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ALSO BY ALEXIS HALL

LONDON CALLING

Boyfriend Material

SPIRES

Glitterland

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Books. Change. Lives.

To MaryThank you for believing in these books

Part One

Chapter 1

I’VE NEVER SEEN THE POINT of hen parties. Though given my experiences of garden parties, dinner parties, and fancy dress parties, it might be that I just don’t like parties in general. Which, in retrospect, might explain why I spent so much of my party-boy years being miserable and hating myself. Personal growth. I was nailing it.

I was also nailing Bridge’s hen do. Or rather her non-gender-specific bird do, because she was never going to want her big prewedding bash to exclude half her friends. Also, since she’d made me her maid of honour, it would have meant excluding myself, which would have been weird. Even if, on some level, I might secretly have preferred an evening at home with my amazing barrister boyfriend.

My amazing barrister boyfriend who still felt like an amazing barrister boyfriend after two whole years.

My amazing barrister boyfriend who—on account of the amazing barrister part rather than the boyfriend part—was currently running late.

So there I was in the roped-off VIP area of an affordably swanky cocktail bar wearing a crocheted vulva hat. A bespoke crocheted vulva hat I’d commissioned from one of Bridge’s friends when I realised that bachelorette-party genital merch skewed strongly in the direction of all penis all the time. And, obviously, I could have just not had genitalia-themed decor at all, but then it wouldn’t have been a proper non-gender-specific bird do and that would have made Bridge sad. And making Bridge sad was something I wanted to avoid both in my capacity as maid of honour and in my capacity as her, y’know, friend.

James Royce-Royce plucked a dong-shaped lolly from the dong-shaped lolly jar. It was the first time I’d seen him, or his husband James Royce-Royce, without their newly adopted son in months. Their newly adopted son who they had, inevitably, named James. Although to avoid confusion, they just called him Baby J. “I must say, Luc,” he said. “I’m a little offended that you went with commercially produced phallic sweeties rather than asking for my contribution.”

Bernadette May, a relatively famous cookery book writer who Bridge had gone through so many work-related disasters with that they’d become friends out of sheer necessity, smouldered dismissively from across the table. She was one of those people who could smoulder at anything—and usually did. “That’s because your contribution would probably be a real horse’s penis rolled in saffron and finished with gold leaf.”

“Whereas yours,” retorted James Royce-Royce, “would be a Victoria sponge topped with marzipan willies.”

“Which is why”—I pulled my vulva more tightly over my head—“I asked neither of you. This is our night to celebrate Bridget, not for you two to have a schlong-themed cook-off.”

Bridge was sitting beside me, wearing a penis hat and, like all of the guests, a T-shirt that, owing to a miscommunication on the phone with the printers, read Bridge’s Bitches No Oliver I Think It’s Fine We’re Using It in the Reclaimed Sense and Anyway It’s Too Late to Change.

“Actually,” she said, “I think a schlong-themed cook-off would have been pretty cool.”

“Nongendered-genitalia-themed cook-off,” said Priya. “I’m not going home to my girlfriends and telling them that I went to a phallocentric baking event.”

Girlfriends, plural, was a new-enough development in Priya’s life that it had messed up Bridge’s seating plan. She and Theresa were still making it work, but an experimental threesome over Christmas had turned into a much less experimental set of regular hookups, which had turned into a solid official relationship just as I was helping Bridge address the invitations.

“You know,” I told her, “Theresa and Andi would both have been super welcome. I made spare T-shirts for them and everything.”

Priya gave a dismissive shrug. “Yeah, but the truly great thing about being in a throuple is that your partners can keep each other company instead of having to come to shit like this where they have to pretend to like your arsehole friends.”

I winced. “Can we remember that not everybody here knows everybody else, so calling people arseholes might come across the wrong way?”

“It’s fine.” That was Jennifer, who was sitting in her husband’s lap sipping a cocktail through a perfectly ordinary straw, thank you very much. “Brian talks like that all the time.”

“Then again,” said Peter from underneath her, “Brian is kind of an arsehole himself.”

Bridget spread her arms wide in an effort to encompass the entire group. “How about we accept that I love you arseholes and leave it at that.”

“Thinking about it”—James Royce-Royce was still inspecting his untouched phallic lolly—“we should probably have had arsehole-themed decorations as well.”

I glowered at him. “How about we definitely shouldn’t. My search history is incriminating enough as it is.”

“Is it, though?” Priya was giving me an I-think-not look. “You and Oliver practically live together. I bet your search history is nothing but ‘how to make vegan jam’ and ‘scenic walks near Clerkenwell.’”

Scarily, non-gender-specific bird do aside, that was pretty accurate. “You can’t possibly know that.”

“Last week,” said Priya in a devastating monotone, “you emailed me to ask my opinion on a table lamp.”

As one, the guests gasped.

“Luc,” cried James Royce-Royce. “No. Not a table lamp.”

“Shut up,” I responded very maturely.

Priya nodded gravely. “Yeah, he and Oliver are getting into raw, hard-core table lamping.”

“Shut up,” I responded very maturely.

“They’re at it,” she went on, “nearly every weekend. In every room. On every table.”

“It was one table.” I waved my hands despairingly. “One time.”

Peering archly over his martini glass, James Royce-Royce raised an eyebrow. “That’s how it starts. But before you know it, you’ll be getting into the really kinky stuff like uplighters.”

“No uplighters!” I yelled. Though Oliver had suggested that one would do wonders for the living area in my flat.

“I do hope,” said Peter, “that you’re at least using surge protection.”

I stood in a way that I hoped was decisive, not huffy. “I hate you all. Does anyone want another drink?”

Thankfully, most tails were already cocked, but a couple of Bridge’s work friends called for a round of cosmos. Cosmoi? On the way to the bar, I checked my phone to see if my amazing barrister boyfriend was actually going to show up.

I’m so sorry, he’d texted. Snowed under at work. I’ll be with you as soon as possible.

I’m so sorry, he’d texted again. I can’t get away quite yet.

I’m so sorry, he’d texted again again. I’ll be leaving in ten minutes.

And then: Please don’t worry. Everything is fine and I’m definitely going to be on my way soon.

Then: I’m sure you’ve thrown a wonderful party.

Then: I realise this is substandard boyfriending. I’ll make it up to you and to Bridget somehow.

Then: Leaving now. With you in twenty minutes.

Then: Traffic worse than expected. Sorry.

This was so typically Oliver. I was mildly annoyed that he wasn’t here. But his panicked texting was also weirdly endearing and I was in love with him. So fuck.

I was just in the middle of composing a playfully frustrated yet reassuring reply when I walked straight into the back of a solid wall of couple.

“Shit.” My thumb slipped, and I accidentally sent Oliver a string of nonsense. “Sorry. I wasn’t—”

And then my fucking ex turned round. The worst part about it was that for a tiny fraction of a second, before my head started to spin and my throat started to fill with imaginary frogs, I was almost pleased to see him. Because we’d been together for five years, and the bit of my brain that had got used to being in love with him hadn’t quite caught up with the whole he’s-a-traitorous-fuckface angle.

“Oh my God,” said the man who I’d once thought ruined my life. “Luc.”

“Miles,” I yelped. “It’s been ages.” Ages since you sold the intimate details of our relationship to a tabloid for fifty grand. But I smiled anyway because he didn’t deserve my emotional authenticity.

He, on the other hand, smiled like he was genuinely happy we’d run into each other. He’d always had a knockout smile, and his new immaculately groomed beard only made it knockoutier. Prick, prick, total prick. “Hasn’t it?” He turned to the implausibly perfect-looking young man by his side, a vision in glitter and rainbows. “JoJo this is Luc, Luc this is JoJo.”

“Hi.” JoJo stood on tiptoes to kiss me on both cheeks. “So how do you know Miles?”

Had he not even mentioned me? Then again, how would you? By the way, darling, you should know that my last relationship ended because I totally fucked the guy over? “Oh, we…we used to date.”

Miles had circled around and was standing very close to me now. And he’d put a hand on the small of my back in a way that was one part friendly, one part possessive. “Crazy times, right, Luc? And we’ve got so much catching up to do. Do you want to join us for a drink?”

Even if I hadn’t needed to get back to Bridge’s party, that would have ranked pretty low on my things-I-want-to-do list, somewhere between getting my eyebrows burned off with a chef’s blowtorch and spending a weekend in a bath full of dead squid. “I’d love to,” I said, “but I’m actually really busy right now. Bridge is getting married and she’s made me her maid of honour and my boyfriend is going to show up any minute—” The moment I mentioned Oliver, I realised how pathetic I sounded. I might as well have come straight out and added, But you wouldn’t know him because he goes to a different school.

“Oh, you’re still friends with Bridge?” said Miles. “Cool. I know you two always had that—y’know—that nineties gay-best-friend thing going on.”

Was he serious? Was he fucking serious? “I’m not sure I’d put it quite…”

“And on the subject of weddings”—JoJo was beaming like a cartoon sun—“can I tell him?”

Miles kissed his boyfriend on the top of his tiny head. “I think you’re going to have to now.”

“We’re getting married!”

I looked down at JoJo’s outstretched hand, and sure enough, there was a sparkling band of diamonds, chosen with way more taste than I would ever have had and, honestly, way more taste than I would have expected Miles to have. Maybe he’d bought it with the money he got for selling me out. “Oh,” I said, and then, realising that he was probably expecting a slightly bigger reaction, I added, “Congratulations.”

For a second nobody said anything, but the awkwardness of the moment very much spoke for itself. Because how was I supposed to react to this? Here was Miles, smiling that shoe-salesman smile at me, flaunting his adorable fiancé like he was one of those puppies you keep in a designer handbag and acting like he hadn’t completely fucking betrayed me.

“Anyway,” I continued, “I should. I might. Yeah.”

I was just disentangling myself when the music changed, and “Tartarus” came on.

“Tartarus.” The breakout single from Jon Fleming’s multiplatinum album Pendulum of the World. As part of the hype for the second season of The Whole Package, my dad had given this series of powerful, heartfelt interviews about how his struggle with cancer had made him confront his own mortality and realise what really mattered in life. Somehow the fact that he’d never had cancer in the first place—that nobody had even told him he had cancer or given him any reason to suspect he might have cancer—had got lost in the noise, and he’d become this poster child for survivors everywhere. He was even doing a public awareness campaign for the NHS.

Anyway. Pendulum of the World was his album about how fucking wise and brilliant he was now he was a selfish old prick instead of a selfish young prick, and “Tartarus” was this navel-gazing dirge about staring into the abyss and coming back stronger that had won the bastard a Grammy and could entirely fuck off. Especially because the last thing I needed just when I’d had an unexpected run-in with the narcissistic ex who’d sold me out for short-term gain was to be reminded of my narcissistic dad who’d sold me out for short-term gain.

In an effort to distract myself, I looked down at my phone. My text to Oliver had somehow autocorrected from It’s okay, see you soon to Its okay see your document, which had prompted a series of replies reading:

What document?

Was that text meant for me or somebody else?

Lucien, is something wrong?

I’ll be there as soon as I can. If something is wrong, tell me.

I’m sorry I took so long.

And I should probably have replied, but I couldn’t quite face it. Fate or the universe or whatever had decided to rub my clearly happy and successful piece-of-shit ex and my clearly happy and successful piece-of-shit dad in my face within thirty seconds of each other. And while I was also technically clearly happy and successful, it felt a whole lot less clear with my amazing barrister boyfriend sitting in traffic while I was being introduced to fabulous, perfect look-how-engaged-and-beautiful-I-am JoJo and his Technicolor waistcoats and his sparkly ring.

Especially since, as I suddenly remembered, I was still wearing a crocheted vulva on my head.

Bridget’s friends were relying on me for a cosmo top-up, but right then my maid-of-honour duties seemed less important than my get-the-hell-out-of-there duties. The bar was too loud and too hot, and I needed some air. So I tucked my phone into my jeans and slunk off to sit outside and do some good old-fashioned feeling sorry for myself.

Except, as it turned out, even that was easier said than done because we were in fucking London, so sitting outside would have meant plonking my arse down on a pavement that approximately twenty-seven million people were trying to walk along at the same time, all desperately hurrying from wherever they had been to wherever they were going and not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to someone getting in their way.

Not being quite self-loathing enough to let a whole city trample over me, I went to look for somewhere I could sit down and, because of the previously mentioned London issue, failed to find anywhere that wasn’t already occupied and wound up wandering into a badly lit park that, in a better state of mind, I’d have avoided for fear of being murdered and/or arrested.

And that was the point when I realised that my best friend had made me maid of honour for the wedding she’d been dreaming about since she was five, and I’d just bailed on her non-gender-specific bird do.

Fuck.

Fuckity, fuckity, fuck.

In a way it was comforting. People always worry that being in a relationship will change them, so it was good to know that being with Oliver hadn’t completely destroyed my ability to be a shitty friend. And a shitty boyfriend. And an all-around shitty person.

Fuck.

At last I found an empty bench and collapsed onto it like a sack of deeply shitty potatoes—the kind that have been left in the kitchen too long and are getting weird knobbly things growing out of them. Because that was me, wasn’t it? I was a knobbly-sprouting potato of a person. I’d been given the perfectly simple job of getting a bunch of people who liked each other to have a nice time in a bar full of fruity drinks and penis nibbles, and I’d managed to fuck even that up.

I checked my phone again.

Where are you?

Fuck. I’d fucked that up too.

WHERE RU ??!!?? RUOK???!

That wasn’t Oliver, that was Bridge. Which meant she’d noticed I was gone. Which meant I was making her special night—well, I suppose her actual special night was the wedding night, but her slightly less special night—all about me.

I pulled off my crocheted vulva hat and stared at it, and it stared back accusingly like a sexual Eye of Sauron.

Fuck.

I was the worst maid of honour ever.

Fuck.

I was a bad friend and a bad boyfriend, and the reason people kept screwing me over and abandoning me was because I sucked and deserved it.

Fuck.

“Is this seat taken?”

Turning around, I saw Oliver standing behind me. He looked a funny mix of composed and dishevelled, his tie loose around his neck and his formal shirt unbuttoned to reveal his Bridge’s Bitches No Oliver I Think It’s Fine We’re Using It in the Reclaimed Sense and Anyway It’s Too Late to Change T-shirt beneath. He looked more worried than angry.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“Bridget said that you’d disappeared, so I asked around to see if anybody had seen a tall man with a vagina on his head running away from a cocktail bar.”

“Vulva,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“The vagina is internal—the external part is the vulva.”

Oliver gave me his warmest, reassuringest smile. “Either way it was a distinctive enough look that you weren’t hard to find.” He came around the bench, sat down next to me, and put his arm around my shoulders. I leaned in to him without even thinking about it. “Bridget told me she saw Miles. She thought that might have been why you left.”

I nodded. “They were playing my dad’s song too.”

Oliver gave me a little squeeze. “That sounds like quite the perfect storm. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“So was I. Fuck, sorry, I mean… I mean it would have been great if you were there. I don’t mean… I know you had to work.”

“I know what you mean.”

“It just would have been great to be able to say ‘Hi, Miles, fuck you, my life is great.’”

Oliver gave a sort of half laugh. “You could still have said it.”

“Yeah, but I’d have had no proof.”

“You’re proof.”

One of these days I was going to stop being surprised when Oliver said exactly the right thing. But this wasn’t the day. “For fuck’s sake, Oliver. Stop being so…so…completely great.”

And for a while we just sat there, and I let myself feel safe and held and loved, and he took my hand and didn’t say anything because he didn’t need to.

“Also,” I said, because I’d decided that feeling nice was overrated and I wanted to ruin the moment, “his fiancé is, like, twelve.”

“I assume not literally?”

“No, but he’s…like…this tiny little pretty boy called JoJo. I mean who the hell is called JoJo?”

“I assume that’s rhetorical?”

“I’ll tell you who’s called JoJo,” I went on. “A prick, that’s who.”

Oliver was still there and still, despite my decision to insult an innocent stranger, not judging me. “Perhaps. Although personally I think the man who sold you out and made you afraid to ever trust anybody again is a bigger prick.”

“Oh yeah. He’s a huge prick. Which is ironic because his actual prick is quite tiny.”

“Is that true?” Oliver gave me another smile. “Or are you just trying to make me feel special?”

“You know, I can’t remember. But he deserves to have a tiny prick. And if you could tell all your friends he has a tiny prick, that would be fantastic, thanks.”

That made Oliver laugh. “For you, Lucien, anything.”

So I kind of had to kiss him.

And then I kind of had to kiss him again. Y’know, just in case.

And then it felt…it felt okay. Because the rest of the world didn’t matter. I mean it did because I had, like, friends and a job and things I actually cared about. But Miles didn’t matter, and JoJo certainly didn’t matter. “I think…” I said. “I think I can go back now.”

So we got up, I put my vulva hat back on my head, and I let Oliver Blackwood—my amazing barrister boyfriend—escort me back to my best friend’s non-gender-specific bird party. And I knew, deep in my heart, that everything was going to be fine.

After all, it wasn’t like I was ever going to see Miles again.

Chapter 2

"OKAY," I TOLD ALEX TWADDLE. I was seriously running low on jokes, but the ritual was so much part of my life now that I wasn’t about to give up on it. “Let’s try this one. There’s a man who works on a bus selling tickets, and he loves his job, but one day he loses his temper with a passenger and throws them off the bus and they fall under a car and die.”

“I say”—Alex looked outraged—“that’s not on at all. Especially not for a bus conductor.”

“No,” I agreed, “it’s very poor behaviour and, spoiler, you should remember that because it might be relevant later.”

“Good to know.” For a moment, Alex looked contemplative. “I say, that might help with your jokes in general. Give a chap a bit of a pointer on what a chap’s supposed to be paying attention to.”

“Duly noted. Anyway, he gets sent to court for throwing this passenger under a car.”

Alex nodded. “For being a bad conductor, you mean?”

The Alex-joke-foreboding was beginning to rise up. “Yes, I suppose so. Although I think they’d probably just have called it murder. Anyway, the judge sentences him to the electric chair.”

“I say, how ironic.”

Abandon joke. Abandon joke now. “Ironic in what way?”

“Well, you know, chap’s a bad conductor, gets sentenced to the electric chair. I say, it’d be rather droll if he was such a bad conductor that the chair didn’t work, wouldn’t it? Be sort of like a play on words.”

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