Husband Material (London Calling #2)(91)

The recipe I’d hastily Googled while heading downstairs to the street required chia seeds, agave nectar, and almond milk, and I had no idea where I’d get any of those. Fortunately, I lived in one of those bits of London where you couldn’t walk twenty paces without tripping over a wholefood store or an artisanal cheese stand so I was pretty confident I’d be able to source them without too much trouble.

Besides, they sold half this stuff in Tesco. Part of me was a bit concerned that almond milk was supposed to be an ethical no-no, although I couldn’t remember why or if I was getting it mixed up with palm oil, but I decided that from Oliver’s perspective at least it was preferable to cow.

In the end the ingredient I had most trouble with was “sturdy bread” because I had no idea what that meant and didn’t want my French toast to fall apart in the pan. But for some reason when you went up to somebody in a shop and said, “How sturdy is your bread?” they thought you were taking the piss. The internet told me I should be using brioche, but it also told me that brioche wasn’t vegan unless you got a specific brand, and that brand only made burger buns. In the end I went for sourdough on the grounds that if a bread that you could use to subdue an intruder in an emergency wasn’t “sturdy” enough, nothing was.

Back at the flat, I took the extremely sensible and grown-up precaution of opening all the windows and taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm. And then I got to it. To my joy, the first step of the recipe was basically “stick everything except the bread in a bowl and stick the bowl in the fridge,” and I could definitely do that. I mean, yes, I probably put in too much cinnamon because I dropped the spoon, but then cinnamon was one of those ingredients you could never have too much of. Like, y’know, ginger or garlic. Oh God, I’d inherited my mum’s cooking genes, hadn’t I?

As if this realisation wasn’t terrifying enough, it belatedly occurred to me that while getting a nice expensive bread was cool, it meant that it wasn’t sliced. And the phrase “the best thing since sliced bread” was a cliché for a reason. In the end I wound up cutting the loaf into roughly a dozen irregularly shaped chunks, none of which could in all honesty be called “slices.” There was the end piece, which had the approximate dimensions of a butt plug. Then the next piece was as thick as my thumb at the top and thinner than my bread knife at the bottom. Then there were two bits that were mostly crumbs; one halfway decent slice that somehow got fat in the middle and thin at each end; and the rest was a mixture of wedges, triangles, and lumps that I hoped, perhaps naively, would hold up fine in the pan.

When the requisite fridge-leaving time had passed, I fished out my batter and began soaking my bread. The recipe suggested that twenty to thirty seconds a side would be fine, but I gave it a bit longer because I wanted to be sure. Some of the thinner slices, or the thinner bits of the thicker slices, fell apart almost at once, but I figured I still had enough for an okay breakfast.

One by one, I transferred the slices of vanilla-and-cinnamon-infused bread to the pan and, as instructed, gave them three to four minutes on each side until golden brown. Or, more realistically, until ghost-white in some places and charred almost black in others. In the end I threw two pieces away, ate one myself to make certain I wasn’t feeding Oliver something actively poisonous, and piled the rest as attractively as I could on a plate.

It was at about this point that I realised I’d forgotten to buy any toppings, so I grabbed some more of the agave nectar and gave it an artful drizzle. Okay, not artful exactly but presentable. Then, waving my way through the billows of smoke that I’d mostly managed to confine to the kitchen area and hoping I didn’t smell too badly of charred almond milk, I went through to surprise Oliver with breakfast in bed.

He was where I’d left him, in a crumple of duvet, dozing a kind of doze I recognised: the doze of somebody who didn’t really want to be conscious but whose body was all unconsciousnessed out.

“I made French toast,” I told him plaintively.

He blinked in a disorientated way. “You did what?”

“Made French toast?” For some reason, it came out like an apology.

“Lucien, that’s very sweet of you but you realise it’s not vegan.”

“Obviously I realised it’s not vegan. It’s full of cow juice and chicken boxes. But I used substitutes. Because I’m amazing and you’re lucky to have me.”

“You are and I am, but”—he cast his bleary eyes over my quite literally burnt offering—“that looks ambiguous.”

I perched myself on the edge of the bed. “Well, you have to eat.

But I understand if you don’t want to eat this.”

Pushing himself into a sitting position, he selected the least awful piece of French toast and ate it valiantly. “Actually, out of everything you’ve made me, this is one of the least dreadful. Some bits of it are even quite nice.”

I’d take that. “There’s also coffee,” I said. “Which I’ve definitely not fucked up.”

And for a while we sat in silence, sharing my okay French toast and my genuinely decent coffee. Oliver was looking slightly better than he had last night, which meant he was looking kind of like the zombie version of himself, instead of the ghost version. He was propped against an artful construction of pillows, the duvet drawn to midchest height, picking at his late breakfast/early lunch with visibly increasing energy. At some point in the near future, he might even be standing upright.