Chapter Text
It was burning a hole in his pocket.
Not literally of course. For one thing, heirloom jewellery couldn’t literally burn skin. At least not the ones in his family. Another reason being that he didn’t keep it in his pocket. It was neatly tucked away in its box, hidden deep inside one of his shoes. His beloved had a bad habit of snooping in his drawers; digging out books he’d abandoned halfway through or flipping through his mail. She’d even taken to rifling through his underwear drawer in his closet. Not that he minded really; everything she found led her to questions he was happy to answer, sharing tiny parts of himself he’d almost forgotten existed.
So no. It wasn’t burning a physical hole. But he could feel it in his mind. Every time he looked at her. Every time she noticed, and she smiled back at him; sometimes shy as a schoolgirl, and sometimes with glittering eyes full of devious promises for the night to come. He cherished both.
He hadn’t realised how much he loved her until recently. He’d known he had feelings for her, and that those feelings had been getting harder and harder to ignore over the last year. Even when he’d blurted out a proposal, from the first to the last. It hadn’t been until she’d sought him out that night as he was packing to leave, her eyes red from crying and a letter crushed tightly in her fist. His heart had cracked at the sight of her, and he didn’t even stop to think before pulling her close and closing his bedroom door behind them. She was safe, and she was there, and that was all he needed to know in that moment. Gentle words of comfort led to whispered apologies - the first that either of them had ever given the other - which led to lips against skin, hands in hair, and clothes on the floor. When he finally awoke hours later to find her still there, he knew that he was completely and utterly and irrevocably in love with her.
They had one glorious week where they were never out of each other’s sight for longer than ten minutes, and never out of each other's arms for longer than twenty. If he could have lived the rest of his life like that, he would have died a happy man. The only thing that could have pulled him from her was a summons back home to England. Which is exactly what he received. He spent the entire trip craving her like an addict to a drug, spending every second that their waking hours overlapped on the phone just to hear her voice, and when he finally arrived home and saw her for the first time in seven days he tried not to weep like a baby in her arms.
The ring he brought back for her was burning a hole in his pocket. But he couldn’t say that he minded all that much.