“Slipped and fell on your eyeballs?”
“He wanted you. He totally wanted to do you, right there and then. He wanted to have dirty hot sex with you in this, um, nice family park.”
“Morning,” said Oliver to a passing dog walker, who was politely pretending she hadn’t heard the dirty hot sex talk. “Anyway,” he went on, as we wandered down the lake, “I’m very flattered, but I don’t think I’m the sort of man joggers check out in parks.”
“Oh my God. Which part of the three-legged dog story were you not listening to? You’re totally the sort of man joggers check out in parks. Have you seen yourself lately? You’re all wholesome and handsome, and clearly up for fucking someone into the mattress.”
“Morning,” said Oliver to an elderly man and his grandchildren. And then, to me, “I think you’re operating from a position of bias.”
I mean, I was. But I was also right. On the other hand, this hadstrayed from reminding Oliver how special he was to me to an argument about whether strangers wanted to do him or not. “Doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” I insisted, only slightly smugly.
Oliver paused for a moment, allowing Spud to tangle us together in the lead. He leaned in and kissed me in a Saturday-morning-in-public-appropriate way. “I love you.”
Taken by surprise, I accidentally blushed. “Oh fuck off.”
He laughed and we stood there with Spud gambolling around us, and for a moment I was just filled with this terrifying sense of absolutely-perfect-ness because we were here in our park with our dog on our lazy morning walk, and it was everything I’d never dreamed of because I’d never believed I’d be able to have it and—
“Fuck,” I said. “I’m going to lose my job.”
Chapter 12
We both knew, of course, what the deal was, CRAPP-wise. We’d known for ages that it was, at the very least, at risk. But saying it out loud, baldly, plainly, and in those exact words—I’m going to lose my job—had sort of helped. I mean, I was still an absolute mess but at least I was now an absolute mess who’d articulated a small part of his messiness. Plus it meant Oliver went straight into supportive-and-comforting mode.
He smoothed my brow with his un-dog-occupied hand. “Not for at least a year.”
“Yeah, but—but—it’smy job.”
“I know.”
“I don’t evenlikemy job.”
He—or rather, the mix of his arm and Spud’s lead—gave me a little squeeze. “I don’t think that’s anywhere near as true as it used to be, and I don’t think it used to be particularly true at all.”
“What am I going to do?” The part of my brain that absolutely refused to admit my life could be in a good place was going into overdrive. “Find someothertiny quirky charity that nobody cares about in need of a fundraiser?”
From the way Oliver was looking at me, I could tell I’d failed some pretty basic parts of rhetorical question construction. “Well,”he said. “Youcoulddo that. It sounds like that might actually be quite a straightforward thing to do, in fact.”
“I know, but—”
“Which doesn’t mean,” he added, “that it isn’t scary. Because change is always scary, and I do realise that as somebody who works in a job with a uniform that hasn’t been updated since the mid-seventeenth century, I’m not really one to lecture people on embracing newness. But we’ll manage, Lucien. We have each other and Spud and a nice house that we can comfortably afford even on one income and—”
“You think we might have to drop down to one income?” My inner drama llama was latching on to whatever it could, and it was taking me along with it.
“I think if we did, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. You’re already working from home most days, and Spud needs somebody to look after him.”
I frowned. “You’re saying I should be a house husband?”
“I’m saying we have options. I’m not expecting you to have dinner waiting for me every night when I get home or saying you should be waking me up with French toast every morning.” He gave a frown of his own. “Especially not after how it went last time. All I mean is that there comes a point where you can stop running because you’re there. And we’re—I don’t want to presume—but you are very much mythere, and I hope I’m yours, and everything we do together now is just…it’s whatever we make it.”
This was very…nice and stuff. Except my brain was still only about sixty percent trained to accept nice and stuff. “Are you seriously telling me that back when we met, you looked at me and the shithole of my life and thought, ‘That’s someone I want to try and make a home with’?”
“Well”—Oliver stepped delicately over Spud’s lead before he pulled us into the lake—“no. I mostly thought, ‘There’s someone who’s far too cool and interesting for me.’”
“Oh I see,” I protested, mostly jokingly. “But you don’t think that anymore. Now you know how shit and boring I am.”
“Yes.” Oliver nodded gravely. “I’ve stayed with you all these years because of how shit and boring you are. Morning,” he added to a young woman with pink hair and a dachshund. “Obviously,” he went on, “I’ve never stopped thinking you’re cool and interesting. You’ve just also been good for my self-esteem.”
“That does sound like me,” I said, because I knew there came a point where my refusal to admit I had positive qualities stopped being cute and started being fucking annoying.
