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The first time Asa holds his hand, for just a moment, Anthony believes in reincarnation. In love that utters its name like a spring welling up through time. Destiny, at the very least.
It’s only for an instant. And sure, when you study the universe, you learn things that make you wonder if you’ve actually got it all wrong, that make you feel the immensity of what you’ll never know. Sometimes, it seems to Anthony like he’s dancing on the edge of what he could possibly comprehend, even if he had all the answers in front of him. That is to say, Anthony Crowley has had such moments before, when he imagined that the explanation for everything is really so out-of-left-field that it must be, for all intents and purposes, magic. But he’s never felt that about another person.
The sensation is certainly more fleeting than Asa’s hand, which finds his about half an hour into their third date – a seaside picnic – and stays tangled up with him for the rest of lunch, Anthony’s faltering one-handed grip on his sandwich be damned. But he’s noticed it. And then it happens again a few hours later, at the end of said date, when Asa tugs him through the door of the bookshop (after hours, naughty) and kisses him in the dim lamplight of the front room, palm resting on Anthony’s heart while it does whatever the picked-last-in-gym equivalent of a somersault is. The fact that he was sort of expecting it gives Anthony the chance to dwell on the feeling for a moment, try to inventory what is going on. He decides that it is something more than attraction. And then Asa pushes him up against a bookshelf, at which point, to be honest, he pretty much stops worrying about it.
From then on, it happens all the time – the weird reincarnation thing, that is, not so much the bookcase snogging on account of his bad back – and at every occurrence, he is forced to draw the same conclusion. Anthony didn’t have an unexciting romantic life before Asa, and he fancies he knows what it’s like to be driven to distraction by a pretty face or walk on cloud nine at the start of a relationship. He’s not sure what to call whatever this is. There’s something about Asa, something he feels through his skin, sees in the back of his eyes, flowing outward.
Eternity and iteration. The things that matter are supposed to last – forever, if forever exists. But the truth is that no person has ever perceived forever or can account for its being, for what it means. Does love matter less because people die and, as far as anyone knows, the love goes with them? He and Asa weren’t young when they found each other: do they matter less than if they had been young, than if they had more time together? Might it be that all this bothers Anthony, deep down, and he just wants to believe that there’s more to their story?
“I can hear you overthinking again, you know.”
Asa’s fingers are carding through his hair. They’re in the cottage, on the well-loved lumpy couch that they bought from Ms. Sandwich on Whickber Street before they left Soho behind for retirement. Asa has been on the same page of Brideshead Revisited for about ten minutes now, and Anthony is lying back against his chest, eyes shut. He’s making a mental note to ask one of his colleagues in biochemistry if it’s possible for the human body to produce every emotion-altering chemical at once, and if perhaps they have any tips for what to do when this happens, so he doesn’t explode.
“I’m… trying to figure out something about time, I s’pose,” Anthony mumbles.
“If it could only be like this always,” Asa recites poignantly, smoothing a cool hand against his husband’s forehead. It’s nice, a slight balm on his migraine. “Always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe, and Aloysius in a good temper.”
“Yes, that’s it, that’s the whole problem in a nutshell. It can’t be like this always,” Anthony replies seriously, turning to meet Asa’s eyes. “But it feels like it has been. To me. It feels like we were made for always, and I don’t know what to do when one of us goes.” His voice chokes unexpectedly on the last few words, and Anthony winces.
The smile on Asa’s face is small but full of tenderness. “You know what I tell myself, when I get frightened?” he says after a fashion, resuming his gentle ministrations. “There is so much we cannot know. We have no reassurances about the afterlife, if there is one. I want to trust that everything will be all right, but…” Asa pauses, blinking away a tear before it forms. “But I do know that you are my other half, Anthony Crowley. My best friend, my dream. And whatever happens, and wherever we go when we die, we’re sure to be going the same way. Don’t you think?”
Anthony churns it over for a while, then manages to give him a watery grin. “I guess so. That only makes sense.”
A thing that ends does not cease to exist, it only approaches zero: so quiet, so infrequent, so dark that nobody knows it’s around. But it is also as inescapable as the air. After a while, it becomes clear to Anthony that there is a certain logic to this sensation he gets around Asa, but he hasn’t got the cypher. Holding hands does it a lot. Being in the bookshop, too. Angel-themed anything, strangely enough. (Asa was delighted when Anthony started calling him “angel,” but he never found out what lies behind it.) Driving together at top speed. And, well, the first time it happened at a Renaissance Fair had been bizarre. When they took Asa’s niece to pet goats at the zoo was probably the most mortifying one. During their wedding, and any time they have happened to be standing near a basin of holy water. When they saw the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. (Anthony contrived to get Asa to look at a picture of the painting online sometime later, to test his hypothesis. It worked.) Enough connections, almost-memories, to fill multiple lifetimes – a seemingly inexhaustible resource. He can’t make heads or tails of it, and he probably never will.
But just once, he gets close. It happens a few years into retirement, when the sad but not unexpected event of Derek’s death comes. The old man had refused to part with his shop to the bitter end. Nobody wanted the expense of keeping up the place, so Derek knew that it would go with him and had willed that Asa be given remit to take whatever he pleased from the stacks before liquidation.
This is how the pair of them end up standing in the front room, looking around for the last time. It smells sweet inside from the dust of slowly decaying pages. Everything is exactly, remarkably, as Anthony remembers it. But now an uncanny silence has fallen over the place, redolent of departed friends and vanished summer days.
“We’ll say goodbye, then,” Anthony murmurs like the words are leaving his mouth of their own accord.
Beside him, Asa nods. There are worry lines and dark bruises under his eyes: neither of them has slept much since they heard from Derek’s son that he was in hospice care.
“That’s where we met,” he smiles sadly, pointing down the aisle toward the astrophysics section.
“And it would have been just that, if Derek hadn’t told me to go after you,” Asa adds, squeezing his hand.
“Ah, he was a good man,” Anthony sighs. “But I think I could have come up with an excuse to swing around and buy another book from the cute bookseller.”
“Well, I certainly hope so. It wouldn’t even need an excuse, knowing you. Lord knows your office is still jam-packed, and you’ve donated most of your collection at this point!” Asa snickers even as he raises a sleeve to dab at his cheeks.
Anthony hums sympathetically. “You all right, Angel?”
“I seem to have gone a bit misty-eyed.” He shakes his head and draws in a fortifying breath. “All right. The world keeps turning. We’re going to say goodbye, and then we’ll head off and have a scrummy lunch at Nina’s before the drive home.”
Anthony turns to watch Asa while he takes in the details of the place. The emotion in his eyes is complicated, heavy with the loss, but also brimming with love for many happy years spent here. Asa raises his hand and blows a kiss out to it all. And then he looks at Anthony.
Asa kisses his fingertips and places them against Anthony’s lips. And just for a second, the world outside falls away, and a bewildering lightness fills Anthony’s body. A burden he did not know he was carrying inside him – a great and unexplained resentment, a sense of utter helplessness, heartache so biding it feels as though it’s eating him alive – it all fizzles out just as suddenly as it came on, leaving him with a bizarre sense of accomplishment. And as he smiles back at Asa, all is clear: now things are exactly as they are meant to be.