Husband Material (London Calling #2)(121)

“Well, it’s good a job this lemon posset is your secret lover and not your client.”

“Isn’t it?”

He reached across the table, offering me a generous spoon of the dessert I was now trying really hard not to think of as Mr. Posset.

Thankfully my appetite outweighed my empathy. Which, thinking about it, was why I’d make a crap vegan.

And, anyway, Oliver looked ridiculously handsome just then, his eyes all softly silver, and the stern lines of his face gentled somehow.

I leaned forward and, telling myself I was being sexy and elegant, and not looking at all like a plastic hippo in a family board game, accepted a mouthful of tart lemony goodness.

Even accounting for the no-cows-were-harmed factor, it was amazing. “Urmgudidfrgurnhwrgrdthsws.”

“Pardon?” asked Oliver.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, I’d forgotten how good this was.’”

“If I looked anything like that, I can see why you thought I was cheating.”

I chased a smudge from the corner of my lips. “Hey, your eating-dessert face is way more cheatingy than my eating-dessert face.”

“Logically,” he pointed out, “neither of us have any basis on which to make that comparison.”

Yoinking the ramekin over to my side of the table, I took control of the situation. “You either get to be pedantic or eat posset. Which is going to be?”

He lowered his lashes is mock contrition. “Posset, please.”

While Oliver’s eating-dessert face was sexy as fuck, his asking-for-dessert face was sexy as fucker. And for a moment, just for a moment, I half wished this was our first date again. I mean, not literally because it had been a disaster. But I wanted to keep this.

This almost fragile feeling of everything being what it was and being for its own sake and not needing to go anywhere or become anything else.

But that was how relationships began. It wasn’t how they lasted.

You couldn’t live forever on lemon posset and French toast. At some point you had to think, really think, about where you were going and what it meant. You had to ask if you were in this forever, and if you were, what were you going to do about it, and if you weren’t, what were you even doing.

You were either in or you were out. You either got married or you moved on.

And I never wanted to move on. Oliver was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and I couldn’t let him unhappen. If that meant fighting about bands and arguing about venues and making peace with his mother and endlessly rehashing a fucking balloon arch, then…then it was worth it.

It had to be worth it.

Because otherwise, what were we?





THE GOOD THING ABOUT GETTING married—I mean, apart from the whole spending your life with the person you loved bit—was that it gave you a lot to do. Which made it very difficult to have complicated feelings. Or, to put it another way, very easy to avoid having them. And that worked for me right until the night before the wedding.

I’d gone to bed early because I was trying to be responsible, but then I’d had to get out of bed to throw up. Then I’d gone back to bed, but I’d had to get up again to throw up again. And, after throwing up for the third time, I called Bridge. Being Bridge, she answered. Even though it was three in the morning.

“Luc?” she asked—sleepy but doing her best. “Is everything okay?”

I lay down on the bathroom floor. “No. I keep vomiting and I think that probably means something.”

Mumbly Tom noises drifted down the phone. Then I heard him getting up and moving into a different room, reasoning correctly that this was going to be a long call. Then Bridge’s voice again, “What did you have for dinner?”

“I didn’t have dinner. I felt too much like I was going to be sick, and then I was. Loads. And I feel like I’m going to be sick again, except I don’t think there’s any sick left to be. So I’m just sweating and heaving.”

Bridge thought for a moment. “It’s all right to be nervous…”

“This isn’t nervous, Bridge. This is my body telling me something is profoundly wrong.”

“Well.” She thought for another moment. “Take some milk of magnesia?”

Another wave of nausea swept over me. “No, I mean profoundly wrong emotionally.”

“It’ll calm your stomach down,” she insisted.

Still feeling wobbly in six different ways for six different reasons, I crawled upright and checked my bathroom cabinet. “I don’t have any.

I have”—I took another look—“ibuprofen and Bonjela.”

“I’ll bring you something.” I could already hear her getting out of bed.

“You don’t have to. Not bring something. I mean, you should stay at home in your home where you live with your husband who you’re married to.”

The thumping and rustling from the other end of the line suggested she was already getting dressed. “I’ll still be married when I get back. You’ve been my best friend for years. I’m not letting you down now.”

“You wouldn’t be letting me down,” I told her. “You just wouldn’t be letting me drag you out of bed at three in the morning when we’re both getting up in four hours.”

“Well, there you are. I’m rising early, that’s all. It’s healthy. It’s healthy, wealthy, and wise.”