Snatching up both the posset and one of the spoons, Oliver half turned away from me. “Excuse me, I need to confer with my client.”
“‘By confer with,’ do you mean eat? I’m pretty sure you can get disbarred for that.”
“I can confidently say”—Oliver dug the spoon into Mr. Posset —“that I know of no barrister who has ever been disbarred for eating their clients.”
“But not because it’s allowed? Because it’s never happened.”
“I think,” said Oliver thoughtfully, “it might be considered a violation of the core duty to act in the best interests of the client. And, for that matter, the requirement not to behave in a manner that diminishes the trust the public places in the profession. But there’s never technically been a test case on it.”
“Well, it’s good a job this lemon posset is your secret lover and not your client.”
“Isn’t it?”
He reached across the table, offering me a generous spoon of the dessert I was now trying really hard not to think of as Mr. Posset.
Thankfully my appetite outweighed my empathy. Which, thinking about it, was why I’d make a crap vegan.
And, anyway, Oliver looked ridiculously handsome just then, his eyes all softly silver, and the stern lines of his face gentled somehow.
I leaned forward and, telling myself I was being sexy and elegant, and not looking at all like a plastic hippo in a family board game, accepted a mouthful of tart lemony goodness.
Even accounting for the no-cows-were-harmed factor, it was amazing. “Urmgudidfrgurnhwrgrdthsws.”
“Pardon?” asked Oliver.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, I’d forgotten how good this was.’”
“If I looked anything like that, I can see why you thought I was cheating.”
I chased a smudge from the corner of my lips. “Hey, your eating-dessert face is way more cheatingy than my eating-dessert face.”
“Logically,” he pointed out, “neither of us have any basis on which to make that comparison.”
Yoinking the ramekin over to my side of the table, I took control of the situation. “You either get to be pedantic or eat posset. Which is going to be?”
He lowered his lashes is mock contrition. “Posset, please.”
While Oliver’s eating-dessert face was sexy as fuck, his asking-for-dessert face was sexy as fucker. And for a moment, just for a moment, I half wished this was our first date again. I mean, not literally because it had been a disaster. But I wanted to keep this.
This almost fragile feeling of everything being what it was and being for its own sake and not needing to go anywhere or become anything else.
But that was how relationships began. It wasn’t how they lasted.
You couldn’t live forever on lemon posset and French toast. At some point you had to think, really think, about where you were going and what it meant. You had to ask if you were in this forever, and if you were, what were you going to do about it, and if you weren’t, what were you even doing.
You were either in or you were out. You either got married or you moved on.
And I never wanted to move on. Oliver was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and I couldn’t let him unhappen. If that meant fighting about bands and arguing about venues and making peace with his mother and endlessly rehashing a fucking balloon arch, then…then it was worth it.
It had to be worth it.
Because otherwise, what were we?
THE GOOD THING ABOUT GETTING married—I mean, apart from the whole spending your life with the person you loved bit—was that it gave you a lot to do. Which made it very difficult to have complicated feelings. Or, to put it another way, very easy to avoid having them. And that worked for me right until the night before the wedding.
I’d gone to bed early because I was trying to be responsible, but then I’d had to get out of bed to throw up. Then I’d gone back to bed, but I’d had to get up again to throw up again. And, after throwing up for the third time, I called Bridge. Being Bridge, she answered. Even though it was three in the morning.
“Luc?” she asked—sleepy but doing her best. “Is everything okay?”
I lay down on the bathroom floor. “No. I keep vomiting and I think that probably means something.”
Mumbly Tom noises drifted down the phone. Then I heard him getting up and moving into a different room, reasoning correctly that this was going to be a long call. Then Bridge’s voice again, “What did you have for dinner?”
“I didn’t have dinner. I felt too much like I was going to be sick, and then I was. Loads. And I feel like I’m going to be sick again, except I don’t think there’s any sick left to be. So I’m just sweating and heaving.”