Chapter 25 #2
“I hope you’re happy,” she said, her voice a knife laced in drops of deadly belladonna, dripping bitter and flat.
“I am,” Oscar replied, his lips curving up as he slid his feet back into his shoes. His mother’s nostrils flared.
And it was hard for a child to hate a living parent when there was a dead one, but Oscar had a life of practice, too many nights of tears praying to a god he didn’t believe in for his mother to say just once she loved him, too many faint white lines on his skin.
So it was easier to turn and go than it would have been for somebody else.
A time before, Oscar would have said that he must be an awful person.
But Oscar wasn’t awful.
Oscar had been hurt, and for a long time he’d carried that burden on his hunched shoulders, packed it all up in boxes that were taking space in the attic of his mind.
As Oscar glanced at the gate he was swiftly approaching at the end of the path, he glimpsed the flowers already beginning to bloom in the neighbors’ garden, the greening of the branches as new leaves began to bud.
Maybe it was time for a bit of spring cleaning.
Oscar needed to make space for new things now, new burdens he would gladly share, and as the baggage scattered on the air above his mother’s lawn and the gate clicked shut behind him, Oscar smiled to himself.
And he didn’t look back.
When Oscar’s parents paid the deposit on their wedding venue, people laughed.
They told them they were crazy to spend money on something like that when the world was about to end.
But in the summer of the year 2000, Oscar’s mother wore her white dress, defying all the odds, and Oscar remembered playing back their wedding video over and over, winding back to the part where everyone was dancing to “Mambo No. 5.”
Even as a child, Oscar had imagined one day looking like Papa. He’d looked so handsome in his tacky white suit, his messy hair so much like Oscar’s. He’d been so young.
When Aaron’s key turned in the lock at half past five, Oscar was stirring pasta sauce and humming the opening to Lou Bega’s famous song, thinking about Papa and the part where he spun Grandma around on the dance floor, her purple sequin dress straight out of Old Hollywood on her much younger body.
“Hey!” Aaron’s smile was the summer of the year 2000, a ray of light on the seabed.
“Hi…” Despite the pasta sauce simmering on the stove, the apartment smelled like Aaron’s favorite Summer Breeze detergent from when Oscar had washed and changed their sheets and the blanket that was now spread over their couch.
The floor was spotless, the furniture dusted, and there was a fresh bunch of sunflowers on the coffee table, Aaron’s mug warmer wiped down and waiting for his after-dinner cup.
“You’ve been busy…” Aaron hung his tote bag on the hook by the door and bent down to lift Luigi, pressing kisses to his face over and over again and letting him down only after a sufficient number of mews and protests.
Oscar swallowed his fear and turned off the stove.
He might not have known exactly where he was going or why earlier that day, but his heart was set, and his mind made up, and if Aaron was a ray of sunlight on the seabed, Oscar wanted to be the water refracting him in rainbow splendor.
“That smells delicious! Why’d you turn it off? You haven’t even set the water to boil.” Aaron frowned, mouth pinching in the center as he pushed his glasses up and pressed them to the space between his eyebrows with the tip of his finger.
“We can eat later. I want to talk to you,” Oscar said.
His body felt lighter than it ever had before, the spring in his step lifting him off the ground like anti-gravity. If kid Timothée Chalamet was in the cornfield, then Oscar was grown up Matthew McConaughey, and he was flying up to space, each stride bringing him closer to the sun.
“It’ll ruin the sauce! We can talk while you cook, baby,” Aaron replied, shaking his head.
“Fuck the sauce.”
Oscar took Aaron’s hands as he arrived in front of him, yanking him close, pressing their lips together in a sweeping kiss that had been building inside him the entire day. When he pulled away, Aaron’s eyes were fixed on him, lined with curiosity.
“Okay, I know we can’t afford to fuck the sauce right now,” Oscar said sheepishly. “I’ll scrape it off the bottom and eat the crunchy bits if I have to. I can live off chickpeas and beans and oat cookies for a few months, Aaron.”
“That’s debatable, Spike, but fine. What do you want to talk about?”
Aaron brushed Oscar’s face, and despite his eagerness, Oscar lingered there for a moment, relishing his touch, living in it, drawing the energy his mother had tried to siphon from him, the way she had his entire life growing up. But no more.
Her time to dance was over, and it was his turn now, luck and genes and history be damned.
Aaron’s eyes were still fixed ahead when Oscar dropped to the floor, his knee cracking as it met the wood. By the time he registered the motion and looked down, Oscar had pulled the golden band out of his pocket and was holding it up in the air between them.
“Marry me,” he said.
Oscar would never have believed these words coming out of his mouth just a year before.
He’d always imagined that if he ever got married, it would be years after he met his person, years into living with them, years and years and years.
But “Mambo No. 5” was playing over in his head, and every name Lou Bega said had been replaced by Aaron Aaron Aaron.
“I mean it. Will you marry me?”
“Spike, where is this coming from? You’re being crazy right now.
Since when—” Aaron looked down at him, flabbergasted, eyes darting from Oscar’s face to the plain scratched ring in his grip, the same that had cooled the heat on his face after so many tantrums, the same that had stroked his cut hair every time Papa had fixed it, the same that had glinted underneath the bathroom lights as Papa pressed toilet paper to his wrist, catching sunlight on the sidewalk from his nightmares.
“Since now,” Oscar said.
“Will you at least get up?” Aaron’s eyebrows were scrunched up, but he hadn’t walked away, and this would have to be enough for Oscar, enough to drive him forward, enough to fill his tank and keep him going. “If this is some Walk to Remember bullshit—”
“I’m not trying to be romantic,” Oscar said, shaking his head as he stood, “although I hope it is. I hope you like the flowers and that I got down on one knee. I wish I could afford to take you out to dinner, too, but this is what I can do right now, and I promise I will always give you everything I can for the rest of our lives.”
Oscar swallowed, and it went down easy. Oscar breathed, and the air was clear. The moths that had battered the inside of his stomach his entire grown life had turned into butterflies, their feather-soft wings tickling a warm, love-laced laugh out of him.
“Boo, I hope and dream and pray that everything will be okay, that marrying young means we get to celebrate those ridiculously expensive-sounding anniversaries like sapphire and platinum.”
“What if it isn’t like that?” Aaron’s nose twitched.
And Oscar might have slapped himself a week before for bringing it up like this after what had seemed like a good day, but not now. Oscar was ready. He didn’t need to be Papa. He only needed to be someone who would make him proud.
“Then all the more reason to say yes.”
Oscar pressed a soft dry kiss to Aaron’s forehead, staying with it a second, willing that brain of his to be kind, to reject this difficult possibility looming in front of them, frightening them senseless.
He pulled away and knew there were tears in his eyes, but his gaze wasn’t blurred.
Oscar had never seen more clearly than he did right now.
“All the legal mumbo jumbo is the reason I even thought about this. If it comes down to something…if it’s a bad result,” Oscar said, “I want to be the one.”
“The one what?” Aaron asked, swallowing, but he wasn’t saying no. He wasn’t saying no. He wasn’t saying no.
“I want to be your legal caregiver. I don’t want anybody else to be kneeling in front of the shower washing your hair, if there ever comes a day when you forget how to do it.
I don’t want anybody else making decisions you wouldn’t want them to make.
” Oscar leaned in, brushing the tips of their noses together.
“Aaron, I don’t trust your father or your brothers to make difficult decisions for you.
If I’m your husband, I become your next of kin.
And if you tell me you want a purple sky, I will get myself into a spaceship and drown the world in paint for you, even if it takes all the air from my lungs. ”
Aaron found his eyes, his entire face contorting as he understood what sacrifice Oscar had promised to make. Oscar nodded, allowing the tears that had gathered along the rims of his eyes to escape through the corners.
“What if we adopt a baby, and I’m not around to help? You’d never wake up, not if it cried itself to death,” Aaron mumbled.
“Then we won’t adopt a baby,” Oscar said. “We’ll have our honeymoon years and adopt an older queer kid nobody wants to take home, a whole litter of them if you want, and give Tobe a run for their money.” Oscar kissed Aaron on the cheek.
“And what if I say something mean to you?” Aaron asked. “I never expected you to stick around if I got sick, Spike.”
“It’s not up to you whether I stick around or not.
I’ve made that choice. And so what if you say something mean?
I was forged in the fires of Marjorie Peters, Aaron.
Not in the worst of your foul moods can you beat that, I assure you.
” Oscar kissed Aaron on the chin. He longed to kiss him everywhere.
“And what if you end up spending the rest of your life picking me up off the floor, wiping my mouth when I can’t anymore?” Aaron’s voice wobbled.
“That’s why I have arms, so I can pick you up, and I would never let anybody else near that pretty mouth anyway,” Oscar said.
“But Oscar, what if I forget your name?” And Aaron’s voice went down to a whisper on the last word. It tore into Oscar, cutting him like those sewing scissors his mother had locked in her drawer.
“Then I will teach it to you over and over again,” Oscar whispered back, pressing softnesses to Aaron’s temples, mapping his way to his mouth across his connect-the-dots freckles. “And I’ll fool you into thinking it’s been Spike all along.”
“It has been Spike all along,” Aaron said. His lips wobbled into a smile.
“Well, given it’s Papa’s ring I’m trying to give you, that’s rather fitting,” Oscar replied.
He pulled away, looking at Aaron’s face in full for the first time in minutes. Fuck, he was beautiful. Fuck, Oscar loved him.
“I can’t very well say no to Papa’s ring, now can I?” Aaron cocked his head to the side.
His eyes brightened, catching the light that lived between them, that breathed hope into Oscar every day he lived with him. Aaron took a step back and held out his hand, waving his fingers in invitation.
All the little bits of Aaron in Oscar’s version of the song from his parents’ wedding video came together to complete a whole as Oscar slid the ring onto his finger, lifting his hand to his lips and kissing it.
“Are we really doing this?” Aaron murmured. “You’ve just turned twenty-one. And we can’t afford anything right now. You were just saying you’re going to scrape burnt sauce off the pan and sprinkle it on your pasta like parmesan cheese.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I pictured you doing it.” Aaron’s smirk was a playground Oscar wanted to spend the rest of his life on, his scrunching nose the slide down which Oscar wanted to run his finger over and over again.
“And it would be crushed pepper, not parmesan cheese,” Oscar replied.
“We still can’t afford anything,” Aaron said.
“We can offer our guests drip filter coffee, one cup each, and when everybody leaves, we can go for pancakes, just us. We’ll give them knitted party favors—all your half-finished projects—and you can knit a tux for each of us.”
“We could also wear sweaters and jeans, Spike. And go to the courthouse and have everybody over after.” Aaron—sweet, smart, measured Aaron—drew in a breath that sat in his chest for a long, long time.
“I’d marry you in sweatpants,” Oscar said.
He wrapped his arms around the small of Aaron’s back, pulling him in by the waist. Their lips met in the middle, the last coffee Aaron had sipped on his way home from work still lingering bitter and delicious as his tongue slipped through the gap between Oscar’s teeth, deepening their kiss, his hands rising up Oscar’s back as they climbed through his shirt.
Aaron’s ring was still cold against Oscar’s skin, still new, still settling.
“I’d marry you wearing nothing at all,” Aaron said as he pulled away, eyes smoldering with the same desire that simmered in Oscar’s middle, dripping hot for him.
Oscar didn’t need to be told twice. A moment later, Aaron was hoisted up on Oscar’s hips with a yelp, legs wrapping around his waist. Their clothes lined up behind their bedroom door, a carpet of scattered things that mapped their way to bed.
Entirely naked and hungry for more than just food, Aaron fell onto the mattress like a gift from the skies, and Oscar descended, ready to give thanks and worship.
As his lips trailed kisses up Aaron’s thighs, rising to the heat of his center, fingers trailing his wetness and slipping into Oscar’s mouth to taste it, Oscar smiled, looking up at him.
He couldn’t wait until the day he could call him husband.