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“You’re over there next to Nick Nelson.”
Nick turned from the window at the mention of his name. Mr. Lange was looking at a lanky, dark-haired boy standing at the front of the room. The boy turned to look at where he was going to sit for the remainder of the year. Meeting eyes, Nick thought he’d never seen eyes as icy blue as the ones on the boy in front of him. What had Mr. Lange said his name was? Nick hadn’t paid much attention past his own name. All he knew about the blue-eyed boy was that he was in year 10. Racking his brain, Nick couldn’t recall much more beyond that. The boy settled into the seat next to him, dropping an aqua colored backpack onto the floor.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
The boy met Nick’s eyes quickly before looking away to rummage in his backpack and pulled out a stack of papers. It was the start of term; how did he already have homework? Nick’s brain finally caught up with him and he stopped looking at the boy to resume doodling swirls on his notebook instead of doing anything useful.
The boy, who Nick soon learned was named Charlie Spring, hunched over what appeared to be maths homework. It seemed to be similar to what Nick was doing, but that didn’t make sense if Charlie was the year below him. It didn’t really matter, but Nick was looking for any excuse to start a conversation, and Charlie’s eyes were trained onto the sequence of numbers and letters. Nick blinked back over to his own notebook, grasping for something to say. He didn’t want to just sit next to someone all term and not say anything.
Turning to ask about the maths homework, Nick was cut off by the bell, indicating that the period was over. Before Nick could focus his attention back on Charlie, the boy was gone. Nick blinked at the now empty chair. Well, I’ll try tomorrow.
***
“Well, if it isn’t Charlie Spring. Happy New year!”
“Hi Mr. Lange,” Charlie replied, trying to pull up a small smile and wipe Ben from his mind for the time being.
“Let’s see… where did I put you on the seating plan… Ah yes! You’re over there, next to Nick Nelson.” Charlie turned to see a blond boy he recognized staring out the window. Sunlight streamed through the window turning his light hair golden and illuminating him and the seat next to him. The flip in Charlie’s stomach wasn’t disconcerting at all. “He’s in year 11, so only a year older than you!”
Seemingly upon hearing his name, the boy turned from the window and made eye contact with Charlie across the room. Charlie felt his whole body tighten. The boy, now waiting as Charlie made his way to the empty chair, was one of Harry Greene’s inner-circle.
Charlie sat next to the broad blond and quickly risked eye contact.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Pleasantries completed, Charlie retreated into his bag, pulling out the maths homework that had been assigned last period to avoid doing anything that could be seen as untoward. He attempted to disappear into the algebra review, hoping to avoid the ire of the older boy. But Nick Nelson didn’t seem to have any interest in needling Charlie the way his friends did. For most of the period Nick left Charlie alone, Charlie sending up a prayer to whatever divine powers happened to have taken pity on him.
Just before the bell was supposed to ring, Charlie felt Nick shift in his direction. Dreading he would be pulled into a conversation, Charlie again thanked the patron of social anxiety for the merciful ringing bell. Faster than he even expected of himself, Charlie gathered his things and dashed out of the classroom.
He finally allowed himself to breathe once he was seated in History waiting for Aled to join him. He had avoided any conversation today, but could he really do that for the rest of the year? The last thing he wanted was to gain any extra comments from that group by talking to one of them. He was lucky to not have any classes with Harry Greene and had to hope that Nick Nelson proved to be at least nice enough to leave him alone.
It didn’t help how beautiful the year 11 looked with the winter sun streaming through the classroom window. How inconvenient, Charlie thought.
***
Day 2
“All right?” Nick asked as Charlie dropped his bag next to the chair.
“All right,” Charlie answered. Attempting to keep his face neutral.
Day 3
“Morning!” Nick said beaming at Charlie.
“Morning…” Charlie answered, anxiety lighting in his stomach.
Day 4
Nick and Charlie somehow entered the classroom at the same time and bumped shoulders.
“Hey!” Nick Nelson said with a toothy grin.
“Hey…” Charlie responded, hoping Nick didn’t think that he’d bumped him on purpose. He’d said hello to Charlie every day this week. What did that mean? Was Nick mocking him by saying hello? Charlie wasn’t quite sure how that worked but his brain started to cloud. He was sure Nick had had a good laugh with Harry about how gay Charlie was seated next to him in form and that he hoped he didn’t catch “the gay.” Why else would Nick talk to Charlie if it wasn’t to mock him? They weren’t even in the same year group. What if-
“Er.. Charlie?”
Abruptly pulled from his spiral, Charlie snapped his head up.
“You don’t have any tissues, do you? My pen… er… exploded.” Nick’s hands were covered in blue ink, palms facing his chest, as though the ink could explode again from his open hands. Blue was splattered all over the white dress shirt and the table. Nick had a small smile on his face, shoulders up by his ears, looking almost bashful asking Charlie anything.
“Ah, no, sorry,” Charlie responded, still trying to clear his mind from the spiral he’d just been dragged out of.
Mr. Lange appeared behind the two of them, and Nick smiled absently up at the teacher.
“Oh dear, Nick, you’d better go clean up in the bathroom. Charlie, can you go with Nick and open doors for him?”
Charlie’s heart rate spiked. Oh no. One on one with Nick Nelson? In the bathroom? Charlie’s brain eagerly supplied the comments Nick, or his mates might have.
Charlie kept himself as far physically from Nick as he could while holding open the door. Nick happily bobbed past Charlie, seeming unaware of younger boy’s discomfort.
***
“Sorry about this,” Nick said, holding his hands close to his already soiled shirt, hoping to minimize the mess.
“It’s fine.” Nick searched the somewhat empty, but polite face for any indication that he was bothered but came up with nothing. So they started walking together down the hallway.
“Hopefully I’ll get to miss some of first period…” Charlie began, both to Nick’s surprise and delight. “I have double science.” Charlie kept his gaze trained on the ground as they walked, hands deep in his pockets, elbows tucked tightly against his sides.
“Ugh! Who d’you have?” Nick asked, hoping he didn’t sound too enthusiastic at the boy starting a conversation.
“Mr. Hutchins,” Charlie supplied.
“Oh my god. I had him last year! He smells so bad of cat food!” To Nick’s delight this pulled a small smile out of Charlie, and he finally looked up at Nick.
“He REALLY does.” Nick blinked quickly at the dimples appearing at the edges of Charlie’s smile. After another beat Charlie continued. "So… how did your pen explode?”
“It’s a fountain pen.” Nick responded, hoping his voice didn’t betray how excited he was to be having a conversation with his seatmate. “They do that sometimes.”
“Aren’t fountain pens really hard to write with?” Charlie asked, just one of the dimples disappearing as the ghost of a smirk appeared.
“Yeah, but it makes my handwriting look well nice.” They’d arrived at the bathroom and Charlie removed one hand from his pockets to push the door open for Nick. Their conversation paused as Nick attempted to scrub the ink off at the sink. The water was turning blue and ink was getting on the faucet handles, but it still seemed to be sinking deeper into Nick’s skin.
“It’s not coming off!” Nick whined, turning back to Charlie, who now had his arms crossed in front of his chest.
Charlie gave a short laugh. “You’re gonna be blue forever.”
Nick held up his now wet hand and turned it in front of his face, stepping away from the sink and closer to Charlie. He pretended not to notice how Charlie’s hands tensed on his biceps as Nick stepped closer.
“It looks like I’m wearing gloves,” he said, slowly turning his hand in front of his face.
“You can make it the new school fashion,” Charlie added quickly, the smirk coming back and one dimple popping up. Nick counted it as win.
“I’ll pretend it’s a tattoo!” Nick said beaming.
Charlie’s arms dropped to his sides and his smirk morphed into a nervous smile. “I think that might be against school rules.”
Nick was about to make a comment about only nerds being concerned with school rules, but the bell broke their banter.
“Oh,” he said looking up, as though the bell was staring down at them and caught them slacking off between classes.
“We’d better go,” Charlie said quickly. Nick nodded and took the five steps away from Charlie to the hand dryer.
“Was that the first bell or the second bell?”
“Dunno, I’ll check.”
After a few moments, Nick gave up on the ancient hand dryer and, wiping his hands on his trousers, turned back to Charlie, whose prominent mouth had fallen into a line.
“Charlie?” Nick pulled Charlie from whatever was on the screen.
“Er, yeah. First bell,” Charlie said, sliding the phone back into his pocket. Nick blinked at Charlie, his expression once again unreadable and polite. Well, at least Nick had made some progress in befriending the blue-eyed boy. As they headed back to the form room to collect their things, Nick hoped he could make Charlie smile again. And again, and again, and again.
Nick loved making new friends.
************
“Ah shit.”
Charlie popped his head up from where he was calculating statistical derivatives at the coffee table. Nick was seated at his small dining table where, up until a moment ago, he’d been working on lesson plans for student teaching this week. Now, however, he was leaning back, covered in blue ink and glaring at the papers in front of him.
Charlie had to press his hand over his mouth to keep from giggling. Nick glanced over and gave Charlie a dark look. “Oh, so it’s funny that the last four hours of work have gotten covered in blue ink?”
“No, no of course no,” Charlie choked out, earning him a deep frown from his boyfriend. “You never learn, do you?”
“I’m supposed to turn this in!” Nick exclaimed, looking away. His pale skin ignited incredibly easily and Charlie could already see the blush pooling on his soft cheekbones. “I want it to look nice,” he added, quieter this time.
Charlie decided to give up on his studying and moved across the tiny apartment Nick shared with three other guys from Leeds Rugby to drop a kiss onto his forehead. They’d all gone home for the weekend so Charlie and Nick had the flat to themselves.
“I’m gonna get you covered in ink too,” Nick muttered, clearly trying to still be annoyed.
“We can be blue together,” Charlie said, completely failing to cover his laugh. Nick finally got up to try and clean his hands off, knowing they’d be tinted blue for at least a few days. Charlie waited by the table for Nick to give up on cleaning his hands and come back over, letting his smirk fall into a fond smile.
“I’m going to be blue forever,” Nick said, finally allowing a big grin to grow across his face.
“Pity Truham didn’t appreciate your fashion sense. Maybe it’ll catch on at Leeds?”
“Least it isn’t against the school rules here,” Nick replied, leaning in to drop a kiss on Charlie’s lips. “Did you want to kiss me that first day?” Nick asked quietly as he pulled back, suddenly serious.
Charlie seemed to need to consider the question. “Honestly, I was desperately trying to come off as not gay as I possibly could. I’ve told you this before, but I was so scared you’d be weirded out by me that I was actively trying not to even be gay too close to you.”
Nick nodded. It made sense, his friends had been far from model allies when they were sixteen. The good ones had stepped up when they’d been called out though, and Nick was planning on asking Sai to be the best man at his and Charlie’s wedding. Not that he’d been thinking about getting married to Charlie since he was seventeen.
“I really can’t blame you for that,” Nick brought his hand up to grab hold of Charlie’s. “But I hope you know I’m the exact opposite of weirded out by you being gay to me.” It was now Nick’s turn to smirk as his gaze slipped from Charlie’s eyes to his lips.
Charlie looked up, a single dimple appearing just below Charlie’s prominent cheekbones. “Oh? And what’s the exact opposite of being weirded out?” Instead of answering, Nick ducked his head to kiss Charlie’s neck and move his hands onto his waist. “Well in that case, we should really get this shirt off before you make any more of a mess with the… ink.”
************
“Stop playing with it, love.” Charlie reached down to grab Nick’s glove covered hand from where it was fiddling with where the edge of the glove met the hospital gown. He knew it was going to leave an indent on his skin. Luckily, he forgot about how itchy his wrist was and moved on to being annoyed by the layers of plastic between his and his husband’s hands. Warmth was the only thing that came through the gloves, not the soft skin where Charlie’s long fingers met his hand, not the callous on his middle finger of his right hand from too many years holding pencils, and not the way goosebumps popped up on the back of his hand when Nick moved his thumb just right along the inside of Charlie’s knuckles. But the blue-eyed man’s hand also distracted him from his nerves, just like it had for the past twenty years. He didn’t need to think about the hard hospital chairs, or the anticipation every time the door opened, he could just focus on his husband’s hand and think about how important today was.
Charlie ran his own blue gloved finger over Nick’s fingers, lifting their hands onto his lap to stare at them. The ghost of a smile played on his lips and Nick wanted to watch the reaction of lips and dimples forever. But Charlie’s eyes were far away, happy for once, but far away.
“What, love?” Nick asked quietly squeezing Charlie’s hand with a very unappealing squeak.
“Blue gloves…” Charlie breathed. “Never did become the new school fashion.” When Charlie lifted his head, Nick found the icy eyes he was constantly getting lost in held a bit of mischief in them.
Nick’s brain struggled to find the reference, which seemed to amuse Charlie more. “That’s okay. The conversation wasn’t quite as present as the Snow Day, but it still sticks in my memory as the first time we really talked.”
The memory came flooding back. Fountain pen, blue ink, easy banter, dimples, the deep knowledge he had to be friends with Charlie Spring, even if he didn’t know why yet. The first time he saw warmth directed at him in those bright cerulean eyes. A knowing smile spread across current Nick’s lips, and he was tempted to kiss his husband long and hard in the middle of the hospital ward. He settled for a light kiss in the curls near Charlie’s temple.
“Spring-Nelson?” A nurse came out of the doors. Both Nick and Charlie stood. “You can come with me. Everything went well, it was a perfectly normal birth, everyone is healthy.” She led them through the prenatal unit of the hospital to the room their surrogate was in.
“Hi Martha,” Charlie said, coming up beside the woman and placing a hand on her shoulder.
“Hi you too. They said they’d bring her in a moment. They need to weigh her an log her height. ” She laid her head back against the pillow. “I must say, that was the easiest childbirth I’ve had!” Nick and Charlie had selected Martha as a surrogate partially due to the fact she already had four children of her own and had been a surrogate once before. They would have hated to have a woman going in who didn’t know what she was getting herself into.
A nurse came in holding a small bundle wrapped in a yellow blanket. She smiled at the three of them, going to hand the bundle to Martha, but she waved the nurse off. “Her dads should be the first to hold her.”
The nurse turned and Charlie moved to take the small thing from her, eyes soft and dimples sparking on his cheeks. Nick came up behind him, hands encircling his waist to look down at their daughter. Charlie cooed at the bundle in his arms. “She’s beautiful,” Nick choked out, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“My sweet Delia,” Charlie whispered. “You are so loved, and you don’t even know it yet.” She was almost bald except for a few delicate whisps of golden hair, the same as Nick’s turned in weak winter sunlight. Charlie moved a finger towards her to touch her face and her eyes blinked open revealing deep pools of blue, nearly identical to Charlie’s.
“Well, at least the proper genes came through from the egg donor,” Nick chuckled softly into Charlie’s ear. “Welcome to the world, little one.” Nick’s hand came up to softly stroke his daughter’s head, overwhelmed with adoration.