Erik comes for him in October, and Charles doesn't return to the school until the following June.
He's thrilled to catch up with everyone, to see his students in their caps and gowns. He stops to talk to as many of them as he can both before and after the ceremony, knowing he needs to make the most of the opportunity. In just a few more years, chances are that he won't know the name of every student who walks down that aisle to receive their diploma. They'll know him, of course, but secondhand, from pictures and videos, from their teachers' stories and the history books. The familiarity and easiness with which he interacts with these students, the ones he knows so well from classes, breakfasts, one-on-one sessions in his study, running into each other in the hallways—that will all be gone.
He had a hard time letting go of the school at first. For the first few months of his retirement, he called every other day to ask how things were going, to keep up with the happenings and offer his advice whether it was asked for or not. Then he realized no one was listening to him anyway and stopped calling in order to see how long it would take for them to call him and beg for his help. But they didn't, and they didn't, and after a few weeks it occurred to him that they weren't going to, that they don't need him anymore. The school may be life's work, but he's not nearly as important to it as it is to him. It's a fact that still stings months later.
Part of him has wondered, at various times over the past eight months, if he would return for graduation and not wish to leave again—if he would find he misses this place even more than he thought he did.
But as happy as he is to see his students, by the time most of the graduating class have gone, heading forward into the summer and the rest of their lives, Charles is ready to leave, too. He's ready to go home, to the little house he loves the way he's never loved the mansion.
If he loves the mansion at all, it's because of what's inside it; it's nothing more than brick and mortar on its own. But he loves everything about the little house Erik chose for them. It's small, and it's plain, but it's big enough for two, and it doesn't need to be elaborate for Charles to see the care and love Erik put into it, everywhere he looks.
The porch light is on when Charles gets home. Erik is napping in the living room. Looking at him snoring on the couch with his reading glasses on and a book open on his chest, Charles is struck anew by how much more he loves him than he did less than a year ago.
Oh, he's always loved Erik. He's loved Erik for most of his life; he's loved Erik fiercely and cautiously and everything in-between. But now, for the very first time, he loves Erik as he really is, rather than as some ideal or daydream.
He wakes up next to Erik every day, and it's just as lovely as he ever imagined, but it's the least of it, too. There's so much more than that.
For instance, they fight as much as they ever have, but it's rarely about politics anymore now that they have better things to fight about.
Charles has a tendency to leave his dirty socks on the foot of the bed instead of putting them in the hamper. This never seemed to bother Erik during any of their rendezvous in hotel rooms across the country, but it's evidently intolerable to him now. Charles could do without the master of magnetism waving dirty socks under his nose three times a week, and he does try to remember—but he's been leaving his dirty socks on the bed for fifty years, and spent thirty years before that dropping them on the floor, so he hasn't been making much headway.
Erik, meanwhile, turns the heat up so high when it's cold that Charles can barely breathe for how stuffy it is. Recently, he's been turning the air conditioner off, with much the same result. Both of them storm over to the thermostat ten or more times a day, except on those few days when the temperature outside is basically perfect and they can call a truce and open all the windows instead.
And they can't seem to come to any kind of agreement on whether or not to get a dishwasher. Erik is militant about cabinet space, for some reason. Charles feels that Erik has plenty of cabinets at his level, so if Charles is willing to sacrifice cabinet space at his level, that should be all there is to it. He's tired of having itchy prune hands whenever it's his turn to do the dishes, but Erik won't budge.
Then there are the things Charles never knew about Erik before, things he never even thought there might be to know.
There's Erik's love of woodworking, which Charles finds utterly charming. It's evident in every table, every bookshelf, every chair and ramp or rail in their home. Erik spends hours every day in his woodworking shed out in the backyard, a steady hum of contentment at the back of Charles' mind. Contentment—and something more underneath it, something old and quiet and fragile, like the memory of a sense memory. Charles often wonders where it comes from. He can well imagine Erik as a small child, playing at his father's feet as he worked; he can as well imagine Erik as a young boy, small hands mimicking larger ones as he makes a birdhouse for his mother, a dollhouse for his sister. But he doesn't know for certain. He hasn't asked if he may look, either. He's not the fool he once was; he knows the damage he could do, going in so deeply. So instead he just listens, and if sometimes he speculates, he spends far more time simply enjoying it for what it is.
One big surprise was that Erik is adamantly not a morning person, even though all the evidence over the years indicated that he is. Charles' recollections of early mornings with Erik when they had only just met each other all involve Erik tearing off the covers, half-dragging, half-carrying Charles out to the car, then shoving a cup of coffee and a bagel at him before roaring them out of the parking lot. In the weeks they spent together at the mansion, Charles tended not to wake up until Erik had gone on his early morning run, showered, eaten breakfast, and, on no few occasions, climbed back into bed for the sole purpose of sulking loudly until Charles woke up in self-defense (generally around noon). None of this proves anything, of course, given that Charles' sleep schedule at that point of his life didn't allow for him to actually witness the first few hours of Erik's day—but later on, whenever Erik kidnapped him for a few days here or a week there, he always seemed to wake up alert regardless of the hour. But mornings on vacation are evidently not the same thing as mornings; as it turns out, Erik takes an hour and three cups of coffee to wake up on normal days. First thing after he wakes up, he heads into the kitchen to start the coffee, slumps against the counter and glares at the coffeepot with one eye squinted and the other squeezed closed, as if this will encourage it to brew more quickly. It's still the most adorable thing Charles has ever seen.
This is their life. It's quiet, unless they're shouting at one another. It's mundane, if you don't count Erik cooking dinner without leaving the couch, or Charles having conversations with what Erik's thinking instead of what he says. It's not at all what Charles thought their life would be like, if and when Erik came back to him: it's not Erik moving into the mansion; it's not Erik teaching languages, physics, and history; it's not Erik's mere presence scandalizing teachers and students alike until they come to know the Erik Charles has always known. This is nothing at all like that, it doesn't resemble any fantasy Charles ever let himself have—but it's real, and that makes it better than any guess or dream or hope could ever be.
Eight months ago, Charles woke up in his bed at the mansion to find Erik there with a ring in his pocket and an offer on his lips. He went with him that same day, knowing he was jumping in—but then, hasn't he always jumped in after Erik? Isn't that the first thing he ever did? He's never regretted it, not once, and he never will.
He spent fifty years holding onto his love for Erik, like a seed cradled in his hands, which he watched over and nursed as best as he could over Erik's long absences. Over the past eight months, that seed has finally been allowed to take root and grow. For the first time, Charles can no longer imagine living without Erik; for the first time, he can no longer imagine Erik leaving. At long last, they have everything they could have had, everything they should have had from the beginning.
Erik stirs a little on the couch. Charles wonders what he got up to today. He probably put in some work on the patio; that's what he'd been making plans about as Charles pulled out of the drive. He's been working on it for weeks. Charles has been pretending not to know about it for those same weeks even though it's fully visible from the kitchen window. He spends a lot of his time pretending not to hear many of the thoughts going through Erik's head, so pretending not to know Erik's building a patio so he can get Charles that Jacuzzi for his birthday is simple enough.
He goes into the kitchen and makes two cups of tea. Then he comes back into the living room and sets one cup down on the coffee table next to Erik, and parks his chair on the other side. He reaches over to the nearest shelf and pulls out a book to read. It won't be long until Erik wakes up, and Charles will be right here waiting when he does.