Chapter Fourteen The Engagement Party
Their straight married friends claimed the purpose of an engagement party was to bring the two families together except Danny and Luis didn’t have families to bring.
After coming out they were both estranged from their families and they had long since resigned themselves to this fact.
Yet Danny remained keen on the idea of an engagement party as a way of drawing together their separate social threads.
Anyway, why should they give up this chance to throw a party?
Luis wasn’t sold. The wedding was the party; he didn’t understand the point of a party to announce a party.
It seemed excessive, expensive and self-congratulatory.
Danny was sensitive to accusations of excess – he had faced them his whole life, too much emotion, too many hand gestures, too much sway in his walk or too many colours in his clothes.
It came as no surprise that his wedding preparations, despite being over a decade late, might be described as ‘too much’, as though he were planning to serve glitter-filled cocktails on the backs of swans.
Secretly Danny worried that without the ripples from a splashy announcement their engagement wouldn’t feel real, existing only in their minds as a hazy Highlands memory.
There was a risk that they would slip back into their regular rhythm and routine, allowing the planning to drift until the engagement became nothing more than a promise that they would one day fulfil.
Sure, Luis would be wearing a ring, but a case could be made for spending two years planning the wedding – to take their time.
Except the very last thing Danny wanted to do was to take his time.
They had done that already. After moving slowly, he wanted to move fast, like a child sprinting downhill.
It was September, his heart was set on a summer wedding with the engagement party as a starting pistol.
Agreeing to keep the party unfussy and informal Danny selected Village Bar on Wardour Street, the place where they had met, which felt meaningful because who would’ve thought, back then, that a legal union of any kind would one day be allowed.
Though not a night for solemn speeches, Danny planned to say a few words, wanting to tell the story of how, on that bitter February night, he claimed not to be waiting for anyone when the truth was that he had been waiting for someone his whole life and that someone was Luis.