Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I’ve slept for three hours. My eyes feel like they’ve been ironed.
Femi is beside me, backpack on, travel pillow already around his neck because Femi prepares for journeys like normal people prepare for surgery.
Water bottle, neck pillow. Noise-cancelling earbuds Allan bought him for Christmas, still in the box because he didn’t want to open them until ‘a special occasion.’ A two-hour flight to Austria. That’s the special occasion.
I scan the gate, students in clusters. A girl from my econometrics tutorial is asleep against her rucksack. The two PhD students are talking to Deakin about conference etiquette.
And Laurence.
Far end. Trolley bag, blazer, coffee in hand. Talking to Dr Salgari, whose eyes carry enough knowledge to end careers. He nods, professional. Attentive. The public Laurence, in public.
I know what those hands do in the dark, where they grip, how they tremble when I.
He looks up, across the gate. Through thirty people.
Half a second.
Stomach. Drop.
He looks away, adjusts his bag. Speaks to Salgari in a way that makes her laugh. The performance is seamless.
I pull my hood up. Three hours of sleep and his flat is still on my skin. I showered. Didn’t fix it. The soap isn’t mine. The smell isn’t mine. Nothing about the last three months is mine except the wanting.
The plane is small. Two seats on each side, the aisle is narrow enough that my knee hits Femi’s every time someone passes. I’m by the window. Grey clouds, grey runway, grey city disappearing.
‘Here.’ Femi pulls a book from his bag. Holds it up. The cover’s nothing special; paperback, dog-eared already, some novel I don’t recognise with a map on the front. ‘Allan gave me this for the trip.’
‘He bought you a book?’
‘Open it.’
I open it, the flyleaf—handwriting, neat, slanted, blue ink.
To Femi, who makes every adventure better just by being in it. Four days is too long. Come back to me—all my love, A.
The ink is pressed hard.
I stare at it, evidence on the page.
All my love.
Written down. Permanent. In a book, Femi will carry through airport security and leave it on a bedside table in a hotel room, and nobody will look at it and think it’s dangerous. Nobody will delete it. It’s there—a man’s love, handwritten, where anyone can see it.
Something adjacent to pain.
I close the book and hand it back.
‘That’s nice,’ I say. My voice sounds right. I’ve checked.
‘Is it too much?’ Femi looks at the dedication again. ‘We’ve only been together six months. Is “all my love” too much at six months?’
‘No. It’s good.’
It is good. It’s everything locked away.
Laurence’s handwriting exists in one place.
The margins of my problem sets, red ink, and professional commentary on differential equations.
Good approach. Check line 4. That’s what I get.
That’s the written record of us. Not all my love.
Not come back to me. A correction and a grade.
If I died tomorrow, the evidence of us would be nothing. A contact saved as A. A key with no label. Marks on my wrists that’ll fade by Friday.
I turn to the window. Press my palm against the plastic. The clouds are white now, clean. The filthy grey of Manchester was replaced by bright unhelpfulness.
My phone. Type: Can’t wait. Send.
Delete the thread, both sides. The habit of a boy whose love lives in the gaps between messages that no longer exist. Two words. Can’t wait. Gone. As if I never.
As if.
Seven rows ahead, on the other side of the aisle, Laurence reaches into his pocket. Pulls out his phone, glances at the screen.
The tension in his frame. The pull and release. He puts the phone away. Doesn’t look back.
Doesn’t need to.
Vienna’s airport has marble floors and signs in German and the confidence of a city that’s been important longer than England has been a country. The light is precise. The crowds move with an order that Manchester’s Piccadilly would find personally offensive.
Baggage claim, the belt crawls. Students cluster, academics stand apart.
I position myself at the belt. Laurence is four bodies away, watching like a man who’s never mislaid anything. Careful. Precise. His bag appears; he reaches for it.
I reach for mine at the same time. The movement puts us side by side. His elbow, my forearm. The contact is brief, accidental, and plausibly nothing.
I lean in. Close enough that only he hears.
‘Just a few more hours.’
He swallows. He tightens his hand on the handle of his trolley, and that focus goes everywhere except to me.
‘Dr Haldrey.’ Salgari’s voice is behind us. Bright. Professional. ‘Shall we get the group together for the bus?’
He pivots. ‘Of course.’ The mask snapped back on. But his knuckles on the trolley handle are white.
He walks away towards the group. The blazer, the perfect posture. The institutional formation that protects him from everything he wants.
Tomorrow I’ll sit in a room and watch the man Laurence fucked stand at a podium. Tonight first. Tonight is ours.
In a few hours, I’ll be in Laurence’s hotel room with him and the lights of a foreign city through the window. And the day after that, the test begins.
The bus to the hotel is warm. Femi is beside me, earbuds in, Allan’s book open on his lap. The dedication to facing up. All my love.
I look out the window. Vienna unfolds, the Ringstrasse curving past in a slow Habsburg arc, trams the colour of old wine, stone facades the colour of old butter. A city built for people who take their time. The opposite of everything I am.
Room 401, fourth floor. The corridor smells of cleaning products and fresh linen.
Laurence is in room 419, in the same corridor.
I drop the bag on the bed. Small, clean, anonymous. Bed, desk, window facing an inner courtyard.
I unzip the bag, clothes out. Four nights stretching ahead like a proof I haven’t started, full of variables that don’t belong to me.
The window, the rooftops. Stephansdom’s spire in the middle distance, dark against grey. The sky is already darkening. March in Vienna, the light leaving early, the M?rzwind against the glass, the city settling into its evening self.
I sit on the bed. The mattress is firm, better than the halls. Better than anything.
Four nights, no Ronan, no corridors. No library cards or single-letter contacts or the constant arithmetic of risk. Just a door between his room and mine, and the freedom to knock on it without checking the street first.
Somewhere in this hotel, Hugo Lockhart is pressing a shirt for tomorrow’s keynote. The geometry of the three of us under one roof is a triangle I haven’t solved and don’t want to.
I open the programme on my phone: page eleven, the professional headshot.
Close it, lock the screen.
Four doors, I counted twice. Tonight I’ll knock on one of them and everything else—the programme, the headshot, the triangle—can wait until daylight forces it.
The restaurant has chandeliers. Actual chandeliers, crystal, tiered, designed to make everyone look important and food look expensive. The Viennese take dinner seriously, like Mancunians take complaining about the weather: with total commitment and no apparent joy.
Long table. Students at one end, academics at the other. The line between us is invisible. Exact. Femi is beside me, working on his schnitzel like it’s a proof he has to solve—the girl from econometrics across from us, talking about tomorrow’s keynote.
Day two, panel B, page eleven.
I cut my food. Don’t taste it.
Laurence is seven seats away. Between Salgari and Deakin, wine glass untouched, fork moving, even tempo, nothing wasted. He’s wearing a blue shirt I haven’t seen before. The collar sits against his neck, and I don’t.
He laughs at something Salgari says. The professional laughs. For public use. Not real. The real one I’ve heard exactly four times. Each was in the dark.
The meal drags. Ninety minutes of conference small talk, which is regular small talk but with footnotes. Someone mentions Godel because we’re in Vienna and mathematicians can’t help themselves. Someone else mentions a Heuriger, and half the table starts googling.
Laurence’s eyes find me. Mid-sentence, mid-nothing. Through the chandelier light, seven place settings, and the architecture of pretending.
Everything drops.
He looks away.
I push schnitzel around my plate and think about what’s under that blue shirt and how many hours are left until the table empties and the corridor empties and the only sound is the lock turning.
‘You haven’t eaten,’ Femi says.
‘Jet lag,’ I say. We flew for two hours.
The corridor at midnight is silent like churches are silent. The carpet is thick enough to swallow footsteps. Room 401 behind me, closed, the bed untouched. Room 419 ahead.
I knock, three, slow, pause. Two.
The code is stupid. We agreed on it by text three days ago, a text I deleted within seconds, as everything between us gets deleted. Three and two. Probably prime numbers because the man can’t switch off even when he’s arranging a shag.
The door opens. The light from inside is warm and low, and his hand comes through the gap and grabs my wrist and pulls.
Inside. Door shut, lock turned—his back against it, my front against his. The deadbolt sliding home is the most obscene thing I’ve heard all day, including the bloke at dinner who pronounced ‘Wiener’ like a body part.
Kissing him. Both hands in my hair, pulling, angling, and the kiss is different here.
No countdown in it, no one-ear-on-the-stairwell.
No tram to catch, no hallway to check, no risk calculus running in the background like a programme that never closes.
Just warmth and mine. Vienna outside, nowhere else to be.
I push him harder against the door. His shirt, the blue one, the one I’ve been undressing in my head for three hours, comes untucked, and I find skin beneath, and it’s warm and taut, and his stomach contracts under my touch, and the sound he makes is.
A sound I haven’t heard before. Open. Unguarded.