Chapter 17 #2
Every movement tears another sound out of him. His head thrown back against the headboard, throat exposed, breath shattered completely. His hands move helplessly over my body like he can’t decide whether to hold me closer or push me away from the intensity of it.
‘Ewan.’
Not Carrick. Never Carrick here.
His voice breaks completely on my name.
Then I hit that angle again and Laurence comes apart.
Not gradual. Not controlled.
Explosive.
His whole body freezes beneath mine with a sharp, wrecked cry, hands digging painfully into my hips as the orgasm tears through him all at once. The plug keeps pressing inside him through the aftershocks, making every wave hit harder than the last.
‘Jesus Christ—Ewan—’
The words collapse into my name.
I come seconds later with my forehead against his shoulder, pleasure hitting hard enough to blank my thoughts clean while Laurence keeps shaking underneath me, breath broken into helpless fragments against my throat.
After: we lie there, his breathing ragged. Mine worse. His hand on the back of my neck. The plug is still inside him. We don’t move.
He falls asleep with me pressed against his chest. Just like that. Mid-breath. He’s run out of things to brace against.
I lie still until his breathing evens out. Then I extract myself, slowly, the art of leaving a sleeping body without waking it. Bathroom.
Look at my reflection, flushed, wrecked, the stubble rash spreading like a map of everywhere he’s kissed.
The cabinet. I open it for the mouthwash—second shelf.
I go back to the bedroom. Laurence hasn’t moved. His breathing is slow and deep. The man who held me. The man with photos under towels.
I get into bed, pull the duvet up. He finds me with his arm, automatic, unconscious. Heavy and warm and certain.
I close my eyes, and he tightens his arm.
Morning. The flat is grey through the curtains, and I’m awake before he is, and my body knows where it is and whose.
He’s behind me. Plug still in him. I can feel it through the small of his back where his hip presses against mine, the slight unyielding shape of it shifting whenever he breathes. His cock is half hard against my arse. Sleep architecture. No instruction from the upstairs.
He shifts. The shift presses him into me with a small, unconscious intention that the conscious part of him is going to be embarrassed about in about ninety seconds.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbles, into my shoulder. Not very sorry.
‘Don’t be.’
I roll over. Bedside table. The lube is still where I put it last night. He watches me through half-shut eyes, glasses a million miles away, hair a disaster, and the look on his face is one I’ve never seen on him before nine in the morning.
‘Take it out,’ he says.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
I do. Slow. The base, the curve, the give. His breath catches the way it caught last night. I drop the plug on the towel and reach for the lube, and he’s already turning, opening his thighs, watching me the way you watch someone hand you the next thing you wanted before you’d said it.
My fingers, two, then three, slick. His body, already open, almost no resistance. He makes a sound into the pillow that isn’t Lancashire and isn’t English and isn’t anything I can identify, just want, low.
Condom. Fast. The cap of the lube again because there’s no quiet way to do this and there shouldn’t be.
I push in.
It’s easy. Easier than anything has any right to be. The long slow give of a body that’s been opened all night and is asking for the next thing. He exhales like he’s been holding the breath for a year and the year ended forty seconds ago.
‘Christ.’ Lancashire, finally, the syllable I was waiting for.
I move. Slow at first, then not slow. He’s already gone, the way the body goes when it’s had no time between one thing and the next, when there’s no boundary between the man who fell asleep inside you and the man who’s inside you now, just one continuous warm thing the body has agreed to.
He comes against the sheet without a hand on him. I come into him a few strokes later, quiet, my forehead at the back of his neck.
After. He turns onto his back. Looks at me sideways. The half-smile.
‘I’d write you a thank-you note,’ he says. ‘But I think we’re past the formal stages.’
‘Coffee will do.’
He goes to make one. Doesn’t bother with trousers. Kettle, kitchen, November light. I lie in the bed and listen and decide that this man is mine in a way I haven’t worked out the maths for yet.
The next day. Campus. The concourse between the maths building and the library. Students everywhere, scarves and coffees, the organised chaos of a January that’s decided to rain sideways.
Femi falls into step beside me. Doesn’t say hello. Doesn’t smile. His expression is the one I’ve only seen once before—the night he told me about the lecturer, and I laughed it off, and he looked at me like I’d failed a test he’d set on purpose.
‘You were out yesterday.’
Cold, immediate. A blade, no handle.
‘Library,’ I start, and the word tastes like ash because I’ve used it too many times and it’s worn through.
‘You weren’t anywhere near the library.’ He doesn’t slow down. Eyes fixed ahead. ‘I was on the Chorlton tram. You came out of Beech Road. At ten at night, with your hood up. Like you’d prefer not to be seen.’
My blood—no, lower. Gut. The drop you feel in a lift, except the lift hasn’t moved.
‘Femi. Don’t.’
‘The mystery guy… it’s him, isn’t it?’ Now he stops. Turns. His eyes on mine, sad and certain. ‘Haldrey.’
The name spoken by him is a different thing from the name in my head. For me it’s heat, hands, how the vowels sound when they’re coming apart. In Femi’s, it’s a faculty listing: a power imbalance, a safeguarding issue.
‘I’m not going to tell anyone.’ He says it first before I can beg. ‘But this is dangerous, Ewan. For both of you. You know that.’
I know it like the edge of a cliff, you’re still running towards.
‘He’s not, it’s not what you think.’
‘What do I think?’
Silence is an answer enough. Because what Femi thinks and what’s happening might be closer than I want to admit, and the gap between it’s not like that and it’s exactly like that is the width of a photo in a bathroom cabinet.
The worst part: he’s not angry. Anger, I could fight.
‘Please,’ he says.
He walks away into the crowd. The rain. The campus that contains all the evidence and all the risk and all the reasons this was always going to collapse.