Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Three missed calls, all from Ronan.
I should have noticed.
He picks up before the first ring finishes. Not a good sign.
‘Where were you?’ No hello. No preamble. Ron doesn’t do warm-ups.
‘Library.’ It assembles itself and exits. Impressive or clinical, one of the two.
Silence.
‘Third time this week I can’t reach you in the evening.’
‘I turn my phone off when I’m studying. You know this.’
‘Since when?’
Fair point. I’ve never turned my phone off in my life. The phone is an organ—it functions, or I’m dead.
‘Since the workload picked up.’
More silence. He was breathing through the line. A door closes somewhere behind him, his flat, maybe, or the stairwell of whatever building site he’s finishing late on.
‘Mum says you sound different.’
My hand tightens on the phone. ‘Different how?’
‘Distracted. On the phone. Like you’re somewhere else when she’s talking to you.’ A pause. Too long. ‘She worries. You know she does.’
‘I’m fine. Tell her I’m fine.’
‘I’m not your messenger service, Ewe. Ring her yourself.’
He’s right about that. I haven’t called Mum in nine days. The weekly call has become biweekly, and has become whenever I remember, which is rarely, because the hours between lectures and Laurence’s flat don’t leave much room for pretending.
‘Are you at the guy’s your seeing?’
‘No. Just busy with coursework.’
The lie is so smooth it scares me.
He doesn’t respond.
The gears. He leaves gaps and waits for people to fill them, except Ron’s worse than that. He’s family.
The gap stays empty.
‘Because if you were,’ he says. Slowly. Each word is placed like a brick. ‘You’d tell me. Right?’
How he says it. Lower than accusatory or suspicious.
‘Obviously.’
‘Because Manchester’s.’ He stops. Starts again. ‘You’re on your own up there, Ewe. And I know you think you’ve got it sorted but you’re eighteen and you’re—’
‘I’m what?’
‘You’re my brother.’ Quiet. The blunt edge of him is softer than I’ve heard in months. ‘And if anything were going on, I’d rather hear it from you than find out some other way.’
The guilt arrives like a slow leak—the kind you don’t notice till your shoes are wet.
‘Nothing’s going on. I promise.’
‘Right.’ The disbelief packed into the syllable. The right means I’m filing this. ‘Listen. I might come up in a couple of weeks. See the city. Check you’re eating actual food.’
‘You don’t need to do that.’
‘It’s not about need, Ewe. I want to see where my brother lives. That a crime?’
Laurence’s shower gel on my skin. Ron’s voice in my ear.
‘Fine. Let me know when.’
‘Will do. Get some sleep.’
He hangs up, and the screen goes dark.
I lie there and stare at the ceiling, and the guilt is not guilt. Something next to it.
Ron loves me. Ron asked questions I can’t answer.
Beside me, Laurence shifts. The mattress dips.
‘Everything alright?’
I laugh once. Wrong sounding.
‘Define alright.’
He pushes himself up onto one elbow, looking at me properly now. The marks from the pillow still across his chest, his glasses abandoned somewhere on the floor.
‘Ewan.’
That voice. Careful already.
And suddenly I can’t stand it.
I kiss him, a kiss that takes. My teeth on his lower lip, fingers fisting his shirt, shoving him back against the bed. He grabs my wrists not to stop me but to redirect. My body rejects the course correction.
He stops it. Flips me, pins my wrists.
He lets go, sits back. The distance between our bodies is sudden and cold.
‘Don’t lie to me. Don’t bring your shit here.’
‘Where the fuck am I supposed to bring it?’ The words rip out of me.
Louder than I meant. Louder than either of us expected.
‘This isn’t just MY shit, Laurence. My brother just called me.
Three times. Asking where I am every evening.
And I sat there and lied to his face because I CAN’T tell him I’m getting fucked by my lecturer four nights a week, can I? ’
His jaw muscle is working.
‘So don’t tell me not to bring my shit here. This is the only place it exists. You made sure of that.’
Silence. Long.
‘You think I don’t know that?’ His voice is compressed. Not calm; a held thing. ‘You think I don’t know what this is?’
‘Then stop acting like it’s just mine to carry.’
He doesn’t answer. Sits on the bed, and looks at the floor
I grab my shirt.
‘Ewan. Wait.’
The door, the hallway, the stairwell.
I walk. Don’t wait for the tram. Walk through Chorlton in the rain with a bite mark on my lip that’s bleeding slightly, and the taste of the fight and the water soaking through my jacket and me.
The anger goes first, quickly. Underneath: the cold of leaving the only warm place I’ve found.
The rain on my face. My feet are on the pavement. The tram stop appeared through the dark.
Somewhere in Chorlton, my hoodie is still on its hook.
I’ll want it back. That’s the worst part, not the fight. The certainty that I’ll come back for it.
Two days.
Forty-seven hours, if I’m being exact.
Forty-seven hours of no text, no call, no key turning in a lock. Forty-seven hours of the phone face down on the desk, and me not looking at it, and looking at it.
I last this long, then I go.
The tram to Chorlton, the stairwell. The door. My key in the lock. The click.
He’s in the hallway like he heard me coming.
We look at each other.
Sorry hangs between us. Or: the door slamming shouldn’t have happened. Or: my brother called, and I panicked, and I brought it here because there’s nowhere else, and you told me not to, and you were right, but also fuck you for being right, because where does that leave me?
None of it leaves my mouth.
He takes a step, I take a step. The distance collapses like a proof closing.
His mouth, my mouth. His hands in my hair and my back against the wall and the radiator pressing into my spine.
The next day, Tuesday. Six-something PM.
The building empties, doors. Footsteps. Then nothing, last lectures done. Staff trickling out, fluorescent lights on their dim setting. The maths department on the fourth floor is empty; nobody comes up here voluntarily, not even the mathematicians.
Room 4.12. Corner room, one window, a lectern that’s seen better decades. Laurence is packing his bag. Papers, laptop, the Thermos he carries everywhere, the leather satchel, too old for a thirty-one-year-old, exactly right for him.
I stand in the doorway.
He sees me, stops mid-zip.
Pulse.
‘Not here.’ Quiet. Final.
He doesn’t move.
That’s the thing. The mouth says not here, but the body doesn’t step back, doesn’t reach for the bag, doesn’t walk to the door. The body stays.
Inside. Door shut behind me.
‘Ewan. Don’t.’
I sit on the lecturer’s desk. His desk. Where he stands, where he teaches, I lean back—the boy where the man should be.
‘Come here.’
He comes. Because of course he does. The mouth lost this argument three minutes ago.
Minutes pass. Seconds. The sound of a door opening somewhere on the floor. We’re standing three feet apart. I was by the window, arms crossed, face neutral. He stood by the lectern, coat in hand, bag across his back.
‘The epsilon-delta proof,’ I say, fast. Low. ‘Ask me about it.’
His eyes flash. Understanding.
‘So the bound on the error term is tighter than you’d expect,’ he says, just as the door opens. Mid-sentence.
The cleaner. A man in a blue tabard with a mop and a trolley and an expression of mild surprise.
‘Thought this room was empty.’
‘Just finishing some preparation,’ Laurence says. His voice is perfect. His hands are shaking. ‘We’re just heading out.’
The cleaner nods, wheels the trolley in. Doesn’t look at us again.
The corridor, the stairwell, the ground floor.
Laurence stops at the fire exit. Turns to me. His face is the colour I imagine drowning victims go before they’re pulled out.
‘That’s it.’ The words are granite. ‘I mean it, Ewan.’
I look at the satchel strap twisted where he’s gripping it. At the vein in his neck.
‘Okay,’ I say.
This time, I want to believe him.
Almost.
The pub near campus has sticky tables, a fruit machine that plays the same six notes on rotation, and a draught Guinness that Femi insists is acceptable and I insist is an insult to Ireland and my grandad’s memory.
Femi and Allan are sitting opposite me. Holding hands on top of the table. Fingers laced, thumbs moving.
Allan laughs at his phone and shows it to Femi, and Femi laughs too. They lean into each other, temple to temple—the easiest gesture in the world.
I drink my pint, watch them. The fruit machine plays its six notes.
Femi nudges Allan. ‘Get us another round?’ Allan goes. Femi turns to me.
He waits. Femi’s silences are different from Ronan’s. Ron’s silences extract. Femi’s make room.
‘You could have this, you know.’
‘Have what?’
‘This.’ He nods towards where Allan’s at the bar. ‘Someone’s hand on the table. Going to the pub without checking the door first. Not lying to everyone you know.’
He says it without accusation. That’s the worst part. Just: this exists.
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘It is that simple. For most people.’
He’s right. And the rightness of it is unbearable.
What I’ve got isn’t architecture. It’s demolition dressed up as a floor plan.
‘I’m fine, Femi.’
The look that says I know you’re not. The most generous thing anyone offers me.
‘Okay,’ he says. He puts his hand on my arm. And squeezes. And doesn’t ask again.
Allan comes back with three pints. Sits down. He finds Femi’s hand immediately, like breathing. Their fingers interlace, and I feel something I can’t name. Not envy. Envy would be easier.
The pub, the fruit machine. The sticky table. Femi’s hand in Allan’s, visible, simple, unafraid.
I finish my pint. My hand is around the glass.
His ceiling. I know it better than my own.
The condom was knotted in the bin. Lube is still open on the nightstand. His palm, warm, heavy, against the bone. His breathing slowed against my back.
Good sex, proper good.
He fucked me into the mattress, and I came so hard my ears rang. So why am I staring at a ceiling crack and feeling like I’ve eaten a full meal, and I’m still hungry?
January in Manchester is personal. Damp that gets into the walls, into the sheets. Two weeks in Lewisham for Christmas, and the city’s been punishing me since I got back.
Two weeks of Ron watching me like a documentary. Two weeks of Mum not asking the questions she’s clearly running her tongue over. Two weeks of sleeping in my real bed and reaching for a body that wasn’t there and pretending I was reaching for my phone.
And Dad was in the armchair for most of it.
Arsenal on. Volume up two notches higher than anyone needs.
Alright, when I came through the door on the twenty-third.
Safe travels when I left on the sixth. In between: twice, to the back of my head.
Once about the boiler. Once about whether the 171 was still running.
The rest of the time, I’m a shape in the corner of his eye, he’s training himself not to turn towards.
Christmas dinner. He asks Ron to pass the salt across me.
Across, not round. Like I’m a serving dish.
Mum’s mouth tightens. She doesn’t say anything.
The words stay locked behind my teeth, too.
Ron puts the salt in his hand without looking at either of us.
Gravy keeps going round the table because gravy doesn’t care.
After the pudding, he goes back to the front room for the highlights.
Door clicks without slamming. Sean Carrick doesn’t slam doors.
He removes himself. That’s his move. That’s the move he’s been doing in my direction since I was thirteen, and the fish fingers and peas, and I’ve learned it like you learn weather.
Look at the sky, get a coat. Don’t take it personally. Take it personally.
And now: term, Laurence’s ceiling. Again.
He traces my hip bone with his thumb. Slow. Absent-minded.
Routine.
Three months ago: detonation. Now it’s. What? Background radiation?
He shifts, pulls me closer. His chest against my back, lips brushing my ear, his cock softening against my arse. He breathes against me, warmth through his ribs. It’s good. It’s warm. It’s exactly what anyone would want.
So why do I want to claw through it?
‘Don’t you ever want more? We can’t… like, date. And I liked the rope thing.’
Out before I’ve signed off on it. My mouth, freelancing again. He goes rigid, every muscle tensing at once, like someone’s passed a current through the mattress.
Shit.
‘More.’ Controlled.
‘Christ.’ I turn to face him. His expression shifts, eyes going too still. ‘More of this. Of us, more… variety.’
The panic recalibrates.
‘Variety.’
I reach for my phone on the nightstand. Unlock it. Find the page I bookmarked three days ago in Lewisham while Ron was in the kitchen and Mum was watching Pointless, and I was on a sex toy website with the screen brightness turned down like a Cold War operative.
I show him.
The page. Plugs, vibrators, blindfolds, and a set of restraints in matte black. Design that takes itself seriously. His eyes move across the screen. I track him the same way I watch him solving problems.
Embarrassment. There, the flush rising.
Curiosity. The eyes are narrowing, going back to the restraints.
Arousal. He twitches against my thigh, involuntarily, a body betraying intent. Telling.
‘I—’ He stops. Takes the phone from me. Scrolls. He pauses his thumb on a prostate vibrator with a curve that suggests the designer understood anatomy at an intimate level. ‘Where did you find this?’
‘The internet, Laurence. It’s not a speakeasy.’
He shifts, barely visible. He moves his thumb to the plug, silicone, tapered, designed with a specificity I respect. He stares at it longer than the others. The calculation unfolds, risk assessment, and desire.
‘We could try.’ Quiet. The Lancashire vowels drop when his spine does. ‘Nothing too…’
I take the phone back. ‘I’m not asking for a dungeon. Just. Different.’
The plug I bought at seventeen from a shop on Lewisham High Road has its own story.
The bloke behind the counter didn’t even look up from his phone, and I used it alone in my room, figuring out what my body did when nobody was watching.
That’s a different vulnerability, and my quota’s reached for the night.
Squeezes my hip. Body a beat ahead of his words, as always.
‘Show me,’ he says. His eyes on mine, not looking away. The glasses off, he always takes them off for sex, ‘Show me what you like.’
No. Don’t name it.
I kiss him. Slow. Months ago, this would have been impossible; urgency ate everything. His hand in my hair. Mine on his chest.
I stop looking at the ceiling.