Boyfriend Material(94)

There was a flapping of coats and a shuffling of shoes, and Jennifer and Peter came back into the room, followed by a surprisingly dapper man in a plum waistcoat and a small, round woman in a polka-dot lindy-hop dress.

Oliver—who wasn’t so relaxed as to forget his manners—stood to greet them. “Ben, Sophie, this is Luc—he’s my boyfriend. Luc, this is Ben, who’s a stay-at-home dad, and Sophie, who is Satan.”

“I’m not Satan,” she huffed. “I’m Beelzebub at worst.”

“Jennifer?” Oliver made a slightly imperious gesture. “Who was your last client?”

Sophie rolled her eyes. They’d clearly played this game a lot.

“A refugee from Brunei, who’d have been tortured if he’d been deported.” Jennifer lifted her glass of Lambrini in a toast-like gesture. “Yours, Oliver?”

“A barman who stole from an employer who cheated him. Yours, Sophie?”

She mumbled something incoherent.

“What was that? We didn’t hear you.”

“Fine.” She threw her hands in the air. “It was a pharmaceutical company whose drugs, let me be very clear, cannot be proven to have killed any children at all. What can I say? I like clients who can actually pay.”

“Just to check,” I asked, having slowly come to the realisation that Oliver’s friends being straight was not the only thing that made them different from my friends, “am I the only person in this room who isn’t either a lawyer or married to a lawyer?”

Peter reverentially returned the wobbly Ferrero Rocher to the Ferrero Rocher table. “Well, you could fix that. It is legal now.”

“By which I think he means”—Amanda looked up from the sofa, where she’d been sitting largely on top of her husband—“that it would be legal for you to marry Oliver. Not that it would be legal to kill every lawyer in the room, whatever Shakespeare had to say on the subject.”

“What?” cried Peter, comically startled. “Why would you go there? Obviously I meant marriage. Not murder.”

“Tell me that again when those three have been talking jurisprudence for three hours.”

Oliver cleared his throat—he’d gone a little pink. “I know you’re all terribly excited I have a boyfriend. But I think that dropping the M-bomb at this stage in my relationship would be an excellent way to ensure I don’t have one for much longer.”

“Sorry.” Peter hung his head. “I wasn’t actually…I didn’t mean…please don’t break up with him, Luc… Have another Ferrero Rocher.”

“And for the record,” Oliver went on, “just because I have legal right to do something doesn’t mean I actually have to do it. Especially not with someone I’ve been dating for less than two months. No offence, Luc.”

I pulled dramatically out of his arms. “Are you fucking kidding me? What am I going to do with the dress?”

This earned a proportionate laugh and made me feel like I was boyfriending appropriately.

“Shall we not”—Jennifer threw the room a stern look—“attempt to make anyone feel comfortable by suggesting they get married. We’re actually thrilled to bits you’re here, Luc. And the good news is only some of us are lawyers.”

“Yes.” Ben was pouring himself a glass of the good wine. “I live off my wife. It’s extremely modern and feminist of me.”

“And I did law at university,” added Brian, “with Morecombe, Slant, and Honeyplace over here. Thankfully, I realised it was fucking awful and I was shit at it, and went into IT.”

“As for me—” began Peter, before he was interrupted by the doorbell. “That’ll be Bridget.”

Jennifer went to let her in and Bridge burst into the front room, still taking off her coat, a few seconds later.

“You are not,” she cried, “going to believe what’s happened.”

The room got about halfway through a chorus of “Careful, Bridge” when the hem of her jacket caught Peter’s lovingly stacked pile of Ferrero Rocher and sent them flying, bouncing, and rolling across the floor.

She spun round. “Oh my gosh. What was that?”

“Nothing.” Peter sighed. “Don’t worry about it.”

He, Ben, and Tom—who had followed Bridget in—began to gather up the wreckage of the Ambassador’s Reception.

“What’s happened?” asked pretty much everyone.

“Well, I can’t really talk about it, but we’ve recently acquired a very promising new author who specialises in high-concept science fiction. And it got a starred review in Publishers Weekly and everything, and there were some wonderful pull quotes and the one we decided to run with especially recommended it to fans of another, more famous author of high-concept science fiction. So we put it on all the posters and there’s big campaign all over the Underground and it’s on the front of the book and it’s too late to change any of it.”

Oliver was looking perplexed in a way that made me want to hug him. “That seems unalloyedly positive, Bridget.”

“It would be.” She threw herself into the nearest free chair. “Except the more famous author in question was Philip K. Dick. And the pull quote was ‘If you like Dick, you’ll love this.’ And no one spotted it until we started getting extremely disappointed reviews on Amazon.”