by Alexis Hall
I stuffed a teetering forkful of pie into my mouth. “You’re right. That would be a deranged thing to do.”
Another of our silences. On a scale of uncomfortable to horrible, I would probably rate this as unpleasant, and I didn’t know what to do. I’d definitely succeeded in swinging the needle away from “dangerously intimate.” Unfortunately it was now pointing squarely at “not a chance in hell.”
I half thought about kicking him. Just to see how he’d react. But that was probably about as weird as randomly pretending I spoke French. God. This was why I was never going to get a proper boyfriend or even a semi-acceptable temporary substitute. I’d lost whatever capacity I ever had to relate to people in a romantic way.
“How come you’re so fluent?” I asked in a subcompetent attempt to salvage the evening.
“My, ah”—he poked sheepishly at the remains of his vegetables—“family have a holiday home in Provence.”
Of course they did. “Of course you do.”
“What do you mean by that?”
I shrugged. “Just, I can imagine it. No wonder you grew up all nice and put-together and perfect.” And way too good for me.
“I’ve certainly never claimed to be perfect, Lucien.”
“Oh stop it with the Lucien, will you?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you didn’t like it.”
Except I did like it. That was the problem. I wasn’t here to like things. Liking things was trouble. “I told you before,” I snarled, “it’s Luc. Just Luc.”
“Noted.”
A few minutes later, with me looking out the window and Oliver looking at his hands, the waiter came to clear our plates. And a few minutes after that, a lemon posset, topped with rhubarb arrived. It was exquisitely simple—this little white ramekin full of sunshine-yellow cream, topped by a pile of pinkish spirals. I felt awful.
“Nothing for you?” I indicated the empty space in front of Oliver.
“I’m not a fan of desserts. But I hope you’ll like this one. It’s very good.”
“If you’re not a fan, how do you know it’s”—I wriggled my fingers into air quotes—“‘very good’?”
“I… That is… I…”
“Do you want to share it with me?” It was the closest I could get, right then, to an apology. Because it wasn’t like I could say, Sorry I’m so desperate for this to work, and so terrified of this working that I’m lashing out at you over things like you being quite nice, and not wholly unattractive, and having had an ordinary childhood.
He was eyeing the lemon posset the way I’ve always wanted someone to look at me. “Maybe I could have a little? Let me ask for more cutlery.”
“No need.”
Okay. It was, at the eleventh and a half hour, time to get my sexy on. I broke the pristine surface of the cream, mounding it perfectly onto the spoon, along with a few pieces of rhubarb. And, holding it out to Oliver, I offered him my very best, most hopeful smile. Whereupon, he took the spoon from my fingers, crushing me so utterly I couldn’t even enjoy the way a taste of lemon posset made his whole face go dreamy with bliss.
“Thank you,” he said, returning the damn spoon.
I plunged it violently into the pudding, shovelling what remained into my mouth as if it was my mortal enemy.
Oliver watched me, confused once again. “Should I order another one?”
“No, I’m good. Let’s get out of here.”
“I…I’ll get the bill.”
God. I was undateable. Genuinely fucking undateable. No wonder Oliver had practically vomited when that randomer at Bridge’s party had thought we were going out. No wonder he’d dumped me in bed and run away screaming that time I’d tried to hit on him. No wonder he didn’t even trust me to put a spoon of pudding in his mouth.
Chapter 8
I was still in a daze of self-loathing as we trooped onto Dean Street, where we hovered in mutual uncertainty. All the lovely things I’d eaten had turned to rocks in my stomach. I’d fucked this up. I’d fucked this up so badly. All I’d had to do was smile, be nice to him, convince him for a handful of hours I was a semiworthwhile human being. But no. I’d curled up like a hedgehog on a motorway in front of the only man in London willing to go out with me. And now I was going to get fired.
Oliver cleared his throat. “Well. Thank you for…for that.”
He was wearing the full-length overcoat that every posh person in London owned. Except it suited him. Gave him this air of effortless quality. While I was standing there in slutty jeans.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I should—”
No. Help. No. If he walked away now, that was it. I’d never see him again. And I’d never have another job again. And my life would be over.
I needed a plan. I didn’t have a plan.
So I lost my fucking mind and threw myself at him, fastening my mouth on his with all the grace and charm of a barnacle on a whale’s flipper. It lasted seconds before he pushed me away, a knee-buckling blur of heat and softness, that, for the sweetest of moments, tasted of lemon posset.
“What the hell was—Christ.” In his zeal to get away, Oliver collided with one of the potted plants outside the restaurant, just about managing to grab it before it came crashing down. Which basically meant he’d spent more time voluntarily touching a ficus than he had me.
“It was a kiss,” I said, with a nonchalance I was far from feeling. “Why? Haven’t you had one before? People sometimes exchange them on dates.”
He turned on me with such ferocity that I actually took a step back. “Is this a game to you? What has Bridget told you?”
“What? N-no.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“Nothing’s going on.”
We were sort of dancing down the street at this point, me skipping backwards over the pavement as he stalked after me, shoes clicking and coat flying. There was clearly something very, very wrong with me because it was kind of hot.
His eyes gleamed. “Now.”
I tripped over the kerb as it flattened unexpectedly at a side street. But Oliver caught my wrist before I could fall, yanking me against his body and holding me there. Making me, I guess, equivalent to a plant in his estimation. God, his coat was cosy.
“Please stop playing with me, Luc.” Now he just sounded tired. Maybe even a little sad. “What’s this really about?”
Fuck. The jig was beyond up. “I…I’ve been in the papers again recently. So I need a respectable boyfriend or I’ll lose my job. Bridge suggested you.”
And, of course, Tom had been right all along. It sounded terrible. I ducked my head, barely able to look Oliver in the face.
“I’m sorry,” I went on, inadequately. “I’ll pay you back for dinner.”
He ignored that. “Bridget thought I’d be good for you?”
“Well”—I flapped a hand at him—“look at you. You’re…you’re perfect.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind.” I had no right to touch anything so nice, but I hid my face against his coat. And he let me. “You’ve always acted like you thought you were better than me.”
I was close enough that I heard him swallow. “Is…is that what you believe?”
“Well, it’s true. You are. Happy now?”
“Not remotely.”
The pause that followed whistled in my ears like I was falling.
“Explain to me again,” said Oliver finally, “why you need a boyfriend?”
It was the least I owed him. “Mainly for this big fundraiser we’ve got coming up at the end of April. Our donors all think I’m a bad gay.”
He frowned. “What’s a good gay?”
“Someone like you.”
“I see.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I finally managed to peel myself off his coat. “It’s not your prob—”
/>
“I’ll do it.”
My jaw dropped open so hard it clicked. “You what?”
“As it happens, I also have an event coming up that may go more smoothly with someone on my arm. I’ll be your public boyfriend, if you’ll be mine.”
He was insane. He had to be insane. “It’s not the same.”
“You mean”—one of his cool, grey glances—“I’m to help you with your significant occasion, but you won’t help me with mine?”
“No. God no. It’s just you’re a fancy lawyer—”
“I’m a criminal barrister. Most people think we’re the scum of the earth.”
“—and I’m the disgraced son of a disgraced rock star. I…I can’t hold my drink. I’m unnecessarily mean. I make terrible decisions. You can’t possibly want me to accompany you to anything.”
His chin came up. “Nevertheless, those are my terms.”
“You know you’ll end up in the tabloids if you spend too long with me.”
“I don’t care what people say about me.”
I laughed, shocking even myself with how bitter it sounded. “You think that. And then they start saying things.”
“I’ll take the risk.”
“Really?” God. Dizzily, I found myself reaching for his coat again.
“Yes. But if we’re to do this, we have to do it properly.”
I blinked at him. Properly sounded ominous. I was not good at properly. “You should know I perform very badly in standardised tests.”
“I just need you to make an effort to be convincing. I don’t care about your past, or internet gossip, but”—and here that stern mouth pressed into a hard line—“I would rather not have to explain to my family that my boyfriend is only pretending.”
“Wait. Your family?”
“Yes, it’s my parents’ ruby wedding anniversary in June. I don’t want to go alone.”
“Is it,” I couldn’t help asking, “in Provence?”
“Milton Keynes.”
“And you seriously want to take me? To meet your folks?”
“Why not?”
I barked out another laugh. “How long have you got?”
“If you don’t want to do it, Luc, you can tell me.”
He was never going to call me Lucien again, was he? He was going to respect my wishes like some kind of arsehole. “No, no.” I hastily flung up my hands. “I’ll do it. I just think you’re making a terrible mistake.”
“That’s for me to decide.” He paused, a flush crawling over the sculpted arch of his cheekbones. “Obviously, maintaining the fiction will require a certain degree of physical contact between us. But please don’t kiss me again. Not on the mouth, anyway.”
“Why? Are you Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman?”
His blush deepened. “No. I simply prefer to reserve that intimacy for people I actually like.”
“Oh.” Sometimes, you can half believe you’ve been hurt so much you’ve basically been vaccinated. Rendered immune. And then someone says something like that to you. I forced my mouth into a grin. “Well, as you’ve seen, that’s not a problem for me.”
My only consolation was that Oliver didn’t look very happy either. “Apparently not.”
“But don’t worry. Despite recent evidence, I can keep my lips off you.”
“Good. Thank you.”
Silence sloshed heavily between us.
“So,” I asked, “what now?”
“Brunch at mine? This Sunday?”
Twice in a week? He’d be sick of me before we even made it to the Beetle Drive. And I’d either be sick of him or I wouldn’t. And “wouldn’t” was too scary to handle right now.
“If this is going to work”—he gazed at me solemnly—“we need to get to know each other, Luc.”
“You can call me Lucien,” I blurted out.
“I thought you said you didn’t—”
“It can be your special name for me. I mean”—suddenly, I could barely catch my breath—“your fake special name for me. That’s a thing, right? That couples do.”
“But I don’t want to have a fake special name for you that you genuinely don’t like.” There was that light again. Those secret flecks of silver in the cold steel of his eyes. “That would make me a terrible fake boyfriend.”
“It’s fine. I overreacted. I don’t care.”
“That’s hardly an endorsement.”
“I mean I don’t mind.” Was he going to make me beg? Who was I kidding? I was probably going to.
This was why relationships sucked: they made you need shit you’d been perfectly happy not needing. And then they took them away.
He gave me one of those too-searching, too-sincere looks. “Well, if that’s what you want.”
I nodded, quietly hating myself. “It’s what I want.”
“Then, I’ll see you on Sunday…” He smiled. Oliver Blackwood was smiling. At me. For me. Because of me. “…Lucien.”
Chapter 9
“So,” I said to Alex Twaddle, “a man walks into a bar. And he sits down and there’s the bowl of peanuts. And a voice comes from the bowl of peanuts, saying Hey, your hair looks great. And then this other voice comes from the cigarette machine on the other side of the bar, saying, No it doesn’t, you look like a prick, and so does your mum.”
Alex’s eyes widened. “Oh I say. That’s a bit much.”
“Yeah, keep that in mind because it’s sort of integral to the joke. Anyway, the man asks the barman what’s going on. And the barman says, don’t worry, the nuts are complimentary but the cigarette machine’s out of order.”
“Well, I suppose they wouldn’t have bothered to fix it because you’re not allowed to smoke in pubs anymore.”
I should have seen this coming. “You’re right, Alex. It’s the accuracy that makes it funnier.”
“I’ll keep that in mind too.” He smiled at me encouragingly. “What’s the rest of the joke?”
“That was the joke. The nuts are complimentary, but the cigarette machine is out of order.”
“Are you sure that’s a joke? It just seems like facts about a bar.”
“Once again,” I told him, resigned to my fate, “you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ll try and do better tomorrow.”
I toodled back to my office, actually in a pretty good mood for once. My date with Oliver had been, as predicated, a disaster. But, somehow, not in a bad way? And there was something strangely liberating about having a pretend boyfriend because it meant I didn’t have to worry about all the usual relationship things. You know, like being shit at them. Even my morning tabloid alert had been borderline positive. Someone had snapped us at the restaurant but, crucially, they’d got the moment before Oliver recoiled from me in disgust. So it had come out looking kind of romantic, with Oliver’s coat billowing around us and his face turned up to mine as my lips came down. The headlines were mostly variants of “Package Judge Club Kid Son In New Gent Squeeze Shock,” which I liked because it suggested I had good taste in new squeezes. New fake squeezes.
As I sat down and checked the donor lists to see if anyone else had dumped me, the phone rang.
“Oh my God,” cried Bridge. “You won’t believe what’s happened.”
“You’re right. I probably—”
“I can’t really talk about it, but we’ve just got the English language rights for a really prestigious Swedish author. And everybody has been clamouring to read her debut novel, which is being billed as A Hundred Years of Solitude meets Gone Girl. But there was a lot of debate amongst the team over whether to give it an English title or stick with the Swedish original, and it all wound up being sorted out very last minute and so now the book’s gone to press as I’m Out of the Office at the Moment. Please Forward Any Translation Work to My Personal Email Address.”
“I don’t know. I
think it’s got a certain meta-textual cachet.”
“I’m going to get fired.”
“You’ve not been fired yet, Bridge. They’re not going to fire you over this.”
“Oh.” She perked up. “That reminds me. How did your date go?”
“It was awful. We have nothing in common. I think I might have sexually assaulted him. But we’re going to pretend to give it a go anyway because we’re both desperate.”
“I knew you’d work it out.”
I rolled my eyes, but only because she couldn’t see me. “That’s not working something out. That’s making something up.”
“Yes, but you’ll slowly discover that you’re not as different as you initially assumed, and then he’ll surprise you with how thoughtful he is, and then you’ll come to his rescue in an unexpected moment of need, and you’ll fall madly in love with each other and live happily ever after.”
“That’s never going to happen. He doesn’t even like me.”
“What?” I could hear the look on her face. “Why would he agree to go on with a date with you if he didn’t like you?”
“Remember that bit where we’re both desperate?”
“Luc, I’m sure he likes you. How could anybody not like you? You’re lovely.”
“He told me he didn’t when I tried to kiss him.”
She gave a little squeak. “You kissed?”
“No, I attacked him with my lips, and he was so repulsed he jumped into a potted plant.”
“Maybe he was surprised.”
“I was surprised when you guys threw me a surprise birthday party. Okay, I wasn’t surprised because James Royce-Royce accidentally told me. But I didn’t pull away in horror, saying I only go to parties with people I like.”
“Wait. He actually said that?”
“Pretty much, if you replace go to parties with kiss.”
“Oh.” There was a moment’s silence. “I thought you were just being obsessively negative. You know, like usual.”
“No. No. Those were his exact words.”
She sighed. “Oliver, Oliver. What are you doing? He can be so hopeless sometimes.”
“He’s not hopeless. He’s an uptight git. Um, like, in general. Not because he was bothered by me nonconsensually kissing him. Okay, let me rephrase: he’s an uptight git who, independent of his uptightness and gititude, isn’t into me.”