Valentine's day is Simon's favorite day of the year.
No one would ever guess. No one would ever think to guess. He knows when the shops start putting out red hearts on their windows. He knows when the chocolate starts hitting the shelves in bulk. He knows exactly how many days until you'll walk in wearing that red sweater again.
It's the same one every year. The knit has loosened slightly at the cuffs, and there's a snag near the hem you keep meaning to fix. He noticed the day it happened; he remembers which locker corner caught it.
(The locker isn't there anymore.)
Every year, like clockwork, you show up with your sleeves pulled over your hands, carrying a pocketful of those cheap heart-shaped candies that taste like chalk.
And every year, you hand them out like blessings to men who have done things that would curdle the sugar in your mouth if you knew.
Soap gets a fist full because he makes a spectacle of begging. Kyle pretends he doesn't care but takes two anyway. Price shakes his head, muttering something about sugar rotting teeth, but pockets one when you insist.
Simon watches you make your way across the room, and notes who lingers when your fingers brush theirs, who bends down closer than necessary to hear you better, and who laughs too hard at something that wasn't that funny.
He knows exactly how many hearts are left when you finally stop in front of him.
"Don't start," you say lightly, holding out a little folded card and a candy. "It's tradition."
He takes them without looking at you and waits until you've moved on before he looks down at his palm. A delicate pinkā BE MINEā and when he lets it dissolve on his tongue, eyes tracking the sway of your red sweater, he imagines it tastes like the gloss on your lips.
That night, in the quiet of his spartan flat, he places the new card beneath a heavy book to keep it from curling and takes the old ones out of a tin box he keeps hidden behind spare ammo to read again, all of them dated in pencil on the back.
To my favorite person. Don't argue ā¤ļø
Youāve written it every year, same wording, same little heart slanted to the right. The ink bleeds a little more on the cheaper cards. One year the paper was glossier, and in another, your pen ran out halfway through the word favorite and you pressed harder to make it last.
He knows your handwriting well enough now to read you in it. The loops are bigger when you're tired, pinched when you're stressed. The heart is fuller when you're in a good mood, and smaller when you're not.
He could replicate it if he needed to.
This year, when someone jokes about snatching you up before someone else does, Simon doesn't even look up from cleaning his weapon. He knows who he is. He knows the way the man standsā weight heavier on his right leg from an old injury. Simon also knows the man who signs off on deployment rosters and knows exactly what that man owes him.
Deployment rosters are delicate things; names get bumped all the time. Sometimes upward into a position they're not ready for, sometimes sideways into places much less comfortable for longer, and sometimes they fall off the list entirely, lost in administration reshuffling no one has the time to question.
āSheās already spoken for," Simon says flatly, cloth dragging down the barrel in slow, even strokes.
You blink at him. āBy who?ā
He looks at you then. Finally.
āDonāt argue,ā he says quietly.
