Page 18 of Boyfriend Material
This felt uncomfortably like failing an exam. In a blind panic, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. “Do you have sex in the wig?”
He stared at me. “No, because they’re very expensive, very uncomfortable, and I have to wear mine to work.”
“Oh.” I tried to come up with another question. Except now all I could think of was “Do you have sex in the robe?” and that obviously wasn’t going to help.
“The question people usually ask,” he went on, like he was the only one in the play who’d remembered his lines, “is how do you live with yourself when you spend your whole life putting rapists and murderers back on the street?”
“Actually, that is a good question.”
“Should I answer it?”
“Well, you seem to really want to.”
“It’s not about whether I want to.” His jaw tightened. “It’s about whether you’re going to think I’m an amoral profiteer if I don’t.”
I couldn’t imagine that he—or anyone—would care that much for my opinion, good, bad, or indifferent. I spread my hands in a go-for-it gesture. “I guess you’d better tell me then.”
“The short version is: an adversarial justice system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best that we’ve got. Statistically, yes, most people I defend in court are guilty because the police can broadly do their jobs. But even people who probably did it are entitled to a zealous legal defence. And that’s a principle to which…to which I am ideologically committed.”
Thankfully, while he’d been delivering this monologue—which only needed some stirring background music to reach its full dramatic potential—I was served a truly glorious pie. Beef, as it turned out, almost meltingly soft, swimming in gravy and barely contained by its crisp pastry cap.
“Wow”—I glanced up from the pie and slammed straight into Oliver’s hardest, coldest glare—“you seem really defensive about this.”
“I just find it helps to be honest from the beginning. This is who I am, and what I do, and I believe in what I do.”
I suddenly noticed he’d barely touched his…beetroot, I think it was? Beetroot and other virtuous vegetables. His hands were folded against the table so tightly that his knuckles were white.
“Oliver,” I said softly, realising I’d never said his name before, and confused by how intimate it was. “I don’t think you’re a bad person. Which you must know means next to nothing coming from me, because you only have to pick up a paper or Google my name to know what sort of personIam.”
“I”—now he looked uncomfortable for a different reason—“I am aware of your reputation. But if I’m to know you, Lucien, I’d rather it came from you.”
Shit. This had got real out of nowhere. How hard could it be to get a guy to like you enough to date you for a few months but not so much that you had to deal with those weird emotion things that fucked with your head, ruined your sleep, and left you crying on the bathroom floor at three in the morning? “Well, for starters, it’s Luc.”
“Luke?” Somehow I could always tell when people pronounced it with akand ane. “It seems a shame when Lucien is such a beautiful name.”
“Actually that’s the English pronunciation.”
“Surely it’s not”—he flinched—“Looshanas the Americans would have it?”
“No. God no. My mother’s French.”
“Ah. Lucien, then.” He said it perfectly, too, with the half-swallowed softness of the final syllable, smiling at me—the first full smile I’d seen from him, and shocking in its sweetness. “Vraiment? Vous parlez français?”
There’s really no excuse for what happened next. I think maybe I just wanted him to keep smiling at me. Because for some reason I said, “Oui oui. Un peu.”
And then, to my horror, he rattled off God knew what.
Leaving me to scrape the bottom of the barrel of my GCSE French, for which I’d received a D. “Um…um… Je voudrais aller au cinema avec mes amis? Ou est la salle de bain?”
Utterly perplexed, he pointed. So I was obliged to go the bathroom. And when I slunk back, he immediately confronted me with “You don’t speak French at all, do you?”
“No.” I hung my head. “I mean, my mother used both when I was growing up, but I still turned out stubbornly monolingual.”
“Then why didn’t you just say that?”
“I…don’t know. I guess I assumed you didn’t speak French either?”
“Why on earth would I imply I could speak French, when I couldn’t?”
