Chapter 12
We both knew, of course, what the deal was, CRAPP-wise.
We’d known for ages that it was, at the very least, at risk.
But saying it out loud, baldly, plainly, and in those exact words—I’m going to lose my job—had sort of helped.
I mean, I was still an absolute mess but at least I was now an absolute mess who’d articulated a small part of his messiness.
Plus it meant Oliver went straight into supportive-and-comforting mode.
He smoothed my brow with his un-dog-occupied hand. “Not for at least a year.”
“Yeah, but—but—it’s my job.”
“I know.”
“I don’t even like my job.”
He—or rather, the mix of his arm and Spud’s lead—gave me a little squeeze. “I don’t think that’s anywhere near as true as it used to be, and I don’t think it used to be particularly true at all.”
“What am I going to do?” The part of my brain that absolutely refused to admit my life could be in a good place was going into overdrive. “Find some other tiny quirky charity that nobody cares about in need of a fundraiser?”
From the way Oliver was looking at me, I could tell I’d failed some pretty basic parts of rhetorical question construction. “Well,” he said. “You could do that. It sounds like that might actually be quite a straightforward thing to do, in fact.”
“I know, but—”
“Which doesn’t mean,” he added, “that it isn’t scary.
Because change is always scary, and I do realise that as somebody who works in a job with a uniform that hasn’t been updated since the mid-seventeenth century, I’m not really one to lecture people on embracing newness.
But we’ll manage, Lucien. We have each other and Spud and a nice house that we can comfortably afford even on one income and—”
“You think we might have to drop down to one income?” My inner drama llama was latching on to whatever it could, and it was taking me along with it.
“I think if we did, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. You’re already working from home most days, and Spud needs somebody to look after him.”
I frowned. “You’re saying I should be a house husband?”
“I’m saying we have options. I’m not expecting you to have dinner waiting for me every night when I get home or saying you should be waking me up with French toast every morning.
” He gave a frown of his own. “Especially not after how it went last time. All I mean is that there comes a point where you can stop running because you’re there.
And we’re—I don’t want to presume—but you are very much my there, and I hope I’m yours, and everything we do together now is just… it’s whatever we make it.”
This was very…nice and stuff. Except my brain was still only about sixty percent trained to accept nice and stuff. “Are you seriously telling me that back when we met, you looked at me and the shithole of my life and thought, ‘That’s someone I want to try and make a home with’?”
“Well”—Oliver stepped delicately over Spud’s lead before he pulled us into the lake—“no. I mostly thought, ‘There’s someone who’s far too cool and interesting for me.’”
“Oh I see,” I protested, mostly jokingly. “But you don’t think that anymore. Now you know how shit and boring I am.”
“Yes.” Oliver nodded gravely. “I’ve stayed with you all these years because of how shit and boring you are.
Morning,” he added to a young woman with pink hair and a dachshund.
“Obviously,” he went on, “I’ve never stopped thinking you’re cool and interesting.
You’ve just also been good for my self-esteem. ”
“That does sound like me,” I said, because I knew there came a point where my refusal to admit I had positive qualities stopped being cute and started being fucking annoying.
“Besides”—he gently removed a ladybird from my shoulder and deposited it on a nearby leaf—“irrespective of our mutual incapacity to accept that we live up to the standards set by the other, isn’t making a home together what we’re doing? And have been doing for actually quite a long time now.”
I looked at my feet. Which meant I was also looking at Spud, which helped in some ways. “Okay, but if I don’t have to make French toast or learn to cook or remember to pick up my coffee cups—”
“I would like it if you remembered to pick up your coffee cups,” Oliver pointed out, “whether you stay working or not.”
“If I don’t have to do any of that”—I broke off because Oliver was giving me a stern look—“any of that except the coffee cup thing, then all I’ll be doing is looking after a dog.
My whole life will be looking after a dog.
I’ll get…I don’t know, whatever the dog-related not-a-Muppet-on-a-boat version of cabin fever is.
And then I’ll have no choice but to start an Instagram dedicated to my dog.
This is exactly how people start Instagrams dedicated to their dogs.
I’ll have been out of work for two weeks and Spud will be all dyed weird colours and dressed in tiny outfits I’ve bought off Etsy and our whole downstairs will be full of props I’ve been using for my Dogstagram tableaux and—”
“You might,” Oliver suggested, “be overthinking this.”
“I’m not overthinking this,” I yelled. “These are incredibly obvious consequences of me losing my job because of an anarchist peer and having nothing left to care about except a dog.”
We’d come to a pretty bench overlooking the lake, and with a suspicious casualness, Oliver sat down. “You wouldn’t be left with nothing to care about except Spud.”
“And you,” I added, loyally. Then my brain caught up with my ears as I realised he’d been using his leading tone, not his playfully chiding tone. “Oh. You mean…”
He smiled reassuringly. “It was always the plan.”
“It was, but…” I sat down next to him. At my feet, Spud gazed up at us with the unquestioning faith and adoration you only saw in dogs and children and other people who didn’t know any better.
“But what?”
I thought about it for a moment. “Actually,” I admitted, “I have no but. I was just butting out of habit. This was the plan. This is the plan. The plan is this.”
“Even so. The plan—as this and as present as it may be—doesn’t have to be binding if you don’t feel ready.”
For a while I distracted myself, fuddling with Spud’s ears. Then I glanced up, at all the many and varied families playing happily in the sunlight. And I noticed something, something unexpected. “You’ve met me,” I pointed out. “Have I ever felt ready? For anything?”
“No,” conceded Oliver. And then, he got this look in his eye. A look that said he’d noticed the same thing I’d just noticed. Which was that I wasn’t having my usual freak-out. “But am I right in thinking you’re using that in the positive sense?”
At my feet, Spud was ruffing impatiently. He’d signed up for walkies, not for sitties. And definitely not for sit-while-Daddy-Luc-and-Daddy-Oliver-have-an-intense-conversationies. “I guess so? I mean, I wasn’t exactly feeling ready for this one either.”
“Mruff,” said this one.
“And he seems all right, doesn’t he?” I gestured at exhibit D. D for dog. “He doesn’t seem totally fucked up for life or anything?”
Oliver sighed very slightly. “Lucien, your faith in your capacity to totally fuck things up for life sometimes borders on the hubristic.”
“Thanks, I’ve worked really hard on it.”
“Spud is a perfectly well-adjusted normal happy puppy. We are, in fact, a good team.”
He was right. Our dog was fine. We were fine. Everything was fine. “And you think we’re a good enough team to, y’know…”
“Play doubles badminton?”
“Oliver.”
“Scam our friends at bridge?”
“No. You know.”
“I do know,” said Oliver, archly. “But, as with so many things, if you’re going to do it, you should probably be able to say it.”
There he was, being right again. Like a dick. “Fine. Kids. The kid thing. Do you think we’re a good enough team to do the kid thing? Do you want to do the kid thing with me?”
It would be a lie to say it was the happiest I’d ever seen Oliver look, because one of the weird things about being a decent way into a stable and functioning relationship was that if you were doing it right, you made each other happy a fair amount.
But he looked at least as happy as he did when I picked my socks up without prompting, which was pretty fucking happy. “Yes, Lucien. I do.”
And, on one level, that wasn’t news. We’d had the hypothetical version of this conversation about a million times.
Okay twice. But, either way, this was different.
Because we had a dog now. And that made it real.
That made everything real. “Okay,” I said.
“Great. Cool.” And, then, cool and great as all this was, there was also realness to deal with.
“Um. How do we actually, like, get a kid? Actually?”
Oliver twitched up a sardonic eyebrow. “Well, you see, when a mummy and daddy love each other very much but also lack the material and social capital to support their family—”
“Very funny,” I told him. “Yes, yes, everything is part of a complex system and blah blah ethics. But since we’re doing this—and we are doing this—how do we…do this?”
“Lucien,” said Oliver, laughing in a bemused way, “two of your closest friends adopted a child comparatively recently.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Of course you—” He broke off. “Spud, no.”
Obediently, Spud stopped trying to eat the—on second thoughts, I probably didn’t want to know what he’d been trying to eat; I just quietly pretended it was a fallen leaf—and bounced back to accept a treat from Oliver’s hand.
“Good boy,” he concluded.
Spud stared at me.
“You’ve just had a treat. You don’t get double treats just because there’s two of us.”
“Arrooou,” said Spud, visibly disappointed.
He was then immediately distracted by a duck. It must be nice to be a dog.
“In any case,” Oliver went on, “we have several options, none of them without their challenges.”
“Okay,” I said, trying not to be too proud of myself for not immediately giving up at the mention of challenges.