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"Wake up, love", Richard nudged, "you'll miss it!"
Thomas stirred with a sleepy groan. "Thanks, I think." He stretched and rose stiffly from the sofa, standing until he felt fully awake. "I'll make some tea." If he was honest, the thought of bed seemed more appealing, momentous as the occasion was. However, even well past midnight at age seventy-four, Richard's eyes gleamed with the childlike wonder and anticipation that had occupied them ever since the planned moon landing had appeared in the news, and Thomas did not want to miss a single moment of that. He ambled into the kitchen, the stately drone of the BBC announcer interspersed with the staccato utterances of the three astronauts audible through static and vast distance as he filled the kettle. He retrieved jars of marmalade and raspberry jam from the cupboard and placed two slices of bread in the toaster, shaking out the crumbs and wiping them off the counter beforehand. It looked like they would be up for a while yet. Landing on the moon was no small endeavor, years in the making to be sure, and some previously unimaginable things were worth waiting for. Another hour or two were no matter.
Thomas lifted the softly whistling kettle off the stove and poured. Placing the tea, toast, and other items onto a tray and turning to exit the kitchen, Thomas stopped in the doorway to observe the scene before him. The orange tabby dozed on the back of the sofa, looking simultaneously gormless and grand on his favored evening perch. The dog glanced up at the tray with mild interest and a lazy wag of her tail, not sparing the energy to lift her head. The old quilt that Thomas had laid over the back of the sofa as a guard against pet hair had slipped down again, but Richard hadn't noticed. He was leaning forward, blue pajama top rumpled, eyes wide and glued to the telly, his once golden-brown hair a bit more sparse and currently forming a small corona at the back of his head from lounging against the cushions earlier.
Was it the lateness of the hour that caused the simple, ordinary sight to blur?
Just at that moment, Richard turned. "All right, love? Let me take that." He padded over to Thomas, relieving him of the tray and planting a soft kiss on his cheek.
Thomas blinked. "Fine. I was just...", he paused. Thomas had always been good at crosswords - a youth spent arming himself with knowledge, analyzing the words of others, and looking for patterns and hidden meanings had ensured that - but a poet he wasn't. Lyrical turns of phrase were more Richard's forte, so he settled for paraphrasing a hopeful analogy spoken forty-two years in the past. "Forty years ago, who'd have thought man could go to the moon?"
Richard grinned and, setting the tray down, wrapped his arms around Thomas' torso and rested his head on his shoulder as Thomas poured their tea, kissing his hair. Who'd have thought, indeed.
They sat in sleepy but contented silence for the remainder of the broadcast, watching the extraordinary sight of a human being making a giant leap on behalf of his species. But here on Earth, the warm burble of tea filling two cups; the gentle crunch of toast; and the quiet rustling of their pajama-clad bodies, beset with the aches of seven decades and more but containing souls full of gratitude and wonder, as they snuggled into the sofa cushions and each other, made poetry enough.