by Alexis Hall
“I came in to be close to you.”
I ran through a bunch of responses in my head, but decided it wasn’t the time to be taking refuge in banter. “I like having you here.”
I mean, in abstract I liked having him there. In practice, it was a little bit awkward—but, hey, it was bacon, not the Sistine Chapel. It didn’t take that much concentration, and I could watch it cooking almost as effectively with Oliver’s arms around me as, well, not. Eventually, the water boiled off, and the bacon had crisped up beautifully. As it always did because the bacon hack is the best thing ever.
Oliver fished my thankfully unmouldy loaf of Hovis Soft White Medium from the bread bin he’d insisted on buying me when he’d discovered that I kept my bread on the side like a normal person, instead of giving it its own special box to go stale in. I buttered it up aggressively, because there’s no point trying to make bacon healthy, and offered him his choice of condiments. Well, his choice of ketchup or not ketchup because I hadn’t been as prepared as I would have liked to have been to cook emotional-support sandwiches.
Finally, we were on my sofa with plates on our laps, and Oliver was staring at his bacon butty with that confused, yearning look he sometimes got around desserts. And, if I’m honest, me.
“It’s okay,” I said, “to eat a bacon sandwich.”
“I’m a vegetarian.”
“Yeah, but you’re also human. You can’t be perfect all the time.”
“I shouldn’t do this.”
I sighed. “Then don’t. I’ll eat it. But please don’t expect me to talk you into something that you want to do but feel you have to deny yourself. Because that’s fucked up.”
There was a longish pause. Finally, Oliver took a bite of sandwich. His eyes fluttered closed. “God, that’s good.”
“I know this is wrong of me”—I dabbed a tiny curl of ketchup from the edge of his mouth with a fingertip—“but, fuck me, you’re sexy when you’re compromising your principles.”
He blushed. “This isn’t funny, Lucien.”
“I’m not laughing.”
We baconed for a while in silence.
“Y’know,” I said finally, “I really am sorry that this afternoon didn’t go. Um. Anything approaching well. And I’m sorry I got it wrong in the car. I was just… I’ve never seen you like that.”
He was staring at his sandwich with way too much focus. “I’ll try to make sure you never have to see me like that again.”
“Not what I was going for.” I flailed around in vague private guilt. “I wanted to be better for you at the party. Except you didn’t… I didn’t know what to expect.”
“Oh”—Oliver’s brows lifted nastily—“so it’s my fault you decided to swear at my parents.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I had to un-fuck this somehow. “I get that it’s not my place to criticise your parents. But it feels like the only way you can believe good things about them is if you believe bad things about yourself. And I’m not… That’s not okay with me.”
“Lucien, I need you to accept that I had a perfectly normal childhood. You’re making Mother and Father out to be monsters.”
Reaching out an uncertain hand, I stroked his arm in that wholly unhelpful way I’d managed to perfect in the car. “I’m not saying they’re monsters. They’re just people. But people, well, suck sometimes. And while I’m sure they’ve done lots of good things for you, they’ve also clearly done some bad things. And…you don’t have to bear the burden of that.”
“I’ve never claimed my parents were perfect.” He tugged fretfully at the crust on his sandwich. “But they’ve always encouraged me to push myself, and it’s not unreasonable of them to continue to do that.”
“Okay,” I tried, “but if that’s what they’re trying to do, why are you sitting on my sofa eating a bacon sandwich and being sad, instead of, like, feeling uplifted and motivated?”
He turned, his eyes meeting mine for a long grey moment. “Because I’m not as strong as you think I am.”
“This isn’t about strength,” I told him. “It’s about who you’re choosing to make happy.”
There was a long silence. During which I picked half-heartedly at my sarnie. Apparently there were some situations bacon couldn’t make better.
“I keep wondering,” Oliver said, “why I brought you today.”
“Wow. I know I handled it badly but that’s harsh.”
He was frowning thoughtfully. Because Oliver. “No—you didn’t. Or rather, you handled it as I perhaps, on some level, expected you might. Not that I thought you’d go as far as telling my parents to go fuck themselves in front of Uncle Jim and the vicar. But I think…”
“What?” I asked.
“I think I wanted to do something that was for me, and not for them. To see what it felt like.”
“And, um, what did it feel like?”
“I…I still don’t know.”
“That’s all right.” I moved across and gave him a…well…a sort of nuzzle, I guess, that I probably should have been self-conscious about. “I can live with being for you.”
Quietly, he finished his bacon sandwich. Then he ate the rest of mine. But I felt he probably deserved it after everything he’d been through. Trying to stick with my new grown-up lifestyle, I took the plates back to the kitchen and did that half-washing-up thing where you rinse the worst bits off under the tap and dump the rest in the sink, hoping Oliver wouldn’t have spiralled into a pit-of-fried-meat-related despair and self-recrimination while I was away.
I found him still on the sofa, still looking a bit blank.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.”
I settled on the floor in front of him, folding my arms across his knees. “That’s all right. You don’t have to…um. Anything really.”
“I thought I’d feel guiltier. But I just feel…full of bacon.”
“Don’t knock it. That’s a good feeling.”
His fingers curled lightly into my hair. “Thank you for doing that for me.”
“I’d say I got as much out of it as you did, except you ate my fucking sandwich.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I’m teasing, Oliver.” I butted his hand with my head. “In two weeks, I’ll be able to have all the bacon I like. I’m going to bathe in bacon like that bit in American Beauty.”
“That is a very disturbing mental image. And also undercuts your original consequentialist argument for why it was okay for me to have this sandwich in the first place.”
“Fine. No meat baths then. You’re so unreasonable.”
He laughed, a bit unsteadily. “Oh, Lucien. I don’t know what I would have done without you today.”
“Well, probably you wouldn’t have had to leave your parents’ anniversary.”
“From what you’ve said, that might not have been a good thing.”
“See. You’re making progress.”
There was a pause. “I’m afraid I still can’t quite bring myself to think about it properly. I’m not as fearless as you.”
“I’m plenty fearful, as you well know.”
“It never seems to hold you back.”
I caught his wrist and kissed his palm. “You’re giving me way too much credit. I was a total mess before I met you.”
“Your flat was a total mess. It’s not the same.”
“Y’know”—I smiled up at him—“I’m not going to sit here and argue with you about whether I suck or not. You just keep believing I don’t.”
“I’ll never believe you’re anything less than remarkable.”
Oh fuck. I’ve never been good at this stuff. “Me too. I mean, only like, I think you are. Not that I think I am. I mean, not in a low self-esteem way. Like, that would be really arrogant. Look, can we have sex now?”
; “Ever the romantic, Lucien.”
“It’s how I express myself. It’s part of my unique charm.”
He snorted, but let me lead him into the bedroom anyway. Where I undressed him slowly and, for some reason, couldn’t stop kissing him. And he gave himself up to me, moment by moment, and I lost myself in the rhythm of his body and the hunger of his touch. I came to him like I thought I’d never come to anyone—forgetting to hold back in the need to make him feel as safe and as cherished and as special as he made me. I held him, and he clung to me, and we moved together, and, okay, I gazed into his eyes. And I whispered to him, telling him…stuff. Embarrassing stuff about how much I cared about him and how wonderful he was to me. And I…and we…and.
Look.
It’s not the sort of thing you talk about, okay? It was for us. And it was everything.
* * *
I was awoken, frankly way too early for a Sunday, by a fully dressed Oliver kissing me lightly on the forehead. This wasn’t completely unprecedented because Oliver, being a responsible human adult, didn’t share my commitment to the art of the lie-in, but something felt off.
“Goodbye, Lucien,” he said.
I was suddenly way more conscious than I liked being at this time of the morning. “Wait. What? Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Why? If you’ve got work to do, you can do it here. Or give me ten minutes”—well, that was fairly optimistic but what the hell—“and I’ll come with you.”
“You misunderstand me. I’ve enjoyed our time together, and I’m grateful for your efforts, but we’ve done what we set out to do. It’s time for us both to move on.”
What was even happening right now? “Hang on. What… I… Hey, we had the this feels real to both of us talk. There’s no takesy-backsies on the this feels real to both of us talk.”
“And,” he said, in this cool, empty voice, “we also agreed that we would wait until the end of the arrangement to make any formal commitments.”
“Okay. Then I…formally commit.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Once again, what was even happening right now? The only thing I was certain about was that I did not want to be having this conversation naked. Not that it was looking like I had a choice. “Why not?”
“Because we were wrong. This isn’t real.”
“How isn’t it real?” Pulling the duvet around me, I struggled into a kneeling position. “We’ve gone to restaurants, we’ve talked about our feelings, we’ve met each other’s fucking parents. In what way is this not a relationship?”
“I’ve had far more of them than you. And I can assure you this has felt nothing like one. It’s been a fantasy. That’s all.”
I stared at him, angry and betrayed and hurt and confused. “You’ve been in more relationships than me because—by your own admission—you’ve ballsed so many of them up. Are you honestly trying to claim we’re not a couple because we’re not miserable or bored of each other?”
“It’s easy to be happy,” he told me, “when you’re pretending.”
“Who’s fucking pretending? Do you think I’d be like this if I was pretending?”
He sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his brow in that tormented way he had. Except this time it was expressing more than indulgent frustration at my antics. “Please don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.”
“Of course I’m going to make it fucking difficult. You think I’m just going to let you throw this away? For no reason except… Oh fuck, is this because I made you a bacon sandwich?” I put my head in my hands. “I can’t believe I’m about to get dumped over a bacon sandwich.”
“It’s not about the sandwich. It’s”—he sighed—“about you and me. We’re different people.”
“But we work.” That came out sounding slightly more pitiful than I would have wanted. But I guess I had some choices ahead of me, and if it came down to keeping my dignity versus keeping Oliver, things weren’t looking so good for dignity. “And I don’t understand what I’ve done wrong. I mean, apart from telling your entire family to fuck off. And, okay, that was probably a biggie, but if it was a deal-breaker, I wish you’d told me that before I made a total fool of myself over you last night.”
“It’s not that either.”
“Then,” I yelled, “what the fuck is it? Because from where I’m standing, you spent months telling me I’m wonderful and beautiful and amazing and worth something and now it’s just, what, kthanksbai?”
“It’s not about you, Lucien.”
“How is you dumping me not about me?” Okay. This was good. I could work with this. If I was angry, I wasn’t crying. “Like, did you mean a single word you said since this whole thing started?”
“I meant all of it, but being with you isn’t right for me. And being with me isn’t right for you.”
“It felt fucking right yesterday. It’s been fucking right for ages.”
He wouldn’t even look at me. “I’ve already told you: this hasn’t been real. It can’t last because, as you’ve pointed out, my relationships don’t, and I’d rather remember what we’ve had than watch it go cold and die, like it always does.”
“Oh, come on. That is the worst reason for breaking up with someone I have ever heard.” I made a messy grab for his hand. “I can’t promise you forever because that’s…not at all how it works. But I literally can’t imagine not wanting to be with you. Not wanting this. Whatever we call it.”
“That’s because you barely know me.” With a depressing finality, he untangled his fingers from mine and stood up. “You keep telling me how perfect I am, and must know by now that I’m anything but. In two months you’ll realise I’m not that special, and a month after that you’ll realise I’m not that interesting either. We’ll spend less time together, and mind less about it, and one day you’ll tell me things have come to a natural conclusion. You’ll move on and I’ll be where I always have been: never quite what someone is looking for.” He turned his head away. “I’m just not strong enough to go through that with you.”
There was a pause.
And then, in a moment of epiphany that deserved a full fucking chorus of angels, or at least the Skenfrith Male Voice Choir, I got it.
“Hang on a second.” I actually wagged a finger at him. “I know this because I do it all the time. You like me and you’re scared and you’ve been through something and it’s shaken you up and your first instinct is to run. But if I can work through that, then so can you. Because you are way smarter and way less fucked up than me.”
Another pause.
“How about,” I suggested, somewhere between hope and desperation, “you go into the bathroom for a bit.”
A third pause, and definitely the worst yet.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuckity fuck. This was seriously nonideal. I’d legitimately gone all in on this. I’d said some pretty intense things and put myself way out there. And if after all that it blew up in my face, I didn’t know how I was going to—
“I can’t be what you need me to be,” he said. “Goodbye, Lucien.”
And by the time I got past the “wait, stop, please don’t go” stage he’d already gone.
Which pretty much ruined my Sunday.
And my Monday. And my Tuesday. And possibly my life.
Chapter 49
When I’d arranged Dad Meeting 2: Electric Boogaloo, I’d been counting on Oliver not breaking up with me three days earlier and me not having to trog out to the Chiltern Firehouse feeling useless and heartbroken. At the time, I’d been weirdly touched—I mean, it wasn’t my sort of place, and to be honest, it probably wasn’t his sort of place either, but it was where you went if you were a celebrity or looking for celebrities. So by taking me there, Jon Fleming was publicly upgrading me from “estranged wastrel son” to “legit family member.” And while I hadn�
��t snorted quite enough of his Kool-Aid to believe this was totally for my benefit—it would clearly play well as a chapter in the Jon Fleming rehabilitation story—I’d still benefit from it. A bit. To some extent. In the not-nothing sense that I was coming to accept was my relationship with my father.
Of course it struck me that getting something I thought I’d always wanted and losing something I never thought I’d want in the same week was kind of a pisstastic irony. And not the most helpful thing in the world emotional-stability-wise. Anyway, there I was, sitting at a corner table in a converted Victorian fire station, three seats away from someone I was pretty sure had been in One Direction, but wasn’t Harry Styles or Zayn Malik. And half an hour later, I was still sitting there, and the waiters were circling like very polite sharks.
After an hour, three unanswered texts, and a straight-to-voicemail call, a very nice young woman had gently informed me that I’d need to order in the next ten minutes or vacate the table. So I was left trying to work out if I’d be more embarrassed slinking away from a Michelin-starred restaurant at eight in the evening or sitting alone, working my way through an expensive three-course meal like this had totally been my plan all along.
So I left, getting heartily papped on my way out, but right then, I did not give two fucks. At least, not until one of them asked if Oliver had got bored of me, at which point I suddenly gave a whole lot of fucks. And, a few months ago, I’d have had one of those embarrassing freak-outs that the paparazzi are constantly baiting you into having so they can photograph you having them. But, apparently, the new mature me was just sad about it.
Being mature sucked.
I put my head down and walked, and this time there was nobody to wrap a coat around me and keep me safe from the flashes and the questions. Mostly I was… Actually, I wasn’t sure what I was mostly, especially now Oliver dumping me and my dad dumping me were getting mixed up in my head like a rejection smoothie. As far as Jon Fleming was concerned, I was this frustrating blend of disappointed and not at all surprised. But then there was also this bitter aftertaste, reminding me that if I got pissed off at Jon Fleming for standing me up, and then it turned out he’d tragically died of cancer that afternoon, I’d have felt shitty for possibly the rest of my life. But, apart from checking the internet for obituaries, I didn’t have any way of knowing what was really happening with him so I was stuck in this fucked-up quantum state where my dad was simultaneously an arsehole and a corpse. And Oliver…Oliver was gone, and I had to stop thinking about him.