a question and a ring.
Jon is still looking at him, the little crease between his eyebrows just visible in the dim light.
“What?” he signs, a nervous finger ticking back and forth. “Are you okay?”
Fuck it, Martin thinks, and drops to one knee.
Martin’s seen Jon’s face clothed in almost every emotion under the sun in the past few years – creased and irritated, wide and scared, blank and angry. Smooth in peace. Happy. The way that months upon years of steady fear have carved themselves into the lines of his forehead and the sharpness of his cheekbones. He’s even, over the past year or so, seen some of that start to finally settle into something rounder and softer with rest and good food, the crows feet of repeated laughter beginning to develop around his eyes.
But when Martin, still kneeling, reaches into his pocket for the box, Jon lets his face start to crumple in a way Martin’s never seen before.
Jon has never been much of a crier; enough that Martin can count the number of instances on one hand, maybe, no more. And Martin has never, ever seen him do it like this: shoulders bowing inwards as if his strings have been cut, the transformation of his whole face.
He fumbles in his pocket for his phone and Martin can see him trying for the text app, before he seems to think better of it and puts it back. His hands are shaking. In the moonlight, his dark eyes are huge and glistening as Martin opens the box. He waits, as always, patient for what Martin has to say. Listening.
This is something else Martin has thought about: the perfect words for everything he wants to say. And now that he’s here, it strikes him – the impossibility of it, trying to sum up a span of years in just a few short sentences. He can’t do it.
“I love you,” he signs instead, careful of the open box as it thumps gently against his shoulder.
Jon chokes on his nervous laugh.
If Martin doesn’t have the spoken words, his limited sign vocabulary isn’t going to cut it either. So instead he proffers the box and lets Jon take the ring, faltering, working it between his hands before letting Martin slide it onto his finger.
They stand together, then. Martin wraps him up in a hug, his arms fitting between Jon’s shoulderblades in the same away that they always do, like he’s gathering Jon up. Jon puts his arms around Martin’s neck in return, and Martin imagines he can feel the cool silver of the ring against his skin.
It’s easier like this, he thinks, closing his eyes. Surrounded by nothing but Jon, he can be brave here.
“Marry me?” he says into Jon’s ear, and hears as much as feels Jon exhale his gentle “Yes.”
Later, Martin feels Jon rolls out of bed at what must be close to three o’clock in the morning.
This isn’t unusual: while it’s better than when they first arrived here, Jon’s always been a restless sleeper, and sometimes he needs a turn or two down the hall to shake the cramps out of his leg. What’s different this time is that ten minutes passes, and then fifteen, and then twenty, and he doesn’t come back. Ten more minutes, and Martin’s rolling out of bed after him. Just in case, he thinks. Three years of constant, escalating threat have done a number on his reasonable reactions to situations like this.
Eventually Martin finds him downstairs in the kitchen, silently sat on the cool stone flooring. It's a relief to find him like this, but looking at Jon's face, it also isn't.
“Hello, hello,” Martin says gently, just a thin thread of irony in his voice. He settles to his knees beside Jon. “You know, we have got to stop meeting like this.”
Jon makes a non-committal noise. In the dim light of the kitchen appliances, Martin can see his eyes are glazed. But he’s shifting slightly, so it isn’t one of his frozen periods. Unless it’s passed already, which is something Martin doesn’t want to think about: Jon by himself, sat alone and unmoving in the dark for god knows how long. This is what Martin’s here for, to take Jon’s hands and give him company through it.
So he does. Jon looks down at their clasped hands, and then back out across the darkened kitchen.
Martin sits with him quietly for only a few minutes before he can’t take the silence anymore.
“You want to tell me what’s going on in that head of yours?” he says. He keeps it as gentle as he can.
After a moment, Jon extricates his hands so he can fish out his phone from his pyjama pocket.
What if something goes wrong, he types slowly. What if something happens.
“Happens like…” Martin carefully prompts.
Worms, Jon types, without hesitation. Tall men with sharp fingers. Women on fire. Car crashes, accidents. What if you get sick. What if we have a kid–
Martin’s reaching out a hand for Jon’s arm before he can even think about it. It’s something they’ve talked about before, once or twice – enough to confirm that they’re on the same page at least, but nothing much further than that – but the brief and momentary thought of it still makes him dizzy, in much the same way champagne does. He tries not to consider it too much more than that for too long, for his own good. Just the very thought that Jon would make a good dad is something of a bomb to his higher thought processes.
Jon squeezes his hand, leans over to kiss him briefly, and then goes back to typing.
–and they get sick. He grimaces. What if you change your mind.
“About…?” asks Martin, a little confused.
Me, Jon says.
The abject ridiculousness of this idea hits Martin about as hard as he thinks an articulated lorry might. Hard on its heels is the solid conviction that he needs to respect the validity of Jon’s feelings, because Jon always does the same for him, but the sheer absurdity of this concept makes that quite difficult. He settles for giving Jon’s arm a nice, reassuring pat.
Something of this thought journey must show on his face, because Jon hunches his shoulders.
Yes, I know, he says, and pulls another face. But you don’t have the monopoly on insecurity, you know.
“How long have you been thinking about this?” Martin asks him quietly – this is, he thinks, quite a laundry list of worries, and he hates the thought of Jon sitting with this by himself for any longer than he needs to.
Jon shrugs.
I don’t know. I suppose it’s been getting worse in stages – the two of us becoming closer, getting a job, things like that, it’s all been harder than I thought it would be. It’s foolish, perhaps. It’s not like these aren’t all things that I want. But before, all I had to lose was my life. Even if the world ended, I didn’t think I’d be around to see it. But now – I have things I actually have to be worried about losing.
“Things that matter more than the world,” Martin says dubiously.
If you’re fishing for compliments, I’ll give them to you, Jon says, and the look on his face is a weird mixture of fond, wry and earnest. But I think you know exactly what I mean.
“Ah,” Martin says, embarrassed about walking into that one. “Mm.”
It’s you, Jon clarifies, completely unnecessarily. Which he clearly knows, because while he's typing, he’s wearing that grin that tells Martin he’s enjoying being a little shit. By the way. And also being happy, but that’s also because of you.
“Shut up,” Martin tells him, the tips of his ears burning. “I love you too. But yeah, go on.”
Is it stupid that out of everything real that I’ve had to be afraid of all of these years, things like this might scare me just as much? I’ve been kidnapped three times, Martin. I shouldn’t be afraid of
He doesn’t type anything else.
“Getting married?” Martin says quietly.
Jon nods.
And other things. Going back to London. Talking to Georgie and Melanie again. Leaving this cottage, in any meaningful way. In a weird kind of way, everything I’ve done to make our life here feels like it’s been out of some kind of need. I got a job because we needed money. I’ve been filling my days with hobbies because it’s time that I need to fill. But other things – trying to live again, actively taking up space in the world. He shrugs his shoulders in a weird, loose gesture. Making choices.
“If you put effort in, if you choose it,” Martin says, slowly, “it means that it matters to you. And you think it’ll make it hurt more to lose it.”
Jon takes a long, deep breath. He doesn’t look at Martin. Martin exhales, slowly.
“Do you remember what you told me before you kissed me that first time? And on the beach?” he asks.
Jon still doesn’t say anything, just looks at him.
“You said you didn’t just want to survive, you wanted to live. Jon – I want that for you too. Especially after everything — I think you deserve it. Don’t you?”
Jon shrinks in on himself a little, pulling his head in.
It’s not that I’m not happy, he clarifies. I’m happier than I’ve ever been before, perhaps. But I’m also scared. I don’t want to break something so good on the chance it could be better. Martin, I’ve lost enough.
He erases that.
We’ve lost enough.
Martin sits quietly for a moment, turning things over.
“Do you remember a few months ago,” he says eventually, “when you made that carbonara? And I carried it around the house with me for a bit, and then I ate it on the porch, and you very kindly ignored the fact that I was crying slightly while I washed the dishes afterwards.”
Jon looks bemused, but he’s nodding.
“Did I ever end up telling you that was the first time I’d been able to eat cream or cheese in twelve years?” Martin says, and Jon stares directly at him.
No, he types crisply, you did not.
“It’s, uh — I think it’s called a fear food? Like, othose foods I’ve just been too afraid of the nutritional contents to eat. I mean, there was the lactose thing too, but if I’m being honest, it doesn’t hit me that hard, and I’ve got the pills for it anyway. That’s always been kind of — a convenient excuse.
“And the thing is, I could have lived the rest of my life not eating cheese, or whatever, and been totally happy without it,” Martin says, and hopes as he’s speaking that this is going to make any sense to Jon whatsoever. “But — it was really good. Cheese is fucking good. I’m glad I did it. And now, even if I never eat it again, I’m not afraid of it anymore. Or if I am, I know it’s worth my worry. I mean, to know that I can have it now, when I want it, and it’s not that scary. Does that — does any of that make sense?”
You think perhaps getting married and such, Jon types slowly, is my cheese.
“I… guess… so?” Martin says, with a deepening sense that he’s going about this all wrong. But Jon sitting next to him isn’t looking scornful or skeptical — he just seems quietly deep in thought.
It would be so much easier, Martin thinks, if he felt like he could offer some easy toothless reassurances here — that they’ll always be fine and in love and safe, and they’ll be happy for the rest of their lives. But he knows more than anything else that life is unexpected. He doesn’t know where they’ll be or who he’s going to be or what’s going to happen ten years time any more than he could have anticipated being where he is now a decade ago: he only knows who he is and what he wants and his convictions at this moment, and he has to hope that that will be enough.
Quite apart from that, Jon’s never been the type to be comforted by false promises, even if he was the kind of person who liked to give them. But Martin’s brand of comfort has done well enough for Jon so far, or so it seems. That fact has kept Martin getting up in the mornings for quite some time now.
“I mean, I can’t predict the future. The all-seeing thing is kind of your gig,” Martin says after a minute of quiet, and he gets a sharp elbow to the side for that. “But I’ll tell you what I do know – the point of all this for me, at least for me. Right now, I don’t want to be without you. Yesterday, I didn’t want to be without you. Last month I didn’t want to be without you, or the year before that, or the year before that one – okay, what.”
Jon is by that point wearing a very familiar kind of face, the guilty one where he knows he is about to be pedantic but it pains him not to be. He ducks his shoulders apologetically.
“Yeah, okay,” Martin says exasperatedly. “You’re right, there was that period of six months where I was more concerned with the dangerous and devilish bargains I made to keep you safe from unspeakable evil than I was with spending time with you. Forgive me. Could we put that particular sequence of events aside for a sec.”
Jon gives a small, wavering smile and magnanimously waves a hand.
“And I can’t protect you from worms or women on fire,” Martin says. “Sorry. I mean, I’d try, but. You know. I’m no Gertrude Robinson. But I can definitely promise this – Jon, if I lost you, whether it was to a speeding car or some apostle of a fire or death cult or what-the-fuck-ever, it wouldn’t protect me one fucking bit to know we weren’t married.”
At that, Jon goes extremely still.
“In my opinion,” Martin says, an opinion he finds he is mostly discovering he holds as the words come out of his mouth, “marriage — it’s whatever we want it to be, right? If it was just about the piece of paper, like — my parents were married. For a bit. And it wasn’t – great. Look at Katy Perry and Russell Brand. Charles and bloody Diana, even.”
My parents were married also. I’m told they were happy together, Jon types. Martin jostles him a little closer, slips an arm around him.
“That’s kind of my point, I guess,” he says. “It’s not a guarantee or a curse, it doesn’t mean anything by itself. I just — I think what matters isn’t the marriage, it’s the people in it and what they want it to be. What we want it to be. I mean, if you do want to get married. You don’t— you don’t have to, if it’s too much. If you don’t want to get married, you can just say. You know that?”
That is NOT what this is, Jon says, slapping Martin’s knee to get him to look at the screen. Then he types again, NOT, and sets the screen flashing.
“Noted,” Martin says, and allows himself a brief moment of credit for keeping to himself the weak-kneed happiness that’s currently flooding through him. “What it means for me is that I wake up in the morning and I want to see you, and I go to bed at night and I want it to be beside you. It’s kind of as simple as that, in the end. Things are very good: I want to commit to trying to keep them good, in a tangible and legally recognised way. I want to tell the government that they’re good. I want our friends to come and marvel at how good they are, in a nice romantic setting. I want a day where we can stand around and be smug about how good they are. If you want that.”
Jon snorts. Martin wrestles down a brief but profound feeling of internal victory.
“If you want that,” Martin repeats softly, with a solemn honesty. “I don’t want you to think you can’t change your mind either. And I don’t expect you to always protect me from ethereal monsters, or even the ins and outs of normal, boring, terrifying life, I just. I guess I thought we both might want to make the best of the time we have.”
Jon chews on his lip for a second, and then types. He waits a split second before tilting the screen, the way he always does when he knows Martin’s going to enjoy what he’s about to read.
I’m smug about how good we are every day, Jon has said, but I wouldn’t say no to a special day for it, either.
Martin laughs out loud.
“Insufferable,” he tells Jon, with every inch of fondness he possesses.
Jon grins at him, and then he looks a little serious again.
I need you to know, he says. The only reason I’m sitting here having this —
“Freak out?” Martin supplies kindly, when Jon hesitates.
Small moment of consternation, Jon stresses haughtily. Regardless, it’s only because it matters so much to me. If I didn’t want to marry you, and all that that entails , I wouldn’t be so,” he pauses, “ consternated. You know that.”
“Yeah, love,” Martin says, in a voice uncontrollably and disgustingly suffused with affection. Jon returns him an entirely sappy smile. The whole thing is unbearable in exactly the way that Martin treasures.
To bookend the moment, he eventually coughs and says, “Ready to come back to bed yet?”
Jon shakes his head again, and Martin watches him sign thank you, and then sorry. As soon as he’s done, Martin offers his own hand to Jon’s, and watches his fist unclench by degrees to take it.
“You don’t have to apologise,” he says, an old sentiment by now. “Whatever you need.”
This is the point of it for me, Jon says after a moment, setting his phone on the floor to type with one awkward hand. I don’t want to sit on the floor at midnight with anyone but you. And I always want you to have someone to sit with, if you need it. If we’re talking about what marriage means, that’s where I’m at.
Martin considers, and discards, the idea of saying something back. Jon, next to him, is slumped into him still and content, not expecting anything back although he’s finished his own sentiment. So Martin doesn’t have to say anything: doesn’t have to supplicate or fawn or gush, or convince Jon of staying or resign himself to Jon leaving, as much as he might have once wanted to. It’s a weight he is only just now realising he no longer carries — that constant, ceaseless urge to keep Jon with him at any moment, or to push him away so it won’t hurt as much when he goes.
And he thinks, maybe — hopes — that Jon is beginning to feel the same way that he does: that they’re ready to grow out of this cottage again, go further than the next town over. That they’re steady enough in that relationship — steady enough in themselves – to look forwards together, with each other, instead of just inwards at what they already have here.
Martin never expected or wanted to be healed by romance, he thinks — hates the whole idea, that stupid concept that he’s just been waiting for someone else to swoop in and save him. Even if it did work like that, there’s so much about the way he is and the whole grueling, messy process of growing and changing that isn’t sentimental or idealistic at all, at least not in the ways that he’d have expected it to be from a lifetime of shitty romance novels and television serials.
Instead, what he finds himself with — almost in surprise — is the steady, unshakeable foundation that Jon has given him, solid underneath his feet wherever he finds he wants to walk. Permission and space to be himself: to find out who that is. Inch by fucking inch to get heal himself , to want to get better, to want to live.
He wants Jon to feel that too. This is, he thinks, what he wants this marriage to be for each other: a constant building and rebuilding of the two of them, towards the best and most comfortable versions of themselves that they can be, at their own hands and each others’. He and Jon can sit on the floor together, and he and Jon can pull each other to standing together and keep going, whenever they’re ready.
Gently, he lets their hands fall to the floor still joined; feels the solid smooth metal of Jon’s ring under his fingers, and feels the squeeze of Jon’s fingers pressing briefly between his, for no reason at all. Just because he’s there, and Martin’s there, and that’s what Jon does when they hold hands sometimes.
“Thank you,” he says to Jon, into the quiet darkness of the room around them – for the squeeze, he thinks, for Jon’s weight against his side, for all of it – and Jon gives him a soft, low hum in return.
I love you too, Jon signs one-handedly, and Martin sits in with him in their shared silence, in the easy darkness, and together they wait to be ready to get up again.