Chapter 21 #3
Biscuit. Crushed in my grip. Crumbs on my fingers, and I didn’t feel myself squeezing.
I catch Laurence in the corridor outside the toilets. Subtle as a car alarm.
‘Who is he? Why were his hands on you?’
‘Hugo doesn’t understand boundaries.’ Measured. Careful, pre-built. ‘He never did. It’s partly why we ended.’
Partly. Doing heavy lifting. The rest of the story is still in Laurence’s mouth, and he’s choosing not to open it.
I walk away. The corridor swallows the distance between us, and I feel that I’m being watched on my back like the weather is changing.
The courtyard has a fountain that isn’t running and stone benches designed for contemplation.
I’ve quit three times. Each relapse has a man’s name attached to it.
The Vienna air is cold and sharp, and the sky is a vicious blue, too good for this city.
I sit on the bench. Think about.
‘Interesting talk, wasn’t it?’
I look up.
Hugo Lockhart is standing over me, and his shadow crosses my trainers. White shirt, blazer draped over his arm, coffee in hand. He looks down at me with an expression I recognise. I’ve seen it on men in clubs, at parties, in the queue at Tesco. The look that measures and finds insufficient.
He studies me: the hoodie, the rings, the eyeliner, the cigarette. The result is: amusement. Not the kind you share.
‘You’re his student.’ A statement in the half-smile of a consultant delivering a prognosis. ‘Aren’t you.’
I don’t answer—the cigarette between my fingers. The fountain is not running.
‘How old are you?’
I look at him. Hold it steady, unblinking, the look that says I don’t break first. ‘Old enough to be here.’
Hugo laughs, short, nasal, pure contempt. ‘Christ. He’s really lost it this time.’
This time.
Stay. Hold.
‘He’s doing it again.’ Hugo takes a sip of his coffee. Casual. The casualness is the cruelty. ‘I recognise the look. How he watches you when he thinks no one’s looking.’ He stops. Recalibrates. ‘How long?’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘You’re a terrible liar.’ Another sip. The amusement lingers, and I want to smash it away with my fist.
‘He didn’t tell you.’ It’s not a question. Hugo says it like a weather forecast. ‘I was his student too. PhD, Cambridge, we were discovered. He resigned. I survived.’ Pause. ‘He didn’t.’
The courtyard, the fountain, the not-running water. The cigarette burned to the filter, and I haven’t.
‘Does he do the thing where he makes you feel like you’re the only person who ever understood him?’ Hugo tilts his head. Studying me, the specimen. ‘Yeah. He did that with me too.’
The fountain doesn’t run.
He straightens. Adjusts the blazer over his arm. Finishes his coffee and walks back inside. The door closes behind him.
The courtyard, the not-running fountain. The cigarette burned to nothing. Ash falls onto my jeans. I don’t brush it off.
The CV gap, the too-clean flat. Laurence said I made mistakes and refused to specify which.
I’m not special. I’m a pattern.
Hands, shaking.
I stand up. My legs work because I’m telling them to. The courtyard is empty now except for the fountain that doesn’t run, and a pigeon doing that tilted-head thing pigeons do when they suspect a human is about to drop food.
No food. I leave by the side door instead of the main one. Don’t want to see the lobby, the conference crowd, Hugo’s tall body among the pillars, making small talk with someone whose career he’s gently measuring.
The service corridor smells of coffee and old polish.
I take the stairs instead of the lift because a lift means thirty seconds of trapped mirror, and I can’t with my own face right now.
Four flights. Third floor. Fourth. Each landing is a station where my brain offers a fresh variant of the same sentence.
He’s doing it again.
The maths of it runs itself without input.
I was his student too. Twenty-four. Twenty-seven.
The gap was smaller then, a PhD cohort gap, a shared-vocabulary gap.
The gap with me is twelve, and a lecture theatre, and a man who moved to Manchester because Manchester was the only place still willing.
Laurence’s photograph collection under bath towels suddenly makes a different sense.
Not nostalgia. Evidence he couldn’t throw out and couldn’t bear to see.
Floor four, my corridor. I walk past my room without pausing. The body takes over, the body knowing the route it wants to take. The carpet swallows my steps, and my pulse is doing something unmathematical in my throat.
One second. Two. The hand raised, the knuckles. The sentence in my head: I’m going to go in there and fuck him until Hugo’s face stops being a face.
I know this. It isn’t healing. It’s nineteen and humiliated and finding the only tool I have. The only tool I’ve ever had.
A body in a bathroom, a body in Chorlton. And now, a body behind a hotel door in Vienna, I will use to bandage a wound that doesn’t close with skin.
I know this, and I do it anyway.
I don’t knock. Three and two is over. I pound the door once, and he opens it, and I’m inside before he can.
My mouth on his. Teeth. The kiss is not a kiss, it’s a claim. I shove him backward, grip his shirt, bite his neck hard enough that he hisses, and the sound is mine.
‘Mine.’ I say it into his skin. Against his pulse. My hand on his cock through his trousers, gripping, not stroking. ‘Say it.’
‘Ewan. Fuck.’
‘Say it.’
His eyes. The composure hasn’t cracked. It’s dissolved.
‘Yours.’
I pull his shirt over his head. Push him onto the bed.
Straddle him. The condom is already in my hand because the habit is older than us, and I roll it on and sink without prep, the burn sharp and deliberate, wanting the hurt to overwrite everything Hugo is.
I ride him hard. Mark his collarbone, his neck, the line of his throat.
Every bite is a word that lives in my teeth unspoken.
He grips my hips, and the grip is desperate, and his face is wrecked, and nothing, none of it, is enough.
I come. He comes.
After. The dark. His breathing and mine are not in sync. Sweat and lube, the sheets tangled.
‘You need to trust me, Ewan.’
His voice in the dark.
‘Then tell me the truth.’ I stare at the ceiling. ‘About Cambridge. About Hugo.’
Silence. Long enough that I think he won’t. Long enough for the walls to start forming, the ones I’ve been constructing since Lewisham.
‘He was my student.’
Three words that collapse the space between us.
‘PhD candidate. Cambridge. He was twenty-four, I was twenty-seven. It started as these things do.’ He stops. Starts again. ‘We were discovered. I resigned. He was far enough along that his career survived. Mine didn’t. Manchester was the only place that offered me a position. Nobody else applied.’
The ceiling. The crack in the plaster. A city I can’t see.
‘I didn’t tell you because I was ashamed.’ His voice is the smallest I’ve ever heard. The Lancashire creeping in as it does when his control.’ And because I didn’t want you to think—’
‘That I’m a pattern.’ I say it flat. No question mark. ‘That you have a type. Students who don’t know any better.’
Silence.
It is the answer.
I turn onto my side. Away from him. The marks on his chest will be purple tomorrow. The ones on his neck will show, and Hugo will see them, and it won’t be enough.
I stay. Neither of us moves.
The ceiling has a crack in it, and I trace it—diagonal, hairline. The kind of crack a hotel paints over every four years and never fixes. End-to-end. Back again. A geometry problem I can solve without feeling anything.
What I don’t solve: the problem of us.
The maths runs the same way no matter how I input it.
Laurence Haldrey, twenty-seven, at Cambridge.
Laurence Haldrey, thirty-one, at Manchester.
Same pattern, different decade. The move north wasn’t an escape.
Relocation of the same behaviour to a city willing to ignore it.
Different lecture theatre, same sightline.
He found me in a corridor in September, and the muscle memory took over.
Except.
Except that’s not the whole equation. The equation also includes the coffee he takes black.
The boxed-up photographs he couldn’t throw away.
The jazz club anecdote on a hotel floor.
The laugh—the real one—that surprised him more than it surprised me.
The belt he shook when he loosened it. The moment earlier tonight, when he turned towards Hugo in the biscuit-table crowd, and the muscle memory didn’t take over. He froze.
A pattern that knows itself is a different animal from a pattern repeating unthinkingly.
But. But also. A man who’s made the same mistake twice is harder to trust than a man who’s made it once. And the part of me Hugo put there in the courtyard—the part that says you’re a symptom—has moved in like a tenant who signed the lease while I wasn’t looking.
It sits in the room like a third body. Am I special, or am I a pattern?
Ceiling. Dark. Vienna outside, indifferent to the answer.
He keeps his hand on my back—the choice of it, the only evidence that the pattern isn’t the whole truth.