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Stephen doesn’t remember until four days later.
Every year for eight years he’s deliberately made sure he’s very busy on February 2. He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to mark the occasion. And every year it’s like trying not to think about pink elephants: for days, it’s on his mind almost constantly.
The day everything changed. The day he lost his hands, his career, most of his friends, and, despite the months that passed before it actually happened, the day that led to his entire conception of the world changing.
But this year, Tony asks him if he can do dinner on Saturday and Stephen checks the date and realizes it’s February 6th. “Oh,” he says, looking down at his phone.
“Does Saturday not work?” Tony asks, standing and collecting their breakfast plates. He’d made omelettes; Stephen had had to be very patient, but it had been good in the end.
“No, Saturday is fine, I just realized I missed the anniversary.”
“Anniversary?”
Stephen looks up from his phone and smiles at the sight of Tony washing the dishes. They have both a dishwasher and a service, and there Tony is washing them by hand. “Of my accident,” he says. “Nine years as of February 2.”
“That’s good, right?” Tony says carefully. “That you weren’t thinking about it?”
“It is good,” Stephen agrees. He huffs a soft laugh. “Too bad it’s not ten years. That would have been a little more poetic.”
Tony snorts. “I’ll take a happy ending over poetry any year.”
Stephen looks over at Tony, cheerfully cleaning up after a breakfast date, and thinks about what his life would have been like if he’d never had that accident. After the last nine years, it looks… boring. And lonely.
“Me too,” he says aloud.