“Are you all right?” A very concerned Oliver got to his feet to help me up and then stared, with a non-flattering amount of confusion, at the velvet box of doom I was shakily holding out to him.
“Well, I banged my leg but, um, Oliver David Blackwood, now that you’re not in a cupboard, will you marry me?”
Oliver went through a range of expressions, none of which I could readily identify and at least some of which I was pretty sure were positive. “I thought I’d already agreed to that when I was in the cupboard. I assumed you were trying to call it off.”
“What? No.” I gazed at him in mounting horror, with the moderately affordable ring hovering between us. “Why did you think that?”
“Several reasons, Lucien. It was quite an impulsive thing to do in the first place, we’ve barely spoken about it since, and you literally just said you’d made a mistake.”
I cringed. “Okay, I can retrospectively see how that might have given you the wrong impression. But”—I took a deep breath—“when I said I made a mistake, I meant that I didn’t propose in a very romantic way or in a way that expressed how…how great you are and how…like…feelings you make me.”
Looking only a little bit as if I’d offered him a live snake, Oliver took the box and opened it. For a moment he stared at the distinctly average ring. Then, “It’s beautiful,” he said. “Thank you.” And then slipped it on his finger and— “Oh my God,” I cried. “It fits.”
Oliver looked down at his hand, half-rapt, as though he almost didn’t recognise it. “Yes, yes it does.”
“And,” I added, “it doesn’t look awful.”
He gave a little blink. “No. No, it looks wonderful.”
It did kind of look…wonderful, and he looked wonderful wearing it. Because it was like this little piece of Oliver Blackwood was very visibly mine.
Eventually we noticed that I was still on one knee, and Oliver was still standing, and it created a weird dynamic. So Oliver sat down on the sofa and I sat down beside him, my eyes flicking every now and again to— “Nice ring,” I said.
He normally didn’t descend to my level, but tonight, he smirked.
“I’ve had no complaints.” Then he grew quiet. “About the…the”—he cleared his throat—“wedding. I spoke to my parents today.”
Oh dear. For some reason, Oliver’s parents had never liked me.
I wasn’t sure if it was because of the way I dressed or the fact that my own parents were rock stars or if it possibly had something to do with that one time I told them to go fuck themselves at their ruby anniversary. I’d met them a couple of times since and I’d been marginally better behaved, but the cloud of go-fuck-yourself had trailed behind me like a fart on the way out of a lift. For the first year they’d clearly been biding their time on the assumption that Oliver would come to his senses and dump me—much, to be fair, as I had.
But when it had become clear I wasn’t going away anytime soon, they’d come to accept me the way one might accept a piece of spinach between a dinner guest’s teeth. They knew I was there but, for the sake of their continued happiness, pretended I wasn’t.
“And,” I asked nervously, “how did that go?”
“They said they’d support me in whatever decision I made.”
I winced. “Bad as that, huh?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I mean…” I didn’t even know what I was trying to say. I wanted to be supportive of Oliver, but I didn’t really want to spend the next however-many months tiptoeing around David and Miriam while they by—infuriatingly—either their presence or their absence made me marrying Oliver all about them. “We can… I mean… Do they…”
To my relief, Oliver cut me off. “Let’s just not think about it for now.”
Except I wasn’t sure that made it better. Especially because Oliver was terrible at just not thinking about things. And my ability to just not think about things scaled proportionately with how important that thing was to think about. Meaning, I was great at ignoring bills and hopelessly unable to ignore mean things people said on the internet. “You know I am always onside with hiding from problems in the hope they’ll go away—”
“That’s not what I’m doing, Lucien,” said Oliver sharply.
It was a bit like what he was doing. But Oliver had been seeing a trained professional for nearly two years because of his parents so I did my best to be sensitive and not poke anything that might be the emotional equivalent of a bear or a mine—or a bear-mine, which would be a bear that would maul you and then explode. I held my hands up in a don’t-maul-me-or-explode way. “All right. Just…this is supposed to be about our happiness. And so you need to think about…that. Instead of, you know, what your mum and dad will say.”