Husband Material (London Calling #2)(4)

Fuck.

“Is this seat taken?”

Turning around, I saw Oliver standing behind me. He looked a funny mix of composed and dishevelled, his tie loose around his neck and his formal shirt unbuttoned to reveal his Bridge’s Bitches No Oliver I Think It’s Fine We’re Using It in the Reclaimed Sense and Anyway It’s Too Late to Change T-shirt beneath. He looked more worried than angry.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“Bridget said that you’d disappeared, so I asked around to see if anybody had seen a tall man with a vagina on his head running away from a cocktail bar.”

“Vulva,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“The vagina is internal—the external part is the vulva.”

Oliver gave me his warmest, reassuringest smile. “Either way it was a distinctive enough look that you weren’t hard to find.” He came around the bench, sat down next to me, and put his arm around my shoulders. I leaned in to him without even thinking about it. “Bridget told me she saw Miles. She thought that might have been why you left.”

I nodded. “They were playing my dad’s song too.”

Oliver gave me a little squeeze. “That sounds like quite the perfect storm. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“So was I. Fuck, sorry, I mean… I mean it would have been great if you were there. I don’t mean… I know you had to work.”

“I know what you mean.”

“It just would have been great to be able to say ‘Hi, Miles, fuck you, my life is great.’”

Oliver gave a sort of half laugh. “You could still have said it.”

“Yeah, but I’d have had no proof.”

“You’re proof.”

One of these days I was going to stop being surprised when Oliver said exactly the right thing. But this wasn’t the day. “For fuck’s sake, Oliver. Stop being so…so…completely great.”

And for a while we just sat there, and I let myself feel safe and held and loved, and he took my hand and didn’t say anything because he didn’t need to.

“Also,” I said, because I’d decided that feeling nice was overrated and I wanted to ruin the moment, “his fiancé is, like, twelve.”

“I assume not literally?”

“No, but he’s…like…this tiny little pretty boy called JoJo. I mean who the hell is called JoJo?”

“I assume that’s rhetorical?”

“I’ll tell you who’s called JoJo,” I went on. “A prick, that’s who.”

Oliver was still there and still, despite my decision to insult an innocent stranger, not judging me. “Perhaps. Although personally I think the man who sold you out and made you afraid to ever trust anybody again is a bigger prick.”

“Oh yeah. He’s a huge prick. Which is ironic because his actual prick is quite tiny.”

“Is that true?” Oliver gave me another smile. “Or are you just trying to make me feel special?”

“You know, I can’t remember. But he deserves to have a tiny prick. And if you could tell all your friends he has a tiny prick, that would be fantastic, thanks.”

That made Oliver laugh. “For you, Lucien, anything.”

So I kind of had to kiss him.

And then I kind of had to kiss him again. Y’know, just in case.

And then it felt…it felt okay. Because the rest of the world didn’t matter. I mean it did because I had, like, friends and a job and things I actually cared about. But Miles didn’t matter, and JoJo certainly didn’t matter. “I think…” I said. “I think I can go back now.”

So we got up, I put my vulva hat back on my head, and I let Oliver Blackwood—my amazing barrister boyfriend—escort me back to my best friend’s non-gender-specific bird party. And I knew, deep in my heart, that everything was going to be fine.

After all, it wasn’t like I was ever going to see Miles again.





"OKAY," I TOLD ALEX TWADDLE. I was seriously running low on jokes, but the ritual was so much part of my life now that I wasn’t about to give up on it. “Let’s try this one. There’s a man who works on a bus selling tickets, and he loves his job, but one day he loses his temper with a passenger and throws them off the bus and they fall under a car and die.”

“I say”—Alex looked outraged—“that’s not on at all. Especially not for a bus conductor.”

“No,” I agreed, “it’s very poor behaviour and, spoiler, you should remember that because it might be relevant later.”

“Good to know.” For a moment, Alex looked contemplative. “I say, that might help with your jokes in general. Give a chap a bit of a pointer on what a chap’s supposed to be paying attention to.”

“Duly noted. Anyway, he gets sent to court for throwing this passenger under a car.”

Alex nodded. “For being a bad conductor, you mean?”

The Alex-joke-foreboding was beginning to rise up. “Yes, I suppose so. Although I think they’d probably just have called it murder. Anyway, the judge sentences him to the electric chair.”

“I say, how ironic.”

Abandon joke. Abandon joke now. “Ironic in what way?”