I basked for a moment in having, very briefly, not fucked one thing up. “Actually, when I booked, I told them this was our first-date restaurant and that we’d had the lemon posset and you’d gone vegan since but could they do something. And they said they could.”

Oliver’s eyes got very close to teary again. “Lucien.” He swallowed. “That was…that was terribly sweet of you.”

If I’d been a lot more grown-up, I’d have said, It was nothing. If I’d been slightly more grown-up, I’d have said, Anything for you, babe. But wanting to make someone happy as much as I wanted to make Oliver happy was a very naked feeling to be having in a restaurant so, instead, I just gave an embarrassed cringe and said something that came out as “inerenugh?”

By some magic I’d never quite mastered, Oliver caught the waiter’s eye, seamlessly volunteered that the meal had been lovely and, from there, segued into a requesting a lemon posset with two spoons to finish. I should have got used to Oliver being good at this shit by now but…I hadn’t. Really, all that had changed was that instead making me feel inadequate, it made me feel smug that my boyfriend—fiancé—was polite and considerate and confident and knew how to restaurant.

“You know I’m not letting you use that spoon, right?”

He rolled his eyes in his secretly-into-it way. “When did this become a thing with us?”

“Since we went to this restaurant,” I told him, “and you looked at a lemon posset like you wanted to have sex with it. I have to feed you the dessert so it’s a threesome, not voyeurism.”

“I did not want to have sex with the lemon posset.” It was now Oliver’s turn to speak slightly too loudly for the restaurant. He lowered his voice. “I wanted to have sex with you, but you were making it very clear there was no possibility of that happening.”

“Well”—I grinned at him—“now you get us both.”

“Although one of you only temporarily.”

My grin froze. “You are talking about the lemon posset, right?”

At this moment the waiter returned with the requested posset, plus two spoons. It was as beautiful as it had been last time, all sunshine yellow and tempting.

“Do you have something you want to tell me?” I asked it, scowling.

It probably said something about our relationship that Oliver had a specific exasperated-fondness sigh. “Mr. Posset, remember that you have a right not to self-incriminate.”

“Yeah,” I threw back, having seen many police procedurals, “but it may harm its defence if it fails to mention when questioning something it later relies on in court.”

Snatching up both the posset and one of the spoons, Oliver half turned away from me. “Excuse me, I need to confer with my client.”