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Charles doesn't see Matthew for a while after the divorce-that-wasn't.
"You should talk to him," David signs, then helpfully points across the street where Matthew is peering into the window of a furniture store.
"You are an insufferable meddler," Charles returns, then stumbles as David pushes him in Matthew's direction.
"Don't make me put you on singles websites," David signs, then waves across the street and gets Matthew's attention, that insufferable meddler.
"Charles!" Matthew jogs across the street. "David, hello."
"You can get married now," David signs to Charles, and smirks. "Something to consider. I'll be over there," he signs as he beats a hasty retreat.
"Does he know I know how to sign?" Matthew asks.
Charles groans. "Oh, probably."
--
"How's Carrie?" Matthew asks over the pint Charles makes sure they get as soon as humanly possible. David texted him to say he'd gone home and no one would be waiting up, ending the message with two gratuitous smiley faces. Charles's brother doesn't do subtle.
"She's fine. She's back in America. New York," Charles says. "Kevin and Emily, too." He sees them at Christmas and gets them for two months over the summer. "She's getting married in June." Kevin and Emily are already calling Carrie's fiance Dad. The only thing that makes it bearable is that Charles, despite himself, likes the man. He wouldn't give the marriage even two years, of course, but when has Carrie ever done what he expected her to do?
"I'm sorry," Matthew says. "Joel invited me to his and Roger's self-uniting handfasting. It was a nightmare."
"Was that the one where--?"
Matthew nods. "Orange punch got everywhere. Scarlett is banned for life."
Scarlett hadn't stopped laughing for hours when she told him about it. From Matthew's expression, Charles guesses there's a lot more to the story. "What happened?"
"Before or after she told everyone she'd converted me?"
Charles chokes on his beer.
--
Charles talks to his children at least twice a week. He is horrified as he hears them slowly become Americans. What charmed him so much about Carrie is terrifying when he sees it reflected in their children.
--
Charles remembers Joel as a man who knows how to fill out a suit, which says more about his sexual preferences than he's entirely comfortable with. He meets Joel again about a week after he and Matthew start tentatively dating.
Joel calls him Chuck and pats him on the shoulder after he retrieves an old cookbook from Matthew's top shelf.
"Been looking for this for months," he chats happily. "Be seeing you, Mattie. Take good care of him, Chuck."
After he leaves, Charles sags against the door and stares at Matthew. "I thought gay men had better taste."
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet," Matthew chides.
--
What Matthew doesn't say is: I was young, I was in mourning, I was on rebound, I wanted someone who made me happy and didn't make me need to think.
Charles hears it anyway. He's known Matthew too long not to.
--
Fiona claims not to be surprised. (Matthew declares her to be projecting; she is conducting a strange threesome relationship with Scarlett and Chester.)
--
Somehow they have gotten the point in their lives between weddings. Everyone who is getting married is already married, sometimes more than twice. Everyone who is having children has already had them, with Angus going as high as five. They have not yet hit the slew of graduations, let alone the second generation of endless scores of weddings, this time on the parent's invite list.
For this reason, and, Charles maintains, this reason alone, David wants him to finally get married.
--
"Haven't I suffered enough?" Charles asks. "I was your best man, anyway, that should nearly count."
David is signing too fast for Charles to keep up, and he's kept up with a lot from his brother. He remembers fondly when David would make his points with fists as well as his fingers; back then, David hadn't been lecturing him on the importance of exercising your civil right to get a civil union. There was something to be said for being seven years old and short for your age. It was less prone to sibling ridicule.
"I left someone at the altar," Charles finally gives in and signs, "because you told me to. I'm not going to walk down another aisle just because you said so."
"She was wrong for you," David scoffs. "All wrong. Matthew's good for you. You're cute together."
Matthew taps him on the shoulder. "If I may?"
Charles nods, then turns to get something from the kitchen. When he's turned back, David looks crestfallen and Matthew looks like he just kicked a puppy.
"What did you say?" Charles asks afterwards.
"I didn't marry Gareth because it wouldn't have been a real wedding," Matthew says. "I'm not marrying you either. Same reason."
"Oh," Charles says, and that's nearly the end of that.
--
He could have married Carrie at any point. He didn't want to, but he could have. He'd never wondered what Matthew had thought of that.
Charles realizes, at half past midnight, that he's been a bloody fool.
--
"You don't believe in marriage, you stopped ten years ago," Matthew says to Charles. "You have two children with a woman you never considered marrying, but you didn't believe in putting that relationship down before god and man. And now you're with me and you can't get married and so now you want to?"
"I'm living as a gay man for the first time in my life," Charles replies. "I'm sorry if it's taking me longer than you to understand the mentality."
"This isn't a mentality, this is you being thick," Matthew says, but Charles has already moved on.
--
"Da's gay now," Kevin tells Emily. It's Emily's birthday party and Charles is still stumbling a little from jet lag. "That's why we won't have a step-mom. We'll just have three dads."
"We're not getting married," Charles tells Carrie somewhat desperately. "He says he doesn't like to make a habit of breaking the law."
Carrie pats him on the arm. "It's good to know you're still terrible at expressing emotions."
"What?"
Ted, Carrie's fiance, is some self-help guru who looks like a surfer and talks like a politician. He says, "Charles, I don't pretend to understand how deeply repressed you are, but have you tried talking to your boyfriend?"
"I talk to him all the time," Charles objects, but Ted just tsks and shakes his head.
"I need to find a publisher in England," Ted says to Carrie, "I could make millions."
--
Serena and David invite them over for dinner and announce that she's pregnant with their third.
At some point, Charles realizes, inertia will no longer be enough. At some point, his relationship will unravel from the sheer frustration of never moving forward.
--
"But you believe in marriage," Charles says. "True love, all that."
Matthew grunts and rolls over.
"I'm trying to make a point here. I'm trying to understand why this matters so much."
"And I'm trying to sleep," Matthew says. "You can analyze your failures in the morning and get back to me."
--
Charles can't remember when he met Matthew. He's tried, but gave up years ago. Matthew entered his life at university, that was how it was. He thinks, but isn't sure, that Matthew was a friend of his former flatmate, but his flatmate for the first four months at university was Parisian, and then Matthew moved in for the rest of their university careers, so that can't be it.
But however they met, Charles is suddenly surprised to realize, he's known Matthew for over twenty years.
Matthew's always been gay. He was up front about that, and then after graduation, he moved in with Gareth, who was too old for him but good for him anyway, and that was that. Matthew was gay. And Charles...Charles slept with him for a week at university and then forgot about it and they both never spoke of it. Charles wonders if Gareth even knew.
Charles is not having a crisis of sexuality so much as he's having a crisis of friendship.
"I think I've loved you for a long time," he says to Matthew. "But it simply wasn't important until now. But it's important now."
--
They get civil-union-ized on a Wednesday. Scarlett insists on kissing the grooms.
--
They don't live happily ever after. But it's fine. They both know happily ever after is a myth.
"Gareth used to prefer funerals to weddings. He said it was easier to get enthusiastic about a ceremony one had an outside chance of eventually being involved in."
-Matthew, Four Weddings And A Funeral