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Tarquin is going to make them late.
Ashur isn’t pacing, but he’s close to it, his boots quiet on the carpeted floor of Tarquin’s apartment. He tugs his sleeve up and checks his watch — it’s only been a minute since the last time he checked. Still, he can feel his pulse jump up, his heart beating. “Quin,” he calls.
“Coming!”
When Tarquin hasn’t joined him in the next minute, Ashur sighs and turns towards the door, his hand raised, poised to knock. The door opens.
Tarquin has to tilt his head to meet Ashur’s eyes. He’s always had to, Ashur’s unbearably tall even before he puts on the nicer boots with a few-inch heels to them. Tarquin’s grumbled on occasion about it, about how it figures he’d go and manage to find the one man who makes him feel small when Tarquin is perfectly average height, thankyouverymuch. Ashur’s always smiled at him, dimples on full display, and kissed him until he stopped his grumbling.
Tarquin’s lips are turned down. His eyes are wet. “M’here,” he says and tries to brush past Ashur, stopping only when Ashur’s fingers curl around his wrist and pull him back.
“Hey,” Ashur murmurs. He cups Tarquin’s face and brushes his thumbs against his cheek. “Something bothering you?”
He loves Ashur. He really does. Dating in Minrathous is hell sometimes, even without being gay, even without being trans. Fuck, the fact that he has his pronouns in his dating profile bio usually turned enough people off. And Tarquin had made a rule never to swipe right for anyone who was obnoxiously altus in their profiles.
And then Ashur.
Ashur, with exactly four pictures on his profile, each carefully taken. No pictures of him at lavish parties in suits that cost more than Tarquin’s apartment rent. Just a picture taken just after a haircut, the curls of his hair particularly bouncy, and a glimmer in his eyes, the green flecks shining in the sun. A picture of him leaning against his car, which can’t be newer than a decade old at least — this one had been the one that made Tarquin squint at it. Ashur’s nails were perfectly manicured, usually a dead giveaway for an altus. A picture of Ashur knelt on the ground, a medium-sized dog with its front paws on his thighs and one ear flopped over.
It had been the last picture that made Tarquin reconsider. A candid picture of Ashur laughing at something, in a simple pair of jeans and a black henley, his hands shoved in his pockets. Tarquin knows now it was Dorian who took the picture, that Dorian has an eye for getting ridiculously good photos of his friends.
But he’d swiped right and Ashur had messaged him nearly immediately, a compliment about his eyes. He’d followed it up with a question about the book Tarquin mentioned reading on his profile, and then an apology for double texting, and well.
Here they are, three and a half years later.
Tarquin sighs and more deflates than melts into Ashur’s touch. “Not sure I’m ready for this, is all,” he mutters. Ashur smiles, something soft and warm, and kisses his forehead.
“If you’re not ready, then you’re not ready,” he says, as though it’s that simple. “I won’t push you if you think you aren’t ready. But if it’s just anxiety, then you asked me to not let you back out.”
And, yeah, he had. Three nights ago, when they’d been curled up together in Tarquin’s shitty bed, pressed together in the twin because he can’t afford to upgrade and he refuses to take Ashur’s money. Ashur’s arm lazily thrown over Tarquin’s waist, his head tucked up on Tarquin’s chest. When they’d first started dating, Tarquin had been anxious about this position, worried that Ashur would be turned off from it.
Even before surgery, Ashur had never said a word about his chest. He’d never brought attention to it beyond occasionally pressing a kiss to where his heart fluttered, occasionally running his fingers over warm skin to poke at the places where Tarquin squirmed, ticklish.
Now, Ashur traces the lines of his scars with a pleasant rumbling in his chest, almost like a purr. Tarquin wraps an errant curl around his finger and watches Ashur just breathe, tension eased away from his shoulders. “Come meet my parents,” Ashur says out of nowhere. It’s hard to hear, with his lips pressed to Tarquin’s skin, face tucked down. He repeats it again, more clearly, when Tarquin doesn’t answer right away.
“I…” Tarquin turns his head away, stares at the place on his wall where the last guy living in his apartment had clearly nailed something into the wall and the shitty landlord paint had already fucked right off. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Yeah?” He can hear Ashur’s smile even without looking at him.
“Yeah. When?”
“My mother flies in tomorrow. So, Friday? Friday night?” Friday nights are usually their date nights, the one day a week where Tarquin lets him cover the cost of whatever date Ashur’s planned and lets Ashur take him wherever. It’s always a toss up where they go, and Tarquin’s never not enjoyed anything Ashur has planned, from expensive restaurants to county fairs just outside the city to museum exhibits and fast food.
It’s not about what they do, Tarquin’s figured out, but the fact that Ashur works as hard as he does during the week and still takes Friday nights to plan something just for them. It’s the intentionality, as Ashur would say.
“Yeah. Friday night.” Tarquin lifts his hand from Ashur’s hair and scrubs it over his face instead. He’s clean-shaven for once, shaved his beard off in a brief moment of frustration with it, and he looks years younger all over again. Paired with Ashur’s comfort in the grey threading through his own hair, Tarquin knows they look like the very thing he’d been trying to avoid with refusing Ashur’s money.
“I don’t want a sugar daddy,” Tarquin told Ashur on their first date at a coffee shop near Hightown, down the block from Tarquin’s job at the Chantry archive.
“That’s good, because I don’t want to be one,” Ashur replied, tapping his fingers against his travel mug. A travel mug, because he buys coffee every day and he’d wanted to cut down on the plastic, he told Tarquin when they stood in line. Bleeding fucking heart, Tarquin thought with a degree of fondness that was not appropriate for a first date.
Ashur is the sort of man that comes around once in a lifetime. A cis man with emotional maturity, who prefers stability and open communication to shutting down and getting angry. A man who works unbearably stupid hours in the political field and destresses by volunteering at an animal shelter. An altus who doesn’t flaunt his money, wears it in quiet displays of wealth, who prefers to spend what he has on others, in a combination of gifts and acts of service.
Bastard, Tarquin thinks fondly, every so often. The perfect man, really, and Ashur still smiles the brightest when looking at Tarquin’s grumpy face, pessimistic and worn down by Minrathous.
“Quin?” Ashur prompts him back to attention. Tarquin groans and tries to turn to bury his face in his pillows without deposing Ashur from his chest.
“I’m gonna chicken out day of. Don’t let me chicken out.”
Ashur chuckles and lifts himself up enough to press his face to Tarquin’s neck instead, bared as it is by his attempts to hide. Ashur’s teeth scrape against his skin, where there’s a bruise fading from the last time Ashur had gotten carried away. “I won’t. Promise.”
Ashur kisses his forehead again, tender and soft, and smiles at him. “You are handsome,” he says quietly. “You are wonderful and kind and I am happy to have you in my life, whether or not you meet my parents tonight, or next month, or never.”
His eyes are wet again. Tarquin blinks away the tears and lets out a shaking breath. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s go.”