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The follow-up appointment was three days later.
Nox sat in the passenger seat of Deacon's car on the way there, arms crossed, jaw still mildly tender but functional. He had graduated from milkshakes to soft bread the day before, which Chase had celebrated with an enthusiasm Buddy found disproportionate and secretly endearing.
"You're quiet," Deacon observed.
"I'm always quiet."
"You're extra quiet. Brooding quiet."
Nox turned to look out the window. The town slid past — the gas station that always had one pump out of order, the diner with the hand-painted sign, the stretch of road where the trees leaned in close on both sides. He knew this town by heart now in a way he hadn't expected to when he'd moved in a few months ago. It had grown familiar without his permission.
"I'm thinking," he replied. "Not brooding."
"About?"
Nox said nothing.
Deacon glanced at him sideways. "If this is about the videos—"
"It's not about the videos."
"Because for the record, I took them down. Mostly."
"Mostly."
"The turtle one is still up but there's no identifying information and frankly it deserves to be preserved for posterity—"
"Deacon."
"Right. Sorry." He tapped his fingers on the wheel. "So if it's not the videos, what is it?"
Nox was quiet for another moment. Through the window, a woman was walking a dog that was trying very hard to eat a pinecone. The dog was winning.
"He said yes," Nox murmured finally.
Deacon waited. He had, Nox would privately acknowledge, a reasonable aptitude for waiting.
"I know I was high. I know it wasn't a real proposal. I'm aware it was — whatever it was. Embarrassing. But he said that when I actually ask, he'll say yes." Nox paused. "He said that like it was simple."
"Isn't it?"
"Nothing is simple."
Deacon made a small, thoughtful sound. "Maybe that thing is."
Nox had no response to that, so he went back to looking out the window.
…
Chase was at the house when they got back, because Chase was almost always at the house now — either actually present or leaving traces of himself, a jacket on the hook by the door, a half-finished book on the coffee table with a receipt as a bookmark, his particular brand of shampoo appearing on the shower shelf between Nox's things like it belonged there.
It did belong there, Nox supposed. He'd stopped registering it as out of place some time ago.
"How'd it go?" Chase asked from the couch, putting the book down.
"Healing well. Clear to eat normally in another few days."
"That's great!" Chase's face did the thing where it shifted into genuine, unguarded happiness — the kind that still caught Nox slightly off guard after all this time. "So by the weekend you'll be back to normal?"
"More or less." Nox dropped onto the couch beside him. "Deacon preserved the turtle video."
Chase made a face that was not quite remorseful enough. "In his defense, it's really—"
"If you finish that sentence with 'funny,' your shoes go in the freezer."
"Charming," Chase corrected smoothly. "That's what I was going to say."
"It isn't."
"It is. You were very sincere about it." He tucked his feet up under him. "What sound does a turtle make?"
"I will actually put your shoes in the freezer."
"Blah," Chase intoned, solemnly.
Nox got up and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and to have a reasonable amount of private time to be pleased about this — which was something he was still practicing. Allowing himself to be pleased. Letting it exist without immediately cataloguing the ways it might go wrong.
He was getting better at it. Slowly.
…
That Saturday, Chase made actual food.
Not the careful parade of soft things he'd been producing all week — the applesauce, the pudding cups lined up in the fridge, the soups he'd heated with a focused patience that Nox had observed and catalogued and not commented on. Actual food. Pasta, gluten-free, with garlic and olive oil and more parmesan than was strictly necessary, a salad that involved multiple kinds of lettuce like he was making a point, bread — his bread, the dense slightly-grainy kind from the one bakery in town that did it properly — toasted, with texture, requiring real chewing.
Nox sat down at the table and looked at it.
"You cooked."
"I did."
"You don't usually cook."
Chase shrugged, loading pasta onto plates. "I looked it up. It's not that hard."
Nox watched him set a plate down and settle across the table with the ease of someone who had always sat there — like the chair had been built for him, like this had always been the shape of their evenings.
"You looked up a recipe," Nox ventured, "because I can eat solid food again."
"Yes."
"You didn't have to do that."
"I know." Chase picked up his fork. "I wanted to."
They ate. Outside, the weather had turned proper spring — the kind that meant windows open and the smell of everything waking up. Nox could hear the neighbor's wind chimes and, faintly, some kind of bird that had opinions about something.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Always."
"When you said — what you said. About saying yes." He kept his eyes on the pasta. "Did you mean it in the sense that you'd actually thought about it, or in the sense that it just seemed like the right thing to say in the moment to a person who was very high and crying?"
There was a pause. Not an uncomfortable one. Chase had a gift for pauses that didn't collapse into awkwardness — he just let things sit, let them exist in the air between them, which was one of the first things Nox had ever noticed about him.
"Both," Chase answered. "But not the way you're framing it."
"What way am I framing it?"
"Like the second option is less true than the first." He put his fork down. "It was the right thing to say because I meant it. Both of those things are the same thing."
Nox looked up.
"I've thought about it," Chase continued. "I think about a lot of things, you know. The future and what it looks like. And you're in it. You've been in it for a long time." He picked his fork back up. "So when you asked if I could marry you via Deacon, which was extremely medieval, by the way—"
"I was incapacitated."
"—I said yes because that's what I actually think. Not because you were sad." He twirled pasta onto the fork. "Okay?"
"Okay," Nox replied, after a moment.
"Okay good." Chase pointed at Buddy's plate. "Eat before it gets cold. I put a lot of garlic in that."
"I can tell." Nox took a bite. "It's good."
"Yeah?"
"Yes. Don't look so pleased."
"I looked up a recipe. I'm extremely pleased. I'm allowed."
Nox ate his pasta and did not let himself smile, which he managed for approximately four more seconds before Chase said something about the garlic bread being structurally load-bearing and Nox lost the thread entirely.
…
Deacon came in at the end of the meal, looked at the dishes, looked at Chase, and raised an eyebrow. "You cooked."
"Buddy can eat again."
"Right." Deacon opened the fridge, retrieved something for himself, and leaned against the counter. "Did you use the right pasta?"
"Obviously."
"Because last time—"
"That was one time and I read the label wrong—"
"You were sick for three days."
"I know—"
"I'm just saying. Read the label."
"Deacon, I read the label—"
Nox put his fork down. "Are you two going to do this over dinner?"
A beat. Both of them looked at him.
"Yes," Deacon replied.
"Probably," Chase agreed.
"Wonderful," Nox intoned, and picked his fork back up.
…
Three weeks after the wisdom teeth, almost to the day, Nox's college cohort had a mixer that he was more or less required to attend.
He went. He stood near the snack table for twenty minutes in conversation with a woman named Priya who was writing a thesis on something she described as "the phenomenology of ambient sound in post-war literature," and he found, to his moderate surprise, that he actually had things to contribute. He made it through two conversations and a group discussion about thesis advisors before he registered that his phone had three texts.
The first was from Deacon: The turtle video got reblogged. I'm not saying I'm sorry but I recognize that this is happening.
The second was also from Deacon, thirty seconds later: 15,000 notes. Sleep well.
The third was from Chase: Deacon told me. I'm so sorry. Also hi how's the mixer?
Nox typed back: it's fine. I'm talking to people. 15,000?
Chase: apparently you really connected with the internet
Chase: the floor solidarity angle really landed
Chase: there's fan art
Nox stared at his phone.
Nox: I'm coming home.
Chase: the mixer is only half over
Nox: there is FAN ART
Chase: okay fair enough see you soon
He made it through another forty-five minutes out of sheer stubbornness, took Priya's contact information because she seemed like someone worth knowing, and then walked home. It was close enough, and the evening was the kind of clear and warm that happened maybe a dozen times a year in a way you could actually feel.
Chase was on the couch when he came in, laptop open, looking at something he closed quickly enough that Nox noticed immediately.
"You were looking at the fan art."
"No."
"Chase."
"I was looking at several things, of which the fan art was one small component—"
"Was it good?"
Chase looked at him. "What?"
"The fan art. Was it good."
A pause. "Some of it was really good, actually. There's one where the turtle is very accurately rendered—"
Nox sat down next to him and held out his hand. Chase, with the expression of someone who understood he had already lost this, opened the laptop and passed it over.
Nox examined the fan art for a long time.
"This one," he announced finally, pointing at the screen, "got the proportions right."
Chase was vibrating with suppressed laughter. "You're a fan art critic now."
"I have opinions."
"You're critiquing art of yourself."
"I have standards." Nox scrolled. "This one is wrong. My jaw doesn't do that."
"To be fair, your jaw was very swollen at the time—"
"My jaw has never done that."
"The turtle is cute though."
Nox looked at the small, carefully drawn turtle perched on what was clearly a cartoon version of his own head. The turtle was wearing a bow tie. "The turtle is acceptable," he admitted.
"I'm framing that one."
"You're absolutely not."
"I'm having it printed on a mug."
"Chase."
"A throw pillow."
"I will leave."
"A commemorative—"
Nox closed the laptop. Chase collapsed sideways onto the couch cushion laughing — the full kind, the kind that made his whole frame shake — and Nox looked at him and thought, with the clarity of something that had been true for a while and was only now being fully acknowledged: I am extremely gone on this person. I have been extremely gone on this person for longer than is recoverable from. This is simply my life now.
He was largely fine with it. He was working on being fine with it.
He put the laptop on the coffee table and let Chase laugh himself out.
"Sorry," Chase managed eventually, sitting back up. "I'm done."
"You're not."
"I'm mostly done." He wiped his eyes. "The commemorative plate thing just got me."
"It's a reasonable thing to be upset about."
"I would put it right next to the regular plates so you'd see it every day—"
Nox put his hand over Chase's mouth. Chase's eyes crinkled at the corners. Nox held it there a moment, looking at him — this ridiculous, warm, relentlessly cheerful person who looked up recipes and sat with ice packs and said yes like it cost him nothing — and then took his hand away.
"No plate," he pronounced.
"No plate," Chase agreed, grinning.
They watched something forgettable on the TV for an hour, Chase's shoulder warm against Nox's. Deacon appeared at some point, declared the fan art situation "a cultural event," pointed out that one of the illustrations had the wrong color palette for Buddy's eyes, argued with Chase about whether that made it better or worse, and eventually went to bed. The wind chimes next door carried on. The bird with opinions had, mercifully, gone to sleep.
"Hey," Nox ventured, during a commercial break for something he wasn't watching anyway.
"Yeah?"
He thought about what he wanted to convey. He thought about the pasta and the ice packs and the seventeen I love yous and the way Chase had said whenever you're ready like it was easy — like there was all the time in the world, like he already knew.
"Nothing," Nox replied. "Just. Hey."
Chase turned to look at him. Something in his expression shifted, the way it sometimes did — settling into something quieter, more attentive. "Hey," he returned.
"The mixer was fine."
"Yeah?"
"I talked to someone interesting. About ambient sound in literature."
"That sounds like you."
"It was." Nox turned back to the TV. "I gave her my contact information."
"Look at you. Socializing."
"I'm capable of socializing."
"I know. I'm proud of you."
"It's not an achievement that merits pride."
"I'm proud of you anyway." Chase bumped his shoulder gently against Nox's. "I'm allowed."
Nox let that sit. Outside, something rustled in the dark — a branch, probably, or the neighbor's cat, or the particular sound of a spring night existing quietly when nothing was wrong and the swelling had gone down and the fan art was, on balance, more accurate than expected, and the person beside you on the couch had said yes like it was the easiest thing he'd ever done.
"I'm thinking," Nox mentioned.
"About?"
"Things."
"Super helpful, thanks."
"I'll tell you when I've thought them through."
Chase nodded, not pushing. He almost never pushed — which was something Nox had needed before he'd known he needed it. "Okay."
The commercial ended. Neither of them looked at the TV.
"The turtle drawing," Nox began. "The first one. With the bow tie."
"Yeah?"
"You can have it as a phone background. Not a plate."
Chase looked at him for a moment. Then he smiled — the real one, the unguarded one, not the bright easy surface smile he deployed by default but the one underneath it, the one Nox had learned to recognize, the one that meant something had actually landed.
"Yeah," Chase murmured. "I'll take that deal."
…
The fan art situation did not resolve. This was, Nox told himself, entirely predictable. The internet was a container that once filled did not easily empty, and the particular combination of — whatever it was, the earnestness, the turtle logic, the floor sympathy — had apparently resonated with a specific and vocal portion of it.
Priya messaged him to report that her roommate had been crying laughing at the turtle video and to ask if sharing it further was alright. He told her it was already public, which was technically accurate. She replied with a string of emojis he didn't fully parse and then, unexpectedly, a link to someone's essay on the philosophy of floor solidarity, written with complete sincerity.
Nox read it twice and found it, against all expectation, genuinely interesting.
He forwarded it to Chase.
Chase: I'm framing this
Nox: that's a screenshot not a piece of art
Chase: I'm framing the screenshot
Nox put his phone face-down on the library table and looked at the ceiling and thought about the fact that his life had somehow arrived here: thesis-adjacent reading and fan art and a person who learned to cook gluten-free pasta and said yes.
He thought about what Deacon had offered in the car. Maybe that thing is simple.
He thought about it for a long time.
…
He bought the ring the following May.
There was a weekend trip to a larger town two hours north — a campus visit for a program Nox was considering. Chase had come along because Nox had mentioned it offhandedly and Chase had asked oh, can I come? with such unaffected hope that Nox had agreed before he'd finished processing whether he'd meant to.
He'd meant to think about a lot of things first. The ring was in a small shop off the main street, estate jewelry, and he'd walked past it twice before going in. The jeweler had been a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a beaded chain who had looked at Nox considering the cases and asked, without any particular judgment, "anniversary or proposal?"
"Proposal," Nox replied, and felt the word settle into his chest like it belonged there.
She showed him several options. He chose one that was plain and slightly unusual in a way that seemed correct, paid for it with money he'd been saving toward something else that now seemed substantially less important, and tucked the box into his jacket pocket before going to find Chase.
Chase was two streets over in a used bookstore, having found — in the way Chase always seemed to find things — a hardcover illustrated edition of something Nox had mentioned once, three months ago, in passing.
"Look," Chase announced, holding it up. "It's your book."
"I mentioned that once."
"I know! I remembered!" He was so pleased with himself. Unreasonably pleased.
Nox stood in the bookstore doorway and looked at him — lit by the particular yellow of old fluorescent lighting and afternoon coming through a dirty window, holding a book like he'd found something precious, which he probably had — and thought: he is the most genuinely, uncynically happy person I have ever encountered, and somehow I am the thing he is happy to see when I walk through the door.
One hundred and fifty-three years. He had existed for one hundred and fifty-three years in one form or another, and he had not met a single person like this one.
"Are you going to buy it?" Nox asked.
"I was going to buy it for you."
"Then yes."
They bought the book and walked back toward the parking area through a town that belonged to neither of them, in spring, and Chase asked about the campus visit and whether Nox thought it was the right program, and Nox talked through the research focus and the faculty he'd looked up, and Chase listened the way he listened — which was actually — and they walked past a fountain and around a corner and there was no particularly good moment in the staged or obvious sense, but there was a moment — Chase stopping to adjust something in the bag, turning back to Nox, starting to say okay, ready? — and it was that one.
"Wait," Nox interrupted.
Chase waited.
Nox took the ring box out of his jacket pocket.
Chase went very still.
"I've been thinking about it for a while," Nox began. "I told you I would. I know we're young — I'm aware that's an odd thing for me to say and I mean it anyway. But you said your answer was yes and I'd like to give you the chance to confirm that under non-anesthesia conditions." He paused. "So. This is me asking. For real."
Chase was looking at him with an expression Nox recognized — the real one, the unguarded one, the one that existed underneath everything else.
"My answer is still yes," Chase replied, his voice slightly rough. "Obviously."
"Obviously," Nox agreed.
"Like — was there actually any doubt—"
"I wanted to ask properly."
"You asked properly." Chase reached out and took the ring box with a care that was slightly disproportionate and entirely typical of him. He opened it, examined the ring, closed it, and looked back up. "This is the right ring."
"I thought so."
"How long have you been carrying this around?"
"Since this morning."
"This morning! We've been here all day—"
"I was waiting for a moment."
"You could have — we were at lunch—"
"I didn't want to ask at lunch."
"What's wrong with lunch?"
"Nothing. I wanted to ask here."
Chase laughed, a little disbelievingly, the way he did when Nox did something that landed outside the register he'd anticipated. "Here? In a random town we've never been to?"
"We'll have been here now," Nox told him. "That's the point."
Chase looked at him for a moment. Then he took the ring from the box and held it out with a kind of ceremony that was somehow also completely natural. "Then put it on."
Nox did.
"Okay," Chase exhaled. "Okay, yeah." He let out a slow breath. "We're engaged."
"We're engaged," Nox confirmed.
"I need to sit down."
"There's a bench."
"There's a bench." Chase sat. Nox sat beside him. Across the street, a couple was walking a dog; further along, someone's delivery had been left on the wrong step and they were working out the problem. The afternoon was doing what afternoons do.
"Deacon is going to be insufferable about this," Chase observed.
"Inevitably."
"He's going to say he knew."
"He did know. He drove us to the dentist."
Chase laughed again — real and warm — and reached over to take Nox's hand, the one with the ring, and held it. "Give me a second."
Nox gave him a second.
"I love you," Chase murmured.
"I know," Nox returned. "You told me seventeen times when I was high on anesthesia."
"I'm telling you again now."
"I know." Nox looked at their hands. "I love you too. In case that was unclear."
"It wasn't." Chase squeezed his hand. "But you can tell me seventeen times anyway."
"I'm not doing that."
"Not all at once. Spread them out."
"I'll think about it."
"That's basically a yes."
Nox looked at him. "Yes," he agreed.
They sat on the bench in a town that was now theirs in the particular way places become yours, and the afternoon continued its project of being an afternoon, and eventually Chase pulled out his phone and announced "I have to text Deacon" and Nox replied "of course you do" and Chase typed something, and three seconds later his phone made a noise indicating Deacon's response had been emphatic.
"He says he knew," Chase reported.
"I know he knew."
"He says — and I quote — 'THE FLOOR WEDDING.'"
"I'm going to kill him."
"He says the turtle video was 'the opening chapter.'"
"I'm going to kill him twice."
Chase grinned, pocketing his phone. "At least the turtle thing has a narrative arc now."
"It absolutely does not have a narrative arc."
"Proposal. Wisdom teeth. Engagement." Chase counted on his fingers. "That's an arc."
"That's three events."
"Three events is an arc. Beginning, middle, end."
Nox looked at him. "That's not the end."
Chase's expression shifted — the soft one, the underneath one. "No," he murmured, "it's really not." He lifted Nox's hand and pressed a kiss to it, just above the ring. "Not even close."
Outside the town hall, a bird had strongly held opinions about the fountain situation and was expressing them at length. The couple with the dog had stopped to let the dog investigate something philosophically significant in a hedgerow. The person with the misdelivered package had found a neighbor to consult.
The afternoon continued its project of being an afternoon.
"Ready?" Chase asked.
"Yes," Nox replied.
They got up and walked back to the car, and the day was unremarkable in all the right ways, and it was, Nox thought — squinting at the light off the windshield, Chase's hand warm in his, the ring a small new weight that would take some time to stop noticing — pretty much exactly how it should have gone.
He had existed for a hundred and fifty-three years.
He suspected the next part would be the best of it.