I gave him what I intended to be a playful tug on the arm, but I hadn’t quite factored in things like gravity and balance and wet marble. Oliver had just enough time for a flail and a “What the—” before we tumbled backwards into the bath with an enormous splash.

Thankfully, it was deep enough and wide enough that we didn’t die.

Oliver resurfaced in a flurry of wet fabric and bubbles. Thankfully he was laughing rather than glowering, complaining, or pointing out quite how close he’d come to cracking his head open. “That was very…very you, Lucien.”

“It was an accident.”

“Exactly.”

I took a moment to appreciate Oliver in a near-transparent white shirt clinging to all the bits of his body that I, coincidentally, liked clinging to. “For the record. This”—I made a kind of rectangle that was meant to encompass all of him—“is really working for me.”

“Thank you.” He looked flustered. “It’s, um. It’s actually quite uncomfortable.”

“There’s a solution to that.”

He still looked flustered. “Kiss me again first.”

In my head, I mermaided into his arms, full of seduction and mystery. But I was very much a land-based organism. So I sort of half stumbled, half waded forward, nearly knocking him over again, and finally managed to smack my lips onto his.

Thankfully, we’d had some practice at this—the kissing, not the navigating a neoclassical bath in an earl’s country house—and after a teeny bit of fumbling and nose orientating, we settled into one of the few routines I saw the point of. The world melting away beneath the familiarity of Oliver’s mouth against mine. His taste and the heat of him, and the way he always kissed me so carefully at first—like he wanted me to know I was precious—before he lost himself in urgency. And we got rough and messy and desperate for each other.

Even after two years. When surely it should have stopped feeling this way: all, you know, intense and stuff. Honestly, it still kind of scared me sometimes. And not just because the last time I’d let myself get this close to someone, I’d been really badly hurt, but because I’d never let myself get this close to someone. I wasn’t sure I’d ever known how.

Until I’d met Oliver. And falling in love with him had left me defenceless.

I took the opportunity to make a midkiss play for his trousers. And, again in my head, this had been seamless and sexy. Except in practice, a wet belt was a pisser to undo and wet buttons did not slide easily through eyeholes. I did, eventually, manage to wrangle him out, but I nearly drowned and lost anything that might have resembled dignity.

“Are you all right?” Oliver ask-laughed, as I spluttered back to the surface.