Proof By Contradiction (The Carrick Brothers #1)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Three days in Manchester and I’ve already decided I’m leaving.

Then a man walks into a lecture theatre and ruins the plan.

Sounds like the start of a joke.

The carpet is the colour of a confession nobody wanted to make. Brown, or grey, or some middle ground that suggests bodily fluid and cigarette burns.

Seven thirty in the morning. Welcome to Manchester.

My bag’s still zipped at the foot of the bed where I dropped it three days ago.

Haven’t unpacked. Haven’t put up posters, haven’t arranged the desk, haven’t done any of the sad little nesting rituals other freshers apparently require.

The girl next door has fairy lights. I can see the glow under the connecting wall, which is thin enough that I also heard her cry on the phone to her mum last night.

The bloke on the other side wanks at midnight with alarming punctuality.

Home comforts.

In Lewisham, my room has a double bed, a window that faces the street, and the 171 going past every twelve minutes, on the dot. I had a system, a life, a postcode that held weight.

Here I’ve got a mattress with pin-holes in the wall above it and a view of a car park.

I roll onto my back. Stare at the ceiling. There’s a stain up there shaped like Italy, which feels like the universe taking the piss.

My phone buzzes, it’s my brother Ronan. You settling in? Delete. He’s been texting every day since I left, which is more interest than he managed last year. Guilt, probably. Or Mum told him to—either way.

The bag stays zipped. If I haven’t arrived, I can still leave.

Two hundred freshers crammed into a lecture theatre built for fewer. The heating’s on too high, and someone nearby has made a catastrophic deodorant choice. I slide into the back row next to Femi, who’s already got his notebook open, pen lined up, like he thinks this will matter.

‘Mathematical Methods,’ I read off the schedule. ‘Compulsory for Economics. Taught by the maths department.’ I look at Femi. ‘They’ve outsourced the boring bit.’

‘Give it a chance,’ he says. Femi gives everything a chance. It’s either his best quality or his worst, and I haven’t decided which.

Two hundred glazed expressions. Future traders are realising they fucked up.

Then the door at the front opens, and the man walks in and everything, every stupid thought about carpet and postcodes and getting out, drops.

Tall. His shoulders are broad enough that the shirt across his back is doing structural work. He moves like his body is a calculation. Sets his bag down and uncaps a marker. The tendons in his forearm shift under the skin when he grips it.

Christ.

His face is.

No. Start with the hands. Long fingers, blunt nails, a grip on that marker that says he knows exactly what pressure to apply. Those hands on a whiteboard. On a desk. On the back of someone’s neck.

My neck.

His face. Jaw like it was designed to cause arguments.

Dark hair, pushed back, long enough to grab if you had him on his back.

That stare that hasn’t locked down yet, behind a pair of glasses he thinks make him look academic.

They do. That’s the problem. I’m already thinking about pulling them off.

About how he’d look up close, unfocused, the pupils blown.

Stop. He’s talking.

‘Good morning.’ Deep, measured, Lancashire vowels that sit in the ribs. Half the room sits up straighter. ‘I’m Dr Haldrey. I’ll be taking you through the mathematical foundations you’ll need for your economics modules this year.’

Nobody’s excited. They signed up for supply and demand, not partial derivatives.

I wasn’t excited either. Thirty seconds ago.

I sit up without meaning to.

He writes a problem on the board, three lines. ‘To see where you all are. Have a look at this. Take your time.’

The answer arrives before his pen stops. Substitution, rearrange, solve. Obvious.

Don’t volunteer. Just not playing the same game anyway—if I answer, the room shifts weight, all two hundred pairs of eyes landing at once, and I won’t have it.

I slouch lower in my seat, pick at a thread on my jeans.

Forty-five seconds pass, a minute. Someone in the front row has a go at an answer that’s so wrong it circles back to creativity. Dr Haldrey listens, that perfect professor smile, the one hiding the calculation, then corrects.

He rolls his sleeves up while he talks. One fold. Two.

Don’t look. I look.

Fuck.

The ceiling. The floor. Anywhere else.

Nobody else tries.

‘Don’t worry. This was designed to be a challenge.’

He leans against the lectern—that hip.

He turns back to the room, and that focus sweeps the rows. Passes through me like I’m not here.

Right. Two hundred freshers, why would he stop?

The sting arrives without warning. My dick, fuck, these jeans are not forgiving. I cross my legs, think about bus timetables, the carpet, anything that might help. Nothing does.

All of it, every button done up, every word measured, and I want to watch that control come apart. Want to be the reason it does.

The rest of the lecture is noise. Integration. Integrals, anti-derivatives, and notation I don’t retain. Thirty seconds is all the listening I can manage before his throat pulls everything else out of the room.

I’m not taking notes or stopping.

Femi nudges me. ‘You alright? You’ve gone quiet.’

‘I’m listening,’ I say. ‘This is me listening.’

The lecture ends. People funnel towards the doors. I stay.

I’m watching Haldrey at the front: sorting his papers, exchanging a word with a colleague—the anti-me.

He laughs—quiet, contained—and reaches up to grab a marker from the top of the whiteboard. His shirt comes untucked at the front: a sliver of skin above the waistband, the shadow where his belly dips, the muscle bracketing his hips.

The trail of hair thickening, the V sharpening, the heat. I’ve had my mouth on enough blokes to fill in the blanks, and my brain does it now with a focus my A-levels never got.

Leaving is the obvious move—Femi’s waiting. The lecture’s over. Normal people are already gone.

Leaving feels impossible. I want to stay in this seat and watch this man tidy up for another forty minutes. Pathetic.

‘Ewan.’ Femi stands in the aisle, irritated. ‘Coming?’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Coming.’

Femi gives me a sideways look on the way out. ‘You were staring.’

‘I was thinking.’

‘You were staring and thinking. At the same time. At the lecturer.’

‘Femi. I’m capable of multitasking.’

On the bus to Fallowfield, I press against the glass and watch a city I didn’t ask for slide past in the drizzle: terraced houses, a Greggs, another Greggs. A betting shop sandwiched between the two Greggs was like a cry for help.

Dinner. Unpacking. Whether I’m staying in this city or running home. Sensible thoughts for a sensible first day.

Instead, I close my eyes, and he’s there. Burned in.

Controlled, precise. Completely unaware.

The bus hits a pothole, and my bag slides off the seat. I catch it, zip still done up. Everything is packed, still ready to leave.

The quad at half two on a Tuesday in October has the energy of a train station that doesn’t go anywhere.

Freshers drifting between the registration tents and the Students’ Union, holding paper forms, looking for buildings they can’t find, tripping over their own lanyards.

Grey light. A wind that exists only between the Arts Building and the library and has, according to Femi, its own name in Mancunian folklore.

We’re in the queue for free tote bags, apparently. I’ve stopped asking what else. Femi heard and locked onto it like treasure. ‘Free is free, Ewan.’ Fine. I’m here for the queue, not the tote. The queue gives me a reason to stand in a public place and not be in my room with the stain overhead.

Four hours since the lecture. Still can’t slow my pulse to a civilian rhythm. Every time I close my eyes, the half-second comes back: that hand on the lectern, how his gaze swept the back row and went straight through me like I was furniture. Two hundred freshers and I wasn’t even a blip.

I keep my hood up and try to look bored.

Femi’s halfway through a story about his mum’s reaction to him moving to Manchester, ‘she cried twice, Ewan, once about the weather and once about the lack of good yam,’ when his voice trails off. Just stops. Mid-yam.

I look at him. He’s gone very still.

‘Femi?’

‘Don’t turn round.’

‘Femi what the fuck.’

‘Don’t turn round, Ewan, I’m serious. Just…’

I turn round.

A lad walking past the queue, unhurried, carrying a green coursebook and a KeepCup and the self-assurance of an older student. Tall, open face, wide smile aimed at the middle distance.

He clocks Femi as he passes. Slows, half a beat, not quite a stop.

‘Alright.’

‘Alright,’ Femi says. Voice a whole octave wrong.

The lad grins like that amused him, tips the coursebook in a half-salute, and carries on towards the library. Gone. The interaction fits one breath.

Femi turns back to the queue and pretends to be interested in the tote bags again. His neck is the colour of a brick wall.

‘Femi.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Femi who was that.’

‘Nobody. A lad, second year. He’s in the economics society thing on the noticeboard, I think I saw him on there.’

‘You studied the noticeboard.’

‘I looked at it, Ewan. It’s a noticeboard. People look at them. That’s the whole function of a noticeboard.’

‘You memorised a second year’s face off a noticeboard. Then pretended you’d never seen him before when he said alright to you like he knew you from somewhere.’

Femi steps sideways to look and walks directly into a metal bin with his hip. The impact vindicates my entire afternoon.

‘Femi.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You walked into a bin.’

‘I brushed past it.’

‘With your whole body.’