“Pub quiz down that Eccy Road joint in half an hour. Tom texted. You in?”
“The Porter? Porter Brook Inn?”
“Something like. Just up from Sainsbury’s.”
Mike caught the bottle. “Yeah, alright then. Driving, mind. It’ll be like swimming.”
“Rain’s stopped actually.”
“Huh.” Mike took a swig, and eyed Stephen speculatively. “You alright?”
“Yeah.”
“Took a long session.”
“Swimming, mostly.”
“And then the sauna, judging by your hair.”
“Yeah. And then we sat around in the café for ages. Guess what.”
“What?”
“No, guess.”
Mike rolled his eyes. “School hasn’t bloody started yet.”
“Fine.” The whine was better than any petulant teenager. “Jez reckons Jo’s up the duff.”
Mike raised his eyebrows. “That was fast.”
“She’s sworn off booze and suddenly taking all the vitamins she can get her hands on.”
“Ouch.”
“Yep.”
“Definitely pregnant. Or about to be.”
“Seeing as how the wedding game at Vikki’s is pointless because we won’t agree anyway,” Stephen said, still hanging over the back of the sofa. “Want to bet on the baby instead?”
“What, that it exists? It must exist if she’s off the booze.”
“No, you eejit. If it’s a boy or a girl.”
Mike laughed, surprised. “Didn’t think you’d be up for gender guessing games.”
“Why not? Doctor’s going to have to pick one when it’s born.”
“Fine.” Mike screwed up his face and thought about it. Pointless, he knew all too well—biology teacher all summer long, no matter if school was out or not—but why not indulge in a bit of superstition? “Boy.”
“Why?”
“Jez has only got brothers.”
“Okay. I’ll take girl. Jo’s only got a sister.”
“Not Jo that fires the deciding shot.”
Stephen’s face screwed up. “Oh, thanks for that.”
He whined about the mental imagery of Jez firing his shots all the way down to Ecclesall Road, and then promptly shared them with Tom when they arrived, who was equally disgusted. The team was enormously reduced, but they also had no stakes in winning this time. So it was both more fun and, weirdly, more successful.
“Why can’t you be that bloody good at the usual place?” Mike demanded once they had their winnings and Tom got another round in.
“Then you’d get lazy,” Stephen opined.
They argued about the merits of exercising the brain, then about the pointlessness of doing said exercise when drinking literal poison, then Tom was summoned home by his wife, and Lynn went to pick up her boyfriend from his late shift at the hospital, and it was just Mike and Stephen in the corner booth, making their way through a bowl of complimentary peanuts. Which were a bit shit, but better than nowt.
“I might quit teaching,” Stephen said, holding up a nut, “and become a househusband.”
“On my salary?”
“Oh, no, I’d divorce you. Find myself a sugar daddy.”
“Reckon the headmaster earns enough.”
“Excuse me, a fit sugar daddy.”
“Nah,” Mike said, slapping his thigh as he got up. “You’d miss having a good few armfuls to hang onto and you know it. Another drink, or home?”
* * * *
The oddly idle but cheerful mood lasted until their last call of duty, not ten days before the summer break was due to end. By the time the suits got back from the dry-cleaners, and Mike’s mam dropped off his buttonhole arrangement for the big day, their work suits were being aired on the rack again, and Stephen had refilled his box of stationery goodies from the Smiths in town, complete with a full set of highlighters.
“Don’t need any of that bollocks in science,” Mike had said genially.
“I’m not the one who runs up a literal butcher’s bill, sweetie,” came the not-so-genial reply.
So uncharitable as it was—especially given it was his own stepsister—Mike really wasn’t up for the wedding on the day it arrived. He had a box in his hall ready to go back to the school, and only ten days before he’d have to turn up and suffer through one of those terminally dull training days before the spotty monstrosities were crammed back through the gates. Spending one of those ten days in another sodding tuxedo was the last thing he had in mind.
And even worse, it was the same day as Stephen’s clinic results were due.
“Don’t be a twat about it,” Mike said on their way over to his mam’s house on the morning of the big day. “Whenever they call, just slip out and take it.”
“I can ring them back.”
“Stephen—”
“Don’t tell me how to deal with it, alright?”
His voice was very tight. Mike pulled over, not two streets away from his mam’s, and sighed.
“It’s important to me, too.”
“It’s not the same.”
“No. It’s not. But it’s not just up to you.”
Stephen’s lips thinned…and then he sighed.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Just don’t be a cunt about it, alright?”
“Charming!”
“Naff off, you know what I mean.”
Stephen sighed, and nodded.
“Okay.”
Mike squeezed his hand, and pulled out again.
“Wedding game?” he asked, just to break the tension. “Ending in divorce, or ending in happily ever after.”
“It’s Suze,” came the prompt, if slightly terse reply. “Happy ever after.”
“It’s Vikki. Divorce.”
The car rumbled and rocked down the packed road and he had to squeeze into a tiny space a good hundred feet from the front door. It was wide open, Vikki on the step in her tux having her picture taken with her dad.
“There you are!” Mike’s mam shrieked under a huge flowery hat. “Come on, come on, hurry up! I want a nice picture of the pair of you, looking smart for once!”
“I always look smart,” Stephen said defensively.
“Not with that metal in your face, dear, now stand there, go on, stand there.”
The photographer was plainly used to mothers of brides, step or otherwise, and merely beamed at them beatifically.
“Lovely, lovely, nice and relaxed now, hey, how about a quick peck for the camera, eh, it’s a happy occasion!”
“Like hell I’m snogging you on camera,” Stephen said, but then gave a long-suffering eyeroll and did it anyway. Mike laughed, catching an arm around his waist, and the flash said there’d be some cheesy pic of them grinning like loons at each other from close range now.
“Perfect!” his mam squeaked. “Come on, Mike, you’re late, come here…”
She re-did his cravat, and then he was subjected to posing with her and Leonard, with Vikki, with her page boy and bridesmaids, with one of the ushers who’d clearly been fished out of a leather bar. Stephen stood grinning and taking several shots on his phone before slipping off inside the house, and Mike mentally decided to give that arse a good smack for it later. Leaving him to suffer like this, the bloody cheek!
“Is he alright?” Vikki asked as the cars came around, and Mike rummaged for his own keys.
“Stephen?”
“Yeah. Not like him to just disappear like that.”
Mike pulled a face. “It’s, uh…results day.”
“I thought it was tomorrow?”
“That’s what we told Mam. Didn’t want to cast a shadow on your big day if—well, you know. If.”
“Oh. Oh.” She winced. “Well. Good luck. And you know my offer stands.”
Mike squeezed her arm. “Thank you. Now get in your bloody car and go and get marr—”
“And you.”
“Fuck!”
Stephen reappeared like a mir
age, and plucked the keys from Mike’s hand. “I’ll bring this. You head up with your mam in the fancy one.”
Mike eyed him. “You sure?”
“Yeah, go on.”
“No, I mean—”
Stephen’s face softened. “Missed call,” he said quietly. “I’ll bob your car up to the hotel, and then I’ll ring them back.”
Mike nodded. “Okay.”
He ducked forward for another quick kiss, a hand on Stephen’s hip as though he could will the clinic to give them the right answer, and a flash went off beyond his eyelids somewhere.
“Sodding photographer,” he groused, and let go.
* * * *
The hotel wasn’t as fancy as all the others throughout the summer. It was just a bed-and-breakfast, really, but it was obvious why it had been chosen. It was surrounded by extensive landscaped lawns, complete with romantic weeping willows straddling a babbling brook, and gaudy flowers bobbing under the weight of fluffy bumblebees.
Hell, even Mike would have gotten married here, and cramped B&Bs were hardly his idea of wedding venue material.
Everything was set up in a great white tent, another usher standing by the open door like a bouncer at the world’s weirdest nightclub. More photos were taken, guests milling around excitedly. It was easily the gayest wedding Mike had ever seen—the binary dress code had been well and truly flipped, and there were honest to God feather boas floating about without a hint of insincerity. Mike was simultaneously startled—it was a bit like uni, really—and amused to see his staid, old-fashioned stepfather blithely gliding past a clutch of extremely butch lesbians without batting an eyelash.
The guests were settling. Mike glanced about uneasily. Where the hell was Stephen?
“You look lost, love.” One of Vikki’s aunts he vaguely recognised from big family events.
“Just misplaced my other half,” Mike said, extracting his arm and hastily ducking out of the tent. He fumbled in his pocket for his phone. No chance Stephen had gotten lost. He couldn’t be—
Familiar steps crunched on gravel, and Stephen came around the corner of the building with a cool, collected expression.
No, scratch that. A completely blank expression.
A Black expression.
And Mike’s heart sank.
It was the hiding-his-feelings look that he’d worn at Beth’s wedding. The one he wore every time they went to the clinic. The one Mike had memorised from all the hospital appointments over the years, and the endless battles with the GP back in university. The one he’d worn when Bastard Black had said they couldn’t be parents.
The one that Mike had seen on the last two treatment attempts, too.
Bugger.
It was a carefully constructed mask, and Mike knew it full well. But he didn’t know what to do about it. Stephen didn’t wear that face unless he was too tangled up to process properly, which made him unpredictable. Sometimes he needed to be left alone. Sometimes they’d have a massive fight, and it would actually help. Sometimes he’d get upset. He hadn’t cried once that Mike had seen in the last six years, but never say never. And it meant that Mike was never quite sure what to do, even after nearly a decade, when the mask slid into place over Stephen’s soul.
Apparently, today was a leave it well enough alone day, for Stephen simply kept on walking, right up to Mike’s shoulder like nothing was the matter at all, and said, “Any sign of Suze yet?”
Mike swallowed back the urge to ask. Okay. He could do ignoring it until after the wedding, too. “Not yet, you’re just in time.”
“Good. Let’s go get a seat, then.”
Mike slid a hand around Stephen’s hip.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” The smile was thin. “Come on. I want a good view of you up there with the rings.”
Mike wanted to put it off a little longer, but the ushers were starting to look stressed.
“Alright. Front row seat, just for you.”
Thanks to best man duties, they managed exactly that, Stephen squeezing in next to Mike’s mam. Her flowery hat was already wilting in the summer heat, despite being made of kitchen curtain and plastic. Leonard was already blowing his nose into his handkerchief, eyes red and watery.
To Mike’s surprise, Vikki was the picture of composure. She’d gelled up her hair one last time, the stubby spikes gleaming black. Mike stood up next to her, patting his pocket to check on the rings, and she gave him a wide, beaming smile.
“Christ,” he said. “You look happy.”
“I am happy.”
The urge to tease faded. “As you should be. You’re sodding lucky. And so’s she.”
“I know.” The bluster was gone for a moment, and the kinder, gentler sister—not step, but true sister that she’d become over the years despite their differing parentage, her batshit insane mother and his dead father—shone through for a minute. “Any last minute advice?”
Mike glanced over his shoulder at Stephen.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Remember how you feel right now.”
Vikki squeezed his elbow.
“Thanks for agreeing to stand up with me.”
“Thanks for asking.”
“I would have done the same if you’d asked.”
“I know,” Mike said honestly. “And if we ever do it for real, as Mam puts it, I’ll hold you to it.”
She gripped his hand in a firm handshake, her composure wobbling a moment, and then the minister rose from behind the little desk that had been placed there for the signing of the marriage certificate, and lifted his arms.
“Everyone,” he boomed, and a hush fell. “Thank you for attending this joyous occasion. It is my profound pleasure to welcome you to the marriage of Victoria Avery and Suzette Ling. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to officiate at the joining of two perfectly matched souls, and so I will not pontificate on the meaning of marriage for two who are so completely suited to the act. If I could ask you to please rise, for our missing bride.”
Vikki swallowed, briefly staring with determination at her own feet, before turning.
And her face lit up in a way that made Mike’s chest hurt.
Suze, preceded by her tiny nieces scattering petals, and holding onto her elderly father’s arm, was nothing short of beautiful. She was beaming and crying all at once, and the look of complete rapture on Vikki’s face dragged Mike into the past as much as when he’d seen Beth enter that tiny Scottish chapel at the beginning of the summer.
But it wasn’t Suze who reminded him of where he’d come from—it was Vikki. They didn’t share a single drop of blood, but that look of stunned happiness was one Mike knew from his own past. And not his wedding, but on Stephen’s twenty-second birthday.
They’d been together about a year and a half, two years. They’d done the traditional thing, and gone out on the piss with a load of student friends. And it had probably been the booze, and was definitely the lighting, but Stephen had leaned over the bar to flag down a passing bartender, turned to smile right into Mike’s face and ask what he wanted, and it had been like being punched in the chest. For a split second, he was the most incredible man Mike had ever seen. It had hurt.
Mike hadn’t said a word. But he’d gone and bought a cheap ring the next day, and started figuring out some words. So what if it had only been a couple of years and they were still bloody students?
He’d known, right then and there in that bar, that it was going to be forever.
And the way Vikki looked at Suze, as they came together in front of the minister and the tedious, pompous process of getting married began, Mike knew he’d lost the bet that morning. And who cared? So dinner was on him—or, judging by Stephen’s closed, cold look, the hangover cure breakfast to end all hangover cure breakfasts.
There was no way Vikki was going to let Suze go.
And by the wide, beautiful smile on Suze’s tearstained face, no way Suze was going to try and get out either.
* * * *
T
hey had dinner on picnic blankets out on the grass, the sun beating down and various fusty old relatives disgruntled at getting grass stains on their clothes. Vikki and Suze’s collection of the entire gay scene of Sheffield, on the other hand, revelled in returning to their glasses-in-the-grass pride summers, and dragged the blankets close around the newlyweds to celebrate in a close, intimate style that Mike found himself liking far more than the high table seating arrangement snoozefests of other weddings.
Food was also insisted upon before the speeches, just like at his mam’s wedding, and so Mike got to cosy up to Stephen in peace, exchanging scathing observations about the cheese platter dessert, and teaching Leonard the difference between transvestite, transsexual, and transgender. Which, given Leonard thought that transatlantic was also one of the queer terms, took up most of the meal.
And then Stephen’s phone started buzzing.
“What the—?” Mike started, as Stephen prised himself free of their hug and fished it out of his suit pocket. Private number was flashing on the display. “I thought they already called.”
“I missed it.”
“You said you’d rung them back.”
“Didn’t get the chance,” Stephen said.
Someone was clanking a glass, speeches armed and ready, and Stephen pulled an uncertain face, his thumb hovering over the red cross.
“Answer it,” Mike said brusquely, shoving his leg.
“You have a speech.”
“And you’ve heard it. Go on. They’re married now—that’s more important again.”
Stephen hesitated—then clicked the green button, and staggered up from the blanket, pacing away across the grass to the shadow of the B&B as Suze’s father tottered to his feet, a tiny little man in traditional Chinese formalwear.
Mike didn’t hear a word of it, despite the gales of laughter and the deep ‘aww’ that rose when bride and father of said bride exchanged a tearful hug. He heard Leonard’s deep, rolling voice and the respectful quiet as he held court, but not the words that were said. He was too busy watching the corner that Stephen had vanished around, willing him to come back.
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