Chapter 10 #2
‘I am your lecturer. I mark your work. I write your references. I stand between you and your degree. I slept with you last night, and I had sex with you twenty minutes ago in the shower, and I am going to ask you to hear me say a few things out loud in daylight before either of us moves from this table. Will you do that.’
The grin falls off my face. My hands go into my lap.
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you.’ One nod. ‘First. I am not going to pretend I did not know what I was doing. I knew. I knew at the office hours when you leaned across the desk and I let you. I knew it last night and I knew it this morning in the shower. At no point between week one and this kitchen was I a man who did not know. I am saying this to you once, so that you will not at any point in the next five minutes be able to comfort me by telling me I got carried away. I was not carried. I walked.’
He pauses. He flattens his hands on the table. He is not reaching for me. The not-reaching is part of the speech.
‘Second. You are eighteen.’
‘Eighteen and four months.’
‘Eighteen.’ Flat. No patience for the deflection.
‘And I am thirteen years older than you, and a member of staff at your university, and the weight in this room is not equally distributed, and anyone looking at it from the outside would tell you—correctly—that the responsibility is mine. I am not going to dispute that with you. I am not going to let you sit there in my t-shirt and take the burden off me so I can ease my conscience. I am going to hold on to the larger half of it, because it is mine. Are you following this?’
‘I’m following.’
‘Good.’
Arousal, shame. Need. All of them at once. It is in my stomach, and it is, embarrassingly, stupidly, wrongly, in my dick. Because nobody has ever sat down opposite me and spoken to me in sentences that have main verbs and responsibility in them.
Nobody has treated me like a room whose weight matters.
Not my dad. Not the Year 13 teacher who said aim for Manchester like he was offering me a biscuit.
Haldrey talking to me like this is making me hard, and I want to crawl into his lap for it, and I am appalled at myself, and I am not going to crawl anywhere, I am going to sit very still and take it.
But sitting very still and taking it is not my mode.
My mode is don’t let them see you flinch.
My mode is to get the first word in before they can say the thing you don’t want said.
My mode, for eighteen years and four months, has been to perform the version of Ewan Carrick that will let me leave the room with my edges intact.
This room is a room I cannot edge out of.
I put my hands flat on the top of my thighs, under the table, where he cannot see them.
I breathe through the nose. I lock my jaw against the quip that is already halfway formed, and I swallow it back down, and I do not make a joke about being spoken to like I am actually worth spoken sentences.
The joke would tell him what he already knows.
It would also cost me something I am not yet sure I am prepared to spend.
So I sit very still. And I take it. And I find that taking it, as a posture, is something my body has not rehearsed.
‘Third,’ he says. ‘I am not going to ask you to decide anything for my benefit.’
‘You just said it’s your responsibility.’
‘It is.’ His voice is quiet. ‘It is my responsibility that we are sitting here at all. It is my responsibility that this happened while I still have academic responsibility for you. That part is mine.’
I say nothing.
‘But I am not going to decide for you what you feel about something that has happened to you. Or between us. You are eighteen, and you are sharp, and I am not going to insult you by telling you what your own mind is.’
He looks down at the table. At his hands. Not at me.
‘So you are going to go back to Fallowfield today in my clothes, because yours are frankly still wet in places. I am not going to discuss this at this table. I am not going to ask you for reassurance. I am not going to make you comfort me because I am frightened by what I have done.’
That lands somewhere under my ribs.
‘You are going to sit on your own bed,’ he says, ‘and you are going to decide what you want to say to me. If anything. And then you are going to tell me. Or you won’t.’
‘And you?’
His mouth tightens.
‘I will listen. And I will abide by it. Whichever way it goes.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s the only answer I’m allowed to give you today.’
The silence is so absolute that the fridge hums into it.
And the brass comes back. Because insecure and brass are apparently the same thing, and because I cannot sit in a room with a man saying things this serious to me without the swagger finding some bolthole to come out of.
‘I wanted it,’ I say. I make my voice steady.
I am surprised to find it will obey me. ‘I’m not going to let you sit there being grown up about it without me putting a hand up as well.
I walked into the office hours on purpose.
I wore the jeans on purpose. I leaned across the desk on purpose.
Don’t you dare pretend I was just sat there being eighteen and you came and got me. ’
‘I’m not.’
‘Good. Because I was not.’
‘I heard you.’
‘I chose you the second you turned round at the board in week one.’
‘I heard you, Ewan.’
‘I am hearing you too, Dr Haldrey, and I am telling you that the grown-up speech is landing, and I am not asking you to stop, I am just—’ I swallow ‘—I am just also asking you to know I chose this too, and I am going to carry whatever half of it you are not carrying, and I am not going to let you make me feel like a thing a thirty-one-year-old man walked into without my permission. That’s all. ’
He closes them for one full second. Opens them again.
‘Alright.’
‘Alright?’
‘Alright. I hear you. The halves are yours too. Shared responsibility, with me holding the bigger half because I have more of the things that can lose in this room. Agreed.’
‘Agreed.’
A pause, the fridge tick. He keeps his hand on the table, still not reaching.
‘Now go home and think about it.’
And the brass, on its own steam, because my body has stopped consulting me: ‘No.’
He goes very still.
‘Ewan.’
‘No, I mean—’ I swallow. The word has come out too fast and too rough, but it is not wrong. That is the terrifying part. It is not wrong. ‘I mean I heard you. I heard all of it. I know what you’re asking me to do. I know what you’re trying not to ask me to do.’
His hand is flat on the table.
‘Then go home.’
‘I don’t need time to know whether I wanted this.’
‘That is not the question.’
‘It is part of the question.’
‘Not the whole of it.’
‘Fine.’ My voice shakes once and then steadies. ‘Then the whole question is: do I understand what this costs you, do I understand what it could cost me, do I understand that it can’t be normal, or public, or easy, or fair, and do I still want to be here, now, with you, knowing that?’
He says nothing.
The fridge ticks. Somewhere outside, a car goes through rainwater too fast.
‘Yes,’ I say.
His eyes close for one full second.
‘That is not a decision I can let you make because I want the answer.’
‘Then don’t. Let me make it because it’s mine.’
He opens his eyes.
‘You are angry.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are frightened.’
‘Yes.’
‘You are eighteen.’
‘Yes.’
‘And I am still responsible for what I do next.’
‘Yes.’
The word sits there between us. Not permission. Not absolution. Something smaller and more dangerous: agreement.
He pushes back from the table.
Slowly.
‘Understand me clearly.’
The low voice does something to the room. To my spine. To every stupid, waiting part of me.
‘I am not going to pretend I was swept away by an eighteen-year-old. I am the adult in this room. I am choosing this with both eyes open. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Say it properly.’
‘Yes, Dr Haldrey.’
Not obedience. Precision.
He closes them for half a second. The title in his own kitchen, from a boy in his own t-shirt, something he wasn’t ready for, noted for later, to be used without mercy.
Then the speech stops, and the morning turns.
He keeps me in the chair. Doesn’t move me to another room. Doesn’t even move me to the table. There is only the kitchen, the wooden chair I’m already on, and the man already standing between my knees.
Whatever he had decided, the restraint lasts exactly the length of yes, Dr Haldrey before it shatters.
He kisses me before I’ve finished saying it.
Nothing like the slow kiss from upstairs, or the tender kiss from the shower. This is the kiss from last night’s hallway, the one that started this whole problem. Fast, open, teeth at my bottom lip, and tongue behind that.
His hands go straight up my ribs under the cotton of the T-shirt I am wearing, which is his T-shirt, which makes the gesture complicated in a way my brain has no time to file.
The palms are warm.
I am still sitting on his kitchen chair, and the whole thing has moved from we are talking seriously to we are not talking at all in the space of one sentence.
He gets both hands under my thighs and pulls me forward, right to the edge, so my hips are at the front of the chair and my back hits the chair-back. The chair scrapes once against the floor.
‘Haldrey.’
‘It’s all right.’
It is not all right. It is a kitchen chair. It is very obviously not designed for this.
Then he steps between my thighs and presses in, the whole length of him through denim, through the joggers he lent me, a single unbroken line of hip against hip.
My hands go up the back of his T-shirt. His skin is hot, the muscle along his spine tightening under my palms.
He rocks forward once. Slow. Testing if the chair holds.
The chair holds.
He rocks forward again, less slowly, and the friction through two layers of fabric catches the whole front of me at once.
My cock was half-hard from the speech. I am the adult. I am choosing this.
It is not half-hard anymore.
It is painfully hard and trapped against the seam of his joggers, and his cock is equally hard pressed against mine through his own fabric, and the wood of the chair is pushing back under me with every roll of his hips, and this is not going to take long.
‘Dr Haldrey.’
‘Yes.’
‘The chair.’
‘The chair is fine, Ewan.’
I half-laugh, half-moan.
He catches the sound against my mouth.
The rhythm is instinct. We don’t negotiate it.
My legs come up around the backs of his thighs and hook there and pull him in, and he rocks forward, and there is no prep, no drawer, no condom, no angle to engineer.
There is just his cock against mine through layers of cotton and the friction of a man grinding into me on a kitchen chair because neither of us could get to the bedroom, or the table.
My T-shirt, his T-shirt, rides up.
His hand is on the small of my back, holding me flush to him. His other hand goes to the side of my face, and his lips find my neck, and he bites the place where my pulse is. The bite is not gentle. The wood of the chair creaks under us once, and the pace doubles.
Fast.
Instinctive.
No plan to it at all.
A thirty-one-year-old mathematician who has just said I am the adult, I am choosing this with both eyes open is now grinding himself against me in his own kitchen like he has misplaced every sensible thought he has ever had.
‘Oh.’
It falls out of me. Small. Unscripted.
My hand closes on the back of his neck. My hips tip up into his, and the next roll of him presses right into the head of my cock through the fabric, and everything goes somewhere it has never been on a piece of kitchen furniture before.
He knows.
He reads it off my body.
He kisses me harder, and the rhythm doesn’t slow. It just gets heavier, every grind hitting the same place, my own cock trapped between the seam of his joggers and the solid press of his body.
‘Come on, Ewan.’ His mouth is against my mouth. The low Lancashire right on the surface now, no precision left anywhere. ‘Right here. In my kitchen. On this chair. Like this.’
‘Fuck.’
I come into my own fucking joggers like I have forgotten every adult thing I know.
A full, shaking, unthought-out orgasm that goes through me in one endless wave and doesn’t ask permission and folds me forward into his chest with both hands fisted in the back of his T-shirt and a sound out of me I will be carrying it with me for days.
He is half a second behind me. He stutters once, twice, and then presses in hard and goes still with a small, bitten-off noise against my hair, and I feel him come in his own trousers, against my body.
Nobody moves for a minute.
My face is still on his sternum. His hand is on the back of my head.
The chair has held, miraculously, and the kitchen is exactly where it was, and the fridge is still ticking in the same rhythm as before, and nothing in the room has changed except that we have both come in our own trousers like lads who couldn’t wait for a door to close.
‘Well,’ I manage, into his t-shirt. ‘That was dignified.’
He huffs. The closest thing to a laugh I have heard out of him.
He pushes his face into my hair for one second. Breathe out.
Then he gathers me, that is the verb, gathers, not hauls, not lifts, not drags, into his chest, my cheek on his collarbone, his palm flat on the back of my head, his other hand at the small of my back. The word isn’t cuddling. It’s holding as he needs me close to say what comes next.
‘Ewan.’
‘Mm.’
‘Nobody can know.’ The professional voice is back, but it is different, quieter now, resting against the top of my head, a thing being said into my hair instead of from the other side of a desk.
‘Absolutely nobody. They would fire me, Ewan. No hearing, no second chance. I am not saying it to frighten you. I am saying it because you need to hear it properly, with me holding you like this, so that later you can’t pretend you didn’t understand. ’
‘I know.’
‘I am serious about this.’
‘I know.’ I tilt my head up so my chin is on his sternum, looking up at him.
‘Our secret. Our whole secret. I don’t have anyone I’d tell anyway.
Not my best friend. Not my brother, not my mum, not a soul.
Nobody in this university gets to know what this is until you decide they get to.
I’ll call you Dr Haldrey in the corridor and not smile and not look at your mouth. I can do all of that.’
He moves his hand fractionally in my hair. The closest thing to a full exhale I have had out of him all morning.
‘I should have been stronger.’
‘You don’t believe that.’
‘I do.’
‘You believe you should have been. You don’t believe you could have been. Different equation.’
A crack, the ghost of a real smile. ‘You’re infuriating.’
‘So I’ve been told.’