Work Text:
The first time that Lizzie really considers the word “boyfriend,” it is due to someone else’s slip of the tongue.
She is meeting a repeat client for dinner, and when the woman stands to shake her hand, she peers around Lizzie and asks, “Oh, couldn’t your handsome husband join us this evening?”
Lizzie, to her credit, maintains composure. “Oh, no –”
William isn’t my husband?
He’s just my boyfriend?
We aren’t married?
As she searches for the polite way to clarify, she finds herself answering, “He has other plans today.”
She refuses to analyze her response.
The term boyfriend reeks of high school, of commitments made and broken on prom nights. It doesn’t seem to apply to the 31-year-old man sitting in boxers and a t-shirt and tube socks, wearing glasses and morning stubble and reading the business section as he eats monochromatic cereal.
Lizzie wonders if boyfriend was ever the right term for him.
“Yes?” he pauses between bites, spoon hovering, and raises his eyebrows at her.
“Nothing,” she laughs back at him as she shakes her head and turns to fiddle with the coffeemaker.
Boyfriend may not be right, but she cannot pinpoint what word is right. Partner? (too businessy.) Lover? (too TMI.) Beau? Suitor? (too antiquated.)
The other options? (too daunting.)
She isn’t quite ready to say them in her head, let alone aloud.
She can’t pinpoint exactly when she does become comfortable with those options.
Perhaps it is when Fitz announces that he and Brandon are finally engaged. Perhaps it is when Bing and Jane follow close behind.
But what really gets under Lizzie’s skin is seeing GiGi with her boyfriend. Whenever Sidney comes up from Sanditon, he and GiGi exist in a little fluffy bubble of cotton candy. Giggling. Sugary nicknames. Tickle fights.
Tickle fights, for pete’s sake.
She is thrilled to see GiGi so happy, and the couple is unquestionably well-suited. But Lizzie can’t help but see that what she and William have is beyond that; deeper and with a more-defined future.
After almost 2 years together, some of the novelty is gone. There is less frantic rawness to every aspect of their relationship.
What is in its place is bigger, better, more filling and comprehensive. It’s seeing his naked ass every morning, not just during intimate moments, but as a matter of routine. It’s him having a cup of tea waiting for her on the kitchen counter when she finishes her morning schedule. It’s the way he knows that she loves the smell of fried eggs, but can only eat them if they’re scrambled. It’s going to sleep together – once in a while – without having sex first. It’s planning future trips and holidays as a couple, rather than individually.
So, Lizzie wonders, if shiny and new GiGi and Sidney call each other girlfriend and boyfriend, what does that make her and William?
She begins perusing his old photo albums, ogling snapshots of William and GiGi as babies, children. One night when he is out of town, she slams an album closed at 12:30 in the morning, because she keeps gravitating back to a particular image of a toddler GiGi. The picture is on a beach, and the sun is setting. In this one picture, GiGi’s glossy black hair reflects the red sky above her. Lizzie can’t flush the image of a russet-haired Darcy child from her brain.
As she climbs into a lonely bed, she scolds herself. You don’t imagine future offspring with your boyfriend. That’s something you do with a husband. Or at the very least, a fiancé.
The new words burn where she has thought them, branded into her grey matter. “Fiancé,” she says out loud. She expects the word to float in the air, spin around, and slap her in the face. When it doesn’t, she shrugs and tries the next one. “Husband.” This one slaps her a little bit… but not hard enough to hurt.
And just like that, the fear fades. Husband. It is a good word.
Lizzie finds herself avoiding using the word boyfriend. At an odd dinner party where she is known and he is not, she starts with, “This is my b-“ but stops and introduces him as, “This is William Darcy.”
It was a spur-of-the-moment change, totally unintentional and unplanned. But, once it is out, hanging between them, she knows that she meant it as a hint. She wants him to hear the undertones, the reality that the old labels just don’t fit anymore.
She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t want to be disappointed because he is typically blind to hints and subtleties and innuendoes.
He is not blind this time.