Page 108 of Boyfriend Material
I was still a bit too emotioned out for that much fibre. So I helped myself to a banana, from a bunch that hung from what appeared to be a bespoke banana hanging place,next to, but notin, the offensively well-stocked fruit bowl.
“What’s with the…?” I pointed. “Do you have a problem with bananas?”
“Not personally. But they release ethylene, which is a ripening agent, and can cause other fruit to go bad.”
“Oh. Right.”
“I’m sorry. Would you rather I’d said that I was concerned about treason in my fruit bowl and strung them from a gibbet pour encourager les autres.”
“You remember that time I pretended I spoke to French to impress you? Well, I still can’t.”
He laughed and pulled me into a kiss—which got me not quite into his lap but very much lap adjacent. “You don’t need to speak French to impress me.”
My heart stuttered. But I still wasn’t used to all of this…intimacy and okayness. “What are you eating?” I blurted out instead. “It looks like spunk with fruit in it.”
“Thank you, Lucien. You always know exactly what to say.”
Sheepishly, I nuzzled into his neck and was thrilled by the discovery of his…whatever the opposite of a five-o’clock shadow is. The prickle of hair under my lips a reminder that I was still here. That we both were. Together.
“It’s bircher,” he went on. “Oats, soaked overnight in almond milk and—as you correctly observe—fruit. But, to the best of my knowledge, no semen, human or otherwise.”
“So it’s cold porridge?”
“A lot lighter and fresher—but substantial enough to keep me going through a court case. Also I can make it at the start of the week and it sees me through until Saturday, which is convenient.”
I was smiling helplessly at him. “Do you put little labels on the jars so you know which is for which day?”
“No.” He gave me a stern look that, somehow, wasn’t stern at all. “Bircher is fungible.”
“Well, if it goes fungible, you probably shouldn’t eat it.”
He laughed, somewhat indulgently. But, hey, I could get used to being indulged—especially by Oliver.
Chapter 34
I’d spent the rest of Monday with Oliver, feeling fragile but content, in a sort of snow-day haze. We’d talked so much the night before that we didn’t have much to say to each other, but that was good somehow. Oliver had mostly sat decorously on his sofa, readingThe Song of Achilles, and I’d mostly sprawled over him napping. I hoped I wasn’t going to keep having emotions, because it would get really tiring really fast. Then in the middle of the afternoon, and despite my protests, he’d insisted that we go for a walk, which had turned out to be far nicer than a walk round Clerkenwell had any right to be.
Of course, taking Monday off meant having to catch up on Tuesday. And since the Beetle Drive was rolling over the hill like a clump of dung under the hind legs of aScarabaeus viettei—wow, I had been working at CRAPP way too long—I had a whole lot to do when I got in the office.
We’d decided that the fundraiser should include a silent auction back when we (that is to say, I) set up the first one a few years ago and I think we’d just thought it sounded good. But it turned out they were a fuckton of work because you needed either a small number of expensive things and a lot of rich people, or a large number of moderately priced things and a reasonable number of rich people, and every time it was touch and go whether the balance was going to shake out right.
It didn’t help that Dr. Fairclough insisted on donating a signed copy of her monograph on the distribution of rove beetles in south Devon between 1968 and 1972, which was apparently a wild time for the Devonshire rove beetle. And I wound up having to buy it every year under a series of increasingly unlikely pseudonyms because nobody else would bid on it. The most recent had gone to a Ms. A. Stark of Winterfell Road.
Just as I was securing a helpfully obscene discount on a Fortnum & Mason hamper—which always did well at an auction even though they aren’t actually especially hard to get hold of—Rhys Jones Bowen appeared in my doorway with his usual impeccable timing.
“Busy, Luc?” he asked.
“Yes, fantastically.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I’ll only be a moment.” He claimed my spare chair with the air of a man who has no intention of only being a moment. “I’m just here to pass on a message from Bronwyn. She said thank you for getting photographed outside her restaurant. It did her the world of good, and she’s booked out for the rest of the pop-up. She was going to offer to cook you dinner, but she can’t because now she’s got too much on.”
What with Cam’s wanky think piece nearly destroying my relationship with Oliver, I’d taken a break from my Google alerts. “No problem. Honestly, I kind of hadn’t noticed.”
“It was a lovely article in the end, all about how you were turning over a new healthier leaf, and trying to get your shit together like your dad. And the newspaper man asked Brownyn, and she said you weren’t nearly as much of a knobhead as she thought you were going to be. So that’s good, isn’t it?”
“In an ideal world, my press coverage wouldn’t include the word ‘knobhead’ at all but, yeah. I’ll take it.”
I waited hopefully for Rhys Jones Bowen to leave, but instead, he sat there stroking his beard. “You know, Luc, I’ve been thinking. As what you might call a social media guru, I recently discovered that there’s this website called Instagram. And apparently, if you’re a little bit famous and a bit of a bellend, you can make loads of money on it pretending you like things.”
