Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Outside the window: Manchester at eleven on a Saturday. Takeaway queues, smokers on pavements, a couple walking hand in hand towards the Northern Quarter. Two blokes, nobody looking at them. Nobody is calculating, just walking.
I think about Femi’s hand in Allan’s. How it just existed. On the table, under the table, in the car park, when we said goodbye. Continuous. Uninterrupted.
I think about the belt loop and the beat he held before letting go, about the flat in Chorlton where my name isn’t on anything.
The tram stops, and I get off. The walk to the halls is ten minutes, and I pull my jacket tighter, and the key shifts against my thigh.
Femi holds Allan’s hand. In the daylight, in front of everyone.
I hold a key in the dark. Press it into my leg through the pocket until the teeth leave marks. The brass warming against my skin. The marks it leaves: proof that I was here, proof that he wanted me, proof that exists only in the dark where nobody’s allowed to look.
Nobody’s looking. And that’s the whole of it.
Three weeks.
Twenty-one days of the office door staying open, of that focus passing over me in the corridor like I’m furniture.
I know because I’ve been counting. The pen that stops mid-sentence when I walk past his door. How he angles his body towards the window when I’m in the room, as if the car park is suddenly fascinating.
Tuesday. Two forty-five. Half the department is in a seminar downstairs. I checked the timetable on the noticeboard. Casually. The way one casually memorises a building’s schedule for no reason.
The book I’m holding is real. Grimmett and Stirzaker, Probability and Random Processes. I borrowed it from the library three weeks ago when I still thought I’d use it as a prop only once. Turns out props have a longer run than expected.
His door is open. He’s marking—red pen, papers fanned across the desk, glasses on, the posture of a man using admin as a wall. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow. One fold. Two.
My feet stop before I tell them to.
Light from the window catches the line of his forearm.
Move. Walk in, be normal.
‘Dr Haldrey.’ I hold up the book. ‘You recommended it week three.’
He looks up, and the pen stops. He parses the words before speaking, before his expression does the thing, the fractional widening.
‘The convergence section was good.’ I’m already inside. My hip against the doorframe. ‘Chapter seven. The way he handles the contradiction proofs.’
‘Ewan.’
I step in and close the door.
The click.
The pen hits the desk. Not placed, dropped.
He’s out of the chair. Two steps. His fist in my shirt, the fabric bunching, and he kisses me before I can finish. His tongue and his grip and his body pressing me into the bookshelf.
He bites.
A knock.
We freeze.
Warmth still hovers inches from my cock. My hand is on his cheek. The desk is at a different angle than it was five minutes ago, and his glasses are halfway down his nose, and the knock comes again, sharper, and we move faster than I knew either of us could.
He back to his desk. Sitting, glasses straightened, pen ready. I’m zipped, buckled, shirt tucked, leaning against the bookshelf with Grimmett and Stirzaker in my grip like a student asking a question about chapter seven.
Two seconds, maybe three. We’re good. We’re professionals.
He opens the door.
The colleague. Her. She’s holding a folder—the expression of someone formulating theories about why she had to knock twice.
‘Department meeting in ten.’ She looks past him. Sees me. Her eyes do a calculation, and I read it.
‘I’ll be right there.’ His voice is perfect. Steady, even, every bolt tightened.
She nods. Her eyes return to me. Observant, not hostile, not suspicious. Filing.
She leaves. Her heels on the corridor floor, receding.
He closes the door and leans against it. Shuts them.
‘We can’t do this here.’
The laugh comes out before I can catch it. Nervous, stupid.
He doesn’t laugh. His face is the colour of the corridor walls.
‘That woman,’ I say. ‘She looked at me.’
‘She looks at everyone. It’s her default setting.’
But his hands are in his pockets. Knuckles press through the fabric.
03:14. Red numbers on the phone on the carpet next to the bed, and I’ve been watching them for an hour, two, maybe more. The dark has the texture it only has between three and four in the morning, the hour not belonging to yesterday or tomorrow.
I can’t sleep.
This isn’t a thing that happens to me. I’m the person who falls asleep on buses, in bathtubs, in philosophy lectures I didn’t mean to enrol in.
Ron used to come into my room at six in the morning and say Oi, clever one, wake up, your toast is burning, and I’d have slept through the smoke alarm.
Sleep and I have an arrangement. Tonight my pulse is behind my eyes and in the tips of my fingers—the carpet pattern of his office floor, the colleague’s heels receding down the corridor, the noise I made that I cannot unremember.
I turn over, dark above me, room guessed from memory, then turn back. The phone is in my grip before I’ve decided: you awake—no question mark. Send.
03:16. The three dots start, stop, start again.
No.
Typed and sent in under ninety seconds at quarter past three in the morning—still awake. A pause. Then the three dots again.
Why.
Not are you okay, not what’s wrong, just why—the one-word question he uses when he wants you to do the work yourself.
can’t sleep, I type.
Delete.
my head is loud, I type.
Delete.
I am eighteen, and this is mortifying. I sit up against the headboard, pull my duvet over my knees, and press the call button before I can think about it for one more second.
It rings once.
‘Hello.’
‘Hi.’ My own voice is strange in the dark room, too loud, so I drop it.
Neither of us knows why we picked up.
‘Did I wake you,’ I say, for something to say.
‘You didn’t wake me.’
More silence. His breathing reaches across the line. Carpeted room, low ceiling, a bedroom, I know. Left side of the bed. On his back. Phone to the right ear, which is wrong for a left-handed man. His left hand is doing something. Somewhere.
‘Are you alright,’ he says eventually.
‘Yeah.’
‘Ewan.’
‘Never had this before. I’m the world’s best sleeper—trains, libraries, everything. Tonight my head won’t shut up.’
‘Is it this afternoon.’
The office, the colleague, all of it.
‘I don’t know,’ I say again, which is a lie, and he knows it’s a lie, but he doesn’t call it.
‘Tell me what your room looks like.’
It disarms me. I’m expecting you should try to sleep, or we can’t do this over the phone, the professional reset I’ve been half-hoping for and half-dreading, and instead he asks like a man asking for proof I’m somewhere real.
‘Small.’ I look around for him. ‘There’s a stain on the ceiling shaped like Italy.
Carpet on the floor the colour of a wound healing wrong.
A desk under the window with a mug I haven’t washed.
A poster the last tenant left up. Some band I’ve never heard of.
The blind is broken on one side so the streetlamp comes in diagonal. ’
A small exhale on his end. Almost a laugh, not quite.
‘Describe the stain.’
‘Italy, I said.’
‘Yes, but what shape of Italy. A healthy Italy, a sick Italy. A holiday Italy.’
I blink at the ceiling.
‘It’s a brown Italy. The boot’s there but the heel’s weird.’
‘Mm.’
‘What’s your ceiling.’
‘White.’ A beat. ‘That’s a terrible ceiling.’
‘Yes.’
I slide down the headboard until I’m flat on my back, phone against my ear on the pillow, his voice very close now—not performed-close, actual-close. The hair on my neck rises.
‘Laurence.’
I say it into the phone, and the dark takes it. Second time out loud, getting easier, not easy.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t want you to say anything sensible.’
‘Alright.’
‘I want you to talk about something that isn’t me and isn’t us and isn’t anything that happened today.’
A pause. Then, in the same low voice with the same Lancashire underneath it:
‘I’m reading a book about the Loire valley.
A travel guide from 1987. The photos are appalling.
The author is desperately in love with his own adjectives.
In chapter four he describes a chateau as “a confection of masonry suspended between terrestrial and dreaming” and I had to put the book down and have a glass of water.
Chapter five is about a goat cheese. He can’t decide whether it is assertive or philosophical. ’
My chest cracks. Tenderness. Just the fact of him, making himself ridiculous for me.
‘Keep going.’
‘There is an eight-page digression on a particular gate in a village called something impossible to pronounce. I cannot say it in my head without embarrassing myself. He knew the locksmith’s father. In the village. The locksmith’s father made the hinges. The hinges are described as patient.’
I laugh into the pillow. My eyes are suddenly hot.
‘The locksmith’s father’s hinges,’ I say.
‘Patient hinges.’
Quiet for a beat. His breathing against the line, steady. Mine has been slower than it has been in hours.
‘Tell me where you grew up,’ I say into the pillow. ‘Not the whole of it. A street. A bus number.’
Another pause. On his end, he moves, a soft rustle of duvet against something. When he speaks, the voice is lower still.
‘The bus was the 40. Morecambe to Lancaster. I used to sit upstairs at the front and watch the coast come in and out of the mist. On a clear day from the left-hand side of the upper deck you could see the Lakes across the bay.’
‘What was the street.’
‘Clarendon Road. The front door was red. My mother repainted it every third year, a shade she maintained was Farrow and Ball but I have reason to doubt. There was a rowan tree in the front garden that predated the house. I once ate the berries. They are not edible raw.’
He’s talking to a phone at twenty past three in the morning and handing me a door his mother painted, and a tree he poisoned himself with when he was small, and my ribs do the thing ribs do when a man gives you a sentence he was never going to give anyone else tonight.
‘Did you get ill.’
‘I was green for a day. My mother gave me cream crackers and called me an idiot with such affection I have never forgotten it.’
Mother, not mum. A knight’s move. I log it in the drawer I am not keeping.
‘Go to sleep, Ewan.’
‘In a moment.’
‘Now.’
‘You first.’
‘Deal.’
The line stays open while my breathing slows to something my body recognises, and his does too, and somewhere around 03:52, my thumb loses its grip on the phone, and it slides sideways on the pillow, and my last thought is patient hinges, and I’m gone.
I wake at seven with the phone dead against my cheek. The call log says Laurence—1 h 24m. The line just stayed open. He must have dropped off first. Or he waited.
Both options sit there. My reading of them is wrong.
I plug the phone in. Lie back down, stare up.
The first time I say it, we’re on his bed, and he’s inside me with my face in the pillow, and it comes out without consultation from any part of me that plans things.
‘Harder, Dr Haldrey.’
He stops completely. His hips flat against my arse, his hands on my waist, his cock buried to the root, and everything still because I’ve just used his title in bed and neither of us knew that was coming.
Then he tightens his grip, pulls his hips back, and the thrust that follows rearranges my understanding of his self-control.
He fucks me harder, I say it again, and again, and each time the academic cracks wider and the sound he makes gets a little less human, and I’m grinning into the pillow because I’ve found the cheat code to the most complex system I’ve ever encountered.
I come first, he follows, as usual, the distance between us narrowing every time.
Afterwards, in the shower, his hands are on my back, soapy and slow, the water too hot, thumbs tracing the muscle running along my spine. I lean into the tile and close my eyes and surrender to this part—the part I have no instructions for.
The fucking I understand—the urgency, the mechanics, the competition of two bodies figuring out who wants it more.
But the shower, his thumbs, the way he washes my hair without being asked, fingers in my scalp, my head tipping back against his neck, soap running down between us—nobody rushing, nobody performing.
Another person has never washed me, never had just his lips resting on the bone where the muscle starts.
I turn around and kiss him because kissing is a thing I’m good at, and standing still under someone’s hands is not, the pivot happening so fast he doesn’t notice. Or he notices and lets me.