Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Neither of us slept. The proof is in the morning, his gaze red-rimmed, mine worse. Eight hours in the same bed pretending the other one didn’t exist. He got up at six. Showered. Dressed. I listened to the water through the wall, the drawer, the silence after.
I left while he was still doing his tie. Didn’t look at him. The door clicked, and the corridor swallowed me.
Breakfast. Day three: the chandelier, the thermal coffee.
The pastries are arranged as if they’re auditioning for a photograph.
I sit with Femi and the econometrics girl and a PhD student from Leeds who talks about Bayesian methods like football—with passion and the assumption that everyone shares it.
I eat a croissant. It tastes of flour and butter and absolutely nothing else.
Laurence is across the room. Different table, further away. As if distance fixes anything. He’s talking to an older colleague, someone from Berlin, judging by the conference badge. The man says something, and Laurence laughs.
Neither the real laugh nor the one from the first night, the one that made me think a word I won’t. This laugh is constructed. Professional. It works, but the seams show.
His hands are around the coffee cup. Both hands, the grip too tight. He does that when.
Don’t catalogue. Don’t analyse. Don’t do the thing where you reverse-engineer his body language and pretend the data doesn’t.
He turns. Slightly. The light catches the bruise on his neck, visible above the collar, the one I put there with my teeth twelve hours ago while calling him mine. He adjusted the collar this morning. It slipped.
Hugo is two tables away. The bruise registers, the flicker, brief, surgical, noted. A tension at his lips. A footnote rather than a smile.
I look at Laurence again. The tight hands, the forced laugh. The collar he’s tugged twice in the last minute. Him who confessed in the dark that Manchester was exile, that shame was the reason for Hugo in a box under towels. And I am. What? Another box? Another thing to be sorted away?
But then. He reaches for a napkin, and his sleeve pulls back, and I see the marks on his wrist. From the belt, from us.
Faded now, yellow-green, lingering. He didn’t cover them.
He’s wearing a watch, but the watch sits below the marks, not over them.
He chose not to hide them. Or he forgot.
And with Laurence, forgetting doesn’t exist.
I look at the coffee. The croissant. Around us, mathematicians are discussing proofs.
And I see him. Not the liar, not the conquest, not the authority figure I set out to dismantle in a lecture theatre in September. I see a man who lost his career for loving the wrong person and rebuilt something smaller, and then I showed up, and he did it again.
The ground moves, in the—no. In me.
The anger is still there. The betrayal is still there. Hugo’s voice in the courtyard: You’re a symptom. But underneath, something has shifted that isn’t anger.
Nowhere near forgiveness. My eyes don’t drop.
That focus finds mine across the room. He holds the contact. The circles under his eyes, the collar, and the hands betray the man who didn’t sleep.
I hold back for two seconds. Three.
Then I look away first.
A decision, not a retreat.
I go to him at eleven instead of midnight. No knock code, no secrecy. Eleven PM. A fist on the door. Once.
He opens it. His face does something language can’t hold, like I wasn’t supposed to be here.
‘You’re insane,’ he says.
‘And you’re a liar.’ I walk in. The door closes. ‘But I’m here.’
The first kiss is violent. My teeth on his lip, his hand in my hair pulling hard enough that my neck arches back, and the sound I make is not want.
I shove him, and he catches my wrist. Twists.
I’m against the wall, his weight pinning me, warmth at my neck, his cock hard against my hip and mine against his, and the friction is rough and artless and good.
He pulls his belt free. The leather through the loops, that sound, the one from last month, the one that means give me your hands, and I offer my wrists because I know this part, we’ve done this part, but when he loops the belt around and pulls it tight, his hands are shaking, and the shaking is new.
I pull free. One hard yank, the knot wasn’t secure, or he didn’t want it to be—his wrists now, my hands. I pin him to the bed, and his pupils dilate, and I hold his arms above his head and grind down.
We fuck. Rough. His legs around me, my hand under his thigh lifting the angle, the condom rolled on fast, practised, dark-room efficient.
The first inch, resistance, then the give.
His body decides, I hold there. Not patience, not tenderness, the physics of it, the pressure back against my cock that means wait, and I wait, my teeth against his neck, and his hips tilt up by a degree, and that’s, that’s the answer.
I push deeper, the heat of him. The closest heat that nothing else is.
His thighs tighten. The sound he makes isn’t controlled.
Surrender. A body saying yes before the mind’s caught up.
I set the pace, fast. Punishing. Every thrust carries the courtyard in it.
Hugo’s smirk, you’re a symptom, the pity worse than contempt.
I fuck him like I’m trying to drive that sentence out of my body and into his.
Doesn’t work. The maths on this, anger just. He grabs my face. Both hands stop me mid-thrust.
‘Look at me.’
I look. His eyes are wet. Not crying, overflowing, a leak.
‘You’re not Hugo.’ His voice cracks on the name, Lancashire, coming through the fracture. ‘This is not the same thing.’
‘Prove it.’
He rolls me over. He finds every mark, the bruises from the window, the bite on my arm, the thumbprint on my hip, kissing each one with attention rather than urgency.
He works his way down. My cock, then lower. His tongue where I’m still open from the thrust and the sensation makes my spine. I grab the sheet. His mouth and fingers together and nothing like this, not after-sex territory when the sex was already supposed to be the—
He strokes me again. Slow. By the time warmth closes around the base, I’m shaking, and he doesn’t speed up. Doesn’t give me the release I’m looking for.
‘Please.’ My voice. Wrecked, unrecognisable.
He takes me to the edge. Holds me there. His fingers curl inside me at the angle that makes my vision—
I come so hard that the sound that leaves me isn’t a sound. Everything I’ve been holding since the courtyard exits my body in a single convulsion, and he stays; the patience; the fucking patience of this man who treats my body like a proof he’s determined to complete without shortcuts.
Nobody has ever done this to me.
He moves up and lies beside me. Doesn’t ask for reciprocation. His cock is hard against my thigh. He ignores it.
I reach for him anyway. My hand. Slow. I stroke and watch, and he comes into my fist, the sound small and private and aimed at no one but me.
Dawn. The curtains gaped. Vienna’s sky is grey-blue, the indeterminate colour before daylight commits.
‘I should have told you.’ His voice in the half-dark. ‘About everything. From the beginning.’
‘Yes. You should have.’
Silence.
‘But I’m still here.’ It’s the first choice I’ve made in months that isn’t want or anger or the need to win. Something quieter that I don’t.
His arm around me, tighter than last time.
‘I know,’ he whispers—Lancashire, all of it.
I close my eyes. His breathing against my spine. The vertebrae he counted are still humming.
His presence is unhurried. That’s enough.
Eyes closed, body sore, breathing together.
Still here, not leaving.
I wake up, and the first thing I feel is not his body. It’s the absence.
Vienna has church bells and trams and the smell of coffee from the Café Hawelka downstairs and the low hum of a city that doesn’t rush, but it’s a different emptiness that fills me.
Internal. The first peace I’ve had in months.
My body aches in places. The small of my back, the inside of my thighs, the skin he bit two nights ago that’s layered now.
His mark over his mark, evidence stacked on evidence. But the ache is distant.
The curtains are still gapped. Vienna’s pre-dawn is grey-blue. Undecided. The glow finds the room, and I lie still and catalogue.
The floor: his belt, coiled where it fell. My jeans, his shirt. A condom wrapper next to the bedside table, one of four, if I’m counting, which apparently I am. The sheets tangled off the foot of the bed, one corner still caught under the mattress.
The man beside me.
He sleeps face down. One arm under the pillow, the other reaching across the bed into the space where I was and finding my hip.
The window. I stand there in my boxers with the dawn filling the courtyard and Vienna waking up in stages, a tram bell, a shutter, a pigeon on the cornice.
I’m not thinking about the sex.
The smart move is thinking about it. Three nights.
The freedom of the first, the laugh, the window, the plug, and his hands.
The possession of the second, Hugo’s name still lingering like acid, the marks I put on him and meant, the way he turned over for me without being asked, his thighs around my hips and his Lancashire under my mouth and Hugo’s name driven out of both our heads at the same minute.
Last night—the battle, the belt, the prove it, how his breath—no. I’m not thinking about any of it.
I’m thinking about the moment between the third and fourth time on the first night when he told me about the jazz club in Vienna and his voice kept breaking, and we were laughing on the floor with him in my grip, and it was stupid and graceless and the funniest thing I’ve.
And the moment when he said look at me and that focus was wet, and I looked, and there wasn’t a lecturer or a conquest. There was a person. Asking.
The glass is cold, and I lean into it. Good.
It’s sex.