Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Light I haven’t earned.
Real morning light. Grey-gold, coming through blinds that somebody chose on purpose. Landing on a duvet that smells of detergent and skin and the salt-sweet of last night that makes my stomach drop.
The arm.
Across my waist. His wrist against the skin below my navel.
Stillness claims me. Malfunction. My body has received information it cannot parse. His warmth along my spine, the slow rhythm of his breathing, the knee slotted between mine like it was built to go there.
I’ve woken up next to blokes before. Disentangle, dress, leave. I had memorised it since I was sixteen.
This isn’t choreography. This is his face between my shoulder blades and his arm holding me. A sentence that holds.
He tightens his arm fractionally in sleep.
But yesterday the hallway became the bedroom, and I must have—fallen asleep. Inside the arms of a man I was only supposed to fuck.
I extract myself like I’m defusing ordnance—millimetre by millimetre, breathing through my teeth.
He slides his arm off and makes a sound, low, unconscious, a body registering absence, and rolls onto his front. Face in the pillow. One arm off the edge of the mattress.
He looks younger. The tension is gone, the mouth open instead of set. Give him twenty seconds after those eyes open. The guilt will arrive like a fire alarm in a library.
My body is filing reports.
My arse aches, deep, muscular.
My thighs are bruised where his fingers dug in. The bite on my neck throbs. I can feel where his cock was inside me like a shape my body has memorised and is already asking to have back.
Clothes, door, tram, halls. File it.
Instead, I’m standing in the hallway of his flat in my boxers at half seven in the morning, staring at his bookshelves as they owe me answers.
The flat is a small, terraced conversion on the first floor.
Everything is controlled, not tidy, controlled.
Books are arranged by subject, then alphabetically within each section.
Pure mathematics on the top shelf. Applied maths.
Then physics, philosophy, a novel sitting sideways like an escapee.
The desk in the corner: papers stacked, edges aligned, a mug with a Mobius strip joke that I’m annoyed to find funny.
The kitchen: a kettle, a single banana turning brown in the fruit bowl. He doesn’t stay here; he visits.
A guitar in the corner. Acoustic, well-used, the fretboard is worn smooth where the chords live. The thought of those fingers on the strings, the same ones inside me last night—move on.
Vinyls on a shelf by the window. Two rows. Top: Nirvana, Pixies, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins. Bottom: Portishead, Massive Attack, Mogwai.
What I notice: what isn’t here.
No photos. No postcards, no birthday cards, no framed anything. A thirty-one-year-old man with no visible past. No family, no friends, no evidence. The books tell me what he thinks. Nothing tells me who he is.
Bathroom. His toothbrush, his razor, his soap. And on the bottom shelf behind the towels, a bottle of aftershave. Expensive. Nearly full, I uncap it. Citrus. Amber underneath, bitter, nothing like the soap-and-cotton smell I fell asleep pressed against.
This isn’t his.
Someone left this here. Maybe Hugo, who stayed enough mornings to claim shelf space. Who isn’t here anymore but hasn’t been fully forgotten?
I recap it. Put it back exactly where it was.
Exactly where it was, I’m good at this. I’ve been picking things up and putting them back in houses I shouldn’t be in since I was fourteen and dated a lad with divorced parents and a panic threshold.
You learn fast. The memory for the angle of a toothbrush in a glass.
The shelf-edge where a bottle has worn a faint ring on the wood.
Hugo’s aftershave has worn off a ring. It has been on that shelf long enough.
And for a second I hate him for that—for the ring, for the certainty, for having had long enough to leave a mark—and then I remind myself I am eighteen and stood barefoot in the bathroom of a man I really didn’t know, and hating exes I have never met is not a good look and not a thing I have earned.
I fold the towel back over the aftershave.
The medicine cabinet above the sink is worse.
Not because of what’s in it—plasters, paracetamol, a single pack of painkillers three years past their date—but because of what isn’t.
No second deodorant. No contact lens solution.
No evidence that the occupant of this bathroom has ever needed to be more than one version of himself in front of another person.
The flat is rehearsed for solitude. Hugo was, at some point, an interruption to that rehearsal. So am I.
‘Oh God.’
I’m back sitting on the bed when he wakes. He opens them, sees me, and the twenty seconds I predicted compress into three. Confusion, recognition. Horror.
‘Oh God. What have I done?’
Not we. Not what happened. What have I done?
He sits up. The duvet falls to his waist and keeps going, and I see the scratches on his left arm, mine, and his cock half-hard against his thigh because panic doesn’t reach below the waist at this hour.
I look.
He follows my gaze and grabs the duvet.
Too late, mate.
‘This. We can’t. I should have—’
‘But you didn’t.’ I stay where I am. Legs crossed, calm, wearing borrowed calm like I’m wearing his boxers. ‘And neither did I.’
I lean forward and kiss him. Slow, soft. Nothing like the hallway. A question where last night was a statement.
He doesn’t pull back. He brings his hand up—reflex, not decision—and cups the back of my head, and the gentleness of the kiss is worse than everything that came before it. The violence I have a category for. The tenderness is—
My hand is under the duvet. He’s still half-hard, and when I close my fingers around him, the sound he makes into my mouth is not a protest, no matter how many syllables he gives it afterwards.
‘Shower,’ I say against his lips. ‘Come on.’
His shower is narrow, the spray too hot, the steam thick enough to blur the edges of everything. The closeness of him when he reaches for the soap. My hip against his when I turn. Nothing accidental.
I kneel.
The tile is hard, and the water hits my back, and his cock is in my mouth, the taste of his skin sharper through the steam. He has one hand on the wall, the other in my hair, not pushing, just there, the touch of a man too wrecked to guide and too far gone to let go.
He comes, I swallow. Stand. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.
Laurence doesn’t reach for the towel.
He finds my eyes through the steam. ‘My turn,’ he says. Then he goes down.
I, what?
A man with a PhD. Thirteen years on me. On his knees on the wet tile of his own bathroom, with the water running over both of us.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know.’
The feel of him.
Every blowjob I’ve had has been from lads my age.
Functional. Enthusiastic like PornHub teaches: teeth first, no patience.
This is different. Slow and then not slow.
His hands are on my hips, not grabbing. Holding.
The thumbs tracing the bones like he’s reading me.
The angle deepens, and he does something with his throat that makes my palm crack against the tile.
Nobody does this.
Nobody stays after. Nobody kneels when it’s already over for them.
This man is on his knees, anchored on my hip, warmth unhurried, and I have no place in this geography except to receive. Looking would shatter it. Closing my eyes would waste it. I have no reference for generosity like this.
I come. My knees go. He catches me, both hands, hip bones, holding me upright through it. When it’s over, he stands and holds me under the water, and I’m shaking, and nothing makes sense.
He holds me. Again.
Kitchen. Coffee. I’m sitting at the table in his joggers and a t-shirt that hangs loose on me. The fabric smells like him, the real him, the soap-and-cotton, and my brain wants to catalogue it, treasure it, which I’m not allowing.
He puts a mug in front of me. Sits down opposite, the coffee goes untouched.
This has to break in the next sixty seconds.
I feel it like a lecture hall about to end, the chair backs already shifting, the room preparing to let you back out into the corridor.
This is the moment where blokes say right well, cheers then, and I say, yeah, cheers, and somebody hands somebody a jacket, and the door does the thing doors do.
The protocol is not what I want to do.
What I want is for nobody to name anything for a bit longer.
Sit in his t-shirt. Drink a coffee that holds no appeal.
Let the unlabelled silence stay unlabelled because the moment somebody labels it, one of us walks out of this kitchen with the smaller half of the thing, and the one with the smaller half is going to be me, because the one with the smaller half is always me.
So I do what I do when a situation is bigger than me. I perform smaller than it.
‘So.’ Slouch. The slouch, the one I learned on pub benches before I was legally allowed to be on them. Elbow on his table, mug turning lazy. The grin I use when I want a lad to not notice I’m nervous. ‘Dr Haldrey. This is a first for you, isn’t it?’
The eyebrow goes up. ‘Meaning.’
‘Breakfast with a guy like me. Bet the last bloke you had in this kitchen at eight had his own flat and an article to read.’
It’s out of my mouth before I’ve thought it.
Laurence doesn’t flinch, which is worse than if he had.
‘Ewan.’
‘It’s fine, I was just—’
‘Put the mug down.’
I put the mug down. My hand does it before my face has decided whether to resent it.
He’s looking at me properly now.
A face I haven’t met yet, not the marking-face, not the lecturer-face, not the man-on-his-knees-in-the-shower face—all armour. The kindness has been stripped out like a nurse removing a blanket before a procedure.
‘I am thirty-one years old.’
He says it measured. The Lancashire underneath the vowels is very audible now.