Ah. Between this and the plate, I wasn’t winning any sensitivity awards this year. The thing was, Oliver had been in therapy for about eighteen months now, and while it had really helped him in some ways, it was a steps-forward, steps-back situation. Like, he’d got to the point where he was no longer obsessively going to the gym every day and treating food like the enemy, but worrying less about his body ninety percent of the time had made him more self-conscious the other ten percent. I mean, he was still far and away the fittest person I’d ever seen in real life, but the problem with giving yourself an eating disorder in pursuit of an impossible beauty standard was that if you got rid of one, you got rid of the other.

“Oliver,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything you’re not comfortable with. But you’re the most amazing, gorgeous, sexy man I have ever been allowed to do depraved things to. And I don’t think that’s ever going to change. Even when we’re married and we’ve both stopped trying and you’re, like, seventy-five with nose hair.”

He looked faintly appalled. “I will never have nose hair.”

“Well, I’d be into you, even if you did. Now come on”—I tried to signal this is a safe, if aquatic space—“get in the bath.”

Slipping off his shoes and socks, he padded over and crouched down at the top of the steps. “I do know you’re not judging me. I just find it very hard not to judge myself.”

I tried to be sensitive to Oliver’s body image issues, I really did. But, at the end of the day, he looked like him and I looked like me, and sometimes it was hard to remember that when he was being down on himself, he wasn’t being down on me by association. Still—and this was definitely something I couldn’t have done even a year ago—sometimes when you wanted someone to trust you, you had to trust them first. So I stood, letting the water stream off me like a shit Venus, waded over and kissed him, a hand catching the collar of his shirt, and my lips hard and urgent on his.

Trying to say things that I didn’t know how to say. Asking him to believe that I loved him and I wanted him and that he’d never be anything but beautiful to me.

When I finally let him go, he was tousled and blushing and—“Lucien, now I’m drenched.”

“Then,” I said, “you might as well be in the bath.”