Boyfriend Material(122)
“It’s easy to be happy,” he told me, “when you’re pretending.”
“Who’s fucking pretending? Do you think I’d be like this if I was pretending?”
He sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his brow in that tormented way he had. Except this time it was expressing more than indulgent frustration at my antics. “Please don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.”
“Of course I’m going to make it fucking difficult. You think I’m just going to let you throw this away? For no reason except… Oh fuck, is this because I made you a bacon sandwich?” I put my head in my hands. “I can’t believe I’m about to get dumped over a bacon sandwich.”
“It’s not about the sandwich. It’s”—he sighed—“about you and me. We’re different people.”
“But we work.” That came out sounding slightly more pitiful than I would have wanted. But I guess I had some choices ahead of me, and if it came down to keeping my dignity versus keeping Oliver, things weren’t looking so good for dignity. “And I don’t understand what I’ve done wrong. I mean, apart from telling your entire family to fuck off. And, okay, that was probably a biggie, but if it was a deal-breaker, I wish you’d told me that before I made a total fool of myself over you last night.”
“It’s not that either.”
“Then,” I yelled, “what the fuck is it? Because from where I’m standing, you spent months telling me I’m wonderful and beautiful and amazing and worth something and now it’s just, what, kthanksbai?”
“It’s not about you, Lucien.”
“How is you dumping me not about me?” Okay. This was good. I could work with this. If I was angry, I wasn’t crying. “Like, did you mean a single word you said since this whole thing started?”
“I meant all of it, but being with you isn’t right for me. And being with me isn’t right for you.”
“It felt fucking right yesterday. It’s been fucking right for ages.”
He wouldn’t even look at me. “I’ve already told you: this hasn’t been real. It can’t last because, as you’ve pointed out, my relationships don’t, and I’d rather remember what we’ve had than watch it go cold and die, like it always does.”
“Oh, come on. That is the worst reason for breaking up with someone I have ever heard.” I made a messy grab for his hand. “I can’t promise you forever because that’s…not at all how it works. But I literally can’t imagine not wanting to be with you. Not wanting this. Whatever we call it.”
“That’s because you barely know me.” With a depressing finality, he untangled his fingers from mine and stood up. “You keep telling me how perfect I am, and must know by now that I’m anything but. In two months you’ll realise I’m not that special, and a month after that you’ll realise I’m not that interesting either. We’ll spend less time together, and mind less about it, and one day you’ll tell me things have come to a natural conclusion. You’ll move on and I’ll be where I always have been: never quite what someone is looking for.” He turned his head away. “I’m just not strong enough to go through that with you.”
There was a pause.
And then, in a moment of epiphany that deserved a full fucking chorus of angels, or at least the Skenfrith Male Voice Choir, I got it.
“Hang on a second.” I actually wagged a finger at him. “I know this because I do it all the time. You like me and you’re scared and you’ve been through something and it’s shaken you up and your first instinct is to run. But if I can work through that, then so can you. Because you are way smarter and way less fucked up than me.”
Another pause.
“How about,” I suggested, somewhere between hope and desperation, “you go into the bathroom for a bit.”
A third pause, and definitely the worst yet.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuckity fuck. This was seriously nonideal. I’d legitimately gone all in on this. I’d said some pretty intense things and put myself way out there. And if after all that it blew up in my face, I didn’t know how I was going to—
“I can’t be what you need me to be,” he said. “Goodbye, Lucien.”
And by the time I got past the “wait, stop, please don’t go” stage he’d already gone.
Which pretty much ruined my Sunday.
And my Monday. And my Tuesday. And possibly my life.
Chapter 49
When I’d arranged Dad Meeting 2: Electric Boogaloo, I’d been counting on Oliver not breaking up with me three days earlier and me not having to trog out to the Chiltern Firehouse feeling useless and heartbroken. At the time, I’d been weirdly touched—I mean, it wasn’t my sort of place, and to be honest, it probably wasn’t his sort of place either, but it was where you went if you were a celebrity or looking for celebrities. So by taking me there, Jon Fleming was publicly upgrading me from “estranged wastrel son” to “legit family member.” And while I hadn’t snorted quite enough of his Kool-Aid to believe this was totally for my benefit—it would clearly play well as a chapter in the Jon Fleming rehabilitation story—I’d still benefit from it. A bit. To some extent. In the not-nothing sense that I was coming to accept was my relationship with my father.