Chapter 4 #2
Oh God, I was the worst person in the world.
I’d run out on my deeply considerate partner at three a.m. because I was worried about a dog, and then sent him a cryptic text over an hour later implying that something bad was happening to two people he cared about.
We’d established a while back that marriage wasn’t on the cards for us, but at this rate Oliver was going to be downgrading me from fuck to kill.
And I couldn’t entirely say I didn’t deserve it.
I was just trying to compose a reassuring text that wasn’t going to make him plough into a lamppost in frustration when I heard rapid, slightly familiar footsteps approaching down the hallway.
And then a tousled, pale-faced Oliver Blackwood with misaligned shirt buttons was in the room.
And I was completely fucked. Or possibly completely killed.
“Oliver, I’m…” I started at the same time he said “Lucien, what’s wrong?”
“Well.” I gazed up at him, trying to compose a reassuring sentence that wasn’t going to make him plough into a lamppost in frustration. “Nothing’s wrong, really?”
“You’re at the hospital.”
“Circumstantially. Bridge is having a baby. That’s where people have babies. I mean, a lot of people. Not everyone, obviously. And those choices are completely valid.”
Oliver gazed back at me, his eyes tired, and at their coolest, most washed-out shade of grey.
“While I appreciate this defence of the autonomy of pregnant people, it doesn’t explain…
anything. Why did you sneak out without waking me up?
Why is Bridget at a hospital that isn’t the one she planned to go to?
Why—” He paused, frowning. Shit, he was putting the pieces together.
He knew me too well. “Let me guess: You had a three a.m. crisis about the fact we’re getting a dog in approximately eight hours.
You instinctively called Bridget, forgetting in your panic that she was heavily pregnant, and by the time you tried to course correct, she was already on the way to meet you.
Probably on the Millennium Bridge because Bridget thinks doing something once makes it a tradition. ”
There was a long silence as I tried to compose a way of saying Yeah, basically that wasn’t going to make him plough into a lamppost in frustration.
“Okay,” said Priya, sort-of-not-quite saving me. “That was almost romantic. In a fucked-up way.”
Even a drive across London couldn’t blunt Oliver’s instinctive politeness. Which meant he gave a deeply sincere “Hello, Priya, Andi. I’m sorry you’ve been so inconvenienced” before turning back to me and adding, “I think we might need to have a conversation.”
Normally, I was a big fan of Stern Oliver. Normally, though, I wasn’t in a hospital waiting room with my most sarcastic friend and the younger of her two girlfriends.
“Some-one’s in trou-ble,” sang my most sarcastic friend.
“I’m not in trouble,” I retorted. “We’re going to have an adult discussion about my flaws.”
Priya gave me a look of performative anticipation. “Go on then.”
“Somewhere else,” Oliver said firmly, before escorting me in a totally non-demeaning way out into the corridor.
We wandered a bit, not saying very much, looking for a good confront Luc with his failings spot and eventually settling on a pair of seats bolted to the wall near a very fake potted plant.
I stared at my feet.
“You’re sure Bridget’s all right?” Oliver asked.
“Yeah. She went a little bit into labour but”—I arse-pulled some unconvincing confidence—“you know it’s not like in the movies, where it’s ‘Whoosh, scream, woowoowoo, pant, baby.’”
“Why, Lucien. I had no idea you were such an expert.” It was Oliver’s dryest voice.
Something stronger than gravity was pulling me down into my seat. Probably shame. “I really do think she’s okay. We would have heard if she wasn’t.”
“I,” began Oliver, squeezing the bridge of his nose, “I really don’t know what to say.”
“That I’m a terrible person? That I should go to my room and think about what I’ve done?”
“Since we share the same room, Lucien, I think that would just be annoying.”
“I’m really sorry?” I tried.
“There’s no need to apologise.” He paused. “Well, Tom might feel differently. Bridget is pathologically incapable of blaming you for anything.”
“Look,” I blurted out. It wasn’t a particularly apology-compatible blurt, if I was honest. “She’s really hard to say no to.”
Oliver turned his head towards me, and to my immense relief it was in a reassuring way, not in a Get your fucking shit together, you utter fuckup way. “I’m aware of that. Although for what it’s worth, one can learn to do it.”
“You can. I can barely say no to those people who call up and ask if you want to change mobile providers.”
On anybody else, his smile would have been condescending.
I hoped I’d never get bored of Oliver’s look of indulgent affection because if I did, I’d be in real trouble.
It was the one he needed most often. “Bridget is an adult woman and can look after herself. But I do wish you’d talked to me instead. ”
“She’s my best friend,” I replied instinctively.
“And…” he prompted.
“And…and”—the words tumbled out in a horrible torrent of inconvenient facts—“I was afraid that if I brought up the dog thing again, you’d be all, ‘Lucien, I thought you’d got over being a selfish insecure narcissist, but clearly you’re just as bad as you were five years ago. I’m dumping you.’”
Oliver’s lips twitched. “That does sound like something I’d say.”
“You say it in my head all the time.”
“As a barrister, I can confidently inform you that I am not legally liable for the words or actions of the version of me that lives in your head.”
“I know.” By this point I’d slid so far down the seat that my shoulders were in my bum divot. “But sometimes he seems so much realer than you. Because you’re, you know, so great and everything.”
“Lucien, you’ve been with me long enough, and seen me through so much, you must know that isn’t true.”
Giving up on the seat as a bad job, I collapsed into a not-exactly-kneeling position in front of him. “You are so great and everything.”
“And you make me happy. And you will continue to make me happy, whether or not we get a dog, and no matter how many times you wake me up to tell me you’re not sure about getting a dog.”
“I’m really not sure about getting a dog.”
“Yes.” His fingers lightly pushed the hair back from my brow. “I gathered that when I woke up without you.”
“People who make their best friends get cabs to the Millennium Bridge at three in the morning on a semi-regular basis shouldn’t have dogs.”
“Those feel like non-overlapping magisteria.”
For a moment I could only stare at him. “Stop trying to turn me on in a hospital.”
He laughed. “You know as well as I do that managing your neuroses and looking after a pet are different things.”
“Are they, though? What if I pass my neuroses onto the dog? What if my neuroses stop me taking care of the dog? What if—”
“You won’t, they won’t, and there’s two of us so we’ll deal.”
“It’s not fair,” I muttered, glaring up at him, “when you make things sound simple and reasonable.”
“Then,” he went on, “you’re not going to like what I have to say next. Which is, if you don’t want a dog, we don’t have to get one.”
I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. “But if we can’t get a dog, then… Then we can’t get a dog.”
“Yes,” agreed Oliver. “That is indeed what ‘not getting a dog’ means.”
“No, but I mean…” Normally Oliver was much better with euphemism. “Like it would mean we’d never have a dog. And we’ve been having the ‘Do we see a dog in our future?’ conversation for a while now.”
At last, Oliver cracked my ingenious code. “I know we said that getting a dog would be a good way to test how ready we were for—”
“A dog,” I interrupted.
“Exactly. But even if we’re not in a…dog-adopting space now, that doesn’t mean we never will be.”
He’d meant this in a reassuring way, but it was actually one of the last things I needed to hear.
“Okay, but…what if it does? I know you want…dogs. And you should have dogs. You’d be an amazing…
dog owner. And I don’t want you to look back on our life together and be all, ‘I wish I’d been with somebody who I could have owned a dog with. ’”
“I won’t,” replied Oliver with a certainty you could build a world around. And I wanted so badly to build a world around it.
“You can’t promise that.”
“I think you’ll find I can.”
This was getting messy and sticky and uncomfortable in all the ways I didn’t like. “Are you sure? Because it’s looking a lot like I’m going to keep spiralling into the wrecked pile of unwashed pants I used to be every time we try to do something, you know, challenging or grown up.”
“Lucien.” Oliver saying Lucien in his serious voice made my internal organs want to run away, leaving my skin behind as a distraction.
I blinked up at him in growing dismay. “What?”
“I would very much like it if you stopped pretending that the man I fell in love with is a different person from the man who is currently having a…dog-related breakdown in St. Thomas’s Hospital.”
“He’s not a different person,” I demi-wailed. “That’s what I’m saying. I can feel myself slipping back—”
“I would also like it if you wouldn’t keep pretending you’d ever stopped being him. I liked him.”
“But he sucked. He was a complete mess.”
“And so was I. And I still am. And yet here we are.”
Okay, this was getting insulting. “Wait, are you saying I haven’t changed at all?”
“Of course you’ve changed,” he murmured, stroking my hair in earnest. “Everyone changes. But that doesn’t mean you’ll never react to an old fear or remake an old mistake.”
“And,” I asked, “you really think I’ll be an okay…dog owner?”
“Yes,” said Oliver, answering a different question entirely, “I think you’ll be a wonderful dog owner.”
“Even though I’ve had really bad role models, dog-owning-wise? Like, what if we get a dog and then I bail on it the way my dad bailed on…his dog?”
“That won’t happen,” said Oliver, so firmly it was almost a prophecy.
“But what if—”
“After all these years,” he went on, “I am very, very used to your flaws. You can be flaky, you can be prone to panic, you can be a little self-absorbed at times…”
“Great pep talk,” I told him.
“But you have never been somebody who abandons people.”
I gave a distressed bleat.
“Abandons dogs,” Oliver corrected himself obligingly. “You don’t have it in you.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe him so much.
Because Bridge had been right. This wasn’t about not wanting a dog.
I definitely wanted a dog. Possibly more than one dog.
I wanted to grow old with Oliver Blackwood and have dogs with him, and everything I’d said about looking back and regretting hadn’t only been about Oliver.
Because if we didn’t get a dog, if I couldn’t even take the first step towards building the life and the family that I’d sort of never quite dared to hope for, then I could say with one hundred percent certainty that I would turn around in old age and say to myself, “Well, you fucked that up, didn’t you, you absolute bellend. ”
So I took a deep breath, put on my waders, and tromped through my own bullshit until, on the other side, I was hugging Oliver way too tightly.
And we stayed like that, hugging way too tightly, until a kindly nurse laid a hand on my shoulder and asked Oliver if I was all right and if there was anything he could do for us.
“It’s okay,” I sniffled, not wanting this NHS professional to think either of us had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. “We’re just getting a dog.”