Chapter 303
“I gathered that,” Darren smirked, and his eyes slid sideways. Jayden glanced aside, and an elderly woman—likely Lillian’s relative, judging by the size of her—glowered back. “Problem, love?” Darren asked obnoxiously, and Jayden turned away from her to laugh into the top of Darren’s shoulder. “Didn’t think so,” Darren grumbled, and Jayden kissed him, dizzy with all the positive emotion, and smiled against his mouth.
“You were gorgeous up there in the church,” Jayden confessed. “And at the dinner. I wanted to just pull you away from the piano right then when you started playing. I forgot how fucking sexy you look when you play, and dinner was so awkward.”
“Sorry.” Darren smirked.
“No, you’re not,” Jayden laughed and then softened. “In all seriousness, I think I just fell in love all over again.”
Darren’s mouth ticked upwards in a quick, fleeting smile. There was something intangible behind his eyes, and Jayden kissed his cheek again, burning still with the need to touch him, even if not for sex this time.
“You’ll never claim to be sorry for that,” he murmured, and Darren chuckled.
“Yeah, think you’re right there. Hypothetically, you know, we could do it all over again and get free wine and presents if we got married.”
“Yeah but I couldn’t sneak you off in the middle of it. The people getting married are kind of crucial to the deal, and that would be crap having to watch you walk around in a proper penguin suit all sexy and shaggable and everything and have to wait.”
“It’d be our wedding; we could do whatever we liked.”
Jayden smiled, kissing his other cheek. The faintest rasp of stubble made itself known against his lips, and he transferred his attention to those lips, mouthing at the faintest split where he had bitten it too hard in the hotel room. “Are you asking?”
Darren shrugged. “Hypothetically, if I did, would you say yes?”
“Mm,” Jayden hummed. “Are you asking?”
“If I were asking, I’d have asked.”
“Well.” Jayden slid closer, until they weren’t so much dancing as hugging and rocking lightly on their feet together. “Hypothetically, you know, if in a hypothetical situation you were to ask properly, with a date at my favourite restaurant and a ring and everything like that, then…I suppose hypotheticallyI’d say yes, yeah.”
Darren grinned, squeezed him a little tighter, and said nothing in reply. Jayden rested his head on one wide shoulder with a sigh, smiling at the warmth of one hand at his hip and the other around his back, and the gentle power settled in Darren’s body. Jayden felt truly calm for the first time in months, felt as though they really had won the battle, felt as though…as though Darren’s illness couldn’t beat them.
Not as though they had won, but as though they would win.
“Darren?” he murmured.
“Mm?”
“You’re…it,” he said finally, and Darren kissed his ear.
“Yeah,” he said. “Think I figured that out by now.”
* * * *
They retired from the wedding entirely at midnight, after far too much champagne and not enough food and when the dance floor started rocking gently under their feet even when they weren’t dancing. Jayden retrieved Darren from the dance floor and the clutches of Lillian’s sister, who had flirted incessantly with him all night, and Paul drunkenly bade them ‘Merry Christmas!’ as they said their goodbyes. Ruby laughed, said she’d see to her brother, and wished them good night.
Darren was very drunk, the pills probably heightening the effect of the booze, and a faint prickle of concern started up in the back of Jayden’s mind as he steered him into and out of the lift, into the hotel room, and onto the bed—and then it faded, when Darren caught his tie, pulled him down for a messy and slack kiss, murmured an endearment, and drifted off to sleep.
“Love you,” Jayden mumbled, turned him onto his side, and went to shower.
When he came back, Darren had woken up a bit, and disappeared into the shower himself. Jayden tidied up their abandoned clothes and flicked on the TV very quietly. He felt exhausted, drunk, sated, and lucky. Supremely, ridiculously lucky. When Darren returned, naked and dripping wet and smelling of hotel shower gel, Jayden kissed him and reeled him in by the hair and ended up with a living blanket. They were too tired and too far gone to make much use of the lack of clothes, and Jayden dozed, woke, and dozed again to the deep power of Darren’s half-asleep breathing, the damp motions of his lips against whatever skin he found closest, and the occasional venture of a clumsy hand over Jayden’s chest, ribs and belly.