“May?”
“I’ve had a look at the”—he did thepuppy giving pawgesture—“book, and it’s possible I succumbed to a certain amount of confirmation bias.”
I blinked at him from within the safety of my duvet wrap. “So we can try the thing?”
“We can try the thing.”
“I really will move the pen.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed. “You don’t have to. It’ll be easier with both of us.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he agreed.
I had that difficult end-of-an-argument feeling that wasn’t quite catharsis, because there hadn’t been enough of a blowup, and wasn’t quite triumph, even though I’d technically got my own way. It was a sort of low-key not-as-nice-as-it-should-have-been sense of resolution where you were glad it was over but far too aware that it had happened. It didn’t help that Oliver still had a slightly tragic look in his eyes.
“Lucien,” he said after a while. “Did you…did you mean it?”
“About the dog?”
“About my thinking things are, and I quote, ‘only good if they suck.’”
“No,” I said and then immediately undid that by adding, “well, not exactly. It’s just…” There was no easy way to sum this up. Because people were messy and life was messy and you couldn’t actually explain what a person was like in a sentence or a sound bite. “Like, most of the time you’re unbelievably kind and compassionate and everything, but sometimes you…I don’t know, sort of forget?” Privately, I was pretty sure thosesometimeswere when he was dealing with things he knew his father would have had Very Strong Opinions about and didn’t trust his own expertise enough to overrule him. But that was an argument-starting observation, not an argument-ending one.
On account of being a far better, far less defensive person than me, Oliver seemed to be genuinely thinking about what I’d said. “I like to think compassion isn’t the sort of thing one just forgets about.”
I tried to shrug, but my shoulders were too tightly wrapped in duvet. On the one hand, really nice of him to self-reflect. On the other hand, really annoying of him to…self-reflect. “Notforgetforget. You just get so caught up in wanting to do the right thing that you sometimes lose sight of who it’s meant to be rightfor.”
He kept on self-reflecting, like a git.
“Come on,” I said, half pleadingly. “You know you don’t have to be perfect all the time.”
That earned a small smile. “I do, in fact, accept that—though it’s taken a lot of therapy to get there.”
“And me,” I added. “I’ve been helpful.”
“Of course you have. But, as you pointed out yourself several years ago, it isn’t the job of a romantic relationship to fix my mental health issues.”
“Yeah, but”—at this point, I couldn’t tell if I was being play-insecure or real-insecure—“let’s not sell me short here.”
Slowly, Oliver unwrapped me from my sausage roll. It wasn’ta particularly dignified process because I’d put myself in a bad-mood bundle, which meant I was lying on both edges of the duvet. Eventually, though, I was de-cocooned, and Oliver settled over me with that blend of tenderness and purpose that always reduced me to mush. Sexy mush. Doable mush. “I would never,” he whispered. “Don’t tell her, but I like you more than my therapist.”
It had been, like,days. And as much as I’d missed sleeping comfortably, it was far from theonlything I’d missed. “Oh…oh good.”
“For a start, you don’t charge me by the hour.”
“Maybe if I did you’d listen to me more.”
Okay, so there were times to be pissy. Many times, at least if you were me. But one of those times was absolutely not just as you and your boyfriend were navigating the transition from argument to makeup sex. Thankfully, Oliver was either more mature or hornier than I was. “I deserved that,” he admitted. “And I promise I’ll do better in future. In fact”—his voice slipped into something more comfortable—“I might start now.”
“I’m not sure I like where this is going.”
He nuzzled against the side of my neck. “That’s a lie, isn’t it?”
“Well, obviously. But you listen to me just fine in bed.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t like hearing you.”
