Boyfriend Material

by Alexis Hall

  “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.”

  He opened his arms in a way that looked half like he was channelling Jesus and half like he was saying ‘Come at me, bro.’ “You want to take a shot, go right ahead.”

  I was strangely relieved to discover that I had no actual desire to hit him. “I can see,” I drawled out, in my best Jon Fleming voice, “why that might be something you want me to do. But I’m afraid I can’t give you what you’re looking for.”

  Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought my dad looked almost disappointed.

  “Look,” I went on. “This is on you. Either you make an actual effort to spend some actual time with me somewhere I can actually get to. Or I walk out of here right now, and you can enjoy dying of cancer alone.”

  Jon Fleming was silent a moment. “I probably deserved that.”

  “I don’t care if you did. It’s just how things are going to be. So, what do you say?”

  “I’ll be in London again in a couple days. I’ll come see you then.”

  I let out a really long breath. “Fine. Come on, Oliver. Let’s go home.”

  Chapter 30

  We got underway in silence.

  “Do you mind,” I said, “if we skip Night Vale for now?”

  “Not at all.”

  The soft thrum of the engine filled up the car. And, beneath it, the steady rhythm of Oliver’s breath. I rested my head against the window and watched the motorway streaking past in a grey haze.

  “Are you—”

  “Can I put some music on?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  I stuffed my phone into the dock and fired up Spotify. For some reason that might well have been a cry for therapy, I had this urge to listen to one of Jon Fleming’s old albums. Half-reluctantly, half-anxiously I swiped “Rights of Man” into the search bar. And holy fuck, my dad had been on a lot of shit over the years. Not counting several best-ofs, remixes, and decade-anniversary collections, there were about thirty albums there, including The Hills Rise Wild, which was one of the ones he’d done with Mum. And which I was never ever ever playing.

  I dithered between the The Long Walk Home, which was his latest release, and Leviathan, which was the one everyone’s heard of and that won a Grammy in 1989, and eventually settled on Leviathan. There was brief pause as the title track buffered. And then the speakers began belting out a level of angry prog rock that they really hadn’t been designed to cope with.

  To be honest, I’m not sure I’d been designed to cope with it either.

  I’d gone through a phase when I was about thirteen of obsessively listening to Jon Fleming’s music. Then I’d decided I never wanted to listen to it again, which meant hearing it now was a fucking weird experience. Because I remembered it perfectly—not only the music, but how it had felt, being that age, and having a dad who was at once so accessible and so absent. He was completely in his music. And, even now, when I’d just spent an hour yelling at him, not in my life at all.

  Oliver’s eyes slid briefly to mine. “Is this…”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s, um. Loud.”

  “Yeah, he was loud in the ’80s. In the ’70s, it was all trees and tambourines.”

  Another interlude of cynical growling and heavy guitars.

  “Forgive my ignorance,” said Oliver, “but what’s it even about?”

  “According to Mum—and we can double-check on Wikipedia if you like, because it didn’t exist when I last listened to this album—it’s about Thatcherite Britain. Y’know, because everything in the ’80s in this country was about Thatcherite Britain.”

  “Does it have anything to do with Hobbes’s Leviathan?”

  “Um. Probably? I mean, unless we’re talking about the cartoon tiger, in which case, still maybe, I have no idea.”

  Oliver gave one of his little chuckles. “Well, he called his band ‘Rights of Man.’ So I assume he had some interest in
the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

  “Oh fuck.” I thunked back against the headrest. “Does everybody know more about my dad than I do?”

  “I don’t know more about your father. I just know more about the Enlightenment.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure I’m finding that very comforting. It just means you know more about my dad and more about history.”

  “You know”—another swift look—“I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “I do. But I enjoy poking your middle-class guilt.”

  “In which case, you should be pleased to hear I’m feeling at the very least ambivalent right now for encouraging you to reach out to him.”

  “You’re right. This was a disaster and it’s all your fault.”

  He flinched. “Lucien, I—”

  “I’m joking, Oliver. None of this is on you. It’s on Jon Fucking Fleming. And”—uh, why did he keep making me say this stuff—“I’m glad you were there. It would have been way worse without you.”

  The next track was gentler and flutey-er. “Livingstone Road” I could annoyingly still remember.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, after a moment, “it didn’t go better.”

  “It was never going to.”

  “And you aren’t…too hurt?”

  If anyone else had asked me, or if Oliver had asked two weeks ago, I’d probably have said something like Jon Fleming stopped being able to hurt me a long time ago. “Not too hurt but…yeah.”

  “It’s hard for me to understand why anyone wouldn’t want you in their life.”

  I snorted. “Have you met me?”

  “Please don’t laugh this off. I mean it.”

  “I know. It’s just easier to push people away than watch them leave.” The words hung there, and I wished I could suck them back into my mouth. “Anyway,” I went on quickly, “you were still right. If I hadn’t tried, I’d have spent my whole life as the bastard who abandoned his dying father.”

  “You wouldn’t have been. It might still have felt that way, but you wouldn’t have been.” A pause. “What will you do next?”

  “Fuck knows. See what happens when he calls.”

  “You’ve done all the right things, Lucien. It’s down to him now. Although, frankly, I don’t think he deserves you.”

  Fuck. I really needed him to stop being nice to me. Well, stop or never stop.

  I let Leviathan run to the end, and then Spotify decided I wanted to listen to Uriah Heep so we…listened to Uriah Heep. And a four-hour algorithmically guided journey through ’80s progressive rock later, most of which I spent not quite asleep but near enough to it that I didn’t have to think about anything, we got back to mine.

  “Do…” I did my best to sound nonchalant. “Do you want to stay?”

  He looked over at me, his expression unreadable in the shadows from the streetlamps. “Do you want me to?”

  I was too tired to fight it and too washed out to pretend. “Yes.”

  “I’ll find somewhere to park and meet you upstairs.”

  Normally, this would have been my opportunity to try and contain the worst evidence of my god-awful lifestyle but, actually, I’d been super careful lately and had managed to keep my flat looking almost as nice as it had when my friends had left. Which meant now I had nothing to do except stand awkwardly in front of my sofa and wait for Oliver. And that was how he found me, still in my coat and plonked like a lemon on the rug Priya had given me to tie the room together.

  “Um,” I said. “Surprise?”

  He glanced from me to the lack of filth to me again. “You cleaned?”

  “Yes. I mean, I had help.”

  “You didn’t do this for me, did you?”

  “For myself. And a bit for you.”

  He looked genuinely overwhelmed. “Oh, Lucien.”

  “It’s…it’s not a big de—”

  He kissed me. And it was the most Oliver kiss, his hands cupping my face gently to draw me to him, and his lips covering mine with a deliberate care that was its own kind of passion. The way you’d eat a really expensive chocolate, savouring it because you knew you might never get another. He smelled of familiarity, of homecoming, and of the night I’d spent wrapped in his arms. And he made me feel so fucking precious I wasn’t sure I could bear it.

  Except I also didn’t want it to end. This moment of finding something I’d long since given up looking for. Maybe even stopped believing in. The wild impossible sweetness of somebody kissing you for you—because of you—and everything outside the press of bodies, the ripple of breath, the stroke of tongues drifting away like old leaves in autumn.

  It was a kiss to make you invincible: hot and slow and deep and perfect. And for a little while, for as long as Oliver was touching me, I forgot to need anything else. I clutched helplessly at the lapels of his coat. “W-what is even happening right now?”

  “I rather hoped it was obvious.” The mouth that had moved on mine curled into its softest smile.

  “Yes but. Yes but. You said you only kiss people you like.”

  At this, he went very pink very quickly. “It’s true, but I’m sorry I said that to you. Because I do like you. As it happens, I’ve always liked you. I just thought you’d find me ridiculous if you knew how much.”

  “Oh come on”—my head was reeling—“when have I needed your help to find you ridiculous?”

  “You make a good point.”

  “So kiss me again.”

  I wasn’t used to Oliver doing what I told him, but I guess it was a special occasion. Or the tidying had gone to his head. In any case, he didn’t stay careful long: we ended up on the sofa, Oliver between my legs, his hands pinning mine against the cushions, everything a tangle of harsh breath and arching bodies and way, way too many clothes. And, God, his kisses. Deep, drowning, desperate kisses. Like he’d been told the world was ending and for some bizarre reason he’d decided I was the last thing he wanted to do.

  “And here I thought,” I gasped, “you were supposed to be a good boy.”

  He gazed down at me. With his hair mussed, and his mouth red, and his eyes dark with passion, he looked very bad indeed. “And here I thought you were far too socially conscious to entertain that sort of sex-negative stereotype.”

  “I am. I’m socially conscious as balls. I just meant…this wasn’t a side of you I ever thought I’d see.”

  “Well, you weren’t meant to.” His expression grew solemn again. “We agreed…that is…what we’re doing. It’s not supposed to be—”

  I wasn’t sure what he was going to say next, but I knew I didn’t want to hear it. Tomorrow we could go back to acting like this was nothing. But tonight…I don’t know…I guess I was too tired for my own bullshit. “Oliver, please. Let’s stop pretending. You were amazing today. You’ve been amazing all along.”

  He was blushing. “I’ve done what we agreed. That’s all.”

  “Okay, then. But you’ve made me happier than, well, anybody. In a really long time. And I’m not trying to mess with what we’ve got or make you do anything you don’t want to do. Only I…I guess I wanted you to…to know?”

  “Lucien…”

  “Um,” I asked, after a very long pause, “were you intending to finish that sentence?”

  He laughed. “I’m sorry. It’s just this isn’t a side of you I ever thought I’d see.”

  “Yeah.” Him and me both. “I’m not used to…any of this. Being with someone and being able to count on them, and wanting them to be able to count on me.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I’m not quite used to this either.”

  “But haven’t you had loads of boyfriends?”

  “Yes, but”—his eyes slid away from mine for a moment—“I never quite felt I was enough for any of them.”

  “That makes zero sense.”
<
br />   “Well,” he said, smiling, “you do keep telling me you have low standards.”

  “Hey, I was being self-deprecating. Keyword ‘self.’”

  He leaned in and kissed me again—a fleeting brush of his lips against mine. Normally I didn’t do sweet but, well, Oliver.

  “So”—I was a bit worried I’d jinx it but I had to ask the question—“is kissing part of the arrangement now?”

  “If it…if you…wouldn’t mind.”

  I heaved a heavy sigh. “Since you insist.”

  “I’m serious, Lucien.”

  “I know you are, and it’s adorable. Yes, I think we should add a kissing subclause to the fake boyfriend contract.”

  His lips twitched. “I shall draft one first thing in the morning.”

  Honestly, I could have taken a lot more teenage-level sofa action with Oliver, but we’d driven to Lancaster and back, and my dad had been a total cock to both of us, and we technically had grown-up jobs to go in the morning, all of which added up to bedtime. Besides, I didn’t have any books, so Oliver would be forced to rely on me for entertainment, and now we’d negotiated kissing, I intended to be pretty darn entertaining.

  Gentleman that I was, I let Oliver use the bathroom first and then slipped in to clean my teeth and make sure I didn’t need a shower before I attempted to get snuggly with the attractive man I’d brought home with me. I was at the toothbrush-in-mouth stage when I realised my phone was flashing pretty insistently and, without really thinking about it, I checked my alerts. The problem was, Google had been pretty kind to me recently with its Celeb’s Kid Doesn’t Fuck Up Much stories, which meant my guard was way further down than it should have been. And so A Life Like Ordinary: The Here Nor There of Luc O’Donnell by Cameron Spenser kicked me right in the teeth.

  Luc O’Donnell isn’t famous, it began. Even his parents—the so-called “celebrities” in this celebrity lifestyle piece have names more likely to provoke a “who” or an “I thought he was dead” than the universal snap of recognition that you get with the genuinely celebrated. When I met him at a party a month or so back, a mutual friend had told me his dad was that guy from that reality TV show (“that guy” being Jon Fleming and “that reality TV show” being The Whole Package insofar as those details matter). At the time, despite what we’re constantly being told about our “media obsessed culture,” neither the guy nor the show meant much to me, but it seemed like as good an icebreaker as any, so I went up to him.