Husband Material (London Calling #2)(126)

“While I’m not going to say I disagree, I will say dumping me at the altar feels pretty wrong too.”

Standing, Oliver collected the wastepaper basket and set it carefully back in its place. Perhaps it was the only thing in the room he knew how to fix. “I know how badly I’ve hurt you, Lucien. But”—he returned to his seat—“would you truly rather I married you? Even if it would make both of us miserable?”

I imagined the room outside, bristling with our friends, family, and work colleagues I would rather not have invited. How they would all be sitting there, waiting for us to prove our relationship was just as good as theirs. And I remembered last night, standing on the Millennium Bridge with my best friend, trying not to throw up at the thought of letting Oliver down. “Yes.” My voice rose, in pitch if not in volume. “Because that’s the polite thing to do. I mean, I didn’t want to marry you either, but I was going to go through with it because I’m a great person and I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

A little pause. “Pardon?” said Oliver.

Welp. There went the moral high ground. “Nothing.”

“Did you just say,” asked Oliver, “that you didn’t want to marry me either?”

“That’s not the point. The point is I love you so much I was willing to do it anyway.”

Twitching out his exquisitely chosen pocket square, Oliver dried his eyes. “Well, that’s very flattering. But clearly an abysmal idea.”

“Whereas breaking up on our wedding day is a fucking corker.”

I drew my knees up to my chest and hid my face against them.

This was, like, the worst day of my life. Even worse than the day I passed a newsstand and realised my entire relationship with Miles was now a tell-all story in the tabloids. At least then there’d been a clear villain. Now I was being left at the altar by a genuinely wonderful guy for reasons that were— Actually…

“Hey,” I said. “Hang on. Why don’t you want to marry me?”

He gave me a challenging look. “Why don’t you want to marry me?”

“Oh, no you don’t.” I wagged a finger at him. “I’m a mess. I’m obviously going to have second thoughts about anything that looks even a little bit like commitment. You, though, you fucking love responsibility. What’s wrong with me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you.” He vanished briefly behind his pocket square, emerging again slightly tearstained. “Well, there’s quite a lot wrong with you. There’s quite a lot wrong with everybody.

But my life is infinitely better with you in it.”

“And yet.” I tried not to sound bitter. I failed hard.

“It’s marriage, Lucien.” He paused for a long moment. “I know you think I’m very…conventional. You’ve told me so repeatedly.”

“No,” I protested. “We discussed this, and we agreed you were a Moomin jigsaw.”

“Then consider this part of my Moomin jigsawness.”

At that moment, the nice humanist lady we’d got to do our nondenominational, queer-friendly ceremony stuck her head through the door. “Ten minutes, guys.”

Oliver and I stared at each other blankly.

“Great,” I told her, giving the least convincing thumbs-up in the history of primates.

Her gaze travelled over the scattering of wastepaper and the two men who were blatantly still crying. “Everything all right?”

“Absolutely.” My voice came out like a public service announcement from the thirties. “What could possibly be un-all-right?”

“Okay.” The nice humanist lady began a somewhat hasty retreat.

“I’m just next door if you need anything.”

“Bugger,” said Oliver quietly.

I peeled myself off the floor and a made a futile attempt to, in every sense of the word, groom myself. “Well. I guess we’d better head on out there and tell everybody we know that our relationship is a great big joke.”

“Lucien.” Oliver caught my wrist with unexpected urgency. “Can we… Can I say something first?”

His fingers on my skin were torturously familiar. “I mean…do you have to?”

“Yes.”

Part of me wanted to tell him no. That he had no right to ask this of me. But he kind of did. I shrugged. “I guess you’ve got ten minutes.”

He looked briefly flustered, like he’d just taken over the case and the court had denied him recess. “About marriage and the…the Moomin jigsaw.”

“Clock’s ticking, Oliver.”

“I know I don’t like rainbows,” he said in an incredible rush, “but that doesn’t mean I feel represented by the trappings of heterosexuality either. And I know that, technically speaking, marriage is not an inherently straight institution. The thing is, it feels that way to me. It always has. And I’m not sure how to make it…not.

And I don’t think I want to.”

This would have been a lot to take in, even if we weren’t on an eight-minute countdown. “You loved Alex and Miffy’s wedding. You were in your element.”

“Yes, because I wasn’t supposed to feel part of it. I was supposed to watch it happen to other people. I enjoy going to the theatre. It doesn’t mean I feel an intense desire to be an actor.”