Boyfriend Material(110)

“Ah. You mean like Ulysses?”

“Probably? But more about a cow and less about…I’m going to go out on a limb and say sad Irish people?”

Alex thought about this for a long moment. “And so I’m led by the intrinsic structural features of the knock-knock joke medium to anticipate that the punch line will be delivered following my delivery of the expected reply ‘the interrupting cow who’ but because the interrupting cow is an interrupting cow, it instead delivers its punch line during said response, thus confounding my expectations with hilarious consequences.”

“Um. I think so?”

“It’s rather good.” He leaned sideways. “I say, Rhys. Come in here.”

Rhys Jones Bowen’s head appeared in the doorway. “What can I do you for, fellows?”

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

Alex shot me a conspiratorial look. “The interrupting cow.”

“The interrupting cow who?” asked Rhys Jones Bowen.

“Moo!”

There was a pause. He stroked his beard. “Ooh, I like it. It’s rather Dadaist. You see, I was expecting you to interrupt me during the final line because you’re an interrupting cow. But you didn’t, so I was surprised, and that made it funny. I’ll be chuckling about that all day, I will.”

They were doing this deliberately, weren’t they? They were evil geniuses who’d been playing me for years. Before any of us could go back to what we laughably called our jobs, Dr. Fairclough appeared from upstairs and to my dismay (but not my surprise), Rhys Jones Bowen stopped in the doorway and turned to her.

“Got a joke for you, Doctor F,” he announced.

Her reply was wordless and discouraging, but he was not discouraged.

“Knock, knock.”

To my surprise, she did in fact reply at once with a curt and formal: “Who’s there?”

“The interrupting cow.”

“Thank you, but mammals are not my area of interest. Excellent job last night, O’Donnell.”

“Moo?” Rhys finished somewhat limply.

“Thank you?” I said, trying and failing not to sound like this was the first remotely supportive thing I’d ever heard her to say.

“Good. I hope you are motivated by this positive reinforcement. If not, I can put a jar of sugar solution in the break room.”

“Um, I think I’m okay.”

Dr. Fairclough literally checked her phone. I wondered how many seconds she had allocated to taking an interest. “I additionally commend your choice of Mr. Blackwood. He was by far the least insufferable part of Saturday evening. Maintain a relationship with him and bring him next year.”

“Just to check”—I did not like the way this was going—“am I fired if I don’t?”

“No. But I may suspend your sugar solution privileges.” At which point, her phone beeped an alarm. “I hope you all feel valued as employees. I’m done with you now.”

Thus reassured of my value as an employee, I wandered back to my office and began to tackle the substantial post-Beetle Drive housekeeping. There were pictures of the event to curate and send to Rhys Jones Bowen, so he could add them to the pile of things he was supposed to be doing social media with. There were donors and, with my more mercenary hat on, donations to follow up. Payments to be made. Apologies and thank-you’s to be issued depending on circumstances. Basically a bunch of T’s to dot and I’s to cross—and, for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate but I was sure had very little to do with Dr. Fairclough’s new, improved management style, I found myself surprisingly happy to get on with it.

And I also made a sneaky booking at Quo Vadis for the day after Oliver’s parents’ do. Which, yes, was embarrassingly sentimental. But the alternative was turning to him in the car on the way home and saying “Hi, how about being my fake boyfriend for real?” And that didn’t feel like…enough? Of course, this might be too much. But given the choice between making Oliver think I didn’t care about him and making him think I was a creepy weirdo—actually those were both really bad. Fuck.

This was hard. Romance was hard. How did you romance?

More to the point, how did Oliver want to be romanced? I thought about asking Bridge but she would have told me to take him up the Seine—not a euphemism—in a candlelit rowboat or save his sister from being dishonoured at the hands of a dashing rake. And I wasn’t in any position to do either. Besides, I was pretty sure he didn’t have a sister.

Wait. Did Oliver have a sister? He’d told me this, but that was back when I didn’t give a shit. I think he’d said he had a brother? And that was when I realised how little I actually knew about him. I mean, I knew he was hot and nice and a barrister and he liked it when I… Okay that definitely wasn’t helping. But he’d met my mum, and my dad, and seen me cry several times. How did I wind up being the one who did all the intimacy here?

On top of which, I was less than a week away from having to hang out with his family, and what a shitty boyfriend I was going to look if I had no idea who any of them were. And probably Uncle Battenberg was going to come up to me and be all “Ah, you must have met Oliver through his water polo team” and I’d be all “What-er-polo-what?”