“He’s ready for it,” replied Oliver, looking down at our contribution to the general doggishness.
For a moment or two, Oliver and I busied ourselves with the menus, and I felt briefly guilty. “Sorry, they seem a bit low on vegan options.”
Oliver gave me a think-nothing-of-it smile. “That’s to be expected. They do doggy ice cream, which will please Spud, and a vegetable chilli, which I’m sure is lovely.”
“Are you?” I asked. “Or are you just being nice?”
Oliver reached across the table and took my hand. “What matters is that we’re here together. Just you, me, and Spud.”
“Ruff,” said Spud. And there was an answering “Ruff” from another table. Followed by another “Ruff” and then two yaps and a growl.
I peeked suspiciously over to where the other noises had come from. There was a corgi lurking nearby, and whereas every other dog in the place looked deeply chill, it looked twitchy, stressed, and about to take its twitchy stressedness out on anybody who got near it.
But as Oliver had said, this wasn’t about having a wide range of vegan options, or not being exposed to yappy animals, it was about being together, so I ignored the corgi, smiled back at my boyfriend, and just said, “Yeah.”
“It’s been a while,” he added.
And I said “Yeah” again.
“And also”—he sounded uncharacteristically hesitant—“and alsoa lot.”
In many ways, it was a massive relief to hear him admit it. “So much a lot. Like looking back—”
“Ruffruffruffyapruff,” interjected the evil corgi.
“Looking back,” I continued, “getting a dog to see if we were ready for a kid was kind of lowballing it.”
Oliver laughed, and I was glad he was laughing again because I’d been missing it. “Just a little,” he agreed.
“Do you think it’s too late to start training Jaz with one of those clicker things?”
“I don’t think she’d respond well to it.” Unfortunately, while I’d been going for wryly amusing, Oliver ran very quickly out of both wryness and amusement. “Then again, I don’t think I knowwhatshe’d respond well to.”
There was…not bitterness exactly, but there was an edge toOliver’s voice that I really hoped wouldn’t last the whole evening. “You do,” I told him. “At least, you do as well as I do.”
“That’s very kind of you, but it’s simply not the case.”
The boyfriend-instinct in me wanted to disagree because the alternative was to tacitly say,You’re right, you flat-out don’t get our foster daughter. But while I’d never have put it that harshly, there was, perhaps, the tiniest smidgen of truth in the idea that he and Jaz didn’t quite fit perfectly into each other’s worldviews. So I went with the safely neutral, “We never expected this to be easy.”
“No,” Oliver agreed, and then pulled his phone out. Which I thought was weirdly rude of him until I realised that this was an order-on-the-app place. “Do you know what you want, by the way?”
I’d barely thought about it, but fortunately this was a pretty typical pub, menu-wise, and being a filthy carnivore, I could just go straight for the burger option.
Oliver tapped our choices into his phone and scanned his card, and then I once again had his utterly undivided attention. Which I’d missed almost as much as making him laugh.
“Yapyaprrrrrufffyap.”
Mostly undivided attention.
“Rationally,” Oliver said slowly, and I could see him glancing at the evil corgi out the corner of his eye, “I understand that it isn’t my job to make her like me. I just think”—he gave my hand a little squeeze and his lips narrowed—“I don’t think I’d accounted for how bad it would feel when she didn’t.”
“Yap,” said the evil corgi. “Ruff. Ruff. Rrrrufff.Yap.”
“Also,” Oliver went on, letting the next table’s dog distract him from what I was beginning to realise was a genuinely hard topic for him, “I’m immensely glad that we trained Spud better than that.”
“Ruff,” said Spud.
“Daddy Oliver is right,” I told him. “You are thegoodest boy, aren’t you?”
