Chapter 18 #2
I’ve texted Laurence: Brother visiting: three days, no contact.
I’m sorry. The reply came in twelve seconds: Understood.
Be careful. Then, two hours later: I’ll miss you.
I read it four times and then locked the screen and put the phone face down on the mattress because the wanting had become unbearable.
Three days. No messages, no calls, no phantom vibrations. The phone in my pocket is like a severed limb still twitching. Every time I didn’t check it, the not-checking was louder than any notification.
I’ve never gone three days without hearing his voice. The absence since the first time has a texture. Dense. Uncomfortable.
Pathetic. Three days, people survive wars.
Friday night: takeaway in my room, Ron on the floor because there’s no chair, both of us eating chicken and pretending this is normal. He asks about modules. I tell him about Henderson’s econometrics. I don’t tell him Henderson’s lecture is the one I walked out of to get fucked against a door.
Saturday morning. The campus tour, my idea, preemptive, the performance of a student with nothing to hide. Here’s the maths building. Here’s the library I definitely use. Here’s the student union, where people drink and live straightforward lives in which nobody’s shagging their lecturer.
I’m good at this—the act. Ron walks beside me and asks questions, and I answer them with the right mix of boredom and detail—enough to seem genuine.
We pass Room 4.12 heading to the café. The door’s closed. My skin reacts, no, keep walking. Keep talking about module choices and library hours, and the load-bearing walls I’ve replaced with paper.
But Ronan doesn’t look at buildings. He watches how I hold my phone, how I react to sounds, the pattern of my attention. He’s not being subtle about it.
‘You check your phone every two minutes,’ he says, outside the engineering block.
‘Everyone checks their phone every two minutes. It’s 2026.’
‘Not like that. Not the screen, the lock, the screen again. You’re waiting for him.’
‘I’m not waiting for anything.’
Ron’s mouth does this thing. Not a smile, the ghost of one. For now.
Saturday night. The bar in the Northern Quarter, my choice, because Ron asked for ‘somewhere with good beer’ and this place has thirteen taps and the music’s loud enough to drown a confession.
‘I’ll get them in,’ I say. ‘What d’you want?’
‘Whatever’s local.’
I push through the crowd towards the bar. The ordering takes five minutes because the bartender is performing a personality and the bloke ahead of me can’t decide between pale ale and an existential crisis.
When I get back, Ron is different.
It shows subtly, in a way only someone who’s spent eighteen years reading him would catch. His posture’s changed. He was sitting back, one arm over the chair, the investigator’s sprawl. Now he’s forward. Both hands on the table.
I put the pints down. ‘Alright?’
‘Fine.’ Too fast. He picks up the glass. Drinks. The ice cubes catch the light, and he watches them.
I glance behind me, at the corner table.
Someone studying, notebooks spread across every inch, laptop open, a pencil between their teeth.
Lost in it, barely present in his own body.
An oversized jumper worn loose, rings on three fingers, nails painted dark.
Hair that sits between lengths, between intentions.
I look back at Ron. He’s not looking at the corner table. He’s very specifically, pointedly, not looking at the corner table. He rubs his thumb on the base of his pint glass—a tic I’ve never seen.
‘Good beer,’ he says. Takes another drink. A shift in his expression. Something looser, almost confused. ‘So. The bloke you’re seeing?’
Warm it up, get the subject talking—his friendlier mode.
‘Ron.’
‘What? Normal question. Brother to brother.’ He’s making eye contact with me now. Proper eye contact.
I play the game, give him scraps. ‘There’s a lad in my mathsclass. Fit, boring. Not worth the—’
A pause. He rests his thumb on the base of the glass. Then: ‘Been a long week.’
He says it at the table. Ron doesn’t open with his own week. Ever. He opens with my week, my term, my life; he’s auditing from two hundred miles away. His week stays off-camera, the thing that makes my week possible.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ He rolls his shoulder. ‘Just long.’
I wait for more. More doesn’t come. Ron has never in his life offered a second sentence about his own day without being asked twice. The ask would be an opening, and openings cost Ron money. Stay quiet.
I file it under knackered, allowed. Ron being allowed softness is a novelty I’m not going to poke.
I drink. The music changes. Someone laughs too loudly near the bar.
And Ron’s eyes drift—a breath, no more—back to the corner.
The person at the table hasn’t moved. Still studying.
The pencil is now behind one ear, the light catching a silver ring.
They push a strand of hair back, and Ron’s hand tightens on his glass.
‘Another round?’ he says. Already standing and already moving towards the bar, which happens to require walking past the corner table. He doesn’t look as he passes.
That flicker stays unexamined. Ron’s investigation is already inside my perimeter, and my own secret is loud enough to drown out whatever that was. It’s his.
I’ve got enough.
Sunday. Femi and Allan. Chance encounter on the walk from halls to the Arndale because Ron wanted ‘proper coffee, not that machine stuff in your kitchen.’ We pass them on Cross Street.
Femi in his puffer jacket, Allan’s arm through his, both of them wearing the ease of a couple who’ve had good sex and a lie-in and aren’t hiding either.
‘Ewan!’ Femi’s face lights up—real, uncomplicated. Then he sees Ron, and the wattage drops fractionally because Femi knows things now, and the brother’s presence is a variable he hasn’t solved for.
Introductions. Handshakes. Allan is easy, open, and asks Ron about London like he’s genuinely interested. Femi stands close enough that his sleeve touches Allan’s—habit rather than performance.
Ron watches, and I track him watching. The arm-linking, the casual touches. Femi leans into Allan when he laughs, and Allan shifts to make room, reflexive, practiced, visible to every person on this street, and neither of them is calculating the cost.
‘Your mate’s got it sorted,’ Ron says after, when they’ve turned the corner, and the street has swallowed them. He sips his coffee. ‘Nice lad. Boyfriend, out in the open. No secrets.’ A pause. ‘Why can’t you just do that?’
The cut, clean. Because he built me. Knows where the joins are weakest.
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘Why not?’
Because the man I’m sleeping with could lose his career if I linked my arm through his on Cross Street.
Because the man whose bed I sleep in four nights a week has only a letter on my phone.
Because simple is a luxury for people whose love doesn’t carry a disciplinary code, and I’ve used the word love without meaning to, and that’s.
‘It isn’t.’
Ron drinks his coffee and looks at the street. Says nothing.
Nothing is worse.
Sunday afternoon. I’m in the bathroom. Thirty seconds, maybe forty. The tap running, the mirror, my own face giving nothing back.
When I come out, Ronan is holding my phone. Screen lit. Thumb on the message thread. He has the expression I imagine coroners wear.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
He doesn’t flinch. ‘Who is A? You dating a criminal?’
The blood leaves my face.
‘Give me my phone.’
‘You’ve deleted half this thread. There are gaps. Whole days missing.’ He scrolls. ‘But what’s left. I’ll miss you. Thinking about you. This isn’t a mate, Ewan.’
‘Give me my phone.’
I snatch it, and he lets me. The letting is worse than if he’d fought—it means he’s already read enough.
Silence. His face, my face. The Carrick bone is identical, doing identical damage.
‘Is it a teacher?’
It drops into the room like a brick through glass because he suspects, not because he knows.
‘No.’
‘Ewan. Is it.’
‘It’s not a teacher. It’s someone else. It’s private. And you had no right.’
‘Private. Right.’ He stands. Picks up his bag, the site jacket. ‘You’re eighteen years old and you’ve got a secret relationship with someone you won’t name who texts you things like I’ll miss you and you’re deleting half the evidence. That doesn’t sound private, Ewan. That sounds like trouble.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I know what fear looks like. I’ve been watching it on your face all weekend.’
Both of us are in this cramped room, furniture too close. Ron’s chest is rising and falling too fast. Mine, worse.
He stands in the doorway. Hurt. Hurt. The skin is taut around his eyes, and the tension at his lips and his hands gripping the strap of his bag like it’s the only thing holding him upright.
‘I’ll find out,’ he says, below the threshold. ‘Whatever you’re hiding. I’ll find out.’
The door shuts—his footsteps down the corridor. The stairwell door is banging. Gone.
I sit on the bed. Phone in grip. The screen with the thread from A, the gaps where I’ve deleted, the scraps Ronan’s already read. The fragile architecture of a secret with a hole punched through its load-bearing wall.
Laurence, somewhere in Chorlton, marking papers, not texting, trusting the distance. He doesn’t know what happened in this room. Doesn’t know that his existence in my phone, reduced to a single letter, has been held up to the light.
I open the thread. Type: He knows.
Delete it, retype. Delete.
The ache of a body trained to need and then had it removed for seventy-two hours.
The screen goes dark. My reflection in the glass. Hollow. Wired.
Everything above it is still standing—just a matter of how long.