Page 63 of Boyfriend Material
Dear Luc,
There is no room in the workplace for facetiousness.
I refer you to last month’s memo on the new paper-fastening policy. For financial and environmental reasons, we are requiring all documents to be bound with recyclable treasury tags. We expect these to be reused wherever possible.
Kind regards,
Barbara
* * *
Dear Barbara,
Please pay the hotel. The manager just called me, and we are at risk of losing the room.
Kind regards,
Luc
PS—We have run out of treasury tags.
* * *
Dear Luc,
If you have run out of treasury tags, please submit a requisition form.
Kind regards,
Barbara
* * *
I was just composing a devastating reply, because I absolutely had one and it was absolutely a good use of office time, when my phone buzzed. It was a text from Oliver which, the preview helpfully informed me, began with the wordsBad news.
Oh fuck. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.
Without my telling it to, my brain started filling in a hundred different ways that sentence could end. And it probably said something about what a messed-up place I was in Oliver-wise that it went straight to “We’re breaking up” rather than “My grandma’s died” or “I have syphilis.”
He was though, wasn’t he? I’d been a total maniac last night. He’d had to rescue me from reporters and then cuddle me until I went to sleep like I was a highly strung puppy. And in the morning, I’d woken up sprawled all over him, and made a huge fuss about him leaving, which had obviously been because I was still half-asleep and not thinking straight, but given how sleep-halved and not-straight-thinking I’d been, I remembered making some pretty forceful arguments. After all that,Iwanted to break up with me, and Iwasme.
In the end I did the mature thing: put my phone in my drawer without reading the message and went for coffee. Under normal circumstances, I would never have been relieved to see Rhys Jones Bowen doing anything, but the fact he was already installed at the coffee machine meant that this whole operation was going to take about three times longer than it would have otherwise, and that was exactly what I needed.
“Thank goodness you’re here, Luc,” he exclaimed. “I can never remember. Is it water in the front and coffee in the back, or the other way round?”
“Coffee goes in the little basket that’s got leftover coffee in it. And the water goes in the bit at the back that’s already half-full of water.”
“Ah, you see, that’s what I was thinking. But you know when you get one of those things and you always get it the wrong way round, and then even when you get it right, you trip yourself and do it the other way anyway.”
I was about to say “no” in my most withering tone but actually, thatwaskind of a thing. I got it myself with the number ofm’s inaccommodation. And the number ofc’s for that matter. Besides, Oliver would have disapproved. Oliver who’d just sent me a text saying he had bad news, which I was going to have to look at some point, and deal with, and probably be hurt by and—shit, what was the point of a displacement activity if it didn’t displace anything.
“I know what you mean,” I said. And slid into a useful waiting position, while Rhys Jones Bowen navigated the intricacies of the, to be fair, somewhat complicated coffee machine.
“Oh bother.” He knocked the back of his hand against the steamer nozzle. “I always forget that’s there. It’s going to blister now, and that’s my typing hand as well.”
I stifled a sigh. “Why don’t you go and see Alex for some aloe vera. I’ll finish up here and leave your coffee on the desk.”
There was a bewildered pause.
