Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The phone rings at half eight on a Friday. Bad, because Ronan doesn’t ring on Fridays. Sunday is the routine. He confirms I’m alive. I confirm I’m fine. Mutual fiction. Friday means the pattern’s broken.
‘Which library, exactly?’
No hello, no warm-up. Ron’s voice was flat and guarded.
‘What?’
‘The library. The one you’re always at. Because I checked online, your university account, the one Mum set up, and your library card shows three visits this entire term.’
Three. Out of what I’ve claimed to be, conservatively, forty. My stomach drops through the mattress.
‘You checked my library account?’
‘You gave me the login. Christmas. When you couldn’t remember your student number.’ His voice doesn’t waver. ‘Three visits, Ewan. You told me last week you were at the library every evening.’
‘I study in other places. Coffee shops. Different places.’
‘Don’t.’
Silence. His breathing on the line. Mine held.
‘Stop checking on me. I’m eighteen, not a child.’
‘Then stop lying to me.’
The calm is the worst part. If he shouted, I could shout back. But Ron’s calm is a wall I’ve never found a way around.
‘You know… I’m seeing someone.’ Out before I’ve decided to say it. Teeth clenched on the rest. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Who? Since you’re lying for them.’
‘Someone.’
‘Why the secrecy? You’ve never hidden anything from me, Ewan.’ A pause. ‘You don’t hide. You’ve never hidden. So whatever this is—’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘It’s the hiding that’s scaring me.’
He’s right. I’ve never been ashamed of who I fuck.
‘I’m coming up. Two weeks.’
‘Ron.’
‘Not negotiable.’
Ronan doesn’t hang up. He just stops talking. That silence sits in my ear.
I lie back. Ceiling. Still trying to be somewhere else.
Two weeks.
My phone screen glows with seven unread messages from Laurence. The newest: Thinking about you.
I lock it, roll over. Press my face into the pillow, and I can’t breathe. Panic and want, simultaneously, the same broken-down body. And the clock is ticking.
Two weeks.
The message arrives during Henderson’s lecture on econometrics. Henderson, who could make a bank heist sound like planning permission.
My phone buzzes face-down on the fold-out desk.
B17. 3 pm.
I stare at it.
Laurence doesn’t text during working hours. Laurence barely texts full stop. Has rules.
Quarter past two. Forty-five minutes.
Henderson drones on about variance estimators while my cock reads the message before the rest of me does and forms its own plan.
I lean towards Femi.
‘I’ve got a headache. Might head out early.’
His eyes lift to mine. That look again. The one that’s been there since last week, since the Chorlton tram and the hood on Beech Road.
He doesn’t say anything.
Just turns back to his notes.
I gather my stuff and leave.
Mid-afternoon dead zone. Humanities corridor nearly empty. My trainers quick and soft.
B17 sits at the far end of the old wing, technically a seminar room, practically abandoned. The lights out here flicker half a second before fully committing. Nobody schedules tutorials this far down unless they’ve lost a departmental argument.
I knock twice.
The door opens instantly.
Laurence grabs my wrist, pulls me inside, and the lock clicks before I’ve even fully crossed the threshold. Then his mouth is on mine.
No preamble. No careful checking. Just three weeks of restraint collapsing all at once.
His hands everywhere at once—my face, my hair, down my back hard enough to bruise. The kiss wrecked from the beginning. Hungry in a way I’ve never felt from him before.
‘I couldn’t—’ he starts.
Doesn’t finish.
Good.
Don’t finish. Don’t think.
I grab his belt.
Practised now: buckle, button, zip. Four seconds. My personal best was three, but his cock’s already straining against the fabric and the extra second is because I want to feel the heat of him through the cloth before I free him.
There.
Hard and thick and leaking into my hand.
I’m on my knees before either of us has consciously decided on it.
The carpet is rough against my shins. Dusty institutional carpet that probably predates my birth. His cock in my mouth and the sound he makes—this bitten-off groan he tries to swallow and can’t—is worth every lie I’ve told to get here.
I take him deep.
My jaw aches almost immediately, and there’s no asking it to stop.
The taste of him: skin, salt, soap from this morning, the sharp slickness of pre-come when I drag my tongue beneath him where the vein runs thickest.
His hand in my hair.
Holding.
Not forcing. Just holding with this disbelieving tightness like he still cannot quite process the sight of someone on their knees for him in a university building at three in the afternoon.
A door slams somewhere down the corridor.
We freeze instantly.
His cock still warm between my lips. My fingers against his thigh. Neither of us breathing.
Footsteps.
Closer.
Past the room.
Keep going.
Silence again.
I look up.
He looks destroyed already. Glasses crooked. Lips bitten dark red. Pupils blown wide enough to erase most of the grey.
Christ.
For this—for twenty stolen minutes in a dead seminar room—he gets to stop being Dr Haldrey and become only a body.
I pull off him slowly and stand.
Turn around.
Hands flat against the door.
‘Fuck me.’
Behind me, his breathing goes ragged.
I can practically hear the fight happening inside him: risk calculation against want. Professional ruin against the fact that he’s already reaching for the lube.
‘Quick,’ he says hoarsely, more to himself than me.
Two fingers.
The stretch familiar now, my body opening around him easily despite the angle. Standing bent against a seminar-room door is objectively terrible posture for this, but wanting has obliterated practicality.
Then he pushes in.
My forehead drops hard against the wood.
Fuck.
The fullness hits wrong first, then adjusts, then lands devastatingly right, and the sound that tears out of me absolutely carries through the walls.
Fast.
Hard.
Urgent enough to feel dangerous.
I grip the door handle for leverage while he fucks into me with the kind of control that only barely counts as control anymore.
Locked university room. Tuesday afternoon. My lecturer inside me.
The rational response would be to stop.
I physically cannot.
Laurence’s mouth finds my ear.
‘Ewan.’
Just my name.
The Lancashire stripped completely bare of professionalism.
I come untouched against the door with a sound I don’t recognise as mine. The orgasm rips through me violently enough to blur the room at the edges, and behind me Laurence loses rhythm completely.
His thrusts stutter.
Then he buries himself deep and holds there with a rough broken sound against my shoulder, his whole body shaking.
Silence.
Our breathing.
The faint electrical hum of the dying projector in the corner.
He pulls out carefully. Steps back.
The soft clink of his belt.
The terrible sound of professionalism being reconstructed piece by piece.
I turn around.
He’s leaning back against the seminar table now, one hand braced behind him like standing upright requires concentration.
‘We’re out of control,’ he says quietly.
‘I know.’
‘This can’t happen here again. We said—’
‘I know.’
I tuck myself back together mechanically. Zip. Belt. My legs still shaking.
The glasses go back on. Tie straightened. Every visible part of Dr Haldrey restored to factory settings except for the flush still spread high across his throat.
‘You should go first,’ he says. ‘I’ll wait five minutes.’
Five minutes.
His grip still aches around my hips. The come cooling against the inside of my jeans is going to be a problem in approximately thirty seconds.
‘Laurence.’
‘Go.’
Quiet rather than cold.
I know that voice. Heard it after every line we’ve crossed so far, and we are rapidly running out of lines.
I leave.
The corridor feels too bright. My phone heavy in my pocket.
Ron’s messages sitting there unanswered.
I care.
That’s the unbearable part.
I care so much it’s making me stupid—him, warm and shaking against my back, or my brother closing in from two hundred miles away.
Both of them asking for something I don’t know how to survive giving.
Outside. The air hits different after you’ve been fucked. Colder, sharper, the campus is enormous around me. Students crossing the quad with coffee and purpose.
My legs haven’t stopped shaking. It could pass for the cold.
In two weeks, Ron will be here. He’ll walk these corridors with that investigative look he gets.
The one that maps exits and catalogues inconsistencies.
He’ll sit in a pub and ask questions I’ve used up all my answers for.
He’ll know. Ronan reads people like I read proofs, structurally, ruthlessly, searching for the contradiction that brings the whole thing down.
And there is one. There’s always been one. The relationship between student and lecturer contains an axiom that invalidates every theorem we build on top of it. We fuck against doors anyway.
The tram, the seat, the window. Manchester is sliding past in its usual grey. My phone buzzes once, Laurence: Get home safe, and then, underneath, ten minutes later: Ron: Two weeks. Booked the train.
Two fronts, two men. Every day, the gap between this and catastrophe gets thinner.
Piccadilly Station on a Friday evening is a machine designed to process misery. Commuters and students and the lost, all funnelled through barriers and concourses, the overhead boards clicking through delays like a bored croupier dealing bad hands.
Ronan comes through the barrier. This isn’t a social visit. The jacket’s wrong. The one he wears to work. Rucksack strapped on, no smile.
‘Alright?’ I say.
He takes inventory: the weight loss, probably. The eyeliner, which he’s never minded but notes now. The whole of me, recalibrated.
‘You look thin.’
‘Cheers. Lovely to see you too.’
We walk. Tram to Fallowfield, my halls, my room, thin walls, the blind still broken on one side, the radiator clanking like it’s got an opinion.