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“So,” I tried. “This hitting-on-me thing you’re doing. I’ve got to say it’s pretty minimalist.”
“Will it…will it ever stop hurting?” “Non.” Mum shook her head. “But it will stop mattering.”
Bridget Welles: my Token Straight Friend. Always late, always in the middle of a crisis, always on a diet.
“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.”
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.
This was why relationships sucked: they made you need shit you’d been perfectly happy not needing. And then they took them away.
“You kissed?” “No, I attacked him with my lips, and he was so repulsed he jumped into a potted plant.”
Then again, it’s amazing what rich people will do for free food.
Giddy from a rare sense of accomplishment, and swept along by a rush of something that was either optimism or masochism, I unlocked my phone and pinged a message to Oliver: do fake boyfriends fake text
I left him hanging for a while to show that I, also, had important life stuff to be getting on with. Never mind that I actually watched four episodes of Bojack Horseman and had a vindictive wank before replying Sorry to keep you waiting and no wonder you’re single if the second text you send a guy includes the word verisimilitude
Because the way someone seems in a photograph and the way they really are is this horrible uncanny valley of recognition and strangeness. And it’s even worse when you can see bits of yourself in them.
And now, ironically, I’ll have to get an Uber because I can’t make the train and I’ve got no cash for a cab.” He cleared his throat. “You could stay the night if you wanted.” “Wow, you are seriously committed to me not supporting Uber’s business model.”
“Terribly sorry. Still a bit of a novel sitch. Not that it isn’t fearfully nice that you’re a homosexual. Just never brought one to the club before. After all, they only let ladies in three years ago. They can’t join, of course. That way madness lies, let us shun that. And, actually, thinking about it, it must be terribly jolly for one’s lady to be a gentleman. You can go to all the same clubs, have the same tailor, play on the same polo team. No metaphor intended.”
“Lord Ainsworth usually has a glass in each hand the moment he walks through the door. That’s why they call him Double Fisting Ainsworth. At least, I think it is. Could be something to do with the prostitutes.” “Yes,” agreed Oliver. “It’s always hard to tell, isn’t it?”
“It seems a shame.” Miffy had finished her beef Wellington and was making inroads into Alex’s. “Ally and Ollie seem to be getting on terribly well. Of course, their couple name would be Ollivander, which I’m sure I’ve heard somewhere before.” “I think,” offered Oliver, “it’s the name of the wand-maker from Harry Potter.”
There was a brief silence, which Oliver delicately steered us over by asking if everyone was ready to move on to dessert. “I couldn’t help but notice,” he went on, “the jam roly-poly on the menu. I’ve always been rather partial.” Alex bounced in his seat like a poorly trained beagle. “I’m a dick man, myself. Thick and solid, and piping hot, and slathered in what the French call crème anglaise.” I was still having way too many Oliver-related emotions, but I couldn’t not steal a peek at him. And, of course, he didn’t look even the slightest bit as if he was about to die of laughter in a room
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Somehow, against all reason and sense of self-preservation, I invited Oliver into my flat. I mean, to give him his due, he didn’t immediately drop dead from disgust and E. coli.
“I’m truly sorry. I wasn’t intending to judge, but this situation, frankly, demands judgment. I mean, how can you not be miserable living here?” I threw my hands up in exasperation. “I’m confused. What on earth has given you the impression I’m not miserable?”
“Well, fuck me sideways with a baked aubergine.”
A rumble outside heralded the arrival of Priya, her girlfriend, and her pickup truck. I mean, the rumbling was the truck.
A spaniel that currently had its forepaws on his shoulders and was licking his nose lovingly, while staring deeply into his eyes. If I’d tried to do that, he’d have told me he wanted it to mean something.
“Where I am going with this, mon caneton, is that I don’t give a shit. It is my curry, and I will make it the way I fucking well want to. And that is the way Oliver should live his life. Because the people who matter will love you anyway.”
God. By the time this was over, I was going to have a near-fatal buildup of unused sarcasm.
My working theory was that getting a dessert from a vegan restaurant was like having sex with someone less attractive than you—they knew it was a tough sell, so they tried harder.
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.
I’m socially conscious as balls.
Besides, you only need that many classical allusions if you have a very tiny penis.”
“I’d have a witty comeback, but I’m kinda distracted right now.” “You do seem,” he said dryly, “to be markedly less intransigent when you have an erection.” “Yes, it’s my Achilles’ penis.”
I’d almost forgotten what it was like for a moment like this to mean something—the first time you saw a partner undressed, how they both gained and lost mystery, the truth of them, all their secrets and imperfections, surpassing any fantasy you could have conjured.
“It’s a funny thing, the pendulum of the world.”
Why does she bother trying to talk to bipeds?”
