“You won’t, they won’t, and there’s two of us so we’ll deal.”
“It’s not fair,” I muttered, glaring up at him, “when you make things sound simple and reasonable.”
“Then,” he went on, “you’re not going to like what I have to say next. Which is, if you don’t want a dog, we don’t have to get one.”
I didn’t like that. I didn’t like thatat all. “But if we can’t get adog, then… Then we can’t get a dog.”
“Yes,” agreed Oliver. “That is indeed what ‘not getting a dog’ means.”
“No, but I mean…” Normally Oliver was much better with euphemism. “Like it would mean we’d never have a dog. And we’ve been having the ‘Do we see a dog in our future?’ conversation for a while now.”
At last, Oliver cracked my ingenious code. “I know we said that getting a dog would be a good way to test how ready we were for—”
“A dog,” I interrupted.
“Exactly. But even if we’re not in a…dog-adopting space now, that doesn’t mean we never will be.”
He’d meant this in a reassuring way, but it was actually one of the last things I needed to hear. “Okay, but…what if it does? I know you want…dogs. And youshouldhave dogs. You’d be an amazing…dog owner. And I don’t want you to look back on our life together and be all, ‘I wish I’d been with somebody who I could have owned a dog with.’”
“I won’t,” replied Oliver with a certainty you could build a world around. And I wanted so badly to build a world around it.
“You can’t promise that.”
“I think you’ll find I can.”
This was getting messy and sticky and uncomfortable in all the ways I didn’t like. “Are you sure? Because it’s looking a lot like I’m going to keep spiralling into the wrecked pile of unwashed pants I used to be every time we try to do something, you know, challenging or grown up.”
“Lucien.” Oliver sayingLucienin his serious voice made my internal organs want to run away, leaving my skin behind as a distraction.
I blinked up at him in growing dismay. “What?”
“I would very much like it if you stopped pretending that theman I fell in love with is a different person from the man who is currently having a…dog-related breakdown in St. Thomas’s Hospital.”
“He’s not a different person,” I demi-wailed. “That’s what I’m saying. I can feel myself slipping back—”
“I would also like it if you wouldn’t keep pretending you’deverstopped being him. I liked him.”
“But hesucked. He was a complete mess.”
“And so was I. And I still am. And yet here we are.”
Okay, this was getting insulting. “Wait, are you saying I haven’t changed at all?”
“Of course you’ve changed,” he murmured, stroking my hair in earnest. “Everyone changes. But that doesn’t mean you’ll never react to an old fear or remake an old mistake.”
“And,” I asked, “you really think I’ll be an okay…dog owner?”
“Yes,” said Oliver, answering a different question entirely, “I think you’ll be a wonderful dog owner.”
“Even though I’ve had really bad role models, dog-owning-wise? Like, what if we get a dog and then I bail on it the way my dad bailed on…his dog?”
“That won’t happen,” said Oliver, so firmly it was almost a prophecy.
“But what if—”
“After all these years,” he went on, “I am very,veryused to your flaws. You can be flaky, you can be prone to panic, you can be a little self-absorbed at times…”
“Great pep talk,” I told him.
