Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
My phone buzzes.
How’d it go?
Femi, I type back. Fine. You?
Three dots, typing. Stop typing again. This goes on long enough that the bus passes two stops.
I texted Allan. Coffee tomorrow.
I stare at it.
Coffee tomorrow. A napkin, coffee, and a number folded over someone’s heart.
I had an orgasm against a soap dispenser with someone whose name I’ve already forgotten.
The bus stops. Someone gets on smelling of kebab. I shift to the window.
Femi’s going to sit across from Allan tomorrow. Ask him what his favourite food is. Films? Modules? Whether he prefers cats or dogs. Allan will answer, and Femi will listen, and they’ll do this again and again.
I never knew that—the repeating.
A locked bathroom. A stranger’s breathing when he finishes. How to leave. Don’t look back.
And then I think about him, out of the blue. Not the bloke from the bathroom.
He, the man from the lecture theatre.
Hands, voice. The look.
Three AM, hard again. Stomach tight, breathing uneven.
Thursday night. The bloke next door’s finished his midnight appointment, and the halls are still enough to hear someone’s phone alarm three rooms down, going off and off and off.
I open the laptop. The glow turns everything blue. Probably look deranged—no mirror on this side, plausible deniability.
I type: Dr Laurence Haldrey, mathematician.
This isn’t stalking. Stalking requires physical proximity and a disregard for restraining orders. This is a boy in his pants at 2 am with WiFi.
The university page comes up first. Staff profile. Dr Laurence Haldrey, Lecturer in Mathematics. Photo: professional, neutral background, no awkwardness required. He’s failed anyway. Jaw, glasses, the hair pushed back—a man who could break rules and walk out clean.
Below the photo: qualifications, BA Mathematics, Oxford. PhD Pure Mathematics, Cambridge.
Oxford. Then Cambridge, then Manchester.
That’s not a career trajectory. That’s a descent. Papers in journals from my late-night rabbit holes: work that should’ve led to Trinity, not a 9 am lecture for hungover economists.
Between Cambridge and here, a break.
There it is, the gap. Cambridge ends. Manchester starts almost a year later. Twelve months of nothing. No visiting position, no sabbatical. Just a hole where a career should be.
People don’t fall from Cambridge to Manchester without a push.
Scroll to the bottom.
Office hours: Tuesdays, 14:00–16:00. Room 2.14, second floor, maths building.
One line on a staff page, typed in the flat font of a university template, meant for the panicked first-year who wants to know whether the first coursework’s worth forty percent—meaning, in other words, for nobody but me.
I read it three times. The first for the room number. The second for the time. The third because reading it feels like being in the room.
Close the tab. Open it again. Read it once more to check I didn’t make it up.
Didn’t make it up.
I take a breath and keep browsing.
Facebook.
Old, semi-abandoned, a profile that hasn’t been updated since 2019. Cover photo: a library. Profile picture: abstract art, blues and whites, something between trying too hard and not trying at all. Everything else is locked. Privacy pulled tight.
But profile pictures are always public on Facebook. And under this one, fifty likes, no comments except one.
Hugo Lockhart: Still your favourite. x
Three words and a kiss. Under a painting, on a dead account.
Ninety-nine people would scroll past that.
A friend commenting on art. But I’m not ninety-nine people.
I’ve been reading signals since I was a kid, the tilt, the angle, the extra word that doesn’t need to be there.
Still, your favourite isn’t about a painting.
It’s what someone writes who stood next to you while you looked at it.
Who knows which ones you stop in front of?
And the x. One small letter that transforms the whole thing entirely.
Next to the comment, Hugo Lockhart’s profile picture—a man at a lectern, mid-smile.
My stomach clenches, rebellious.
The laptop stays open—half two, a lecture at nine, unhinged behaviour.
I click his name.
Hugo Lockhart’s profile is the opposite of Haldrey’s. Public. Updated. A man who wants the world to see him—conference photos, dinners, everywhere. I scroll through them, assembling a face mostly out of the knowledge that Haldrey knows him.
A kitchen, morning light. Two men at a counter, coffee mugs, and the remains of breakfast. Hugo in a t-shirt, grinning. And next to him, slightly behind, half-turned from the camera like he didn’t want to be in the shot.
I stop breathing.
It’s him. Barefoot. In a faded navy t-shirt.
Then the beach. Mediterranean light. Hugo bare-chested, and behind him, a man’s torso cropped at the neck—the body: swimmer’s build, dark hair on the chest, sun-redded skin. I know that body.
I shouldn’t.
The laptop closes. Palm flat on the lid, pressing it shut. The room goes dark again. Breathe. The stain overhead, Italy-shaped, the one I’d mapped last week when I couldn’t sleep. Count to ten. Think about proofs. Think about Ronan booting the kitchen window at age thirteen. Think about anything.
My hand opens the laptop. I didn’t tell it to.
I’m hard. All because of that beach photo, which my dick insta-liked, way before my brain finished processing the image.
I prop the laptop against the pillow and take myself in hand. The beach photo fills the screen. The faceless torso, the V. The shadow beneath.
I wonder how that hairy chest would taste.
I think about those hands. On the whiteboard, then on me. Around my wrist, pinning it to the mattress. He pressed me into the bed, thirteen years older, broader, heavy enough to keep me there.
I think about his voice losing the lecture-theatre steadiness. His Lancashire vowels are cracking. My name breaking on those careful lips, Carrick, probably, not Ewan. Whether his control would snap and he’d stop holding back.
My hand speeds up. The angle’s right. I’ve done this enough times that the mechanics are automatic, but the image is burning.
I think about being under him. The stretch. His cock fills me, and the angle hits right, and those glasses are knocked sideways.
I come.
Hard, sharp, starting at the base of my spine and detonating upward. My whole body locks, then releases, and I’m left gasping at the ceiling with streaks on my stomach and the laptop still glowing next to me.
I’ve wanked over blokes before. Plenty. Random lads from house parties, the hot bloke at the bus stop, that barista in Lewisham who always gave me extra foam. Background noise.
I reach for a tissue, clean up, routine.
But nothing holds.
The image is sharpening instead of fading: the torso, the swim shorts on those hips.
Friday, ten past nine. The theatre hasn’t changed—same carpet, same deodorant disaster four rows down.
Femi’s already sat. Pen lined up. Notebook open to a fresh page with W2: Lec 4 in biro across the top and a date, because Femi dates his notes like they’ll be inspected. I drop into the seat next to him with my hood still up and fists in my pockets.
The front row’s already stacked with the gunners. Girl with the highlighter array. The bloke who printed the lecture slides out in colour and stapled them. I clock them, and then I clock the door at the front, which hasn’t opened yet, and I feel the thing in my stomach tighten by a notch.
I’ve been keyed up since two in the morning on Thursday.
Since the departmental page on the laptop: Dr L.
Haldrey, Office Hours: Tuesdays, 14:00–16:00.
Open to all students, in a blue hyperlinked serif that shouldn’t do anything to anybody, I’ve replayed the line more than I’ve replayed any actual lecture content—the L.
Full stop. The staff profile gave me the rest. I read the first name once and closed the tab like it was something I wasn’t allowed to have yet.
In my head, he’s Haldrey. Mr Haldrey, because the title fits better.
Because the first name is a door I haven’t earned.
Thirty-one hours of this.
Pathetic.
The door opens at nine twelve, and he comes in like yesterday’s going to be today and tomorrow, all the days the same weight, and he sets his bag down on the lectern.
No wave, no warm-up patter. Just glasses on, marker uncapped, a nod at the front row as I see you, relax.
Then he turns his back on the theatre and writes the title across the top of the board in small, tight letters.
The Squeeze Theorem.
Femi snorts. ‘Sounds like a nightclub.’
Answering requires looking away. The shirt stretches when he lifts his arm to write. One fold on the sleeves today instead of two.
He turns back to the theatre.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘You’ve had one-sided limits this week.
You should be comfortable telling me what it means for a limit to exist from the right, from the left, and whether those two have to agree.
Today’s about what you do when the function in the middle refuses to behave. You know the side limits. You trap it.’
Trap it.
My pulse takes the word personally. My pulse has the IQ of a golden retriever this week.
He draws three curves—one high, one low, one messy thing in between that dips and wobbles. Labels them g, h, f.
He turns, looks at the theatre.
‘What can I say about f?’
Silence. Two hundred freshers are doing the thing where they go very still because they’re hoping eye contact won’t find them. The girl with the highlighters has her hand half-up and half-down, undecided.
I lift mine.
Didn’t plan to. Didn’t mean to. My hand’s in the air above my head like it belongs to somebody braver and I’ve been renting it out.
He sees me. ‘Yes. Back row. Go on.’
The whole theatre turns. Femi makes a small, strangled noise beside me that I’ll pay for later.
‘It’s got nowhere to go, sir,’ I say.