Chapter 21 #2
‘We have all night.’ Against his neck. The stubble. His pulse is going faster than mine, and mine is.
He pulls back, holds my face.
‘We have all night,’ he repeats. Tasting the concept rather than correcting it. The concept. As if he’s never—as if we’ve never.
We haven’t. Every time we’ve fucked, it’s been stolen from the timetable like a library book you know you’ll have to return.
Tonight there’s no due date.
His hands are on my belt. My hands are on his buttons. The blue shirt falls, and there he is, the dark hair I’ve traced with my tongue enough times to draw from memory, the body I know in the dark. But in this light, in this room, without the ambient dread, tonight it’s different.
We make it to the bed. I push him back, straddle his hips, grind down.
His cock strains against his trousers, and I reach between us and press my palm flat against it, and his head drops back, and the sound that comes out of him fills the room because the room can hold it.
No thin walls. No woman crying to her mum next door.
Just us and the chandelier city beyond the curtains.
Clothes gone, all of them. A tangle on the floor, his and mine, indistinguishable.
I reach for my bag. Condom. Lube. The plug, already in me since the shower two hours ago, because I spent the dinner sitting on it with schnitzel on my fork and a straight face, and the thought of Laurence seven seats away not knowing, and the thought of that thought made the whole evening bearable.
I pull it out, and he watches. The reaction there, how his lips part, how his cock twitches against his stomach, that alone is worth thirty minutes in the hotel bathroom, the prep I never bother with for the lads I pull in smoking areas.
He takes the plug. Sets it on the bedside table. His fingers replace it, two, slicked, patient. Because Laurence does everything in sequence and the sequence includes this: the slow push of his fingers inside me, the curl, the Fuck. That angle. The—
My hips jerk. My cock leaks against his stomach, and he finds my neck, and his fingers keep going, and the patience of this man is either his greatest quality or a war crime, depending on how close I am, and right now I’m—
‘Now,’ I say.
He rolls the condom on. I sink. Control the angle, the pace, the depth, my palms flat on his ribs, his fingers digging into my thighs, and we’ve done this enough times to know the mechanics, but we’ve never done it without the clock running, and the difference is, everything.
I ride him slowly.
His hands climb my ribs. He traces the obliques with his thumbs, the muscle that brackets my hips, and his hips rock up to meet mine, and the rhythm is unhurried. Nowhere to be.
I come with his name in my mouth, not Haldrey, not Dr. Laurence. Against his skin. He follows. The grip on my hips is hard enough to bruise, and I want the bruises, want proof that lasts longer than a deleted text.
The floor happens because the bed gets too warm.
The window happens because Vienna’s lights are ridiculous, and I say so. He looks at them. Then at me. Crosses the room, his hands on my hips, before the decision has been made verbally.
He pins me against the glass. The pane is cold, and the cold travels through my palms and into my shoulders.
My breath fogs a patch the size of a plate.
Behind me, he finds the angle, slow, testing, his cock already hard again because apparently thirty-one is not sixty and he has opinions about Vienna too.
The curtains gap just enough. A sliver of the city visible—the lit spire of something Baroque, the tram lines glinting, a lamp on three floors down. The city can’t see me. I know it can’t. The silver makes my cock behave as if it could.
He starts slow. Matches the rhythm to the condensation spreading on the glass.
I try to say something clever, and my mouth produces a consonant, a vowel, a sound that isn’t either.
His hand comes around, takes my cock, the grip that already knows the speed and the pressure.
The rhythm shifts. Faster. Not rushed. Deliberate.
I come against the glass. A stripe of it, warm, quickly cooling. It’s been barely thirty minutes since the last time. Eighteen and relentless, and he’s still catching his breath from round one, and the disparity makes him laugh.
A real one. Surprised.
‘You’re going to kill me,’ he says, still inside me. Still pressed against my back.
‘You’re thirty-one, not ninety. Keep up.’
The laugh again, warm against my neck.
New.
We end up on the floor eventually. Blanket pulled off the bed, his back against the radiator, me in his lap, his cock in my hand, slow, while he tells me about the time he got lost in Vienna at twenty-three on a conference trip and ended up at a jazz club that didn’t serve anything except schnapps and disapproval.
I’m stroking us off while he tells this story.
His voice keeps breaking mid-sentence. The combination of the anecdote and the hand job is so absurd that I laugh and he laughs, and we’re both laughing with our cocks in my fist, and this—this graceless moment on a hotel floor in Austria—this is the thing.
He comes laughing. I didn’t know that was possible. Pressed against mine, his breath hot and ragged and the sound halfway between a groan and a laugh, and I catch it, and he catches my mouth, and the kiss tastes of everything I’ve been pretending this isn’t.
Four AM, the curtains still gaped. Vienna’s glow through the glass, amber and distant, a city asleep while we refuse to be.
He’s on his side. I’m on my back. His arm across my chest, heavy. He draws small circles on my sternum with his thumb. Conscious.
Last time we shared a bed, I didn’t mean to. Fell asleep by accident, bolted before dawn. Dressed in the dark. The click of the door behind me was like a period at the end of a sentence I didn’t want to finish.
This time I don’t move. Technically, I could—the door’s right there, my clothes on the floor, my room four doors away. I don’t.
The laugh is still in the room, so the stillness holds.
He breathes slowly, almost asleep. Almost. He tightens his arm.
‘Stay.’ Murmured. Half-conscious.
Same word he used every time. Same voice. Except usually I put my jacket on and walked out into the cold and pretended the leaving was the point.
This time Vienna holds its breath, his heartbeat beneath me.
Eyes closing, letting it happen.
‘What are you thinking?’ His voice is a rustle. Close to sleep. Closer to honest.
‘I’m not.’
‘Liar.’ Almost a smile in it.
The arm tightens. The thumb resumes its circle on my sternum. I listen to him breathe. Count six breaths. Eight. Ten. The slowing of it, the way his ribcage settles against my side. A body doing the arithmetic of trust without asking permission.
‘Laurence.’
‘Mm.’
Nothing after that. I meant to say something. The name was meant to go somewhere. It didn’t. He hums acknowledgement anyway, the syllable that means yes, here, whatever it is.
Tomorrow: panels, keynotes, page eleven, Hugo Lockhart at a podium. Tomorrow, everything I’m not thinking about tonight will.
Tonight, I’m staying.
Tonight: the circles on my chest. The breath is slowing. The arm that doesn’t let go.
Staying.
I leave at half past five. The corridor is grey at pre-dawn. Four doors, my room. The bed untouched, the pillow cold, the whole scene staged for a forensic team that’ll never arrive.
Shower. My hair still smells of him. The bite mark on my neck is purple, thumb-shaped. I’ll wear it under my collar all day.
Breakfast is performance art. I sit with Femi, eat toast, drink coffee that tastes of hotel and dust. Laurence is three tables away. Professional mask, colleague small talk. He was exhausted because I kept waking him.
Don’t look. Eat toast.
He doesn’t look either. The not-looking has its own grammar by now.
Today, panel B—two o’clock.
The conference hall seats three hundred. Wood paneling, flattering lighting. I take a seat near the back, my natural habitat. Femi’s in the row ahead, notebook ready, because Femi attends everything.
The moderator introduces the panel: three speakers, the third name.
‘Dr Hugo Lockhart. Cambridge.’
Two words. The moderator says more, but those are the two I hear.
Properly tall, six-two, maybe six-three; the height that reorganises a room. Clean-shaven, the face of a man designed for press photos and alum newsletters. White shirt, open collar, no tie. No eyeliner, no rings, no jewellery, nothing that signals anything except expensive and certain.
He reads straight. A gay man the world doesn’t clock because it doesn’t know where to look.
My gut drops.
He speaks as Laurence speaks, precise, structured, the same cadence, but faster. More confident. He doesn’t pause to consider his audience.
I look at Laurence. Front row, end seat, the posture of a man watching a device diffuse itself, and not sure whether to want it to. His hands are on his knees. Perfectly still. The stillness I know.
Hugo makes a joke about a mathematician walking into a bar. Everyone laughs. Laurence doesn’t.
Twenty minutes. Where Laurence holds back, Hugo expands. Where Laurence offers space, Hugo fills it.
I sit in my Lewisham hoodie with my rings and my eyeliner and my nineteen years, and I look at this man, this tall, built, and I think: so that’s what Laurence goes for.
I don’t flinch. Externally.
Coffee break, the conference mill. Cups and saucers and the same three conversations re-forming.
I’m at the biscuit table when it happens. Hugo crosses the room towards Laurence. Straight line, no hesitation.
He touches Laurence’s arm. The thumb on the inside of the elbow. Placement, duration, they both know it. Hugo says something. Laurence’s mouth moves. The words stay swallowed, unreachable. Hugo leans in, smiles—the smile of someone sharing a private joke.
Laurence doesn’t pull away. The muscle memory hasn’t.