Husband Material (London Calling, #2)

by Alexis Hall

“You still make me happy, Lucien. You are still everything I want and a lot of things I couldn’t have imagined wanting—” “Thanks.” “In a good way. We don’t have to do this. We can move at whatever pace you like. But you should know that I am yours, more truly than I have ever been anyone’s. Because when I’m with you, I’m me. Not someone I think I should be. And I’ll be with you, however you want, for as long as you’ll have me.”

“Yes,” said Oliver, as he de-spanielled the sofa. “My refusal to drink milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.”

Mum considered this. “That is a fair point.” She sat down on the sofa and put her arm around Oliver. “Luc, this is Oliver, he is my son. He is a very nice boy, he has a good job and always calls his mother. Oliver”—she gestured contemptuously at me with her free hand—“this is some ungrateful shit who sometimes comes to my house and eats my curry and complains about it.”

One day, I wanted somebody to look at me the way Rhys looked at hypothetical free chips. Although to be fair, Oliver sometimes did.

“No spanking,” I whined. “Too sleepy.” There was a pause. Then Oliver said, “I appreciate I need a sleazy moustache in order to deliver this line properly, but we probably should get out of our wet clothes.” Trying to imagine Oliver in a sleazy moustache was sufficiently…something that I brain-knotted myself back into wakefulness and began peeling my T-shirt off. “Are you here to deliver a pizza?” I asked. “Is it twelve inches?” “Yes.” It was Oliver’s driest voice, which was pretty fucking dry. “I’m here with the twelve-inch hot sausage pizza you ordered. Also, my penis.”

“I’m not sure porn is your calling.” “Are you sure? I think the X-Rated Barrister has a certain ring to it. I was going to call my debut feature Habeus Porkus.” “Not Men’s Rear?” “That’ll be the sequel.”

I shrugged. “I’ll be okay. I mean…you can always warm me up.” Unfortunately, Oliver was still fixated on making sure I didn’t die of a chill like a Victorian spinster. “Shall I run you a bath?”

He drew the quilt from the bed and wrapped it round me—which shifted the vibe from sexy boy slut to starving urchin rescued by kindly gentleman—before disappearing into the en suite.

always kissed me so carefully at first—like he wanted me to know I was precious—before he lost himself in urgency.

“I don’t want this to be your last memory of our relationship. I still want to be with you. I want to be with you desperately. I want to be with you more than I’ve ever wanted anything. I just don’t want it to be within a framework of…of…the social thingy paradigm of marriage.”

“But…but we were about to get married. We can’t go from being married back to dating. That’s…that’s not how it works.” “Which is why,” declared Oliver, “marriage will always feel straight to me. Because it presumes that a relationship is only valid if it follows a pattern that for most of our lives we were totally excluded from.”

“Okay. Except now we can be included. So shouldn’t we be, y’know, trying to be?” Oliver shrugged. “For some people, absolutely. But for me, it feels like a framework I didn’t create and can’t control that I’m expected to impose on my own life.” “And that’s why we can’t get married?” I asked. Because, oddly enough, I didn’t find this very comforting. “You love me and you want to be with me. You just don’t want to do it in the way nearly all our friends have done?” He stood, drawing me close with the lightest tug on my wrist. I don’t know why I went—given I still strongly suspected I was angry at him—but I did. “Is that so unthinkable?” “I–I don’t know.” I was tired enough and emotional enough that my brain was beginning to turn into an eel sandwich. “And I only have three minutes to work it out.” I’d been staring at the numbers on my phone, but then Oliver gently turned my face to his. “Lucien,” he said softly. “You know you are the truest thing I have ever dared choose for myself. And we are the only thing I’ve ever had that I haven’t let other people define for me.”

And, suddenly, for the longest-shortest second of my life I didn’t feel tired anymore. Or confused or scared. Because Oliver loved me. Oliver really loved me. And in this way that was just ours.

“You’re a mess,” I told him. “Oh, a complete one. But I’m your mess, Lucien. And always will be. If…” He hesitated, his stern mouth softening in that way that felt very particularly mine. “If you still want me.”