Work Text:
The plumber who turned up was not at all what I’d been expecting. I’d been prepared for a man in his 50s with a flat cap hiding a combover, a grungy t-shirt stretched over a paunchy belly, and maybe a hairy arse crack on display. Instead, I opened the door to find a guy who looked a bit like he could be a Love Island bombshell, if that particular contestant entered the villa carrying a toolbox plumbing implements for whatever reason.
“Hi, Sam, Becker and Son Plumbing,” said the Hot Plumber in a Scouse accent. I blinked for a moment, taking him in. He flashed a disarming grin and added, “Here for the toilet install?”
"Um, right, sorry, I was not expecting…” I started, then—because I was in a loving, committed relationship—managed to finish with “…you to be on time?” Which, I realised as soon as I said it, was maybe kind of rude. But Hot Plumber didn't seem bothered, at least.
“Soonest started, soonest finished,” he said with a shrug. “Did the toilet arrive on time as well then?”
It had. He set aside his tools for a moment as I showed him through to the space in the sitting room where I’d stashed the oversized box of toilet that B&Q had delivered yesterday and gestured at it with a totally unnecessary “ta-da” flourish of my hands.
“All right then, where’s this going?”
“Um, upstairs, just on the left,” I said, following him up the stairs while doing my best not to stare at his arse, because again—loving, committed relationship… and also I was not trying to sexually harass the only tradesman in a 20-mile radius who turned up on time. “Do you… need a hand with the toilet?” I asked tentatively.
“Nah,” he said. "But I find it's best to take a quick check at where it's going before hauling toilets upstairs,” he went in to take a look at our currently-chipped toilet. Then he went back and studied the label of the box with a look that seemed somewhere near the intersection of Concerned Avenue and Dismayed Boulevard.
“Is everything… all right?” I tried. “Something wrong with the toilet?”
He blew out a sigh that seemed to indicate everything was in fact, not all right. “This is a Duravit No.1 Close Coupled Closed Back Toilet with Seat, which, to be clear, is a perfectly fine loo…” I sensed a ‘but’ coming just as Hot Plumber frowned. “But…” (there it was) “You’ve currently got an open back toilet in place and I can see from your current pipes that the closed back design on this,” he gestured to the box “just won’t be able to contain that,” he finished, gesturing towards where our current toilet was hooked up to the wall.
I looked in the direction he’d indicated, trying to determine if there was some way I was getting out of this without paying an arm and a leg more than the amount he’d quoted me.
“I see,” I said, despite the fact that I blatantly did not actually see. “So… what are our options?”
“Well, I could install this toilet, but it’ll be more expensive and take longer since I’d have to replace some of the connection there…” he indicated our current bathroom. “Or, yez could return this toilet, get one with a different back and the install should be a whole lot quicker.”
“And that would be… cheaper?” I asked, just to confirm that this was actually the case.
“Yeah, unless you bought some dead fancy toilet to replace this one. But yez could get a perfectly adequate toilet for about £100 less than this one here, if you really wanted,” he said. “I don’t know how concerned about design or extra functionality you are…”
“Is… that a thing people care about? Should… I care about that?”
“I used to work in bathware sales,” he said sounding, I thought, weirdly nostalgic. “You’d be surprised the things people care about when it comes to toilets.”
“I don’t care about how it looks or anything other than it doing normal toilet things…y'know, normally. We’ve got a home visit for our foster daughter tomorrow and I don't think it will look good on the report if there’s a broken toilet in her bathroom. You couldn’t just… re-seal it?” I asked, knowing before I got the words out that the answer was probably no.
“That… definitely needs replacing,” Hot Plumber said, frowning at our current bathroom. “I don’t want to put down a fellow tradesman, but if it had been me, I’d of probably told yez not to bother with the sealant and just replace the bog straight away. Even if it’s sealed up, using a cracked loo is… risky.” His said this last bit like he was breaking some bad news to me.
“Risky, like it might… leak or flood?” I was pretty sure I didn't want to hear the answer because Hot Plumber frowned some more.
“If all it does is flood, you'd be lucky. Yez can Google it if you’re in the mood to read some harrowing stuff, but… basically, think of the parts of yourself that you’d least want to be cut to shreds by shards of porcelain, because those are the parts most likely to be involved. Let’s just say the best time to replace the toilet would’ve been straight away, but the next best time is… now, like.”
I winced, not wanting to dwell on the fact that we’d apparently been putting Jas’s life and limbs at risk for the last few weeks. Fuck. Maybe in addition to Could it be Sepsis? the NHS should remind us to just ask: Is this loo cracked?
“OK, but we definitely don’t have the correct toilet on hand to do that now?”
“That’s about the shape of it,” he nodded. “Or, you know, the incorrect shape of it, as it were. You're my only callout for the rest of the afternoon, so if we can get yez an open back toilet here, I can still install it today.”
“Any recommendations on where I can get a correctly-shaped toilet on short notice with no car?” I sighed. “My boyfriend had to take ours to work today, and I’ve got a call with either the director or former director of the Skenfrith Male Voice Choir choir in about an hour that was surprisingly hard to schedule, and so unfortunately, I’m not particularly flexible.”
I was prepared for him to wish me luck and head out, but Hot Plumber looked thoughtful.
“Tell you what, my boyfriend runs a chain of bedding and bathwares stores. Same-day delivery orders usually have to be placed before noon, but…” he paused. “I don’t want to make any promises, but let me see what I can do.”
He pulled out his phone to make a call and I took that as my cue to step away so as not to seem like I was eavesdropping. Not wanting to disappear too far into another part of the house and thus force Hot Plumber to hunt me down with updates, I occupied myself with calming Spud down in his crate.
A few minutes later, Hot Plumber appeared in my study doorway looking cheery.
“Well, good news,” he said. “The shop has a Kerala Round Rimless Open Back Close Coupled Toilet in stock, which should do nicely with your space and can get it delivered this afternoon.”
I blinked at him, waiting for whatever ‘but’ might be coming, but there did not appear to be one.
“Thank you?” I said, not quite believing my luck. “So… do we… just wait until then…? Or…”
“I need to remove your old toilet and get things all set for the install, which will take me a bit,” Hot Plumber said. “The new one should be here in the next hour or so. Yez can… get on with your… male voice choir call, if you need.”
“All right then,” I said, before remembering to add, “Thanks again.”
🚽🚽🚽
Just over an hour later, the doorbell rang and for the second time that afternoon, I was not at all prepared for the person stood on the other side. A tall, dark, fancy man in a dark, fancy suit was on my doorstep with a large, incongruous box of toilet at his feet.
“Luc?” he said in a confused voice. As he brushed an errant strand of white hair off his forehead, I realised it was, of all people, Jonathan Forest.
Except. Jonathan had maybe… gotten kind of hot since the last time I saw him? Upon closer inspection, I saw he was still the same bushy-eyebrowed, angular, lanky git I’d known at university. Only now, he’d grown a stubbly beard that softened his craggy face a bit, and his eyebrows looked a little more… groomed, maybe. His hair had been styled differently too, a bit looser and more relaxed with a little bit more white showing at the temples and, befitting his new Hot Daddy look, he’d acquired a pair of glasses.
“Jonathan?” I said, equally confused.
“Jonathan!” cried Hot Plumber in what I think counted as surprised delight as he emerged from the stairs behind me. I stepped to the side so that Hot Plumber could give Jonathan an enthusiastic hug and watched as Jonathan honest-to-God blushed in response.
“Sam, hi, I, um—” he stammered.
“I didn’t expect you to personally be delivering the toilet,” Hot Plumber said with a grin. “Yez didn’t have to come all the way out here.”
“My… afternoon meetings got cancelled,” Jonathan continued to stammer to Hot Plumber, “And… I saw in the system that you’d put in the express delivery request and… Well, I figured… it would be nice… to see you. And anyway, Mum's been on me to visit her Aunt Donna in Romsford, so… ” he trailed off with a shrug.
At this, Hot Plumber became basically the living embodiment of the ‘face with heart eyes’ emoji and I realised I was definitely staring at the two of them.
“Uhm…” I tried to clear my throat. “Come through. Do you… need help with… the toilet box?”
“I can manage,” snapped Jonathan, and he lifted the large and box and carried it inside.
By now, Spud was going absolutely mental in his crate, so I closed the front door and went to let Spud loose so that he could greet the new arrival and inspect the new toilet box. Jonathan crouched down in front of Spud, then looked up at me a little tentatively.
“Er… may I pet your dog?”
I nodded. “This is Spud,” I said, and Spud said, “Ruff.”
“Ah, you must be smelling Gollum on me,” Jonathan said, presumably to the dog because he was using that talking-to-animals kind of voice people get when interacting with dogs, and also, I wasn’t really in sniffing range. He gave Spud scritches behind his ears and Spud sniffed him enthusiastically and thwacked his tail on the floor appreciatively. “You smell Gollum, don’t you? Gollum is not going to be pleased that I pet you.”
“Is Gollum… your dog?” I asked, still feeling bewildered by the entire situation.
“He’s our cat,” corrected Hot Plumber, who paused from the toilet unboxing to get out his phone and show me a photo of a creature that even charitably I do not think qualified as a cat.
“Oh...” I said, not doing a particularly good job of masking the horror in my voice. “I… can… see why you call him Gollum…”
“Yeah, he’s an ugly little bastard,” Hot Plumber agreed, giving the disfigured animal displayed on his phone screen a fond smile.
“He’s a very good cat,” Jonathan snarled, more than a little defensively as he straightened up. “Once you get to know him.”
There was an awkward silence for a moment as the three of us stared at each other in varying levels of confusion and surprise.
“Sorry, do you… all know each other?” asked Jas, who had apparently emerged from her room at some point in the last few minutes and was eyeing us sceptically.
“Oh. Um, Jas, this is Jonathan Forest,” I said, feeling a little pleased with myself that I’d managed to remember Jonathan’s surname this time. “He and I went to university together. He… sells toilets. Apparently. Jonathan, this is Jas, our foster daughter.”
“How do you do,” said Jonathan with a stiff nod towards Jas, and since, despite his glow-up, he hadn’t fully graduated out of his awkwardness, he added more stiffly, “And, um, this is Sam Becker, my boyfriend… and your plumber, but I gather you knew that part.”
“Aye,” said Hot Plumber, whom I guessed I should’ve been calling Sam now. “Lovely to re-meet yez all. I should probably go install this toilet. I’ve already got everything prepped, so I reckon it should be pretty quick.”
Jonathan nodded to the boyfriend whom I would never in a million years have pictured him with. Not that I could really picture him with anyone, come to think of it.
“I can… um…” Jonathan flicked a glance at me, “Wait in the car?”
“You can wait in here, if you like,” I offered.
“Do yez not have to go, like?” Sam asked Jonathan. “I know you’re really busy and…”
Jonathan shook his head. “No, as I said, my afternoon got cancelled and…” he made sort of a flailing gesture.
“All right then. Give me two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” Sam pressed a kiss to Jonathan’s cheek, gave Jas and me polite nods, and went about hoisting our new, acceptably-shaped and uncracked toilet up the stairs.
“Can I watch?” asked Jas, because the afternoon apparently wasn’t done with unexpected twists.
“Be my guest,” said Sam, and she and Spud followed him.
“So… how… have you been?” I tried once Jonathan and I were left standing alone together.
“Really good, actually,” Jonathan smiled in that way people do when they are in fact quite pleased with the way life has been going for them lately. “Work has me pretty busy, but I can’t really complain.”
“Sam seems… nice,” I said. “He’s been the most helpful tradesman I’ve ever hired at least. Have you… known each other long?”
“A few years,” Jonathan said. “Though we only began dating about, well, I guess it’s been a little over two years now… And… did I hear you’d gotten married a few years back? I… um… Forgive me, I forgot your partner’s name—”
“Oliver,” I supplied. “And we… um, held the wedding but in the end decided for civil partnership instead of marriage.”
Jonathan nodded. “Well, congratulations all the same. Are you still working for… was it a bug charity?”
“For now,” I shrugged. “Though, it’s looking more and more like we may be winding things down, as an organisation.”
“Sorry to hear that. Did… the bugs… all die off? Or… all get saved?”
I gave a long sigh. “The earl who was our largest funder died off, so now I’m organising a music festival to try to save the dung beetles. Though right now it’s looking mostly like a toilet festival since that, plus an Ed Sheeran cover band, is most of what we have booked so far.”
“Well, I suppose I can’t really slag on toilets,” Jonathan’s mouth twisted in what might have been a half smile, “Given my line of work.”
“And Sam’s,” I added.
Jonathan made a low chuckle. “Yes, that too.”
“Don’t suppose your company would be interested in sponsorship opportunities?” I asked, about 80 percent as a joke and about 20 percent as a truly desperate fundraiser, knowing perfectly well this was not going to go anywhere but figuring I had nothing to lose. “I have a freshly-edited pitch deck I could send for your consideration.”
“Um,” Jonathan said, looking actually thoughtful. “I… suppose I could have a look. We have a fairly limited budget for charitable sponsorships, but…” he made a kind of a who knows gesture. “Dung beetles, toilets, and music… might… be a fit?”
I gave him a surprised look. “You don’t have to. I know the last time we saw each other, I was a bit of a… how did you put it?”
“A cock?” he offered.
“Yeah…” I shrugged. “Erm. Sorry ‘bout that. I think I was probably a little… on edge that day.”
“Well, given where we were, that was probably fair,” Jonathan shrugged back at me. “Do you… keep in touch with Miles at all?”
“God no,” I scoffed with a little too much disgust to pull off the detached coolness I’d aimed for. “I mean, not really. No.”
“I haven’t either,” he said with a nod, “Though I did hear he and the YouTuber separated last year.”
"Really?" I asked, too caught off guard by this news for the expression of nonchalance I tried to assume moments later to be believable. “Where… did you hear that?”
He rolled his eyes a little. “My sister is a subscriber to Jojo's channel. And she loves to gossip. Apparently, they’d 'appreciate it if everyone would respect their privacy at this delicate time’ and they ‘still have the utmost respect for one another,’” Jonathan half-sneered.
There was silence for a moment while I processed that information.
“Ugh, don’t make me feel like the only arsehole here because I’m still petty enough to indulge in a little schadenfreude now and again,” Jonathan sighed, looking pained.
And I genuinely laughed. “Not at all, I’m just busy congratulating myself on my incredible personal growth at not having learned this news until now. And I guess I had sort of hoped for Jojo’s sake that they’d make it work. They seemed… I dunno, genuine? At their wedding.”
“I don’t know. It all felt a bit performative to me,” Jonathan shrugged, and then to my continued surprise, added, “I always thought you were too good for him at any rate.”
“Thank you?” I tried, now so thoroughly caught off guard I may as well have left every door in the place wide open.
There was more silence for another moment but just as it started to turn more awkward, Jonathan kept talking.
“And you’re… fostering now,” he said in his familiar monotone, which meant I wasn’t quite sure if it was a question or a statement of fact.
I nodded. “Well, after getting a dog, parenting an actual human seemed like the next logical step.”
He smiled in a way that I couldn’t quite read. Maybe I just hadn’t seen enough of Jonathan’s smiles to have any idea how to categorise or interpret them.
“We’ve been…” he glanced at the staircase, made sort of a half shrug, and looked down, “Talking. About options. We’re not quite there yet. But I know the process can take some time. So… It’s always helpful to do research, I guess.”
I nodded. Was Jonathan trying to have a conversation about adoption and fostering?
“It’s… a big decision,” I settled on and he looked up.
“Yes, well. Perhaps I’ll give you a call and we can get coffee or something, if you’re up for it,” he met my eye. “I’d love to hear more about your and Olivers’ experiences.”
“Um, sure,” I tried.
Also, given how much effort it had taken to schedule a dinner party with our actual friends, I wasn’t sure how likely it was that Oliver and I would meet up with Jonathan and Hot Plumber to have what would probably be an exceptionally awkward conversation about the challenges of being foster parents. Then again, the dinner party with actual friends had gone poorly enough that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some other social engagements on rotation. If nothing else, we could practise being the kind of couple who actually interact with other couples without getting into deeply personal attacks on each other's life choices. Also Oliver would probably appreciate the opportunity to share all the research he’d compiled with someone who might actually read it.
Fortunately, before the silence could be formally upgraded from Slightly Awkward to Incredibly Fucking Weird, Hot Plumber, or I guess, Sam reappeared.
“Right, toilet is all sorted. If you want to take a look and make sure everything looks ok to you, I can send you the invoice.”
“I’m… sure it’s fine,” I said. At the best of times, I've always felt strange checking on the work of tradesmen since I never really have any idea what I’m checking, and since this particular tradesman was, by some bizarre twist of coincidence, Jonathan’s boyfriend, it seemed reasonable enough to hope he wasn’t ripping me off.
“If you’re sure then…” he shrugged and turned to Jonathan, “Shall we off then?”
“Indeed,” said Jonathan. But before turning for the door, he reached into his fancy suit jacket, pulled out a fancy silver case, and slid out a ridiculously fancy business card from it. “You can email me that pitch deck, if you like,” he said as he handed it to me. And then—because he was Jonathan, and would probably always be a bit of an awkward git—he added, “Good luck with the new loo.”
“You too,” I said reflexively, then we all blinked at each other for a moment before Sam broke the silence with a laugh.