Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ileave things.
A charger, first, plugged in behind his bedside table, wound neatly, like it fell out of my bag—and the next time I’m at his place it’s still there, still plugged in, socket switched on.
A hoodie draped over the arm of the sofa as if I forgot. I didn’t. The grey one, too big, smelling like my laundry, destined to smell like his flat.
A book—Hatcher’s Algebraic Topology, not for any course, just brilliant and something I want him to see on his shelf next to his books. Know I was here.
A bookmark. A bakery receipt from a shop in Withington I’ve never been to, tucked into page 112 of the book he keeps on his bedside table, marking a line I read over his shoulder and wanted him to come back to. I don’t tell him. He’ll find it or he won’t.
He doesn’t remove them, doesn’t move them.
The charger stays, the hoodie migrates from sofa to the hook by the door—not hidden, not folded, just hung with a place found for it—and my book appears on his shelf, slotted between Munkres and May, alphabetically wrong but thematically right.
I stare at it for thirty seconds before realising I’m staring and turning away.
And then, one Tuesday evening, I’m on the tram back to halls with my hand in my bag feeling for a pen, and my fingers close on an object I did not put there.
I take it out—a pencil. HB, wooden, sharpened recently to the point a mathematician sharpens.
Along the shaft, in faded white, a Cambridge crest and a college name I can’t read without sitting up straighter.
A pencil that has lived on a shelf or in a drawer for a decade, minimum, and has now transferred, unremarked, into the rucksack of an eighteen-year-old who lets himself into a Chorlton kitchen on weekday mornings.
I sit with it in my palm for three tram stops.
He didn’t say. He won’t. The only window he had was when I left the bag by the table while I was in the shower.
I put the pencil in the pocket where the key lives—brass and graphite, together in denim against my thigh.
I find a bruise on my hip shaped like his thumb, study it in the bathroom mirror, purple with yellowing edges, and when I press it, the ache connects directly to everything.
On campus, we’re strangers who share a building.
I wear crew necks, he keeps his collar buttoned, and in lectures I sit in the last row eyes forward while he talks in that careful voice, the performance requiring more energy than either of us has left after what we do with the evenings.
Tuesday morning in the corridor, we pass each other, his eyes forward, mine forward, and between us the echo of what those hands were doing at midnight. A first-year walks between us, asking about an extension deadline, completely unaware she’s standing between us.
‘Of course,’ he says, professional and perfect. ‘Email me the details.’
The girl leaves, neither of us looks back, and the bite mark under my collar pulses with my heartbeat.
On Wednesday, he’s got a conference call that runs past eleven. I’m in my room staring at a problem set that should be done by now, reading the same line about Lagrange multipliers for the seventh time—every time my brain hits the word constraint, it translates it into his hand on my—
I throw the pen across the room. It hits the wall and the bloke next door thumps back because it’s wanking o’clock and he doesn’t appreciate the interruption.
Friday lecture, he’s at the board, I’m in the last row, and we haven’t touched in thirty-six hours. His voice does the thing where it drops half a register when he turns away from the room, and I swear to God if he rolls his sleeves up, I will cause a scene.
He rolls his sleeves up.
My fingernails bite crescents into my palms, and the notebook in my lap earns its keep.
He stumbles on a proof, recovers, but the pause is there—the beat where his gaze fixes on my row and he loses his place. Nobody notices except for me.
I haven’t gone out in a long while, and Femi forces me to.
Saturday night, a bloke from a house party in Fallowfield: twenty, chemistry, a flat in Rusholme with a mattress on the floor and a Bob Marley poster doing heavy lifting for his personality.
Fit enough, willing, and knows the choreography.
We get as far as his lips against the corner of my mouth before I check out completely. He reaches for my belt, and I let him. His fingers are quick and practised, his right hand wrapping around my cock, and the technique is fine. Good, even.
But it’s the wrong hand.
The wrong grip. The wrong pressure on the upstroke.
I’m lying on a mattress thinking about how Laurence does this with his left, slower, his thumb doing that circle at the base.
I’m soft. Getting softer.
The lad looks up, confused.
‘You alright, mate?’
His voice is higher than I’d clocked at the party. Twenty-year-old earnest. He is trying.
‘Yeah.’ I sit up, back against a wall that smells of cigarettes absorbed over months. ‘Yeah, mate, sorry.’
‘Is it me?’
No, it is profoundly not him.
It’s the knowledge I have, which has not asked my permission to be mine, that the grip I want is left-handed and slower and belongs to a thirty-one-year-old across the city.
It’s that my body has signed a contract without consulting me on the terms.
I make an excuse and leave. The tram back from Rusholme takes eleven minutes, and I spend all eleven thinking about Laurence’s hands, hating myself for the comparison, hating myself more that it isn’t even close.
The category of strangers in rooms and bathrooms has closed.
I didn’t vote. It’s closed the way a shop closes when it has nothing left on the shelves.
Someone’s turned the light off, flipped the sign, and the boy who lived off that shop’s stock is in the street in the rain with coins in his pocket and nowhere useful to spend them.
Sunday, I let myself into his flat at seven, and he’s in the kitchen, and I’m on him before the key’s out of the lock, and when he says ‘I missed you’ and stops himself, the words hang there, unfinished.
We both know what it was.
The problem set is week eight’s—applied analysis, convergence proofs, epsilon-delta arguments. Laurence distributes it on Tuesday, and I finish it on the tram, done before my stop. I hand it in on Wednesday with the others and don’t think about it.
Thursday, his flat, afterwards, on his sheets under his ceiling with sweat cooling on my ribs and his hand resting on my stomach in that way I still haven’t learned to hold still for.
‘That solution you turned in.’
I turn my head. He’s on his back, eyes on the ceiling, but his voice has shifted register—something closer to the lecture theatre.
‘The epsilon-delta argument in question three. You didn’t use the standard approach.’
‘The standard approach is longer.’
‘The standard approach is what I taught.’
‘Yours works. Mine’s faster.’
He turns his head, eyes doing the thing they do when reading a proof that surprises him—recognition before impressed.
‘Where did you learn to think like that?’
I shrug, the sheets shift. ‘Nowhere. It’s just how it works.’
‘It’s not how it works for most people.’ The hand on my stomach doesn’t move, but the pressure shifts. Heavier. Like he’s holding me in place for what comes next. ‘You could do extraordinary things with that mind, Ewan. You know that?’
The register is teacher, not lover, and I have nowhere to put the words.
Nobody’s said this to me. No teacher, no Ronan, no Mum, no admissions tutor who processed my clearing application like it was a parking ticket.
Deflect. Make a joke.
‘Cheers.’ It comes out flat—just cheers.
He watches me. The look lasts too long and contains too much. He sees it, the gap widening.
I kiss him. Because kissing stops conversations, and this is a conversation I’m not having.
He slides from my stomach to my hip—the grip, familiar now.
But that look, when I pull back. The thing behind the want. The acknowledgement that says I know what you just did.
He knows.
He lets me do it anyway.
My body against his, the heat rebuilding. His mouth on mine and the taste of coffee and the convergence of two things that shouldn’t exist in the same place.
His hand, my hip. The bruise he made last week is still tender.
He presses into it. Holds.
Later. Much later. The flat is doing the almost-silent thing again. Laurence is in the shower. Water hits the tile through two doors and a corridor. He hums, barely, no tune. The ghost of music, formless.
I get out of bed. Pull on his t-shirt, the soft navy one with the collar stretched by my own hands, and pad barefoot into the living room because I am nosy, because I am eighteen, because the call at three in the morning two weeks ago left a word in my head that I’ve been carrying around like a coin in a pocket. I want the book it came out of.
A travel guide from 1987. Patient hinges—a confection of masonry.
The bookshelves.
I’ve looked at these shelves before. First morning after the hallway, in my boxers, trying to read him by spines. Pure on top, applied below, the novels are out of place like escapees. Evidence of a mind split between logic and beauty. Physics. Philosophy. A shelf of dead men’s words.
I didn’t look at the bottom shelf.
The bottom shelf is travel books.
This is a small surprise. Laurence strikes me as the type to stay in conference hotels alone and read about other people’s loneliness.
And yet, a whole shelf. Neatly aligned. The spines are older than the maths, faded cloth, the cracked gold of titles from the eighties and nineties, the palette of a secondhand bookshop in a town whose name ends in -by-the-sea.
I crouch. Tilt my head to read the spines.
Spain on Foot. The Naked Hebrides. A Year in the Ardèche. Walking the Alpujarras, the Dordogne Road. A set of yellow Michelin guides with the spines broken at particular pages. A slim dark-green hardback with the title in silver: The Chateaux of the Loire: a Traveller’s Companion.
I pull it out.