‘It’s better than dreading the moment of check-in when they expect us to take separate rooms or separate beds. In Cairo we changed hotel.’
The manager had refused to give them a room with a double bed, offering them a ground-floor room with twin beds facing a rubbish-strewn alley, when they had paid for a Nile-view room. He told them the hotel was overbooked and when this was queried, he suggested, if they were unhappy, they could stay somewhere else. They would not be refunded. They had left, losing all their money. Remembering the events, Luis nodded.
‘Once, in twenty years of travelling, one bad experience.’
Danny said, ‘Luis, she was sweet. She was nice. She was—’
Luis cut in, ‘She was nervous. You put her on edge. You put me on edge. And I know that I’m tired. But I’m also tired of always being confronted with it. I’m tired of it always being an issue even when we’re halfway up a mountain in the middle of nowhere.’
His use of the word ‘it’ made their sexuality sound separate to them. Danny tried to keep his voice steady, but he was no longer in control of his passions and the words tumbled out.
‘Maybe when it goes wrong those times upset me more than they upset you.’
Moving towards the bathroom Luis declared, ‘If you’re always trying to stop something bad from happening, you’re always going to be defined by it.’
Irritated by the condescending tone, Danny shot back, ‘I am defined by it!’
This caused Luis to stop at the bathroom door.
‘But I don’t need this hiking holiday to be defined by it. I don’t need the Highlands to be defined by it.’
With that said, Luis stepped into the bathroom.
Danny perched on the end of the bed, citrus oil and sweat beading on his cheeks like synthetic tears. Mist crept into the valley, pooling at the base of the mountains – impressive, if he had been in a good mood, but right now it felt foreboding. He couldn’t explain that the real reason he wasbeing hypervigilant was because he wanted the proposal to go perfectly, except his hypervigilance had provoked a conflict he wanted to avoid. And Luis was right, he couldn’t incubate them from the world. It was a fool’s errand to try. He was still watching the slow creep of the mist when Luis stepped out of the shower, clean and calm, kissing Danny on the side of his head.
‘I’m sorry.’
But all Danny could think about was the idea that he had made a fuss. Luis might see a wedding the same way – as an unnecessary fuss, questioning the point of an expensive and time-consuming ceremony which would achieve nothing more than legally rebranding them as civil partners, a compromise label that they had rejected eight years ago. Luis didn’t want to be defined by it. Civil partnership would define them. It was possible that Danny had placed too much value on the tradition of surprise. He should have tested the waters. Yet traditions existed for a reason. Marriages were proposed, not debated. You were supposed to be able to read your partner and make the call. Danny had made the call.
Chapter ThirteenWill You Marry Me?
On Bank Holiday Monday, 27 August 2012, twenty years, six months and eight days after they first met, Danny was going to ask Luis to marry him. The forecast was for light showers, clearing eastwards during the afternoon, but Danny wasn’t troubled by the prospect of rain. They had overcome far bigger obstacles to reach this point and anyway, there was romance to sheltering from the weather. By the time the clouds cleared and the sun broke through they’d be engaged. After all the doubts, Danny became so excited he could barely make a dent in his immense Scottish breakfast of spiced Lorne sausage served on a white bap. When Luis asked why he wasn’t eating Danny answered that he couldn’t wait to reach the summit. Luis tilted his head, curious as to why the response sounded like a non sequitur.
After the steep climb out of the village of Kinlochleven the path rose above the low-lying clouds, Luis’s favourite place to be. Despite their relative seclusion and their early start the route to Fort William was dotted with hikers. To avoid turning the proposal into a public scene, Danny ventured off the main path under the pretext of searching for a vantage point for photographs. They climbed towards a rocky outcrop, at times on their hands and knees, reaching a granite ledge. With wisps of cloud settling on the lower slopes, the mountains appeared to be steaming as if the landscape had been recently forged and plunged into the freezing loch waters. Opening his rucksack, ostensibly for his water bottle, Danny removed the ring box while Luis stood nearby admiring the view. The showers softened to a drizzle and Danny stepped forward, joining Luis at the edge. He had imagined going down on one knee but in the moment the gesture seemed inauthentic and when Luis turned to him, expecting to be handed a water bottle, he saw, instead, the open box and the platinum engagement ring gathering spots of Highland rain.
For a time Danny couldn’t speak, unsure whether he would be able to utter the most important sentence of his life. He was convinced that if he opened his mouth he would start to cry, which he had promised himself he would not do until he had heard Luis’s answer. The question should be asked flat, in a steady tone, without emotion, applyingno pressure on the other person. Eventually he found the composure to say, ‘Luis, will you marry me?’
In this moment Luis’s green eyes appeared enormous. With an inscrutable expression he lifted the ring box out of Danny’s hands, no doubt playing back the past couple of months like a reel of celluloid, examining each frame for missed clues.
During the protracted silence, the thought popped into Danny’s head that he should’ve asked the question in Spanish as well as English. He had never learned Spanish since there was never any chance of him catching up with Luis’s English, but for occasions like this he could’ve at least learned the phrase. Maybe the reason Luis was taking so long to answer was that he had always imagined being asked in Spanish and hearing the words in English, in the middle of the Scottish Highlands, maybe it was all too foreign – marriage, the mountains, being offered an engagement ring as if he were the bride-to-be.
Desperate for Luis to speak, Danny waited as Luis looked up at the sky and then down again.
‘Okay, Danny. Let’s get married.’
And that was it. Luis was a world-class lawyer, eloquent and persuasive in a language that he had made his own. Were those really the best words he could manage to the world’s most romantic question? Danny had expected more. But what? Some new sensation – a jolt of electricity, as if theassorted limbs of a loving union might be lifted into a higher state of being by the lightning strike of a proposal. He was being silly. The question was plain. Yes or no. It was best answered plainly. Luis had said yes.
Luis placed the engagement ring on his own finger. Technically that was Danny’s job, but he had lost control of the ring box. And what was he supposed to do – snatch it back? The fit was good; the nights of secret measuring with string had paid off. The ring looked right. They kissed, their first kiss as fiancés. Danny waited for the jolt he had hoped for. But these seconds felt like the previous ones. Or perhaps, a little worse, anticipation replaced by anticlimax. The only sound Danny could hear was the wind through the trees and over the rocks as if the mountains were whispering about them.
Part TwoAutumn
Chapter FourteenThe 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.
