“Then…I’ll see you in the morning?” He sounded uncertain. The same way I felt uncertain. Like neither of us knew how badly we’d fucked this.
“Yeah,” I replied.
That was when I realised that this would be the first time I’d watched Oliver go to bed without me in…maybe in ever. And I couldn’t bear it, so I followed him to the foot of the stairs, and then when he went up I went past and into my study, where I found Spud still curled up in his pen. We should have let him out after the guests had gone, really, only we’d got distracted stabbing each other in the emotional liver.
“Well,” I said to him as he skipped up to me with oblivious puppyish happiness, “it’s just you and me again tonight.”
“Ruff,” said Spud.
And it turned out, that was exactly what I needed to hear.
Chapter 37
I’ve always been a heavy sleeper. Probably because my sleep patterns—like most of my lifestyle—were extremely unhealthy. So when Oliver came down a few hours later, I didn’t wake up until he was physically shaking my arm.
I made totally dignified blurgling noises and swatted at something I might have been dreaming about but instantly forgot. “Wharaugh?”
“Do you really think you couldn’t raise children with me?”
“Wur?”
Oliver was sitting on the arm of the sofa wearing his stripiest pyjamas and his most serious, most introspective expression. “Do you really feel that if it doesn’t work out with Jasmine—”
That woke me straight up. “Hold on, don’t turn Jaz into some kind of…dry run.”
To my surprise, Oliver looked immediately apologetic. “Of course not. And you’re right. I just mean—do you think that…because of the way that things have gone with Jasmine. Because of—have the last few weeks really made you so convinced that I…that I can’t be a good father?”
Sometimes when somebody asks you a really horrible question, the best answer you can give them is the time it took you to think of one. And I was beginning to suspect this was one of those situations.Still, since I’d used the thinking time already, I did my best to use some actual words as well. “It’s more—I don’t know if the kind of dad you’re trying to be and the kind of dad I’m trying to be are the kinds of dad who can dad together.” Then I very quickly added, “Butthatdoesn’tmeanIwanttobreakuporanything.”
“Are you sure?” asked Oliver. Which made me taste bile and possibly blood. “Because…because if I’m honest, I’m not sure I’d want to stay with me if I felt the way you said you feel.”
This was getting dangerous. Losing-things-you-loved dangerous. “How do you think I feel?”
“You’ve made that very clear, Lucien. You as good as said—no, youdidsay—I was turning into my father.”
Okay, there was that. “Yeah, but not all the time. Just, like…”
“Just when I’m around Jasmine?”
With the stakes being so high, it might have been a bad time to call him out, but this was kind of the whole problem. “Her name,” I told him, “is Jaz.”
I could see him mouthing out the word, rolling it around like a Werther’s Original. “I suppose thatisrather indicative.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”
Oliver looked down at his hands. He was perched on the arm of the sofa only inches away from my head and he looked small. Really, really small. And then he went on, in the quietest voice I’d ever heard, “I don’t know what to do.”
That was so unexpected that I had no idea how to handle it. If it was good or bad or both or neither or anything. “About what? Jaz? Us? The leftover shish barak?”
He was breathing very deliberately now, like he was worried he might forget how. “I…I didn’t expect this to be easy.”
We’d just come off the worst and biggest argument we’d ever had, including some of the really big ones from back when his dad had been at his worst, so I didn’t want to escalate. But I’d alsonoticedsomething. “Oliver,” I said as gently as I could manage. “You said that in the pub too. Is it…is it at all possible that you’re saying it because deep down, there’s a little part of you that sort of…y’know. Did. Expect it to, I mean.”
Oliver blinked. “Credit me with some self-awareness.”
He could, on the whole, have had much worse reactions. “No, seriously, think about it. If you’re totally, completely, one hundred million percent honest with yourself—”
“Lucien”—he was trying to sound playful, but I could see I’d hit a nerve—“criticise my parenting all you like, butpleasenever cite a percentage greater than a hundred.”
