BECAUSE I’D BEEN TOO LAZY to ever take anything down (except that one Rights of Man poster I’d put up and thrown away at least three times), the walls of my old bedroom were kind of a history of things I’d been into my whole life. Starting with the original 151 Pokémon poster from when I’d been about ten, moving up through Cary Grant from the classic movie phase I’d had when I’d been twelve and wanting to feel very grown-up. Then there was the Brokeback Mountain poster back from when “two cowboys shag once, then one of them dies” was the best rep you got in mainstream media if you weren’t old enough to watch Queer as Folk. Also, they weren’t even proper cowboys; they spent most of their time looking at sheep. Which, growing up in a place where looking at sheep was about the most exciting thing you could do on a Friday night, wasn’t the escapist fantasy I was hoping for.

I scowled moodily at Cary Grant and tried to shake the notion that I might have had a thing for stern-featured clean-cut guys that went back way longer than I thought. And it felt weird to be lying on my childhood bed thinking about adult problems. Because you didn’t get much more adult, either in the euphemistic-about-sex way or the realistic-about-bills-and-responsibilities way, than stressing over your wedding.

And, hoo boy, was I stressing. It was just so muddy and impossible. Because I loved Oliver and I wanted to be with him for, like, ever, but the more I thought about it, the more I got this hard-to-pin-down not-quite-sick, not-quite-scared, not-quite-something feeling that we were doing it wrong. Of course I’d been feeling like I was doing it wrong for…well, not my whole life. When I’d been young and full of unearned confidence, I’d been pretty convinced that I was nailing it and anybody who failed to nail it was suffering from a tragic case of not being me. But then Miles had happened and suddenly I’d realised that the young, confident me was full of shit, and then a whole lot of years had passed and now here I was, slowly getting better but still crushingly aware I was making it up as I went along. Except even by my standards, the wedding had strong doing-it-wrong energy.

I’d proposed almost by accident. I’d nearly been put off buying a ring by a mildly rude man in a mid-range jeweller’s. Oliver’s parents had been so horrified that they’d made the whole thing feel less like a party than a protest, and then one of them had immediately dropped dead, giving everything a complex set of implications that I was nowhere near getting my head around. And now we were bickering over tiny details that neither of us cared about.