Husband Material (London Calling #2)(70)

The thing was, I didn’t need Oliver to run me a bath. I was perfectly capable of running one for myself. But.… It was nice, wasn’t it? To be taken care of. “I guess…that’d be lovely.”

He drew the quilt from the bed and wrapped it round me—which shifted the vibe from sexy boy slut to starving urchin rescued by kindly gentleman—before disappearing into the en suite. From within came the sound of Oliver’s shoes moving efficiently on tiles, along with the heavy gurgling of early-twentieth-century pipework.

Eventually I drifted through, where I was largely unsurprised to discover that even the substandard rooms in Lettice Manor came equipped with the kind of bath that Roman senators would fuck their boyfriends in.

“Wow,” I said, peering through the steam at Oliver. “You must really love me.”

Oliver peered back, his normally austere hair gone curly in the heat. “Well, I do. But have I done something to make it particularly obvious?”

“Just that you’ve run this whole bath for me,” I told him, “and you haven’t once mentioned what a horrible waste of water it is.”

“Well… It is a horrible waste of water, but in the overall scheme of things I think you can permit yourself one bath. Besides”—he gave me a smile that said Mean Oliver hadn’t quite left the building—“I think you’re probably owed a few.”

“Are you saying I don’t wash?” I protested.

“I’m saying that between your unwillingness to do dishes and your occasional failure to be arsed with a shower, you’ve probably shrunk your water footprint enough to be indulgent just this once.”

I de-quilted and de-pantsed and descended down the marble steps into the steamy, bubbly, lightly scented water. “I wash. Both myself and dishes.” I paused. “Not simultaneously. Although, thinking about it, that would really cut my water footprint.”

“You’re right,” Oliver conceded. “I’ve maligned you unjustly. I suppose I’m still traumatised by that time you left a plate in the living room for a week.”

“So did you.”

“It was your plate.” He folded his arms. “And I was waiting to see if you’d notice.”

“It wasn’t a messy plate. It’d only had a sandwich on it.”

“Even so. Plates belong in the kitchen. In the cupboards. Not in the living room.”

I stretched out in the water, floating slightly—which frankly felt weird. Most baths I couldn’t even straighten my legs in. “Is this what being married to you is going to be like?”

“It’s what I’m like.” There was an unexpectedly defensive note in his voice. “So it may well be?”

Mostly, I’d been teasing, and I’d thought he was to begin with, but somewhere down the line we’d snagged on the brambles of an old argument. “I’m sorry about the plate,” I said. “I’d genuinely kind of…stopped seeing it. But I haven’t done it again. And, you know, you can always say: ‘Luc, pick up your shit.’ Or rather”—I did my best Oliver, which was nowhere near as good as the real thing —“‘Lucien, please rationalise your paraphernalia.’”

His lips twitched. “I do not sound like that.”

“You sound a bit like that. Also, I’m still upset you said I never shower.”

“I didn’t say you never showered. I just pointed out that sometimes you skip a day.”

“Everybody skips a day,” I insisted. “It’s healthy. For natural oils and things. And it’s not like I smell—oh my God, do I smell? You’d tell me if I smelled, right? Except you didn’t tell me about that plate.”

He undid the top button of his shirt. “Yes, I’d tell you if you smelled, which you don’t. I was trying to make a lighthearted reference to the fact that you’re sometimes adorably…” That wasn’t good pause. “Uninterested in routine.”

“Who’s interested in routine? It’s routine. The clue is in the name.” I splashed water in his direction, which made him dance his shoes out of the way. “Also, are you just going to stand there criticising my personal habits while I have a bath?”

That made him pinken slightly. “Of course not. I’ll…I’ll leave you to it.”

“I more sort of meant you could join me if you want to.”

He hesitated, with that anxious, half-hopeful look in his eyes he sometimes got around dessert.

“This thing is huge,” I added. “How many huge-bath opportunities are we going to get in our lives?”

“Probably several, if we wanted them?”

“Come on, Oliver. I’m lonely and…y’know… wet.”

“Lucien, I—”

“It’ll save water,” I interrupted. “Ethics demand that you get in the bath with me.”

“It’s just…” He hesitated again. “On the subject of routines, I haven’t been to the gym recently and, well, the lighting in here is quite harsh.”

Ah. Between this and the plate, I wasn’t winning any sensitivity awards this year. The thing was, Oliver had been in therapy for about eighteen months now, and while it had really helped him in some ways, it was a steps-forward, steps-back situation. Like, he’d got to the point where he was no longer obsessively going to the gym every day and treating food like the enemy, but worrying less about his body ninety percent of the time had made him more self-conscious the other ten percent. I mean, he was still far and away the fittest person I’d ever seen in real life, but the problem with giving yourself an eating disorder in pursuit of an impossible beauty standard was that if you got rid of one, you got rid of the other.