“And then you just dragged your feet until it was too late so you could get your own way regardless. And that, Lucien, is exactly the kind of thing your father would do.”

It was, but that was pretty fucking rich coming from Mr. My-Way-or-the-Highway. “Oh, right, yeah, I’m definitely the one acting like his father here. Because this high-handed, controlling, patriarchal weirdly heteronormative attitude you’re taking doesn’t remind me of anybody at all.”

One of the many difficult quirks of my relationship with Oliver was that we had diametrically opposed anger reactions. And now Oliver was anger-reacting all over the place, which for him meant getting very tense and calm. “It isn’t weirdly heteronormative,” he said, “not to want to get married in a pub.”

That was another old argument, and another one where we’d sort of stopped talking and then Oliver had invented a compromise out of nowhere. “It wasn’t a pub, it was a vintage venue space with an attached bar, and I thought it was nice. You on the other hand wanted to get married in a Victorian banqueting hall full of pictures of dead white men.”

“Firstly”—Oliver began counting on his fingers—“it’s Elizabethan. Secondly, it seems a little appropriative and disingenuous to complain about pictures of dead white men when we are ourselves both white men. Thirdly, that venue was at Gray’s Inn, which has personal significance for me because it’s a body I actually belong to. And fourthly, we didn’t go with that venue either, so I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”

Defeated, I slumped backwards, and as I did, my left arm flopped with an uncontrolled floppishness that caught the stack of papers whose order I had so carefully preserved and sent them tumbling to the floor in a mess of sticky tags and handwritten notes.

Oliver grew very still indeed. “Lucien,” he said in his most carefully regulated monotone, “I feel like your presence here is becoming unhelpful.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” If Oliver’s anger instinct was to get super-duper calm, mine was to get super-duper sarcastic, which was probably less mature but also probably healthier in the long run. “Is my involvement in our wedding becoming inconvenient?”

“Now you’re being—”

“If you dare say I’m being childish, I am getting up and walking out of that door.”

Oliver gave me a cold, distant look that I’d seen a couple of times before but had never imagined would be directed at me. “Right at this moment, that might be the most practical thing you can do. Leave this to me, Lucien, I’ll have everything finished by the time you’re back.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. It had been ages since I’d had a good storm-out.

I stormed.

I stormed so extravagantly that I ended up at my mum’s house.