Page 76 of Husband Material
He undid the top button of his shirt. “Yes, I’d tell you if you smelled, which you don’t. I was trying to make a lighthearted reference to the fact that you’re sometimes adorably…” That wasn’t good pause. “Uninterested in routine.”
“Who’s interested in routine? It’s routine. The clue is in the name.” I splashed water in his direction, which made him dance his shoes out of the way. “Also, are you just going to stand there criticising my personal habits while I have a bath?”
That made him pinken slightly. “Of course not. I’ll…I’ll leave you to it.”
“I more sort of meant you could join me if you want to.”
He hesitated, with that anxious, half-hopeful look in his eyes he sometimes got around dessert.
“This thing is huge,” I added. “How many huge-bath opportunities are we going to get in our lives?”
“Probably several, if we wanted them?”
“Come on, Oliver. I’m lonely and…y’know…wet.”
“Lucien, I—”
“It’ll save water,” I interrupted. “Ethics demand that you get in the bath with me.”
“It’s just…” He hesitated again. “On the subject of routines, I haven’t been to the gym recently and, well, the lighting in here is quite harsh.”
Ah. Between this and the plate, I wasn’t winning any sensitivity awards this year. The thing was, Oliver had been in therapy for about eighteen months now, and while it had really helped him in some ways, it was a steps-forward, steps-back situation. Like, he’d got to the point where he was no longer obsessively going to thegym every day and treating food like the enemy, but worrying less about his body ninety percent of the time had made him more self-conscious the other ten percent. I mean, he was still far and away the fittest person I’d ever seen in real life, but the problem with giving yourself an eating disorder in pursuit of an impossible beauty standard was that if you got rid of one, you got rid of the other.
“Oliver,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything you’re not comfortable with. But you’re the most amazing, gorgeous, sexy man I have ever been allowed to do depraved things to. And I don’t think that’s ever going to change. Even when we’re married and we’ve both stopped trying and you’re, like, seventy-five with nose hair.”
He looked faintly appalled. “I will never have nose hair.”
“Well, I’d be into you, even if you did. Now come on”—I tried to signal this is a safe, if aquatic space—“get in the bath.”
Slipping off his shoes and socks, he padded over and crouched down at the top of the steps. “I do know you’re not judging me. I just find it very hard not to judge myself.”
I tried to be sensitive to Oliver’s body image issues, I really did. But, at the end of the day, he looked like him and I looked like me, and sometimes it was hard to remember that when he was being down on himself, he wasn’t being down on me by association. Still—and this was definitely something I couldn’t have done even a year ago—sometimes when you wanted someone to trust you, you had to trust them first. So I stood, letting the water stream off me like a shit Venus, waded over and kissed him, a hand catching the collar of his shirt, and my lips hard and urgent on his.
Trying to say things that I didn’t know how to say. Asking him to believe that I loved him and I wanted him and that he’d never be anything but beautiful to me.
When I finally let him go, he was tousled and blushing and—“Lucien, now I’m drenched.”
“Then,” I said, “you might as well be in the bath.”
I gave him what I intended to be a playful tug on the arm, but I hadn’t quite factored in things like gravity and balance and wet marble. Oliver had just enough time for a flail and a “What the—” before we tumbled backwards into the bath with an enormous splash.
Thankfully, it was deep enough and wide enough that we didn’t die.
Oliver resurfaced in a flurry of wet fabric and bubbles. Thankfully he was laughing rather than glowering, complaining, or pointing out quite how close he’d come to cracking his head open. “That was very…very you, Lucien.”
“It was an accident.”
“Exactly.”
I took a moment to appreciate Oliver in a near-transparent white shirt clinging to all the bits of his body that I, coincidentally, liked clinging to. “For the record. This”—I made a kind of rectangle that was meant to encompass all of him—“is really working for me.”
“Thank you.” He looked flustered. “It’s, um. It’s actually quite uncomfortable.”
“There’s a solution to that.”
He still looked flustered. “Kiss me again first.”
In my head, I mermaided into his arms, full of seduction and mystery. But I was very much a land-based organism. So I sort of half stumbled, half waded forward, nearly knocking him over again, and finally managed to smack my lips onto his.
