Work Text:
Denny's Come to Town
by MJ
Denny had never been unfaithful to him? Depending on your definition of infidelity, Denny had been all across the board since they'd become involved.
Not that Alan was that much more innocent, or that Denny didn't encourage it - it was Denny who'd insisted that Alan go meet the gorgeous view in the bikini when they'd been at the spa, although it was also Denny who'd been irked when Alan suggested that he'd planned to bed her that afternoon, and had suggested that the substitute for a hot woman in a cool room was his own hand.
Come to think of it, maybe Denny had a right to be irked there. After all, your lover, loosely tied though the two of you might be, did have a reasonable expectation that you would rather have sex with him than with yourself.
Still... it was Denny who had gotten married - even if the marriage had only lasted for three hours - and who had insisted that the marriage would change nothing between them, even while ditching Alan, for what Alan had thought would be an evening of scotch, steaks, and sex, in order to go peruse flatware designs with Bev.
If getting married on your lover wasn't cheating on the relationship, it was as close as you could get to it.
The thought did give one pause - could one really cheat on a lover by taking a spouse, as long as the lover had been there first and the spouse came along later? It seemed a plausible argument.
But Denny hadn't been far off the mark when he'd said "At the end of the day, you've still got me." There was no arguing with that. Even when he'd been engaged, and bedding - if that was what one did on a couch - Bev in the afternoons at Crane Poole & Schmidt, he'd still met Alan every night, even on those nights that he'd left Alan to go back to Bev. In his own way, Denny had tried to make good on his promise that nothing would change during his marriage. And, as he'd said, Bev had told him that he could sleep with anyone else he pleased... although there was a gulf as wide as the ocean between a fast zipless fuck with someone intermittently - or regularly - and a romance, in wives' minds, and Alan was quite sure that his relationship with Denny was not exactly what Bev had meant when she'd given Denny his blank check.
At the end of the day - for that matter, at the end of the wedding - Alan still had Denny, and Bev certainly didn't.
Of course, Denny was a man who, no matter what the actual psychiatric state of his mind, knew what he wanted and how to get it... or how to lose it.
It might not have been pure fate, and raging hormones, that had driven Denny into dragging a cocktail waitress into the coatroom at his wedding. A marriage that only lasted three hours, after all could be assured never to change much of anything. Bev might have given Denny permission to do as he pleased, but the one guaranteed string on any open relationship, Alan knew, was the golden rule, "Don't embarrass me in front of anyone else with your outside activities." Even if Bev had a suspicion about Denny and himself, they'd been at least somewhat discreet. But there was nothing more blatant than being caught by a roomful of guests at your own wedding.
Had Denny wrecked his wedding deliberately? Alan wasn't at all sure. Denny could, and would, do anything, if he felt it in his ultimate interest. But Alan was still there, and Bev wasn't, which perhaps indicated where Denny did feel his ultimate interest lay.
Denny Crane's open relationship meets Denny Crane's open marriage, Alan pondered as he poured two fingers of The MacAllen for himself and headed out to the balcony, waiting for Denny's meeting to end.
One marriage down for the count in 180 minutes. One lover back in the fold, despite both of their wanderings in the meadow.
Perhaps fidelity wasn't what - or who - you did... perhaps it was where you committed. Apparently Denny had picked his commitment, as had Alan. As far as Alan was concerned, the result was satisfactory, even if Denny's recollection of matters past was only slightly faulty.
It was all too much thinking for one drink to handle. Alan eased himself into an armchair and waited, watching the pigeons of Boston deciding where to settle for the evening.
end