Husband Material (London Calling #2)(71)

“Oliver,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything you’re not comfortable with. But you’re the most amazing, gorgeous, sexy man I have ever been allowed to do depraved things to. And I don’t think that’s ever going to change. Even when we’re married and we’ve both stopped trying and you’re, like, seventy-five with nose hair.”

He looked faintly appalled. “I will never have nose hair.”

“Well, I’d be into you, even if you did. Now come on”—I tried to signal this is a safe, if aquatic space—“get in the bath.”

Slipping off his shoes and socks, he padded over and crouched down at the top of the steps. “I do know you’re not judging me. I just find it very hard not to judge myself.”

I tried to be sensitive to Oliver’s body image issues, I really did.

But, at the end of the day, he looked like him and I looked like me, and sometimes it was hard to remember that when he was being down on himself, he wasn’t being down on me by association. Still— and this was definitely something I couldn’t have done even a year ago—sometimes when you wanted someone to trust you, you had to trust them first. So I stood, letting the water stream off me like a shit Venus, waded over and kissed him, a hand catching the collar of his shirt, and my lips hard and urgent on his.

Trying to say things that I didn’t know how to say. Asking him to believe that I loved him and I wanted him and that he’d never be anything but beautiful to me.

When I finally let him go, he was tousled and blushing and —“Lucien, now I’m drenched.”

“Then,” I said, “you might as well be in the bath.”

I gave him what I intended to be a playful tug on the arm, but I hadn’t quite factored in things like gravity and balance and wet marble. Oliver had just enough time for a flail and a “What the—”

before we tumbled backwards into the bath with an enormous splash.

Thankfully, it was deep enough and wide enough that we didn’t die.

Oliver resurfaced in a flurry of wet fabric and bubbles. Thankfully he was laughing rather than glowering, complaining, or pointing out quite how close he’d come to cracking his head open. “That was very…very you, Lucien.”

“It was an accident.”

“Exactly.”

I took a moment to appreciate Oliver in a near-transparent white shirt clinging to all the bits of his body that I, coincidentally, liked clinging to. “For the record. This”—I made a kind of rectangle that was meant to encompass all of him—“is really working for me.”

“Thank you.” He looked flustered. “It’s, um. It’s actually quite uncomfortable.”

“There’s a solution to that.”

He still looked flustered. “Kiss me again first.”

In my head, I mermaided into his arms, full of seduction and mystery. But I was very much a land-based organism. So I sort of half stumbled, half waded forward, nearly knocking him over again, and finally managed to smack my lips onto his.

Thankfully, we’d had some practice at this—the kissing, not the navigating a neoclassical bath in an earl’s country house—and after a teeny bit of fumbling and nose orientating, we settled into one of the few routines I saw the point of. The world melting away beneath the familiarity of Oliver’s mouth against mine. His taste and the heat of him, and the way he always kissed me so carefully at first—like he wanted me to know I was precious—before he lost himself in urgency. And we got rough and messy and desperate for each other.

Even after two years. When surely it should have stopped feeling this way: all, you know, intense and stuff. Honestly, it still kind of scared me sometimes. And not just because the last time I’d let myself get this close to someone, I’d been really badly hurt, but because I’d never let myself get this close to someone. I wasn’t sure I’d ever known how.

Until I’d met Oliver. And falling in love with him had left me defenceless.

I took the opportunity to make a midkiss play for his trousers.

And, again in my head, this had been seamless and sexy. Except in practice, a wet belt was a pisser to undo and wet buttons did not slide easily through eyeholes. I did, eventually, manage to wrangle him out, but I nearly drowned and lost anything that might have resembled dignity.

“Are you all right?” Oliver ask-laughed, as I spluttered back to the surface.

I spat out half the bath. “Fine. Lungs are overrated.”

He was still laughing as he kissed me again, and for a while, we made out like Love Island contestants, only without the cameras and the sarcastic Scottish voice-over. The water buoyed us up in this slightly magical way and I was light as champagne bubbles, drifting with Oliver through the foam.

Lying back against the wall of the bath, I let him float in my arms for a while. “I can’t believe this is going to be us in a few months,” I told him.

“Isn’t it us right now?” he asked.

“No, I mean—getting married. Not in a cathedral, of course, and not putting all our guests up in a palace the night before but…yeah.”

He was quiet. Too quiet. “It does seem rather unreal, doesn’t it?”

Even this late at night, even naked and covered in soap, I could tell when he was tense. “Are you okay?”