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It’s a smaller crowd than the charity show afterparty, mostly family, a couple of friends, the people who really supported them while recording the album. They’re at at the karaoke bar across the bridge from the Duke, where Beth walked in to find Kitty screaming into a mic last year, and turned her world upside down.
Kitty was suspicious why Beth insisted they have the do here and not the pub, Beth’s explanation of “practicality, they have a stage and the Duke doesn’t”, when the Duke has a perfectly good garage, isn’t sufficient, but Beth is insistent, and surprisingly, Jess doesn’t complain, so Kitty doesn’t argue.
Jess will tell Kitty, a few days on, that it was a purely sentimental choice on Beth’s part, and that’s the primary reason Jess didn’t throw a fit. Also that Jenny footed the bill for it helped, and Jess is at least somewhat grateful she doesn’t have to pour pints at her own event, but mainly it was her amusement at Beth’s nervous, romantic sentimentality when she asked for Jess’ help. Jess’d never seen her quite like that.
But in this tiny karaoke bar, they cram the keyboard and drums onto the packed stage, play a few of their shorter tracks; the place really isn’t built for an eight piece band, and the sooner they can finish, the sooner everyones’ eardrums get a reprieve, and the sooner they can get to celebrating. Jess says a few words, thanks their families, friends, for their support. Then Kitty goes to take back the mic, and before she can grab it, Beth does.
“Uhh, hello.” She winces as the microphone lets out a high pitched feedback, jerks to hold it a bit further from her face.
“Sorry, all. As Jess said, thank you for being here. It really means the world to us. This band, these women,” Beth looks around at the rest of the band, they’re all smiling as if they’re in on a secret and someone forgot to tell Kitty, whose confusion from being shafted is very quickly forgotten by how charmed she is by Beth’s awkward introduction.
“Well, it all started as just a silly charity gig, but has truly given me a new lease on life. I really don’t know where I would be without all of you, if I’m honest.”
Wherever you are in the world and wherever I may have gone to.
Her voice breaks a bit, and Kitty reaches out, holds tight to the hand Beth doesn’t have vice-gripping the mic. Beth takes a deep breath as they look at each other, squeezes back.
Doesn’t let go, as she continues, “but there’s one thing in particular, regardless of the band, and whether this album is complete shit, that I will always be grateful for.”
She takes a step closer.
“It’s that it gave me you.”
Says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
Kitty feels like she could burst. Partially because she’s proper embarrassed that Beth is waxing poetic about her to a room full of people she barely knows, partially because she’s trying really hard not to snog the daylights out of Beth before she gets a chance to finish what is so very clearly, to Kitty, a marriage proposal.
In the pause while Kitty hopes she doesn’t look like she’s trying not to jump her bones, Beth steels herself with a determined huff.
“So.” She takes a step closer, lets their interlocked hand swing gently between them. “Kitty Eckersley. I’ve got a question for you.”
“Yes.” Kitty breathes out a little too quickly, sounds like both a reply and an premature answer to the question yet to cross beth’s lips. She blushes at the way Beth rolls her eyes, as a quiet amusement bubbles across the room of people watching them.
She doesn’t notice any of it, with the way her heart is pounding and the laser-focus she has on Beth.
“Will you sit down?”
What?
Out of all the things she could’ve said, that certainly wasn’t anywhere on Kitty’s list. Beth motions behind Kitty, and with a confused furrow she turns to see Jess standing there, a barstool between them.
“Come on, love.” Jess reassures her.
Kitty takes a glance around at the band, realizes there’s something bigger going on when Holly winks at her conspiratorily. She lowers herself with a tentative hand onto the stool, turning back to Beth, who’s now heading back to her keyboard, handing Kitty’s mic to Yvonne who immediately gets working on swapping it in for Beth’s backing mic.
“What are you—”
She cuts herself off when it clicks, what Beth is doing. She barks out an incredulous laugh, and the sound brings Beth’s eyes back to hers as she sits down behind the keys.
“Really?” Kitty asks, and it’s quiet, enough that she knows Beth reads her lips more than hears it, because she gives a silent nod and affirmative wink in reply, before leaning into the mic Yvonne’s now finished finnicking with.
“Really.”
Kitty rolls her eyes at the hopeless romantic she’s fallen in love with.
If there are other people in the room at this point, Kitty forgets they all exist when Beth starts playing a familiar, slow, melody. Kitty realizes what the song is right before Beth sings the opening line, “Just before our love got lost”.
For four straight minutes, Kitty just stares at Beth, mostly trying not to cry as Beth mostly avoids staring back at her, like looking too long would cause her to lose her nerve, give up halfway through the song. Kitty’s leg starts bouncing on the rung of the stool, so that the slow-building overwhelmed, anxious energy threatening to make her lose it completely is expelled somewhere, so she doesn’t jump out of her seat and interrupt something that the band has clearly practiced without her. Rude, actually. At one point, Kitty tries to get Yvonne to hand her Beth’s unused mic but she shakes her head once, decisively.
At the last couple of notes, Kitty moves to stand up but a firm hand on her shoulder stops her, looks up and over to see Jess with a tear track running down her cheek (what a sap), before turning back to Beth as the applause in the room dies down, and Kitty remembers that it’s not just them and the band. Beth detaches the mic and slowly extricates herself from the keyboard setup, makes her way back towards Kitty’s side of the small stage.
“Words have always been our strong suit, I think, you and I. We wrote a song the night we met—I say we ‘coz neither of us is willing to take the credit for it. We wrote our first song that night, and then more songs, on more nights after that. You filled my home with music, and levity, happiness, and somewhere along the line, my home stopped being four drafty stone walls and started being you, sat next to me, at our piano, warm, alive.”
She’s talking faster than usual, like if she stops she’ll forget how to speak entirely. It makes Kitty want to kiss her.
“So, you can imagine, it came as a bit of a shock to me, that when I went to sit down and write out what exactly I was going to say to you tonight, that none of the words I came up with felt quite right. Though, I guess it makes sense, in a ways. I’m useless without you there, where the writing’s concerned.”
Kitty chuckles at that, “Back atcha, babe.”
Over a year into this, and she’s used to, by now, the ways she makes Beth nervous, the ways she challenges Beth to creep outside her comfort zone. The ways she gives Beth permission to want things she’s never been told she’s allowed to want. It’s been a throughline of their relationship, since the first time she put the thought into Beth’s head about women and desire, the first time she held Beth close as she took Kitty by the waist and kissed her in their living room.
Her heart is pounding, but she musters all the bravado she can manage, and winks at her, a calm reassurance.
Beth sits in it for a minute, Kitty recognizes the way that calm rushes over her, like it shot right from Kitty’s eye into Beth’s soul. Kitty’s happy to sit here however long Beth needs, so long as she keeps looking at her like she is.
“I don’t know if you remember, but, three months ago-ish, we took a drive up to Sheffield to have lunch with our son?”
Our son. The way Beth does that, so effortlessly includes Kitty, still gives her a warm fuzzy feeling in her gut.
Kitty nods, remembers that August day by the lunch more than anything else. It was warm, damn near perfect weather, so nice out that they’d spent half an hour chatting outside while lunch was nearly done cooking and accidentally burned the bake. The smell made Fearne nauseous so they ended up going for pizza instead while the house aired out, and then Kitty spent half the afternoon sitting with Fearne’s swollen feet in her lap, watching Beth and Tom attempt to reassemble Tom’s childhood crib that Beth brought flat-packed from the farmhouse loft. Remembers something petty in her, a fleeting thought that it was right it was her there, instead of Martin. Like in a different world it would’ve been the two of them all along, but in that world they wouldn’t have had Tom, here, now.
Kitty snaps out of it as Beth continues, “we were in the car on the drive back, listening to music, as usual, it was quiet, but, calm. Perfectly average drive. You were holding my hand over the center console. Then that song”, she motions back to the piano, “came on your shuffle. And I don’t know how much you remember...”
Kitty shakes her head gently, Beth was right, it was a perfectly average drive, and one they did with enough regularity that they all kind of blurred together. Kitty barely has any recollection of it.
“But it came on, and you turned the volume up a bit, and just, sang along to it. And I don’t know entirely what the catalyst was, but we were listening to that song, and every line felt like a pound of bricks stacking up on my heart. I could barely breathe. I was afraid if I took my eyes off the road I’d swerve and crash. And of course, you didn’t notice. You just sat there, holding my hand, with your head on the side of the door, arm halfway out the window doing one of those little,” she does a little flying motion with her hand, “wave things in the wind, not a care in the world.”
“And when I finally looked over at you, and you looked back, you smiled at me and it just...hit me. And it was the exact same feeling that I’d had the first time I heard your voice, in this pub, on this stage, year and a half ago. I knew that I was at one of those turning points in my life, you know, the ones that change everything, the ones that define you, that split your life into chapters, befores and afters.
“I knew, undoubtedly, that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you, then. In that car, with that song playing. And I have spent the past three months trying to figure out exactly what words could do justice to just how wonderful being loved by you makes me feel.”
She steps into Kitty’s space then, free hand grabbing Kitty’s nearest, pulling her to stand.
“I don’t think I’ll ever have the words for it, on my own. So um, I’ll borrow a couple more, if that’s alright.”
Kitty grips Beth tightly, two hands encompassing Beth’s wrist, afraid that if she lets go she’ll be unmoored completely by what comes next.
“Marry me.”
She doesn’t ask it as a question, she doesn’t need to. The way Kitty pounces on her, yanks her close before wrapping both arms tightly around Beth’s neck—in a hug that would’ve knocked anyone else off-kilter, anyone who wasn’t as prepared as Beth is, always is now, for Kitty—and digs her face into Beth’s neck briefly before kissing her once, twice, thoroughly a third time to the sound of an audience that for once, they couldn’t give a damn about, is answer enough.