The Weekend Arrangement

The Haunted Rooms of Your Life

Mondays by far were the worst.

Martin and Jon deliberately stayed away from one another to attempt to be as professional as possible on Mondays. Mondays were as chaste as a nunnery; and they would fling themselves into work to try and distract themselves from each other.

This Monday was even harder than normal. Separating last night had been difficult- good night kisses and whispered I love yous kept turning into more; and they had pushed it far, far past the five o'clock deadline they tried to maintain. Martin had eventually made it back to his flat just before it was officially Monday, but neither had slept at all apart from the other. It ended up serving them surprisingly well; Tim and Sasha were expecting Jon to look like- well, like a sleep deprived Jon, and Martin was able to hand wave off concerns about his own weary demeanour with a vague account of his mother's troubles.

Jon cloistered himself in his office, the door closed as he avoided as much as possible.

He was avoiding Martin; only accepting cups of tea with no more than a thank you and a small, furtive smile. Anything beyond that and Jon didn't fully trust himself to be able to hold back something that would give them away. Even just the delicate, subtle way Martin stroked his fingers when handing him a new cup sent shivers racing up his arm and threatened to unravel him. He was avoiding Tim and Sasha, afraid his secret happiness might spill over and be so obvious as to inspire pointed questions he'd be unable to respond to. Questions he just didn't feel capable of answering- questions whose answers carried the potential for tremendous amounts of pain. In some ways Jon thinks he might be avoiding himself. He has no idea what to do, or where to go with the revelations of the weekend. He couldn't imagine being parted from Martin- not now- but neither could they maintain the precarious nature of their relationship forever. So he closed his door and avoided as much as he could while he concentrated on paperwork where the questions were simple and the solutions obvious.

Martin was also restless and unsure of the path forward. .

Together with Jon everything seemed simple and clear. They were together and in love and if that had to remain a secret, then it just would. Away from the blissful fog of their togetherness though, the planning and execution of their clandestine relationship was taxing. It was hard to keep quiet; and he was beginning to run out of excuses for not going out with the others. Sasha had recently taken it upon herself to try and introduce Martin to a seemingly endless line of her friends (all 'lovely men') and he had to step carefully around those invites- revealing he was quite happily spoken for already would only invite prying questions that would certainly back him into a corner he couldn't escape.

For all of the possible predicaments that lurked, the weekend had left Martin with an unfamiliar, unaccustomed joy and he had been distracted all morning. He had nearly missed his stop on the tube, too busy drifting in that rapturous dreaminess to pay any attention to the commute. Jon loved him and Martin struggled to remember the last time anyone had told him they did. That it was Jon who said it- who murmured it to him as they fell asleep, who greeted him in the morning with it, who shouted it while they were tangled together; filled Martin with a dangerous sort of euphoria. Now here, so close and yet so far away from Jon things seemed even more hazardous- Martin was sure he'd do or say something stupid that would reveal them, and leave them unprotected against reprisals. So, other than the conventional, expected deliveries of tea (accompanied with a secretive touch and a private smile) Martin stayed away from Jon and kept himself at his desk, sinking deeply into the piles of work he had missed while away in Blackpool. The lunch hour came and went and Martin just stayed where he was, even when Tim and Sasha left on break; Martin wasn't sure he could stop himself from doing something rash and foolish in Jon's office so he just redoubled his efforts on a confusing bit of cross checking where the dates had become unaccountably scrambled.