And for a while we just sat there, and I let myself feel safe and held and loved, and he took my hand and didn’t say anything because he didn’t need to.
“Also,” I said, because I’d decided that feeling nice was overrated and I wanted to ruin the moment, “his fiancé is, like, twelve.”
“I assume not literally?”
“No, but he’s…like…this tiny little pretty boy called JoJo. I mean who the hell is called JoJo?”
“I assume that’s rhetorical?”
“I’ll tell you who’s called JoJo,” I went on. “A prick, that’s who.”
Oliver was still there and still, despite my decision to insult an innocent stranger, not judging me. “Perhaps. Although personally I think the man who sold you out and made you afraid to ever trust anybody again is a bigger prick.”
“Oh yeah. He’s a huge prick. Which is ironic because his actual prick is quite tiny.”
“Is that true?” Oliver gave me another smile. “Or are you just trying to make me feel special?”
“You know, I can’t remember. But he deserves to have a tiny prick. And if you could tell all your friends he has a tiny prick, that would be fantastic, thanks.”
That made Oliver laugh. “For you, Lucien, anything.”
So I kind of had to kiss him.
And then I kind of had to kiss him again. Y’know, just in case.
And then it felt…it felt okay. Because the rest of the world didn’t matter. I mean it did because I had, like, friends and a job and things I actually cared about. But Miles didn’t matter, and JoJo certainly didn’t matter. “I think…” I said. “I think I can go back now.”
So we got up, I put my vulva hat back on my head, and I let Oliver Blackwood—my amazing barrister boyfriend—escort me back to my best friend’s non-gender-specific bird party. And I knew, deep in my heart, that everything was going to be fine.
After all, it wasn’t like I was ever going to see Miles again.
"OKAY," I TOLD ALEX TWADDLE. I was seriously running low on jokes, but the ritual was so much part of my life now that I wasn’t about to give up on it. “Let’s try this one. There’s a man who works on a bus selling tickets, and he loves his job, but one day he loses his temper with a passenger and throws them off the bus and they fall under a car and die.”
“I say”—Alex looked outraged—“that’s not on at all. Especially not for a bus conductor.”
“No,” I agreed, “it’s very poor behaviour and, spoiler, you should remember that because it might be relevant later.”
“Good to know.” For a moment, Alex looked contemplative. “I say, that might help with your jokes in general. Give a chap a bit of a pointer on what a chap’s supposed to be paying attention to.”
“Duly noted. Anyway, he gets sent to court for throwing this passenger under a car.”
Alex nodded. “For being a bad conductor, you mean?”
The Alex-joke-foreboding was beginning to rise up. “Yes, I suppose so. Although I think they’d probably just have called it murder. Anyway, the judge sentences him to the electric chair.”
“I say, how ironic.”
Abandon joke. Abandon joke now. “Ironic in what way?”
“Well, you know, chap’s a bad conductor, gets sentenced to the electric chair. I say, it’d be rather droll if he was such a bad conductor that the chair didn’t work, wouldn’t it? Be sort of like a play on words.”
“Yes.” I was trapped. Trapped in an absurdist prison of meta-humour with a posh nitwit who was secretly a genius that delighted in tormenting me. “Yes, that would be droll. So anyway, they send him to the…umm…to the electric chair and it…um…it doesn’t work.”
Alex grinned. “Ah, because he’s a bad conductor, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Actually, old boy, wasn’t quite as droll as I’d anticipated. Not in practice.”
There should have been some kind of joke-related emergency service you could call to rescue you in situations like this. “Sorry.”
“Not your fault. Although in retrospect I think knowing the twist in advance made it less comical.”
“You don’t say?”
Alex nodded. “Yes, you see the essence of humour is surprise.
So if you want to get better at this joke-telling lark, you might want to keep your cards a little closer to your chest.”