Husband Material (London Calling #2)(3)

For a second nobody said anything, but the awkwardness of the moment very much spoke for itself. Because how was I supposed to react to this? Here was Miles, smiling that shoe-salesman smile at me, flaunting his adorable fiancé like he was one of those puppies you keep in a designer handbag and acting like he hadn’t completely fucking betrayed me.

“Anyway,” I continued, “I should. I might. Yeah.”

I was just disentangling myself when the music changed, and “Tartarus” came on.

“Tartarus.” The breakout single from Jon Fleming’s multiplatinum album Pendulum of the World. As part of the hype for the second season of The Whole Package, my dad had given this series of powerful, heartfelt interviews about how his struggle with cancer had made him confront his own mortality and realise what really mattered in life. Somehow the fact that he’d never had cancer in the first place —that nobody had even told him he had cancer or given him any reason to suspect he might have cancer—had got lost in the noise, and he’d become this poster child for survivors everywhere. He was even doing a public awareness campaign for the NHS.

Anyway. Pendulum of the World was his album about how fucking wise and brilliant he was now he was a selfish old prick instead of a selfish young prick, and “Tartarus” was this navel-gazing dirge about staring into the abyss and coming back stronger that had won the bastard a Grammy and could entirely fuck off. Especially because the last thing I needed just when I’d had an unexpected run-in with the narcissistic ex who’d sold me out for short-term gain was to be reminded of my narcissistic dad who’d sold me out for short-term gain.

In an effort to distract myself, I looked down at my phone. My text to Oliver had somehow autocorrected from It’s okay, see you soon to Its okay see your document, which had prompted a series of replies reading:

What document?

Was that text meant for me or somebody else?

Lucien, is something wrong?

I’ll be there as soon as I can. If something is wrong, tell me.

I’m sorry I took so long.

And I should probably have replied, but I couldn’t quite face it.

Fate or the universe or whatever had decided to rub my clearly happy and successful piece-of-shit ex and my clearly happy and successful piece-of-shit dad in my face within thirty seconds of each other. And while I was also technically clearly happy and successful, it felt a whole lot less clear with my amazing barrister boyfriend sitting in traffic while I was being introduced to fabulous, perfect look-how-engaged-and-beautiful-I-am JoJo

and

his

Technicolor

waistcoats and his sparkly ring.

Especially since, as I suddenly remembered, I was still wearing a crocheted vulva on my head.

Bridget’s friends were relying on me for a cosmo top-up, but right then my maid-of-honour duties seemed less important than my get-

the-hell-out-of-there duties. The bar was too loud and too hot, and I needed some air. So I tucked my phone into my jeans and slunk off to sit outside and do some good old-fashioned feeling sorry for myself.

Except, as it turned out, even that was easier said than done because we were in fucking London, so sitting outside would have meant plonking my arse down on a pavement that approximately twenty-seven million people were trying to walk along at the same time, all desperately hurrying from wherever they had been to wherever they were going and not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to someone getting in their way.

Not being quite self-loathing enough to let a whole city trample over me, I went to look for somewhere I could sit down and, because of the previously mentioned London issue, failed to find anywhere that wasn’t already occupied and wound up wandering into a badly lit park that, in a better state of mind, I’d have avoided for fear of being murdered and/or arrested.

And that was the point when I realised that my best friend had made me maid of honour for the wedding she’d been dreaming about since she was five, and I’d just bailed on her non-gender-specific bird do.

Fuck.

Fuckity, fuckity, fuck.

In a way it was comforting. People always worry that being in a relationship will change them, so it was good to know that being with Oliver hadn’t completely destroyed my ability to be a shitty friend.

And a shitty boyfriend. And an all-around shitty person.

Fuck.

At last I found an empty bench and collapsed onto it like a sack of deeply shitty potatoes—the kind that have been left in the kitchen too long and are getting weird knobbly things growing out of them.

Because that was me, wasn’t it? I was a knobbly-sprouting potato of a person. I’d been given the perfectly simple job of getting a bunch of people who liked each other to have a nice time in a bar full of fruity drinks and penis nibbles, and I’d managed to fuck even that up.

I checked my phone again.

Where are you?

Fuck. I’d fucked that up too.

WHERE RU ??!!?? RUOK???!

That wasn’t Oliver, that was Bridge. Which meant she’d noticed I was gone. Which meant I was making her special night—well, I suppose her actual special night was the wedding night, but her slightly less special night—all about me.

I pulled off my crocheted vulva hat and stared at it, and it stared back accusingly like a sexual Eye of Sauron.

Fuck.

I was the worst maid of honour ever.

Fuck.

I was a bad friend and a bad boyfriend, and the reason people kept screwing me over and abandoning me was because I sucked and deserved it.