Disclaimer: Why no, this does not belong to me.
Leaping
The further you go, the more you tend to look over your shoulder at that vague, fuzzy impression of a starting line minutes, hours, maybe even years behind your heels. Another step, a double-take, that's just how it goes and he can't help it, especially when that line doesn't match the rhyme scheme of the rest of their progress. Tell anyone of their beginning, their catalyst and then tell of the most recent happenings, and he's bound to find himself labeled a delusional liar complete with delusional bliss. That same anyone's wedding gift might as well be decorative divorce papers.
He admits the story is one that will need deflecting early on from any—and the idea seems foreign—children that might arise. They're going to need to make something up to explain or simply begin the tale where most hoped it began, with a weekly ritual and a kiss on his stoop. Even to their adult maybe-children, the prologue would make for conversation that couldn't be anything but awkward. What could he say? The first time your mother and I slept together, she was high on crystal meth that she stole from a gay patient that had been hitting on me and who almost gave her HIV.
No, that most definitely would not work, for the ensuing inquiry (surely after a long period of shocked blinks and stifled coughs) would probably be "Well wasn't that a one night stand, then?" And of course, clearly, very clearly, the answer would be no: the follow-up just took a couple years to reach, the mile markers in their path occasionally lying and being eons apart, many, many miles, but he didn't care. At least the markers were there, and at least the two of them hadn't collapsed from exhaustion before they reached them, and at least they knew, now that they had cascaded over one of the last big hurdles, that any other marker was in their reach.
The silence as they passed over that hurdle dragged on as everything slowed in transition—from two lives to one life, from one high to the next.