Chapter Text
Stede spent about half the night wallowing.
Not bad, he thought, considering the revelations he’d had today, realising how monumentally he’d fucked everything up. He allotted himself a few good hours of wallowing time, thinking about all the opportunities he’d had to just go for it, replaying everything in his head. The times Ed had complimented his appearance and he’d thought he was just being nice. The times he’d caught Ed looking at him in a certain way, but he’d stopped himself from reading any further into it. The time he’d gone on a date with somebody else and then told Ed about it because he’d somehow thought that’s what Ed wanted!!!!!!! God, what the hell had he been thinking?! At least it provided him with plenty of material to flash back to as he wallowed, but as the evening dragged on, he decided that that was quite enough. Recounting his own idiocy wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Maybe he’d had the right idea this morning… something productive, that was bound to get him in the right mindset. So he forced himself out from under his blanket, and tried to pull himself together. He managed to tidy up a bit, wash some of the dishes that’d just been sitting in the sink for the past few days. He called Alma and Louis for their scheduled evening catch-up, listening to their tales of school reports and playground antics, and actually engaging with them. He even asked to speak to Mary afterwards, surprising pretty much everyone involved, including himself.
“Stede?” she asked cautiously, as soon as she took the phone over from Alma. “Everything alright?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, the words bursting out of his mouth before he could even think about saying hello.
“For… what?” Mary asked, sounding understandably concerned that Stede was about to inform her of some new catastrophe.
But, no. Just the old ones. He apologised for always being so distant, for dodging any attempt she made at forging a deeper connection, for pretending to fall asleep far earlier than he ever did half the time just to get out of talking to her. “That’s the real reason our marriage failed,” he said. “Well, that, and the other thing. The gay thing. But I don’t think we’d have been very compatible even without that. We’ve got barely anything in common, I don’t really care about art, and–”
“Stede,” Mary interrupted, at least sounding a little bit amused by this whole tirade. “What the hell brought this on?”
“Nothing in particular,” he said, because he definitely wasn’t prepared to tell his happily re-partnered ex-wife about the budding relationship he’d screwed up by not being honest about his feelings, and the one person he was totally unable to apologise to over the phone. “Just… good to communicate, isn’t it? Share our thoughts, let it all out? Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking, do you think I could have the kids stay over during the Christmas holidays? All this separation, Mary, it’s no good for anybody.”
“I… okay?” Mary asked, voice high. “I mean, yes, but we’ll have to talk about it properly–”
“Great!” Stede practically shouted down the phone. “That’s great, isn’t it – talking? Talking things through? I always advise it. Everybody should do it, don’t you agree?”
“Is everything alright, Stede?” Mary checked for the second time in this phone call, probably convinced that he was having a mental breakdown by this point.
And this was usually the moment when Stede would tell her that everything was perfectly fine. That he wasn’t upset at all by her calling his outfit a bit garish or saying that his model ships were cluttering up the mantlepiece. That the Badmintons weren’t bothering him at work at all and he certainly didn’t think about setting the building on fire with them inside of it every damn day. That he was perfectly satisfied with their marriage and their life and things were exactly how they ought to be, all while burying his feelings deep down and hoping she’d never figure them out. But that time had long since passed.
“No,” he replied simply, and it felt like letting out a breath he’d been holding for 20 years. “No, it’s not alright. But… I’m working on it.”
He couldn’t be sure, but in the quiet that followed, he liked to imagine Mary smiling over the phone.
“And you’re serious?” she asked, after a moment had passed. “About the kids? Because if you’re just asking on a whim…”
“It’s not a whim,” Stede insisted hurriedly. “I promise. It’s no good to be apart like this, it’s… I don’t want to ruin everything. Again. It's not too late, is it?” he asked weakly, admittedly a little afraid of what she’d have to say.
But he needn’t have been.
“No, Stede,” she replied gently. “I think it’s a good idea. It’s been hard for them, doing it all over the phone. They’ve missed your story time,” she added, with a chuckle. “Apparently I can’t do the voices.”
Stede suddenly felt his heart in his throat. “I thought they’d be too old for all that,” he confessed, almost shakily.
“They’re your kids, Stede,” Mary said, and for once, her voice sounded strangely fond as she said his name. “They’ll never be too old for stories.”
***
As soon as this phone call ended, with some almost unprecedented warm goodbyes and the agreement to organise everything properly soon, Stede practically ran down his stairs into the bookshop below, and began pulling every single one of his old childhood books off the shelves. He remembered all of them, of course, and where they were placed: some were definitely too young for Alma and Louis by now, and some had already been sold – he thought of Ed, reluctantly taking his copy of Peter and Wendy, promising he’d take care of it, take care of Stede… God, he’d been an idiot – but he saved the rest, bundling them all up into his arms and carrying them upstairs like he was robbing the place, hoping nobody walking by the bookshop this evening caught sight of the insane man frantically looting the shelves in the dark and tried to call the police on him.
As soon as his books were safe upstairs again, he threw himself down at his desk to take a breather. There, he reached into one of the drawers and dug out his notebook, the very same one he’d used to write up his personal ad to begin with. He wouldn’t have met Ed without this notebook. He wouldn’t have lost Ed without this notebook. Books held an awful lot of power in their pages, even this silly blue pad with its torn-out paper and scribbled-out words. With that in mind, he flipped across to a brand-new page, smoothed it down at the spine, and wrote a header in block capitals.
OPERATION: TALK TO ED (WHILE RESPECTING HIS BOUNDARIES)
There. If he could take steps to get close with his children again, hell, if he could patch things up a bit more with Mary, surely he could manage it with Ed. The key difference, of course, was that Ed was the one who’d closed himself off, and he showed no signs of reopening, which maybe cracked Stede’s heart in two a little, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him. He was a man on a mission, and that mission was to get his damn life together and win Ed back, no matter what it took!
This proved trickier than he’d hoped.
He began that night with a bit of brainstorming on how to actually see him again, but it was clear that wasn’t going to happen at Kraken Coffee, and short of stalking, he had no way of finding him elsewhere. And even if he did somehow bump into him (or seek him out in a totally normal, non-stalkerish way) there was also the possibility that Ed wouldn’t be interested in hearing him out anyway. That he’d written Stede off by now, as the oblivious idiot who’d fumbled him completely, and there was no way he’d give him the chance to try again. Stede tried not to think like that, but he couldn’t help it, because he knew it was possible. A lot of people wrote Stede off, and Ed had more reasons than most. Still, that didn’t stop him from trying.
He spent the next few days constructing an elaborate list of options, ranging from sending letters addressed to the coffee shop in the hope that Ed would think they were business related and open them, to actually disguising himself as a coffee shop inspector, fake moustache and all, giving himself a legitimate reason to have a meeting with the owner (this one was soon decided to border too much on stalker territory, or at the very least unlikely to actually work). Running short on viable ideas while between customers at the bookshop, he asked a surprisingly noncommittal Lucius for help – frankly, he’d expected a bit more enthusiasm or at least advice from the boy, but he just kept on with his vague maybe just wait and see what happens platitudes, which were hardly constructive. Perhaps he really did think that Ed was being unreasonable and it wasn’t worth trying to win him back, but Stede knew better than that. That said, he hoped Oluwande would at least be a bit more open, but it seemed that he had reservations of his own.
“Oh, I’m not the best person to ask,” he said when Stede asked for his advice, looking supremely uncomfortable with the whole thing. “I wouldn’t know. About… how to get a guy to like you, and all that.”
“Come on, now, I hear your partner’s wonderful,” Stede argued, because while he was sorry to have missed their grand introduction a few nights ago, he’d heard reports from Lucius that they were a very good match indeed, so surely Olu knew what he was doing.
“Yeah, but,” Oluwande faltered awkwardly. “That doesn’t mean I can help you with your thing. Everybody’s different.”
“Mmmm, soooooo true,” Lucius chipped in from across the room. “Olu, can you give me a hand over here? Can’t quite… reach this shelf.”
Stede huffed as he watched Olu (who, notably, was in fact shorter than Lucius) very eagerly joined him, presumably just as an opportunity to get away from Stede. This theory was only enhanced when the pair of them seemed determined to avoid him for the rest of the afternoon, flitting around the store, busying themselves with menial task that they could apparently think up that kept them away from whichever parts of the bookshop Stede happened to be standing throughout the day – it was, admittedly, the most work he’d ever seen Lucius do, so he shouldn’t complain, but he did have to wonder what had put all these ants in their pants. In fact, it wasn’t until the day was drawing to a close, with Olu already having left early to meet his partner after work, that Lucius actually deigned to speak to Stede again at all.
“Hey, boss, take a look at this,” he said, tossing something in Stede’s direction that almost hit him square in the face.
Stede caught it in alarm, and then, blinking rapidly, looked down at what he now held in his hands. Today’s newspaper. “What about it?” he asked.
“Funny you should ask,” Lucius said, “but I just remembered I was looking through the ads this morning–”
“Come on, really?!” Stede interrupted in frustration, because he couldn’t believe Lucius was bringing the personals up, after all the trouble they’d gotten him into! He went to toss the paper dramatically aside, when Lucius rushed over.
“Maybe you should think about taking a look,” he said.
“Lucius, this is the last thing I need to be looking at right now,” Stede said, close to crumpling the damn thing in his hands.
“You never know, your dream guy might be waiting for you in there,” Lucius pressed, to the point where it was actually a little bit mean.
Stede jutted his chin out. “I doubt it,” he retorted firmly, and tried to push past Lucius to get to the bin behind the counter, but once again the boy intervened, stepping back to stand right in his way again.
“Stede, just,” he spoke through gritted teeth, before smiling sweetly. “Humour me, kay?”
Evidently Lucius was not backing down, so Stede decided the only thing he could do was prove him wrong. Pursing his lips so hard that his jaw felt funny, he very pointedly flapped the newspaper open and sought out the familiar page. It felt as wrong as he’d expected, going back there now – traitorous, almost, when he knew full well there was only one person in the world he was interested in. “I really don’t know what you could possibly…” he continued to complain as he looked down, but his voice trailed off as his eyes were drawn to the unmissable ad right in the centre of the page that Lucius had circled in bright red ink.
DESPERATELY SEEKING STEDE
Similarly aged gay man of kissing height, salt-and-pepper/brown, seeking avid reader and snappy dresser for fun, romance and adventure. Must enjoy nature/theatre/the ocean, and appreciate the finer things in life. Anyone else need not apply.
Stede gaped at the words on the page for what felt like an eternity, mouth opening and closing like a particularly baffled goldfish. “Lucius, what… how did you…” he managed eventually, not quite a question, but close enough.
“Oh, yeah, so, turns out that Olu’s mystery partner just so happens to work at Kraken Coffee,” Lucius said, looking across at Stede with a wicked grin. “I know, like, what’re the chances? But yeah, they got me in touch with your Ed, I had a few choice words with him…”
“Wait, what did you say?” Stede panicked, because if Lucius had been remotely rude–
“Mostly that he was being an idiot,” Lucius smirked, “but that’s okay because you’d been an idiot first, so basically I think you’re made for each other and the pair of you should just talk it through or whatever. I did tell him to just come by the bookshop and see you in person, but I guess he thought you’d like this more, for some reason,” he said, waving his hand towards the newspaper.
Stede nodded, mouth dry, heart going a mile a minute in his chest as he thought about all of the ads he’d cut out over the years, looking for any similarities, any potential connections that could lead two people to one another, and now here was an ad written to perfectly match his own. “More romantic,” he breathed out.
“God, you’re really fucking made for each other,” Lucius muttered.
“Hang on, is this why you and Olu were being so weird?” Stede demanded, because it would definitely explain why Olu had gotten all cagey at the mere mention of his partner, let alone why the two of them had been flitting about all day.
“Yeah, he swore us to secrecy,” Lucius said, with a roll of his eyes. “Said it had to be just the right moment. He’s kind of a drama queen, actually.”
The right moment? Stede looked at the clock, and… of course. 6:05 PM. Just after closing. And for the first time since they’d last spoken, Stede at last knew exactly where to find him. “He’s in the coffee shop,” he said simply, heart pounding so hard now that he could barely hear his own words. “He’s waiting for me.”
“Yep, that checks out,” Lucius agreed, far too casually for what had to be one of the most monumental moments in Stede’s life.
Hell, there should be an orchestra, or maybe something happening in slow motion: anything cinematic. But perhaps that was up to him. And without another word, he darted towards the door with the newspaper clutched tightly in his hand, not sure he was ever going to be able to put it down – he wanted to cling onto this feeling forever.
“Remember, you owe me!” Lucius called after him with laughter in his voice, as Stede rushed out of the bookshop. “100 quid for the dream guy, 500 quid if–”
Either the door had shut behind him or Stede had gotten too far away to hear, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t care what was behind him, just what was in front of him, as he ran down the street and around the corner, newspaper flapping alongside him like it was trying to escape from his grip and take flight, but he wasn’t going to let it. He skidded to a stop outside Kraken Coffee, pausing to catch his breath so he didn’t wind up barging unceremoniously in through the door unable to speak. Through the window, he could see that the lights were on: that low lighting he had come to expect from their after-hours rendezvous’, which had been notably absent these past few days. Which meant that he was right, that Ed must be here waiting for him, and that set his heart off beating rapidly again, despite his best efforts to calm himself down. Concluding that it was ultimately a lost cause, he took a final deep breath, ignored the CLOSED sign staring him right in the face, and pushed at the handle. A rush went through him as the door opened, and he stepped into the familiar warmth of the coffee shop, but as he walked to the middle of the room, he couldn’t help but feel a little unbalanced. The lights may have been on and the door may have been unlocked, but Ed wasn’t behind the counter, and Stede’s heart skipped a beat this time, wondering if he’d made some kind of mistake, read things wrong again, wound up here when he wasn’t supposed to after all.
“Ed?” he called out nervously, taking another cautious step towards the counter, when he heard a voice off in the corner of the room.
“Looking for someone?” the voice asked, all low and rumbling, and Stede could burst open with joy at the mere sound of it.
“Ed!” he exhaled, in a mixture of happiness and relief, as he turned to face his favourite chair in the corner – just as he should have expected, a second chair was set up opposite, its back facing the rest of the room, but there was a familiar head of hair peeking up over the top, and Stede watched as Ed stood from the armchair, still with his back turned, and – oh, Stede would recognise that pyramid jacket anywhere. The promised replica from the movie, at last, and it looked fantastic, of course… but then Ed turned around, and his face was an even more welcome sight.
“Dunno if you saw the sign on the door, we’re actually closed,” Ed said casually, but the grin on his face was as clear as day, a grin that Stede hadn’t been sure he’d ever see again, and as Ed walked over and Stede gazed at his smiling face in the low light, he forgot pretty much everything he’d wanted to say to him. That was, until Ed finally stopped in front of him with a slightly expectant look, like he was waiting for Stede to speak next, which he realised he probably should, even if he wasn’t entirely sure where to begin. And so, in the absence of all other thoughts, he went for the obvious.
“You wrote me a personal ad,” he said, weakly jiggling the newspaper in his hand.
Ed looked down at it with a shy sort of smile on his face. “Yeah,” he said, “I did.”
“It’s lovely.”
“Learned from the best,” Ed chuckled, before pausing to scratch at the back of his neck a little awkwardly. “Your, uh… little bookshop friend told me you had a big stupid crush on me, or whatever.”
“He was right,” Stede said, wondering if Lucius had used those exact words, but deciding he didn’t care, because it was certainly accurate. “Mostly the stupid part.”
“Hey, c’mon,” Ed said, expression dipping into a frown. “Probably… wasn’t the best flirting tactic to help you find some other dude to go out with. Just wanted an excuse to talk to you. Kinda backfired.”
“Maybe we’re both a bit stupid, then,” Stede suggested, a smile playing at his lips.
“Nah,” Ed said, wrinkling his nose and shaking his head. “Smart as hell.”
Stede huffed out a laugh, surprised by how easy it was to talk to him now that they were on the same page. It was like they’d hardly ever been apart. “I like this,” he said, reaching out to graze his fingers against the sleeve of Ed’s jacket, eager to see it properly close up.
“Yeah?” Ed asked, stepping back and dutifully giving him a slow spin to show off the design sewn into the back in full detail. “Thought I’d dress to impress.”
And Stede was impressed – it was so clearly DIY in a way that he found utterly charming. He could imagine Ed pausing the movie at exactly the right moment to get a good look, gathering the right materials, sewing it all together and wearing it around proudly, knowing exactly how cool he looked. And then, all these years later, wearing it again for Stede. Although…
“Shouldn’t I be the one wearing it?” he asked, feeling bold all of a sudden. “Since you’re desperately seeking me?” It felt like a bit of a risk, to be teasing him like this so soon after… everything, but it was a risk that paid off, Ed’s face splitting into a wide smile.
“Yeah, alright,” he said, shrugging it off and immediately handing it over. “As long as you don’t rip it with those massive fucking biceps.”
Stede let out a little giggle as he removed his burgundy checkered blazer (autumn vibes, always) folding it over the back of the closest chair as he slipped into Ed’s jacket – it was in fact a little tight on him, especially around the shoulders, but he could feel Ed’s heat radiating off it, and couldn’t help but wrap it even tighter around himself, wondering if it would be possible to feel this way forever. Warm and snug and held. All at once, he needed Ed to feel the same way.
“Here, you can wear mine,” he insisted, picking up his blazer again and passing it over, watching as Ed, still smiling, put it on. There was something thrilling, he felt, in lending Ed his clothes. Giving him a piece of himself, just like he’d given him that book. Trusting him to keep it safe. But there was one thing he still hadn’t given him, one thing he’d come all the way here to say, so he might as well say it now. Reaching out, he rested his hand on Ed’s arm, and looked directly into his eyes. “I’m sorry, Ed,” he said, as sincerely as he’d ever spoken the words.
“Me too,” Ed replied, much to Stede’s surprise – but when he raised his eyebrows, Ed went on. “For avoiding you. And telling everyone else to avoid you. N’trying to get you to stay away,” he mumbled, looking down at his shoes, suddenly shy again. “Just… hurt, y’know?”
“I know,” Stede replied, as gently as he could, as he stepped in a little closer. “Thanks for… letting me come back,” he chuckled, turning to look at the empty coffee shop around them, this place they’d spent so many evenings together, each of them burned into his memory as clearly as what he was seeing before him now – which was Ed tilting his head up again, a fond look on his face.
“To be honest, mate,” he said, leaning in towards him, their noses brushing together as he spoke. “You never fucking left.”
Stede wrote Lucius a cheque for £600 the next morning.