Chapter Text
Nick Nelson wasn’t convinced he wanted a stepdad.
Yeah, selfish. He knew. He’d never tell his mum.
Anyway, too late now, he thought, brushing his teeth, drying his hair, buttoning his shirt. And it wasn’t as if he was a child. Grown men aren’t supposed to be mummy’s boys.
He glanced at the clock, which mocked him from the faded blue wall, beside a Formula One poster hung there years ago, one corner torn off.
Ten-thirty. Shit. Mum had left long ago.
Despite his best efforts, his bow tie was still completely lopsided, his hair was sticking up in the back, his jacket was creased, and he couldn’t for the life of him find his stupid fountain pen.
He looked around, checked a random dresser drawer, in the hopes it would materialise. He didn’t think he could do today without it. In a last-ditch effort he shifted a small pile of laundry with his foot, then grinned. There it was.
He bent to pick it up, struck by the contrast between the scuffed honey floorboards of his childhood bedroom and the stiff, shiny dress shoes he’d bought just for today. He hadn’t been to a wedding since he was a little kid. It wasn’t really acceptable to hide under the table during a reception once you were twenty-one. Shame.
His phone buzzed.
Imogen: I’m outside when you’re ready :)
Fountain pen in pocket, he glanced in the mirror. Not terrible. He tried to feel happy about today.
At least David wasn’t coming. He’d made some sorry excuse not to leave his new job studying World War II history in America. Small mercies.
Nick resented that he was glad his brother wasn’t showing his face at his mother’s wedding, but that could be unpacked later.
Nick: Coming!
He turned the key in the lock, performing the familiar ritual of jiggling it around and praying to whatever gods were up there that it wouldn’t stick. Eventually the key came loose and, satisfied the front door was closed, he turned towards the street, one hand on Nellie’s leash.
His hair fluttered in the April wind.
Imogen stood leaning against her blue Mini Cooper, wearing a floor-length pink wrap dress and an enormous pair of sunglasses. Nick probably would have laughed at her if he hadn’t been so distracted by the fact his mother was getting married.
“There you are!” She smiled, then reached down to pet Nellie. “You put a bow tie on her collar? Nick, that’s so cute!”
“Yeah.”
She looked up at him. “You okay?”
“Yeah, fine.” He attempted an enthusiastic nod. “We’re gonna be late.”
“You clean up alright, Nelson.”
Once they were in the car, Nick stared out of the window, wishing he was back at Leeds. He’d give anything to be hungover right now, eating cold pizza and losing to his roommates at Mario Kart. He reckoned he could list about a hundred better ways to spend a Saturday than this.
Imogen, driving just slightly too far over the speed limit for his comfort or anyone’s safety, glanced over at him.
“Are we going to talk about why you’re acting completely depressed on the morning of your mum’s wedding?”
Nick sighed, but said nothing.
“Come on, you big baby. I only agreed to come because I thought it would be a good time.”
Silence.
“If you’re going to be in a mood all day because you won’t be your mum’s favourite boy anymore, I’ll drop you off and then go and have a lovely time at the dog park with Nellie.”
Nick scoffed. “Dressed like that?”
“Yes, dressed like this, Nicholas. I look fantastic. Everyone will just think I have somewhere better to be afterwards.”
He laughed through his nose. “Please don’t leave me alone in there.”
She looked at him again, and clearly saw the pleading look in his eyes. “Of course I won’t, idiot. It’s got to be weird seeing your mum marry some random guy.”
Nick smiled weakly at that. “He’s not even that random. They’ve been going out for years. And he’s a perfectly nice guy. I just never thought…” He felt like he might cry. This was ridiculous.
“You never thought she’d actually get married again.”
“Yeah.”
“Fair enough.”
He looked down at his lap. “He doesn’t deserve her.”
“Nick, I know you think she’s actually the sun, but you’re being kind of an idiot here.”
Sigh. “Yeah, I know.”
“He’s smart, and he’s hardly bad-looking, and you said he treats her well, and she’s happy. It’s pretty simple.”
“Yeah.” He was staring straight ahead.
She pulled up abruptly, left tires clipping the curb.
Nick started. “We’re not at the church yet.”
“Nicholas, look at me.”
He looked. Nellie panted softly from the back seat.
“You’ll be fine. So will she.” Imogen pulled her sunglasses down her nose to look at him properly.
“I know. Sam is a good guy. But so was Dad.”
“Sam doesn’t have France to run off to, though.”
He laughed. Properly. “You’re right.”
She nodded, started the car again. “I know.”
“Thanks for coming with me. I absolutely could not handle the thought of distant relatives constantly asking me if I’d found someone yet.”
“Of course.”
They sat in silence for a few moments.
She asked, “Have you had breakfast?”
“Um. No. Woke up late.”
They pulled into Tesco on the way and managed to arrive early enough to sit and eat their sausage rolls in the carpark.
The reception was huge. Relations aside, Nick had no idea his mum had this many friends. He’d heard a lot of “look at you, all grown up!” and “I can’t believe how tall you are!” from people he barely recognised.
He was glad to have Imogen with him. They made a good team. She was pretty, he’d been informed of how handsome he was by just about every older woman in the room, and they were excellent at fielding strangers’ questions about their own romantic life: “No, not engaged yet” - Imogen had stifled a laugh - “we’ve only been together four months.”
This was obviously completely untrue. They were just best friends. Everyone in high school had been convinced they were dating since Year Seven. They’d kissed, once, drunk on vodka lemonade and pressure to be conventional at one of Harry Greene’s parties in Year 11, then immediately agreed it had been a total mistake and never spoke of it again.
Nick didn’t mind taking advantage of the fact they looked like they belonged together. He would have done the same for Imogen.
“Got to go to the bathroom,” said Imogen.
Nick nodded. “Have fun.”
She rolled her eyes. “Dumbass.”
Suddenly alone, he took a glass of champagne from a nearby table to hide behind, back against the wall. Sam was holding Sarah on the dance floor as they swayed to Christina Perri’s A Thousand Years. Corny, but cute.
“Hey, Nick!”
He looked up, thoughts broken. “Tara! You came!”
She grinned. “Of course I did!”
He set his glass back down on the table. “Someone I’m actually glad to see.”
Tara’s eyes narrowed, taking in his face. He’d thought he was doing a good job of arranging his features to look relaxed and polite.
“You okay? You look tense.”
“Yeah. Just a bit overwhelmed.”
She nodded. “Must feel strange.”
He really was glad she was there. Tara was technically his ex-girlfriend, which would in ordinary circumstances make her a strange candidate for an invitation to his mother’s wedding. She and Nick had briefly dated in high school, and by the time she’d realised she was a lesbian and broken up with him, she’d bonded irrevocably with Sarah, an ex-dancer, over ballet.
“Uni going okay?”
As she asked this, a tallish, slim boy approached, holding two drinks. He handed one to Tara. “Here you go.”
He looked at Nick, and Nick forgot his own name.
Light tan skin, pale eyes that seemed to be their own light source, framed by long eyelashes and thick dark eyebrows, crowned with curly black hair. And cheekbones.
Nick didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone look that good in a suit.
Tara looked at him sideways. “Uh, Nick, this is Charlie. Charlie, Sarah is Nick’s mum. You two both went to Truham, I think, only Charlie would’ve been in the year below you.”
“Hi,” Nick managed. He did look familiar. He was much taller now.
Charlie’s lips parted slightly, revealing dimples like valleys for Nick to get lost in. “Hi.”
“Darcy’s got the flu but she insisted I come today, so I brought Charlie,” Tara explained. Nick wasn’t really listening.
Charlie smiled, and Nick looked down at his shoes for fear the wind would change and he’d be caught staring at him forever.
“Plus, I wasn’t sure how a whole room of fifty- and sixty-somethings would feel about me showing up with my girlfriend in a tux.”
Nick chuckled. “Yeah. I’m… not really sure how that would go down either.”
Somehow it was awkward, suddenly.
Charlie broke the silence. “So, Nick, what do you do?”
Nick wasn’t sure that small talk was much better. He coughed slightly. “Er. I’m studying teaching at the University of Leeds. Second year. Um, I took a gap year first.”
Very eloquent, Nelson.
Tara smiled. “He’s top of everything. And for some reason they gave him a rugby scholarship.”
He reached over to poke her. “Shut up.”
He dared to look back at Charlie, who just smiled.
Imogen returned, drink in hand. “Hi, Tara!”
“Imogen! How are you?”
“Good, thanks. How about you? How’s Darcy? Wait - who’s this?” She smiled at Charlie.
“Darcy’s sick, so I convinced my friend Charlie to come. Charlie, this is Imogen.”
Charlie nodded. “Nice to meet you.” His eyes slid back to Nick.
Why was the back of his neck so warm?
He was aware of Tara and Imogen exchanging looks.
“Er, I’m going to get another drink,” said Imogen. “Tara, can you come with me? I need to know how you got your eyeliner like that.”
Nick felt his heart rate double and tried to shoot daggers at Imogen, who just smirked at him and turned away.
Charlie laughed as they walked off. “I once let Tara do my makeup for a freshers party. She stabbed my eye five times but I escaped alive.”
Nick grinned. Tried not to imagine Charlie wearing eyeliner. Failed. “You should let her do it again sometime.”
Charlie blinked.
Nick realised what he’d said and felt his face flush. “Um. Sounds fun, I mean.”
“C’mon.” Charlie motioned to some nearby chairs at an abandoned table. “We can’t just hang around at the edge of the room like wallflowers all evening.”
Charlie hoped he was coming off smoother than he felt.
Nick sipped his drink, watching the dance floor. “God, I love old people dance moves.”
Charlie took the opportunity to look at him some more. He hadn’t actually changed very much since high school. Same brown eyes, sturdy build, lopsided smile. Just more filled out. And more freckles. He still played rugby. Charlie wasn’t ashamed to admit he found that hot.
“That guy over there, with the moustache,” Nick pointed to a man dancing on a chair near the edge of the dance floor. “He’s my mum’s best friend’s husband. Can you believe he’s actually doing the sprinkler?”
“That shouldn’t be allowed,” said Charlie.
Nick grinned. His eyes crinkled up and Charlie, heart fluttering, thought about running his finger along those eyelids.
“They had it right with the music, though,” Nick looked back at him.
Charlie looked away quickly. Well done, Spring. Way to make it obvious he’d been staring.
He composed himself. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s good!” Nick protested.
“Eurythmics? Really? And they were playing Enya five minutes ago!”
“What’s wrong with Enya?”
Charlie shook his head. “You cannot play Enya at a wedding.”
“Well, why not? I think it’s actually quite romantic.” Nick took off his suit jacket and hung it on the back of his chair, and rolled up his sleeves. Charlie’s eyes lingered involuntarily on his forearms.
“It just doesn’t work! You can’t dance to Enya.”
“Okay, fine.” Nick leaned closer to pick up a clean paper napkin from the table. Charlie caught a faint waft of sweat and grassy cologne. It was extremely distracting. “The perfect wedding playlist, then. Let’s make a list.”
With a fountain pen Nick pulled from his pocket (Charlie could not get over the fountain pen), he wrote down ‘Bruno Mars - Marry You’.
“No.” Charlie crossed his arms. “Absolutely not. Terrible start.”
“It’s a classic! It’s staying on there.”
Charlie huffed. “Fine.”
“Your turn.” Nick passed him the pen.
Conscious of the loaded topic of conversation — somehow he was building a wedding playlist with a guy he’d spent most of his GCSE years having a minor crush on — Charlie chose carefully.
‘The Strokes - I’ll Try Anything Once’.
“I don’t see it,” said Nick.
Charlie was a little bit impressed that Nick knew The Strokes. He gave him back the pen and emptied his glass. “So we’re even.”
Nick wrote ‘Oasis - Wonderwall’.
“Nope. No, no, no. No way.” Charlie went to snatch the napkin from Nick, at least just to change it to the Ryan Adams version. Nick fought back.
“I feel very strongly about this,” Nick laughed. Trying to get away, he made a pen mark on Charlie’s hand.
Charlie snatched his arm away, suddenly self-conscious again. He looked down at the small curved line, right over the soft part below his thumb, and feigned indignation. “How dare you!”
Nick took his hand. Charlie’s heart stopped.
Tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration, Nick placed two careful dots above the line. “There. Better?”
A smiley face.
“Maybe.” His heart started to beat again. Charlie thought about not washing his right hand for the rest of his life.
Nick nudged him. “Do another one.”
Charlie added ‘Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance with Somebody’.
“Finally something we can agree on,” said Nick.
Their eye contact lingered a little too long for Charlie’s comfort. He coughed. “Do you want another drink?”
Nick nodded. “Yes, please.”
When Charlie returned with two more glasses of champagne, Nick’s hands were covered in blue ink. So was part of the tablecloth.
“What did you do?” asked Charlie.
“My pen just… uh… exploded.”
He laughed. “Idiot.”
“Help, Charlie!”
“Come to the bathroom with me. I’ll get the doors so you don’t get ink everywhere.”
In the bathroom, Nick scrubbed his hands with vanilla-scented hand soap. “It’s not coming off!”
“You’re gonna be blue forever.”
“It looks like I’m wearing blue gloves!” Nick held his hands up on either side of his face.
“You can set some sort of fashion trend, maybe,” said Charlie, thinking privately that if Nick said jump, the world would ask how high.
“Or I’ll pretend it’s a tattoo.”
“Mm.” Charlie raised an eyebrow. “Intimidating.”
Nick glanced in the mirror. “Oh, fuck.”
“What?”
“It’s all over my shirt!”
So it was. Little dots of blue, in a spiral shape, stark against the white. Charlie bit back a comment about Nick’s shirt possibly being a bit too small, because it sat very tightly over his chest, but that wouldn’t be strictly relevant. Or warranted. Or appropriate, really. Instead, he dampened a paper towel with some water and dabbed ineffectually at Nick’s chest.
“Ah! That’s cold!” Nick wriggled away.
“Would you rather hang around covered in ink all evening?’ asked Charlie.
“You said I look intimidating. Everybody will just think I’m really cool.”
“If you say so.” Charlie heard the opening notes to Sweet Caroline. He took a deep breath. “Come and dance?”
“I can’t dance,” said Nick, smiling bashfully down at the floor.
Charlie shrugged. “Neither can I. Come on!”
Nick grinned. “Okay.”
Hours passed. Nick counted the time in songs instead.
Slowly, people began to leave, saying goodbye to Sarah and Sam, who sat in a corner, heads low, talking softly. Nick realised he felt lucky to witness that kind of intimacy.
At some point Imogen came up to him, to let him know she was heading home. Nick wasn’t even ready to consider tearing himself away from Charlie, so he said he’d walk home.
“If you’re sure,” she said, hand on his arm. “Text me when you get home safe.”
He’d given up reminding her that he didn’t need taking care of.
As she walked off Nick looked back at Charlie, who was staring fixedly down at his own hands.
They talked more, about university, and Sarah, and Ancient Greek epic poems — a part of the conversation Nick couldn’t quite follow, but he didn’t mind. Nick found out Charlie was doing a degree in maths with a minor in creative writing at the University of Brighton, where Tara went, and that he ran cross country on the athletics team there, and that he had absolutely no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and that he played the drums. This made Nick wonder absently what his shoulders looked like under his suit.
Nick told Charlie stories from his gap year, which was far less interesting than it sounded because most of it had been spent working in cafes and pubs in rural Australia, then eventually finding a local rugby club to play for in Brisbane and settling there for a few months.
“Why Australia?” asked Charlie. “Isn’t the whole country, like, full of spiders and crocodiles?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I just needed to be on the other side of the world for a bit,” Nick said after thinking for a moment. He didn’t mention the countless planned visits during Year Thirteen that his Dad bailed on hours before, or the way David had been with him when he’d moved back home to find a job after finishing university, or how he’d felt about the person he became after hanging around the likes of Harry Greene for seven years.
“I don’t even think I learnt that much over there. Like, about myself or whatever. And yes, I spent a month in far-north Queensland, which is literally crawling with crocodiles.”
“I’d like to see you fight a crocodile,” Charlie looked up at him through his eyelashes, voice distinctly flirty.
Bloody hell.
Once Nick had got over wondering why the back of neck felt so warm again, he replied, “Oh, so you want me dead, then? Those bastards are fucking lethal.”
Charlie sipped his drink and changed the subject, suddenly flushed. Nick’s stomach twisted slightly.
Eventually, after enough champagne, they danced to Billy Joel.
It was probably just too much to drink and not enough canapes, but looking at the soft curved shadows cast on Charlie’s face by the pink and blue lights, Nick felt distinctly lightheaded.
Nick waved off his mum and Sam as they left for their Menorca honeymoon the next morning, hangover barely concealed, hair hanging in his eyes. He made breakfast, then sat on the kitchen bench on the phone to Imogen.
“Are you serious? You didn’t get his number?” she said, voice bordering on shrill. “You were talking all night!”
“I don’t know.” Nick wasn’t sure why he felt embarrassed. “We were just… talking about other stuff.”
“You could ask Tara for his number.”
Nick shook his head, then realised Imogen couldn’t see him. “We only hung out at a wedding for a few hours. He’s basically a stranger. I’m not asking Tara for a stranger’s number.”
Imogen just sighed loudly, then changed the subject.
Nick felt like he had some kind of bizarre mental inertia because he couldn’t make himself think about planning some house party for Truham and Higgs graduates coming home for summer. Just Charlie’s hair shining purplish in the coloured lights.
He let Imogen talk, making noncommittal noises every so often, until his phone bleeped.
Incoming call from ‘Mum’
“Sorry, Imogen, I’d better take this.” He picked up the other call. “Hi, Mum. What’s up?”
“It’s Nellie, love. I forgot to mention before we left. Can you take her to the vet before you go back to Leeds, please?”
Nick frowned. Nellie looked up at him contentedly from her spot in a sunbeam on the floor.
“Why? What’s wrong with her?”
“She hasn’t been eating properly. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, but we’d better get her checked over.”
“You’re right. I’ll do that. Of course,” said Nick.
Once Sarah had hung up, he sat in the back garden and played with Nellie for a while. His mum was right. It was probably nothing to worry about.
Nellie was sixteen, though. He knew that was really, really old. But Nellie had been such a constant in his life for so long that it was hard to believe she wasn’t going to live forever. He buried his face in her brown, sun-warmed fur.
“Vet tomorrow, Nell. Sorry.”
Nellie whined.
He pulled out his phone, meaning to look for pictures of her as a puppy, but he opened his Photos app to a blurry image of Charlie, taken mid-laugh, mouth open wide. The lights flashed rainbow behind him.
Nick smiled and zoomed in on Charlie’s face before he could stop himself.
“Look, Nellie.” He scratched her between the ears. “That’s Charlie. I met him last night.”
Nellie licked the screen, then turned to Nick for nose kisses.
“Bork!” She gazed at him with liquid, intelligent eyes.
He picked her up and held her like a baby. “You reckon?”