Work Text:
London, 1931
They are in their favourite bar in Soho, with beers in front of them and their feet resting on top of each other underneath the table, trying not to think too hard about how at eight o’clock next Tuesday morning Jemma will be bundled on a steam train back up to Sheffield, when Fitz says it.
‘There’s no other way around it,’ he says, leaning back in his chair and looking up at her. ‘We have to get married.’
Jemma just about chokes on her beer. ‘I’m sorry, what did you just say?’
Over her shoulder, Fitz nods at the waiter, who brings them another round. ‘The only reason,’ he says once he has another beer in his hand, ‘that your parents want you to go home is so that they can parade you at their society dinners and find you a nice boy to marry you off to. Correct?’
Pulling a face, Jemma runs her fingers down the neck of her bottle. She had known it was coming when her mother visited her last month. Mrs Simmons had stood with her mouth turned down in the middle of Jemma’s shoebox-sized flat and had wrinkled her nose at the sound of the motor cars in the street below, letting her know in a pointedly loud voice of the excellent match Mrs Baker’s daughter from down the road had made with a perfectly boring, but perfectly respectable, banker whose father had served in a high position in the war office. Even so, it had been a nasty shock to receive the train ticket in her letter this morning.
‘Correct.’
‘And you don’t want to go home,’ Fitz continues, scanning her face for any indication that he might be wrong. ‘You want to stay in London and you want to write.’
Jemma swallows back the lump in her throat before saying quietly, ‘I do.’
Ever since she had received her scholarship to university five years ago, defying both her parents’ expectations and desires for her future, that had been all that she had ever wanted.
With a nod, Fitz takes another swig of beer. ‘So we get married. That way, your parents can’t try and force you to marry someone else and you don’t have to leave London and stop writing.’ He shrugs. ‘It’s the only way.’
Feeling her heart start to thud inside her chest, Jemma pushes down the feeling of hope his words are awakening in her and shakes her head. ‘Fitz…I can’t ask you to do that for me. It’s not fair on you.’
‘Well, neither is losing you!’ Glancing around the bar and seeing that people are watching them, he drops his voice and leans closer to her. ‘You’re my best friend, Jemma, and you have been since university. I don’t know if I could do this without you. I don’t think I want to do this without you.’
Biting her lip, Jemma has to fight to keep her threatening tears from falling. ‘You were an amazing writer before me, you know,’ she says thickly.
‘Oh, I know I was,’ Fitz replies, but behind the bravado there is sincerity shining in his eyes. ‘But you make me even better.’
She is just about to respond to this when the waiter tells them that it is closing time and asks them to leave. Jemma slips her arms into her coat and watches Fitz drain the last of his drink. He is right, she knows that. He is her best friend, and she doesn’t want to imagine what her life would look like without him in it. Which, she hates to admit, is why his suggestion is so tempting…
Glancing up, Fitz catches her staring. ‘Well?’ he says, and Jemma detects a hint of nervousness in his voice. ‘What do you think?’
She sighs. ‘I think that you’re drunk,’ she says, holding out a hand to lift him to his feet. Patting down the front of his waistcoat, she feels a sudden pang of how much she is going to miss him. ‘Ask me again in the morning.’
As she settles down to sleep that night, she genuinely believes that he will have forgotten all about it by the morning, and that the notion will forever reside in the back of her mind, a wistful dream of a life that was never meant to be hers.
She is quite surprised when, before the clock has struck seven the next morning, she opens her front door to find Fitz standing there waiting for her. He gets down on one knee, presents her with a round wooden ring from his curtain rail and asks her again to marry him.
And, just like that, Jemma Simmons finds herself engaged.
They get married the next morning at the first registry office they can find.
It takes Jemma two hours to decide what to wear, even though she repeatedly tells herself how ridiculous this is.
This is Fitz, she scolds herself, as she holds first her pink dress and then her yellow one up in front of herself in the mirror. Fitz, who has seen you in your sloppiest of clothes plenty of times. Fitz, who will probably turn up with a stain on his jumper and his hair uncombed. He isn’t going to care what you’re wearing.
And besides, she thinks, as she digs in her drawers for her laciest petticoat, this isn’t even a real wedding.
In the end, she chooses her blue dress with her black patent shoes, and on the way to the registry she picks a primrose from the verge of the pavement and tucks it behind her ear. Once she gets there, she is surprised to find Fitz already there, wearing what looks like a brand new shirt. Standing in front of the registrar, she notices that he has polished his shoes as well.
The process itself is fast, far faster than Jemma had anticipated, and before she knows what is happening she is signing her name on the dotted line. And then, she is married. To her best friend.
Standing on the steps outside the registry after it is over, both she and Fitz turn to one another and exhale slowly.
‘So,’ Fitz says eventually, holding out his arm to her, ‘ready to go home?’
The decision that they will both live in Fitz’s home is easily made. For starters, he actually owns his house, a small two up and two down near Covent Garden with a metre squared space of garden, but it is infinitely bigger than Jemma’s rented rooms and it has its own bathroom.
They spend the rest of the afternoon moving all her dresses and books and scraps of paper with lines of half-written poetry scribbled on them into the house. Jemma is astonished to notice how well they fit in, alongside his shirts and scripts and half-finished novels.
They encounter their first issue when they turn around in the only bedroom and realise the obvious.
‘Of course,’ Fitz says, needlessly, ‘there is only one bed.’
‘Of course,’ Jemma repeats.
She is just about to remark that it might not be so bad to sleep in the same bed, and remind him that they had done it before at university following parties that lasted too long into the night and left them both too drunk to stumble home, when Fitz tugs a blanket and a pillow off the bed and turns to go down the stairs. Jemma follows him.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Living room,’ he says, glancing back over his shoulder. ‘I figured I’d sleep on the sofa and let you, you know, take the bed.’
‘You will do nothing of the sort!’ Aghast, Jemma jumps in front of him and tries to tug the blanket out of his hands. ‘Fitz, you’ve just opened your home to me. I’m not going to let you turf yourself out of your own bed!’
‘Technically,’ he points out cheekily. ‘It’s our home now. What’s mine is yours, and all that.’
Rolling her eyes, Jemma swats at him. ‘I will sleep on the sofa. It’s only fair.’
This is nothing unusual or new, this battle of wills between them. Ever since the day they met, they have known the other is just as stubborn as they are and Jemma is reminded of this as Fitz begins to spread the blanket over the sofa, as though he hadn’t heard her speak.
Pursing her lips together, she waits until he steps back and then sits down on the cushions before he can, crossing her arms over her chest decisively.
Fitz groans. ‘Jemma…’
‘I’m sleeping on the sofa,’ she repeats.
He shakes his head. ‘If you sleep on the sofa, then I will sleep on the floor.’
‘If you sleep on the floor,’ Jemma retorts, ‘then I will sleep there with you.’
Fitz narrows his eyes at her. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’
Leaning back into the sofa, Jemma lifts one eyebrow at him in a challenge.
That night, they both sleep on the floor.
The night after that, it takes her only minimal persuading to convince him that they can both share the bed.
As the weeks go by, it does not take them long to fall into a distinct pattern.
Jemma rises first, slipping into the bathroom to dress whilst Fitz snores on, buried deep underneath the coverlet. By the time he finally trips down the stairs to the kitchen, she has already made breakfast, which they eat together, sometimes in a companionable silence if they are reading or in a flurry of words and sentence snippets if they are brainstorming.
The rest of the day is devoted almost entirely to writing. In truth, it is not quite so different from the stretch of seemingly endless days they had spent together in the university libraries, sitting at separate desks but passing one another hasty notes with half-formed ideas written on them every so often.
There is a familiarity to it, Jemma thinks, and yet it is something utterly new. Now, once they have packed up their stories and worlds inside their notebooks with bleary eyes, they do not go back to separate bedrooms and separate houses. Instead, they climb the stairs together and fall asleep in the same bed.
She begins to learn things about Fitz that she hadn’t known before. She learns that he has a particular spoon that he likes to slurp his soup from and that he will double check that he has bolted the doors before he changes to his pyjamas. Her memory is refreshed on what he looks like before he falls asleep, and her alcohol-addled memories are enriched by the sight of him tugging his shirt off in the lamp light, forgetting for a moment that she is already in the bed and watching him. She learns that he has a string of moles threading their way down the small of his back, like pearls.
But of course, he is learning about her too. The first time he sees her sigh with resignation on a particularly dark evening, and reach into the leather case for her spectacles to be able to read the paper, his eyebrows shoot up, even though he doesn’t mention it. He starts bringing a glass of water up into the bedroom at night, so that she doesn’t have to navigate the narrow steps in the dark for a drink. The morning after she unwittingly undresses in the bedroom, believing him to have been still asleep, he asks her cautiously where the scar on her hip had come from.
It is incredible, Jemma thinks, how you could be best friends with someone for so long and yet so much of them is still a mystery to you.
They have been married for three months when Jemma practically trips into the house one afternoon, her chest heaving as she throws her handbag onto the stairs.
‘Fitz!’
He emerges from the living room, a piece of toast between his lips and his feet bare.
‘What? What is it?’
Shaking her head, Jemma takes the toast from him and hurries into the kitchen to throw it in the sink.
‘Hey!’ he protests, and she raises one hand to his chest to stop him.
‘My parents are coming.’
‘As alarming as that is,’ Fitz admits, ‘it’s certainly no reason for me not to eat my lunch.’ He looks past her at the discarded toast wistfully. ‘When are they coming down?’
‘Ah.’ Jemma pulls a face, already turning away from him to close up the numerous books and notepads strewn across the kitchen table. ‘Well, you see, that’s the thing. They’re already here.’
‘In London?’
This nugget of information seems to throw Fitz, but not, Jemma thinks ruefully, as much as her next one is about to.
‘Yes, in London,’ she says, hurrying through to the living room to straighten up the couch cushions and retrieve the dirty mugs from the floor. Fitz follows her, and she presses the cups into his hands. ‘And they want to come here to the house and meet you.’
He gives a poorly concealed groan. ‘But they’ve already met me. Multiple times.’
‘I know they have. But not as…you know…’ She sighs, lifting up her shoulders and boggling her eyes at him. ‘My husband.’
She watches Fitz swallow hard, his grip on the mugs tightening slightly. ‘When are they coming?’
Jemma grimaces. ‘Um, seeing as I left them paying the cab that drove us here just up the road two minutes ago and that my father is a notoriously slow walker…I’d say in about twenty seconds?’
Fitz gapes at her, and not for the first time this morning she feels disgustingly guilty and a terrible person for springing not only one but both of her parents on him at such short notice. She is about to burst into profound apologies, when the sound of a rap at the door makes them both jump.
After a split second staring at him, as if she could somehow draw some strength from his similarly horrified expression, Jemma quickly steps past him into the hall.
‘Jemma,’ Fitz hisses, following hot on her heels, ‘what are we supposed to…I mean, how are we meant to…?’
She can only shake her head at him, unable to tell him quite what they are supposed to do either.
‘I don’t know,’ she says, pausing in front of the front door. Fitz stops next to her. His presence gives Jemma the extra pinch of confidence that she needs to take a deep breath, and turn to him with a smile pinned on her face. ‘I suppose we’ll just have to…act married.’
‘Right,’ Fitz mumbles, as she smoothes down her dress and reaches up to pat his hair into place. ‘Because we know exactly what that feels like.’
But, as she stretches out to open the door to her parents, Jemma feels him slip his hand into hers.
After a whirlwind week of visiting all the London landmarks with her parents and Fitz, and holding her tongue when they remarked upon the size of the house and the tidiness of the kitchen, a party at her father’s business investor’s house feels a lot like the final straw for Jemma.
She makes her way back into the dining room from the parlour, where the record player is churning out jazz music at a dizzying pace and where she has just escaped the arms of an old family friend, intent on spinning her so fast to the music that the colours around her started to blur into one.
But, of course, Jemma has to concede that particular blurring might have had less to do with the speed of the dance and more to do with the amount of champagne she has drunk already tonight.
In the middle of the dining room, she spots Fitz, still sitting at the table with his dinner jacket thrown over the back of the chair. She had spent most of that morning coaxing him into wearing the customary white shirt and black bow tie expected at a function like this and now, looking at him across the half-lit room, Jemma is exceedingly glad that she had put the effort in. He looks exceptionally handsome.
‘Hey,’ he greets her softly, as she approaches him. ‘Having fun?’
‘No,’ she grumbles, and, slipping an arm around his neck, she clambers onto his lap, kicking off her shoes and lifting her feet up off the ground.
Fitz protests weakly but, as she tucks her head into his shoulder, she feels his arm come up to hold her around her middle, keeping her steady on his knees. This close to him, Jemma can feel his pulse beat rhythmically through his shirt.
Over the past few days, this level of physical contact between the two of them has become easier and easier to initiate, in an attempt to persuade her parents that they are indeed a married couple very much in love.
It had begun with holding hands in front of them, and then they had started winding their arms around each other’s waists and trailing hands on their shoulders. Then it had progressed to dipping their heads together and brushing their lips so close to the other’s skin that they could almost taste it. In fact, Jemma muses, the only thing they are yet to do is kiss.
‘How soon can we leave?’ Fitz asks.
‘Soon,’ she sighs, nuzzling further into his neck. ‘Mum and Dad asked the taxi to come back for us at one, and it’s half past twelve now…’
He nods, and she feels his hair brush against her temple. ‘Hey, do you think we’re fooling them? Your parents, I mean?’
Jemma blinks, and it takes a moment for her to remember why they are needing to fool her parents, why her best friend is allowing her to be this affectionate with him, and she finds that she feels an unexpectedly sharp pang of disappointment in the middle of her chest.
‘Oh, yes,’ she says after a moment. ‘I think they’re completely convinced.’ She rolls her eyes at him. ‘Although, we both know they’re not exactly happy about it…’
Fitz snorts, and his hands tighten around her waist. ‘Yeah, well. It’s not like we care about that, is it?’
‘No,’ Jemma whispers. ‘It’s not.’
They stay like that, wrapped up in each other, for a little while longer, until Jemma thinks she is on the verge of falling asleep. When Fitz moves abruptly, she lifts her head, thinking he means to tip her off. He steadies her, one of his hands moving to her thigh to let her know he had no intention of that.
‘Jemma,’ he asks, quietly, ‘who is that man staring at us from the other corner of the room?’
Frowning, Jemma glances up without making it too obvious where she is looking. When she sees who Fitz is talking about, she groans.
‘Oh,’ she mumbles, ‘that’s one of Dad’s friends’ sons. Humphrey, I think his name is. Or maybe it’s Hugh. Complete prick and dull as dishwater. I think Dad was hoping he and I would get married one day.’
‘Hmm.’ Fitz follows her gaze, a little less inconspicuously. ‘He looks like a prick.’
‘Yes,’ Jemma agrees.
‘And he looks jealous.’
‘Urgh.’ She crinkles her nose. ‘I wish he’d stop looking at us and go away.’
Underneath her, she feels Fitz shift in his seat and he takes a deep breath. ‘Look at me, then.’
He says it so quietly, Jemma almost misses it, but she turns to look down at him anyway, her mouth half-open to ask him what he means. Her frown falls away, however, when she sees the look on his face, as though something inside him has been unlocked.
When he tilts his face up towards hers, Jemma closes her eyes.
The first kiss is soft and slow, almost lazy as their lips meet for the first time. Fitz’s mouth is warm, and he tastes like claret wine and cream. The sensation is so dizzyingly pleasant that Jemma finds herself sighing into him, her heart starting to beat just a little bit faster as his lips continue to press against hers.
When he moves to pull away, she slides her hand to the back of his neck and kisses him again.
This time around, they know how the other’s mouth feels, and so they are far more interested in understanding how they can make them move. Jemma feels Fitz prise her lips open to deepen the kiss and it sends a thrill running down her spine. One of her hands falls to his chest, the other twists up into his hair, bringing them even closer together.
She matches his pace kiss for kiss, her lips practically tumbling over his in her eagerness to explore every inch of them. The feel of them, the way they fit against her own, the way he is setting her pulse racing, is territory as unexplored to Jemma as the depths of the ocean or the furthest shelves of the library or the small of Fitz’s back underneath his shirt. She kisses him again, her teeth just grazing the inside of his lip. Fitz moans quietly, and his hand edges up the hem of her skirt, barely skimming the skin peeking out above her silken stockings. Every patch of skin that his fingertips touch feels as though it is being brought back to life.
The sound of a knife being dropped off the table makes them both shudder, drawing away from each other with a sharp intake of breath.
Jemma takes her hand away from Fitz’s chest, pressing it to her own instead, and feels her heart hammer against her ribcage fervently. Fitz’s own hand had left her thigh the moment they had pulled apart, and he is now holding it chastely against her waist, keeping her balanced but touching her as lightly as he can. He touches the back of his hand to his lips and blinks.
‘Is he still looking at us?’
‘Who?’ Jemma is still having trouble remembering her name, let alone the circumstances surrounding their kiss.
‘Hugh-Humphrey. Has he stopped watching?’
Flicking her eyes up, Jemma sees that the chair he had been sitting in is empty.
‘Oh. No, he seems to have left.’
‘Good.’ Fitz sinks back into his chair, and she doesn’t dare look at his face to see whether he is disappointed or relieved. ‘I didn’t like him being there either.’
‘That was an effective enough strategy, though,’ Jemma says after a minute or two, once her heart has returned to its resting rate. ‘Don’t suppose you could come up with another one to get us out of further parties like this?’
‘Ah.’ When she turns back to him, Fitz has a slightly sheepish look in his eye. ‘I, um, don’t think you need to worry about that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I was sitting next to your dad at dinner and when he remarked that the stuffed pigeon was a treat after eating your cooking all week, I might have said…’ He winces remembering, and rubs the back of his neck ruefully. ‘Well, let’s just say that I don’t think they’ll be inviting themselves to stay again.’
In that moment, Jemma has an overwhelming urge to kiss him once again.
She had hoped that, once she was sober enough and her parents had returned home, meaning that she would no longer have to spend her days draped around him, that the urge to keep on kissing Fitz would start to subside. Unfortunately for Jemma, however, the opposite appeared to happen.
As the days go by, she only wants to kiss him more.
It is not as if she is constantly conscious of it, but she finds the desire arising at various times of the day. When she wakes in the morning, with the scent of his hair on her pillow and his closed eyelashes just inches from hers. When she has a breakthrough moment with a line or a rhythm, and he dances around the room with her in delight. When they are sitting on the sofa together in the evening, and she has to fight to keep her limbs to herself, and not clamber across the cushions to kiss him senseless.
Once, when he brings her a cup of tea when she has been bent over her typewriter for hours, Jemma thinks that she is going to pass out with the effort it is taking her not to lean up and press her lips to his.
What only makes this even more unfortunate is that, after a couple of weeks, Fitz suddenly seems determined to do everything in his power to stop it from happening. It is little things to start with, things that she might not even notice if she wasn’t suddenly so hyperaware of what he is doing. He sits on the other end of the sofa to her, with a gap between them far larger than normal. When they are writing, Jemma will look up in surprise after realising hours have gone by and he hasn’t poked her to check a sentence for him, or ask her for a synonym.
Worst of all, one night about a month after the kiss at the party, she wakes up one morning to find his side of the bed stone-cold. On making her way downstairs, she discovers him asleep on the sofa, a blanket pulled over his knees and a pillow from upstairs underneath his head, having clearly spend the night there instead of next to her. Swallowing hard, Jemma pulls the blanket up to cover his chest and goes into the kitchen to make some tea.
She means to ask him about it, she really does. But every time the opportunity arises, the words catch in her throat and she has to bite them back, vowing to herself next time, I will ask him next time.
It’s almost funny, Jemma thinks to herself. For someone who spends so much time thinking about words, she can never find the right ones when she needs them.
The air inside the bar is hot and heavy, festering with beer and body odour. Part of that, Jemma acknowledges reluctantly, is coming from her. She has an embarrassing tendency to sweat profusely when nervous.
The stage is set up with a silver microphone, waiting patiently for her to step up to it and start to read. Glancing back into the audience gathered in the bar, Jemma quickly scans their faces. She recognises a few as regulars, some are old acquaintances from university, but most are complete strangers. Her heart sinks as she realises that Fitz is not in the audience at all.
The organiser of the reading clears his throat at her, and nods pointedly towards the clock on the walls, reminding her that she only has a small opening to read and that if she wants people to hear her poetry tonight then she had better get a move on. Setting her lips in a firm line, Jemma steps up to the stage.
‘Hi,’ she says cautiously into the microphone, and has to stop herself from wincing at how loud her voice sounds. ‘My name,’ she continues, taking a small step backwards, ‘is Jemma Simmons, and I’d like to thank you for coming out to listen to me tonight.’
The room in front of her is silent, and the table she had reserved for Fitz to sit at is still woefully empty. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, Jemma licks her lips and begins to read.
The poetry had started to flow just three weeks earlier, in a way that she had never experienced before in her life. Instead of snippets at a time she was writing full poems in minutes, the words flowing out of her in a stream that felt almost endless. After four days of writing, Jemma had filled an entire notebook with her words and was reaching out for a second. Within a week, she had filled that too.
When she had been approached to read tonight, the organiser promising her that a renowned publisher would be in the audience, she had sat down with all her books in front of her and chosen the poems carefully, pouring over them for hours. One or two she picked from her university days, several from the years since, but most from the last fortnight.
She starts with the university ones, trying not to cringe at the sound of her words echoing across the silent bar. Her fingers shake, holding the ivory pages in front of her and squinting to read them without her glasses. All of a sudden, the lines she is reading sound clumsy and badly structured to her ears, clichéd and tired. Jemma finds herself stumbling over the words, her face growing hotter and hotter.
She is just struggling to the end of the university poems when the door to the bar bangs. Her voice hitches mid-word and she looks up, along with everyone else, to where Fitz is hurriedly crossing the room to his table. His eyes are wide and apologetic as he takes his seat, but he smiles at her and offers her an encouraging thumbs up.
Swallowing back her nerves, Jemma straightens her back and continues to read.
Suddenly, she finds that the words flow easier now, and her voice grows louder and more confident as she lifts her face up towards the audience as she reads. Every time she feels her heart start to quicken, she finds Fitz’s face and watches him nod at her, silently urging her to go on, and her grip on her pages loosens again.
The poems are all but tumbling out of her mouth now, almost as fast as she had written them. Jemma can feel her pulse beating again, but this time out of exhilaration rather than nerves.
There was something utterly freeing about hearing your own words read aloud that enabled you to see things in them that you had never done before. For example, Jemma was learning that she had a habit to overuse enjambment, that she was overly fond of natural imagery and, most of all, every single one of her poems was about-
She breaks off sharply, swaying slightly on the spot as the realisation hits her. The beginning of her last poem dies on her lips and she closes her mouth. The audience obviously takes this as meaning that she has finished and they begin to applaud politely, but Jemma barely hears them. In between their tables, Fitz’s seat is once more empty and the door to the bar is swinging shut again.
She practically falls of the stage in her haste to follow him, almost colliding with an older man heading towards her.
‘Oh!’ she stumbles, her hands coming up to stabilise him but her eyes already drifting past him to the door. ‘I’m terribly sorry…’
‘Not a problem, Miss Simmons.’ The man smiles at her. ‘In fact, it was you that I was coming to see.’
‘Really?’ Jemma hops from foot to foot, her politeness reluctantly winning over her desperation to reach Fitz. ‘And, um, why is that?’
‘I was hoping that I could buy you a drink, perhaps we could talk for a while…’
Shaking her head, Jemma tries to step past him. ‘Sir, I’m flattered,’ she grimaces, ‘truly. But there is somewhere I really need to be, and I if I could just-‘
‘Would it change anything,’ the man interrupts, ‘if I told you I was interesting in giving you a book deal?’
Jemma freezes. She looks up into the man’s face and recognises him as the publisher the reading’s organiser had assured her would be here. For a moment, the prospect of what he is offering her flashes in her mind, the promise of seeing her words in print, to be read by hundreds and to exist in the world long after she was gone.
But then all those images fade, and all she can think of is Fitz.
‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry, but it doesn’t. I need to find someone…’
‘I understand.’ The publisher fumbles in his pocket and pulls out a card, which he presses into her palm. ‘But once you find who you’re looking for and if you change your mind, the offer is still open.’
Jemma nods her thanks, tucking the card into her purse, but her mind is already moving past him as she hurries to the door, hurtling at a thousand miles per hour towards something far more important.
Like how she has to tell her husband that she has fallen in love with him.
It is an unusually warm summer evening, but there is still a faint breeze in the air that rustles Jemma’s hair as her feet hit the pavement over and over again. She had hoped to find Fitz on one of the streets outside the bar, but he has walked further than she anticipated and she only just catches up with him as he is turning his key into the lock of their front door.
‘Fitz!’
At the sound of her voice, he jumps and his keys fall to the floor.
‘Hey.’ He flashes her a quick, startled smile as he bends down to retrieve them. ‘I, uh, didn’t think I’d see you back home so soon. Wasn’t there a party after the reading?’
Jemma shakes her head. ‘I didn’t stay.’
‘Why not?’ Fitz frowns at her. ‘Wasn’t a publisher supposed to be there?’
‘Oh, yes, he was.’ She waves her hand dismissively, eager to get to the real reason she had followed him home. ‘I did meet him and he gave me his card, but I…’
‘But you left?’ Fitz sounds utterly disbelieving. ‘Jemma, why would you do that?’
‘Because you had left too!’ Pushing the gate open, she steps up the garden path towards him. The lamp outside the front door, the lamp they always left on in case they came home late, gives off a faint orange glow, bathing his face in amber light. ‘I needed to see where you had gone, and why you hadn’t waited for me.’
Fitz blinks. ‘Just home,’ he says, gesturing behind him to the front door. ‘I’ve been really tired recently, and I didn’t want you to feel like you had to come with me, so I didn’t…’
Taking a deep breath, Jemma takes one final step towards him, realising that if she does not say it now then she never will.
‘I’ve figured it out,’ she says quietly.
For a moment, she sees alarm flash across Fitz’s face. ‘Figured what out?’
‘As I was standing up there reading my poems and looking out – looking at you – it just suddenly clicked.’ In spite of herself, Jemma laughs, the giddiness of the realisation catching up with her. ‘They’re all about you,’ she whispers, looking up at him. ‘All of them. Even when they’re not about you, they still are. Even if they’re not about you, they’re about things you’ve taught me, or places we’ve been together. You’ve crept into my poems, without me even noticing. And I think – no, I know, I know that the reason…the reason that you have, and the reason they’re all about you is because I love you.’
Her last words seem to fill the space between them, repeating over and over again in Jemma’s mind. Her heart hammers against her ribcage as she looks up at Fitz, his expression unreadable and his eyes dark under the porch light.
‘I love you, Fitz,’ Jemma repeats, just because now she has finally found the words to say they taste so sweet. ‘I’m in love with you.’
He stares at her for a moment more, before taking a shaky breath.
‘I didn’t think I could tell you,’ he murmurs.
Jemma frowns. ‘Tell me what?’
Fitz rubs at the back of his neck, the ghost of a smile appearing on his lips. ‘I realised it a couple of weeks ago. That is, I think it’s been happening for years without me noticing and I knew that something had changed after we kissed at the party, but I didn’t know what. And then, one day, I just woke up and I knew.’
‘What?’ Jemma whispers, her heart in her mouth. ‘What did you know?’
Fitz looks up at her and grins as though he had never imagined this moment would exist. ‘That I’m in love with you too.’
And then, before she knows quite what she is doing, Jemma has crossed the short distance between them and is kissing him like her life depends on it. Her hands come up to his cheeks, stroking her thumb against his cheekbones, and Fitz’s arms loop around her back to pull them even closer together, as if he could fuse them into one being.
The kiss is just as soft as she remembers it but there is a joy to it now that had been missing before, and as her lips move effortlessly over his, Jemma gets the unmistakable feeling that she has come home.
‘But why?’ she asks breathlessly once they pull apart. ‘Why didn’t you think you could tell me that?’
Fitz shakes his head, reaching out to take her hands in his. ‘I thought it would look bad,’ he confesses. ‘Me, saying we should get married so you can stay in London and then conveniently falling in love with you a few months afterwards. I mean, what were you going to think?’
Jemma laughs aloud at this, feeling her heart swell as she realises just how good her best friend is, how kind and caring he could be and how unbelievably lucky she is to be married to him.
Fitz drops his forehead down to rest against hers. ‘I didn’t want you to feel,’ he explains, ‘like I’d pressured you into anything. Like you were – I don’t know – obliged or something.’ He lifts his eyes up. ‘I would never want you to feel like that, Jemma, like you had to do anything or be anything you didn’t want to-‘
With one swift motion, Jemma brings her lips forward to kiss him again.
‘Fitz,’ she murmurs. ‘Please stop talking.’
With an eagerness that sends a jolt of excitement running down her spine, he does exactly what she asks.
It takes him a little bit of fumbling to open the front door with one hand whilst still holding onto her waist with the other, but Fitz manages it. They stumble clumsily into the hallway together and Jemma tips her head back to allow him to kiss her more easily, her arms looping around his neck as they sway on the spot.
Somehow, they manage to make up the stairs. Their kisses are becoming more heated now, their hands on one another’s bodies more urgent as they uncover more and more of each other that is yet to be discovered.
As she falls backwards onto their bed, something cool and hard and angular presses into Jemma’s spine and she breaks away from Fitz’s lips to give a soft cry and tug it out from under her. It is a manuscript she recognises as one of his, his most recent and favourite, tied together with a length of string, and she is about to ask him about it when Fitz takes it from her and throws it behind them onto the floor. Bending his head, he kisses her and Jemma finds herself gasping again, but this time for a very different reason.
‘I’ve been rereading my novel,’ he murmurs against her lips.
Chuckling, Jemma traces his jawline with her fingers. ‘That’s a funny kind of foreplay,’ she teases, before reconsidering. ‘Although, that’s not to say that I’m not into it, of course…’
Fitz groans, and buries his head in her shoulder. Apparently, he quite likes it there because he peels back the fabric of her dress and presses a smattering of kisses to her clavicle, making Jemma grip even tighter to his shoulders.
‘Not what I meant,’ Fitz mutters, but even he can’t keep the wide grin off his face for long as she brings her lips to his again, arching forwards to deepen the kiss. ‘I was flicking back through it before I went to your reading – which was why I was late, and I’m sorry for that, by the way – but I found something that I think you’ll find interesting.’
Jemma quirks one eyebrow at him and he smiles at her, before wrapping his arms around her waist and carefully rolling them over so that he is flat on his back looking up at her. In the light of the moon outside and the love in his eyes, Jemma feels illuminated.
‘It’s exactly like you said,’ Fitz whispers. ‘I don’t know how I didn’t notice when I was writing it, but as I was reading it, there you were. In every line, in every phrase, in every paragraph.’ He rubs his hands gentle across her bare arms. ‘Whenever I turned the page, it felt like I was reading you.’
Blinking back happy tears, Jemma leans forward to take his face in her hands and kiss him again. Fitz kisses her back, one hand winding into her hair to lock them together, while the other begins to fiddle with the buttons on the back of her dress.
With a deep thrill, she understands his meaning, and retaliates by pulling his shirt up and over his head. As she spreads her palms over his bare chest, her lips still tangled with his, Jemma feels Fitz’s heart beat against her skin.
‘I am so glad,’ she mumbles to him, ‘that you talked me into marrying you.’
She feels Fitz grin, his smile warm against her own. ‘Yeah,’ he whispers back, ‘yeah, me too.’
When he kisses her again, and Jemma closes her eyes as they become husband and wife in every sense of the word, it feels like a deeper promise than any wedding ring.
It feels like the ending line of a perfectly pitched sonnet.