To my relief, Spud had no sense of irony, so hedidn’trespond to this by making the exact kind of scene I was congratulating him for not making. Instead, he just thumped his tail on the ground and looked happy.
“At the risk of sounding unbelievablyDaily Mail,” Oliver went on, “I find it very hard not to think you shouldn’t be allowed a dog if you’re going to let it carry on like that. If nothing else, it’s very unfair on the dog.”
A waiter passed by the evil corgi’s table, and it snapped at her. Not so close that she was in any real danger, but close enough that it made her jump.
“It’s pretty unfair on the rest of us too,” I said. “Then again, it might just be corgis in general. Have you ever met a corgi that wasn’t a massive dick?”
Oliver gave me a playfully superior look. “I like to think anything can be its best self, given the opportunity. Even a corgi.”
“Are you telling me that corgi”—I jerked my head towards its arse, which was currently sticking out from under the table, probably because the rest of the corgi was doing something evil beneath it—“is misunderstood? Does it have a tragic backstory?”
“Yes, its tragic backstory is that it was bred to run around on a farm, herding animals, and it was bought by two Londoners who thought it would look good on TikTok and demonstrably did not train around its natural instinct to nip at animals and control the space it’s in.”
“Ruff,” said Spud, supportively.
I plonked a depressed elbow on the table. “Well, now I just feel bad. It’s no fun being mean about a dog that’s secretly yearning for the wide-open fields of…of…wherever there are wide-open fields.”
“I’m sorry.” I’d been mostly messing around, but Oliver looked genuinely chastened. “I didn’t mean to rain on your snark parade.”
“Oh, come on. You know my snark parade’s all-weather.”
His smile had taken on a slightly strained edge. “All the same, this is our one evening to ourselves and I’m…I’m not being a very good companion.”
“Oliver”—I squeezed his fingers tightly—“you’re companioning fine. And Jaz will come round.”
“What if she doesn’t?” he asked. “She could be with us until she’s eighteen. That’s a long time to live with someone who resents you.”
“She doesn’t resent you.” I paused. “Okay, she probably does.”
“Reassuring. Thank you, Lucien.”
“No, I mean, like, only the really general sense that she probably resents everything because she’s fourteen and she’s been treated like shit.”
“And I’m trying to help her.”
“Yeah. And you can and you will. It’s just…” I tried to think of the most Oliver-friendly way to put it. “It’s just going to be a bit of a learning process.”
Oliver was gazing at me with some messy mix of hope and not-quite-getting-it. “You think she’ll eventually learn that I’m not her enemy?”
That wasn’t a million percent what I’d been going for. But I didn’t think it was going to be helpful for either Oliver or Jaz—or, for that matter, our date night—if I tried to make Oliver think about things the same way I did. Especially because the way I thought about things was usually crap and frequently wrong. “I think,” I said slowly, “if we can find a way to show her…” I trailed away, out of ideas and out of options.
“That I”—Oliver had an eyebrow in its most sardonic position—“like the corgi, am misunderstood.”
“No, well. Not exactly. Well. She just needs to see…like…the good person that you are. That I, and everybody else who’s ever met you, know you are.”
“When you first met me, you thought I was a dick.”
“And now I’m completely in love with you,” I cried, triumphantly. “So you see, it works.”
He laughed again, one of his softer laughs, hisI’m only now admitting how vulnerable I’ve beenlaugh. “Thank you, Lucien. You always know exactly the right thing to say.”
“No, I don’t. I say the wrong thing all the time.”
“And yet somehow it works for you. For me. For us.”
The waiter the dog had snapped at appeared briefly by our table, setting down my burger and Oliver’s chilli. He glanced up at her and gave a reflexive yet utterly sincere “Thank you, that looks lovely” before turning back to me.
Glad of the interruption, I looked down at my burger. “Okay, there’s a slim chance we need to get out more because this very ordinary pub burger is looking a-fucking-mazing right now.”
