Boyfriend Material(24)

“Then write a fucking song about it, you arrogant, narcissistic, manipulative, bald wanker.”

Then I got the hell out of there. As the door swung closed behind me, I caught Mum’s voice saying, “Well, I think that could have gone a lot worse.” Which was her all over really.

Pucklethroop-in-the-Wold did, technically, have a taxi service—or at least it had a bloke called Gavin who you could call, and he’d come and pick you up in his car, and charge you about a fiver to take you to one of the three places he was willing to go. But it was actually only a forty-minute walk across the fields to the station. And I was having the sort of hot-ragey-cryey feelings that made avoiding other humans a pretty high priority for me.

I was very slightly calmer by the time I was on a train, whooshing back to London. And, for some reason, I decided that would be a good moment to pick up Oliver’s voicemail.

“Lucien,” he said, “I don’t know what I was expecting, but this clearly isn’t going to work. There isn’t going to be an ‘in future’ but if, in some imaginary future, you were thinking of standing me up again, at least do me the courtesy of inventing a decent excuse. And I’m sure you’re finding all this very funny, but it isn’t something I need in my life right now.”

Well. That was…what it was.

I listened to it again. And then immediately wondered why the fuck I’d done that to myself. I guess maybe I was hoping it would be better the second time around.

It wasn’t.

The carriage was mostly empty—it was a funny time of day to be heading into the city—so I tucked my face into the crook of my arm and shed some surreptitious tears. I didn’t even know what I was crying over. I’d had an argument with a father I didn’t remember and been dumped by a guy I wasn’t dating. Neither of those things should have hurt.

Didn’t hurt.

I wasn’t going to let them hurt.

I mean, yes, I was probably going to lose my job, and probably be alone forever, and my father would probably die of cancer, but you know what, fuck everything. I was going to go home, put on my dressing gown, and drink until nothing mattered anymore.

There was fuck all I could do about the other stuff. But I could do that.





Chapter 11


Two hours later I was in Clerkenwell, standing outside one of those dinky Georgian terraces with the wrought-iron railings and the window boxes, holding down Oliver’s doorbell as if I was worried it would fall off the wall.

“What,” he said, when he finally answered, “is wrong with you?”

“So many, many things. But I’m really sorry and I don’t want to fake break up.”

His eyes narrowed. “Have you been crying?”

“No.”

Ignoring my obvious and pointless lie, he stepped out of the doorway. “Oh, for God’s sake, come in.”

Inside, Casa de Blackwood was everything I’d expected in some ways and nothing like I’d expected in others. It was tiny and immaculate, all white-painted walls and stripped wooden floors, with flashes of jewel-bright colour from rugs and throw pillows. Effortlessly homey and grown up and shit, leaving me jealous and intimidated and weirdly yearny.

Oliver closed his laptop and hurriedly tidied away a selection of already neatly stacked papers before settling onto the far end of the two-seater sofa. He was in what I guessed to be his casual mode: well-fitting jeans and a light-blue cashmere jumper, and bare feet, which I found strangely intimate. I mean, not in a fetishy way. Just in a “This is what I look like when people aren’t around” way.

“I don’t understand you, Lucien.” He rubbed at his temples despairingly. “You ditch me with no explanation—by text, because a phone call would apparently be too much. And then you turn up on my doorstep, still with no explanation because a phone call would apparently not be enough.”

I tried to pick a not-avoiding-or-crowding-you spot on the sofa and sat in it, knocking my knee against his anyway. “I should have phoned. Like, both times. Except, I guess, if I’d phoned the first time, I wouldn’t have had to phone this time.”

“What happened? I honestly thought you couldn’t be bothered.”

“I’m not that much of a flake. I get that the evidence is kind of against me here. But I do need this…this”—I gave an inarticulate wave—“thing we’re doing. And I’ll try to do better if you give me another chance.”

Oliver’s eyes were at their silverest—soft and stern at the same time. “How can you expect me to trust you’ll do better next time, when you still won’t talk to me about this time?”

“I had some family shit. I thought it was important but it wasn’t. It won’t happen again. And you signed up for a fake boyfriend, not a real basket case.”

“I knew what I was getting into.”

I wasn’t quite strong enough for Oliver’s opinion of me right now. “Look, I get I’m not what you’re looking for, but can you please stop throwing it in my face?”

“I… That…” He seemed genuinely flustered. “That wasn’t what I meant. I was just trying to say that I didn’t expect you to be something you weren’t.”

“What, like remotely reliable or sane?”