Boyfriend Material(75)

“Are you…” It genuinely upset me that I was having to say this. “Are you even sorry?”

He stroked his chin. “I think being sorry is too easy. I made my choices and I’m living with them.”

“Um. That sounds a lot like a no.”

“If I’d said yes, what would it change?”

“I don’t know.” I made a show of mulling it over. “I might not think you’re a colossal prick.”

“Lucien…” Oliver’s fingers brushed my wrist.

“You can think what you like of me,” said Jon Fleming. “You’ve got that right.”

There was this pressure building inside me, hot and bitter, like I was going to cry or vomit. The problem was, he was being so reasonable. But all I could hear was I don’t give a shit. “I’m supposed to be your son. Don’t you care how I feel about you?”

“Of course I do. But I learned a long time ago you can’t control other people’s feelings.”

My potato wasn’t protecting me anymore. I pushed it away and put my head in my hands.

“With respect, Mr. Fleming.” Oliver somehow managed to sound both as conciliatory and as unyielding as my dad. “I think it’s a mistake to apply the same standards to magazine reviewers and your own family.”

“That’s not what I meant.” I got the impression that Jon Fleming was not a big fan of being challenged. “Luc’s a grown man. I’m not going to try to change his opinions of anything, least of all myself.”

I could feel Oliver’s stillness beside me. “It’s very much not my place to say,” he murmured, “but that position might come across as trying to evade your responsibility for considering the impact your actions have on other people.”

There was a small, unhappy silence. Then Jon Fleming said, “I understand why you feel that way.”

“For fuck’s sake.” I looked up. “I can’t believe you responded to being called on your bullshit with the same bullshit.”

“You’re angry.” He was still fucking nodding.

“Wow, you’ve got a real insight into the human condition there, Dad. I can see why ITV thinks you’re a music legend.”

He folded his hands on the tabletop, long, gnarled fingers interlacing. “I know you’re looking for something from me, Luc, but if it’s for me to say I regret choosing my career over my family, then I can’t. I’ll admit I hurt you, I’ll admit I hurt your mother. I’ll even say I was selfish, because I was, but what I did was right for me.”

“Then what,” I pleaded, feeling way more like a child than I was comfortable with, “am I doing here?”

“What’s right for you. And if that’s walking away and never speaking to me, I’ll accept that.”

“So you’ve asked me to make an eight-hour round trip to tell me you support my right to decide whether I come and see you? That is fucked up.”

“I see that. It’s just I’m increasingly aware of how few opportunities I might have left.”

I sighed. “Credit to you, Dad. You really know how to play the cancer card.”

“I’m only being honest.”

We stared at each other, locked in this weird stalemate. I shouldn’t have come. The last thing I needed was Jon Fleming finding new and creative ways to tell me he’d never wanted me. And now I couldn’t even walk away without feeling like the bad guy. My fingers folded desperately over Oliver’s arm.

“You’re not being honest,” he said. “You’re being truthful. I’m a barrister. I know the difference.”

Jon Fleming glanced at Oliver, somewhat warily. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“I mean everything you’re saying is perfectly unobjectionable when taken at face value. But you’re trying to make us accept an entirely false equivalence between you abandoning your three-year-old child and Lucien holding you accountable for a choice you admit to making freely. They are not, in fact, the same thing.”

At this, my dad gave a wry smile, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “I know better than to argue with a lawyer.”

“You mean I’m right, but you can’t admit it, so you’re making a joke about my profession and hoping Luc will mistake it for a rebuttal.”

“Okay”—Jon Fleming made an everybody-settle-down gesture—“I can see things are getting heated.”

“They’re not getting heated at all,” returned Oliver coldly. “You and I are remaining perfectly calm. The problem is you’ve been profoundly upsetting your son for the last ten minutes.”

“You’ve said your piece, and I admire you for that. But this is between me and Lucien.”

I jumped up so sharply the chair fell over and crashed with incredible force onto what I’m sure were authentic Lancastrian flagstones. “You do not get to call me Lucien. And you don’t get to do”—I waved my hands in a way that I hoped encompassed the everythingness of everything—“this anymore. You reached out to me. Yet somehow I’ve wound up being the one who makes all the effort and the one who has to take responsibility when it crashes and burns.”

“I—”

“And if you say ‘I understand where you’re coming from’ or ‘I hear you’ or anything remotely like it, then even though you’re an old man with cancer, I will fucking deck you so help me God.”