“Yeah”—I clawed at my throat—“it’s digging, but it’s not choking.”
“Oh, good. Because unnegotiated choking was not what I had planned for this evening.”
“I’d be relieved to hear that,” I told him, “but now I want to know when we’re going to do the negotiated choking.”
“Perhaps after the movie.”
“Wait. You got the movie as well?”
He took my hand and started drawing me upstairs. “Yes, and I moved the television upstairs. In my head, it was all very romantic.”
“It is very romantic,” I admitted. “It’s probably one of the most romantic things anyone has ever done for me. But you know, like, feelings make me self-conscious. And being self-conscious makes me defensive. And when I’m defensive, I’m sarcastic.”
“And I love you anyway, Lucien.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered. “I love you too.”
Despite my best efforts with my socks and sex toys, Oliver kept the bedroom immaculate. And it was still immaculate. Only now it was immaculate with the downstairs TV balanced on the chest of drawers, candles arranged artfully on every spare surface and—with typically Oliverian attention to detail—new bed linen in shades of red and gold. And the worst thing was, I couldn’t even find anything glib to say.
“The thing,” Oliver began, “about Pretty Woman is that when people first watch it, they either love it or hate it. If they love it, they will always—”
“Oh, shut up, Oliver.”
I pushed him down on the bed and straddled him. For a moment, I could only look at this ridiculous, kind, and beautiful man who made ridiculous, kind, and beautiful gestures and was ridiculously, beautifully mine. And he was looking right back at me, his eyes grey velvet in the soft light, the severe lines of his face that couldn’t—in moments like these—quite hide how vulnerable he got when he knew he’d been, frankly, extra and was expecting to be rejected or laughed at for it. Leaning down, I kissed him again, the way you only kiss someone when they’ve filled the room with candles for you.
We were definitely, definitely going to watch Pretty Woman.
But maybe not for a while.
"AS A LEGAL PROFESSIONAL," SAID Oliver as we set off for Surrey at unspeakable o’clock in the morning in the car Oliver had hired for the occasion, “I feel I should point out that Edward actually has a fiduciary responsibility to his company and his investors, which means dropping a billion-dollar deal in favour of a ship-building contract is somewhat unethical.”
I fished the final piece of homemade French toast from the Tupperware box on my lap. “Very much the point of that movie, Oliver.”
“I’m aware it’s not part of the central romantic fantasy, but it is made explicit earlier that he doesn’t work with his own money. So by deciding at the last minute to make boats with a surrogate father figure, instead of doing what he told people he was going to do, he’s technically committing massive fraud.”
“Isn’t”—I licked cinnamon from my fingertips—“the implication that he’ll make more money from the ships long term?”
“It’s a billion-dollar deal. The contract with the navy is only for a few million dollars. That’s still over nine hundred million dollars unaccounted for. No wonder Stuckey is incandescent. Not, I hasten to add,” Oliver hastily added, “that this justifies his sexually assaulting anyone.”
“Are you going to be like this when we go and see the musical?”
I asked.
He slid me a mischievous look. “Only if there’s a song about business ethics.”
“I’m kind of assuming it’ll be songs about…shopping? And maybe, I don’t know, sex work?”
“Ah,” said Oliver, “so you think it’ll open with Vivian climbing out of a window in her thigh-high boots, singing,”—he sang—“The laws that are supposed to protect me make things worse in practice. And well-intended regulations can have negative con-”—he tapped the steering wheel—“se-quen-ces. If my profession was decriminalised, it wouldn’t be unfairly stigmatised. And I wouldn’t have to worry about the sexual offences…” He paused and finished in his normal voice, “Act, 2003.”
I was sitting in a car with a man who would and, thinking about it, could improv a mediocre show tune about the complexities of the UK
sex industry. And for some reason I was okay with it. “You,” I told him, “are a dork who cares too much.”