Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
The words he chose: I can’t.
No, I don’t want to. No, I’m not attracted to you. Not this is wrong.
I can’t.
Can’t is a wall with a crack in it. Can’t knows exactly what you want.
I pick up my cup. Drink. The coffee’s gone cold.
The chair’s still warm where he sat. The coffee’s still full. The coins he threw down are scattered like shrapnel.
I pick one up—a two-pound coin, still warm from his pocket.
Warm from his—
Right. We’re doing this.
I stand. The second shower, the humiliating thoroughness. And the man I did it for left his coffee and walked out.
The café staff haven’t cleared his cup. Nobody’s noticed he’s gone. The double espresso has cooled into a skin, and beside it sits a teaspoon he never used.
A man who leaves his coffee is a man running on something other than protocol. I know that much.
I know I did this. I know I pressed I need it into his face in a public space until the only move he had left was to stand up and walk out on a ￡3.
40 drink. I have, in six weeks, dismantled a thirty-one-year-old lecturer in pure mathematics by leaning across a café table and saying the one sentence I had that wasn’t a lie.
There should be a win in that. A flat, clean one—the kind that stays in the muscle.
There isn’t.
There’s just the coin in my palm, still warm from his pocket, and the sound in my head of him saying I can’t, which is what people say when they mean I will, and also what they say when they mean I won’t, and I don’t yet know which one he meant. He walked out. It could go either way.
Through the window: Chorlton High Street. He is in a navy shirt, moving too fast for a walk. He’s not running, though his legs move like he doesn’t know it.
I grab my jacket.
I follow at a distance. Two streets back, matching his pace, letting the residential roads do the narrowing for me. Victorian terraces, sycamores dropping the last of October, a cat on a wall that doesn’t bother to watch me pass.
Two streets back is the right distance. Far enough that he can’t hear me if he stops and turns.
Close enough that I don’t lose him at a junction, I’ve done a version of this before.
Sixteen, Lewisham, a lad in a gilet who said he was popping out for his cigarettes and was walking the other way.
I remember thinking halfway down the road that catching him wouldn’t help, and turning round.
This isn’t that.
The man in front of me doesn’t want to be caught in a state of apprehension. He wants to be caught in the sense of found. In the sense that somebody has decided, on my behalf, that I am worth the decision in the sense of not having to do it.
I am eighteen, and I am walking behind a thirty-one-year-old maths lecturer along a street whose name I don’t know, and I am making that decision on his behalf.
Femi would tell me to turn round. Femi would tell me that following a lecturer is not a line the law has any nuance about.
Femi isn’t here. I have, in the last seventy-two hours, stopped checking what Femi would say about any of this, because every answer is turn round, and every step I’ve taken has been the opposite.
He turns onto a tree-lined street. Bay windows. Hedges trimmed by people who own their own secateurs.
He stops at a door, blue, peeling, terraced conversion. Reaches in his pocket, fumbles the keys. Drops them. The tremor travels this far. Fifteen minutes ago.
I wait until he gets the key in the lock.
‘Dr Haldrey.’
He goes rigid, full-body lock. The key halfway turned. His frame tensing, climbing into itself.
He turns. Slow. The face I’ve been dismantling in my head for six weeks is white. Not pale—white.
‘What.’ He cracks on the word. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We weren’t finished.’
‘We are. I told you everything I needed to tell you.’
‘You told me you can’t. That’s not the same thing.’
His eyes. Behind the glasses, in the dim of the porch light, wide, furious, terrified. I’ve seen that combination before, never with this much voltage.
‘Leave.’ Low. Hard. ‘Now.’
‘No.’
The key is still in the lock. He grips it. The door is half-open like an equation he refuses to resolve.
I step forward, into his space. Close enough to smell the coffee he didn’t drink on his breath, the detergent on his collar, the warmth underneath that’s just him, sharp and living.
His warmth presses through both our shirts.
The plug reminds me it exists. My cock has been half-hard since the café. Now it’s not half anything.
He doesn’t step back. The door behind him swings wider.
I step through. Past him, into his hallway. The space he left was exactly wide enough.
The door closes; he closes it. He leans against the wood, pushing, and the click of the latch is deafening.
Dark. The hallway is narrow, dim, the last of the daylight through a frosted window at the end, his breathing, mine, and the radiator’s tick.
‘This can’t happen,’ he starts.
Stillness keeps me grounded, no touch—just the two of us in his hallway with the dark between us.
‘Tell me to leave.’ A beat. ‘Say this is wrong and I’ll walk out and never mention it again.’
Silence. The radiator. He breathes, ragged, too fast.
The hallway is a narrow rectangle of choices he has not yet made. I stand in the part of it he hasn’t closed off. I do not move. Moving now would be a pressure he doesn’t need.
In the dark between us, a great deal is being weighed.
The career variable. The eighteen-year-old who walked into his office hour with a strategic centimetre of bare neckline and stayed two minutes longer than necessary.
The variable he’s been refusing to put on the board for six weeks—the one where he wants this.
He is putting it on the board. I can hear it in the way his breathing has gone uneven in a pattern I haven’t heard from him before, a pattern the controlled version of him would have pulled back into line by now.
I keep my hands where they are. I do not look at his mouth. The last thing he needs, in the three seconds it will take him to resolve this, is somebody standing too close performing the answer for him.
And underneath everything: the thing I do not say, because saying it would be pressure and because it is, in any case, the wrong shape for this room.
If you tell me to leave, I will leave. I’ll survive it.
I’ve survived every other version of wanting something I wasn’t allowed to have.
I will go home, and I will finish this degree, and I will, on some day a decade from now, remember the smell of his hallway and the tick of the radiator and the three seconds I stood in the dark waiting for a man to choose me or not.
Three seconds. Five.
‘Stay,’ he says. One word. Then he breaks.
A noise, guttural, raw, and feral. He, who measures every word. His hands grab my shirt collar. He shoves me back against the wall, and the plaster is cold through my t-shirt, and his mouth is on mine.
Fuck.
None of the Haldrey I’d built in my head for six weeks. He’s pulling my hair, and I’m pulling back, and we’re—
His tongue against my teeth. The groan he makes when I bite his lower lip. Deep, involuntary, all control shredding in that one sound.
He pins my hips to the wall. His cock fully hard, pressing against my hip. This buttoned-up man is shaking and making sounds like that because of me. Best thing I’ve ever felt.
I reach under his shirt. His skin is hot, muscles jumping under my fingers. His stomach is tight, trembling, and lower, the trail of hair below his navel. He bites my neck. Hard. My hips jerk forward, and the plug presses deeper, and I swear out loud.
‘Fuck.’
He pulls my t-shirt over my head. The chain catches. Doesn’t stop. Mouth on my collarbone, belt next.
I reach down. Find the outline of him through his trousers. Thick. Curved slightly left. I knew it, I fucking knew it, I’ve been reading that silhouette for weeks.
I undo his belt one-handed. Zip. I reach inside. Close my fingers around him. Hot and heavy, and his whole body shudders.
He gasps against my neck when I grip him. The noise he makes is everything.
‘Ewan.’
My name is in his mouth. Not Carrick. Not Mr.
Ewan.
In the dark hallway of his flat, with his trousers around his thighs and my hand on his cock.
I pull the condom from my back pocket. The lube. Muscle memory, same compartment as always, except I’m shaking and I don’t shake for anyone.
‘Put it on.’
He looks at me, eyes blown. Chest heaving. Takes both. Tears the condom packet with his teeth.
I turn. Hands against the wall. Undo my own jeans, shove them down. He’s behind me. His heat against my back, his ragged breath against my neck, his cock pressing against me through the latex.
‘There’s—’ He finds what he finds. Traces the base of the plug and stops. The pause while a thirty-one-year-old mathematician puts together what an eighteen-year-old boy did in a bathroom this morning, in case today was the day.
‘You—’
‘I’m ready.’ Palms flat on the wall. The plaster is cold, and I’m burning. ‘I’ve been ready since before you ordered that fucking coffee.’
He pulls the plug out. Slow. My body contracts around the absence, and then his fingers are there, slicked, two, finding the give where the plug left me open, pressing in. Methodical even now. Even with his hands shaking and his breathing ragged, and the hallway’s dark.
‘Now,’ I say. ‘For fuck’s sake.’
He reaches with his free hand to turn my face, searching my eyes for the real yes, not the performed one. The one that’s mine and not a script I’ve run before with strangers whose names I forgot on the tram home.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I want this.’
His breath sharpens against my temple. He nods, barely.
He enters me with a thrust that pushes me flat against the wall, and the stretch is—God—bigger than the plug, bigger than my fingers, bigger than any bloke who never bothered with this much warm-up.
The fullness rolls up my spine, a second too much, then not enough, and I push back, and he bottoms out and makes a sound against my neck that I’ll remember when I’m dead.
The grip I imagined, fingers digging in, blunt nails against bone. He pulls back and drives in again, and the angle hits exactly where it needs to, and I gasp, ‘There. Fuck. Right there.’
He does it again, and again. Deep strokes that get rawer with every one.
The lecturer, the precision, is gone. The man behind me is just a man, desperate, grunting, his face buried in my neck, his cock hitting that spot with every thrust, and the pressure building in my gut like a pressure resolving.
My cock is trapped between my body and the wall, and the friction is almost enough, and I reach down to finish myself, but he gets there first.
His left hand.
The one that erases the board from left to right.
That hand closes around me, strokes in time with his thrusts, and the coordination is—how is he still coordinated?
I can’t think. I can’t.
I come. Hard. Against the wall, against him, clenching around him as every muscle in my body fires at once.
He follows two thrusts later, his rhythm breaking, a sound torn out of him, raw and low, his whole body pressing me into the plaster as he shakes apart.
The hallway is dark. The radiator is still ticking. He breathes against my shoulder.
We don’t speak.
He softens inside me and pulls out.
I should—clean up, readjust, make a joke, the easy exit.
My body stays anchored. He holds me there with his arms.
Both arms. Wrapped around my chest from behind, his breathing slowed. He’s trembling—the fine, total-body tremor. Relief, or need.
He doesn’t let go.
I wait for the exit. The step back. We shouldn’t have—the return to separate bodies.
He doesn’t let go.
He tightens his arms fractionally, involuntarily.
I’ve done this dozens of times. The departure is the easiest part.
This man is holding me in his hallway like I’m the last fixed point in a collapsing system.
I feel a weight under my sternum. Heavy. A variable I didn’t account for.
His heart beats against my spine, slowing, steadying.
My hands over his.
The departure is the easiest part.
Always has been.
What nobody taught me is: what happens when someone stays.