Husband Material (London Calling #2)(105)

“Fine, I’ll book us a string quartet.”

“I didn’t say book a string quartet. You can book whoever you like.”

I tried to roll my eyes without Oliver noticing; it didn’t work. “What I would like is to save a few quid, get a bloke with a laptop, and not have to use my zero musical knowledge to decide which of nine identical-seeming groups of blokes in waistcoats are going to do covers of Ed Sheeran songs at the only wedding we’re ever going to have. Especially since neither of us like Ed Sheeran.”

“I thought ‘Photograph’ had its moments.”

“‘Photograph’ does not have its moments,” I yelled. “No Ed Sheeran song has moments. I can’t believe I’m marrying someone who thought ‘Photograph’ had moments.”

Oliver threw his hands in the air again. “You’re marrying someone who is occasionally able to resist the hipsterish urge to dislike popular things.”

“I like plenty of popular things.” My head was starting to hurt.

Talking to my boyfriend was actually giving me a headache. “It’s just none of them are made by smug ginger men.”

“Lucien.” Clutching at his forehead like he too was getting a headache, Oliver ticked something decisively off his list. “Hire. A.

Band. I don’t care which band, but hire a band.”

“Fine. Do you want the Shine, Harvest Moon, or Ulysses?”

“What part of I don’t care am I failing to communicate?” snarled Oliver.

“And do you not think,” I asked, “that it is kind of fucked up that you don’t care what band we hire?”

“There’s no point caring—the wedding is in three weeks. The choice now is either band or no band.”

“Or DJ,” I pointed out.

There was a pause, then Oliver turned around and stared like he didn’t recognise me. “Oh my God, this was your plan all along, wasn’t it? We agreed on a band—”

“We didn’t agree.”

“You said that you’d book one—”

“You told me to book one.”

“And then you just dragged your feet until it was too late so you could get your own way regardless. And that, Lucien, is exactly the kind of thing your father would do.”

It was, but that was pretty fucking rich coming from Mr. My-Way-or-the-Highway. “Oh, right, yeah, I’m definitely the one acting like his father here. Because this high-handed, controlling, patriarchal weirdly heteronormative attitude you’re taking doesn’t remind me of anybody at all.”

One of the many difficult quirks of my relationship with Oliver was that we had diametrically opposed anger reactions. And now Oliver was anger-reacting all over the place, which for him meant getting very tense and calm. “It isn’t weirdly heteronormative,” he said, “not to want to get married in a pub.”

That was another old argument, and another one where we’d sort of stopped talking and then Oliver had invented a compromise out of nowhere. “It wasn’t a pub, it was a vintage venue space with an attached bar, and I thought it was nice. You on the other hand

wanted to get married in a Victorian banqueting hall full of pictures of dead white men.”

“Firstly”—Oliver began counting on his fingers—“it’s Elizabethan.

Secondly, it seems a little appropriative and disingenuous to complain about pictures of dead white men when we are ourselves both white men. Thirdly, that venue was at Gray’s Inn, which has personal significance for me because it’s a body I actually belong to.

And fourthly, we didn’t go with that venue either, so I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”

Defeated, I slumped backwards, and as I did, my left arm flopped with an uncontrolled floppishness that caught the stack of papers whose order I had so carefully preserved and sent them tumbling to the floor in a mess of sticky tags and handwritten notes.

Oliver grew very still indeed. “Lucien,” he said in his most carefully regulated monotone, “I feel like your presence here is becoming unhelpful.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” If Oliver’s anger instinct was to get super-duper calm, mine was to get super-duper sarcastic, which was probably less mature but also probably healthier in the long run. “Is my involvement in our wedding becoming inconvenient?”

“Now you’re being—”

“If you dare say I’m being childish, I am getting up and walking out of that door.”

Oliver gave me a cold, distant look that I’d seen a couple of times before but had never imagined would be directed at me. “Right at this moment, that might be the most practical thing you can do.

Leave this to me, Lucien, I’ll have everything finished by the time you’re back.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. It had been ages since I’d had a good storm-out.

I stormed.

I stormed so extravagantly that I ended up at my mum’s house.

“Luc.” She opened the door with a look of puzzlement on her face that quickly became one of concern. “Oh no, what has happened? Have you discovered Oliver randomly travels in time and so you have known him your whole life and are only just beginning to realise it?”

“So,” I asked, “you’ve been watching Doctor Who or reading The Time Traveller’s Wife?”