Chapter 11
On Saturday, I schlumped downstairs in my schlumping boxers, only to discover that Oliver was up, dressed and ready, with Spud wriggling in his harness.
“Shit,” I said. “Is it Big Walk Day already?”
Oliver glanced up with a playful smirk. “No, I’m just introducing our puppy to the leather scene.”
“Hey. Spud is far too young for that, even in dog years.”
“Ruff,” said Spud. Oliver, being Oliver, had been getting Spud used to the harness for the best part of a week, which unfortunately meant he was so comfortable that he thought nothing of zooming around the study, knocking over the wastepaper basket as he went.
“Sorry.” I ran a hand through my even-more-chaotic-than-usual hair. “I just…with everything…I forgot.”
“Lucien, it’s fine.” Oliver gazed at me with that horrible, endlessly understanding sincerity that I knew I’d never take for granted because that would involve believing I deserved it. “If you’re not feeling up to it, we can go another time.”
“What?” I cried. “No. He’s worked super hard for this. He’s communicating his poo needs, he’s started sleeping downstairs, he’s had all his injections, and he was a really good boy during the injections…”
“He was a better boy than you were.”
“I was concerned. Those were big needles. He’s a small dog.”
Oliver gently extricated Spud from the wastepaper basket. “As intelligent as he may be, I don’t think Spud is especially motivated by long-term incentives.”
“But you’ve put his harness on. We’ve spent all week teaching him that means something good, and now you’re going to dash his little canine hopes.”
“True,” Oliver conceded. “I’d rather Spud’s hopes remained undashed, at least while he’s at such a tender age. I can take him by myself if that’s easier.”
“I don’t want to let you down,” I plaintived. “Either of you.”
“It’s Saturday—you’re entitled to a day off, and my emotional well-being is not tied to whether you sit out one of the many walks that now lie in our future.”
“But it’s Spud’s first proper walk. With, like, a park and a real risk of seeing rabbits and other dogs and things. I can’t miss that. That’d be like missing his first birthday or his first word.”
“If Spud has a first word, we’ll have bigger problems than whether you miss it or not.”
Spud had finally decided I was more interesting than the carpet and trotted over to say hello. “I suppose,” I mused, as I bent to ruffle his ears, “he’s had his first word, and it’s ruff.”
“Ruff,” agreed Spud.
“I think”—Oliver fished out the lead and clipped it deftly to the harness—“that’s technically a vocalisation.”
“I think you’re technically a vocalisation,” I told him. Very maturely.
He lifted a brow. “Have you been talking to Colin again?”
“He bugs me when Spud’s pooing.”
“I still think he’s just testing your boundaries.”
“He’s not testing my boundaries,” I protested. “He’s being a little shit.”
“He’s a child.”
“Yeah, and some children are shits. That’s, like, a basic child fact.”
I didn’t like to think Oliver looked sanctimonious, but he was beginning to look sanctimonious. “If you think of him as a shit, he’ll live down to your expectations.”
Internally, I would die on the hill of Next Door’s Kid’s little-shit status.
But it wasn’t an argument I wanted to have with my partner on a Saturday morning in my schlumping pants on what was supposed to be Big Walk Day.
So I just said “I guess” and then “Give me a second” and went upstairs to change.
One pair of slightly less schlumpy pants, a pair of actual trousers, and a marginally better T-shirt later, Oliver, Spud, and I were on our way to the park.
“Morning, Mr. Blackwood,” called Next Door’s Kid cheerily.
“Good morning, Colin,” Oliver called back, turning briefly to wave and then turning back just in time to miss the look of pure, satanic evil that Next Door’s Kid shot me a moment later.
One of the things that had sold us on the house when we were first looking at it was that we were within a street-and-a-half’s distance of a very pretty park.
At the time we hadn’t quite articulated to ourselves what we might want a very pretty park for, other than that it seemed like a good thing to have access to.
I think we’d vaguely assumed it would be nice to go for walks in.
Possibly dog-related walks in, although that was slightly before we’d had the whole Is a dog a thing that is an us thing?
conversation and the increasingly uncoded Is a dog actually a trial run for something more bipedal?
conversation. Of course, in practice we’d never gone for an actual walk in it because as soon as you live in a place, you start blithely ignoring everything that made you want to live in that place to begin with.
So, it felt pretty vindicating to finally be taking our puppy to the park that we’d each secretly dreamed we’d one day take a puppy to.
It was one of those crisp autumn mornings, with a pale blue sky and ducks pissing about on the lake, and Spud was skipping around ecstatically like he’d never been out of doors in his life.
Which, now I thought about it, he mostly hadn’t, unless you counted short training walks and being taken outside to make an entry in the Defecation Chronicle.
Of course, that did mean from his perspective we’d essentially taken him into a massive massive toilet.
In fact, from Spud’s perspective, the whole world was a massive massive toilet.
And, honestly, I could relate.
“Are you all right?” asked Oliver.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just thinking how from Spud’s perspective, the world’s a massive massive toilet.”
“Lucien, I don’t even know where to begin with that.”
“How about telling me how extremely charming and quirky I am.”
“Truly”—Oliver cast his gaze dreamily upwards—“I don’t know how I lived so many years without realising that the one thing I needed to complete me was a man who would tell me that, from our dog’s perspective, the whole world is a massive massive toilet.”
“Okay,” I said. “But it is. And you do.”
He adjusted his grip on Spud’s lead and took my hand. “You’re right. I do.”
“And it is.”
“And,” he admitted reluctantly, “it is.”
“Ruff,” said Spud, affirming the toiletness of the cosmos. Like, verbally. He didn’t demonstrate. Though, of course, my sexy barrister boyfriend had a pocketful of poo bags anyway.
As we strolled along, Spud frolicking joyfully in his massive massive toilet, I tried to enjoy the moment and not think too much about how Next Door’s Kid was a sociopathic master manipulator or how a punk earl was about to destroy my livelihood or how that one guy—that one highly attractive guy jogging towards us right now—was definitely checking Oliver out.
I mean, I didn’t blame him because Oliver was a smokeshow and a bag of chips, especially when he was all relaxed and wearing one of his well-fitted cream jumpers.
Okay, also when he was not at all relaxed and wearing a suit because he had to stop an innocent person going to prison or something.
And also all the other times. Anyway, point was, someone was checking out my boyfriend, and it was extremely cool because my boyfriend wasn’t checking him out back.
Which meant, after all these years, I’d won at gay.
Oliver gave me a curious look, probably because he’d caught me smiling, and while he saw me smiling more than most people, it was never going to be my usual state. “You seem happy.”
Even I knew it was slightly unclassy to boast to your boyfriend that he was so into you he didn’t realise how hot other people found him. So I kind of flailed. “Oh, I just…remembered something.”
“What sort of something?”
“It was back when we were doing that whole dating-but-not-dating-but-dating business.”
“Ah yes.” Oliver smiled. “A time in our lives when we were both behaving extremely sensibly.”
“For verisimilitude,” I reminded him.
He nodded. “Naturally.”
“Right. Well, as part of my extremely sensible and verisimilitudinous behaviour back then, I…” Actually, maybe I should have just told him about Attractive Jogging Guy.
Fuck. “I mean, you were just very casually being the best thing that had ever happened to me, and I couldn’t imagine ever being, like, worth it—”
“Lucien,” he said, in this faintly chiding way that I found oddly romantic because it meant he truly couldn’t imagine thinking as little of me as I used to think of myself.
“Anyway, as well as all the other shit you were pointlessly good at, you turned out to be amazing with Judy’s dogs.”
“Ruff,” said Spud.
“Not you,” I explained. “Different dogs.”
“Mruff.”
“And”—I turned back to my boyfriend—“in that moment I built this whole scenario in my head about how you were going to get a dog with three legs and you’d be walking your dog with three legs in some park and then some guy would come up to you in the park you were in with your dog with three legs and he’d be all, ‘Wow, it’s really nice of you to be looking after a three-legged dog,’ and you’d be like, ‘Yes, I’m just kind of amazing like that. ’”
Even in my head, this had sounded pretty bad. It was way worse in my actual mouth. I was sort of hoping Oliver would do the merciful thing and let me drop it. But he seemed far too amused. “And what do I do,” he asked, “after I tell a complete stranger how amazing I am?”
“Obviously,” I went on helplessly, “he’d be all, ‘I find that very sexy, let’s bang,’ and you’d bail on me and get with Three-Leg-Dog-Park-Kindness-Is-Sexy Guy and you’d have this great life while I was found dead under a pile of empty pizza boxes.”
Somehow Oliver contrived to look meltingly affectionate while also making it clear I was talking absolute bollocks. “I can see why this was making you so happy,” he said. “You always did love pizza.”
“It’s not about the pizza.” Two seconds ago, I’d been desperate to talk about literally anything else.
But I’d come this far. I was seeing the weird three-legged dog pizza death story to the end, no matter what it cost. “It’s about how, you know, we’re here and it’s years later and stuff.
So now we’re in the park with our three-legged dog, and Kindness-Is-Sexy Guy can’t have you… because…because me.”
Oliver gazed at me for a long moment, then looked down at Spud and said, very seriously, “Don’t worry. I won’t let Daddy Lucien cut your leg off.”
“He’s metaphorically three-legged.” I pouted.
“Thank you,” said Oliver. “This is a very romantic way of pretending you weren’t checking that jogger out earlier.”
“What? No. Our eyes met as we were mutually checking you out.”
“It’s okay to look at other men, Lucien. I’m not threatened. After all, we have a metaphorically three-legged dog together.”
“Ruff,” said Spud, apparently happy with his metaphorically three-legged status.
There was no way to keep debating this without sounding mega defensive. But I kept debating it anyway. “No, no. Hang on. I agree with you that neither of us should be threatened because dog, five years, etcetera. And I agree looking isn’t cheating, but I genuinely wasn’t looking. He just—”
“Slipped and fell on your eyeballs?”
“He wanted you. He totally wanted to do you, right there and then. He wanted to have dirty hot sex with you in this, um, nice family park.”
“Morning,” said Oliver to a passing dog walker, who was politely pretending she hadn’t heard the dirty hot sex talk. “Anyway,” he went on, as we wandered down the lake, “I’m very flattered, but I don’t think I’m the sort of man joggers check out in parks.”
“Oh my God. Which part of the three-legged dog story were you not listening to? You’re totally the sort of man joggers check out in parks. Have you seen yourself lately? You’re all wholesome and handsome, and clearly up for fucking someone into the mattress.”
“Morning,” said Oliver to an elderly man and his grandchildren. And then, to me, “I think you’re operating from a position of bias.”
I mean, I was. But I was also right. On the other hand, this had strayed from reminding Oliver how special he was to me to an argument about whether strangers wanted to do him or not. “Doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” I insisted, only slightly smugly.
Oliver paused for a moment, allowing Spud to tangle us together in the lead. He leaned in and kissed me in a Saturday-morning-in-public-appropriate way. “I love you.”
Taken by surprise, I accidentally blushed. “Oh fuck off.”
He laughed and we stood there with Spud gambolling around us, and for a moment I was just filled with this terrifying sense of absolutely-perfect-ness because we were here in our park with our dog on our lazy morning walk, and it was everything I’d never dreamed of because I’d never believed I’d be able to have it and—
“Fuck,” I said. “I’m going to lose my job.”