“Well, think how much worse it would be if we never get to have sex again because there’s a dog permanently sharing our bed.”
Damn that Oliver. Going straight for my Achilles penis. “Is there not some kind of middle ground between ‘Never have sex again’ and ‘Let a dog cry itself to sleep every night’?”
“In the short term? Not really.”
I slouched into bed next to him. “This is some Victorian-parenting bullshit.”
“And I agree,” murmured Oliver, rolling over to face me, “that treating a child like this would be very bad. But, wonderful as Spud may be, he’s not actually a human being. Dogs need boundaries and consistency. The more we reinforce those, the happier he’ll be.”
“He doesn’t sound very happy.”
“Lucien.” He pressed his mouth to mine, meltingly soft. “I love how much you care, even if you’re usually pretending not to.”
“You’ve really lowered your standards if you think being upset by a sad puppy is unusual.”
“I just mean, you work so hard to hide this side of yourself.”
Oliver kissed me again.
And thenagain.
And then his kisses started sort of trailing downwards, in a way I was normally extremely into.
“Oliver,” I cried. “Are you trying to sex me right now? Are you trying to sex me to the soundtrack of a distraught dog?”
“I was trying to distract you from the dog who, I repeat, is and will be fine.”
I actually pushed my very hot, very smart, very principled barrister boyfriend away from me. “I am not in the mood. I have never been less in the mood. And that includes that one time we both had food poisoning.”
“I’m sorry,” said Oliver, looking—to his credit—a bit embarrassed. “I’m aware this is difficult for you. I…just… Sorry.”
I propped myself up on one elbow, leaned over him, and brought my face to a distance from his face that was only acceptable if you were in a long-term relationship and you’d both recently brushed your teeth—and sometimes, frankly, not even then. “Are you seriously not at all bothered by…” I paused and let Spud, who was still howling mournfully, speak for himself. “That?This.”
Oliver let out a gentle sigh. “Of course it’s not pleasant. But I know it’s for the best—for Spud and for us—so I feel the responsible thing to do is see it through.”
“What if we just…checked on him?”
“Then he’ll be reassured for a few minutes and then feel abandoned all over again when you come back to bed.”
Snuggling down on Oliver, I began to suspect I was having a philosophical crisis. “I don’t think I believe in being cruel to be kind. I think that’s just being cruel.”
“And I would normally agree with you,” said Oliver, calm again, now he’d given up on misplaced horn. “But this isn’t cruel. It’s necessary.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s how cruel people justify being cruel.”
“It’s the consensus recommendation amongst experts.”
“Then…fuck experts.”
One of Oliver’s eyebrows arranged itself into a condemning arch. “In the current global climate, I’m not sure that’s a sentiment anyone should be endorsing.”
“Oh, come on. This isn’t Brexit or vaccines. This is an adorable puppy who is ours, who we are making unhappy.”
“Lucien.” It was his rarely used short-on-patience voice. Which he generally only used when he was caring really hard about something that he couldn’t fix. “We have three options. We can go downstairs and check on Spud, which will change nothing the moment we come back to bed. We can set a precedent of letting him do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, in which case we will be—and I want to stress this—extremely irresponsible dog owners. Or we can continue with our current course of action.”
Okay. He was doing a rhetoric. And I knew he was doing a rhetoric. I’d been with Oliver for long enough that I understood how he thought, and I knew how he argued, and I could even, sometimes, on a very good day, beat him at his own game. This was not, given it’d started with my friend going into labour on the Millennium Bridge and ended with my dog going through the stages of grief in my study, a very good day.
The problem was, Oliver was technically right. Leaving Spud to cry his little doggy heart out was the best thing to do if we were thinking about our long-term futures as people who wanted a well-trainedpet. And wedidwant that. Especially because if we couldn’t train our pet properly, it probably meant we’d suck at all kinds of other responsible family stuff, and that said bad things about our ability to look after a…after any other dogs we might want to get in the future. Except I also wanted to stop feeling sad, like, right now. And I wanted Spud to stop feeling sad. And I wanted Oliver to stop feeling sad, too, which I was pretty sure he was, behind the rationality, tough love, and closing arguments. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say that without sounding like an arsehole. Like I cared more about my own comfort than Being a Responsible Dog Owner. This was the downside of having a partner who’d honed his debating skills at Oxford and the bar when I’d honed mine at three in the morningina bar.
