Chapter 8 #2
‘That’s—good progress.’ He exhales. Something larger than a sigh. Like he’s been holding it for weeks, for as long as we’ve been doing this with the books, the cold coffee, the door. ‘These sessions in my office.’
He’s looking at the desk.
‘They’re not working.’
My stomach drops an inch.
For half a second, I read that sentence the way a different person would read it. They’re not working, said by a lecturer to a student behind a closed door, is the first sentence of a referral. A pastoral email. A quiet word with the programme director. A door that does not open for me again.
‘The space is too—’ He stops. Starts again. ‘It’s too private.’
My breath catches before I can stop it.
His eyes lift, then lower again. ‘I don’t mean—’
No. He does not say that. He refuses the sentence before it can become dangerous.
‘It would be more appropriate to meet somewhere else,’ he says instead. ‘A café, perhaps. Somewhere with other people. Somewhere we can talk about the work without the room making everything worse.’
My stomach climbs back up. Not all the way. Enough.
He isn’t closing the door.
He’s opening one with witnesses.
Other people.
He stops. Stares at the gap where the words should be, like he can’t believe his own mouth has brought him here.
He does not look at me. He is, I realise, editing in real time.
Trying out the sentence in his head and then trying to make his mouth deliver a version of it that a panel could read as pastoral concern and not a man proposing to relocate the problem.
‘Perhaps we should meet for a coffee. Outside. To discuss your progress properly.’
He says properly, as people say responsibly, like the word itself is a leash, and he’s hoping it’ll hold.
A coffee. Outside. Other people. A venue he has chosen because he cannot trust the venue we are currently in.
He has not chosen to end the meetings. He has chosen to move them.
I watch him watch himself make that distinction, and I understand, for the first time in six weeks, that I am not the only person in this building keeping an account.
‘Sure.’ I keep my voice level. Flat, textbook-casual. ‘Good idea.’
He nods, once. Eyes on the screen. ‘Saturday. I’ll email you the details.’
‘Cool.’
I stand. Pick up my bag, walk to the door. My hand on the handle. The metal is cold, and my palm is not, and the air behind me shifts. He’s not looking. Definitely not looking.
‘See you, Dr Haldrey.’
I close the door. Gently.
The corridor is empty—fluorescent light, linoleum, and a fire extinguisher that’s been there since before I was born. I walk twelve steps before the smile hits—the private, stupid grin.
The absence of attack was the attack.
I’m half-hard in the corridor of the maths department, which is new, because usually it takes more than a coffee invitation.
I stop walking—the corridor hums, pipes somewhere. The postgrad is still typing.
The triumph should be clean. It’s not. There’s grit in it.
He looked at his palms on the desk. Away, not at me. Like they’d done something without his permission, and he was trying to decide whether to forgive them.
He’s not losing a game. He’s admitting he’s at war with himself.
I’ve pulled men almost twice my age before.
There’s a specific face a man makes when he realises a younger lad has got him.
The face is usually, in my experience, pleased—pleased in the dirty, relieved way—the admission that he’d already made the decision and was just waiting for someone to make it for him. That face is a face I know.
Haldrey’s face, now, in the office I just left, is not that face.
Haldrey’s face is the face of someone who has spent his professional life refusing to be the man in the newspaper paragraph that begins Dr and ends suspended, and who has just scheduled a coffee that he does not know, yet, whether he is going to be able to keep himself in the professional shape of.
I push through the double doors. October. Rain. Manchester is doing its one trick. The cold hits my face, and the thing is still there, and I walk through the wet car park with my hood down because the rain accomplishes what my body cannot.
The smile comes back, weaker. Still there.
Out of the office, out of the fortress, where he’s a lecturer, and I’m a student, and the desk between us is a DMZ.
A café. Coffee. Two men at a table like it means nothing.
I cross the road. A bus goes past, wrong number, wrong direction, doesn’t matter.
The sigh stays. He said it properly, like a prayer he’d already stopped believing in.
Keep walking. Towards the coffee. Towards the daylight. Towards the place where nobody knows what two men at a table means, and I can pretend, for an hour, that the distance between us is a choice rather than a sentence.
I’m not going to tell Femi. That’s the first clean decision of the afternoon.
I’m not going to walk into halls with this under my tongue and let him read it off my face.
Femi’s been giving me one piece of eye contact per day for three weeks, the calibrated kind, the kind that says I am still waiting for you to choose to tell me.
If I tell him there’s been a coffee invitation, he will ask me a question I don’t want to answer, which is: and you said yes.
And I did. Flat. Textbook-casual. Like it was what I’d come in for.
Which, if I’m honest with myself, and I am, on this stretch of Oxford Road between the maths building and the number 42 stop, I was.
The bus shelter is empty. I sit under it because sitting is closer to the pavement than standing, and I need to be close to the pavement for a minute.
The rain keeps going. A man on the other side of the road is shouting at a pigeon.
I breathe.
My phone buzzes.
Of course he’s sent it already. Of course he has.
Saturday. Eleven o’clock. A café off the student circuit, off Didsbury way, the kind of place a lecturer would go on a weekend to read the paper without being seen by the blonde girl in the red hoodie or the lad who types like he’s already been rejected.
A real place, on a real map, that I am going to walk into on Saturday at eleven o’clock like a person keeping an appointment.
Four days.
I spent forty minutes in the bathroom this morning, which is thirty-eight more than I’d spend for any bloke I pulled on a Friday night.
Douching first. The shower attachment, the patience, the tedium of making sure everything is right. Clean. The kind of clean nobody notices unless it isn’t there.
This is not a hookup.
This is someone who owns hardback books and drinks his coffee black and calls me by my first name in a voice that makes the syllables sound like they belong to him. Someone who will notice.
So I’m thorough. Then the shower twice, because the first time I can still smell the halls on my skin, and I’m not bringing Fallowfield’s eau de institutional carpet to this.
Soap in the places where soap matters. Then the razor, the bits I’d normally leave.
Then lotion, because he has the kind of hands that would notice the difference between a man who moisturises and a man who doesn’t.
Then the plug. Small, silicone, the one I bought online and hid in my sock drawer because some things don’t need explaining to a flatmate.
I put it in—the first cold spike of lube, the stretch, the adjustment, the dull pressure once the base settles—and stand in front of the mirror, naked and flushed, counting breaths until the flush fades.
Get dressed. Sit on the bus for fifty minutes and feel it shift every time we hit a pothole, which in Manchester is every four seconds, and my cock has thoughts about this that I file under later.
The plug is for him. Only for him.
And this feels like empty hope. I wore it once for a hookup in Lewisham, and it was stupid; the bloke lasted three minutes, the prep wasted on a sprint.
For Laurence, I want to be ready. Ready for whatever he—if he—wants.
Laurence.
When did he stop being Haldrey?
Don’t get ahead of yourself.
Lube, condoms in the backpack. Those are standard. That’s anyone. I’ve carried them since sixth form, like house keys, part of the kit, check before you leave.
But the douching, the plug. The second shower. Four checks in the mirror, three t-shirt changes: this is different. This is me, who doesn’t give a fuck, giving all of the fucks about whether a thirty-one-year-old mathematician thinks my body is good enough.
Strategy, obviously. Just strategy.
I’m seven minutes late. Calculated.
The bar is in Chorlton, far enough from campus that Haldrey would have computed the odds before booking it. Flat whites with latte art, exposed brick claiming we’re independent, four-quid coffees that say we know you’ll pay it—that place.
He’s in the corner. Already seated, already nursing a cold drink, already checking the door every fifteen seconds, he arrived early for a meeting he’s been telling himself isn’t a date.
I see him before he sees me. Use the seconds.
Outside the university, he’s different. The shirt is softer, navy, and open at the collar.
No tie, no jacket. The sleeves rolled up: a conscious choice, like he considered his forearms and decided to use them.
There’s a watch on his wrist that I’ve never noticed on campus.
Silver, simple. He’s never worn it there.
He looks younger, less constructed. More like a man and less like a man playing a role, and the difference tightens my stomach the same way the plug has all morning.
I stand in the doorway of the café for a beat longer than I need to.
I want to know what he looks like when he thinks he’s alone.
He looks like someone you’d walk up to in a pub.
Someone you’d stop for directions. A whole category of man I’ve watched him refuse to be in front of students for six weeks.
A girl says, ‘Excuse me,’ behind me. I step out of the way. He still hasn’t seen me.