Boyfriend Material(62)

“I recommend you breathe at some point in the very near future.”

He had a point. I breathed. “Anyway, you really can sit this one out. I’m pretty sure it’s too early in our fake relationship for you to be meeting my mother.”

“Well, aren’t I going to be meeting your father next week?”

“That’s different. I care about my mum.”

“I’d like to meet her, if it wouldn’t make you uncomfortable.”

I opened my mouth, realised I had no idea what I was going to say, and finally settled on, “Okay then.”

Given I was already late, Oliver suggested we rendezvous at Waterloo, which I suggested sounded like a terrible love song from the forties. Then I texted Mum to let her know I’d be bringing my fake boyfriend, threw on my coat, dashed out the door, and tried not to think too hard about what it meant that I wanted Oliver to meet my mother.





Chapter 24


Half an hour later I was sitting on a train with Oliver. And it was weird. The problem was that being on public transport with someone for more than a couple of stops on the Tube fell down the uncanny butt crack between necessity and social occasion. I mean, it was basically just the two of you, sitting down facing each other, for about as long as you would if you were in a restaurant, only with much worse surroundings and without food to give the whole thing focus. Worse, I was worried I was going to blurt out something awful like “I missed you” or “I tidied my flat for you.”

“So,” I said. “How’s the case?”

“I’m afraid I can’t—”

“Talk about it?”

“Precisely.”

A pause, both of us looking anywhere except at each other.

“And—” he crossed one leg over the other and then uncrossed it when he kicked me in the knee—“your work? It’s going well, I take it?”

“Actually yes. By the low bar it sets for itself. The Beetle Drive hasn’t accidentally been relocated to a warehouse in Tooting Bec. Nothing’s caught fire in at least a couple of weeks. And some of the donors I scared off by doing the bad gay might deign to come back to us.”

“I’m glad the plan seems to be working. But I confess I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the assumptions that seem to underlie it.”

“You’d better not be getting cold feet on a train halfway to my mum’s.”

“I’m not. I just don’t think you should have to be dating someone like me for it to be acceptable to be someone like you.”

I finally met his eyes again. How had I ever found them cold? “I know, right? And what especially grinds my gonads is that it’s not even my, I will admit, real and extensive personality flaws they object to. It’s that they think I might have casual sex sometimes. Which, ironically, I’d be doing more of if I was in a healthier place emotionally.”

“I hope you wouldn’t.” He blinked several times. “That is, not in a sex-negative way. Just that, as far as I know, we never agreed this was going to be an open fake relationship.”

“What would that even be? Are you telling me that you don’t want me to have fake sex with other people when I’m fake dating you?”

“Well, I hadn’t given it much thought. But, if we were really dating, I’d want to be monogamous because that’s just, well, my preference. And so if you’re going to pretend to date me, I’m afraid you’ll have to pretend to be monogamous. Which, I suppose, when the press are following you, is going to be an awful lot like being genuinely monogamous. Is that”—he seemed to be trying to sink through the seat—“going to be a problem?”

“I wish I could say yes because I’m beating them off with a stick. But in practice, it just slightly changes the reason I’m not getting laid.”

“I thought when you said you hadn’t been in a relationship you meant, um, you hadn’t been in a relationship. Rather than you weren’t…”

I stared at him, daring him to finish that sentence.

“…getting any? As it were.”

I had to laugh. As it were indeed. “And I bet you couldn’t imagine me being any more of a loser.”

“You know I don’t think you’re a loser. But I don’t understand why you’d have difficulty…um…” He seemed to be flailing again.

“As it were?”

“In this area.”

This would have been a brilliant opportunity to build a deeper and more lasting relationship, based on trust, honesty, and mutual understanding. I could have told him about Miles. About partying like there was no tomorrow. And then waking up one day and finding out there definitely, definitely was. Oliver would have understood. It was kind of his whole jam.

“It’s complicated,” I said instead.

And he didn’t push it, because of course he wouldn’t push it, and I almost wanted him to—just so I could get it over with. But that was also the worst thing I could possibly imagine. So we went back to silence for the rest of the trip. Fun times.

I’d never been so glad to see Epsom Station (facilities lacking according to Google). Hopefully the woeful inadequacy of the station at which you couldn’t even use your fucking Oyster card would take my mind off my woefully inadequate attempts to emotionally connect with my fake boyfriend. We de-trained ourselves and struck out across the fields towards Pucklethroop-in-the-Wold.