Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Femi grips my arm in the corridor outside the lecture theatre, harder than his worrying frame should allow.
‘We need to talk.’
‘About what?’
‘Not here.’
He steers me through the fire exit, down the concrete stairs that smell of cigarettes and old rain, and out into the courtyard behind the maths building. October wind. A bench nobody uses because it faces the bins. Femi sits. I stand.
‘Alright,’ I say. ‘Talk.’
He looks at me with that face, the one where he’s lined up everything he needs to say and is deciding which door to kick in first. I’ve seen it twice before.
Once, he told me I was drinking too much at his cousin’s wedding.
Once, when he spotted the lovebite on my neck, the summer I was fourteen, he asked if I was being safe.
Both times, he was right. Both times, I wanted to strangle him.
‘I’ve seen how you look at him.’
Nothing moves. I make sure of it.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Haldrey.’ Just that. ‘In the lecture. At the vending machine on Monday. You stood there five minutes pretending to choose a sneak while he walked past.’
‘I was choosing a KitKat.’
‘You hate KitKats.’
Fuck.
‘What the fuck are you doing, Ewan?’
The courtyard is empty. Just the bins, the bench, a Hoover whining from somewhere inside. Nobody is listening, which makes it worse.
‘Nothing. I go to his office hours. He’s a maths lecturer, I’ve got maths questions.’
‘You haven’t got maths questions. You’ve got his weekly schedule memorised.’ He leans forward. Elbows on knees. The posture of a speech. A prepared one. ‘I’m not stupid, Ewan. I know what you look like past interested.’
Heat is crawling everywhere.
I sit down. Not because I want to, because standing feels like an admission that I’m ready to bolt.
‘He’s a lecturer.’
‘He’s a lecturer.’
‘He’s your lecturer. The policy is black and white. I checked.’
Stomach drops. ‘You checked?’
‘For me and Allan.’
He says it flat, no drama, like he’s reporting what he had for breakfast.
‘Before we made it official. I checked the university relationship policy. Wanted to be sure student-student was allowed.’
He pauses.
‘It is. Staff-student isn’t. Not if they’re marking your work. That’s not a grey area. It’s not case-by-case. It’s a sacking offence.’
Sacking. Stays.
‘I’m not—’ I start. Stop. What am I going to say? Am I not doing anything? Am I not interested? The flush on my neck is doing its own press conference. ‘It’s office hours.’
‘It’s not office hours.’ Quiet now. Not accusation, but concern. ‘You don’t dress like that for office hours. You don’t come back vibrating from office hours. I’ve known you since we were twelve and I have never—not once—seen you like this about anyone.’
I look at the bins. Grey. Industrial. Better than looking at Femi. He’s reading me in forty-point font.
‘He’s different,’ Femi says. ‘The others aren’t. The blokes on Canal Street, the lads at parties; none of them make you sit up.’
Silence arrives before I can stop it. I’m.
‘You walked into the theatre Friday in a jumper I’ve never seen you wear. You answered a question in front of two hundred people. You—you, Ewan—were the first person to put your hand up. I was sat next to you. I saw you pick the words.’
The courtyard gets smaller.
‘You go quiet. You check your phone. You space out in lectures and then you come awake when he walks in. It’s.’ He stops. Rubs his face with both hands. ‘It’s exactly what I did with Allan. Exactly. Except Allan’s a second year, not a forty-something-year-old man with a PhD and a duty of care.’
The wind picks up. A crisp packet skids across the concrete and hits my shoe.
‘He’s not—he’s thirty-one. And it’s not like that. What do you want me to say?’
‘I want you to hear me.’ He turns on the bench.
Full body, facing me, the Femi who once sat outside the headteacher’s office for two hours because he wouldn’t grass on me, and also wouldn’t lie.
‘If this goes wrong, and it will go wrong, Ewan, because this kind of thing always goes wrong, he doesn’t lose a crush.
He loses his career, his reputation—everything he’s built.
You walk away with a story. He walks away with nothing. ’
The words stick. The crisp packet blows on.
I hadn’t thought about it like that. Not in those words.
I’d thought about what he might do if I pushed, and what he might not do.
I’d thought about his face, his stillness, the recoil, if that was doing too much work.
I had not thought about the filing cabinet.
I had not thought about the letter on headed paper that would end a career a man had spent fifteen years putting together.
For a second, I can feel the shape of what Femi outlined, like touching the edge of it in the dark.
Then I put it away. Because if I hold it any longer, I’ll stop.
Something in me wants to tell him. The whole thing, the mapping, the schedule, the cologne strategy, how my knee touched Haldrey’s under the desk, and neither of us moved.
The beach photos, the wanking. The name that fell out of my mouth while a stranger gripped me.
Because Femi would listen, and it’s lodged in my ribs.
But telling him makes it real. And real has consequences that live in a filing cabinet somewhere with the university logo on the front.
‘It’s not what you think,’ I say, which is such a pathetic deflection that I nearly laugh at my own mouth.
‘Thinking would make it worse.’ He’s picking at a thread on his jacket, a nervous habit since Year 9, the one he falls into before calls with his dad. ‘I’m scared, Ewan. For you. And yeah, for him too, because he seems like a decent man and decent men make the worst decisions when they—’
He stops. The words gather behind his teeth. Then he swallows them.
‘I’m not telling you what to feel. I’m telling you what’s at stake.’ He looks at his hands. ‘Watching you destroy someone would break something in me. And I can’t watch someone destroy you.’
The first half I’d rehearsed a defence for—the second.
‘Nobody’s getting destroyed.’
‘Good.’ He stands. Brushes off his jeans. He’s said what he had. ‘Tuesday, yeah? Pub after your, um. Office hours.’
The um has a blade in it.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Tuesday.’
He goes, the fire door shuts—the bins, the wind.
Femi’s words have a half-life. Still there. Sacking offence. Stays.
Stomach. Something cold. The lid doesn’t fit.
The bus passes a Greggs. Then another Greggs. Then a gap where a third Greggs used to be before it died of loneliness.
My phone holds his staff photo, screenshotted weeks ago—not stalking, strategic awareness, the glasses, the hair pushed back, the face of a man who didn’t want his photograph taken. I scroll to the saved ones from Hugo’s Facebook—the kitchen, the beach, the body I want despite everything.
Femi’s voice, still buzzing: he loses his career. His reputation. Everything he’s built.
My thumb hovers over the beach photo. The V of those hips. The swim shorts.
I’ve been through this album enough times to have a favourite. I have a favourite. I know which photograph I go to when it’s too late at night and my body won’t settle, and it isn’t the beach one.
That’s the photograph. I can’t defend it. I don’t try.
Tuesday is in two days.
The responsible move is skipping office hours. Steer clear—hearing room.
I zoom in on his staff photo. His collar. The triangle of skin where the top button is undone.
I lock the screen, but the face stays, burned into the glass like a constant in a proof.
Tuesday. 13:47. Thirteen minutes early because fuck strategy.
Femi’s voice has been doing laps in my skull for days. Sacking offence, sacking offence, sacking offence. I’m here early because the alternative is another hour of pretending I’m not coming.
The problem set’s in my bag—real this time, no planted errors, no wrong turns. After what he pulled last week, dissecting my forgeries with surgical calm, I’m not insulting his intelligence again. He’s too sharp. The man I want sees straight through me, and that’s the problem.
Which should be a problem. Shouldn’t be the hottest thing about him.
I knock. Twelve seconds, the door opens.
He’s different—shirt the same, office the same. Cold coffee is still developing a civilisation on the desk. But the posture’s rigid, controlled, every tendon engaged.
‘Mr Carrick. You’re early.’
Two seconds of held eye contact, the two of us in a corridor nobody else is in, at thirteen minutes to two on a Tuesday afternoon, and the thing we are not saying is louder than the thing I came here to say.
‘Sit down.’
I sit. The same chair, the same desk. The dangerous space between us hasn’t changed, but I do, holding back, not pushing. Strategy, not surrender.
He takes my problem set. Reads it. No forgeries to find this time, and I see the moment he registers that, a flicker across his brow, surprise disguised as concentration. The work is clean and correct. Better than correct.
‘This is good,’ he says. Neutral. Careful. The voice of someone performing the role.
‘Thanks.’
Silence. He makes notes, the pen moving with precision. The wrist is angled. The shirt cuff pulled back just enough to show.
I stand up. He flinches—barely, his spine stiffening, a micro-adjustment in the chair—and I move towards the whiteboard as if I’m reading it, which I am, but I’m also moving into the space behind his chair where his back is turned, and his neck is exposed above the collar.
The whiteboard has two sets of equations. The student problems are on the left, neatly contained. On the right, in smaller handwriting, is his research. The familiar fragments, the proof stuck at the same point, three lines trailing off, the marker recapped and uncapped and recapped. He’s stuck.