Husband Material (London Calling #2)(124)

Quietly, Bridge lowered herself down beside me. “Well, I could slap you if you like, but I think you might have to accept that this actually is reality.”

She was right. It sucked, but she was right. “So it’s be married when I don’t want to be married or tell the man I love, on our wedding day, that I don’t want to marry him.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck.”

“Yes.”

I looked up, and she looked back. Sometimes I thought Bridge’s capacity for compassion was endless, but maybe it just happened to be about the same as my capacity for bullshit. I suppose in many ways that was the same thing. “Leaving somebody at the altar is a pretty shitty thing to do, isn’t it?”

Bridge nodded.

“And probably…probably he’ll dump me?” That made my stomach move in a whole new and interesting way that I wished I hadn’t learned it could move.

“I don’t know. I–I think I would.” Her nose wrinkled. “I mean, if I was standing there with Tom in front of all our friends and the vicar said, ‘Do you take this woman? and Tom said, ‘No, but I’d still like to hang out,’ I might not respond well.”

I sighed. “Guess I really should have taken the blow-job option instead?”

“That would have been simpler.” She put an arm around me. “If this doesn’t seem like a silly question, why don’t you want to be married to Oliver?”

“I guess,” I began, although I wasn’t sure how I was going to continue. “I guess because…me and Oliver… It’s always been… We shouldn’t work.”

“Oh, but you do,” Bridge insisted. “And I always knew you would.”

“You didn’t know, you happened to guess right.” I sighed. “The truth is, I don’t quite know how we’re together. And it’s not that we’re fragile, it’s just that we’re…our own thing. And marriage is its own thing. And I’m not sure those things fit.”

“You didn’t think you and Oliver would fit at all, and you did.”

“I know. But this feels wrong, and being with Oliver has never felt wrong.”

“Getting married doesn’t have to change anything,” Bridge offered. “It’s just a party and a piece of paper.”

“It’s not, though, is it?” I said. “It’s everything marriage means to everyone who’s ever been married ever, or known anybody who’s ever been married ever, or everyone who’s ever been told they can’t get married ever. It’s this huge thing that eats things, and I think it’s going to eat me and Oliver.”

Bridge squidged a bit closer. “Have you thought about telling him this?”

“Yeah, the time to do so would have been literally any time before now.”

She made a nervous face. “So that leaves option two?”

“I can’t do that either.” The thought of how badly that would hurt Oliver was like a knife in my balls.

“It’s one or two, Luc,” said Bridge with gentle finality.

Which made me realise, well past the eleventh hour, that there wasn’t really a choice here. It had to be option one. Because I loved Oliver and, like a prick, I’d asked him to marry me and, supportive of my bullshit as always, he’d said he would. The least I could do was not leave him at the altar.

I had to see this through.





THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY life was passing in a miserable blur.

Bridge got me home at about six and Priya picked me up an hour later, making certain to tell me I looked like crap. Which I did. Oliver was going to be so proud to take this haggard, badly shaven wreck of a human being to be his lawful wedded husband.

And now I’d been deposited in a side room at the Green Room— why had we chosen a venue with multiple rooms that was only named after one of them—where I was managing very diligently not to jump out the window or drown myself in the tall Americano that Priya had bought me in an effort to get me functional.

My brain was blank apart from a scrolling marquee that read This is a terrible mistake, this a terrible mistake. But we’d been through this last night: in the vortex of fuckery I’d made of my life, this was the least fucky way to fuck things.

And we’d be fine. We’d be fine. We were a good couple. We worked. We weren’t very good at organising weddings, but whatever happened with Oliver, I could be a hundred percent certain I was never doing this again. So that was cool. I had learned a valuable lesson about myself and the world.

Oh God. I was going to throw up.

“Lucien?” I heard Oliver come up behind me as I was crouched over a wastepaper basket in a state of pre-upchuck preparedness.

“Are you all right?”

“Totally fine,” I told him. “I just dropped some…cuff links.”

“You’re not wearing cuff links.”

“No, because I dropped them.”

“Your shirt has buttons on it.”

“Obviously.” I sat back on my heels. “Because otherwise my chest would be hanging out.”

“On the cuffs.”

“Oh, right.” Clearly the cuff-link jig was up so I switched to a different pretending-everything-was-normal strategy. “Anyway, shouldn’t we be not seeing each other before the—” Finally, I glanced Oliver’s way and realised that he looked, if anything, worse than I did. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted. “Actually, are you okay?”