To Have and to Hold

by Riley Knight

  It was a weird question and Ran frowned. She sounded pretty serious about it. Like this wasn’t just a routine question. But maybe he was imagining things.

  “Yes, of course, I am.” He’d been here since he was a baby. Worked jobs before. Even had a birth certificate stating that his mother and father were, in fact, his parents, though he’d been born in Kyoto, Japan.

  Hell, he had a social security number, and had since the adoption had gone through. It had gotten him into school, and numerous jobs that he’d held to help him pay for those years in university.

  “Then I’m afraid there’s been some sort of mistake,” the woman said, her tone of voice polite enough, but confused. Well, there was a lot of that going on. “Our preliminary screening has indicated that you are not a citizen, nor a permanent resident.”

  Ran frowned. There was no doubt that was odd. He shook his head.

  “There’s definitely been some sort of mistake,” he agreed. “May I call you back while I try to figure out what’s going on?”

  The woman agreed, and Ran ended the call, then turned to Justin, that frown still on his face.

  “What’s going on?” Justin asked, and Ran shook his head. He didn’t even know where to start.

  “I need to call my parents,” he said and reached for his phone again. To his relief, Justin stayed right where he was, on the couch behind him. His presence was comforting, and he badly needed it.

  Chapter Two

  Justin

  There had been a moment, and it wasn’t a moment that Justin was allowed to think about, and he knew it. But it had been there, just when Justin was waking up, when he’d felt the tight, tempting curve of Ran’s ass against his cock, when he could almost swear that Ran had been rubbing lightly against him.

  Ridiculous, of course. Impossible. Or at the very least, highly improbable. Still, Justin considered asking him about it. Not that it would do anything. Not that Ran, who had been likely sound asleep, would even remember.

  Any thought of doing so was blown right out of his head, though, when he saw the look on Ran’s face. He’d only sort of paid attention to the conversation, being much more occupied looking at the beautiful lines of Ran’s back, and how adorably disheveled the other man’s dark hair was.

  Ran had no idea how beautiful he was. Maybe that was part of what made him so damn gorgeous, that he just walked through the world without the slightest notion of it. He didn’t see how people stared at him. He was too busy having his nose in a book.

  Not that Justin would ever do anything about it, of course. His friendship with Ran was way more important than anything else going on in his life, and while he knew that the man was gay, he wasn’t egotistical enough to think that that automatically meant he would be attracted to Justin.

  So Justin just watched, and he was subtle about it. That was just how things were, and how they would always be. At least he had Ran in his life at all.

  Ran, with those dark, gorgeous almond shaped eyes, those pretty lips, that smooth, golden skin. Ran, who could easily be a model, but had no idea. And not just in a fake way where he pretended he didn’t know while sucking up the attention.

  Ran was probably the most alone person that Justin had ever met, and that included himself, which was saying something. He’d grown up with a single mother who was more interested in getting her next bottle of wine than she was about her own kid.

  When Ran turned around, though, Justin was all business. He tried not to let even the slightest trace of his attraction to Ran show, even in his eyes. He was pretty good, he’d been told, in looking almost expressionless, and it came in handy when it came to his beautiful, unobtainable best friend.

  The conversation with Ran’s parents hadn’t been a long one, and from the look on Ran’s face, it hadn’t been all that full of good news, either. Justin had only picked up bits and pieces of what was going on, but it certainly hadn’t sounded good, no doubt about it.

  “What’s up, man?” Justin asked, sitting fully up on the couch so that Ran could settle himself. He sort of looked like he needed it. Like he might faint if he didn’t.

  “My mom says she’ll call me back. That there was so much paperwork to bring me into the country that it’s not impossible something got overlooked …”

  Without thinking about it, Justin put his arm around Ran’s shoulder. It wasn’t a conscious decision that he made, he just did it, and apparently, it was the right move because Ran buried his face in Justin’s chest.

  Justin had never seen Ran act like this with anyone else, and it had always pleased him. It felt like Ran needed him, and there wasn’t really anyone else on the planet who did.

  So maybe they needed each other. Maybe that was what it came down to.

  “It’s just some stupid mistake. It can get fixed,” Justin said. He believed it was true. After all, Ran had been in the country for going on thirty years. There was no way that he didn’t belong here. Anyone could see that.

  Justin felt Ran nod, and maybe one of them would have said something else, but then a phone started ringing again. It was Justin’s this time, he could tell from the ring tone, and he sighed and closed his eyes, doing his best to ignore it.

  “Aren’t you going to get that?” Ran asked, pulling away from him to look at him with huge, dark, confused eyes. It probably didn’t occur to him that a phone could be ringing and it could be someone you didn’t want to talk to. Someone who was less than impressed with you.

  “Nah, this is more important,” Justin said, and then, when Ran arched his eyebrows at him, he sighed softly. “I mean, I know who it is already. It’s not a big deal.”

  Ran frowned, searching his face, and then sighed and shook his head.

  “It’s your work,” he said, not even guessing. He knew without a doubt, and Justin rubbed at his tired eyes. He hadn’t gotten enough sleep, he was pretty sure, or maybe it was just the rough way he’d been awakened.

  Somehow, Ran always knew things about him that other people didn’t. Maybe it went with the best friends territory, but Justin knew he was a mystery to most people. He preferred it that way and had ever since he was a kid and the social workers had been poking around his house from time to time.

  “Yeah, it’s fine,” Justin said dismissively. But he really should have known better. His friend just wasn’t the sort of person who would ever understand blowing work off.

  Justin did understand. He understood about being so stifled at work that he wanted to scream. About dealing with assholes all day, entitled jerks who thought that all they had to do to get their way was to scream loudly enough.

  And about how, more often than not, those people were rewarded.

  There were always more of these jobs, too. No matter how often he got fired, and it was pretty damn often, he could always count on finding a new job. Gas stations, fast food, grocery stores, retail … he’d worked it all, and hated it all.

  But it was impossible to explain any of that to Ran, who had probably never missed a day of work in his life. Who had the best work ethic of anyone that Justin had ever met.

  So it looked like he was going to work.

  Sighing, he bowed to the inevitable and went to get his hideous work uniform.

  * * *

  Work was terrible, not that that was anything new. He’d been yelled at so many times that it should have stopped making him angry, but it hadn’t. The biggest relief of his day was when he was taken off of the cash register and told to go clean the restaurant lobby.

  By the time his shift was done, he knew that he reeked of fries and grease, and not only that, he was at risk of committing murder. His boss, a repulsive little man with greasy black hair and a lined face that looked like leather, smirked at him when he saw him. Each and every time.

  “Nice of you to show up today,” the man would say, or something like that. It got old, really, really fast. Somehow, Justin managed to keep his mouth shut. It wasn’t easy.

  While he was scrubbing tables an
d emptying trays, though, it gave him time to think. To hum to himself, and sometimes, if he wasn’t too busy, to take a little notebook out of his pocket and scribble out some lyrics.

  All he found himself thinking about was Ran, though. Ran, who might not even be legally allowed to work in the country. Ran, who was as American as anyone he knew. If Ran didn’t belong here, than Justin sure the hell didn’t, because Ran had contributed way more than Justin ever had.

  There was nothing Justin could do, though. Ran would get whatever paperwork that he needed to do done, and then it would be like none of this had happened.

  But wasn’t it notoriously hard to become a US citizen? It wasn’t something that Justin, who had been born with that honor, had ever thought about much, but he’d heard things. Especially working in the types of jobs that tended to get a lot of foreign people, he’d heard a lot.

  After work, he took out his phone and quickly did a good search on ‘Fastest ways to become a US citizen.’ The first result that came up told him that it would be getting married to someone who was already a citizen, and Justin snorted.

  “Yeah right,” he said and walked to his crappy little car. Who would Ran even marry? He wasn’t even dating anyone.

  There was an obvious person, of course. Himself. He was a citizen, after all. But Ran deserved so much better, and, anyway, no doubt his best friend had already taken care of it.

  Still, the idea didn’t quite go away.

  * * *

  Justin would have sworn that the only thing really on his mind when he drove away from his work was getting into a nice hot shower to try to scrub the smell of fries away. And yet, despite that, he found himself driving, not toward his own tiny apartment, but to the part of town where Ran’s run down little basement suite was.

  It made sense, though, he told himself. He’d had to leave so suddenly that morning, after all, and things were unresolved. He needed to know what was going on.

  It probably would have been polite to at least text and ask if he could come over, but Justin didn’t bother. He just headed over, and when he was there, he tried the door handle and found that it turned easily.

  When Ran was home, he never locked the door. He never had to, with his entrance tucked out of the way as it was. He’d never been broken into, not even with the crime rates in this neighborhood being fairly high.

  There had been some habits that had been formed when they’d been roommates in college, and they were still true. Justin opened the door and walked in without even thinking, knowing that Ran wouldn’t mind.

  “Justin? Is that you?” Ran’s voice was coming from the postage stamp sized living room, and Justin followed the sound of it to find his best friend sprawled out on the couch, effortlessly graceful, but with a frown on his face that Justin didn’t like seeing.

  “Yeah,” Justin said, completely unnecessarily because Ran could clearly see that it was him. “What’s going on, man?”

  He settled down on the couch as Ran moved his feet for him, and he could clearly see that the news wasn’t good.

  “I talked to my mom just a half an hour ago. She looked through my adoption paperwork, and she found one that she forgot to fill out. The form to have me naturalized.”

  Justin frowned, looking at Ran. It seemed impossible to him that this was happening. His whole life, he’d just assumed his best friend was an American, and he knew that Ran had assumed the same.

  “So what does that mean?” Justin said, looking into his best friend’s beautiful, worried face.

  “It means I’m not an American. I’m not even legal to work here.” He shook his head. “I never thought … all of my jobs have been paid under the table, and it never came up. I mean, I got into school just fine …”

  How strange this must be. Ran was neither an American, nor Japanese. He was in between worlds, he’d slipped through the cracks, and now it seemed like this had a pretty good chance of ruining his dream.

  Why Ran would want to be a teacher, why he would want to deal with bratty kids who didn’t even want to be there, Justin didn’t know. It sounded like hell to him. But there could be no doubt that he did. That he always had. And the fact that he couldn’t because of a technicality seemed grossly unfair.

  “So what will you do now?” Justin asked, and Ran shook his head, running his slender fingers through his dark hair and pushing it away from his face in a habit that Justin recognized as being one that Ran indulged in when he was stressed out.

  “I don’t know. I guess I have to go for my green card and hope,” he said quietly. “That’s really the only chance. It’s not easy to become a citizen.”

  From the tone of his voice, Justin understood without needing to be told that Ran had spent a lot of time, probably all day, looking into this. Trying to find ways. And to have his voice sound so hopeless, that hurt.

  “There’s another way,” Justin pointed out. The words burst out without him even thinking about it. The fact that Ran wasn’t even there legally, that he could technically be deported back to a country that he hadn’t even been to since he was an infant, that was horrific.

  It was certainly worth making himself look like an idiot for a second, Justin figured. The worst thing that could happen was that Ran would reject him and maybe laugh at him. He could deal with that, especially when there was so much on the line.

  To his relief, Ran didn’t make him spell it out. The other man just sighed and shook his head.

  “Yeah. I can marry someone. Who’s going to want to marry a gay bookworm with no savings and nothing to bring to the table? I’m not even dating anyone that I could ask. Short of putting up something on Craigslist, I’m not sure how to even go about finding someone who would do me that sort of favor.”

  For a moment, Justin struggled with himself. There had to be someone better. Someone who could hold down a job. Someone who had more talents than just scribbling down a bunch of song lyrics that he never shared with anyone, writing songs that were just for himself.

  There had to be. Some random stranger off the street would statistically have to be a better spouse, better marriage material.

  But he had something that no one else had. He loved this man. He cared about him too much to want him to take any sort of risk or to be caught in a marriage where there was no love at all.

  Maybe the love they had for each other was just friendship, but it was better than no love at all.

  On the other hand, it would be a strain on their friendship. Wouldn’t it? Justin had never been married before. Was it different than just having a very close friendship? He really had no idea.

  Maybe it didn’t have to be. Maybe every marriage was different. He didn’t know. His mother had never been married, at least not to his knowledge. He hadn’t spoken to her in years, so who knew?

  The point was, he was hardly the poster child for the best person to marry. And that made him nervous to bring it up, even though it had been on his mind ever since he had left work.

  So he struggled with himself, his mind darting back and forth, unable to settle on any decision. He should, but … he shouldn’t, but … reason after reason went through his head, and he frowned, trying to work it out.

  The thing was, though, he could help. And when it came down to it, what sort of person would he be if he let his best friend go through something like this without at least trying to help?

  In the end, it would be Ran’s decision. Justin wasn’t going to force him into anything, of course, he wouldn’t do that. So what was the harm in asking? It would at least show that he cared, which he honestly had a hard time doing a lot of the time.

  So he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He was going to do this. He was going to propose to his best friend, and nothing had ever been this terrifying to him in his entire life.

  What if he said no? What if he said yes? Either way, Justin wasn’t sure that he knew how to deal with it.

  Whatever. Ran deserved this. Not only did he deserve the chance to stay in
his country, the only one he’d ever known, but he deserved a real proposal.

  “Look, I don’t have a ring or anything …” Though the idea had been on Justin’s mind, he hadn’t planned enough for that. Hadn’t even been sure that was needed.

  Steeling himself for the rejection that he felt was almost inevitable, he slid off the couch and onto the floor, kneeling there while Ran looked at him through amused, confused dark eyes.

  “What are you …?” Ran asked, as well he might, but Justin captured his hand and held it in his.

  “Ran Moore, will you marry me?”

  Chapter Three

  Ran

  It was a joke.

  Though Justin was a pretty quiet guy, he was also absolutely hilarious. He certainly wasn’t above some friendly pranking, and the first thing to go through Ran’s mind was that that’s all it was.

  Which made him mad.

  This was his life that Justin was making fun of. Maybe Justin didn’t realize it, but it was.

  And that was what made him realize that it wasn’t a joke.

  Justin could be a brat, yes. No doubt about that. But he wasn’t cruel, and Ran knew his best friend well enough to know that he would know better than to tease about this.

  “Justin?” Ran asked, just to make sure. Did Justin really know what he was actually proposing here? Literally proposing. As in marriage. To his best friend. Ran felt a little dizzy just thinking about it.

  Until recently, the idea of marriage hadn’t even entered into Ran’s thoughts. Oh, he was a fan of allowing it to everyone, but as for it being something that he would do himself? No. He had too much going on in his life to even date.

  And then he’d read that the quickest way to get citizenship was to get married.

  It probably wasn’t the only way, at least for him. The fact that his legal parents were American would help, and he would probably eventually get what he wanted, but it would take a while. Years, maybe.