Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
I’ve spent forty-five minutes getting dressed, which is thirty-eight more than I’ll ever admit to.
The jeans are strategic. Dark, slim, cut high enough to give the illusion of a longer line, field-tested on every Lewisham dance floor worth the name. T-shirt: white, fitted, visible where the sweatshirt falls open because I’ve unzipped it to exactly the right point.
I put the cologne on anyway. Wrists. Neck. Enough that in a room four steps wide, he’ll have no choice.
A third spray at the base of the throat, where a jumper collar pulls down when a man leans forward to look at a page. Not accidental. Designed.
I almost don’t do the chain. The chain’s a flag, the chain says queer to anyone with an eye for it. Then I leave it. If he notices the chain, he’ll notice the chain. If he doesn’t, he wasn’t going to anyway.
The rings go on last. Three. One for every provocation I’m walking in with.
My reflection in the cracked mirror: eyeliner smudged right, chain outside the shirt, three rings. Lewisham in Manchester, weaponised.
I look fit. That’s not vanity, it’s data.
I take one more look. Ask myself if this is too much. Ask myself what too much would even look like. What I have on is exactly enough to be deniable if he says anything and exactly enough to mean something if he doesn’t.
Which is to say, perfectly calibrated.
The problem set’s in my bag. Same trick as last week: real mistakes threaded through correct work, believable enough to justify the visit. Except last week, he looked at my solution, and the ground still hasn’t resolidified since.
Fourteen minutes past two. I’m late. Let him sit with it. Let him wonder if I’m coming.
Let him want me to.
His door isn’t closed.
I knock. Wait. Count the seconds because my pulse won’t let me count anything else.
The door opens—coffee from the broken machine, cotton, paper, and ink. My breath catches.
‘Mr Carrick.’ A beat. ‘You’re late.’
‘Sorry. Lost track of time.’
I didn’t lose track of anything. Time is the one thing I’ve been monitoring with the precision of someone counting down to detonation.
But I say it easily, offhand, and walk past him into the office.
Close enough that I nearly brush against him.
Close enough to leave a wake of Tom Ford in a room that’s four steps wide.
The chair across his desk. I sit. But not where I sat last week, further to the right, another inch closer. The desk between us is narrow, and if I shift my knee forward, contact.
His leg, my leg. Through two layers of fabric. Barely there. He doesn’t move.
He doesn’t move.
He could. A re-cross of the legs, a shift of the weight, the micro-adjustment every man makes every ten minutes while sitting at a desk.
He doesn’t. He holds the contact as if moving would admit there was a contact to move away from.
The stillness is the answer. The stillness is an answer I wasn’t sure I was going to get.
I breathe. Don’t let it show.
My heart’s going hard enough that I can feel the pulse in the side of my neck. I want to check if he can see it. I don’t check. If he’s looking, I’ve won. If he isn’t, I don’t need to know I lost.
‘I’ve been working through the problem sets,’ I say. The voice I use for him: clean, measured. The version of me that sounds like it belongs in this building. ‘But I’m stuck on something.’
I put the pages on the desk. He picks them up, his fingers on the paper, same grip, edges only, like he’s handling something that could detonate.
He reads. Scans. He creases his brow at the errors, and I track it like watching a lock pick turning: that moment when the mechanism gives.
‘Line four,’ he says. ‘You’ve assumed continuity where it hasn’t been established.’
I wrote that error at 11 pm in my halls room with the lights off and the taste of his name still in my mouth.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Can you show me?’
He leans forward. Writes. The pen moves, and his sleeve rides up, and there it is, the hair catching the overhead light. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it.
Throat. Dry.
I lean in too. To look at the page. Obviously. Close enough for the second time, and I feel him register it, a tightening in his posture so subtle nobody else would catch it.
I notice.
He traces the substitution path with his pen. Patient, thorough. Then stops.
‘You’ve made the same error in a different form on line eleven.’ The glasses push up on his nose. His eyes find mine directly, and the kindness evaporates. ‘Both errors assume the same false premise. But the rest of your work doesn’t make that mistake. Not once.’
Silence.
‘Almost like you know the premise is false,’ he says. ‘And wrote it that way on purpose.’
Skin. Heat. Flush creeping down my spine.
I wasn’t ready for that. The plan was cologne and knee contact and the long game of erosion, and instead this man has picked apart my forgeries in five minutes with the same hands I came here to be touched by, and now he’s watching me, and I have no response.
I shrug. ‘Maybe I had an off night.’
He holds the look for another beat. Then returns to the page as if nothing happened.
‘The substitution here,’ he says, pointing, and his voice shifts: gentler, the register opening when he forgets to be careful. ‘Once you establish the bounds, the rest follows.’
His pen drops.
His, not mine. It rolls off the desk, settling between us, closer to my side. I could let him get it. The smart move is letting him get it.
I bend. Slow. My hand closes around the pen. I come back up.
Slower than I bent down. Slow enough that the jumper rides up at the back and the chain shifts on my collarbone. The line of my throat is available for inspection for approximately two and a half seconds longer than a retrieval from under a desk should reasonably take.
His gaze is.
Somewhere else.
I’ve watched men look at me. I know the catalogue of looks: the chart-it-out, the stolen, the guilty, the greedy.
What I clock on his face in the one frame I catch before he adjusts is the interested one, which is the one I had half-guessed at and half-hoped for and in either case had not earned at this decibel.
It snaps up, too late—a fraction of a second where that focus was lower.
He pulls back.
His hand reaches for the pen I’m already holding.
A professional reflex, my pen, thank you.
It stops halfway. He remembers, presumably, that I’m going to have to hand it to him, and that handing means contact, and that contact was the last thing that made him recoil.
He chooses to let me have his pen rather than touch me twice in five minutes.
The pen is in my hand. The pen is a small, cheap Bic biro, and it is currently holding more information than it was manufactured to hold.
‘You make everything so…’ I pause. Let the silence fill. ‘…clear.’
He tightens his jaw. The vein on his neck, the one I’ve mapped, catalogued, imagined running my tongue along, pulses.
‘That’s enough for today.’ Tight. The voice of a man pulling a fire alarm in a building that’s already burning. ‘You’ve got the concept.’
I stand. Slowly. My knee withdraws from his space. He doesn’t acknowledge that it was ever there.
‘Same time next week?’
He doesn’t nod. Doesn’t say yes. What he says is: ‘If you need it.’
The if is doing so much work; it should unionize.
‘I need it,’ I say. And I leave.
I hold the door handle for half a beat before I open it.
I know what’s on the other side—a corridor, a lift, the rest of an ordinary Tuesday—and I know what’s on this side, and the choice to walk through is a choice I’m making in front of a man who has stopped breathing in order to watch me make it.
I walk through.
When my knee touched his, he didn’t move.
When I bent for the pen, his attention scattered, and he didn’t move.
Last week was the mind. This week was the body. Two data points form a trajectory.
But the look when I bent down. Clinical for half a second, and then the other kind. Fast, stolen.
Hands. Nails in my palms.
I can still feel his knee.
I’ve had men look at me the way he looked at me.
Blokes my age, tattooed bouncers, post-rugby types, a married lad at a wedding in Deptford, the entire back half of Canal Street on a Saturday.
None of them looked at me like they were going to be accountable for it later.
His look had accountability written all the way through it.
Guilt not of the I shouldn’t want this kind.
Guilt of the I shouldn’t be allowed to want this, and I do kind—the guilt of a man who thinks about consequences and has already calculated them.
That’s the look I’m going to think about, with my hand in my pocket or on my cock or wrapped round a pint in a pub telling Femi I’m fine.
The pub is the one near campus, carpets that predate optimism, a telly showing football nobody’s watching, lager that tastes like it’s endured a hard life. Femi’s already at a table. Pint in hand. Glowing.
Glowing is understating it, the lad is radioactive.
‘He met my mum on FaceTime last night,’ Femi says, before I’ve even sat down.
I set my pint on the table. ‘Your mum.’
‘She loves him. She said he has kind eyes.’ He’s beaming so hard his whole body can’t contain it, the excess leaks into every movement. ‘She never says that. She told my last boyfriend he looked shifty.’
‘Your last boyfriend was shifty.’
‘That’s not the point.’ He takes a sip. Sets the glass down hard. ‘The point is she used his name. She only uses names for people she’s decided to keep.’
Femi exists in a world where you meet someone’s mother on a screen and she comments on the quality of their eyes, and this is considered progress towards permanence.
A world where Tuesday night means FaceTime with parents, not engineering a knee-touch under a desk with a man thirteen years older who won’t say your first name.
‘That’s proper good, Femi.’