Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
That should feel like good fortune. It feels like being stripped.
He’s in there, already, and I’m out here, and the inch of open door is the most charged inch of space that has ever existed in my body.
I am, I register with distant and genuine amusement, terrified.
Not socially. Not about being caught—catching is something I’ve thought through, catching has a plan.
Terrified in the way my body has been waiting to be terrified, a fear that’s been earmarked and saved up for this corridor and this door and this moment.
13:52. I find the student toilets, lock myself in a cubicle, count my breath: in for four, hold for four, out for four, as Ron taught me on the roof at thirteen. It does nothing.
I flush for cover, wash my hands. Check my face in the mirror.
The eyeliner’s subtle today, on purpose.
The chain’s tucked inside the collar. The rings are off, that’s the only real tell.
I took the rings off in my halls room thirty minutes ago, and I can still feel the absence on the first three fingers like phantom limbs.
Haldrey has not seen me without the rings before.
He will, now.
13:56. I’m standing outside his office holding a problem set I solved three days ago and a facial expression I’ve been practising in the halls bathroom.
The expression says: struggling student. Eager but confused. A fresher who needs extra help and isn’t afraid to ask for it.
The problem set says: I have no idea what I’m doing.
Both are lies.
My heart’s too fast, too high. The beat before a bloke kisses you in a club. Eye contact, mouth. Nervousness is not something my body does.
A voice from inside, aimed somewhere that isn’t me. He’s on the phone, maybe, low, steady, the vowels going private the way they only do when there’s no theatre to fill, the sentence staying locked behind the wood.
Now.
I raise my hand to knock, and it’s shaking, which is new information about this body, and I can sort it out on my own time because I need it to perform the motor function of knocking on a door, and it needs to perform now.
Three knocks, even spacing. Not too hard, I won’t be the fresher who hammered. Three neutral professional knocks on a two-inch gap of oak.
Inside, the small sound of a chair moving.
‘Come in.’
The handle’s cold under my palm. I push the door open and step across the threshold like a boy with forged papers at a border.
He looks up from his desk, and I get three seconds of his face before the mask slips on—recognition, the tightness in his jaw.
‘Mr Carrick.’ He says it like he’s testing the sound. ‘Come in.’
The office is smaller than I expected—four steps wide, maybe five long.
Books on every surface, piled to the radiator.
A whiteboard with equations in handwriting I’d recognise from space.
A mug of coffee that’s gone cold enough to have a skin on it.
The window’s cracked open, and October comes through in a thin line of damp air.
It smells like paper and him: skin and cotton and the ghost of the coffee from the broken machine.
I sit in the chair across from his desk—it’s close, narrow, our knees almost touching, a handwidth apart, his heat reaching across when it shouldn’t be possible.
I sit the way I’ve decided to sit. Left leg over right, the slight tilt that opens my body towards him without making the opening obvious.
My hands light on the edge of the chair, one on each side, relaxed.
I know where my throat is in relation to the collar of the jumper.
I know the jumper’s pulling across my chest in a way that cannot be accidentally corrected without drawing more attention than leaving it.
The soap I used this morning has faded enough to be plausibly forgotten. I made a study of forgetting it.
‘I’m struggling,’ I say. ‘With the problem sets.’
He looks at the pages I’ve put on the desk—my handwriting is messier than usual, a few wrong turns included for verisimilitude. He picks them up, studies them, fingers at the paper’s edges, and I think about those fingers.
‘Where specifically?’ He’s already scanning.
‘Integration by parts. Can’t see where to start.’
This is a lie so large it should have its own postcode. I see where to start. I see where to finish. Three routes between the two and a shortcut that eliminates all of them. The lie puts me in this chair. In this room. In the radius of those hands.
He explains. I listen. I nod at the right moments and furrow my brow at the wrong ones, and the whole time I’m cataloguing: how he leans forward when he’s demonstrating, the softening that only comes when he forgets to maintain the register.
I breathe shallow, and the proximity does what proximity does. Blood relocates. I shift in the chair.
Twenty minutes in. He’s warming up. The teaching voice has relaxed, the edge of performance dropping as the subject takes over.
I lean in to look at the work. Close enough that he registers it. He doesn’t pull back. But his pen stops mid-stroke, for a skip, then continues. Good. He noticed.
I run the next provocation lower on the scale. A question about when the approximation breaks down—phrased in terms that bring me half a word closer to limit from above and limit from below than strict politeness would allow. He doesn’t react.
I shift in the chair. The knee moves an inch closer to his.
Not touching. An inch away. Inside the radius where his body has to register mine as something it’s adjacent to.
I watch the tendon on the side of his neck do the thing it did on Friday in the theatre.
One swallow. Disciplined. Visible from nine inches.
Thirty minutes. He sets a real problem. One that matters, watches while I work. I mess up line three. He corrects it. Our hands are both on the paper.
I leave my hand there a beat longer than the correction requires. Not a grab, not a grope—just a hand on a piece of A4 inside the field of his. The pad of my thumb is half a centimetre from the cuff of his shirt. The sleeve is folded one fold today. Good mood. I file that and keep working.
I solve the rest. Showing my work, being good.
Forty minutes. He’s explaining a concept I already understand—continuity, limits, the behaviour of functions at infinity—and I’m about to nod again when I clock it.
The second problem, half-visible under his notes, was the one behind the one he set.
Harder. Nothing on any Economics problem set looks like this.
The smart move is staying quiet.
‘Have you tried it this way?’
The words come out before the strategy catches up. I pull the paper towards me, pick up his pen, and write two lines. A substitution he hasn’t used. A collapse that turns six steps into two. I see it instantly, the path already there.
I put the pen down. Look up.
He’s staring at me. At me.
The mask is gone. What’s underneath isn’t suspicion or the guarded blankness of a man protecting his career. It’s—
It’s a look I have no name for. I’ve seen want before, the glazed half-focus of someone undressing me in their head. This isn’t that. This is sharper, hungrier. The look of a man who’s found something he wasn’t looking for and can’t look away.
‘How did you see that?’ Almost to himself.
I shrug. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’
It’s not. Haldrey knows it’s not. The space between what I said and what we both know is a live thing.
He blinks, the mask comes back. Slower. Like pulling on a coat when you know it doesn’t fit anymore.
‘That’s not a standard approach.’
‘Is it wrong?’
‘No.’ He looks at the two lines again. ‘It’s right. Elegant.’
Elegant.
From someone who published in the Annals of Mathematics before thirty. Aimed at me.
The wiring behind my sternum rearranges itself.
He slides a paper towards me. Our fingers brush. In any other context, it wouldn’t register.
His knuckle against mine, a half-inch of contact.
Warm. The kind of warm a body is when it’s been sitting still inside a cold room for two hours.
His skin has a tiny raised thing on the index finger, a callus I hadn’t clocked from the front row—pen callus, almost certainly, the price of a man who writes everything in longhand before he types it.
He recoils, too fast, and looks at the desk.
The recoil is the whole thing. The recoil is information I did not earn and am not entitled to, and now possess.
A man who was unbothered by accidental contact would not recoil.
A man who felt nothing would not look at the desk.
I watch him re-sort his own face. It takes him three breaths. I count them.
Stillness keeps me together, and breathing stops being automatic.
‘Same time next week?’ I say.
He nods, once, stiff. Doesn’t look up.
I stand. Walk to the door. My legs work, which is a miracle of engineering.
‘Mr Carrick.’
I turn.
He’s looking at me now. The mask is on, but the eyes behind the glasses aren’t.
‘You’re not struggling with the problem sets.’
It’s not a question.
I hold his gaze, one beat. Two.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not.’
The door clicks shut behind me.
The departmental bathroom is three doors down, and I make it there in eight seconds, lock the cubicle, and get my hand around my cock.
Hard already. Embarrassingly hard. The kind of hard that’s been sitting under a desk for fifty minutes and doesn’t care that I’ve only just found a cubicle to address it in.
My jeans were tight, and I could feel the imprint of the zip along the underside of me as I free myself, the stripe of cold where the metal sat against skin.
One hand against the door to brace. The other working, fast.
The look, the mask dropping. His face when he saw the solution, the recognition, the hunger. I come thinking about being seen and being seen like that, as my mind mattered.
Spurts across my hand and into the tissue. I stay folded forward with my weight on the door for ten seconds, panting quietly, the taste of iron in my mouth where I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound.
I clean up, flush. Wash my hands. Soap twice, because my skin smells like me, which is to say it smells like a man who just came thinking about a maths lecturer. The face in the mirror is flushed, pupils blown. A face that screams what I did.
I wait three minutes, splash cold water. Breathe.
I feel like I’ve swallowed a live wire.
He knows. He said it, you’re not struggling. He looked at my solution and jerked away when our fingers touched. The plan worked—next Tuesday.
But.
That look.
The other look. The one when he saw the maths. The curiosity, the recognition.
Nobody has ever looked at me like that. The blokes I’ve fucked haven’t. The teachers who gave up didn’t. Ronan tries too hard; Femi tries right. But this is different.
I wanted his composure in pieces. I got that.
But the other look came too. The one that wasn’t wanted.
Elegant. Nobody’s ever handed me that before—no frame for it.
I wanted to be a problem he couldn’t solve.
I walked in planning to be exactly that: tight jumper, open knee, the plausible-fresher script.
What I didn’t plan for was the other angle.
The one where a man like him looks at a substitution I did in fifteen seconds and goes quiet, and the quiet is a different kind of noticing than the noticing I rehearsed for.
He saw me seeing him. That part was always on the cards.
He saw my head—that one I didn’t send him an invitation to.
Next Tuesday.