Chapter 4 #2
‘Thinking.’
‘Sounds dangerous.’
‘Usually is.’
A pause that doesn’t need solving.
His hand against my stomach. Just there.
The man is around thirty. Dark curly hair, a bit soft at the waist. Arms that have carried boxes, not weights. The cataloguing mechanism is running—same one I always run—and it’s cataloguing everything that this man is not. He’s not tall. He’s not held together. He’s not careful.
I stay ten minutes longer than I’ve ever stayed anywhere.
Beto says something—there’s coffee, if you want—and the word coffee opens a door I didn’t know was in the wall. A real thing, proposed at eleven o’clock on a Thursday night by a man who has no stake in whether I accept. A whole ordinary future, offered without ceremony.
And I want. Not the coffee. Not him.
I want to be the kind of man who could accept a coffee at eleven on a Thursday night from a man he just fucked and say yes and mean it. Who could sit at a kitchen table with one hand around a mug and one hand on someone’s thigh and let the two ordinarinesses exist in the same body?
Then I leave too fast. Shoes on without sitting down, laces stuffed into the heels. Shirt misbuttoned, corrected in the stairwell. A thanks that sounds wrong even as it leaves my mouth, because thanks is what you say to the barista, not to someone whose arm fit across your waist like a brace.
Outside, the air on Wilmslow Road is cold enough to reset me. I walk without direction for two blocks before stopping.
The feeling hasn’t gone.
Emptiness is the control group, the constant that anchors every experiment. Every other hookup has ended in emptiness, and I’ve accepted the result and moved on.
This isn’t that.
Something that hasn’t cancelled itself out.
I stand on the kerb—a bus passes, the 42 towards town, nearly empty. A student on the top deck is lit blue by a phone screen.
I don’t get on.
I stand there until the feeling cools enough to classify, and when I finally name it, the name is worse than the feeling.
Comfort.
I walk home in the cold. Fast. Hood up. The whole way back, I’m running the proof in reverse, trying to find the step where the logic broke, the line where the wrong conclusion crept in. There isn’t one. The proof is clean.
That’s the worst part.
Every orgasm this week has ended in the same place. Different partner, different room, and my mind drifting to the same destination.
A lecture theatre, a whiteboard. Hands I’ve never felt, a voice I’ve played on loop until only the tone remains.
When I’m by myself, it’s worse. Alone in the shower at seven in the morning, hand working, the hot water scalding my back, and the script runs without asking my permission.
Haldrey at the whiteboard. Haldrey is leaning over me at a desk. Haldrey’s hand flat on the small of my back, pushing me forward over a surface—any surface, he’s not picky in my head, he barely is in my head, he’s a mouth and a pair of glasses and the Lancashire correct and a neck-tendon moving.
I come with one palm flat against the tiles and the water gone cold and a name on the inside of my teeth.
Sex with others doesn’t fix it. It feeds it. Each bloke, each mouth, each orgasm: not him.
Seven hook-ups in twelve days. The volume escalating, the pattern replicating, the result identical.
I’ve got the staff page bookmarked. Dr Laurence Haldrey—Lecturer in Mathematics. The photograph is old, taken against a bookshelf, and in it, he isn’t smiling; he is patient in the way someone is when they’ve been told this is going to take two minutes.
PhD Cambridge. Thesis on something I don’t understand about real analysis and sigma algebras.
Two papers. A book chapter in a Routledge anthology, which I looked up at the university bookshop.
I’ve read his acknowledgements page, which is forty words long and mentions a dog named Beckett and a mother in Lancaster and no one else, and those forty words have taken up more real estate in my head this week than anything I was supposed to be reading for the course.
By now, I know he wears one fold on his sleeves when he’s in a good mood and two when he’s tired. I know he arrives at the theatre at nine ten, not nine. I know the way he caps his marker, left-hand, without looking. I know he never leaves early.
My phone rings.
A call, not a text.
At quarter past eleven on a Monday night, on the top deck of the 142, with Manchester sliding past orange and wet.
My brother.
For half a second, I think about letting it ring out. He’ll think I’m asleep. He’ll send a text in the morning like he always does after an unanswered call: catch up when you’re free, no rush, and I’ll reply at some point, and we’ll both pretend nothing happened.
Then I swipe green, no reason attached. Maybe because not answering is another small choice I’ve depleted myself defending.
‘Ron.’
‘You’re up late.’
No hello, no warm-up. Ronan doesn’t do warm-ups.
He’s in a kitchen somewhere, fridge humming, clock ticking, a house where other people have gone to bed.
Probably our mum’s. He’s been staying at hers on weekends since I left; Mum told me that in her last WhatsApp, like it was a neutral piece of information.
‘On the bus.’
‘Where’ve you been.’
‘Library.’
Lie. The inside of my mouth still tastes like somebody else’s skin.
A pause. Ron’s pauses are the part of him I’m most afraid of—a chance to fix it before he has to.
The lie stays.
‘Right,’ he says eventually. ‘Library. Until half past eleven.’
‘It’s a maths course, Ron. Nights are a thing.’
‘I imagine. Mum wants to know if you’re eating.’
‘I’m eating.’
‘Actual meals.’
‘Beans on toast is an actual meal in this country, Ron.’
‘Beans on toast is a holding pattern. She wants to know if you’ve been to the Sainsbury’s.’
‘I went to the Sainsbury’s.’
‘What did you buy.’
‘Ron. Don’t.’
‘What did you buy, Ewan.’
He’s not going to stop. This is the Ron I grew up with: the one who’d stand in the kitchen doorway and ask me where the twenty quid had gone and not move until I told him. When I was twelve, I thought it was bullying. By fourteen, I’d worked out it was love, which is honestly worse.
‘Pasta,’ I say. ‘Jar of sauce. Cheese. Apples because Mum asked if I was having fruit and lying about fruit feels impossible.’
‘But you can lie about other things.’
Answering would unravel it.
Another silence. He’s thinking about how far to push. I can picture him exactly, leaning against our mum’s kitchen counter in his socks, one hand on the mug, the other one flat on the worktop, how Ron stands when he’s deciding whether to make someone’s evening harder.
‘You sound off,’ he says.
‘I’m on a bus.’
‘Not that. You sound, smaller.’
‘I’m tired.’
‘Ewan.’
‘Ron.’
He sighs. Barely. A quarter of a sigh. It’s the closest Ron ever gets to showing that something is costing him.
‘Look,’ he says. ‘I’m not going to do the thing tonight. You’re eighteen and you’ve got a right to a bad night without me running through it with you. But I’m going to say one thing and then I’m going to let you go.’
‘Go on then.’
‘If you’re in over your head with something up there, you ring me. Not Mum. Not one of your mates. Me. I’ve got a whole life of sorting things out for you, it’s practically a qualification. You hear me?’
The bus hits a speed bump. I lurch forward, catch myself against the glass.
A whole life of sorting things out. That’s not a turn of phrase.
He means it. He doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean.
Ron’s not performative, not like our dad was on the rare occasions he bothered.
Ron is precisely as much as he says and usually a bit more.
He’s the one who found me on the roof outside my bedroom at thirteen with my face wet and worked out from the state of me that I wasn’t crying about a girl.
He sat next to me on the tiles for nearly two hours and said three sentences the whole time, and one of them was I love you, you stupid pillock, come inside before mum notices the window’s open.
‘I hear you,’ I say.
‘Good.’
‘Ron.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m okay. It’s a lot, being here. I didn’t expect it to be a lot.’
‘That’s not lying, though, is it?’ he says, and for a second I think he means that’s not good enough, but then I realise he means that’s the first true thing you’ve said in four minutes and I’m going to take it.
‘No.’
‘Alright. Get some sleep. Text me tomorrow.’
‘Okay.’
I hold the phone against my ear for a second after the line’s dead.
I did not ring my brother. My brother rang me. And my brother does not ring on school nights. Ron rings on Sundays, a weekly confirmation of continued respiration. His ringing tonight means his radar is up, already picking up something that shouldn’t be transmitting.
I lower the phone, and it buzzes again.
Calendar reminder: Tuesday, 14:00. Office hours.
Tomorrow.
The glass is cold against my palm. Manchester crawls past, and I think about an office. Small books. A desk.
Him on one side of that desk. Me on the other.
Three feet of professional distance.
I’m already planning it. I catch myself at it before the bus passes Oxford Road, what I’m going to wear.
Nothing too obvious—obvious is for Canal Street.
The black jumper, the one that’s a size too small because I lost the receipt and never sent it back, and a clean pair of jeans.
No aftershave, aftershave is a declaration, and I’m not ready to make one.
Just soap. Skin. The kind of underdressed a student can plausibly be at two in the afternoon.
I’m planning what I’ll bring. The problem sets.
A question I don’t actually need the answer to, so I can watch him explain it and watch the exact moment he realises I already know.
The pen I’ll hold. How I’ll sit. Left leg crossed over right, the way that makes my shoulders square to him, the way that means my knee might, at some point, if the room is the size I’m imagining, brush his.
Eighteen years of default settings, and my brain has turned into a staging room for a man I’ve spoken to once for less than three minutes.
Stomach drops.
Tomorrow.
I’ve mapped him.
He arrives at 8:40 with coffee from the broken machine by the fire escape that only he knows works—black, no sugar, cup in his right hand because the left is on the phone, thumb moving inward across the screen the way only left thumbs do, the gesture nobody right-handed makes.
Lunch in his office. The door opens if he’s eating, closed if he’s marking.
The sandwich is always the same, pulled from the Tesco Express, which suggests either loyalty or total absence of imagination.
He eats at his desk. Pages spread around the food like he’s worried the equations will starve if he doesn’t keep them company.
Tuesdays: office hours. 14:00–16:00.
Open to all students.
I know his coffee order, his lunch routine, and the time his shirt starts to come untucked at the back (around 15:30, when the morning’s good intentions run out). I know he rubs the bridge of his nose when a question bores him and he’s trying not to show it.
This morning, I positioned myself at the vending machine alcove, pretending to choose between a KitKat and a Twirl.
He walks past, smelling of coffee and laundry, pushes his free hand back through his hair, the shirt pulling across his chest. He bites the inside of his lip at whatever he’s reading, concentrated and distant.
He sees me. For half a second. A sweep of the eyes that has no business being as efficient as it is—the kind of sweep you do on a corridor, you know, when a shape’s off-pattern. His eyes land on me, clock me, move on. Don’t come back.
Don’t come back, but don’t pretend I wasn’t there either. There’s a difference. I spend the next forty-five minutes trying not to over-read.
He disappears around the corner.
The KitKat holds no appeal. Nothing in this machine does.
I buy the Twirl, eat it. Don’t taste it. Six hours till office hours.