Husband Material (London Calling #2)(8)

MILES EDWARD GREENE AND MR. JOHN JOSEPH RYAN

REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY AS THEY

CELEBRATE THEIR UNION. RSVP.





IT WAS MY TURN TO cook. By which I mean it was the one night a month when my overwhelming sense of guilt at never cooking overrode both my and Oliver’s awareness that I was horrendously bad at it. Since Oliver had, after a long email exchange with Bronwyn, come to the conclusion that it was ethically unsupportable to be vegetarian but not vegan if you claimed to care about animal welfare and had therefore cut out animal products entirely, I’d decided to make a sweet potato, chard, and celeriac rainbow-layered pie. Which had seemed like a great idea when I’d Googled good vegan recipes a couple of days ago. Then seemed like quite a poor idea when I’d been wandering around Tesco’s wondering where the fuck they kept their celeriac. Then turned out to be an unbelievably poor idea once I’d started trying to make it.

For a start, store-bought pastry wasn’t vegan so I’d had to make it from scratch, and I quickly learned that whipping up your own pastry from coconut milk, flour, and almond oil was really, really hard.

Especially when, according to the recipe, you were supposed to do it in the twenty minutes your beetroot was roasting in the oven so everything would be nice and ready when the time came to combine it all.

An hour and ten minutes into the one-hour prep time that the recipe had promised, I was covered in flour to my elbows, juggling three different roasting tins that had to go into the oven at different times, trying to work out whether my pastry needed more coconut milk (I’d bought extra in case) or more flour (I’d bought extra in case) or less of one or the other (in which case how was I meant to take it out), and fast returning to my monthly realisation that I should never, ever be allowed in a kitchen.

Eventually I got the pastry to a sort of play-dough consistency where I could just about squoodge it into a cake tin and start filling it with layers of chard leaves and semolina, which would apparently absorb the juices but which I was beginning to strongly suspect would not in fact absorb anything. I wrestled the whole mess into the oven, set the timer, and made a brief despairing effort to clean up before realising that I had no idea where to start.

Oliver arrived home just as the smoke alarm went off.

“Smells delicious,” he yelled from the hall before heading into the front room, grabbing a sheaf of documents he’d been working on, and waving them frantically under the smoke alarm.

“Thanks. It’s supposed to be a pie.”

“And what’s it actually going to be?”

“Honestly?” I came through from the kitchen, yoinked the papers gently out of his hand, and took over waving duty. “Probably a takeaway?”

The beeping stopped, and Oliver recovered his documents before giving me a belated honey-I’m-home kiss on the cheek. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

It was never fine. But over the course of our relationship I’d watched Oliver gamely chomp his way through roasted squash that was practically mulch, spinach soup that was practically jam, and more watery stews than I could keep track of.

In the end I served up a kind of vegetable gruel with bits of either burned or raw crust floating in it like incredibly shit dumplings. Oliver seasoned his liberally and tucked in.

“Are you okay?” he asked once he’d managed to swallow a particularly tricky lump of chard. “This is fine, but from the mess”—he indicated the carnage that still filled the kitchen—“it seems like you were more than normally distracted.”

I took a deep breath. This wasn’t going to be a big deal. I wasn’t going to let this be a big deal. “It’s Miles.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise seeing him shook you up that much.”

“No, I mean, it’s Miles again. Like, he came to see me.”

Between his training as a professional barrister, a lifetime of nodding and smiling for his judgmental parents, and two years of pretending to like my cooking, Oliver had one hell of a poker face, but I thought I saw a flattering hint of jealousy creep into his eyes.

“When?”

“Today. At work.”

Oliver frowned. “That seems inappropriate.”

“Yeah, Miles has never been big on appropriate.” To be fair, neither had I.

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to say, ‘I made a terrible mistake, run away with me,’

and I said, ‘Of course I will, big boy.’ I’m packing my bags this evening.”

Oliver put down his fork and gave me a stern look. “Lucien.”

“He wanted to invite me to his wedding.”

“Ah.” For a moment he was quiet. “Do you want to go?”

I was a bit surprised he’d even asked. “Of course not. It would be fucking weird.”

“Well then.” He reached across the table and took my hand. I thought it was meant to be affectionate, but he probably also wanted an excuse to stop eating the pie. “That seems to be a problem with a very simple solution.”

“It’s just…” Fuck. He’d done that thing where he was all supportive of my choices to make me confront the fact that I wasn’t actually sure about them. “I keep wondering if it might be good for me maybe?”

His thumb traced gently across my knuckles like we had all the time in the world and nothing mattered more than this conversation right now. “Good in what way?”