Page 12 of Husband Material
“Really?” he asked. “I won’t care in the slightest.”
And then he kissed me and I stopped caring too. Because whatever else was going on—in spite of Miles and JoJo Ryan, and Bridge’s wedding, and the mess of my past and the mess I was probably going to make of my future—Oliver was mine, and I was his, and I was kind of completely, embarrassingly, disgustingly in love with him. Especially when he knew exactly how to touch me, rough and tender and careful and endlessly…Oliver. When he knew how to make me forget my uncertainties and my self-consciousness so that I wasn’t afraid to cling to him like I needed to cling and let him cling to me the way he needed to cling back. And tell him how wonderful he was, how happy he made me. All the other things I was just beginning to find words for.
And not even sayI told you sowhen we totally wrecked the table.
FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OFdays I back-and-forthed on whether I wanted to go to Miles’s wedding or not. The con column was looking pretty long because it would be a faff, Oliver would have an unbelievably shitty evening on account of not knowing anybody, and, oh yes, there was that tiny, insignificant detail that showing up at all would be a tacit admission that I was totes chill with that one time Miles completely fucked me over.
But somehow, that didn’t stop me secretly wanting to go.
Because things were good. I was—not that I’d ever admit it to anybody at CRAPP—actually enjoying my job. My relationship with Oliver was as strong as it had ever been, although it wasn’t like two years in with Miles I’d been thinking to myself,Wow, this guy’s going to hurt me worse than any human being has ever hurt me in my life.And, God, what was my brain doing? Why was it comparing the selfish prick I’d dated nearly a decade ago with the objectively better man I was seeing right now?
I mean, Oliver was objectively better, wasn’t he? Our relationship was objectively better. We were older and more mature and more sensible and… Wait. Were we just boring? Safe and predictable and full of table lamps. Of course, given recent events, we were getting to the point of having more lamps than tables. Whichdefinitely wasn’t boring. After all, if we were still breaking the furniture, we were doing something right.
Okay. This was exactly why I needed to go to the wedding. I need to show my ex-boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend’s fiancé I’d met once, and a bunch of strangers that I was free and happy and over it and moving on with my new, infinitely better boyfriend. And if I did that well enough, maybe my own brain would believe me.
Until then, though, I needed to get (a) a grip and (b) back in the moment. Especially because Oliver and I were going out this evening on a proper grown-up, we-are-in-a-relationship date. We were doing—and it was kind of hard to say this with a straight face—dinner and a show. He’d booked us a table at this place called Stem & Glory, which was apparently one of the best vegan restaurants in London, and I wasslowlycoming to the conclusion that the best vegan restaurants in the city really were nicer places to eat than an average restaurant that would just serve me a piece of dead cow. Then afterwards…well, that had been complicated. Oliver had wanted to seeDeath of a Salesmanat the Young Vic, but I’d told him that if I was going to a vegan restaurant for him, he had to go toPretty Woman: The Musicalfor me. And honestly, I was kind of psyched about it.
Well, psyched-ish. It had been quite a long day all told because the photocopier had jammed and then Alex had insisted on trying to fix it and got his hand stuck somewhere inside, and Barbara Clench had refused to let me get an engineer to come and extract him because she was concerned that if he was seen interfering with the machine, it would invalidate the warranty. Not that there was much chance of our keeping the incident secret anyway, since Rhys Jones Bowen had been livestreaming the whole time and soliciting possible solutions from his ever-growing army of followers. OrRhystocratsas they’d apparently taken to calling themselves.
Anyway, I was just leaving when my phone rang. It wasBridget’s number, but that was the only clue I had that it was actually her because for a long time she had trouble getting words out. Which was the first sign that something was seriously wrong. Because sure, Bridge lived from disaster to disaster, but she dealt with that by loudly declaring how ruined everything was while at the same time calmly fixing the actual problem. It was a slightly peculiar process but seemed to work for her. When she got quiet, though, that meant she was genuinely stuck and was falling back on my preferred strategy: pretending the problem didn’t exist in the hope that it would go away.
“Bridge?” I asked into the silence. “Bridge, what’s going on?”
“It’s…” The voice was her, but she sounded choked up. “It’s Tom.”
Shit.There were two ways this could go, and neither was good. “Is he okay?”
“Probably.” That was her angry voice. So this was a Tom’s-done-something call, not a something’s-happened-to-Tom call. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
My phone buzzed and a text came in from Bridget. It was a photograph. A photograph of Tom looking furtive with his arm around a pretty young woman. A pretty young woman who wasn’t Bridget. For which there must have been a million reasonable explanations that a person who hadn’t spent most of his adult life developing deep-seated trust issues could have articulated. Unfortunately, Bridget had called me.
“Crap, Bridge,” I said finally. The trick here was to walk the line between being supportive and encouraging her to blow up her own wedding. And I could do that. I could do that. I just had to be nice and as noncommittal as possible and ignore the part of my brain that was screaming,She’s doomed, and so are you. Meeting Miles was a sign, and everything you think you can count on is wrong. “I’m so sorry. Have you…” What would anemotionally mature and undamaged person do? “Have you talked to him about it?”
There was a burbling sound from the other end of the line that eventually resolved into “I can’t get hold of him.”
On its own, that wasn’t unusual. Tom’s job often required him to go quiet for a couple of days, sometimes longer. But it wasn’t exactly reassuring. Or at least I wasn’t reassured, and I didn’t think Bridge would be either. I tried to stick with neutral questions. “How did you get the picture?”
“Liz saw them.”
If it had been any of Bridge’s other friends it might have been less damning, because a lot of them were like, well, me. The type of people who jumped from fearing the worst to deciding that the worst had definitely happened without even needing a run-up. But Liz was a legit vicar, which meant giving people the benefit of the doubt was basically in her job description. And since she was actually officiating at the wedding, it didn’t seem likely she’d be maliciously sabotaging it. “Did she say anything else?”
“Just that they were in a café together and they looked…looked close.”
There were still, surely, other ways to interpret an about-to-be-married man with his phone switched off carrying on in a café with a mysterious hot lady who wasn’t his fiancée. I just couldn’t think of any right at that second. “Do you need me to come over?”
“Don’t you”—Bridge gave a sort of noble hiccough—“aren’t you going out with Oliver tonight?”
Yes. Yes, I was. And it was going to be super romantic and special and all the things that fancy date nights with your long-term partner were supposed to be. “This is more important.”
And the worst—or, from another perspective, the best—of it was that I wasn’t lying. Bridge would never have asked meto cancel, but she also didn’t have to. She’d been there for me through a metric butt load of crises down the years—through Miles, through all the self-destructive shit I’d pulled after, through nearly getting fired, and through everything with Oliver—so I kind of owed her one. Hell, I owed her twenty. And even if I hadn’t, I’d still have been there for her because that’s what friends were meant to do and I’d spent way too long not doing it. “I’ll be right round,” I told her.
She made a sad appreciative noise and, after I’d tried to reassure her that everything was going to be okay in six different ways, each slightly less plausible than the last, hung up.
The next bit was going to be awkward. Well, maybe not that awkward. Because Oliver would understand. Even if we did have a table booked and tickets we’d bought months ago.Oh, shit.It was going to be awkward, wasn’t it?
And thank you, life, for manoeuvring me into a situation where I’d have to let down either my best friend or my boyfriend. It was like whatever I did, no matter how hard I tried, the universe wanted me to know that, on some level, I was a crappy person. On this occasion, my crapness manifested partly in not wanting to tell Oliver to his face—or even to his voice—that I was ditching him to hang out with a sad bride. I was two-thirds of the way through my fourth draft of my first text when I realised that I was living down to the universe’s expectations of me. And, more importantly, not living up to Oliver’s. Fuck. That was the problem with dating a good person. They got their ethics all over you.
So I gritted my teeth and called Oliver.
