Husband Material (London Calling #2)(77)

I sagged in the shadow of a pillar to shelter from the crowd of aristocrats who I was kinda sorta slagging off. “I know. It’s…I don’t know. It almost feels like you prefer this sack of arseholes to the crowd at Miles’s wedding.”

“I’ll admit,” he said, massaging his temples, “I prefer being in a pleasant stately home at the wedding of an affable but harmless man I’ve met more than once to being in a tunnel full of loud music and cultural markers I’ve always found alienating. I don’t think that’s especially wrong of me.”

On one level, it wasn’t. On another—and maybe it was the not sleeping and the being soft-arrested and the rain and the field of liquid cowpats, but I was feeling a difficult mix of drained and antsy.

“I’m not saying it’s wrong of you,” I began, even though I was about to, a bit, “but those were kind of, y’know, my people?”

“They used to be your people,” Oliver corrected, and I wasn’t sure I was in a mood to be corrected. “Your people are Bridge and Tom, Priya and the James Royce-Royces. And, well, and me.”

When he laid it out like that it felt really…really small all of a sudden. Not because I didn’t love my friends—I obviously loved my friends—but because I’d always felt my friends represented, somehow, a connection to something larger? “I guess I just… It still kind of confuses me that you’re totally down with a ceremony that celebrates a God you don’t believe in, gender roles that went out of fashion in the 1950s, and a version of marriage you literally can’t be part of”—I took a deep breath; this was getting way more intense than I’d intended—“but you’re freaked out by a ceremony that celebrates your actual identity.”

“Lucien.” Like me, Oliver was standing slightly unsteadily, and like me he was hiding behind a pillar to stop what was now, undeniably, an argument spilling over the rest of the party like the world’s most disappointing balloon drop. “I’m not sure what you want from me here. We went to a wedding for somebody you hated, and you clearly wanted me to be harsh about it, so I was harsh about it.

We’re now at a wedding for somebody you like, so I’m trying to help things go smoothly. And apparently that’s upsetting to you.”

Oh no, was this a me problem? This was probably a me problem. I mean, let’s be honest, most things were me problems.

Except, hang on. On this one occasion, maybe incorrectly because self-awareness was never exactly my best feature, I was pretty certain it wasn’t a me problem. Yes, if I was being fair—and who wanted to be fair in the middle of a fight—Oliver could play the taking-my-cue-from-you card for some bits of Miles’s wedding. But he knew how much I loved dunking on rich people, and if he was really that committed to having my back, he’d have totally joined in.

I took a deep breath. “What’s upsetting to me”—this seemed like a good time for I-statements—“is that you just seem like you’re naturally drawn to a lifestyle I feel alienated by and naturally alienated from a lifestyle I feel drawn to and…and that’s a crappy thing to realise when you’re about to marry somebody.”

“You’re overextrapolating.” Oliver wasn’t normally this blunt, but then he wasn’t normally this tired. “If I misinterpreted the situation, then I’m sorry, but I’ve only been trying to support you. These have been your friends’ weddings after all.”

Fuck that. He wasn’t getting away with that. “Can you please drop the I’m-only-trying-to-please-you thing. Either you’re bullshitting me—”

“I’m not bullshitting you, Luci—”

“Either you’re bullshitting me,” I pressed on, “which is bad. Or you genuinely have no opinions of your own and are still doing that thing I really thought you’d stopped doing where you just try to perform whatever it is you think somebody else is expecting of you.”

“I’m not—”

It was no use. I’d gone full dam-break. “And now it seems like you’re going to want our wedding to be this mega-traditional bells-

and-incense thing with no queer iconography because you’re so insecure in yourself that rainbows make you uncomfortable.”

I’d gone too far. I’d gone significantly too far. “I don’t believe,”

said Oliver way too calmly, in a voice I’d never heard him use before, “that the fact I don’t feel personally represented by a set of symbols invented by a very specific group of Americans in the late 1970s and popularised as much by global capitalism as by activists makes me insecure in myself.”

Part of me wanted to apologise because I’d obviously hurt him.

But also, for all he was doing the I’m-a-lawyer-so-I-talk-good thing, I didn’t think I was entirely wrong. And unfortunately, as I knew from experience on both sides of the equation, I’m sorry but I’m right never went down well.

“I didn’t…” I tried.

“You did,” he replied. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I might take a short walk in the grounds.”

I made a confused noise because what could you say to something like that? No, stay sounded either controlling or needy but fine, go sounded huffy as fuck. Besides, normally when we fought— which we didn’t that much—I was the one shutting it down or needing my space or, in extreme cases, hiding in a bathroom. And I hadn’t realised quite how rubbish it felt to be on the other end.