Work Text:
“I’m sorry,” Patrick says into the phone, then switches it to the other ear. He can’t have heard what he thought he just heard. “Can you repeat the question?”
“Sure.” There’s a grin in Jake’s voice. “Are you and David planning to get married before or after the midterms?”
“Are we…” Patrick trails off. Jake’s really asking this. How is Jake asking this?
“Congratulations, by the way. I always said you were a beautiful couple.”
So Jake’s seen the statement. But if Jake’s seen the statement, then it’s—Then David—Then—Fuck.
“Jake, I have to call you back!” The phone gets halfway to the cradle, then he hauls it back. “I mean—no comment!” He pushes aside a tower of work, searching for his cell, and everything crashes to the floor. “I mean! I’ll call you back with a comment!”
“Sure, take your time, man.” That same amiable, grinning tone. “I go to print in an hour.”
Click.
Patrick gives up on his cell phone. It’s buried under one of these piles, but there’s no time for which. He opens his email on his laptop and finds an unread message in the David folder of his inbox. He’s replied to the draft Patrick sent him and copied his publicist.
Re: How’s this for a quote?
Looks great honey! Annabelle—please send this out.
Sent from my iPhone and probably from one of the Smithsonians
Patrick leaps out of his chair. “No no no!”
He rushes out the door, right past Ray, who doesn’t even try to remind him of what he’s about to miss, and keeps going.
David’s not at a Smithsonian. Patrick knows exactly where he is—the White House Mess—because that’s where Patrick sent him while he finished up “this one last statement for my boyfriend.” David told him he didn’t have to, that he has other people for that, but Patrick insisted. He said winning the HRC Visibility Award is a big deal and deserves a big deal announcement, which it is and does, but there was also another reason. A reason that hinged on actually reading the fucking quote, David.
Patrick finds the man who still thinks he’s Patrick’s boyfriend at his favorite table in his favorite corner eating his favorite grilled cheese with just enough shredded parmesan melted into the crusts. He has a napkin tucked into his collar, reading glasses perched on his nose, and his phone in one hand as he chews and squints. He’s indescribably beautiful in that way Patrick hasn’t had words to explain in a long time, and hasn’t needed to.
Marry me, Patrick thinks, like he’s been thinking every time he looks at David for weeks now. Maybe he should have just followed that impulse, blurted it out. Kept things simple.
“David.” Patrick’s startled to be out of breath as he approaches the table. Did he run here?
David looks up and lights up a stunner of a smile. “Hey, handsome! Ready to join me?”
“David,” Patrick pants, still with nothing else in his lungs.
“You’re… sweating.” David curls a lip and then an eyebrow. His expression darkens. “Is everything—Oh god, is everything all right?”
“Yes!” The last thing this moment needs is David spiraling out over all the many emergencies that would bring Patrick sprinting down to the basement of the West Wing. “Everything—fine.”
“Okay,” David says, still unsettled. “Then why the damp face?”
“You didn’t read—” Patrick presses a hand to his chest and wills everything swimming around in there to get its shit together. “—my email.”
“Sure I did! I said you did a great job.”
“David. You didn’t read it.”
“I skimmed it!”
“David.”
“I got the gist!” David snatches down his readers and they follow his hand in a large, defensive circle through the air. “What’s the big—?”
The dining room door bangs open.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Stevie strides in like the Chief of Staff she is now, ever since Roland mansplained climate change to Greta Thunberg and had to resign to save face at COP26. She strides in like someone in here owes her a Supreme Court seat. “This is how I find out?”
“Stevie—” Patrick starts, but she’s already reading from the printout in her hand. Of course she reads. All the way to the last sentence, even, which is where she starts now.
“Says Rose, quote ‘I’m looking forward to attending the event and celebrating the achievements of the other honorees with my fiancé, Patrick.’ unquote.” She fixes them with the look she usually reserves for the budget chairman. “Care to explain yourselves?”
Patrick breathes out into the thickest silence he’s ever heard. There are other people at other tables, he’s pretty sure, they can’t be alone in here, not during lunch hour on grilled cheese day. But no one’s making a sound.
“With my…” David looks from Stevie to Patrick and back. “Wha—What’s going on?”
“He didn’t read it,” Patrick says to Stevie. “He was supposed to read it.”
“I skimmed it!”
“You were supposed to read it!”
“No one reads these things!”
“Stevie reads these things! Reporters read these things! Jake—!”
“Will someone please just tell me—! ” David cuts himself off and leans back in his chair, hands waving in all directions. “Why—Why did you write that you were my...?”
“David.” The word comes out soft. “This is me… asking.”
Patrick realizes too late—far, far too late—that he left the rest of his plan upstairs. The Tina Turner playlist in his speakers, the champagne in his desk drawer, the rings. They’re all there waiting for David to come rushing around the doorframe with nothing but questions so that Patrick can give the answer from down on one knee: No, it’s not a mistake. No, it doesn’t need a copyedit, not unless David wants it to.
But instead David skimmed. And Patrick’s here, without the rest of it. He gets down on one knee anyway.
“Oh my god!” David’s hands fly to his face. He looks down at his half-eaten sandwich, the grease stain on the tablecloth, the napkin under his chin. “You’re doing this now?”
Patrick grins. “If you’d rather finish your grilled cheese first, I understand.”
David gasps out a laugh. “No, that’s—That’s okay.”
Stevie makes some kind of strangled sound into her closed fist.
“David Rose,” Patrick begins, trying to forget that he’s never been good at improvising, “I fell in love writing with you. It was easy. It’s easy to write with someone who always knows exactly what he means to say, and refuses to settle for anything different.”
The first time David had to deliver a speech written by someone else—the graduation address at his alma mater—he almost threw up beforehand from the nerves. It was the first time Patrick had seen him like that, as he talked David down over FaceTime, because those were the days when that was all they had. He told David it was a solid speech, well written and inspiring, which was true. But he left out the rest of the truth, which was that yes, it wasn’t good enough, because it sounded like everyone else. Whoever wrote it knew their stuff. They knew the issues and the audience and the right rhythm, but they didn’t know David. Not like Patrick did.
He told David he would do great, and of course he did. A clip of an ad-libbed joke he made comparing Greek life to the Mouse Trap board game went viral, and his thesis about owning your bad choices before they own you launched a thousand thinkpieces. Still, when Patrick looks back on it, all he can remember is David’s greenish face on his phone screen and what they both knew, even if they didn’t say it. The speech would’ve been better if they’d worked on it together.
“Turns out it’s easy to fall in love with someone like that, too.”
David’s eyes are full. He’s close enough for Patrick to reach out and touch, so he does. He takes David’s hand.
“I’ve always chosen my words carefully. Too carefully, maybe. Meeting you made me want to choose braver words. Words that aren’t guaranteed. Unexpected words, I guess.” Okay, time to put down the mental thesaurus. “The kind of words that, when I say them now, I really mean them.” God, that sentence was barely English, but Patrick doesn’t care. “Which is a different kind of careful, I think. You make me the right kind of careful.”
David’s face is screaming Yes, already! Patrick tries to find his way back to the question.
“Writing brought me the love of my life. So it just felt like the perfect way to ask you to marry me.”
The answer doesn’t come in words. David pulls him up and in and kisses it into Patrick’s tongue. It tastes like a promise and like the future and like, yes, parmesan. It sounds like champagne fizz mixed with F Major, and is that—applause? Apparently there are other people in the room after all, who knew? And it is perfect. Even though it went so wrong, it’s perfect.
David pulls back and whispers, “Can I finish my sandwich now?”
“I have rings for you upstairs,” Patrick answers. “24 karat.”
“I’ll take it to go.”
“You absolute assholes!” Stevie lands a punch to David’s shoulder, but he doesn’t even flinch. “No one makes me cry my own tears!”
“Sorry Stevie,” Patrick says, not taking his eyes from David’s. “You weren’t supposed to be here for this part. If David would just learn to read—”
“I skimmed!”
“Assholes!” Stevie repeats, then sniffs back a sob. “I’m so happy for you.”
David gets his to-go box, and Patrick carries it back upstairs for him, just the two of them. The two of them plus David’s lunch, the way it was always meant to be. Around every corner there’s a new person waiting to offer their congratulations, all the way back to Ray, who is of course like the Big Boss of congratulations.
“Patrick! David! I just heard the happy news! Have you thought at all about who might photograph the wedding, because I just emailed you a link to my—”
As usual, David retreats into the office and leaves Patrick to escape from his assistant on his own.
“—are really quite popular and several excellent references, only half of which I wrote myself—”
“Thank you Ray, really, we appreciate it.” Patrick starts closing the door against the rushing tide of enthusiasm. “But we’re not really at the point where we’re making decisions yet.”
“Speak for yourself,” David says, once they’re finally alone. He comes in close and takes Patrick’s face in his hands. He’s already removed his silver rings. “There’s a whole binder of decisions at home I can show you.”
“Mmm,” Patrick hums. “Can’t wait.”
They kiss, but not for long. David breaks it off with a slight bounce of impatience. “Okay, I believe I was promised something shiny?”
“Yes, sorry, hold that thought.” With effort, Patrick extracts himself from David’s attention. “I have to take care of something first.”
“Ugh!” David throws his head back dramatically as Patrick picks up his desk phone and starts dialing. “Oh my god, who are you calling? Obviously there’s no one left in the world who doesn’t already know!”
“Patrick!” Jake answers on the first ring, and Patrick puts him on speaker. “I almost thought you were standing me up.”
“Hey, Jake. David’s here.” Patrick locks eyes with his fiancé and smiles. “We have that comment for you.”