Chapter 7 #2
I clock the way the right-hand side is written.
Smaller than the teaching side. Denser. Every symbol weighed, every subscript a commitment.
A man is talking to himself on a whiteboard in an office with the door shut.
A man who has been trying, for weeks, probably months, to see a thing that is hiding in his own work.
I see it. Fast. The way it comes to me has nothing to do with seduction and everything to do with a mind built for this. The shortcut is sitting in the negative space between line three and line seven like a wedge. Once you see it, you cannot un-see it.
I lean forward to read the right side, my hand comes down on the back of his chair, and I move it—just move it.
The lightest touch—my fingertips across the back of his shirt, the kind you could explain away as accidental. He knows the difference.
I feel the exact texture of the cotton—a twill, with a weight on the thicker side of a work shirt.
I feel the warmth of the body through it.
I feel the moment his shoulder-blade tenses under my fingers, that specific bracing that a body does when it’s decided it will not move away and also will not move closer, and the decision is costing it.
Two seconds. Three. I was behind his chair. My fingers were still where I put them.
His whole body goes still—not relaxed-still. ‘Watch it.’ Low. Hard.
‘Sorry.’ I step back. Half a step. ‘Didn’t mean to.’
Fingertips. Still warm.
My smile says otherwise. I know what my face is doing.
I’ve been rehearsing it since I was sixteen.
Sorry, mate, my bad. The face of a man who knows the apology is cosmetic.
The face that is, for the first time since I invented it, being deployed against someone who is not going to punish me for it and is also not going to reward me for it, and I do not know what to do with a reaction I haven’t met before.
‘Sit. Down.’
I sit—same molecules, different charge.
He turns back to the pages—they tremble in his grip.
He sees me see it, puts the pages down, the gesture of a man reassembling himself piece by piece.
Silence. The clock on the wall does its thing. Somewhere down the corridor, a door opens and closes. Normal sounds from a normal building where normal professional relationships happen.
I should feel triumph. I feel the difference between what I planned and what’s happening.
Don’t finish that thought.
He straightens. Pushes the pages back towards me. ‘Shall we continue?’
The professionalism is back. Welded into place, slightly crooked. But the paper rustling against the silence is still.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Let’s continue.’
He talks through the work. I listen. The air has a texture.
Minutes pass, and he relaxes incrementally. The teaching voice returns.
I let him have it: the restoration, the professional rhythm.
Then I see the proof on the board.
‘The proof on the right,’ I say. Instinct, not strategy. ‘You’ve got a redundant step.’
He blinks, surprise cracks through.
‘Line four,’ I say. ‘You’re establishing a bound that’s already implied by the construction in line two. If you skip it, lines five through eight collapse into two.’
He turns to the whiteboard. Stares. His eyes move, tracking, checking, retracing the logic.
Twenty seconds.
‘Show me.’
I stand again. This time, he doesn’t flinch; he’s thinking, not defending. I take the marker from the shelf. I write on the board. Two lines. The shortcut, visible the moment I looked at it, was the pattern living in the negative space between his equations.
He reads it, reads it again. I can see his brain working, faster than the silence suggests, testing, running the logic against every objection.
The silence goes on long. Forty seconds, maybe.
I’ve stood at whiteboards before, but I’ve never stood at one for forty seconds with a man in the chair behind me not speaking.
The room’s got the acoustic of a held breath.
My hand is still on the marker, the cap in my other hand, and neither has moved.
‘That’s—’ He stops. Takes off his glasses. Rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, and the gesture is so intimate, so unguarded, that I have to look at the carpet.
‘That’s not an Economics student’s observation.’
‘I’m full of surprises.’
‘You are.’ He puts the glasses back on, gaze sharp. ‘You’re wasting yourself in that programme. You know that.’
No shrug this time. The words hit somewhere I wasn’t prepared.
He reaches for a book on the shelf behind him, slim, navy, expensive. Opens it to a page near the middle. Places it on the desk between us.
‘This is the theorem your shortcut relates to. Published last year. Nobody’s found a practical application yet.’ He looks up. ‘Ewan, what you just did on that board, that’s the beginning of one.’
I lean in. Read. His finger is still on the page, and mine comes down next to it, tracing a parallel line, following the notation. Then, contact. The back of his finger against the side of mine. Neither of us planned it. We both stay still.
He’s still looking. At me, at me. How he looked at my solution in week one. The recognition, the hunger, except this time: Worry.
The name—not the surname kept like armour, but Ewan, two syllables, his Lancashire vowels turning my name into something I’ve never heard it be before.
Everything stops—the gap between Ewan and Mr Carrick, a place I could stay.
He hears himself say it. He hears himself say it with the same half-second lag I do, the millisecond in which a word arrives at your ear and you register that it came out of your own mouth, and it is the wrong word, and it is the word you have been editing for three weeks.
I watch him register it. I watch the micro-flinch.
I watch him choose not to apologise for it, which is worse than an apology.
‘Thank you,’ I say. Also low. Also, not be the register it would be if a different word had just been in the room.
He shifts his attention: me, the board, his desk. Recalibrating.
‘Same time next week,’ he says. Something between a question and an if.
‘Same time next week.’
I leave. The door clicks, the corridor swallows me.
The bathroom holds no appeal. The urgency has relocated, away from my cock, straight to my chest, which is a worse place for it and a harder one to fix.
I’ve been to this bathroom twice in three weeks.
Both times, I had to handle the aftermath of an office hour that had got ahead of me.
Today my cock is quiet. Almost polite. Whatever happened upstairs wasn’t where my body is keeping score.
My body is keeping score higher up and further in, and I cannot wank a man’s given name out of my sternum.
He said my name. Said it as if it weighed.
I walk the corridor, thirty steps. Fifty. Past the department office, past the noticeboard with its flyers for guest lectures nobody attends, past the vending machine where I stood watching him like a lunatic three weeks ago.
The proof. The look when I wrote on his board, not the student’s whiteboard, his board, his actual research, and solved what had been eating at him.
His seeing me, something past the armour.
The thing I’ve been hiding since I was a kid and realised I could do maths intuitively, as other people breathe.
My hand on his back. His eyes are on my work.
That’s the problem. Three weeks ago, I walked in wanting his body. Wanting to be the reason a grown man lost control. Simple. Clean. A project with a measurable outcome.
Now he’s saying my name, and he pulled a book off a shelf to show me where my mind fits.
Every Tuesday, the distance between us shrinks by an increment that resists measuring.
The campus is grey. My reflection in the glass door of the library. Eyeliner, chain, rings. I walked in planning a seduction. Came out holding an undefined thing—no shape for my hands.
Ewan.
Like that, exactly like that. The vowels open something in the middle of my name that nobody’s found before.
Pulse loud, too fast, cataloguing nothing. Hands obedient—for once. But the thing behind my ribs.
Still wild.
I make it as far as the bench outside the library before I stop.
Sit down. Let the cold soak through the jeans.
There are three students eating chips from a polystyrene tray on the next bench and a lad in a reflective jacket carrying a ladder, and nobody is looking at me, and I can’t, for a minute, work out what to do with my arms.
Wasting yourself in that programme.
My name is in his mouth. My mind is on his board. One hand’s worth of contact—an apology-shaped silence.
I’ve been paying attention to the wrong chapter of my own biography for eighteen years.