The night stars are merciful in their discretion, you think to yourself as you stand on a balcony. Strange hotel, stranger country and everything seems to you as if it has been taken out of some fairytale, a bizarre fairytale in which nothing is magical and all things are miraculous, far beyond the simply fantastical. All day you were afraid that someone might wake you up from this dream-like state into a painful reality, made harsher by the dream.

You look out at the dark blue sky in which the swiftly moving clouds are lit by those same stars in whose light you are standing, and you let the wind play with your hair, like some lovers have in the past. You didn’t like it, for the most part, a touch too intimate from people presuming to know you, when all they really wanted was to take something from you, a moment of beauty or pleasure, the illusion of being special for having hooked up with you, the pretty boy of the London gay scene.

You lean over the rail and let the thought pass as easily as a smile spreads on your face when you sense the thin, golden band on your left hand. Of course, you will have to take it off tomorrow in favor of a dreary routine of interviews, phone calls, press junkets and picture sessions in which you will have to pretend that all this never took place, that this man never spent the night beside you, your head on his chest and the rhythm of your hearts patiently growing identical, even when the forced distance between you two becomes greater than it should be.

It’s a horrible line of work you two have chosen, and a fascinating one as well. You’re moved between gratefulness and resentment as you remember that, for the longest time, you liked to escape into other people’s lives when you did not like your own and this profession offered you this escape, as well as the opportunity to meet a man you couldn’t have imagined before that day. And there it is again, the gratefulness. And the fear of thinking for too long on what might have been if you two had been different people and the courses of your lives had not have led you to one particular junction.

Even so, as roads often do pass junctions, the threads of your lives could still have continued as two separate ones. Yet, this night, you have joined them officially, have said to each other that which not idly is spoken.

You swore to be his and he, yours.

There weren’t that many people there, but all the important ones were present. Your mother, his son, a variety of siblings. It’s not going to be easy, they all remind you, but you can see the splitting smiles hiding behind their words of concern. They know as well as you do that when you are together, you’re each better than who you are when apart.

You wondered how much you’d remember, as time passes, when even now the blur of events was greater than the precision. The one thing that was as clear as childhood smells are when re-encountered, years later, was the moment when they had to speak.

Yours was a civilian ceremony that was still performed, to the request of your mother most of all, with a small, symbolic – and not quite binding, legally – religious part. There was a rabbi and a priest, a moment when you said, “I do” and a moment when you sanctified your husband – your husband! How odd and wonderful – by an ancient Hebrew word, thrice.

All along, the words he didn’t speak were the ones that counted, the ones ranging from love to adoration and simple bliss for being loved in return, with understanding he would never have known could reach so deeply into his essence.

Everything was golden, thanks to the lit fireplace, even the black tuxedos and Viggo’s blue eyes. Everything was warm around you and you felt safe and luckier than ever before. When you kissed each other at last, an unhastened kiss, you would have undressed your husband if only you could, from all the redundant clothing, to see the play of light on the familiar skin, to test how long you could make him moan at the same slow pace, on the Canadian judge’s desk, before the man you loved would take control and shift you into a more urgent course of action.

Would you always think of this, smiling, when looking at the golden band?

You certainly hope so. You’re not a child and even if some thought of you as such when you entered this relationship, you were constantly aware of the various difficulties you would be facing together. Tonight, you are willing to let all these concerns fall away until morning, until the moment he steps out onto this balcony and up to your side, where he swore he’d always be, in one way or another. The bed can wait for tomorrow. Tonight you’ll make love out here on the terrace, in the open, without restrictions, as your love should have always been.

The End.