Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Itry again. Obviously.
The following Wednesday. Different party, different flat, different configuration. Two blokes this time, a third-year with a beard, and his older mate with hands the size of dinner plates. The logistics are negotiated over warm beer and sealed with a look that means follow us.
Their flat. Condoms for everyone, my rules, non-negotiable.
The bed’s too small for three, so we start standing, shift to the mattress, and adapt.
I’m good at this, the choreography, the reading of bodies, knowing who wants what before they say it.
The bearded one wants to watch. The quiet one wants to be touched.
I’m in the middle, which is where I work best, playing both sides, giving and taking in the same breath.
It’s technically excellent. The angles are right, the friction is right. My refractory’s nothing. I come once, stay hard, keep going. The second orgasm builds slower, deeper.
Close my eyes.
The beach photo, the lecture theatre. The vowels say office hours.
The image won’t leave. Won’t be replaced by what’s happening. Two real bodies pressed against mine, two sets of hands, two cocks.
Trap it. My cock takes it as a cue I haven’t given it.
I taste the bearded one. Mouth on his cock, deep, I like the sound he makes. I try to pin myself to that sound. It slides off.
The quiet one’s hand is on my hip, and he’s fucking hard into me, and none of it is information my body wants to keep.
I come again, it means nothing.
After. Getting dressed in a room that smells of sweat and latex and someone else’s deodorant. The bearded one’s already dozing. The quiet one’s in the bathroom.
I sit on the bed, lace my shoes, and wait for the satisfaction to arrive.
It doesn’t.
The bearded one’s breathing has gone slow and heavy. The quiet one’s running a tap in the bathroom. A normal Wednesday-to-Thursday transition—I’ve done it a hundred times.
Clothes on, shoes tied, the small specific ache that means a good session. I know what this is supposed to feel like. I know the shape of the comedown like I know the shape of my own front door.
I don’t feel any of it.
Three bodies. Every possible combination of hands, mouths, and positions. Technically, it was perfect. The variables were optimized, and the execution was flawless. And the result is.
Nothing.
Like solving a proof and arriving at zero. All that work, all those steps. The answer is a hole where a number should be.
I’ve been shagging since I was sixteen. Two years of accumulating data. The data has always told me the same thing: sex feels good, orgasms feel better, leave before anyone asks your number. Clean system, reliable output. I’ve never once questioned the model.
The model is broken.
The quiet one comes back from the bathroom. ‘Want to stay?’
‘Nah. Early lecture.’
There is no early lecture.
Thursday morning, half seven. I come in the back door of the halls, and Femi is already up.
Of course, Femi is up. Femi’s a morning person, the same way he’s a decent person, reflexively, no drama.
In a moment, he’s got the kettle on, the radio on, two mugs out, and I notice he’s wearing the hoodie Allan gave him on Sunday, which is oversized and that he wears anyway because it smells like Allan.
He clocks the state of me. Just the eyes, up, down, up.
‘Morning.’
‘Morning.’
‘Breakfast?’
‘Tea.’
He pours, hands me the mug. I grip it with both hands because my hands need anchoring, and a mug at least gives them purpose.
‘Ewan.’
‘Mm.’
‘Where were you last night.’
‘Out.’
‘Out where.’
‘Out out.’ I sit down at the table—the kitchen’s empty, but it won’t stay that way, the girl from room 4 who burns her toast should be down any minute. ‘Party. Halls down the road. Some lads in my corridor went, I tagged along.’
Femi nods like he’s accepting the answer, then doesn’t stop looking at me. ‘And?’
‘And what.’
‘You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge.’
‘Three parties, technically.’ I take a sip of the tea. Try to make it sound like a punchline. ‘You know me.’
‘I know you.’
Femi sits down opposite me. Wraps both hands round his own mug. This is the Femi who’s about to say something he’s been rehearsing for a while, and the silence he’s leaving before he says it is the silence he uses to make sure the other person can’t pretend they didn’t hear.
‘Ewan. Are you alright?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re not fine. You haven’t been fine since we got here, honestly.
I kept thinking it was homesick stuff, lad-from-London-can’t-settle stuff, the halls are shit and the weather’s shit and you were going to come round by week two, everybody does.
And then you did that thing in the lecture with the theorem. ’
‘Femi.’
‘Let me finish. You did the thing, and I saw it properly. And ever since, you’ve been going out almost every night and coming back in the mornings like you’ve been through a war, and whatever you’re trying to burn off you’re going to burn a hole all the way through.’
I grip the mug tighter. The porcelain is too hot. I make myself not let go.
‘It’s fresh meat, Femi. It’s freshers’ term. Everyone’s at it.’
‘Not like this.’
‘You don’t know what like this is. You’ve been snogged outside a café once and you think you’ve got the graph plotted.’
It’s a shit thing to say. He absorbs it. Then he decides not to.
He says, ‘Is it the lecturer.’
The kitchen goes, not silent, because the radio’s still on and the boiler’s ticking in the airing cupboard and somewhere above us a shower starts up, but the noise inside my head goes silent.
Everything I was going to say next stops happening, and I sit there with a mug of too-hot tea and a question in the middle of the table I cannot pick up.
I say, ‘What.’
Too fast, too flat.
‘Ewan.’
‘What are you. Femi, what the fuck. What are you even doing?’
‘I watched you watch him. Yesterday, the bloke I bumped into on the stairs said you left at two in the afternoon with your hood up and a face on you, and nobody knew where you’d gone, and this morning you’re sitting here looking like you’ve been running from something that can catch you.
So I’m asking. Once. Have you been with him? ’
He pauses. Adjusts. Quieter.
‘The squeeze theorem thing, Ewan. I’ve known you ten years.
We’ve been classmates for eight. You don’t put your hand up.
You don’t say sir. You don’t sit there watching the back of a man’s neck for forty-five minutes without taking a single note.
I clocked you. I watched you pick each word out like you were laying them on the floor for him to walk across. I’m not stupid.’
I make my face do the thing: the flat, amused look, one eyebrow slightly higher than the other, the mouth in a shape that reads as patient, above it all, belonging to someone who’s heard this song before.
‘Femi. No. He’s like a million years old, mate.
He’s a lecturer. It’s Manchester, not a porn film.
I’m going out and getting shagged by blokes around our age, because I’m eighteen and I like being shagged and I’ve been doing this for two years without strings attached, and I’m not about to start now. ’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I’m not lying.’
‘You’re lying. I’ve watched you lie and that’s the face. That’s the exact face.’
‘Femi.’
‘I’m not going to tell anyone. Christ, Ewan, do you think I’d?’
‘I’m not lying.’
It comes out harder than I meant it. Loud enough that the girl from room 4, who apparently has surfaced after all, pauses outside the kitchen door for half a second before deciding she wants a different kitchen and walking on.
Femi and I sit in what she’s left behind.
He’s looking at me with a soft and unhappy expression. Insulted, maybe. For both of us. The hand not holding the mug is flat on the table, fingers spread. His thumb moves once, a small involuntary tick, and stops.
‘Okay,’ he says. Gentle. ‘Okay. Forget I asked.’
‘Femi.’
‘No, I mean it. Forget I asked. You’ve said no. I heard you say no. We’re not having this conversation again until you want to have it.’ He stands up. Takes his mug to the sink. Rinses it. His back to me, shoulders set. ‘But Ewan.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m here. Yeah? Whenever. Whatever it is, I’m here.’
He leaves the kitchen. Gently. Closes the door with the softness you’d use on a sleeping child.
I sit at the table with the too-hot mug of tea and a chicken-bone lie sitting in my chest and the word Carrick in a lecture theatre and a sun emoji in a phone across the corridor and the private sensation of having just, for once in my life, lied to Femi deliberately.
The kettle clicks off. The normal machinery of the hall continues while I sit here, unmoved.
The tea’s gone cold before I move, but when I do, it’s towards the door, towards the corridor, towards the library where I can work alone and not have to explain the shape of this secret.
I hadn’t planned to stay.
That’s always been the rule since the first one at sixteen. Leave before it settles into anything that requires acknowledgement. Names optional. Conversation minimal. Exit clean.
This time I stay.
Beto’s flat is warm. Not the Fallowfield variety, where the heating pipes rattle and the air tastes of someone else’s microwaved pasta.
Warm in the way that means someone has been living here, properly, for longer than a term.
Books on the floor beside the bed, spines cracked open—a mug on the nightstand with something dried into the bottom.
A Lady Gaga poster tacked to the wall with Blu Tack, slightly crooked. Evidence of continuity.
I’m on my back. One arm behind my head. He’s in the kitchen. I can hear water running. A cupboard opening. Closing.
Normal sounds. Domestic sounds.
I should leave.
I don’t.
When he comes back, he doesn’t say anything. Gets into bed again. Closer this time. Not tentative. Not performing. An arm across my waist like it has a right to be there.
I don’t move it.
That’s new.
‘You’re very quiet,’ he says. Not unkindly.