"I love you. I would love you if tomorrow we lost everything. I would love you if you kept me as a shameful secret on scraps of your time and affection. I would love you if I could never touch you again. I would love you if you woke up and found you weren't gloriously handsome anymore. I would love you if you never loved me. I love you, I love you, I would always love you. Will always love you. I love *you* for *yourself*."
“Darling, I know,” Finnegan says, touching his fingertips to Victor’s cheek.
As if to prove it, he leans forward and presses his lips - closed, not quite shy - to Victor’s. Another day, such a declaration of love might ignite passionate, open-mouthed kisses; the kind that heated up quickly and boiled over into sex.
Tonight, Finnegan is tired. So tired. Everyone has had something to say about his relationship and, finally, the only person who mattered spoke. It should have been all he heard. The “I love yous” should have been all he heard. Instead he hears the worst case scenarios Victor dreams up and he wants to cry. He wants to laugh. He wants to hold his husband and tell him about the secret seeds of doubt others have planted in him, that he has planted in himself, which are now a poison garden of lies and half-truths and uncertainties, with weeds of reality sown in, jutting up in the dirt violently, as if to remind him that there are realities they both try to ignore when they say “I love you”. Tonight he is tired and he hurts and it will take more than hypotheticals to rip up that garden so he can lay down fresh sod.
He wishes he’d kissed Victor with more lust than love tonight. It would be so much easier to fuck him against their mattress than to show him the hurt he’s trying to strip away.
“I don’t doubt you.”
Is it a lie if Finnegan wants desperately to believe it?
“And I never tire of hearing it.”
A truth, because even if he is tired, he can feel his cold blood warm at Victor’s words.
“I love you, too, and I will do everything I can to make sure you know it and that the whole, damn world understands that I love you and choose you. We’ll get through whatever comes our way. We’ve done it before.”
A promise and, really, isn’t that what matters?
Finnegan kisses Victor again and his tense body slackens just a bit, his lips part in invitation, and the world is right again.











