My handholding was veering into clutching. “That’s…that’s true.”
“You still make me happy, Lucien. You are still everything I want and a lot of things I couldn’t have imagined wanting—”
“Thanks.”
“In a good way. We don’t have to do this. We can move at whatever pace you like. But you should know that I am yours, more truly than I have ever been anyone’s. Because when I’m with you, I’m me. Not someone I think I should be. And I’ll be with you, however you want, for as long as you’ll have me.”
Only Oliver would say something like that in the middle of scrubbing his kitchen cabinets. And maybe that was why I could listen to him, when I sometimes couldn’t even listen to myself. Why he made me feel safe and hopeful and worth something when I had a bunch of reasons not to.
Not going to lie, it was kind of annoying.
Because he was right again.
I could do this. We could do this. We were already doing this.
We had something strong and right and special, and I’d be more of a bellend than usual if I didn’t accept that. Cherish it. Hold on to it.
I opened my mouth to tell him yes, of course I’d move in with him, I couldn’t imagine anything better.
Except then, somewhere at the back of my mind, a tiny glitter bomb of a boy in internet-friendly makeup said, It’s worth rolling the dice.
And so instead, what came out of my mouth was, “We should get married.”
I’D AGREED TO MEET JAMES Royce-Royce—the other James Royce-Royce—during my lunch hour outside an embarrassingly middle-end jewellers in central London. He turned up exactly on time with Baby J strapped to his chest, making him look like the world’s most wholesome kidnapper.
“Do you two ever put him down?” I asked.
He blinked at me exactly once. “Yes. Just not in the middle of London.”
That was fair. The last thing you wanted to do was put your kid down for five minutes and then come back to find he’d been detonated by the bomb squad. “So how’s…” I found myself pointing at Baby J.
I didn’t know how to talk to or about children at the best of times, and mostly I got away with it because I usually encountered them as part of large groups of less crap people who did all the cooing for me. But today it was just me and Baby J. Worse, Baby J was a particularly difficult child to talk about because when the James Royce-Royces had first brought him home, he’d looked ever so slightly like something Jim Henson had built out of foam and ping-pong balls. And, needless to say, James Royce-Royce would keep saying things like Isn’t he darling? Isn’t he the most darling thing you’ve ever seen? And I would say things like Well, he’s quite wet.
Are they all this wet?
“He’s fine,” said James Royce-Royce who, where babies were concerned, was definitely my favourite of the James Royce-Royces.
I redirected my awkward glance from the child to the jewellers.
“Um, thanks for coming.”
“No problem.”
It had been a little over a week since I’d, y’know, accidentally proposed to Oliver in a fit of whatever the hell that had been a fit of.
Of course he’d said yes, correctly discerning that if he’d said no, I’d have changed my name, moved to Pluto, and joined the French Foreign Legion. Since then, we’d had one or two short conversations, mostly led by Oliver and mostly focused on what a sensible choice it was to get married because of next-of-kin benefits and mild tax breaks. Which was what happened when, instead of proposing on one knee at the Eiffel Tower, you did it in a kitchen while your partner had his head in a cupboard. And probably meant I owed Oliver…not a do-over exactly, I was never doing that again, but at least a decent ring.
Well. The decentish ring I could get on my budget.
The decentish ring I could get on my budget given about eighty percent of engagement rings were total shit.
“Shall we go in?” asked James Royce-Royce.
Yes. The answer was yes. I couldn’t get a ring if I didn’t go in.
“Maybe?”
“If you don’t like this shop, there are three others within eight minutes’ walk, two of them within the same price range.”
“It’s not the shop. I’m just, I don’t know, nervous I think?”
“That’s because you’re a commitment-phobe.”
“With good reason.”
“Not with good reason,” James Royce-Royce told me firmly.
“Dogs aren’t more likely to bite people who are scared of dogs.”