by Alexis Hall
“Really?” he asked in a tone of hope tinged with suspicion.
“Well, I wouldn’t say you were a full-on pompous arse. Maybe more of a supercilious butt cheek.”
To my surprise, he laughed—a deep, full-throated laugh that made the hairs on my arms stand up in unexpected pleasure. “I can live with that. Now”—he propped his elbows on the table, moving in a little closer—“what else should fake boyfriends know about each other?”
“You’re the one with all the relationship experience. You tell me.”
“That’s the thing about relationships. If you’ve not had many, you’ve got limited basis for comparison. If you’ve had a lot, you’re clearly doing something wrong.”
“You’re the one who insisted we had to get to know each other.” I smirked at him. “You know, for verisimilitude.”
“Are you ever going to let me live that down?”
I gave it a moment’s thought. “No.”
“Fine.” He sighed. “Birthdays?”
“Don’t bother. I’ll forget it. I can’t be fucked with birthdays, including my own.”
“Well, I would remember.”
“God,” I groaned. “I bet you’d get me an incredibly thoughtful gift as well. And make me feel awful.”
His lips twitched. “I would make a point of it.”
“Anyway, it’s July. So we’ll have fake decided we’re not compatible and fake broken up long before it becomes an issue.”
“Oh.” For a split second, he looked almost disappointed. “Your turn.”
“I don’t remember agreeing to take turns.”
“I generally find most situations are improved by reciprocation.”
“Versatile, are you?” I widened my eyes innocently.
“Behave yourself, Lucien.”
Well, that wasn’t sexy. Nope. Definitely not. Not at all. A sweet little shiver whooshed the length of my spine.
“Um.” My mind had gone blank. “Hobbies and stuff? What do you do when you’re not working?”
“Usually I am working. The law is a demanding profession.”
“For the record, saying things like ‘The law is a demanding profession’ is what made me think you were pompous.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” he said in the tone of someone who wasn’t sorry at all. “But I didn’t know how else to convey that I have a fulfilling but challenging job that takes up a lot of my time.”
“You could have gone with that.”
“Dear me. We’ve been dating for less than three days, and you’re already trying to change me.”
“Why would I want you to change when it’s so much fun taking the piss out of you?”
“I…” His brow wrinkled. “Thank you. I think. I can’t tell if that was a compliment.”
It was probably just because I’m a bad person that I was finding him slightly endearing right now. “Yeah. That’s kind of the game. But, come on, you must do something that doesn’t involve wigs and hammers.”
“I cook, I read, I spend time with friends, I try to stay healthy.”
Oh yay. So I hadn’t been imagining the body under those conservative suits. I mean, not that I was imagining it. At least, not very much.
His gaze caught mine. “What about you?”
“Me? You know, the usual. Stay out too late, drink too much, cause the people who care about me needless anxiety.”
“And what do you actually do?”
I really wanted to look away. But for some reason I couldn’t. His eyes kept promising me things I was sure I didn’t want. “I’ve been in a bit of a slump. For a while. I still do stuff—I was out last Saturday—but I never seem to have anything to show for it.”
There was the rabbit hole again, and the last thing I wanted was for Oliver to ask a thoughtful follow-up question that would take me further down it.
“Your turn,” I yipped, grinning wildly, as if my life being basically wrecked was a hilarious anecdote.
His fingers tapped lightly against the table for a moment or two as he seemed to give the matter far too much consideration. “With the caveat that I would be interested irrespective of your parents’ celebrity, could you tell me a little of your background?”
“That sounds like a job interview, not a boyfriend interview.”
“I can’t help being curious. I’ve known of you for years. But we’ve never really talked before.”
“Yeah, because you made it pretty damn clear you wanted nothing to do with me.”
“I would dispute that characterisation but, either way, I do now.”
I made a sullen, embarrassingly adolescent noise. “Whatever. Uneventful childhood, promising career, went off the rails, here I am.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, which was not the reaction I was expecting. “This was too artificial a structure for personal conversation.”
Shrug. Apparently I was still in teenager mode. “There’s no conversation to have.”
“If that’s your preference.”
“What about you?”
“What would you like to know?”
I’d been hoping talking about him would feel less revealing than talking about me. Turned out, it didn’t. I made a sound that could roughly be expressed as “Urdunuh.”
“Well,” he offered gamely. “Like yours, my childhood was very uneventful. My father’s an accountant, my mother used to be a professor at LSE, and they’re both kind and supportive people. I have an older brother, Christopher, who’s a doctor, as is his wife, Mia.”
“Well, aren’t you a bunch of high achievers.”
“We’ve been very lucky. And we were raised to believe that we should pursue something we believed in.”
“Which is what led you to law?”
He nodded. “Indeed. I’m not sure it’s entirely what my parents had in mind, but I think it’s right for me.”
“If I murdered someone,” I told him, discovering, to my surprise, that I meant it, “I would totally want you to be my lawyer.”
“Then the first piece of advice I should give you is don’t tell me if you’ve murdered someone.”
“Surely people don’t do that?”
“You’d be surprised. Defendants have no legal training of their own. They don’t always know what will implicate them and what won’t. I’m not speaking from experience, incidentally.” He gave me a small smile. “My second piece of advice is that if you are ever accused of murder, you should hire somebody significantly more experienced than I am.”
“You mean you’ve never done one?”
“Contrary to what you might think, homicide is actually quite rare. And one tends to come to it later in one’s career.”
“Then what sort of cases do you work on?”
“Whatever comes. I don’t get to choose. It’s often rather banal.”
I shot him a quizzical look. “I thought this was your big passion.”
“It is.”
“You just described it as rather banal.”
“I meant, it can seem banal to other people. If your only experience of the law is television courtroom dramas, the reality that I spend my days defending teenagers who were caught shoplifting nail varnish and small-time criminals who’ve overreached themselves can be somewhat disappointing.” He stood and started gathering up the empty plates and bowls. “Socially, it’s a bit of a lose-lose. Either people think I spend all day putting killers and rapists back on the street for the money, or they think I’m terribly dull.”
Without thinking about it, I rose to help, our hands tangling among the brinnerware. “Maybe we can split the difference and say you’re spending your days putting teenage shoplifters back on the street for the money.”
“Maybe we can split the difference and say I spend my days making sure a single error of judgment doesn’t ruin a
young person’s life.”
I flicked a stray blueberry at him, and it bounced off his nose.
“Your point being?” he asked.
Clearing up. I was very busy clearing up. “You…you really do care about this stuff, don’t you?”
“And that observation led you to assault me with soft fruit?”
“Objection. Badgering the witness.”
“You know that’s not a thing in this country?”
I gasped. “Then what do you do when counsel is testifying?”
“You either trust the judge to know what they’re doing—which they usually do, even the mad ones—or you very politely say something along the lines of ‘M’lud, I believe the honourable counsel for the prosecution is testifying.’”
“And to think”—here I heaved a deep sigh—“I was imagining you leaping up and laying the legal smackdown on the smug suits from the AG’s office.”
“Do you mean sterling public servants from the Crown Prosecution Service?”
“Dammit, Oliver.” His name tasted bright and sharp on my tongue. Sugar and cinnamon. “You’re kind of sucking the fun out of the criminal justice system.”
Very deliberately, he picked up another blueberry and launched it at me. It pinged off my eyebrow.
“What was that for?” I asked with what I hoped came across as feigned petulance.
His mouth was curling into a smile as slow and warm as maple syrup. “You deserved it.”
Chapter 13
Oliver washed up, and I mostly got in the way, which was how I handled domestic tasks.
“Um,” I said, hooking my thumbs in my pockets in a futile attempt to look casual. “Thanks for the food. And for not dumping me and stuff. I suppose I should…”
Oliver also hooked his thumbs in his pockets. Then immediately took them out again, as if he had no idea why he’d done it. “You don’t have to. I mean if you aren’t… There are some things we should probably discuss. About logistics.”
This was more the Oliver I’d been expecting. I guess I’d got a temporary upgrade on account of my dad having cancer. “Logistics, huh? You’ll turn a boy’s head with talk like that.”
“I’m not trying to turn your head, Lucien. I’m trying to make sure this doesn’t blow up in both of our faces.”
I made an insouciant gesture that involved knocking over the tiny vase of flowers that Oliver had just replaced on the table. “Shit. Sorry. But, how complicated is this? We carry on with our lives and tell anyone who asks that we’re dating.”
“That’s rather my point, though. Do we tell anyone who asks? What about Bridget?”
“Yeah”—I tried to fix the flowers and failed utterly—“she kind of already knows the truth.”
“And were you going to mention this at any point? Or were you just going to let me make a fool of myself in front of her as I naively committed to the pretence we were both supposed to be maintaining.”
“Bridge is the exception. We can’t keep secrets from Bridge. She’s my straight best friend. There’s a code.”
Oliver leaned past me and made two small adjustments to the flowers, transforming them from shabby and accusing to radiant and lovely. “But to everyone else we’re really dating?”
“Absolutely. I mean, there’s a guy at work who’s sort of in on it.”
“A guy at the work for whose benefit this whole deception is being practiced?”
“Well, it was his idea, so it was unavoidable. Besides”—I nearly got insouciant again, but then thought better of it—“he’s got the brains of a raspberry pavlova. He’s probably already forgotten.”
He sighed. “Fine. So to everyone except Bridget and this gentleman you work with, we’re really dating?”
“I can’t lie to my mum obviously.”
Another sigh. “So to everyone except Bridget, a gentleman you work with, and your mother, we’re really dating?”
“Well, my other friends might not buy it. You know, because I’ve told them all I hate you. And after years of my love life being a car crash in a dumpster fire it’s pretty fucking convenient I’ve ended up in a stable, long-term relationship just when I needed to do exactly that to not be fired.”
“And”—Oliver’s eyebrows got all mean and pointy—“they’re more likely to conclude that we concocted an elaborate fictional relationship than that you changed your mind about me?”
“It doesn’t have to be elaborate. You’re the one who’s making it elaborate.”
“While you’re putting no thought into it whatsoever.”
“Yep, that’s how I roll.”
He folded his arms ominously. “In case you’ve forgotten, there are two of us in this fake relationship. And it won’t be a very successful fake relationship without real work.”
“Jesus, Oliver.” In my frustration, the flowers got it again. “I might as well actually be dating you.”
At this point, he edged me out of the kitchen and started reconstructing his centrepiece in a way I found, frankly, passive-aggressive. “As we’ve agreed, that is an outcome neither of us want.”
“You’re right. That would be awful.” Except for the French toast. And his cuddly Sunday afternoon jumper. And the rare moments when he’d forget he thought I was a dick.
“Still, now we’re committed, we should do this properly.” He jammed a tulip into place slightly too hard, splitting the stem. “And that means not telling everybody that the whole affair is a pathetic hoax invented by two lonely men. And also getting used to spending time together like we would if we genuinely got on.”
I was starting to fear for the rest of the flowers so I sidled back up to the table and pried them from his fingers. “I’m sorry I let the cat very slightly out the bag. I won’t do it again.”
He was silent for a long moment so I started sticking things back into the vase. They didn’t look good, but at least nothing snapped.
“And,” I added grudgingly, “we can do all the logistics and stuff that you think we need. Just let me know when you want to…logist with me and I’ll be there.”
“I’m sure we can negotiate matters as they arise. And you’re still welcome to stay. If you’d like. If you have no other engagements.”
Engagements? Oh, Oliver. “There was this tea dance I was meant to go to in 1953, but I can probably skip it.”
“I should warn you”—he gave me a cool look, apparently unimpressed by my dazzling wit—“I shall be quite busy with work.”
“Can I help?” Honestly, I’m not a big fan of helping in general. But it seemed only polite to offer. And anything was better than going back to my empty, barely habitable flat and thinking about how the father I hated-slash-was-indifferent-to might be dead soon.
“Not remotely. It’s confidential, you have no legal training, and I saw the mess you made of the washing up.”
“Right. So I’ll sort of…sit then? In the name of learning to put up with each other.”
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that.” He seemed to give up on the flowers. “And please make yourself at home. You can read, or watch television, or… Actually, I’m sorry, this was an awful invitation.”
I shrugged. “It’s probably what I’d be doing anyway. Just in a nicer house with more of my clothes on.”
“Keeping your clothes on is probably for the best.”
“Don’t worry. I know the drill: no kissing, no dick pics, no nudity.”
“Yes. Well.” His hands moved absently. “I think any of those would unnecessarily complicate the fake boyfriend situation.”
“And I’m never unnecessary or complicated.”
There was an uncomfortable pause.
“So,” he asked finally, “are you staying?”
And, God knows why, I nodded.
We settled down in the living room, me sprawled out on the
sofa, and Oliver sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by papers, with his laptop balanced on his knee. It wasn’t exactly awkward, but it wasn’t exactly not awkward either. We were still figuring out how to talk to each other without having a fight, so working out how to enjoy a comfortable silence was a bit next level for us. Or maybe it was just me. Oliver had vanished into the law—his head lowered and his fingers flurrying occasionally across the keys—and for all I knew, he’d already forgotten I existed.
Snagging the remote, I turned on the TV, sheepishly installed ITV Catchup and bopped through the recentlys until I found The Whole Package. There were two episodes now. Joy.
I pressed Play.
And was immediately treated to a thirty-second montage of how great my dad was: clips of him performing interspersed with sound bites from people I assumed were famous music types, but either far too old or far too young for me to have any idea who they were, and all saying stuff like “Jon Fleming is a legend in this business” and “Jon Fleming is the elder statesman of rock music—prog, folk, classic, he can do it all” and “Jon Fleming’s been my hero for thirty years.” I almost turned it off, but then another montage kicked in and I realised they were saying basically the same things about Simon from Blue.
Once they’d finished shamelessly promoting the judges, we cut to the studio where the four of them performed a frankly bizarre take on Erasure’s “Always” before a live audience who reacted like it was a cross between Live Aid and the Sermon on the Mount. My unqualified hot take was that it was the kind of track that could just about take a spurious flute solo, but definitely did not need a rap break from Professor Green.
After that, they got into the show proper which, it being the first ever episode, included a really pace-killing explanation of the format that I only half understood, and the presenter—who I was pretty sure wasn’t Holly Willoughby but could have been—didn’t understand at all. There was something involving points, and bidding, and the judges getting a wild card they could use to steal people, and sometimes the contestants got to pick which judge they went with, but mostly they didn’t. And, finally, someone came on and wailed out an aggressively emotional version of “Hallelujah” before being snapped up by one of the Pussycat Dolls.
