Husband Material (London Calling, #2)

by Alexis Hall

But I smiled anyway because he didn’t deserve my emotional authenticity.

“That sounds like quite the perfect storm. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“For verisimilitude.”

“I stuck by him because I was more his friend than yours and we’re all entitled to our mistakes. Even massive mistakes that hurt people.

To be honest, I was increasingly convinced that weddings were just an elaborate cycle of vengeance that had got really out of hand.

“I don’t believe,” said Oliver way too calmly, in a voice I’d never heard him use before, “that the fact I don’t feel personally represented by a set of symbols invented by a very specific group of Americans in the late 1970s and popularised as much by global capitalism as by activists makes me insecure in myself.”

“Speaking as an artist, I don’t think anyone gets to be an expert on emotions. Your thing with your dad is your thing with your dad. Oliver’s thing with his dad is his thing with his dad, and they aren’t going to work the same.”

And, sometimes, the person you need to be with when you’re in a bad place isn’t the person you want to be with when you’re…when you’re not.”

But I wanted to keep this. This almost fragile feeling of everything being what it was and being for its own sake and not needing to go anywhere or become anything else. But that was how relationships began. It wasn’t how they lasted. You couldn’t live forever on lemon posset and French toast. At some point you had to think, really think, about where you were going and what it meant. You had to ask if you were in this forever, and if you were, what were you going to do about it, and if you weren’t, what were you even doing. You were either in or you were out. You either got married or you moved on. And I never wanted to move on.