Page 75 of Husband Material
“Thanks. I’d love to tell you I was planning something naughty for the wedding but, actually, I just haven’t done any laundry for a while.”
“I’ll admit,” he said, “that was my first assumption.”
Damn.That was the problem with the relationship lasting. You got to know each other too well.
“Whether a product of necessity or design”—Oliver was still looking—“they remain very much appreciated.”
He drew me into a hug. Mostly a hug. Sort of a grown-up hug, one of his hands sliding down to continue his appreciation of my underwear. Such as it was. He was mostly dressed, having shed only his jacket, which meant he was business casual and I was rent-boy chic. So that was a mood. Not necessarily a bad mood, but a very specific one, and one I’d have been uncomfortable with had it been anyone but Oliver.
“You are quite cold,” he said, giving me a little a rub. Of the your-arms-and-shoulders-are-chilly variety. Not of the fun variety.
Trust Oliver to care more about my well-being than my arse.
I shrugged. “I’ll be okay. I mean…you can always warm me up.”
Unfortunately, Oliver was still fixated on making sure I didn’t die of a chill like a Victorian spinster. “Shall I run you a bath?”
The thing was, I didn’t need Oliver to run me a bath. I was perfectly capable of running one for myself. But.… It was nice, wasn’t it? To be taken care of. “I guess…that’d be lovely.”
He drew the quilt from the bed and wrapped it round me—which shifted the vibe from sexy boy slut to starving urchin rescued by kindly gentleman—before disappearing into the en suite. From within came the sound of Oliver’s shoes moving efficiently on tiles, along with the heavy gurgling of early-twentieth-century pipework. Eventually I drifted through, where I was largely unsurprised to discover that even the substandard rooms in Lettice Manor came equipped with the kind of bath that Roman senators would fuck their boyfriends in.
“Wow,” I said, peering through the steam at Oliver. “You must really love me.”
Oliver peered back, his normally austere hair gone curly in the heat. “Well, I do. But have I done something to make it particularly obvious?”
“Just that you’ve run this whole bath for me,” I told him, “and you haven’t once mentioned what a horrible waste of water it is.”
“Well… Itisa horrible waste of water, but in the overall scheme of things I think you can permit yourself one bath. Besides”—he gave me a smile that said Mean Oliver hadn’t quite left the building—“I think you’re probably owed a few.”
“Are you saying I don’t wash?” I protested.
“I’m saying that between your unwillingness to do dishes and youroccasionalfailure to be arsed with a shower, you’ve probablyshrunk your water footprint enough to be indulgent just this once.”
I de-quilted and de-pantsed and descended down the marble steps into the steamy, bubbly, lightly scented water. “I wash. Both myself and dishes.” I paused. “Not simultaneously. Although, thinking about it, that wouldreallycut my water footprint.”
“You’re right,” Oliver conceded. “I’ve maligned you unjustly. I suppose I’m still traumatised by that time you left a plate in the living room for a week.”
“So did you.”
“It was your plate.” He folded his arms. “And I was waiting to see if you’d notice.”
“It wasn’t a messy plate. It’d only had a sandwich on it.”
“Even so. Plates belong in the kitchen. In the cupboards. Not in the living room.”
I stretched out in the water, floating slightly—which frankly felt weird. Most baths I couldn’t even straighten my legs in. “Is this what being married to you is going to be like?”
“It’s whatI’mlike.” There was an unexpectedly defensive note in his voice. “So it may well be?”
Mostly, I’d been teasing, and I’d thought he was to begin with, but somewhere down the line we’d snagged on the brambles of an old argument. “I’m sorry about the plate,” I said. “I’d genuinely kind of…stopped seeing it. But I haven’t done it again. And, you know, you can always say: ‘Luc, pick up your shit.’ Or rather”—I did my best Oliver, which was nowhere near as good as the real thing—“‘Lucien, please rationalise your paraphernalia.’”
His lips twitched. “I do not sound like that.”
“You sound a bit like that. Also, I’m still upset you said I never shower.”
“I didn’t say you never showered. I just pointed out that sometimes you skip a day.”
“Everybody skips a day,” I insisted. “It’s healthy. For natural oils and things. And it’s not like I smell—oh my God, do I smell? You’d tell me if I smelled, right? Except you didn’t tell me about that plate.”
