Page 95 of Husband Material
Crossing the room, he pulled me into his arms and we hugged for an embarrassingly long time. “I missed you,” he whispered.
“I missed you too,” I whispered back. “And I’m so sorry things are shit for you.”
He pressed his face against my neck. “I-I can’t think about it anymore. At least not right now.”
“You don’t have to,” I told him. “We can do…whatever.”
“Would it”—his voice wavered—“resurrect your belief that I’m the most boring man in the universe if I said I wanted to go to bed?”
“Well, I had got us tickets to Alton Towers, but I can move them to another day.”
This time he did laugh, although it had an edge ofmy dad’s still deadto it. So I took his hand and led him through the bedroom.
“Also,” I added. “The advantage of me practically living at your place is that my sheets have barely been slept in.”
He shrugged off his jacket and flopped otherwise fully clothed onto the bed. “At the moment, Lucien, all I care about is being with you.”
Which was convenient because, while there weren’t many things I was confident I could do well, being me was one of them.
I think if I’d let him, Oliver would have passed out where he’d fallen. But because I knew from experience that waking up in your clothes from the night before felt awful, I half coaxed, half bullied him undressed. Then I slid into bed beside him and pulled the duvet over us both.
We lay there for a little while, with me desperately trying to think of something consoling to say that wasn’t just…shit. LikeIt’ll be okayorEverything happens for a reasonorHe was a cock anyway.So, finally, I went with “I love you,” because it was true and safe and wouldn’t make him think about the thing he didn’t want to think about. He murmured my name and pressed in close, his face a sharp-angled shadow in the darkness of the room.
Yeah. Definitely not a words situation.
Carefully I pushed back the tousled waves of his hair, letting my fingers move in long strokes through the strands. He gaveanother little murmur, half-sad, half-soothed, and tilted his head towards me on the pillow.
Very gently, I kissed him. Not a hello-you kiss or a do-me-now kiss. But the sort of kiss that speaks for you. A kiss to draw us together. To show I was there. To promise I always would be, if he’d let me.
And afterwards, Oliver settled into my arms as if he belonged there, and we stayed that way until morning.
IF THERE WAS EVER EVIDENCEthat Oliver was in a bad way, it was that not only was he still asleep when I woke up, but he was still asleep when I got bored of lying in bed—which I thought was basically impossible. Easing myself out from under the duvet as quietly as I could so I wouldn’t disturb him, I surreptitiously dressed and sort of, somehow, found myself standing there, looking at him. Like that bit in a country song where the singer is all “Honey, I love you, but something inside me means I gotta go and do a man thing and I hope when I come back you and little Ellie May will be waiting for me.” And then I’d die in the second-to-last verse and the last verse would be me going, “Dagnabbit, why did I have to do a man thing instead of staying at home with my wife and little Ellie May.”
“Are you staring at me, Lucien?” asked Oliver drowsily. “Are you watching me sleep?”
Oh, fuck.“Only technically. I was mostly thinking, ‘Gosh, I wish I could do something to make Oliver feel better.’ And you just happened to be in my line of sight. And you just happened to be asleep.”
Oliver shifted the pillows into a more ergonomic position. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do, but thank you for offering.”
“I’ll…I’ll leave you to not be stared at.”
He made a vaguely grateful noise and rolled over, and I slipped out, closing the door behind me. Which meant instead of standing by the bed not really knowing what to do with myself, I was standing in my flat not really knowing what to do with myself. So, in the absence of a big green button labelledPress here to fix boyfriend, I cleaned.
It didn’t bring me quite the same sense of virtuous peace that it brought Oliver, but it was nice to know that when he woke up, he would be in a space that resembled a human dwelling, and not a combination laundry basket/litter bin.
When I was done, he still wasn’t up, partly because the job was a lot smaller than it had been last time I’d attempted a major flat tidy and partly because see above re: bad way. It was, however, getting to the point that I thought he might want to eat something, but looking in my fridge, I found there was nothing in it that wasn’t six months past its use-by date, an animal product, or in an embarrassingly large number of cases, both.
There was a jar of gherkins—because fridges spontaneously generate gherkins even when nobody buys them—except I didn’t think materialising at Oliver’s bedside saying,Hello, darling, I know your father’s died and you’re having a lot of complicated emotions, but I’ve brought you a wallywas quite the supportive and/or romantic gesture he needed quite then.
Then I had a genius idea. I would make him French toast. To show that this was a relationship where there was, like, space for each of us to be the French toaster or the French toastee. Then I remembered that there were two tiny flaws in that plan: the first being that I was a godawful cook, and the second being that the main ingredients of French toast were milk and eggs.
But you know what? Fuck it. It was the thought that counted, and there were vegan versions of everything these days. Leaving Oliver a note saying,Gone shopping, have notrun away to be cowboy, back soon, I headed out into the crisp November noon.
The recipe I’d hastily Googled while heading downstairs to the street required chia seeds, agave nectar, and almond milk, and I had no idea where I’d get any of those. Fortunately, I lived in one of those bits of London where you couldn’t walk twenty paces without tripping over a wholefood store or an artisanal cheese stand so I was pretty confident I’d be able to source them without too much trouble. Besides, they sold half this stuff in Tesco. Part of me was a bit concerned that almond milk was supposed to be an ethical no-no, although I couldn’t remember why or if I was getting it mixed up with palm oil, but I decided that from Oliver’s perspective at least it was preferable to cow.
In the end the ingredient I had most trouble with was “sturdy bread” because I had no idea what that meant and didn’t want my French toast to fall apart in the pan. But for some reason when you went up to somebody in a shop and said, “How sturdy is your bread?” they thought you were taking the piss. The internet told me I should be using brioche, but it also told me that brioche wasn’t vegan unless you got a specific brand, and that brand only made burger buns. In the end I went for sourdough on the grounds that if a bread that you could use to subdue an intruder in an emergency wasn’t “sturdy” enough, nothing was.
Back at the flat, I took the extremely sensible and grown-up precaution of opening all the windows and taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm. And then I got to it. To my joy, the first step of the recipe was basically “stick everything except the bread in a bowl and stick the bowl in the fridge,” and I could definitely do that. I mean, yes, I probably put in too much cinnamon because I dropped the spoon, but then cinnamon was one of those ingredients you could never have too much of. Like, y’know, ginger or garlic. Oh God, I’d inherited my mum’s cooking genes, hadn’t I?
