Chapter 20 #2
‘Allan’s booked us a table at eight,’ he says. ‘Some Italian place in the Northern Quarter he’s been saving for when it got important enough to save for. First Valentine’s. He’s terrified.’
‘He’s not terrified. You are.’
‘Yeah, I know. Shut up. That wasn’t the point.’ His eyes are level. The Femi look that started in the freshers’ queue in October and hasn’t stopped sharpening since. ‘The point was that you’re not the only one having a loaded day. Celebrate yours. Properly.’
He hugs me, quickly. Embarrassed. Femi’s version, where he manages to look like he invented hugging and is filing a patent.
‘Ewan,’ he says into my shoulder. ‘Nineteen suits you.’
Then he’s off towards the tram stop, waterproof hood up, already late for something I don’t ask about.
I stand in the rain with a bag of warm samosas and a card that says love, in Femi’s handwriting—the handwriting of someone who’s been walking beside me since forever and found the word for it.
Nineteen. Maybe it fits slightly better than I thought.
Chorlton. Eight.
I come in, and the door clicks. The flat smells of oil, garlic, something with rosemary, a pan on the hob behaving itself.
‘You cooked.’
‘I followed instructions from a book. It’s not the same thing.’
‘Haldrey. Are you cooking me a birthday dinner.’
‘I am cooking something. It happens to be on a day you happen to have been born on.’ Deadpan Lancashire. The vowels are their Sunday-morning selves. He’s stirring, all focus on the pot.
I put the samosas on the counter. He glances at them.
‘Offerings from the other shrine,’ I say.
‘You have a network. Good.’
He serves. Pasta with lamb sauce, rosemary, a crack of pepper, olive oil. He puts a bowl in front of me. He puts a bowl in front of him. He sits down opposite me at his own kitchen table and picks up his fork in his left hand.
We eat. Forks and the radiator clicking, and the rain on the window.
‘Ewan.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Happy birthday.’
Two words, Lancashire. Quiet, he says it once. He doesn’t say it again. He doesn’t say Valentine’s, doesn’t look at the date, doesn’t lean on any of the architecture the day has been trying to build around us. Happy birthday. Full stop.
The wiring behind my ribs does the thing.
‘Thanks.’
He reaches beside his chair. Produces a small object wrapped in brown paper, no ribbon. Slides it across.
‘Don’t get excited. It’s not sentimental.’
I unwrap it, inside: a pen. A proper one, weighted, the barrel dark green, the clip silver, the nib gold.
I know his. He writes with a fat black Lamy that has a left-handed nib ground flat to stop the ink pooling at the wrong angle.
This one is different. The nib is a different shape. Bought for a right-handed person.
I turn it in my hand.
‘I saw how your hand sits when you write,’ he says. ‘You grip the pen like it’s a crime scene. I wanted to see what it would do with one that was interested in you back.’
Interested.
‘Haldrey.’
‘Use it on a proof. Don’t waste it on a lecture note. Proofs earn it.’
He goes back to his food. Professional. Except his thumb is tracing the side of his wine glass, and the thumb is not composed.
I roll the pen between my fingers. Green and gold, and bought for a right-hander by a left-hander. The specificity of it. A gift that says I have been thinking about how your hand moves.
We eat, we finish. I insist on washing up. He lets me, which is a first. He stands behind me at the sink and puts a hand at my nape, thumb on the notch below my skull, and leaves it there for the length of two rinse cycles. The hand. The staying.
After: the sofa, the lights dimmed. His legs crossed mine.
A glass of wine, I don’t drink. He’s back at his marking, week nine papers, the Lamy in his left hand.
He annotates somebody’s incorrect use of a supremum, and I think: I am nineteen and I am in a flat in Chorlton and the world out there is red and pink and queuing for tables.
I have never spent a February fourteenth anywhere that felt like a place before.
He catches me watching.
‘What.’
‘Nothing.’
He caps the Lamy, sets the marking aside.
‘Ewan.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thirty-one minus nineteen.’
The answer arrives before I ask my brain to do it. ‘Twelve.’
‘Twelve,’ he says. He says it like he’s trying the word on. Like he’s been doing the same subtraction all day and decided to say it out loud once, so neither of us has to pretend it didn’t shift.
Twelve. A small accounting done in the dark by a universe that doesn’t ask you about it.
I don’t say any of that. I reach up and take him in both hands and kiss him like the kiss is a thank-you card and a birthday card and a love letter and a receipt and a confession all at once.
He kisses me back. Right hand in my hair. No hurry at all.
Nobody’s getting to say any of this out loud tomorrow.
Tonight the flat is saying it for us.
‘Department trip,’ I tell Ronan on the phone. ‘Academic conference. Four days.’
‘Where?’
‘Vienna.’
Silence. Ron processing. I can hear the construction of the next question, the load-bearing beams being positioned.
‘Who’s going?’
‘Students. Staff. Normal thing.’ I keep my voice level. Bored, even. The voice of a boy reporting admin, not a boy about to spend four nights in the same hotel as a man he can’t stop.
‘Staff meaning who?’
‘Ron. It’s a maths conference. I’m going because my marks are good. That’s it.’
The lie. Smooth. The smoothest I’ve told him, because this one has been rehearsed.
He lets it go. Doesn’t believe it. I can hear the disbelief in the silence, the calculation of a man deciding to wait rather than push. But he lets it go.
Femi doesn’t.
‘You’re bringing three pairs of fuck-me-jeans to an academic conference.’
‘I like options.’
His eyes are on me. He’s worked it out. He doesn’t say Laurence’s name, hasn’t said it since the day on the concourse, but the name is there in the look, in how he doesn’t ask who else is on the delegation.
I fold a shirt. In my bag, under the clothes: condoms, lube, and the plug wrapped in a sock.
And deeper, in the pocket I don’t show anyone, the knowledge that Hugo Lockhart will be standing at a podium in forty-eight hours, and Laurence hasn’t told me, and I haven’t told Laurence I know, and the silence is growing a skeleton.
I zip the bag. Heavier than it should be.
This time, the zipping means something. This time, I’m not keeping everything packed in case leaving is still an option. I’m packing for Vienna and Laurence and the keynote I won’t mention and the silence I’m choosing.
Bag zipped—the commitment in the closure.