Page 31 of Husband Material
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “You clearly have more jewellery-box-snapping practice than I do. Why do you have jewellery-box-snapping practice?”
He gave a little cough. “I might have rehearsed in the mirror a couple of times. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Oh no.” I took his hand and gently kissed it better. “I’m the worst.”
“I should have known better than to trust you with a dangerous jewellery box.”
“Not going to lie.” I kissed him again. “That was a bad call. We both should have known better.”
The kissing drifted from hands to mouths and ended with Oliver pressed against the wall and me pressed against Oliver as seconds…minutes…slipped past in a haze of heat and homecoming and the pleasure of being together again.
Eventually Oliver—looking nicely dishevelled in an otherwise pristine tux—drew back. “Under normal circumstances, I’d be delighted to take this to its logical conclusion—”
“Bylogical conclusion,” I asked, “do you meansex in the hall?”
“Maybe. But, unfortunately, I left some candles burning upstairs and it’s probably best not to leave them unattended for too long.”
I stared at him. “You did candles as well?”
“It’s been a very long week without you.”
This was not making sex in the hallway any less appealing. On the other hand, Oliver had gone to a lot of trouble, and burning his house down would have been a crappy way to thank him. I gestured at the jewellery box. “I think you’re maybe supposed to put it on me?”
In the movie, Richard Gere had stood behind Julia Roberts, gazing passionately into a mirror as he fastened the delicate chain around her equally delicate neck. Oliver had to kind of…stretch a piece of elastic over my face, nearly dragging one of my ears off.
“I feel very sexy and desirable right now,” I said.
Oliver squinted anxiously at me. “Can you breathe? I think it was designed for children.”
“Yeah”—I clawed at my throat—“it’s digging, but it’s not choking.”
“Oh, good. Because unnegotiated choking was not what I had planned for this evening.”
“I’d be relieved to hear that,” I told him, “but now I want to know when we’re going to do the negotiated choking.”
“Perhaps after the movie.”
“Wait. You got the movie as well?”
He took my hand and started drawing me upstairs. “Yes, and I moved the television upstairs. In my head, it was all very romantic.”
“It is very romantic,” I admitted. “It’s probably one of the most romantic things anyone has ever done for me. But you know, like, feelings make me self-conscious. And being self-conscious makes me defensive. And when I’m defensive, I’m sarcastic.”
“And I love you anyway, Lucien.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered. “I love you too.”
Despite my best efforts with my socks and sex toys, Oliver kept the bedroom immaculate. And it was still immaculate. Only now it was immaculate with the downstairs TV balanced on the chest of drawers, candles arranged artfully on every spare surface and—with typically Oliverian attention to detail—new bed linen in shades of red and gold. And the worst thing was, I couldn’t even find anything glib to say.
“The thing,” Oliver began, “aboutPretty Womanis that when people first watch it, they either love it or hate it. If they love it, they will always—”
“Oh, shut up, Oliver.”
I pushed him down on the bed and straddled him. For a moment, I could only look at this ridiculous, kind, and beautiful man who made ridiculous, kind, and beautiful gestures and was ridiculously, beautifully mine. And he was looking right back at me, his eyes grey velvet in the soft light, the severe lines of his face that couldn’t—in moments like these—quite hide how vulnerablehe got when he knew he’d been, frankly, extra and was expecting to be rejected or laughed at for it. Leaning down, I kissed him again, the way you only kiss someone when they’ve filled the room with candles for you.
We were definitely, definitely going to watchPretty Woman.
But maybe not for a while.
