Solitaire

I sit back, nestling into the comfortable padded leather of the car seat and replace my cellphone into the inside pocket of my suit jacket. I sigh heavily and run a frustrated hand through my newly-shorn hair. A few years ago Quatre found it necessary to hire an image consultant to help us ‘cultivate our public image’ as he put it. His name is Nicky and he helps us with our appearance and grooming – and he is a complete tyrant! I had an appointment with him this afternoon, and as a result I am now sporting what Nicky calls a ‘French crop’, which he insists is ‘all the rage’. Whatever!

Quatre has just called to tell me that he will be home quite late tonight and not to wait up for him. Absolute nonsense, of course, I will most definitely wait up for him. This is a familiar scenario. Every time he is late home he tells me not to wait up for him, and I always do. I think of him coming home, tired and hungry, to a dark, dormant house, fumbling his way to the kitchen to solitarily consume his cold, congealed dinner because he is too weary to be bothered with heating it up, or worse still, going straight to bed without eating at all. Then tiptoeing up the stairs to the bedroom, shuffling his way out of his clothes in the dark, for fear that switching on the light would wake me. He would then slide under the covers and fall asleep, cold, lonely and tired, and worst of all, with no-one to hold him. He wouldn’t dare cuddle up to me while I was asleep because he wouldn’t want to disturb my rest. He is so selfless that way. No, it does not bear thinking about. I will wait up for him even if I have to wait until dawn.

I rarely, if ever, have to wait that long, however. He is never home much later than around 11.00pm, which is quite late enough! Hansen, our driver, will drive him home. It’s rare that either Quatre or I drive ourselves to or from work. Our days are stressful enough without that. I will be at the door to welcome him with a big hug and a kiss, and as I help him off with his coat/jacket (depending on the time of year) and relieve him of his briefcase he will admonish me. ‘Trowa,’ he will say, ‘You shouldn’t have waited, I told you not to,’ but the happy sparkle in his eyes tells me that he is glad that I did. I then take his hand and lead him to the dining room, where the huge table has been set for two. I always wait until he comes before I eat. Meals are always more pleasant when taken in company. Hansen will have informed me of the approximate E.T.A., so everything will be prepared, heated and perfectly edible. Depending on the time, either our butler Johannes will serve us, or I will undertake the task if Johannes has already retired. After dinner I will take him to our bedroom, even sometimes physically carrying him. Then I undress him, make sweet, passionate love to him and then hold him in my arms until he falls asleep. Yes, I’d say that this is a much better end to an evening spent working late.

Hansen draws the car up outside the front doors and comes round to open the passenger door for me. I thank him, ascend the short flight of stone steps and step into the house.

“Good evening Mr Barton.” Johannes closes the double front doors behind me and steps forward to relieve me of my jacket. “Mr Winner is working late this evening.” He makes it a statement not a question, though since Quatre and I usually travel home together, this is not too difficult a deduction.

“I’m afraid so.” I confirm. I do not trouble to give any further instructions. Both Johannes and Hansen know the score. They know what to do and when to do it.

I pull off my tie as I ascend the stairs to our bedroom, and once there I swiftly exchange my business clothes for more casual attire. Minutes later I emerge from the bedroom clad in jeans, t-shirt and comfortable suede loafers. All I need to do now is find something to pass the time until Hansen brings my angel home to me. I smile to myself as I think of what Quatre would do in the same circumstances. He would pick up the phone and call Duo. Duo and he would have no trouble talking to each other on the phone for three hours straight! Me, I walk the corridors until I come to the library.

The walls of the library are lined with books of all kinds, but I am interested in only one. I walk up to the only glazed cabinet in the room, open the unlocked door and withdraw a large book, beautifully bound with white and gold brocaded fabric. The covers of the book are slightly padded and yield gently under my touch. I carry it reverently over to my favourite chair. The library is decorated in a quirky and whimsical style, and in one corner stands a magnificent gilt Louis XVI armchair, covered in faux leopard skin fabric. This is the chair that I always sit in when in the library. It is also just large enough for two so when Quatre and I spend an evening reading together, it can accommodate both of us. Altogether a most agreeable chair.

I settle myself down, tucking my legs comfortably beneath me, adjusting myself a little until I find the most comfortable position. I stroke the fabric of the cover gently with my fingertips before slowly lifting it. On the first of the gilt-edged pages is a single date, embossed onto the stiff creamy velum. The day on which all my dreams came true, the happiest day of my life, mine and Quatre’s wedding day. I sigh wistfully and turn the page. Two small roses, dried and flattened, sit pressed between the pages; our corsages. The blooms, once white and full, have yellowed and shrunken over the years, but the memories they evoke are still vividly strong. We chose roses because Quatre had given me a bouquet of roses just after he asked me to marry him.

I remember that day so well. Quatre had planned a special evening, but everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong.. He had bought tickets for the opera, followed by dinner at a swish new restaurant for which tables had to be booked 2-3 months in advance, so in demand were they. Firstly he got caught up at the office and left an hour later than planned. We arrived at the Opera House well after the opening curtain, so we missed the first half of the performance since we were not permitted to enter the auditorium until the interval. After sitting through the second half we got caught up in traffic on the way to the restaurant. Some computer glitch with the traffic light system as I recall, and as a result the roads were in total chaos. We eventually decided to get out and walk, but by this time we were so late that we arrived at the restaurant only to discover that our table had been given away. We found another restaurant and had dinner there, but Quatre was so upset about the whole evening being such a bust that he was close to tears. He kept wringing his hands and apologising for the disastrous evening, saying that he had wanted everything to be so perfect and that now it was all ruined. I tried to tell him that it didn’t matter, but he was inconsolable. At one point he said,

‘I wanted to ask you…, I wanted…’ He tailed off and looked dejectedly at me.

‘What did you what to ask me angel?’ I asked him, and at that point I swear to you I had no inkling of what was coming. Suddenly he began frantically patting at his pockets.

‘Oh Trowa,’ Came the despondent cry, ‘I’ve lost it!’

My poor baby then burst into tears. After some time I was able to calm him down. Still having no idea of what had been lost, I managed to get him to mentally retrace his steps to see if he could pinpoint where he might have lost ‘it’. It transpired that the last place he remembered seeing ‘it’ was in his office. The roads had cleared sufficiently for us to take a cab to the W.E.I building, and sure enough, on his desk was a small, black, velvet-covered box. Snatching it up as if there were a danger of its escaping again, Quatre turned to me and said breathlessly,

‘Trowa will you marry me?’

He thrust the box into my hands and stood there, fixing me with a look half worried, half frightened. As clueless as I was, this was when the penny finally dropped. The whole evening finally fell into place. The special evening he had planned, his obvious agitation all night, his reference to asking me something and his final despair at discovering his ‘loss’. I smiled at him and in a voice that carried a distinct tremor since I was now on the brink of tears myself, I said,

‘Yes, of course I’ll marry you.’

I held the box out to him and he took it. With trembling hands he opened it, removed a simple gold band with a solitaire diamond set in the centre, and slid it onto the ring finger of my left hand. I took him in my arms and kissed him, and every ounce of the deep and overwhelming love I felt for him was in that kiss. On our way out we passed through the reception area. On the receptionists desk was a large vase of white roses. Quatre quickly swept the roses out of the vase and held them out to me.

‘I’m sorry for everything this evening.’ He said. I took the flowers, his first gift to me as an engaged couple, and replied,

‘If we could do it all over again I wouldn’t change a single thing.’

We went home and consummated our engagement well into the night. White roses have been my favourite flower ever since.

I leaf through the pages of the album and as I look at the various photographs the whole day comes flooding back to me. I stop at a photograph of me in my wedding attire, Heero standing beside me as my groomsman. Looking at the photograph ten years on, I can appreciate how dapper we looked, but at the time I thought we looked ridiculous. At the planning stage Quatre and I wanted the whole thing to be fun for all concerned, so we decided on a theme. Treize and Wufei had offered us their chateau in France for the ceremony, so we thought it would be a good idea if Quatre and I, our groomsmen, the ushers and close family members dressed in costumes from the period of the reign of King Louis XVI of France, which would be in keeping with the ambience of the chateau. In fact, Treize assured us that the King was reputed to have regularly stayed there. The other guests could play along with the fancy dress or not, as they saw fit. We were all got up in frock coats, brocaded waistcoats, knee breeches, high collars, lace cuffs, silk cravats and shoes with jewelled buckles, although we drew the line at powdered periwigs. To be honest we all looked like outcasts from the Sanc kingdom and Treize looked just like the General Kushrenada we all knew and hated. It was quite disconcerting and Quatre and I wondered more than once whether we had made a major faux pas.

It all went ahead as planned, however, and the photo of Heero and I was taken just before the ceremony began. I was so nervous, but not nervous about the step I was about to take. I was apprehensive lest Quatre had had second thoughts about taking me on. It came down to the same brass tacks whichever way one looked at it. He had everything and I had nothing. His family, although they never actively or openly opposed him, were not wild about his marrying me. They tolerated rather than accepted me and when challenged would stress that I was very much ‘Quatre’s choice’, meaning that they didn’t exactly approve, but what could they do about it? To their credit though, they were never rude or unpleasant to me, and now they treat me just like one of the family, which I am, of course. Just prior to walking down the aisle the only thing on my mind was that Quatre might have changed his mind, and I think it shows in the picture. On the next page is a photo of Quatre and Duo taken in exactly the same circumstances, poised and ready to walk down the aisle. Quatre, however, looks radiantly beautiful, supremely confident and deliriously happy. He was quite obviously experiencing no such qualms. We had been kept apart for the two days and nights prior to the ceremony. Duo insisted that this was traditional, and we had no option but to comply. This enforced separation had definitely contributed to my worries. Had I been able to see him beforehand I would have been reassured, but as things were, nothing that could actually have happened could have been worse than what my overactive imagination was dreaming up.

The next photograph shows the two of us standing one beside the other, Heero and Duo behind us, just before we walked down the aisle. I have to say that I look considerably more relaxed than in the previous photo, for obvious reasons. The room used for the ceremony was the ballroom of the chateau, and Wufei and Treize definitely did us proud with the decorations. The floral displays were a wonder to behold, and the whole ambience was like a scene from a Fairy Tale. The space between the two banks of seating that formed the aisle was covered with a plush red carpet, and the carpet itself was strewn with white rose petals. The air in the room was redolent with the mingling scent of flowers of all kinds. It was magnificent.

The next few shots mark our progress as we proceed down the aisle, but the one I pause at is a picture taken as we reach the end of the aisle and stand before the marriage celebrant. Once again, Quatre and I stand beside each other in the centre of the shot, Heero stands off to the left just behind me and Duo is in the same position behind Quatre. The rest of the guests fan off to the left and right of the central aisle. The photographer has used an unusual technique for this picture. Quatre and I are in sharp focus, Heero and Duo slightly less so, and everything and everyone else within the shot are distinctly blurred. It’s funny, because that is exactly how I remember experiencing the whole thing. Throughout the ceremony I was completely aware of one person only – Quatre. Heero and Duo I was dimly aware of because they periodically shuffled about on the periphery of my perception, handing us rings and things, but the rest of the congregation might just as well not have been there. It’s terrible to admit, but that’s just the way it was. People told us afterwards that we hardly took our eyes off each other throughout the whole ceremony, and I can well believe it. Quatre Raberba Winner was the complete focus of my universe for the entire duration of that wedding ceremony, and I have to tell you that there ain’t a damn thing changed – he still is.

I don’t know how I managed to recite my vows and give the requisite responses, but I am reliably assured that I was word perfect. I was aware only of Quatre. His beautiful blue eyes stared up at me with such overwhelming love and such utter devotion that I felt sure I would burst if I didn’t take him in my arms and kiss those rosebud lips. Well I didn’t burst and I didn’t kiss him – well, not until I was given leave to do so by the marriage celebrant. Funny how those particular words managed to invade my dream state isn’t it? Suddenly, as clear as a bell I heard the word, ‘It s is my great pleasure to confirm that you are now joined by the bonds of marriage. You may now celebrate your union with a kiss.’ And we certainly did! I seem to recall a round of rapturous applause, which seemed to go on for rather a long time. I distinctly remember a wolf-whistle, which I knew could only have come from Duo Maxwell. Mostly though, I remember my angel in my arms and his soft lips on mine, at long last. I remember his fingers enmeshed in my hair and his tongue entwining with mine, his small body pressed up against me, yielding to me. The sound of the marriage celebrant clearing his throat brought us back to earth and we reluctantly parted. The orchestra that Treize and Wufei had laid on struck up our chosen exit piece, and we prepared to leave the room. Heero and Duo fell in behind us, and in a clearly audible whisper Duo said, ‘Hey, you guys are lucky you stopped when you did. I was about to run out for a bucket of cold water before things went too far.’

The resulting gales of uproarious laughter that all four of us collapsed into (even Heero) are recorded for posterity on the next page I stop at. It is a wonderfully happy picture, reflecting how we all felt just at that moment. Quatre and I were blissfully happy and Heero and Duo were blissfully happy for us. Heero and Duo have an enlarged copy of it framed and hung in their apartment, and Wufei also has a smaller copy in his wallet. I have seen it many a time, but never commented on it. The rest of the day was spent eating, drinking and dancing until well into the night, all of which was captured by the lens of the photographer and the resulting photographs appear in this album. It is a wonderful record of a magical and unforgettable day.

As I close the book I muse on the fact that the only memories of that day that are not recorded within these pages are those of the first night we spent together as a married couple. A magical night that I will never forget, not as long as I live. We had made love together hundreds of times before, but on that night it was as though it was the first time. We explored each other’s bodies as though discovering new and unfamiliar territory and our lovemaking took us to such extraordinary new heights of ecstasy that Quatre wept with the intensity of his climax.

Johannes has just informed me that Hansen has gone to pick up Quatre and they will be back within half an hour. As I rise from my seat, stretch my limbs and cross the room to replace the album, I wonder what heights I will take him to tonight.