Heartbreaker, a Heartstopper Story - Ch. 24

Gay Cuckold, Gay Erotica, +18, Voyeur, Cheating

The pub was called The Crossing. It sat at the end of the village’s only proper street, a squat stone building with a slate roof and window boxes that hadn’t been replanted since the previous summer, and until approximately thirty-six hours ago it had been nothing more than what it was: a quiet local with six taps, a fireplace that worked when it felt like it, and a landlady named Morag who poured generous measures and didn’t suffer fools.

Now it looked like a wedding venue. It was less a Pinterest-curated, someone-spent-ten-thousand-pounds wedding venue and much more like what would happen if a wedding had been planned by a group of sleep-deprived twenty-year-olds with no budget and no time. The ceiling was low and beamed and someone, possibly Darcy at three in the morning, had decided that every beam needed white pennants strung between them. The effect, now that they were mostly up, was genuinely lovely. The fabric caught the light from the windows and moved faintly in the draught from the open door, giving the whole room billowing quality, as if the ceiling were gently breathing. Golden fairy lights were wrapped around every column and wall beam, woven through the bunting, looped across the bar. The tables had been pushed to the walls to clear a dance floor on the old, uneven flagstones, and wildflowers were everywhere, stuffed into pint glasses and jam jars and a ceramic jug shaped like a Highland cow, the scent of them mixing with old wood and the faint smokiness of the fireplace.

The entire village of Thornfield, or what felt like it, had folded itself around this impromptu wedding and decided to make it work. Morag opened the function room without charging extra and produced tablecloths that smelled faintly of lavender and the 1970s. Her husband Callum, a man of approximately nine words per day, spent the morning driving the surrounding lanes in his Land Rover and returning with armfuls of wildflowers. Mrs. Argyll from the post office ironed every tablecloth by hand. Young Robbie from the farm up the hill brought a crate of his mother’s elderflower cordial and refused payment with a blush so fierce Charlie thought the boy might combust. The Campbell from the cottage next door lent actual upholstered dining chairs so Elle’s parents wouldn’t have to sit on pub stools. None of them had met Elle or Tao before Saturday night. None of them had any reason to help beyond the simple fact that a young couple had turned up wanting to get married and the village had decided that this was something worth showing up for.

It wasn’t really what any of them had expected to happen. When Charlie, Elle, Tao, and Isaac had piled onto the northbound train at King’s Cross on Saturday morning, they were running on nothing but excitement, four hours of sleep, and way too many of Aunt Fernanda’s caipirinhas. The plan, to the extent that a plan existed, was beautifully simple: get to Gretna Green, get married, cry a lot, come home. Charlie had imagined the whole thing on the train, staring out the window at the English countryside blurring past while Isaac dozed on his shoulder and Elle and Tao murmured to each other across the aisle. He could see it clearly — s pretty stone chapel somewhere in the village, old and small and perfect. Tao and Elle standing at the front, holding hands. Charlie and Isaac as witnesses. Late afternoon light pouring through the stained glass and painting colour across the flagstones. Maybe Nick, if the flights worked out, slipping through the door at the last moment. It would be simple and golden and exactly right.

Reality, however, was less cooperative. They did find the chapel. It sat just off the main road in Gretna Green, a small, handsome building with a grey stone front and an arched doorway that looked like it had been marrying people since before electricity was a concept. There were flowers in the window boxes. A noticeboard by the door listed upcoming events in tidy handwriting. It was, objectively, exactly the kind of place Charlie had pictured. The three of them — Charlie, Tao, and Isaac, because Elle had been firmly forbidden from entering on the grounds that it was bad luck, a rule Tao had invented on the spot and refused to budge on — burst through the front door with the energy of a small invasion. Tao was already talking before the door had finished opening, something about wanting to book a ceremony, today if possible, or tomorrow at the latest, and could they do late afternoon because the light would be better, and also did they do flowers or should they bring their own?

The registrar, a thin, grey-haired man in a cardigan who had clearly been in the middle of something quiet and was now dealing with three English boys who smelled faintly of cachaça, looked at them over the top of his glasses.

“Do you have an appointment?” he asked.

As it turned out, you couldn’t just elope to Gretna Green anymore. Not in this century, anyway.

The registrar explained it all very kindly. First, they would need to complete an M10 form — that was the marriage notice, both parties required to sign, available for download from the Dumfries and Galloway Council website or in person at this very office during business hours, which were Monday to Friday, nine to four. The completed M10 would then need to be submitted along with both birth certificates, valid photo identification, and any relevant documentation such as proof of divorce or dissolution of previous civil partnerships, should that apply. There was a filing fee. There was also a separate attendance fee for the registrar’s presence at the ceremony. A mandatory waiting period of twenty-nine clear days.

Charlie felt his smile dying in stages. They made their way out of the chapel considerably smaller than when they’d entered. The arched doorway that had looked so romantic ten minutes ago now just looked like a regular door. The flowers in the window boxes were still pretty, but they felt like they were being pretty at someone else.

Elle was sitting on a bench across the road, legs crossed, scrolling through her phone, looking up when she heard them approach. She was wearing a white sundress she’d bought at the train station, the only white thing she’d been able to find at short notice, and she’d bought it without trying it on because, she said, the universe owed her at least a dress that fit, and the universe had delivered, because it looked stunning on her.

“What happened?” she said.

Tao sat down next to her. He took her hand and Charlie watched Elle’s expression as the information landed, the forms, the fees, the twenty-nine days and waited for the disappointment, for the quiet nod, for the brave face he knew Elle was more than capable of producing. Instead, Elle started laughing.

It began small, just a hitch in her breath, and then it cracked open into something full and loud and completely uncontained, her head tipping back against the bench. She laughed until her eyes streamed, and then Tao started laughing too, helplessly, his forehead dropping against her shoulder. She laughed until Isaac, who had been standing there looking like he was attending a funeral, cracked first at the mouth and then everywhere else, and then Charlie was gone too, all four of them losing it on a bench in Gretna Green at eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning while tourists walked past giving them looks.

“Twenty-nine days,” Elle managed, wiping her eyes. “We couldn’t have Googled that on the train?”

“We were making caipirinhas on the train,” Tao said.

“I knew someone should have Googled it,” Isaac said quietly, which made them all laugh harder.

The laughter eventually ran out, leaving behind that warm feeling of four people who had just laughed harder than the situation technically warranted. Elle leaned into Tao’s side, her cheek against his shoulder, and looked out at the village street. The sun was doing something absurd overhead, blazing uninterrupted, a blue sky that Scotland kept locked away for eleven months of the year and then unleashed without warning on a single weekend in summer. A breeze came through carrying the smell of cut grass and something floral from the hills beyond.

“It’s so beautiful here,” Elle said, quiet now.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

“We could still do it,” Tao said.

Elle lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at him.

“The legal stuff — we can sort it out when we get home.” Tao’s hand tightened around hers. “But I don’t want to go back without marrying you, Elle. I don’t care if it’s official. I don’t care if the government of Scotland recognises it. I want to stand somewhere beautiful with you today and say the things I want to say to you in front of the people we love.”

Elle looked at him for a long moment. The sun was in her eyes and she was squinting slightly and her hair was doing six different things in the breeze.

“Where?” she said.

Tao blinked. “What?”

“Where are we doing it? There must be somewhere. A garden, a park, somewhere outside.” She looked around at the street, the hills visible beyond the rooftops. “I’m not getting married in a car park, Tao.”

Every phone came out at the same time. Charlie opened Google. Tao was on Booking.com. Isaac had somehow found a website called ScottishWeddingVenues.co.uk and hadn’t blinked in forty-five seconds. Elle was texting someone, multiple someones, from the speed of her thumbs.

Gretna Green was packed. It turned out that Elle and Tao were not the only couple who had looked at a sunny weekend in Scotland and decided it was a sign. Every venue, every garden, every approved ceremony location in the village was booked solid, Saturday gone, Sunday gone, the little courtyard at the Blacksmith’s Shop gone, the hotel garden gone, even the registry office itself had three ceremonies lined up back to back. Gretna Green in the sunshine was, apparently, the wedding equivalent of a sold-out concert.

“Nothing,” Tao said, lowering his phone. “Everything’s taken.”

“Same,” said Isaac. “There’s a cancellation at a place called the Gretna Hall Courtyard but it’s for next Thursday and it costs eight hundred pounds.”

“We could try Carlisle?” Elle offered, but even she didn’t sound convinced.

Charlie was scrolling with one thumb, zooming out on the map, pulling back from Gretna Green to see what else sat in the surrounding countryside. Little villages dotted the screen, scattered along the roads that threaded between the green and the coast. He tapped one. Nothing. Tapped another. A single B&B, no venue. Tapped a third — a place called Thornfield, sitting about twelve miles north of Gretna Green, barely large enough to register on the map. One pub. One tearoom. A post office. And in the image results, taken by someone on a walking blog and posted three years ago: a wide, open meadow on a gentle slope just outside the village, wildflowers thick at the edges, a low stone wall along one side, and beyond it the Solway Firth stretching silver to the horizon.

“Guys,” Charlie said. “Look at this.”

That had been yesterday. Today was Sunday, and the pub was almost ready.

The extra day had been Elle’s call. They could have done it Saturday evening. The meadow wasn’t going anywhere, Isaac had already started writing something on his phone, and Tao had been visibly vibrating with the need to make it happen before the universe changed its mind. But Elle had looked at him across the table at dinner, in this pub they’d only just found in a village they’d only just arrived in, and said she wanted her parents there. And Tao’s mum. She wanted them to see it. Even if it wasn’t legal, even if it was just words in a field, she wanted her mum and dad standing there when she said them.

Charlie pinned the last of the bunting to the beam above the bar and climbed down from the chair. The room looked good. Better than good, it looked loved, which was more important. He straightened a jam jar of foxglove on the nearest table, adjusted a tablecloth that didn’t need adjusting, and checked his phone.

Nothing from Nick.

Tao had called his mum from the car park at half ten on Saturday night, and Charlie had heard Mrs. Xu’s voice through the phone go from confused to emotional to organisational in eight seconds. Elle had called her parents separately, walking up and down the village street in her sundress, and came back with red eyes and a smile and said they were leaving first thing in the morning. Tara and Darcy, who Elle had texted from the train, were already somewhere on the M6 and had been sending increasingly unhinged voice notes for the past three hours.

Nick’s last message was from six hours ago, sent from what Charlie assumed was somewhere over the Atlantic: On my way. Don’t let them start without me. Before that, a photo of an airport departure board at LAX, a red-eye to Heathrow circled in marker, timestamped two in the morning California time. Before that, a selfie, Nick and Harp crammed into plastic seats at the gate, Harp throwing a peace sign, because of course Harp would miss a party, and Nick looking exhausted and completely determined.

He was coming. He’d said he was coming. The flight would have landed at Heathrow by now, maybe an hour ago, and then there was the connection to — Glasgow? Edinburgh? Charlie couldn’t remember which Nick had booked — and then the drive south to Thornfield, which was at least two hours on roads that Charlie suspected were not built for speed.

“What do you think, sweetheart?”

Mrs. Xu was standing in front of the main table, hands clasped at her waist. The table was covered in the best linen Morag had been able to produce and laden with wildflowers in every shade the countryside had offered up. White, yellow, purple, a few stubborn pinks that hadn’t been part of any plan but had insisted on being included. And in the centre of it all, the cake. It was the only thing in the pub that didn’t look improvised. Two tiers, small, but beautiful. The icing was smooth and white with tiny hand-piped wildflowers climbing one side, and on the top, two miniature figures stood together: a Black girl in white, her hair sculpted into a cloud of tiny curls, and a boy with dark hair in a navy suit, his painted face tilted toward hers. Mrs. Beattie from the tearoom had produced it in under four hours that morning, and Charlie still hadn’t worked out how.

“I think it’s perfect,” Charlie said, walking over to stand beside her.

“It really is, isn’t it?” she said, and right on cue, her eyes filled. She blinked rapidly, one hand fluttering up to her cheekbone. “Oh, no. No, no, no. I have already redone this makeup twice and I am not doing it a third time.” She fanned her face with both hands. “I’m sorry, darling. Ignore me.”

Charlie laughed softly. “You don’t need to apologise. I’ve been on the verge of it all morning.”

She let out a shaky breath and smiled at him sideways. She was smaller than him now — when had that happened? He remembered being twelve, thirteen, standing in the Xu kitchen while she reached up to ruffle his hair. Now he could see the top of her head.

“I’ve never seen him this happy,” she said, quieter. “Not even when he got into film school. Not even close.”

She looked around the room and shook her head gently.

“It’s a pub in the middle of nowhere and it’s the most beautiful wedding I’ve ever seen. How does that make any sense?”

“It doesn’t have to,” Charlie said.

“No,” she agreed. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

She was quiet for a moment, still looking at the cake, at the two little figures on top with their painted hands pressed together. Then she turned to Charlie, and her expression shifted into something fond and pointed and very specifically maternal.

“When you and Nick do this,” she said, “please, give us old folks more than forty-eight hours’ notice. My heart cannot survive another one of these.”

Charlie smiled. When. Not if. Mrs. Xu had said it like a fact, like a date already circled on a calendar that just hadn’t been printed yet, and Charlie loved her for it because that was exactly how he’d been thinking about it too.

All morning, while he’d been pinning bunting to beams and straightening tablecloths and arguing with Darcy about whether fairy lights should spiral around the columns or zigzag between them, his mind had been elsewhere. Drifting to a meadow not too different from the one up the hill behind the pub, wildflowers at the margins, the morning light doing something soft and golden across the grass. Nick standing opposite him. Nick in a cream linen suit, no tie because it would be a morning wedding and ties were too formal and anyway Nick hated them, the collar open just enough to show his collarbones, his hair a mess of blond curls because Charlie would forbid him from cutting it beforehand. Their friends around them. Their families. Tori scowling in the front row because she was trying not to cry. Harp definitely already crying. Mum holding Dad’s hands. Mrs. Xu with her camera.

But none of them would matter, not really, because Charlie and Nick would be holding hands and looking at each other and the rest of the world would go soft and distant, the way it always did when Nick looked at him properly, and Charlie would say the words and mean them with every cell in his body. Nick would say them back, and death could go fuck itself because nothing, not time, not distance, not the worst mistake either of them could make, was going to outlast what they had. Charlie believed that. He believed it the way he believed in gravity, in the turning of the earth, in the absolute certainty that the sun would come up tomorrow and Nick Nelson would love him when it did.

“I’ll give you at least a week,” Charlie told Mrs. Xu. “Two, if you’re lucky.”

She laughed and squeezed his arm, and Charlie went to find more drawing pins.

The last drawing pin went into the beam above the door at half eleven. Charlie stepped down from the chair, wiped his hands on his jeans, and looked around the room. It was done. Darcy was arranging the last of the chairs in a rough semicircle near the fireplace, humming something under her breath. Tara was at the bar with Morag, going over the drinks for the afternoon, a notepad between them. Elle’s dad was outside with Callum, doing something mysterious with a trestle table and a spirit level.

Charlie checked his phone. No new messages.

“I’m going to shower,” he told Darcy, who gave him a thumbs-up without looking away from whatever geometry she was performing with the chair arrangement. “Back in twenty.”

The room Morag had given them was on the first floor, at the end of a narrow corridor that creaked in at least three places and smelled faintly of lavender and old plaster. It was small, just a double bed with a brass frame, a window that looked out over the back garden and beyond it the rising green of the hills, a radiator that was off because for once in Scotland’s history it didn’t need to be on. Charlie’s bag was open on the bed, clothes spilling out of it in every direction — he’d packed in nine minutes and it showed. The bathroom was tiny, barely any room to turn around, the showerhead mounted low enough that Charlie had to duck slightly, the tiles a shade of green that had probably been fashionable in 1987. He stood under the water and let it run over his hair and down his face and tried not to think about flight times.

He thought about flight times.

Heathrow to Glasgow was roughly an hour and a half. If Nick’s red-eye had landed at five, and he’d caught a seven o’clock connection, he’d have been in Glasgow by half eight. Then the drive, two hours, maybe more, depending on the roads. That put him in Thornfield around half ten, eleven at the latest. The ceremony was at noon. That was fine, more than enough time… unless the connection was delayed. Unless there wasn’t a seven o’clock and Nick was on the eight o’clock thirty instead. Unless he’d landed at Heathrow and the queue at passport control was queue that moved at the speed of continental drift. Unless the rental car place didn’t have his booking, or the roads were closed, or he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere in the Borders and was currently driving in circles around Lockerbie wondering why his GPS had stopped talking to him.

Charlie turned the water off and stood dripping in the tiny bathroom, one hand on the wall, steam curling around him. After drying-off, he put on the clothes he’d brought, a white linen shirt, slightly too big, that he’d stolen from Nick’s side of the wardrobe two years ago and never given back, and cream trousers that he’d ironed that morning using the travel iron Tara had somehow thought to bring. His curls were damp and behaving for once, falling in loose dark spirals rather than their usual anarchic sprawl, but his eyes looked tired.

He picked up the phone. Nothing.

No news is good news, he told himself. No news means Nick was somewhere between Glasgow and here, no reception in the hills. It means he’s coming. The silence isn’t absence, it’s distance being closed, the gap between them shrinking with every minute that passes without a message, because you don’t text someone when you’re almost there.

Charlie put the phone in his pocket, checked his reflection one more time and went back downstairs.

The pub was fuller now. Mr. Argent was still in conversation with Callum by the trestle table outside, his wife at the bar with a glass of something Morag had poured without being asked. Mrs. Xu had changed into a deep blue dress and was once again adjusting the wildflowers on the main table and Isaac was in the corner, phone in hand, lips moving silently, running through what Charlie assumed was his speech. He had been asked to officiate, and Isaac had gone so still that Charlie genuinely checked to see if he was breathing. Charlie had made a show of being wounded — arms crossed, lower lip out, the full performance — because Tao was his best friend too, thank you very much, and if anyone was going to stand at the front and say meaningful things about love it should probably be the person who’d been in love the longest. He told himself he was playing it up. He was mostly playing it up. Seventy percent, maybe, which meant thirty percent of him was genuinely gutted, and he knew that was pathetic but knowing didn’t make it less true. That was until Tao leaned across the table, flicked Charlie directly on the nose and told him he he couldn’t be both the officiator and the best man, which made Charlie’s eyes fill immediately. When both Elle and Tao teased him about it, he’d blamed his allergies.

Tao was there too, and once again Charlie was caught off guard by the ongoing fact that his best friend had become annoyingly handsome. He was wearing a grey suit that had no business looking that good on him and his dark hair was combed back properly for what might have been the first time in his life. It changed his face, opened it up, gave him a sharpness that Charlie associated with film directors at press junkets and not with the boy who had once eaten an entire sleeve of Digestives during a single episode of Doctor Who.

Tao came through the door, scanned the room, and his eyes found Charlie immediately.

“How do I look?” he said, stopping in front of him, arms slightly out, inviting inspection.

“Disgusting,” Charlie said. “Revolting. Go change.”

“Helpful. Thank you.”

“You look incredible, Tao. Elle’s going to die.”

“I might die first.” Tao tugged at his collar. “Is it possible to be so happy you actually vomit? Because I think that might be about to happen.”

“Please don’t vomit on the suit. You look too good in it.”

Tao laughed, a short, nervous burst that didn’t quite land. He glanced around the room, the bunting, the fairy lights, the wildflowers, the faces of his mum and Elle’s parents and the friends who had driven through the night to be here, and Charlie watched something enormous move across his face before he pulled it back under control.

“Is Nick here?” Tao asked.

Charlie’s hand went to his pocket before the sentence was finished. He pulled out his phone, but the screen showed him the same wallpaper, the same silence, the same nothing.

“Not yet,” Charlie said.

Tao looked at him. Charlie put the phone away.

“He’ll be here—”

The word caught and Charlie’s mouth stayed open around the rest of the sentence but nothing came out because his eyes had drifted past Tao’s shoulder toward the pub door, and every thought he’d been holding in place for the last six hours fell apart at once.

Nick was standing in the doorway.

Charlie’s first thought, absurdly, was that he was hallucinating. That the hours of checking his phone and telling himself he’ll be here, he’ll be here had finally tipped over into some stress-induced break with reality that was now producing a six-foot-three mirage in the doorway of a Scottish pub. Because the person standing there could not possibly be real. Real people did not look like that after crossing an ocean. Nick was wearing a charcoal suit, the fabric sitting across his shoulders in a way that suggested either exceptional tailoring or an act of God, the jacket tapering at the waist and making his chest look like something that should be illegal in a place of worship, even an improvised one. His blond curls were tousled but not messy, pushed back from his forehead. He was clean-shaven. He was tanned. He looked like he’d stepped off a red carpet somewhere in another hemisphere and driven straight here without stopping, and the contrast of him, this impossibly polished, absurdly beautiful man, framed in the low stone doorway of a village pub with its crooked beams and its wildflowers in pint glasses was so disorienting that Charlie actually blinked, twice, hard, because his brain was refusing to merge the two images.

He was real. He was here. He was looking straight at Charlie.

Nick’s lips pulled into a grin, the grin that had been undoing Charlie Spring since he was fourteen years old and had never once lost its power. Behind him, Harp ducked through the doorway. He was in a navy suit that fit him like a second skin, his dark hair swept back, his tan deeper than Nick’s, and held a bottle of champagne in the other hand, held up like a trophy.

“Hi,” Nick said.

The word was small for Charlie, just for him, a whole conversation compressed into two letters. His eyes stayed on Charlie’s face a beat longer than the word required, then Nick turned to Tao, and the grin broke wide open.

“Congratulations, mate!” he said, pulling Tao into a hug that lifted him slightly off the ground. “Bloody hell. This is brilliant.”

“I’m so glad you made it,” Tao said into Nick’s shoulder, his voice muffled and thicker than he probably intended. “It wouldn’t be the same without you.”

Nick held him for another second, clapped him twice on the back, then released him and stepped aside to reveal Harp.

“You should thank Harp for getting me here,” Nick said. “He sorted the flights, the car, the whole thing. Harp, this is Tao. Tao, Harp.”

Charlie wasn’t remotely surprised that the two of them bypassed the handshake entirely and went straight for a hug, clasping each other like long-lost relatives at a family reunion. Harp was a hugger by constitution and Tao had never met a stranger he couldn’t absorb into his orbit within thirty seconds, so it was, in retrospect, inevitable.

“Sorry for crashing the party, man,” Harp said, stepping back. “Nick said it was cool but if it’s not, I can just sit in the car and drink by myself. I’ve done it before, it’s fine.”

“Are you joking?” Tao said. “The more the merrier. Any friend of Nick’s.”

“In that case—” Harp presented the bottle with both hands, label forward, like a sommelier at a ceremony. “This is for you and your future wife.”

Tao took the bottle, glanced at the label, and his eyebrows climbed.

“I’m not really a champagne guy,” Tao said, turning it in his hands. “But something from 1920 has got to be good, right?”

“It’s fucking incredible,” Harp confirmed. “And there’s a whole crate in the car. Congratulations, man. Seriously.”

“I love you already, Harp,” Tao said, clapping Harp on the shoulder. “Show me this crate.”

Nick and Charlie watched the two of them disappear through the pub door, and before they’d even cleared the threshold Harp was already laughing at something Tao had said. They’d known each other for approximately ninety seconds and Charlie gave it ten minutes before they were finishing each other’s sentences.

Then it was just the two of them. The pub was quiet around them. Mrs. Xu had drifted tactfully toward the bar, Isaac was still absorbed in his phone, and everyone else had found somewhere else to be.

“Come here, you,” Nick said, softly.

Charlie went. He stepped forward and Nick’s arms closed around him and locked, pulling him in tight and Charlie pressed his face into the curve of Nick’s neck and felt something that had been clenched inside his chest for weeks finally, finally let go.

He breathed in. Nick smelled like clean cotton and underneath that, faintly, like the sun, something warm and golden that California had baked into his skin and that no amount of transatlantic travel could wash away. Charlie’s hands found the front of Nick’s shirt, fingers curling into the fabric, and he could feel the solid wall of Nick’s chest beneath it, the muscle straining against the cotton, the steady percussion of his heartbeat under Charlie’s palm. He closed his eyes and let the sound of it fill him up, let everything else go soft and distant.

It had been a good idea, in the end, telling Nick to stay in California. Charlie stood by it. The days of Nick alone in Los Angeles, exploring, discovering the shape of his own freedom — those had mattered. But now, with Nick’s arms around him and Nick’s heartbeat under his hand and the solid, physical, undeniable reality of him, warm and here and his, after weeks of phone screens and time zones and the loneliness of loving someone you couldn’t touch.

Never again. Charlie pressed closer, tighter, his fingers twisting harder in the shirt. Never again. He never wanted to go a single day without this.

“God, I missed you,” Nick mumbled into his hair. He pressed a kiss to the top of Charlie’s head, lingering there, breathing him in. “So fucking much. You okay? Good summer so far?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said into Nick’s chest. “It’s been good.”

He pulled back just enough to look up at Nick’s face. Bit his lip.

“You?”

Something shifted in Nick’s expression, a smile Charlie hadn’t seen before, hotter, darker, with a knowing quality that hadn’t been there when he’d left for California. It sat on his mouth like a secret that was enjoying being kept.

“Yeah,” Nick said. His voice dropped, low enough that only Charlie could hear it. “Really good. I’ve got a lot to tell you, Char.”

Charlie’s stomach went into freefall.

“Yeah?”

“A lot.” Nick’s eyes held his, letting the weight of the word do its work. “I think you’re gonna want to hear every bit of it.”

Heat prickled up the back of Charlie’s neck and spread south with a speed that was deeply inconvenient for a man standing in a pub surrounded by wedding guests and parents. His trousers, which had been fitting perfectly well five seconds ago, were suddenly presenting a logistical problem. He shifted his weight slightly and hoped Nick didn’t notice.

Nick noticed. The smile sharpened.

“Later,” Charlie said, and the word came out rougher than he intended. He swallowed. “After the party. I want to hear everything. All of it. Every detail.”

Nick leaned down, his mouth close enough to Charlie’s ear that his breath grazed the skin.

“Deal,” he said.

The wedding started at noon sharp.

The meadow was wide and green and tilted softly toward the south. Wildflowers grew thick at the margins, foxglove and clover and ragged robin and something yellow that nobody could name, and the grass itself was long enough to move in the breeze, catching the light in rippling waves that made the whole field look like it was breathing. Somewhere nearby a stream was doing something musical over rocks. The sky was enormous, blue from edge to edge, nothing between the grass and the heavens but air and light and the faint suggestion that the rest of the world might not exist at all

At the top of the slope, set slightly back from the crest, stood an oak. It was ancient and vast and solitary and so old it seemed to belong to a different century, its trunk wider than two men could span with their arms outstretched, its canopy spreading in every direction. They stood beneath it. Isaac in the centre, phone in one hand and Tao beside him, hands clasped in front of him. Charlie on Tao’s other side, close enough to reach out and touch his arm if he needed to, which based on the way Tao’s hands were trembling, he might. The guests spread in a loose semicircle on the grass. Tara and Darcy stood together, fingers interlaced, Tara’s head tilted slightly onto Darcy’s shoulder. Mrs. Xu was already crying. Harp stood slightly to one side with a glass of champagne that had seemingly materialised in his hand through sheer force of habit, and beside him Nick, wearing the biggest smile Charlie had ever seen on his face. A small cluster of villagers had gathered at there too, Morag with her arms folded and a look on her face that was trying very hard to be practical and failing, Callum beside her holding his cap, Mrs. Argyll from the post office in her Sunday best, and Young Robbie from the farm, who had put on a tie and looked as though this might be the most important thing he had ever attended.

Then Elle appeared at the gate. She was on the arms of both her parents, Mrs. Argent was on her left, elegant in a violet dress with a matching wide-brimmed hat that framed her face beautifully, and Mr. Argent was on her right, solid and broad in a dark sui. Elle was wearing something new, not the sundress from the train station but something she had found that morning in a vintage shop in the next village over. The dress was ivory, full lace and sleeveless, the fabric delicate and slightly sheer in the light, clinging to her frame and then falling away into a long train that trailed behind her through the grass, catching on wildflowers and releasing them, the breeze lifting it gently and letting it settle again. She was holding a bouquet of the same wildflowers that grew around them, tied loosely with a white ribbon, and on her head, resting on her loose dark curls, a crown of white heather, woven tight and simple, the tiny pale blooms sitting against her hair like something that had grown there.

She looked, Charlie thought, like a creature from an old story. Something that lived in the wood behind the meadow and had stepped out into the sunlight for the first time, curious and unafraid, trailing lace and flowers behind her. Tao made a sound beside him, something somewhere between a breath and a word that never finished forming. Charlie reached over and put his hand on Tao’s arm, but Tao didn’t look at him.His eyes were on Elle and they weren’t going anywhere else.

Elle took her place beside Tao under the oak. Her parents stepped back, Mr. Argent abandoning his composure entirely and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand without apology. The semicircle drew slightly closer, pulled in by some collective instinct that recognised something important was about to happen and didn’t want to miss a syllable.

Isaac cleared his throat.

“So,” Isaac said. His voice came out thin and he stopped, swallowed, started again. “So. I’m not a minister. I’m not a registrar. Actually, I’m not legally empowered to marry anyone. I practised this in the bathroom mirror at half six this morning and made myself cry, so I want to be transparent about where we’re starting from.”

Everyone laughed, a little too quickly, a little to gratefully.

“I brought three books with me,” Isaac continued, and his voice was steadier now, finding its footing. “Because I always bring three books with me. And there are passages I love about love. Neruda. Sappho. There’s a bit from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin I’ve been saving for a moment exactly like this one.”

He looked at the phone, then folded it against his chest, screen down, and looked at Elle and Tao instead.

“But I didn’t use any of them. Because the thing about other people’s words is that they’re always almost right. And almost right isn’t good enough for you two.”

The breeze moved through the oak above them, shifting the light, sending a ripple of shadow and gold across the grass.

“Here’s what I know about love,” Isaac said. “I know that love is not a fixed thing. It changes shape. Sometimes it’s the shape of driving through the night because you couldn’t stand to wait until morning. Sometimes it’s the shape of letting someone go somewhere without you and trusting that they’ll come back. Sometimes it’s a conversation you’ve been putting off for months that turns out to be the most important one you ever have.”

Charlie swallowed. Beside him, Tao had stopped breathing.

“I know that the couples who last aren’t the ones who never hurt each other. They’re the ones who sit down afterwards and say — that happened. I’m still here. We need to talk about it. The ones who choose honesty when silence would be so much easier. Who choose each other again, even when choosing each other is the harder thing to do.”

Isaac’s voice hadn’t wavered once. He wasn’t reading anymore. The words were coming from somewhere deeper than the Notes app, somewhere he’d been building this from for years, watching his friends love each other and learning what it looked like when it was real.

“I know that love asks you to become a bigger version of yourself than you thought you were capable of being. It asks you to hold space for someone else’s fears and flaws and contradictions, and to let them hold space for yours, and to not run away when what you find there surprises you.”

Charlie looked at Nick and across the semicircle, through the scattered light beneath the oak, Nick was already looking back. His face was open and his eyes were wet, and the expression he wore was one Charlie recognised because he’d seen it only a handful of times — on the beach at El Porto, on the FaceTime call after Jet, in the doorway of The Crossing forty minutes ago. It was the face Nick made when he’d stopped managing how he felt and was simply feeling it.

“Elle and Tao didn’t need to come to Scotland. They didn’t need this meadow or me standing here pretending I have any authority whatsoever.” Another ripple of laughter, quieter this time, thinner, because people were starting to lose the battle. “They’ve been choosing each other since they were teenagers. Every single day, through distance and change and the thousand small ways that life tries to pull people apart. They kept choosing. They kept working. They kept building something that lasts.”

Mrs. Xu had given up entirely and so did Tara and Darcy. Harp was blinking very fast and drinking champagne at a pace that suggested he believed, incorrectly, that keeping his mouth occupied would stop his eyes from betraying him.”

“So, yeah, no, I can’t legally marry you” Isaac said. “But I can stand here, in front of the people who love you most, under a tree that’s been here longer than any of us, and say what everyone here already knows.”

He looked at Elle, then at Tao.

“You belong to each other. You always have. And whatever shape your love takes next — and it will change, because it’s supposed to change… it will be extraordinary. Because you two have never once settled for almost right.”

Isaac took a breath. His eyes were bright and his voice had acquired a faint, dangerous wobble.

“Now kiss each other before I start crying again, because I genuinely cannot do that twice in one day.”

Tao turned to Elle. Elle turned to Tao. And Charlie watched his two best friends kiss under the oak tree, in a meadow in Scotland, with wildflowers brushing against the hem of a lace dress, and the sound that rose from the small circle of people gathered there, the cheering, the crying, the laughter, the single loud whoop that was unmistakably Harp, filled the air and scattered upward through the branches and out into the wide, blue, borderless sky.

The party spilled back into The Crossing and kept growing. Harp’s champagne turned out to be extraordinary and even Morag, who had poured drinks for forty years and was not easily impressed, held her glass up to the light and said something in Gaelic that Charlie didn’t understand but assumed was approving. Someone found a speaker. Someone else found a playlist. The flagstone dance floor filled and didn’t empty. Nick danced with Elle, lifting her off the ground during the chorus, her lace train swinging, her laugh carrying over the music. Harp danced with Tara and Darcy simultaneously, one on each arm, improvising something that couldn’t decide if it was a waltz or a controlled fall, and it didn’t matter at all because Harp’s body had never received the memo that he wasn’t a professional dancer. Charlie danced with Mrs. Xu, who was a far better dancer than he was and made no effort to disguise this, leading him through something that might have been a foxtrot while he tried not to step on her shoes and mostly failed.

Word had spread through the village within the hour and, by early evening, the Crossing was fuller than Morag said she’d seen it in years: the Campbells from next door, the postmistress and her husband, Young Robbie who had changed out of his tie and into a slightly less formal shirt, a cluster of hill walkers who had wandered in for a pint and stayed for the party, and an elderly man nobody seemed to know who installed himself in the corner with a whisky and appeared to be having the time of his life.

Charlie took photos of everything. Elle and Tao cutting the cake, Tao’s hand over Elle’s on the knife, both of them laughing because the bottom tier turned out to be slightly frozen and the knife wouldn’t go through. Isaac sitting on the bar with his legs dangling, eating a slice of cake with his fingers, looking drained and peaceful and quietly proud. Harp teaching Mr. Argent a handshake that involved at least seven steps and a fist bump. Darcy asleep on Tara’s shoulder in one of the Campbell’s upholstered chairs at half nine, exhausted from the drive and the dancing and the crying. And Nick — dozens of Nick, because Charlie couldn’t stop. Nick laughing with Callum at the bar. Nick carrying two plates of food from the kitchen. Nick with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the elbows, his forearms golden in the fairy light, talking to Tao about something that had them both gesturing with their hands. Charlie took one of the two of them together, his phone held at arm’s length, Nick’s chin on his shoulder, both of them flushed and grinning, and sent it to Beto with no caption. Beto’s reply came in eleven seconds: three fire emojis, a heart, and a voice note that Charlie would listen to later but whose energy he could already feel radiating through the screen.

It was close to ten when the playlist found something slower. Charlie didn’t know the song, but Nick’s hand found the small of his back and pulled him in, and that was all the invitation Charlie needed.

They swayed more than danced. Charlie’s cheek against Nick’s collarbone, Nick’s arms around him, loose and heavy, one hand resting on his hip, the other tracing an absent line up and down his spine. The pub hummed around them, but it had gone soft at the edges, because world always did when Nick was holding him. Charlie could feel Nick’s heartbeat through his shirt, and the warmth of his skin, and the faint vibration in his chest when he hummed along to a melody he didn’t know. The fairy lights moved gently above them in the draught from the door and the wildflowers on the tables had started to droop, petals curling, giving up the last of their scent into the warm air. Everything smelled like summer and champagne and old stone and Nick.

Charlie closed his eyes. He thought about nothing. For the first time in months, maybe longer, his mind was quiet. No calculations, no anxieties, no quiet inventory of things unsaid or undone. Just this, just the music, the warmth, the weight of Nick’s arms. The sound of their friends laughing somewhere behind them. The knowledge that nothing was missing. That everyone he loved was in this room or somewhere nearby, and the person he loved most was right there.

“Char,” Nick murmured against his hair. His lips brushed Charlie’s ear, and Charlie could hear the smile in his voice before the words arrived. “Don’t look now, but I think you’ve got yourself an admirer.”

Charlie didn’t need to look. He’d noticed the man almost half an hour ago.

He was handsome. Older than them, early-forties, maybe, with a face that had probably been pretty once and was now something better, weathered into something strong-jawed and lived-in. Tall, broad through the chest and shoulders. He looked like he’d spent his twenties lifting things for a living and his forties enjoying the results. The man was at the bar, leaning on one elbow, a pint glass turning slowly in his fingers, and judging by the ease with which he laughed with Morag and the way she topped up his glass without being asked, he was local. His eyes had been drifting across the room to where Nick and Charlie were dancing, finding Charlie, holding for just a second, a beat longer than coincidence would account for, before sliding away. Then starting again.

“Me?” Charlie said. “He’s been looking at you, Nicky. I think he might actually be drooling.”

Nick laughed.

“Yeah? Maybe I should go over and say hello. Proper manners and all that.” His thumb pressed slightly harder into Charlie’s hip. “What do you think?”

Charlie looked up at Nick’s face. That expression was there again, the new one, the one that had appeared in the pub doorway. It made Nick look like a different man. Not a stranger, never that, but a version of himself that had been kept behind glass for years and was now standing out in the open, comfortable in his own skin in a way that went beyond confidence into something quieter and more permanent.

Charlie could already see it.

Nick would let go of him. Cross the pub with that easy stride, and settle onto the stool next to the man at the bar. He’d say something, nothing clever, nothing rehearsed, just hi, I’m Nick, with that smile, the one he used at Roosters, the one that made people forget what they’d been about to order. The man would say hello. They’d shake hands, and Nick’s grip would linger for just a fraction too long, his thumb shifting once across the man’s knuckles before letting go. They’d talk. About what didn’t matter, because the conversation would be happening underneath the words, in the way Nick leaned closer on the bar, in the way their thighs would press together, barely, just enough to acknowledge that the contact was intentional. The man would buy Nick a drink. Nick would accept it. They’d angle toward each other.

Eventually Nick would glance across the room and find Charlie and the man would follow Nick’s eyes and find Charlie too, and Charlie would raise his glass, just slightly, and smile. The touching would start. The man’s hand on Nick’s forearm first, casual, easy to deny if it needed denying. Then his shoulder. Then, bolder now, his thigh, feeling what was underneath it, and Nick would let him, wouldn’t move the hand away, would maybe even lean into it slightly, and the hand would stay there. Settle. Stop pretending to be anything other than what it was.

Then Nick would suggest they go upstairs. He’d say it quietly, close to the man’s ear, and the man would say yes, because of course he would, because nobody had ever said no to Nick Nelson’s mouth that close to their ear. Nick would go first, taking stairs without looking back, disappearing into the corridor above. The man would stay at the bar for a moment. He’d catch Charlie’s eye across the room, and he’d grin. He’d know exactly what was being offered and he wouldn’t quite believe his luck. Charlie would grin back. And then the man would set his pint glass down on the bar and take the stairs too, and Charlie would stay in his seat, just for a few minutes, just long enough to give them time to begin, his heart hammering, his cock already straining against his trousers, the anticipation so acute it was almost pain, and then Charlie would put his own glass down and cross the pub and take those stairs two at a time and open the door to—

“Earth to Charlie.”

Charlie blinked. Nick was looking at him amused patience.

“Where’d you go?” Nick asked.

“Nowhere.” His voice sounded like it belonged to someone who’d just been thinking exactly what he’d been thinking. He swallowed. “Doesn’t matter.”

“So — the bloke at the bar. You want me to go over?”

Charlie looked at the man. The man was looking back, pint glass halfway to his mouth. He was hot. He was interested.

“Not tonight,” Charlie said.

Nick’s eyebrows lifted in genuine surprise.

“No?”

“No.” Charlie’s hands slid from Nick’s shoulders to the front of his shirt, fingers curling into the fabric, pulling him closer by millimetres. “You know what I want right now?”

Nick’s arms tightened around his waist. “Tell me, love.”

Charlie tilted his chin up. His mouth found the space just below Nick’s ear, close enough that his lips grazed skin when he spoke.

“I want you to take me upstairs,” he said. “And I want you to fuck me the way you’ve been fucking all those men in California.”

Nick went still. His eyes had gone dark, the blue almost swallowed and he was looking at Charlie with an expression that made the air between them feel combustible.

“I want everything you gave them,” Charlie said, holding his gaze. “Everything you learned. Every single thing.”

His voice dropped to something barely above a breath.

“Show me what you’ve become, Nicky.”

Nick’s hand came up to Charlie’s jaw. His thumb traced the line of it, slow, proprietary, tilting Charlie’s face toward him. He held him there, studying him, letting the silence pull tight between them until Charlie’s pulse was visible in his throat.

“Come on,” Nick said.

Nick took his hand. Their fingers locked together and Nick pulled him across the pub without looking back to see if anyone was watching. Charlie caught a glimpse of Harp at the bar, raising his champagne glass in a silent toast to absolutely no one, and Isaac pretending very hard to be interested in something on his phone, and then they were at the stairs, and then they were climbing, and the music and the laughter and the light of The Crossing fell away below them, step by step, until there was nothing left but the creak of old wood and the sound of their breathing and the door at the end of the corridor, waiting.

—

Every good love story needs a wedding, right? This time it wasn’t Nick and Charlie’s turn, but their happily ever after is just beginning. Mrs. Xu said “when,” not “if,”, after all, and Mrs. Xu is never wrong about anything.

One chapter left, and then the epilogue, which will be a special gift exclusively for my paid subscribers. Consider it a little something extra for the people who’ve been with Nick and Charlie from the start and want to stay with them until the very end. If that’s you, and you haven’t already, now’s the time to hit that button.

See you at the finish line.