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They’re six years old when Ceylin first really notices Ilgaz.
They were several weeks into Year 1, though they hadn’t had much opportunity or reason to extensively interact until this particular lesson on sums. Their teacher had asked if anyone in the class was familiar with sums, and if they were, would they please be able to add two to five?
Ceylin, who had been doing sums and takeaways with her father for years, counting seabirds, ships, planks of wood on docks, and other everyday things, knew immediately that the answer was ‘seven’. But, before she can raise her hand, the serious looking, long-legged boy who sat a few seats to her right beats her to the punch.
“Yes, Ilgaz?” their teacher calls out encouragingly.
“Six,” Ilgaz answers, calmly and confidently.
“Six, close but not quite,” their teacher says, her tone still pleasant and upbeat.
From the corner of her eye, Ceylin sees Ilgaz slump down in his desk completely, his entire face turning a deep shade of red. His reaction elicits a mild feeling of surprise from her—she didn’t think it was that big of a deal to have made a small and overall inconsequential, minor mistake.
“Does anyone else know what two added to five would make?” their teacher asks.
Since Ceylin does indeed know, she raises her hand.
“Seven,” she says when the teacher calls on her.
“Well done, exactly seven, Ceylin!” the teacher praises with excitement.
Out of the corner of her eye, Ceylin catches Ilgaz giving her a nasty glare, so she turns to scowl back at him with equal menace. His behavior annoys her; it wasn’t anything personal, she just happened to know the answer when he didn’t. Ceylin responded to the teacher because she knew the correct answer, not because Ilgaz gave an incorrect response.
After lunch that day, they have an art lesson, where they’re instructed to draw and color something that makes them happy. Ceylin has a hard time thinking of a subject for her artwork, but eventually she settles on drawing her dining room table full of the food her mother makes whenever her father returns from sea. It does make her happy when he visits home for a few days or weeks in between his work trips.
There aren’t enough crayons in the classroom for every student to have one of every color, but the teacher says that this is a good lesson in sharing, anyhow. After Ceylin shades in the brown of the table and chairs, the gray of the silverware, and the pink of her mother’s shirt, she gets up from her desk to find people to trade colors with.
Immediately, her eye catches Ilgaz’s desk, which houses the first green crayon she’s seen all afternoon. She really needs green for several of the food dishes she drew, especially the shading of the dolma and some of the specks in the baklava.
She walks up to his desk, but Ilgaz’s eyes remain steadfastly glued to his paper as he ignores her, determinedly continuing to color in the branches of a tree he drew. Ceylin takes a moment to study his picture from upside down. It seemed like he was drawing a forest, a variety of tall trees and smaller green plants, a few flowers here and there.
“Nice drawing,” she tells him seriously, “I like how you blend the colors.”
She wasn’t aimlessly flattering, she was simply speaking her thoughts immediately as they came to mind, as she always does. Ilgaz really did seem pretty decent at drawing.
He ignores her, so she continues on with what she came to his desk for.
“Can I use the green crayon if you’re done with it?” she asks.
“No,” he says simply, still not breaking his focus or speed of coloring.
“No, you’re not done with it? Because it seems to me like all of the leaves of your plants and trees are colored in, you’re just working on the trunks and branches now,” she points out deductively.
“No,” Ilgaz says, finally pausing his coloring to look up, staring her straight in the eyes with a cold glare, “green is mine. ”
Ceylin’s short fuse blows in that moment, and she simply snatches the green crayon off of Ilgaz’s desk, glaring back at him, and spins on her heel to walk away. She hears the scraping of Ilgaz’s chair on the ground as he gets up, so, impulsively, she turns back around to stomp on his toes with the heel of her foot.
With a muffled squeak of pain and surprise, Ilgaz sits back down, and Ceylin struts back to her desk with a huge grin.
The rest of the year goes similarly, with Ilgaz and Ceylin constantly at each other’s throats at any opportunity given. No one is more relieved when June comes around and the school year ends than Aylin and Gül are, after being unimaginably fed up with hearing nonstop complaints and stories from Ceylin about her ‘archenemy’ Ilgaz after school every day.
Throughout Year 2, things are similarly viciously hostile between the two of them, but their relationship take a turn for the better on the first day of Year 3.
Çağdaş, a new boy, transfers into their school. During recess on his first day, while Ceylin is playing with one of her friends, Çağdaş comes up from behind her, and yanks on her hair, hard.
“Dirty,” he laughs, “your ugly hair is dirty colored.”
Before Ceylin can react, Ilgaz’s fist swings out of nowhere, sailing in the air briefly until it meets its mark on Çağdaş’s face with a loud sound.
Çağdaş reels back, clutching his nose with a pained expression.
“Eww! Ilgaz wants to marry dirty Ceylin!” he cries out in a disgusted, sing-songy voice.
This time, Ceylin acts before Ilgaz, leaping forward to kick Çağdaş’s shin.
Çağdaş stumbles then, and finally decides that he’s had enough, hobbling away from the pair of them. Ceylin then looks in the other direction, where the friend she had been playing with had run away to another group of girls. With a little sigh, she turns back to Ilgaz.
“Don’t worry about what Çağdaş said,” she rushes to reassure Ilgaz, the other boy’s words stuck to her mind for some reason, “I know you wouldn’t ever want to marry me. And… thanks, I guess.”
Ilgaz shrugs aggressively, his eyes still moving wildly—maybe he hasn’t quite calmed down.
“It was—what he said was wrong. Your hair is not ugly. So, because it was wrong, it wasn’t fair for him to say. And—and because it wasn’t fair, I needed to—to show him that. People shouldn’t be allowed to do things that aren’t fair,” Ilgaz stutters.
“Okay,” Ceylin says simply, nodding her head in agreement.
Later, she likes to remember that day as the day their relationship had done a complete 180, from passionately bitter rivals to the very best of friends.
. . .
They’re sixteen years old when misfortune strikes them both at the same time.
Cüneyt cheats on Ceylin for the umpteenth time and she cuts him off for good, finally having had enough. On the same day, Ilgaz happens to break up with Neva, so Ceylin and her best friend get to be miserable together.
“So, what was wrong with Neva?” Ceylin asks, taking a bite from her lunch and picking at the rough edge of the schoolyard bench she and Ilgaz are sitting on.
Ilgaz lifts up a shoulder, swallowing some of his own lunch before speaking.
“She didn’t really understand me, and I don’t think she was all that interested in trying to,” he explains.
“What do you mean?” Ceylin presses, furrowing her brow, “You two are so similar!”
Ilgaz shakes his head at her, giving a disagreeing frown, and Ceylin’s curiosity piques as he takes his time answering.
“I feel like relationships, it shouldn’t be all about having similar interests or mannerisms,” he says, “It’s more about similar values. I think Neva and I just ultimately care about different big picture things in life, and she wasn’t willing to appreciate what I value. It’s like she doesn’t really hear me.”
Ceylin hums thoughtfully, taking a few sips from Ilgaz’s water bottle as she mulls over his words.
“Yeah, I guess what you said makes sense, about values. What do you mean that she ‘didn’t hear’ you, though? Was she ignoring you in conversations?” she asks.
“No, not ignoring me. I guess she was listening, in the sense that my words certainly went into her ears, but she didn’t really hear what I was saying, didn’t really understand. Maybe she just didn’t care to,” Ilgaz sighs.
“Oh, you’ll be fine,” Ceylin says, leaning to the side to nudge her shoulder against his, “Okay, you weren’t meant to be with Neva. But, you’re such a catch—selfless, intelligent, polite, handsome. And, especially being so young, you have plenty of time to find the girl of your dreams.”
She feels a bit silly reassuring Ilgaz of something that seems obvious to her—any girl would be unbelievably lucky to be the one Ilgaz ends up marrying. But, he’s been Ceylin’s best friend for what feels like forever, so she knows well by now that he doesn’t see his outstanding qualities in the way that she does.
As if he were reading her thoughts about him, Ilgaz just gives a noncommittal grunt in response to her encouragement, and then changes the subject.
“Enough about me, I’m glad you finally dumped Cüneyt. I never liked that asshole,” he says.
“I know,” Ceylin snorts, “You’ve made that abundantly clear many times in the months that we went out on and off.”
“Kind of my job, as your best friend,” Ilgaz shrugs, “to be brutally honest with you.”
Ceylin laughs at his words.
“Oh, come on, don’t act like you’re only so honest because we’re friends, you know you’re honest because that’s just who you are as a person,” she tells him, “but, hey, why don’t you give me your honest opinion right now?”
“Of what?” Ilgaz asks, pausing with his water bottle mid-air.
“Okay,” Ceylin sighs, taking a deep breath and pushing herself into a vulnerable state, “Not that I ever thought I would marry Cüneyt, or anything like that, but I don’t know… the things about me that he couldn’t stand, that he would get so easily annoyed about… it made me think that maybe there is some truth to what my mother has been telling me my whole life. That no one would want to tolerate me the way I am, for the rest of their life as my husband.”
Immediately, Ilgaz sets his lunch down, his face twisting into a deeply upset frown.
“Bullshit,” he tells her softly, “First of all, you’ve already got me, someone who very much enjoys the way you are, not just tolerates you. You’re such a strong presence, I’m certain you’ll attract many guys to choose from before you decide to get married. Out of the two of us, I think it’s actually me that’s less likely to get married.”
“Just because you and Neva didn’t work out?” Ceylin asks disbelievingly, a single brow cocked up questioningly.
“It’s not anything about her specifically, but just thinking about how I started that relationship certain that we would be a good fit because of the way I logically looked at us, compared to how I ended the relationship realizing that she never truly connected with me even a little bit, makes me think that I’m nowhere near understanding relationships enough to get married,” Ilgaz muses.
“I mean, you are sixteen,” Ceylin points out drily, “we both are, so of course we wouldn’t be in the mindset ready for marriage now. It’s not like we can’t learn and grow in the next—I don’t know, ten or twenty years.”
“Still, who knows what the future holds,” Ilgaz says, “Life is so unpredictable, I just wish there was some way to know with absolute certainty that no matter what, I’m going to be okay, at least in some aspects. Like… like a safety net, or insurance, you know?”
At the words ‘safety net’, a silly, unthinkable idea pops up in Ceylin’s mind. Something she had learned about from a movie, or maybe a television show, she can’t quite remember, but it doesn’t matter.
“What if,” she blurts out, because she always has trouble keeping her mouth shut, especially around people she’s comfortable with, like Ilgaz, “what if we could have that safety net? What if we could make that safety net, make a guarantee of our future?”
“How could we possibly do that?” Ilgaz asks dubiously, his eyebrows raised.
“We could make a—a marriage pact. I think I saw this on television,” she starts, “The way it works is that if we’re both still single by some age, say, thirty-five, then we just get married to each other. As friends, obviously. But, it would still be better than being alone.”
There’s a long pause, and then suddenly, Ilgaz sucks in a little, but audible breath, his eyes widening slightly. He stares at Ceylin for several beats, and with each passing second of silence, she grows more nervous. For the first time since she can remember, she can’t make heads or tails of his expression, he’s looking at her in a way he never has before. It’s an unfamiliar, uncomfortable feeling—she’s so used to being able to read Ilgaz well.
“I—I mean, I was kind of kidding,” she hastens to say, trying to play it cool, “Obviously I wasn’t trying to hold you to any serious, binding agreement. I just thought that since we’re such good friends and already know that we get along well, if we both end up single, it won’t be half bad to just get married so we can at least keep each other company as we grow old.”
“Okay,” he tells her, the word rushing out of his mouth in a breathy exhale.
“Oh—really? Are you sure?” Ceylin asks nervously, a little taken aback by his easy agreement.
She doesn’t know why she was feeling so weird. This was supposed to be a lighthearted thing, she doesn’t truly expect them to actually follow up on this, decades later.
“Yes, completely sure and serious,” Ilgaz nods at her earnestly, “If we’re both still single at thirty-five, we’ll get married.”
Ceylin’s heart skips a beat at how genuine he sounds. Ever honest, Ilgaz always was.
“Great,” she laughs, not quite managing to keep her voice completely steady, “let’s shake on it.”
Ilgaz meets her outstretched hand with a smile, looking much more confident than she feels.
After lunch, they have a biology lesson, which in Ceylin’s opinion is one of the most mind-numbing subjects high school students have ever been tortured with. Sometimes, Ceylin wishes that Ilgaz was just a bit less of a rule follower, so that they could entertain themselves passing notes back and forth under their desks during some of the duller lessons. But, even if he did like indulging in things like passing notes, he wouldn’t during biology, anyway. Somehow, he found the subject fascinating, like the total nerd he was.
Ceylin spaces out for several minutes, before she returns to her senses as she registers what she had been mindlessly doodling in her notebook. ‘Ceylin Kaya,’ big and bold in nice scripture. Horror and embarrassment flood her body as she quickly reaches for her eraser. What had gotten into her, and why was she suddenly acting as if she were a silly primary school student?
But, for some reason, she pauses with her eraser above the page, and puts it down, deciding to simply turn the page of her notebook over instead.
The next morning, when Ilgaz arrives at their usual spot in the school yard before classes, he greets her by clearing his throat.
“Yes?” Ceylin asks, her curiosity growing.
“I have something for you,” he tells her, and Ceylin frowns at how oddly stiff he sounds.
He then extracts a jewelry box from a pocket of his pants, and hands it to her. She opens it, and lets out an involuntary gasp at the ring inside. While it didn’t look terribly expensive, Ceylin could tell that it certainly wasn’t costume jewelry, either.
“Um, you definitely don’t have to wear it if you don’t like it, obviously,” Ilgaz continues, his voice an odd mixture of nervous and joking, “but, since we made the pact yesterday, I thought we might as well commit to the bit.”
He lets out a strangled sort of laugh then, and Ceylin still can’t process the bizarre situation.
“It’s… um, the band is white gold. And then the stone is peridot. I—I thought it would go well with your eyes,” he continues, the awkward strain still present in his voice.
Finally, she starts to come to her senses.
“You didn’t get yourself one to match?” she teases, the first thing that comes to mind, likely as a defense mechanism to diffuse the scarily serious tone coloring the conversation.
Ilgaz huffs out a little breath then, his shoulders visibly relaxing as some of his anxiousness seems to disappear.
“If I did, then I wouldn’t have been able to get you one as nice as this one. I’d rather spend all the money on yours, than get you a cheaper one just so I could have one, too,” he explains genuinely.
Ceylin’s heart clenches then, in an abruptly painful, uncomfortably unfamiliar sensation. She had asked the question intending to put things in a lighter mood, but his answer only left her feeling… she’s not sure what she feels, but it’s definitely not relaxed or light.
“Thank you,” she tells him, bringing her hand up to squeeze Ilgaz’s arm, “It’s seriously a beautiful ring. I love it, you really have good taste.”
“I think I have good taste, too,” Ilgaz murmurs as she takes the ring out of the box.
It doesn’t fit on her ring finger, but it slips perfectly onto her middle finger, so she settles it there on her right hand.
“I didn’t know your ring size,” Ilgaz adds apologetically as he watches her put it on.
“Probably for the better to have it on this finger instead,” Ceylin shrugs, “so people don’t think I’m some crazy teenage girl who got engaged.”
“Right, right,” Ilgaz laughs, the strained note back in his voice.
She knows that nineteen years—the amount of time before they reach thirty-five years old—objectively isn’t really all that long in the grand scheme of things. But, all of a sudden, it somehow feels like forever to wait. Not that Ceylin is specifically waiting for it, of course.
. . .
They’re nineteen years old when Ceylin gives up on trying to let new people into her life.
Throughout the last almost two years of university, she had gone with a steady stream of guys on countless unserious dates. It was an odd, tricky to balance and maintain, combination of searching for that one person that she fit with just perfectly, that one person who would prove everyone’s assumptions about her—including her own—wrong, while also keeping her hopes and expectations low, because deep down, she knew it was unlikely that such a person existed.
At best, the dates had been boring or lackluster. At worst, insufferable. Far too many times, Ceylin had left dates early after cursing out a variety of disrespectful assholes, and today was another one for the count.
Still fuming, after she leaves the restaurant she was supposed to be having a dinner date in, she makes the muscle memory drive to the Kaya family’s house. Since she and Ilgaz stayed in İstanbul for university, Ilgaz still lived near his family, though he moved into his own unit, just above the one he grew up in.
This was something that benefited Ceylin, too—she came over to Ilgaz’s place all the time to study or hang out, and now she doesn’t have to feel bad that they might be disrupting his parents or his kid brother when they stay up late studying, or on a movie marathon. Not that the latter happens very often; Ilgaz is a bit of a grandpa who likes to sleep early whenever possible.
After parking, she lets herself in through the gate and then jogs up the stairs to Ilgaz’s unit. A few beats after her knocking, the door swings open, and Ilgaz’s mouth parts slightly in surprise as registers her presence.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on a date?” he asks, stepping to the side to let her in the door.
She only grumbles in response, and marches straight into his living room after taking her shoes off. Ceylin flops down onto the couch with only a little bit of melodrama, and covers her face with a throw pillow. She hears some vague shuffling around, presumably as ever neat Ilgaz puts her shoes onto a shelf, and then footsteps as he walks over to her.
He takes away the pillow from her face, and she’s met with the sight of his grin.
“That bad, huh?” he asks.
“I don't want to talk about it,” Ceylin says, rolling her eyes.
“Beats me why you came here, then,” Ilgaz teases, still smiling, “though you know I have to say it at least once—I told you so. I knew you could’ve done much better than whatever his name was.”
Ceylin rolls her eyes again, ignoring the first part of his statement. He obviously knows why she came here. It’s because that’s just what the two of them do—they’re there for each other.
“Okay, no need to look so happy about it,” she grumbles.
“Not happy at all,” Ilgaz says, putting his hands up in the air, that stupid grin still on his face, “I’m devastated for you, actually. My deepest condolences. Let me know if there’s anything at all I can do to ease the pain of this totally unforeseeable awful outcome.”
Ceylin tosses the couch pillow at Ilgaz’s face, but he catches it with a laugh. God, he can be so drily sarcastic sometimes. No one believes Ceylin when she tells them, though, because Ilgaz doesn’t really let this side of himself out in front of many people. Really, it’s just her that gets to see it, now that she thinks about it.
“He was hot,” she protests weakly.
“He was the biggest walking red flag I’ve ever met,” Ilgaz replies, shaking his head back and forth, his expression growing serious, “I’m just glad you saw that side of him sooner rather than later.”
“Thanks, that optimistic perspective definitely makes me feel better,” she snarks.
“I’m making dinner right now, and lucky for you it’s a recipe for two,” he tells her, “let me finish up and then we can eat, okay? Afterward we can put on a movie, your choice.”
“Seriously?” she asks, sitting up a grin, feeling better already.
“Seriously,” he confirms, smiling back at her.
He chucks the pillow into her lap softly, and turns around to head back into his kitchen, presumably to finish making dinner.
Ceylin follows him into the kitchen so that she can keep him company while he cooks. Time flies by as Ilgaz finishes cooking and the two of them eat, their usual rapport of light bantering taking Ceylin’s mind off of her terrible and short-lasted date from earlier in the evening. It certainly helped that Ilgaz seemed to be in such a good mood, his warmth rubbing off on her easily.
He wasn’t in a good mood when Ceylin saw him earlier that day, sometime in the morning. She was lucky that he had cheered up between then and now, but that was something that sometimes worried her a bit. Maybe it was her imagination, but she thinks that Ilgaz had been getting into quite a few sour funks over the last few years. Unluckily, they often seemed to coincidentally happen around the same time she would go on dates with new guys, which made things stressful for her to deal with.
She mentally shakes her head, clearing her thoughts. No point in dwelling on that right now, she should be making the effort to enjoy the rest of the evening and night with Ilgaz.
After they eat and clear the dishes, they slump down on the couch, and Ceylin takes the remote to flick through different movies before settling on a crime thriller. Though they start out on separate cushions, it doesn’t take long before one subconscious shifting motion after another leads them to how they usually seem to end up—Ceylin leaning on Ilgaz’s shoulder, his arm wrapped around her and his fingers tracing abstract patterns on her upper arm.
Not that the movie is uninteresting, but the absence of constant conversation between her and Ilgaz makes it a little too easy for Ceylin to slip back into her weary thoughts of several hours ago. As she mulls over the date in her head, she realizes that it was simply the final step of a long road she had been walking on for a while now. A road that led her to an inevitable conclusion—she was never going to belong anywhere, to fit perfectly with another person. At least, not in the way she feels she does with Ilgaz.
There was really no one in the world who understood and complemented her more than Ilgaz, and most importantly, he truly does enjoy her company. So, it wouldn’t be right to marry someone else, someone that she fit with less than she did with her best friend. Obviously, Ilgaz doesn’t really want to marry her, the only way that would happen is if in sixteen years, Ilgaz is still single and feels like following through on their pact.
This all leads Ceylin to one conclusion; she’s not ever going to get married, unless it’s to Ilgaz, and if she does, it’ll only be if she gets lucky and he’s still single in sixteen years.
. . .
They’re twenty-two years old when all the women flirting with Ilgaz starts to make Ceylin just a little bit crazy.
After they graduated from university, she had followed him to Manisa, where they had both been living for a few months now. Ceylin tried to tell herself it was purely a coincidence that she only applied for law internships in cities it seemed Ilgaz was likely to be assigned to for his first prosecutor duties. But, the truth was that it was unbearable to even imagine how it would be like to live far away from him for the first time in their lives, so far that they would only be able to see each other several times a year, instead of at least several times a week as they always do.
In Manisa, it seems like every woman around their age is drawn to Ilgaz, which drives Ceylin absolutely insane. Of course, it’s not because she has any romantic interest in him. It’s just a combination of the way they all flirt with him in such a silly, obnoxious manner, the way Ilgaz seems totally oblivious, and the way that it happens so often when Ilgaz is somewhere with her—really, for all these audacious girls know, she could be his girlfriend.
Many girls had been quite interested in him when they first started at university, though the attention seemed to die down quickly. Maybe it was somewhat due to the fact that Ilgaz seemed very uninterested in just about every girl he came across, but Ceylin privately thinks that it also has something to do with the fact that he almost always was hanging around her. She can’t find it in herself to be too upset about being an unintentional deterrence, though. The girls crushing on him were pretty annoying, and if Ilgaz really wanted one of them, he very easily could have chased them himself.
Here, in a new place, out in the real world where they interacted with mostly strangers rather than mostly classmates who knew well that Ilgaz spent a large part of his time with Ceylin, meant that every interested woman had no problem throwing herself at Ceylin’s best friend.
A month into her internship, Ceylin realizes quickly that one of her favorite aspects of the job is getting to know her firm’s clients personally—it makes serving justice for them feel a lot more rewarding. The week before, when the firm’s partners had closed another case, the woman they were defending invited them to her son’s art show. Apparently, her son was around Ceylin’s age, and was trying to get his career as a professional artist started, so he was showcasing and selling some of his work at an exhibition for amateur artists. The partners apologetically told the woman that they were busy the night of the show, but since Ceylin was free, she promised the woman that she would attend.
When the night of the show came around, she brought Ilgaz, thinking they could make a fun night out of it, running an observational stream of commentary on whatever amateur art they came across.
The night starts off well. First, they find the son of Ceylin’s firm’s client, and tell him that they were invited by his mother. He seems a little embarrassed, but is more than happy to talk about the impressionism style he paints with. After that, they walk around the gallery at a leisurely pace, admiring a range of art from renaissance imitations to an odd, minimalist, abstract style that Ceylin can’t identify.
Then, a display catches Ilgaz’s eye, and he gestures at Ceylin to follow him toward it.
“These look like woodblock prints!” he tells her excitedly, “It’s the style the Great Wave off Kanagawa was created in.”
Ceylin smiles at him excitedly. The Great Wave was a Japanese painting Ilgaz had mentioned admiring on several occasions, and once Ceylin had saved up a little more money, she was planning on getting him a really nice quality replica of it.
When they get to the display and the woman running it notices them, her eyes widen almost imperceptibly at Ilgaz, and Ceylin just knows that the woman must find him very attractive—she has a pretty good eye for this sort of thing.
She talks about her work for a little bit, and then both Ilgaz and Ceylin ask her a few questions, although it’s painfully clear from her body language that she’s paying significantly more attention to Ilgaz than she is to Ceylin. Mild irritation prickles at Ceylin, and she just decides to stay quiet and wait until Ilgaz is done chatting with the woman.
At one point, the woman mentions finishing university last spring, and Ilgaz responds, “Oh—same with Ceylin and I!”
It’s then that the woman finally looks at Ceylin for the first time in the conversation, slipping her the barest hint of scorn before letting her eyes slide back over to Ilgaz. Ceylin feels her temper flare up and she bites down on her tongue in an effort to calm herself down.
At long last, the conversation seems to reach an end when Ilgaz mentions to the woman that while he likes her art, he’s not looking to buy anything today.
“That’s too bad,” the woman says, and reaches onto the desk beside her to pick up a business card, “but, here, take my card. That’s also my personal number, by the way. If you need anything at all, don’t hesitate to reach out.”
And then, before either Ilgaz or Ceylin has the chance to react, the woman almost darts forward, and pushes the card into the chest pocket of Ilgaz’s jacket.
“Um, thanks,” Ilgaz chokes out, obviously flustered and stunned, and jerkily turns around to walk away.
The woman winks at Ceylin, who then turns to follow Ilgaz. His face is completely red, and he looks so shocked and disheveled, like a bird that was just pushed out of its nest. At the first trash can they pass, he quickly reaches into his pocket to dump away the business card with a little sigh of relief.
Part of Ceylin wants to laugh because truly, the situation was a little ridiculous, and Ilgaz’s reaction made it all the more funny. And yet, another part of her just feels so irrationally pissed for some reason, and that only makes her mad at herself for feeling so negative, when there was no real reason to be. A woman was interested in Ilgaz, and he obviously wasn’t interested in her. Though, even if he was, it shouldn’t matter to Ceylin—she was his best friend, not his girlfriend or anything. Regardless of the clear logic, witnessing the interaction was still leaving her feeling unsettled.
The art show wasn’t the first time, and it was far from the last.
It happens again the next weekend at the cinema, when they get to the front of the queue at the concession stand, and the cashier who rings them up for popcorn smiles at Ilgaz and offers him free tickets to accompany her to a movie sometime when she’s off the clock, as if Ceylin wasn’t standing right there with them.
It happens yet again at the bowling alley, when they’re getting shoes, and the worker whistles as she hands Ilgaz his bowling shoes, asking, “Wow, is it true what they say about guys with large shoe sizes?”
“Is what true?” Ilgaz asks back with a frown, tilting his head slightly in confusion.
The lady smiles excitedly at his obliviousness and opens her mouth, likely to answer him, but before she can get a word out, Ceylin says, “Thanks!” and grabs Ilgaz’s arm, tugging him away from the shoe counter.
“It’s a pop culture myth,” Ceylin sighs as soon as they’re out of earshot of the lady working the shoe counter, “That men with a large shoe size also have large penises.”
“Wow, really? I had no idea,” Ilgaz says mildly, raising his eyebrows.
“Maybe you would if you weren’t one of those anti-social media old men,” Ceylin teases.
“Ha-ha,” Ilgaz says drily, and then after a pause, “so… she was trying to—was that a pickup line?”
“Of course she was,” Ceylin sighs, “Did you want to go back to the counter and personally confirm or deny her curiosity?”
As soon as the words leave her mouth, she regrets them, chastising herself internally. Worse, it had come out unexpectedly bitter, when in her head she meant it more like a joke.
“Huh? No,” Ilgaz says, looking even more confused than when the woman had first made the innuendo at him.
“Sorry, sorry, nevermind,” she hurries to say, leading way back to the lane they would be playing at, feeling her cheeks flush.
The last straw for Ceylin was the damn cafe. It hadn’t taken Ilgaz and Ceylin very long after moving to Manisa to establish a regular cafe where they would meet try to meet in the mornings, if neither of them had too stressful or busy of a work day ahead, before they had to split off, her to her firm’s office and him to the courthouse.
They had been going to the cafe for almost half a year now, though today there was a new barista preparing and serving them their coffee, so things were going a bit slower than usual. The barista finishes with Ceylin’s drink first, so she moves away to the little side island with napkins to grab a few for her and Ilgaz before heading to their usual booth to save their seats. After a few seconds, she glances back up to the counter designated for picking up drinks, where she sees the barista conversing with Ilgaz, a big smile on her face.
Ceylin looks away, rolling her eyes. Another young woman interested in Ilgaz, what’s new? But then, she hears a loud laugh, and so she looks back at the drink counter startled.
She hadn’t heard what the barista said, but it must have been really funny, given the way Ilgaz was wheezing with laughter. An ugly feeling crawls up Ceylin’s throat, something that feels annoyingly like jealousy, and she viciously shoves it back down with great mental effort.
Not long after, Ilgaz finally makes his way over to their table, his coffee in hand, sporting a big smile. His smile makes Ceylin all of a sudden very nervous, like she’s about to lose out on her chance to… something.
“Ilgaz, the marriage pact,” she blurts out as soon as he sits down.
“Yes? What about it?” he asks, raising his eyebrows.
Shit, too late to back out now, she thinks nervously, twisting her ring around her middle finger anxiously under the table. She had worn it everyday, all of the time, since Ilgaz had given it to her six years ago—it was by far her favorite accessory that she owned.
“I was just thinking… thirty-five is pretty old, don’t you think? I mean, seriously pushing the limits of middle age. I don’t want to be geriatric when I get married, you know?” she rushes out, “So, I was thinking, why don’t we push the termination date of the pact up? Like maybe… thirty, instead.”
Ceylin’s heart is pounding in her chest after she finishes her proposition. She’s always been openly expressive, in general but especially around Ilgaz, so she’s sure he can see how genuinely nervous she is and how seriously she is taking this whole thing. Still, her mind is already in defensive mode, racing through a variety of excuses and ways to play off what she had said as a joke, in case he responds poorly.
“Sure,” he tells her after a beat, beaming at her, “Thirty sounds great to me.”
Because of the ridiculous way he’s smiling, she can’t quite tell if he’s treating her serious question with a serious response, or if he’s being mocking.
“Does it really? So, we’re moving the year from thirty-five to thirty?” Ceylin asks again, just to be extra certain.
“Yes, really. See you at the altar in eight years,” Ilgaz tells her, chuckling, which clears nothing up for her.
“I really can’t tell if you mean that,” she sighs.
“I do,” he tells her, his expression becoming earnest.
After he agrees, she briefly feels guilty. The last thing she wants is to be manipulative and try to push Ilgaz into something he doesn’t really want, but if he really didn’t want to marry her, he would just speak up, wouldn’t he? And besides, eight years was still plenty of time for him to date a woman he would actually want to marry.
She’s also a little confused and suspicious by the big smile he had given her at the question. She doesn’t understand what was so amusing about her suggestion, but she’s not going to ask, in case it's something hurtful.
Regardless, thirteen years to go just became eight years to go, so despite it being early in the morning, the day is already a win in Ceylin’s book.
. . .
They’re twenty-three years old when an afternoon at the courthouse forces Ceylin to confront herself.
She usually looked forward to courthouse days with great anticipation. Partly because she was freshly done with her internship, yet still usually confined to paperwork and other menial tasks at the office, so getting to participate in actual trials was still quite novel and thrilling for her, but also because there was always a good chance of getting to hang out with Ilgaz.
Ceylin and the two associates she had gone to court with finish their hearing in high spirits after snagging a clever win, and she bids them both goodbye after walking out of the courtroom, planning on finding Ilgaz and seeing if he would be free for dinner.
She walks down the path of corridors to his office, humming quietly to herself, when she looks up at some point, and the sight before her makes her stop in her tracks.
Ilgaz is paused at the side of the hallway, speaking to a woman Ceylin is unfamiliar with, hardly several centimeters of space between the two, most definitely not a professional distance. Ceylin is at the very end of the hallway, and Ilgaz is at the opposite end, so she can’t make out any of their conversation, but her mind is already working into overdrive coming up with possibilities.
Then, the woman reaches forward to play with Ilgaz’s jacket lapels, and Ceylin nearly combusts on the spot. Who the hell did this woman think she was? That was clearly a blatantly romantic gesture. Only, no, maybe it wasn’t, because Ceylin did it all the time to Ilgaz, and they have a completely platonic relationship. Except, maybe… Ceylin’s feelings weren’t completely platonic.
She’s in love with him.
Everything is so much more clear now. The realization is calm and without fanfare; it was as if someone had split open her brain, dug out a giant block, and then put her brain back together exactly the way it was before. Perhaps such a life-changing epiphany should have been more dramatic to her, but it really doesn’t change all that much for Ceylin. She realizes that she’s felt this way for as long as she can remember; it’s only now, confronted with this exact situation, that she is allowing herself to put an accurate label on those feelings.
She can no longer tell herself that if she’s lucky, she’ll get to marry Ilgaz in seven years if he’s still single. The truth is that she actively doesn’t want anyone marrying him, other than her. Because, it’s not just about feeling like she belongs with Ilgaz and taking comfort in the fact that he understands her—it’s about being completely in love with him.
Ceylin is still standing in the hallway, staring at Ilgaz and the woman, frozen like an idiot, as Ilgaz awkwardly leans back and side steps the woman out of her grip on his jacket. Ceylin watches as he looks around the corridor frantically, until his eyes finally find her, and his face lights up. He says something to the woman and motions to Ceylin, who the woman then looks at curiously, before he starts walking toward Ceylin.
“Ceylin!” he greets, as soon as he’s within hearing range, “You didn’t tell me you had a hearing today!”
“Um, surprise,” Ceylin murmurs, still distracted with the interaction she had just witnessed and subsequent realization it had provoked.
“Hey, did you want to get dinner, or something?” Ilgaz asks, “I have around an hour more of work, and then I should be free.”
Ceylin takes a second to respond, watching as the woman Ilgaz had been talking with passes them in the corridor, not bothering to conceal the fact that she was staring at them.
“Who’s that?” Ceylin asks, gesturing to the woman’s retreating back.
“Ece,” Ilgaz answers with a slight wince, “She’s a prosecutor who started here a few years before me. She’s a little strange.”
“Ah,” Ceylin says, trying to think if Ilgaz could possibly have meant anything positive by ‘strange’.
“So, dinner?” Ilgaz asks again, raising an eyebrow, likely noticing how distracted she seems.
“Oh—yes, yes, of course! I was actually on my way to find you and suggest that,” Ceylin tells him, finally shaking out of her thoughts and flashing him a smile.
“Great!” he responds, smiling back, “If you don’t need to go back to your office, you can wait in the cafeteria here. Actually, hmm, I’m not sure that’s allowed since you’re not a state employee. Well, if they ask, just say you’re with me. Here, take my ID.”
He then extracts his wallet from his pocket and flips it open to hand her his ID. She takes it with a very slightly shaky hand, as she can’t help but think this all feels just a touch romantic.
“Don’t lose it,” he teases, “I’ll come pick you up from the cafeteria in an hour.”
“See you,” Ceylin replies, giving him a little wave before setting off.
When she enters the threshold of the cafeteria, she almost startles at the sight of Ece right in the doorway, and forces herself to put on a neutral expression as the two women immediately make eye contact.
Ceylin gives the other woman a polite nod, and is planning on heading away in search of a free table to sit at, when Ece starts speaking to her.
“Hello, I don’t believe we’ve met,” Ece says, and Ceylin reluctantly turns back around to face her, “Cumhuriyet savcısı Ece Aksoy.”
“Avukat Ceylin Erguvan,” Ceylin introduces herself, taking Ece’s outstretched hand to shake.
“A lawyer, huh? I noticed you were talking to Ilgaz Savcı just now,” Ece comments.
Although the second part of what she said hadn’t been a question, Ceylin knows exactly what Ece is wondering.
“Yes, he’s my fiancé,” Ceylin says calmly.
She gets a private laugh in her head out of the way Ece’s eyes bug out almost comically.
“Oh—I didn’t know he was engaged,” Ece stammers, flicking her eyes unsubtly to the peridot ring on Ceylin’s right hand, “Er, congratulations.”
“Thank you, it was nice meeting you,” Ceylin tells her, and she can’t help the big grin that stretches across her face as she walks away.
She can only hope now that Ece won’t ever ask Ilgaz how his ‘fiancée’ is doing.
Ceylin never feels good about lying, so she tries to rationalize with herself. What she said, while not true, was technically not super untrue, either. Both her and Ilgaz were single at the moment, and if they stayed on this track, they did ‘agree’ to get married, even though that’s not all that likely to happen.
Was it unethical to actively, deliberately chase away Ilgaz’s prospects, women that he might legitimately want to date or sleep with? Probably at least a little bit. Did Ceylin care? Not nearly as much as she should.
. . .
They’re twenty-five years old when they move back to İstanbul.
Neither of them had really been thrilled to be living so far away from their families, as they had been while living in Manisa for the last three and a half years. Ilgaz finally gets the appointment back to İstanbul that he had been hoping for in early November, and once he does, the only thing slowing him down from starting right away is the time it takes to pack all of his stuff and move back.
As soon as Ilgaz tells her the great news, Ceylin immediately starts looking for jobs in İstanbul. Without him, there would be nothing tying her to this city she would otherwise be alone in, and she doesn’t think she could stand living so far away from Ilgaz, anyway. While her goal was to open her own firm someday, she figured it would be wise to get a few more years of experience as an associate under her belt, so she looks for prestigious bureaus that would strengthen her resume, and that also seem to be doing decent, honest work.
She’s able to get multiple interviews for after the holidays, so, feeling secure enough in her chances of obtaining at least one offer, she resigns from her current firm and packs up her apartment. Due to their job changes, both her and Ilgaz have a few weeks off around the same time, for the end of December and beginning of January, so they take that time to help each other move back to İstanbul.
Ceylin wants to host a party for New Year’s Eve, just to catch up with all of the people they haven't gotten to see much since moving to Manisa, but she obviously couldn’t do that at her parents’ house, where she had just moved back into. Ilgaz, the crazily generous man he was, offers up his apartment unit at his parent’s property to host the party. Ceylin loves him all the more for it, since she knows he’s not particularly fond of big gatherings, and offered just to make her happy.
Not too long after she and Ilgaz are both settled back into the city, New Year’s Eve rolls around, and Ceylin’s heart feels so full and excited throughout the entire night, getting to see both old friends and new ones.
There is Eren, whom she hasn’t seen since university, and is on his way to being promoted to Komiser soon, from the sound of things. He brings a few friends from the precinct who are all super sweet, like Umut and Goksu.
There is also Pars, whom she also hasn’t seen since university. He had become a prosecutor, and like Ilgaz, had been serving in another city until recently getting an appointment back to İstanbul. Pars is a bit of an asshole to Ilgaz, as he always was when they were younger, since Ilgaz had dumped his sister back in high school. But, he also brings Derya to the party, another young prosecutor that Ceylin likes immediately. And, according to Ilgaz’s whispered words in her ear after Pars introduces Derya to her, Derya and Pars are a thing, whatever that means to someone like Ilgaz who had the tendency to be emotionally aloof.
She had also invited Aylin, who had divorced Osman a few years ago, and who’s relationship with Ceylin had surprisingly been improving a lot, recently. In addition to her older sister, there are also a lot of her and Ilgaz’s old high school and university friends, along with their various new significant others and friends.
All in all, the night is warm and exciting, and leaves Ceylin feeling pretty optimistic about her social life in the near future.
Of course, as the night draws on and gets closer to the countdown for the new year, the atmosphere gets predictably and exponentially more tense. The people in relationships obviously start finding each other around the apartment again, and the people in situationships start awkwardly circling each other.
18, 17, 16…
Swallowing a lump of loneliness, Ceylin begins making her way to the kitchen, planning to spend the very end of the countdown there under the pretense of being busy making herself a new drink. On her way, she smiles to herself as she passes Pars and Derya, noticing the way Pars has started to stammer nervously. The real shock, though, is Aylin and Eren. Ceylin’s eyes widen and her jaw drops as she passes by them on the couch, Aylin practically in Eren’s lap and him whispering something in her ear.
11, 10, 9…
Ceylin reaches the kitchen counter and sets her cup down. She closes her eyes for a brief moment, taking a deep breath. Just as she’s reaching for the bottle in front of her, she feels a tap on her shoulder.
She turns around to see Ilgaz grinning at her, but before she can say anything, he traces a path up her jawline, sliding a hand into her hair. He raises his eyebrows at her in a silent question, and ordinarily, she would be too shocked to move, but in a blessing from the universe, her instincts take over.
4, 3, 2…
Her eyes flutter closed, and she leans up on her toes as Ilgaz pulls her head toward his.
1.
Ilgaz kisses her deeply, his mouth moving against hers for the best, most heavenly few seconds of her life, before he draws back. His thumb softly strokes the length of her cheek before he slides his hand out of her hair, and reality sinks in. Finally, the surprise hits her.
“What—um, what was that for?” she croaks out, and then clears her throat, internally cringing at how obviously breathless she sounds.
“Just a kiss for my future wife,” he tells her, a grin returning to his face.
“What?” she says, still stunned, because apparently that’s the only thing she’s capable of saying at the moment.
“Surely you remember the pact we made?” Ilgaz asks, his face morphing into a confused frown, a little crease appearing between his brows.
Ceylin’s heart sinks. She was a clown. A clown, for believing just for a few seconds, that Ilgaz had really developed some kind of genuine romantic feelings for her. Instead, it was just a lighthearted, friendly continuation of the agreement which he probably viewed as a joke, because the only way he’d marry her is that damned pact he just mentioned.
“Ah, right,” she chuckles shakily, “yes, very funny, that was clever of you.”
Ilgaz, despite being generally emotionally aloof toward other people and their relationships, had always been very attentive to her, so of course he sees right away that something is slightly off with her.
“Hey, are you alright?” he asks worriedly, placing a gentle hand on her arm.
His concern for her makes Ceylin’s heart ache, because he really is the sweetest man in the world.
“Yes, yes, of course, more than good,” she rushes to reply with false brightness, “I was just about to mix myself a new drink, but I’ll see you back out there in a second.”
“Okay,” Ilgaz says, flashing a smile at her before disappearing into the living room.
. . .
They’re twenty-seven years old when Ilgaz asks her an odd question.
It’s a rainy Sunday morning, and they’re currently quietly spending time together on Ilgaz’s couch, Ceylin stretched across the length of the couch with her feet in Ilgaz’s lap. He has a pillow over her feet, his elbows resting on the pillow, and he seems engrossed in a novel, while she scrolls through her phone looking for inspiration on a birthday present for İnci, her younger sister.
“Do you ever see yourself getting married?” Ilgaz asks out of the blue.
“Huh?” she says, her thumb freezing above her screen.
“Sometime in the future, do you think you’ll want to get married?” Ilgaz repeats his question.
She doesn’t want to sound stupid by stating the detailed truth, ‘yes, just to you if I get lucky, because of the pact, but even without the pact, I’d only want to marry you, anyway,’ so instead she goes with something vague.
“I don’t know, I guess I can’t be certain right now,” she tells him.
“Well if you did, what would you want?” he asks.
“What would I want?” she responds, confused.
“I mean, what would you want in a husband? What would you want to see in your married life?” Ilgaz clarifies.
Oh, so he was just making idle conversation with casual musings. Since it was a lighthearted question, she decides to answer in a lighthearted way.
“I don’t know, a pet, probably a cat?” she laughs, “Um… a bigger living space, definitely. Of course, my hypothetical husband and I wouldn’t be living in my parent’s house, but I want a place bigger than my apartment in Manisa. At least, the place should have space for a full garden, since I would want to significantly expand on that hobby beyond the flowerpots on my balcony… oh! And definitely a husband who cooks for me. I hate cooking almost every meal, it wastes so much time, and I’m not a great cook, anyway.”
“So, you want to marry someone who can cook for you? Is there anything else you’d want your husband to do?” Ilgaz prods further.
Ceylin doesn’t know how else to answer his question without making it very obvious that she’s describing him in what she wants in a husband, or listing the things she likes to do with him when talking about what she wants to do in her married life. Really, he’s perfect to her the way he is, she’s so in love with him that she’d marry him in a heartbeat, she doesn’t need anything else.
“Er… I guess I’d want him to let me pick what we watch on TV?” she suggests, that being the first thing that came to her mind, since she had recently watched a movie where a husband and wife had bickered over what to watch on television.
“That’s all?” Ilgaz asks disbelievingly.
“It’s not like I spend extensive amounts of time conjuring up an imaginary man to marry and thinking of what I wish he’d do for me,” Ceylin responds defensively.
Ilgaz only snorts and returns his attention back to his book, dropping the subject.
Of course, Ceylin entirely forgets about the conversation after it’s over, since it was just a joking curiosity of Ilgaz’s, nothing to seriously ponder over or analyze.
That’s why the following week, when they’re hanging out at Ilgaz’s apartment again and he is unusually insistent on letting Ceylin pick the movie they watch, she thinks nothing of his slightly abnormal behavior.
“Eh, you can pick, I don’t really want to watch anything in particular,” she shrugs.
“No, no, you should pick,” Ilgaz says, gesturing to the remote.
“Seriously, I’m not being polite, I’m just not in a strong mood for anything specifically,” she tells him, “what’s gotten into you? Usually you love bickering with me over everything, just for the fun of it.”
“Nothing,” he mutters, “But, even if there’s nothing you really want to watch, you should at least pick out something you kind of want to watch. That’s better than not getting a choice at all, isn’t it?”
“I guess,” Ceylin shrugs, giving up and grabbing the remote when she realizes that it’s not worth fighting over his unusually high level of stubbornness today.
She settles on a nature documentary because of the way she caught Ilgaz’s face lighting up slightly at the sight of it, through her peripheral vision.
“Well, wasn’t it good to pick something you wanted?” Ilgaz asks her, a few minutes into the movie.
“Sure,” she tells him, yawning and adjusting the way her head rested against his shoulder.
The original odd conversation is completely gone from her mind when, a month later, Ilgaz texts her to come to his apartment after work, since he had something to show her.
Ilgaz isn’t usually one for elaborate surprises, but Ceylin’s curiosity stays ever present throughout the rest of her work day, before she can finally close up at the office and drive off.
She knocks a few quick taps onto his front door when she reaches it, and hears him say, “The door is unlocked!” from very close to her.
Ceylin only has a moment to wonder why he didn’t just open the door himself if he was right on the other side of it, before she swings the door open to Ilgaz carefully holding what at first glance looks like a small, furry hat.
“Meet Socks!” Ilgaz tells her, beaming excitedly.
Her heart skips a beat. If she had thought before that Ilgaz was the most adorable thing she had ever laid eyes on, she was wrong. Ilgaz, smiling at her, holding what must be the world’s most disgruntled looking little kitten, is by far the most adorable thing she had ever laid eyes on.
“Socks?” she asks.
“Look, he’s got little socks on his feet,” Ilgaz explains, rearranging the kitten in his hands to show Ceylin the kitten’s white-colored feet, contrasting with the gray fur of the rest of his legs, and the kitten mewls in protest.
“Oh my god, I love him already,” Ceylin says excitedly, reaching her hands out.
Ilgaz carefully deposits Socks in her hands, and she gently pecks the kitten’s head.
“Socks can be yours too, if you want,” Ilgaz tells her, looking at her with a weirdly cautious expression.
“Of course I’m going to be this kitten’s mom,” she scoffs, “who else would be?”
It’s just obvious to her. She is Ilgaz’s best friend, and she’s at his apartment all the time, so if anyone was qualified to claim honorary ownership of Ilgaz’s new cat, it would definitely be her.
“Yeah?” Ilgaz asks, a smile slowly stretching across his face.
“Of course,” she repeats, handing Socks back to Ilgaz so that she can take her shoes off.
As it turns out, Ceylin is completely enamored by Socks, and cuddling with the kitten gives her an excuse to come over to Ilgaz’s apartment even more than she had been doing before. Cuddling with Socks leaves an easy lead into cuddling with Ilgaz, so it's always a double win for Ceylin.
Socks seems to imprint on her right away, and after a few months it becomes obvious that Ceylin is the favorite between her and Ilgaz. Of course, she teases Ilgaz about it relentlessly, but she privately suspects that Socks usually seems more excited around her only because he misses her, since she doesn’t live with him like Ilgaz does.
She knocks on Ilgaz’s door one evening, late in the year, and she hears a faint call from the distance telling her that it's unlocked, so she lets herself in.
“How is my baby doing?” she coos as she takes off her shoes.
“Pretty good,” Ilgaz says in a teasing voice from the kitchen, “he had a tough hearing at work today, but he won, of course.”
“Not you, obviously,” Ceylin retorts, rolling her eyes with impatience as she follows the sound of Ilgaz’s voice into his kitchen.
He has his back turned to her, concentrated on putting oil into a pan over the stove.
“Oh, well, excuse me for assuming my best friend came to my apartment to hang out with me, not just to play with our cat,” Ilgaz continues in that same teasing tone.
“Sorry to let you down, but you should know by now that I only come by to see Socks,” Ceylin jokes, “and that smells good, by the way.”
“Thanks,” Ilgaz says genuinely, turning away from the stove briefly to smile at her in greeting, “and Socks was in the living room, last I saw.”
“Great!” Ceylin says, and turns to walk into the living room.
“Hey!” Ilgaz protests, “You’re not going to keep me company while I finish up with dinner?”
“Nope!” Ceylin calls back cheerfully, “I haven’t seen my baby in two days, I’m sure he misses me very much.”
“You haven’t seen me in two days, either,” she hears Ilgaz grumble from the kitchen, and that brings a little smile to her face.
Ilgaz truly outdoes himself with dinner, and after they polish off their plates, they both migrate back into the living room to play with Socks, sitting opposite each other on the floor, taking turns throwing around a little stuffed rat for Socks to go crazy over.
After it’s clear that they’re tiring out the kitten, Ilgaz turns his TV on, and hands the remote to Ceylin.
“Oh, why don’t you pick?” she offers, trying to give the remote back to him, “I swear I feel like we haven’t watched something you’ve picked in months.”
“I just want to watch whatever you want to watch,” Ilgaz says, his tone oddly insistent, holding his hands up and away from the remote.
“Okay,” she sighs with fond exasperation, flipping through movie titles before settling on an unfamiliar romcom.
Then, Ilgaz gets up from the floor to sit cross-legged on the couch, and when Ceylin glances back, he pats his lap. She lifts Socks up from the floor and puts him in Ilgaz’s lap, where he gives a contented little pur. Continuing to play with Socks gives Ceylin an excellent excuse to lay across the couch with her head pillowed on Ilgaz’s thigh.
She reaches out a hand to softly scratch Socks’ head, while Ilgaz settles one of his own hands into Ceylin’s hair, putting the other on Socks’ back to stroke his fur. Ilgaz switches from massaging her scalp to playing with her hair throughout the entire movie, and it takes her a monumental effort to remain outwardly calm and not give a sigh of pleasure, or anything embarrassing like that.
Socks gives Ceylin many more intimate nights like these, and Ceylin is even more grateful to the little cat than before.
The next time Ceylin should have connected the dots, but didn’t, is one early afternoon at the İstanbul courthouse in the new year, just after she and Ilgaz had taken a few weeks off for winter.
She had two hearings in the morning, and made lunch plans with Ilgaz for after, but the hearings finished quicker than she expected, so she ended up heading to Ilgaz’s office a bit earlier than they had agreed on. If he’s busy with other people, she’ll turn back around and walk to the courthouse cafeteria to wait. If he’s not, then she’ll hang out in his office as he finishes with whatever he needs to finish before they head out to lunch.
“Oh, hello, Özge,” Ceylin greets Ilgaz’s clerk as she walks by Özge on the way to Ilgaz’s office, “Do you know if Ilgaz has people in his office right now?”
“Good afternoon, Ceylin Hanım. I don’t think so,” Özge tells her.
“Thank you,” Ceylin tells her, and enters Ilgaz’s office after a brief knock on his door.
As soon as she swings the door open, she’s met with the sight of Ilgaz cursing, and scrambling to hide what looks like a book, or maybe a magazine. He fumbles around with the item for a good few seconds before finally slamming it down on his desk and covering it with the entirety of his upper body.
Ceylin feels her mouth part open in shock. In all of the time she’s known Ilgaz, they had never really kept any activities a secret from each other like this.
“Um, is this a bad time?” she asks.
“No, no, come in,” Ilgaz tells her, coughing awkwardly, sliding the item from his desk to his lap.
“What was that?” Ceylin asks, only to be met with silence and Ilgaz’s face reddening more by the second.
Suddenly, a bizarre thought occurs to her, equal measures hilarious and unbelievable.
“Oh my god,” she says slowly, “Ilgaz, you realize you’re at work, right? If that was something pornographic—”
“What?! No, ” he gasps out, his eyes widening.
Before he has the chance to explain further, Ceylin takes advantage of his shock to dart forward and snatch the item off of his lap. He protests weakly, but she ignores him, reading the title of the book.
“A Guide to Home Gardening?” she says out loud, frowning, “What’s so secretive about this? I didn’t even know you were interested in gardening.”
“It was supposed to be a surprise,” he murmurs, avoiding her eyes and scratching the back of his neck.
“Surprise? What surprise?” she asks.
“Nevermind, nevermind, don’t worry about it,” Ilgaz tells her, “Nothing important, just something dumb. Come on, let's go get lunch.”
He then gets up from his desk, and motions Ceylin out the door of his office.
“Come on, you know I’ll die of curiosity if I don’t understand this,” she tells him stubbornly, not budging from where she was standing.
“That’s really all there is to it, I just wanted to become knowledgeable on gardening,” he sighs.
“As a surprise?” she repeats what he said earlier, eyebrows raised in questioning and still not understanding why exactly Ilgaz had a sudden interest in gardening, “Any particular reason?”
“Yes, as a surprise, but nevermind that now. It’s just something I thought would be useful for me to be good at,” he tells her, looking a little embarrassed.
“Alright,” she tells him reluctantly, and follows him out of his office.
She’s certain that there’s more to Ilgaz’s sudden interest in gardening, but it’s clear to her that she wouldn’t be getting it out of him at that moment.
. . .
They’re twenty-eight years old when Ilgaz finally loses his patience.
Since forever, it’s been a habit between her and Ilgaz that whenever one of them had a birthday, they would celebrate twice, once with others and once with just the two of them. For Ilgaz’s birthdays, that usually meant a more low-key lunch with a few of their closest friends, or dinner with his family. For Ceylin, that usually meant a house party, or occasionally a night at a bar.
They had celebrated Ceylin’s twenty-eighth birthday a week before at Ilgaz’s apartment with a group of their friends, and they were there again now, on the evening of her actual birthday. Ilgaz had insisted on cooking her a nice, fancy dinner, and was very adamant on the fact that she shouldn’t be lifting even a finger to help him with any of it. He had been doing that a lot, lately, now that she thought about it. That is, being overly polite whenever he would cook for her, emphasizing that she didn’t need to help at all because he was more than happy to do everything for them.
After an annoyingly long day at work, she drives over to Ilgaz’s apartment.
“Hey, birthday girl,” he greets her with a grin as he opens the door for her.
“Hi,” she says, returning his smile and pushing her shoes off before following him into the kitchen he had retreated back into.
He buzzes around the kitchen hurriedly, cooking up a storm of what looks like several courses worth of dishes.
“Wow, this all looks so complicated, I can’t believe you’ve done so much already after work,” she comments.
“Took the afternoon off to start preparing,” he says distractedly, practically jumping from one end of the kitchen to the other.
“You did?” she cries in surprise, “Oh my god, you didn’t need to do all of this just for my birthday.”
“I did,” he says firmly, his eyes still on the food in front of him.
“No, you didn’t,” she laughs, “You’ve been doing that a lot recently, don’t think I haven’t noticed. Cooking all of these elaborate meals and not letting me help.”
That gets him to pause for some reason, and he finally turns around to face her, a serious expression on his face. His solemn reaction confuses her slightly, as she was just teasing him.
“So, you have noticed that,” he says.
“Sure I have, it’s kind of hard to miss since you’ve been doing it so much over the last few months. I know you can cook well, I hope you know that. You don’t have to prove it to me,” she says.
“Hard to miss, right,” he mutters, “though obviously, from the way things are going, I do have to prove it to you.”
His expression and tone have taken a turn from serious, to agitated, which spikes Ceylin’s annoyance. She was just joking around, he didn’t need to be weird and give her attitude for whatever reason.
“Okay, if it’s praise you’re looking for, just say it outright,” she scoffs, “no need to restrain yourself for the sake of being humble. Although, I really don’t get the way you’re acting right now. You know how much I love and appreciate your cooking, I must tell you a million times how delicious the food you make is, and how thankful I am that you take the time to cook for me. So, it’s a bit unnecessary to bend over backwards trying to get me to compliment your cooking without explicitly telling me so.”
“I’m not trying to get you to compliment my cooking, I’m trying to get you to marry me!” Ilgaz bursts out, throwing his hands up in the air in frustration.
Her jaw drops, and Ilgaz stares at her with wide eyes after his little outburst, panting aggressively for several seconds. For what feels like ages, it seems neither of them is able to speak, until Ceylin finally breaks out of her shock and confusion.
“You’re trying to what?” she chokes out, almost certain she had misheard.
“Trying to get you to marry me,” Ilgaz repeats, bringing a hand up to massage his forehead, “Only for the last dozen years or so.”
“Wh—no you haven’t,” she stammers, shaking her head at him, because that can’t possibly be true.
“Come on, Ceylin. You weren’t getting any of my hints, so I had to say it bluntly and unromantically like I did just now,” he says, “But, me getting miserable every time you went on a date in university, hating all of your stupid boyfriends? Kissing you on New Year’s Eve three years ago? What did you think that could possibly mean?”
“I don’t know! I thought—I thought you were being a really good friend,” she cries defensively.
“Oh my god,” Ilgaz says, shaking his head back and forth, “Okay, but what about when I asked you last year what you wanted in a husband and in a marriage, and then literally started doing every single one of those things?”
Ceylin frowns, wracking her memory as the conversation Ilgaz was referring to suddenly makes a reappearance in her mind, and everything makes sense. The constant cooking for her, insisting she always picked out movies they watched, the gardening book he was reading at work, even Socks.
“Oh,” she says, her face burning with embarrassment.
“You’re lucky I’m in love with you,” Ilgaz huffs out, still shaking his head, and Ceylin’s heart soars at his words, “because I won’t be teasing you too terribly for this, but I’m definitely never again letting you get away with calling me ‘emotionally aloof’, either.”
“Okay, in hindsight, maybe the clues were obvious, but I guess I always just assumed that there was no way someone as good and perfect as you would ever consider someone so temperamental like me to be in a long term relationship with, and certain not someone to marry,” she admits, casting her eyes down.
She sees him walk toward her from the edge of her vision, and after he stops right in front of her, she feels a gentle pressure on her chin as he pushes it up with his pointer finger to make her meet his eyes again.
“Don’t you ever say something like that again,” he says softly, his gaze sharply contrasting his tone, fiercely burning into hers, “You—you’re everything.”
“I had only forgotten about that conversation from last year because I thought you were just joking around,” Ceylin explains quietly, “But, during it, I was sort of making things up to say, because I had already met the man who would make a perfect husband for me, I didn’t need him doing anything extra, so there was nothing for me to wish for.”
“Seriously?” Ilgaz chuckles, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear.
At this point, they’ve gravitated so closely together that she can almost feel the warmth of Ilgaz’s breath on her face.
“Seriously,” she confirms, smiling at him, “I did want to get a cat eventually, and I still do want to manage a full garden someday, but I don’t really dislike cooking that much, and I don’t care about picking what movie to watch all of the time.”
“So, you’re saying all of my efforts were for nothing?” Ilgaz asks, snaking his arms around her waist.
“I wouldn’t say nothing, ” Ceylin murmurs with a smirk, throwing her arms around Ilgaz’s neck, “How long?”
“Since we were sixteen,” he confesses with a shy little grin, “The exact moment that you proposed the marriage pact, actually. You suggested it, and then I don’t know… something just clicked in my brain. Why, what about you?”
“Oh, I really don’t know how long I’ve been in love with you,” Ceylin muses, “But the moment I admitted it to myself was in Manisa. We were twenty-three, and I was on my way to find you in the courthouse there, when I saw you talking with that other prosecutor, Ece. That was my first time ever seeing her, and she was standing so unprofessionally, annoyingly close to you, and then she started playing with the edges of your jacket. Obviously, that drove me crazy, since that’s my thing to do to you.”
Ilgaz’s smile had gotten bigger and bigger throughout her recounting that day in Manisa, and when she finishes speaking, he’s smiling so widely that Ceylin reckons his face must hurt.
“I have the feeling that nothing like that will ever happen again, because from now on, it’s going to be really obvious to everyone that I’m completely yours,” he tells her.
“So, when do we start?” Ceylin asks him.
“Hang on,” Ilgaz says, drawing back from her slightly to examine her face, “Is that a yes, then? Yes, you’ll marry me?”
“Who’s the slow one now?” Ceylin teases, and then slides her hands up to his hair, tugging him down to her lips.
He kisses her with hunger, squeezing his arms even tighter around her, tugging on her bottom lip. When they pull apart, they’re both slightly out of breath.
“As soon as you want,” he murmurs against her lips, “I have a set of engagement rings upstairs. Actually, the diamond on yours was originally from my mom’s ring, but I had a new one custom made for you. At least I know your ring size this time, and you can finally replace that peridot ring.”
She was overwhelmed by how sweet and thoughtful Ilgaz had been with the obvious care he had evidently put into their engagement rings, but the last part of his statement distracts her.
“Replace?!” she cries out, drawing back from him and placing a protective hand over her ring, “There’s no way in hell I’m ever parting from this ring.”
“Or not,” he says, grinning and gazing at her with such a loving expression, it nearly takes her breath away, “I also have a separate bank account for our wedding that I’ve been putting a little money in every year. Just in case you ever did really want to marry me.”
“Oh my god,” Ceylin whispers, and she can’t help but pull him in for another kiss.
“So, seriously, whenever you want,” he tells her when they pull away.
“That was a lot to gamble, since we weren’t even dating,” she comments.
“I was confident enough in my chances,” Ilgaz shrugs, “But, either way, it was going to be you or no one.”
“You’re really the last romantic, aren’t you?” Ceylin chuckles, the end of her laugh cutting off into a squeal as Ilgaz lifts her up with one arm and boosts her onto his kitchen table.
Their food is cold and unfinished by the time they finally get to it, though they both agree that the cost of delaying dinner was well worth it.
. . .
They’re twenty-nine years old when they get married, just a year short of their marriage pact deadline.