Boyfriend Material

by Alexis Hall

  “I don’t think it counts as pulling a sickie if you’re actually having a hard time.”

  “What?” I watched the muscles in his back as he stirred his pan—and couldn’t tell if noticing that kind of thing again meant I was getting my shit together or my shit had never been together to begin with. “I should ring them up, and say ‘Sorry, I gave myself a nervous breakdown with a Guardian article’?”

  He came over with a pair of mugs and set them down carefully on coasters. I folded my hands around mine, letting the warmth seep into my palms, as the rich scent of chocolate and cinnamon wafted over the table.

  “You’ve been through a lot today,” he said. “There’s no need to diminish it.”

  “Yeah, but if I don’t diminish things I have to face them at their normal size, and that’s horrible.”

  “I think it’s usually better to face the world as it is. The more we try to hide from something, the more power we give it.”

  “Don’t be wise at me, Oliver.” I gave him a look. “It’s unsexy.”

  With the air of someone with a lot on his mind, he turned his hot chocolate a quarter circle, and then back again. “While we’re on the topic of—”

  “Unsexy?”

  “Trying to hide from things.”

  “Oh.”

  “You mentioned in the bathroom that our arrangement was no longer feeling quite as artificial as it hitherto had?”

  “Are you trying to stop me freaking out by using words you know I’ll mock you for using?”

  His eyes met mine across the table. “Did you mean it, Lucien?”

  “Yes.” Was there anything fucking worse than being called on your own sincerity? “I meant it. Can we please go back to what’s important here, which is that you actually just said ‘hitherto’?”

  “As it happens”—he continued adjusting the angle of his mug—“I’ve been having similar thoughts myself.”

  At that moment, I couldn’t tell whether I’d been waiting desperately to hear that or terrified I might. But it showed how far I’d come, and how seriously committed I was to doing better by Oliver, that I didn’t run away screaming. “Okay. Good? That’s nice?” In my defence, my voice had only gone up half an octave.

  “There’s no need to panic. We’re just having a conversation.”

  “Can I go back in the bath—”

  “No.”

  I wheezed. “Look, I … Like I said, I have these feelings. And I’m not used to having these feelings. And every time I have these feelings, I have these other feelings which are…like… When’s he going to the press, when’s he going to let me down, when’s he going to fuck me over.”

  “Lucien—”

  “And”—I ran over him before I could stop myself—“I don’t think I could take it. Not from you.”

  He was quiet for a moment, frowning thoughtfully. “I know the last thing that can possibly help you right now are promises and platitudes. But I do feel quite confident in assuring you that I will never sell your story to the tabloids.”

  “I’m pretty sure Miles would have said that too.”

  “But in a different context.” His tone was very measured, almost detached, but he also reached across the table and took my limp, damp hand in his. “I’m not asking you to trust in me personally. Obviously, I would be gratified if you could, but I understand that what you’ve been through renders that difficult.”

  “I want to trust you, though.”

  “You don’t have to. But you can trust that I have nothing to gain and everything to lose by turning our relationship into a public spectacle. I don’t particularly need the money, and I’ve invested more than a decade in a job that relies on my reputation for discretion.”

  I gave him a brittle smile. “I’m probably worth a lot more now that my dad’s on TV.”

  “My career means far more to me than any sum of money I could reasonably be offered.”

  It took me probably too long to Rubik’s cube my brain into something that could make sense of this. “Okay. Yes. I see that.”

  “And, for that matter,” he went on, “so are you.”

  Well, that was a thing. “Thank you. Really. I…fuck, how do we do this?”

  “I confess”—Oliver had gone a little pink around the ears—“I hadn’t thought that far ahead. This is new territory for both of us.”

  “Um. I don’t want to sound cold-feety, but what if we just…carried on as we were?”

  “You mean,” he said slowly, “you want us to continue pretending to be in a relationship that we admit feels real to both of us?”

  Wow, trying to do the right thing was hard. And seemed very similar to fucking everything up. “I’m worried that if we try to change too much all at once, it’ll go wrong somehow and then I’ll have let you down and you’ll be on your own at your parents’ anniversary and it’ll be my fault.”

  “That’s kind of you, but I’m not going to put a family party above our relationship.”

  “You don’t have to.” I put my other hand over his. “Leaving aside my occasional meltdowns, which I promise I’ll learn to deal with, this is working well for us, and will definitely do what we need it to do. Why rush? Or mess with that?”

  He was giving me an “I’m not quite sure who you are, but I like it” look. “I’m beginning to think you might be better at relationships than you’ve claimed.”

  “I,” I announced, “am growing as a person.”

  “Perhaps I…I could also do better.”

  I smiled at him, too tired to care how goofy it was. “You don’t have to. You’re already perfect.”

  Bed happened pretty soon after that. And, having just exposed the full depth of my emotional wibble, it seemed a bit pointless to worry about what Oliver would think of my boxers or no-pack. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t disappointed or repulsed—instead, he pulled me down into his arms, where I lay quiet and cared for, and quickly drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  We woke late—well, late by Oliver’s standards so, like, nine—although I kept him in bed for another hour or so by octopusing myself around him and refusing to let go until he told me very firmly he needed the bathroom. While he was abluting, and probably remembering to floss and all of those other things we’re supposed to do but don’t, I dug out my phone and called work.

  “Coleoptera Research, Protection… Oh no, wait, that’s not right.” Apparently I’d got Alex. “Coleoptera Research, Reunification, and—bother. Coleoptera Rescue, Research, and—”

  “It’s me.”

  “Me who?”

  “Me Luc.”

  “I’m sorry, Luc’s not in yet. Alexander Twaddle speaking.”

  “No, I know who you are, Alex. I’m Luc. Luc is me.”

  “Oh.” I could hear him thinking. “Then why did you say you wanted to speak to Luc?”

  “I didn—I’m sorry, I must have misspoken.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s easily done, old thing. Only yesterday, I answered the phone with ‘Good afternoon’ and then realised it was only 11:30.”

  “Alex,” I said slowly, “wasn’t yesterday Sunday?”

  “Gosh. So it was. I thought it was a bit quiet.”

  “Anyway.” If I didn’t stop this now, we’d be here all week. “I called to say I’m not feeling so great and I won’t be coming in today.”

  He made a sound of genuine sympathy. “How beastly for you. Is everything all right?”

  “Yeah, just had a rough couple of days.”

  “I know the feeling. Last month my valet was sick and I could barely keep it together.”

  “I’m trying to be strong.”

  “Take all the time you need. A good man is hard to find.”

  At this moment, Oliver came out the bathroom, stripped to the waist. “I think,” I said, “I�
��ll be okay on that front.”

  “Glad to hear it. Toodle pip.”

  I hung up and tried not stare too gormlessly at Oliver—which was easier than it might have been, since my phone was trying to notify itself into an embolism. Glancing into WhatsApp—the group was quiet, and currently named You Can Luc (But You Better Not Touch)—I got Bridged in the face by private message:

  LUC ARE YOU OKAY

  WHAT HAPEPEND WITH OLIVER

  LUC

  LUC ARE YOU OKAY

  LUC

  LUC

  ARE YOU OKAY

  IS EVERYTHING OKAY

  Oliver’s lips twitched. Given he also knew Bridge, he’d probably also fallen victim to her texting. “I’ll be in the kitchen. Come down when you’re ready.”

  Yes, I typed, sorry for the silence. It’s all good. We talked about feelings and Miles and shit

  OMG ARE YOU KSSIING RIGHT NOW??????

  No Bridge. I’m texting you

  WELLS TOPI T AND GO KISS OLIVER

  ANYWAY G2G BEAUSE GEOPOLITICAL UPHEAVEL HAS LED TO PULP PAPER SHORTAGE IN TWICKENHAM

  AND SO NONE OF OUR BOOKS ARE GETTING PRIPNTED

  AHHHHHHHHHHH

  Good luck with that. Thank you for last night

  ANYTIME G2G

  Pulling on Oliver’s dressing gown, I headed downstairs. Oliver was eating something scarily healthy-looking from a mason jar, and reading the Financial Times on his iPad. God, he was adorable.

  “There’s toast.” He glanced up, looking like some kind of weird and highly specific porno for people who are really into incredibly cut men and funny-coloured newspapers. “Or fruit. Or bircher. I can make porridge if you prefer.”

  I was still a bit too emotioned out for that much fibre. So I helped myself to a banana, from a bunch that hung from what appeared to be a bespoke banana hanging place, next to, but not in, the offensively well-stocked fruit bowl.

  “What’s with the…?” I pointed. “Do you have a problem with bananas?”

  “Not personally. But they release ethylene, which is a ripening agent, and can cause other fruit to go bad.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “I’m sorry. Would you rather I’d said that I was concerned about treason in my fruit bowl and strung them from a gibbet pour encourager les autres.”

  “You remember that time I pretended I spoke to French to impress you? Well, I still can’t.”

  He laughed and pulled me into a kiss—which got me not quite into his lap but very much lap adjacent. “You don’t need to speak French to impress me.”

  My heart stuttered. But I still wasn’t used to all of this…intimacy and okayness. “What are you eating?” I blurted out instead. “It looks like spunk with fruit in it.”

  “Thank you, Lucien. You always know exactly what to say.”

  Sheepishly, I nuzzled into his neck and was thrilled by the discovery of his…whatever the opposite of a five-o’clock shadow is. The prickle of hair under my lips a reminder that I was still here. That we both were. Together.

  “It’s bircher,” he went on. “Oats, soaked overnight in almond milk and—as you correctly observe—fruit. But, to the best of my knowledge, no semen, human or otherwise.”

  “So it’s cold porridge?”

  “A lot lighter and fresher—but substantial enough to keep me going through a court case. Also I can make it at the start of the week and it sees me through until Saturday, which is convenient.”

  I was smiling helplessly at him. “Do you put little labels on the jars so you know which is for which day?”

  “No.” He gave me a stern look that, somehow, wasn’t stern at all. “Bircher is fungible.”

  “Well, if it goes fungible, you probably shouldn’t eat it.”

  He laughed, somewhat indulgently. But, hey, I could get used to being indulged—especially by Oliver.

  Chapter 34

  I’d spent the rest of Monday with Oliver, feeling fragile but content, in a sort of snow-day haze. We’d talked so much the night before that we didn’t have much to say to each other, but that was good somehow. Oliver had mostly sat decorously on his sofa, reading The Song of Achilles, and I’d mostly sprawled over him napping. I hoped I wasn’t going to keep having emotions, because it would get really tiring really fast. Then in the middle of the afternoon, and despite my protests, he’d insisted that we go for a walk, which had turned out to be far nicer than a walk round Clerkenwell had any right to be.

  Of course, taking Monday off meant having to catch up on Tuesday. And since the Beetle Drive was rolling over the hill like a clump of dung under the hind legs of a Scarabaeus viettei—wow, I had been working at CRAPP way too long—I had a whole lot to do when I got in the office.

  We’d decided that the fundraiser should include a silent auction back when we (that is to say, I) set up the first one a few years ago and I think we’d just thought it sounded good. But it turned out they were a fuckton of work because you needed either a small number of expensive things and a lot of rich people, or a large number of moderately priced things and a reasonable number of rich people, and every time it was touch and go whether the balance was going to shake out right.

  It didn’t help that Dr. Fairclough insisted on donating a signed copy of her monograph on the distribution of rove beetles in south Devon between 1968 and 1972, which was apparently a wild time for the Devonshire rove beetle. And I wound up having to buy it every year under a series of increasingly unlikely pseudonyms because nobody else would bid on it. The most recent had gone to a Ms. A. Stark of Winterfell Road.

  Just as I was securing a helpfully obscene discount on a Fortnum & Mason hamper—which always did well at an auction even though they aren’t actually especially hard to get hold of—Rhys Jones Bowen appeared in my doorway with his usual impeccable timing.

  “Busy, Luc?” he asked.

  “Yes, fantastically.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. I’ll only be a moment.” He claimed my spare chair with the air of a man who has no intention of only being a moment. “I’m just here to pass on a message from Bronwyn. She said thank you for getting photographed outside her restaurant. It did her the world of good, and she’s booked out for the rest of the pop-up. She was going to offer to cook you dinner, but she can’t because now she’s got too much on.”

  What with Cam’s wanky think piece nearly destroying my relationship with Oliver, I’d taken a break from my Google alerts. “No problem. Honestly, I kind of hadn’t noticed.”

  “It was a lovely article in the end, all about how you were turning over a new healthier leaf, and trying to get your shit together like your dad. And the newspaper man asked Brownyn, and she said you weren’t nearly as much of a knobhead as she thought you were going to be. So that’s good, isn’t it?”

  “In an ideal world, my press coverage wouldn’t include the word ‘knobhead’ at all but, yeah. I’ll take it.”

  I waited hopefully for Rhys Jones Bowen to leave, but instead, he sat there stroking his beard. “You know, Luc, I’ve been thinking. As what you might call a social media guru, I recently discovered that there’s this website called Instagram. And apparently, if you’re a little bit famous and a bit of a bellend, you can make loads of money on it pretending you like things.”

  “Are you suggesting”—it took me a moment to even make my head go there—“that I should become a social media influencer?”

  “No, no, I’m just saying you should go on the Instagram and help people like Bronwyn. That’s what we in the business call leveraging your platform.”

  “Thanks, but I think I like my platform unleveraged.”

  “Well, you do you, as they say.” He stood up, stretched theatrically, walked halfway out the door, then stopped and turned. “By the way, you know how much you and your nice boyfriend enjoyed Bronwyn’s pop-up dining experience?�
�

  I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going. “Yes?”

  “Well, I’ve got this mate Gavin from Merthyr Tydfil, and he’s done a series of glass sculptures inspired by the Rising of 1831.”

  Now, I definitely didn’t like where this was going, but for some reason I asked a question about it anyway. “The who? The what?”

  “That’s so typical of the English. Set the 93rd Highlanders on my countrymen, and then don’t even have the decency to teach it in schools. Anyway”—he paused ominously—“you can learn all about it when you go and get your picture taken at Gavin’s exhibition.”

  Call me paranoid, but I was beginning to think Rhys Jones Bowen had an ulterior motive for wanting me on Instagram. I was about to tell him that I had no intention of going to his mate’s glass sculpture show, but I did owe him for the whole vegan rescue, and also…I guess…helping people was nice? Besides, it was probably the sort of thing Oliver would actually be into. “Okay,” I said. “That sounds interesting. Email me the details, and I’ll ask my boyfriend if he’s up for it.”

  “Don’t worry, Luc,” Rhys said, nodding. “I completely under—oh right. I’ll be honest, I expected you to say no to that one.”

  “Must be Gavin’s lucky day. But I really do have to get back to work.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll bring you a coffee.”

  I thanked him and went back to silent auction hustling. Well, silent auction hustling and texting Oliver: Want to come with me to an exhibition tonight?

  What sort of exhibition?

  Funny you should ask that. Glass sculpture. About—it was while typing this that I realised I’d forgotten what Rhys has said it was about, and even if I could remember, I wouldn’t have been able to spell it—something bad that happened in Wales

  I’m not sure that narrows it down.

  An uprising?

  There was a pause. Anyone else would have been Googling, but Oliver was just typing. There’ve been several.

  Yes. One of them. Rhys wants me to get some publicity for a friend of his and I said I would because you’ve made me a better person you bastard