Chapter 22 #2
Except it isn’t. The knowing has been in me since the first night he stayed inside me after he came and held me and didn’t leave, and I didn’t know what to do with myself because nobody had ever.
Femi. The book. All my love, H. Written in blue ink on a flyleaf that anyone can read. The obscene simplicity of that, loving someone in a way that has evidence.
Could I want that?
I don’t like it. It brings with it a life I haven’t designed—a life where I introduce someone to Ronan, where someone leaves a toothbrush at my flat, where the contact in my phone has a name instead of a letter.
With Laurence.
It crosses my mind, I let it cross. Don’t look at it directly. With Laurence. Sat across from Ronan at a table. With Laurence, walking somewhere, in daylight. My arm through his like Allan’s through Femi’s. Public. Like it’s allowed.
The wanting won’t come. It would require admitting something I’ve spent nineteen years building walls against. That the distraction, the hookups, the blokes, the transactional accumulation of bodies, was never freedom.
And then.
It’s there. At the edge. Like a shape forming in fog before you can name it.
Lo.
The two letters form at the base of my skull. They want more. They want the ve to follow, the completion of the word, the click of it into place like a door I’ve been holding open for years, finally allowed to close.
My breath on the glass. The condensation I left there is a small proof—I was here. I stood here thinking this.
Nineteen years of definitions. Ewan Carrick, the one who doesn’t.
The lad from Lewisham, the middle of three, the version Ronan checks on and worries about.
The Ewan in the photograph on Mum’s fridge is eight and has ice cream on his face, and in the photograph, he hasn’t started yet.
The one who started is the one standing at a Viennese hotel window in his boxers, watching dawn happen to a city that doesn’t care.
This Ewan is about to form a four-letter word, and he knows- he knows like a man knows the train is coming before he hears it- that saying it completes a circuit that cannot be broken.
Consequence. Ronan’s face. Mum’s face. The version of me my family built for themselves, replaced by a version they’ll have to learn.
No.
I pull back from the glass. Vienna doesn’t care.
I let it retreat. Saying it, even letting the four letters form, would mean meaning it.
And I don’t know what comes after that. I’ve never been on the other side.
The blokes were bodies. Laurence is in the bed behind me, his breathing the only evidence that the last three nights happened outside my head.
I get dressed fast—the jeans from the floor, the t-shirt, the hoodie. My hand is on the door handle when I hear him shift—a murmur. He’s reaching for me in sleep.
I don’t turn around.
I don’t turn around because if I turn around, I’ll get back in the bed, and if I get back in the bed, I’ll stay, and if I stay, I’ll have to face it, and it will.
The door, the corridor. The carpet is swallowing my footsteps. Room 412, my key. My room, my untouched bed.
The mirror, when I wipe it, shows a face I don’t recognise.
The features are mine. The architecture behind them has been rearranged.
‘Get a grip.’
The mirror doesn’t flinch.
Today I’ll sit at a different table. Today I’ll be the version of myself that doesn’t need this—sharp, detached, the boy who doesn’t raise his hand. I’ll rebuild it. I’ve done it before. I know exactly how to.
My hands are on the sink. Gripping.
The face in the mirror is not convinced.
Vienna outside, bells. Trams. I stand dripping in a bathroom deciding whether to run towards something or away from it and already knowing, already knowing before the towel hits the rack, that running is the only race I’ve never.
Mirror. Steam. The outline of a word I won’t say.
I pick the table furthest from the academics.
Sit with my back to Laurence’s section of the room.
Order eggs. Laugh at something the PhD student from Leeds says about Hilbert spaces, laugh too loud, laugh like a boy having a brilliant time at a conference who hasn’t spent the last hour staring at a bathroom mirror trying to disassemble his own face.
The wall is up, brick by brick. I’ve been laying it since Lewisham—different face for every room, every bloke, every version of a city that needed a different Ewan. The Lewisham version, the Manchester version. The version that sits in a lecture theatre and doesn’t raise his hand.
This morning: that version. The one who doesn’t need.
Femi sits beside me. Doesn’t say anything. Eats his yoghurt, and I eat my toast—the eggs. The chandelier does its job.
Laurence is staring. Don’t turn around. Eat the eggs, be the version.
He catches me in the corridor outside the conference room, between panels. The foot traffic has thinned, and the corridor is all thick carpet, muted light, and walls that swallow sound.
‘Everything alright?’
His voice. The one he uses when he’s trying not to sound like he’s asking what he’s asking. He’s wearing a different shirt, grey, buttoned to the collar, covering the marks. His eyes aren’t where they usually are.
I did that. I’m the absence he reached for.
The knowledge settles, deep, immovable.
‘It’s just sex.’ I say it flat. Level. The line I assembled in the shower this morning, pre-fabricated, load-tested. ‘Don’t make it weird.’
Pain flickers across him. Fast. A flinch he catches before it finishes. His face hardens. The control I’ve mapped, the one I’ve. Don’t.
‘Right.’ He nods. Steps back. The professional distance clicks into place. ‘Of course.’
He walks away, and the corridor swallows him. His posture is rigid.
But I see it because I put it there.
My hand goes to the wall. Stays there.
Sex. The words taste of nothing. They taste like the eggs tasted, of performance. The mirror saw through it this morning. The man in the corridor saw through it now. The only one still fooled is my hand flat on the wall. Eyes closed.
The wall I built this morning has a crack in it already. Two hours. Pathetic.
Someone passes in the corridor. A delegate with a lanyard and a folder casts me the half-glance you cast at a student leaning against a conference-hotel wall with his eyes closed and clearly not having the best day of his life. Sees me. Carries on. The Austrian politeness that does not inquire.
My fingers flat on the wallpaper. Embossed, Baroque print, an ornate floral repeating itself up and down the corridor. I trace one of the flowers. Ridiculous activity for a Tuesday afternoon.
I could turn around. Go after him. Say I lied, it isn’t just sex, and I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t that: three corridors, a lift, his room.
I don’t turn around.
The thing you build walls against doesn’t stop existing. It just has to find a different route. I’ll need a different route by dinner.
Wall. Breath. The flower under my fingertip.
I open my eyes.
Lunch. Last day. The conference restaurant with its cloth napkins and its civilized murmur and its belief that mathematics and Wiener Schnitzel belong in the same sentence.
Hugo sits next to Laurence.
Three tables away, fork in my grip. Tension is tighter than the situation requires.
They talk, and Hugo says something. Laurence responds, not the forced laugh from yesterday’s breakfast, not the professional performance. Something between them that predates me, a shared vocabulary I’ll never have. Cambridge. A bed, a secret.
Hugo leans in, close, familiar. Casual. Practised.
The jealousy is different today. Smaller than the territorial range of the courtyard. Sadder. Colder. No counter-claim. Hugo doesn’t need to touch him. He had him first.
Hugo has known Laurence at thirty-one. At twenty-seven. At the ages I won’t reach for years. Hugo’s got the reference points: the career, the shared citations, the life built at Cambridge before I existed. I’ll leave my degree in three years with a forwarding address, while Laurence stays forever.
I’m nineteen. With eyeliner, from Lewisham.
The fork bends in my grip. I set it down.
Laurence laughs at Hugo’s joke. I know the real one. It lives on a hotel floor in my memory and nowhere else.
Does he laugh like that with me? Or differently? And which answer would be worse?
Last night. Vienna’s final act. I go to him because the alternative is the untouched bed, the room, the silence. Staying away from him is a weight I’ve hit my limit carrying.
He opens the door. Doesn’t speak. Pulls me in by the wrist, and the grip is—not desperate. Tender. He’s had his fingers on my skin since the corridor, and now: permission.
We make love.
I’ve never used that phrase.
Sex has always been sex—a transaction with a defined output.
You enter, you exit, you keep the receipt.
But what happens in this room on this last night is not sex.
What happens is slower than anything I’ve known, and every time I try to speed up.
Instinct, habit, the nineteen-year-old reflex that says faster, harder, get there.
He slows me down. His breath against my skin.
The rhythm he sets is not the rhythm of want.
It exists beyond my vocabulary. I try naming it anyway. Nothing fits.
I touch him. During. My hand on his cheek while he’s inside me. The gesture surprises me more than the sex. I’ve never done that, not with any bloke, not with anyone.
His face. Where the whole person lives, the why stops mattering, and the doing continues.
He catches my hand. Holds it against his face. Turns into it. His lips on my palm.
There’s no sound between us for a long minute. The only noise is the city beyond the window and the mattress giving with each of his slow pushes and my breath when his hips meet mine at the bottom of the stroke. He moves like someone who has all the time in the world and intends to use all of it.
‘Look at me,’ he says. Not the order from yesterday. Not the command. A request.
I look. He watches me watch him. The proximity of the eye contact is more than the cock in me. I never kept my eyes open, and here I am keeping them open for a man who is moving inside me as if measuring something only he can see.
His thumb brushes my cheek. ‘There you are.’
I come looking at him.
After. The sheets, the dark. Two bodies not separate for once, tangled.
‘What was your life like?’ I ask. ‘Before here. Before Manchester.’
It comes from somewhere I don’t recognise. Somewhere that isn’t strategy or conquest.
‘Controlled,’ he says. ‘Predictable. Cambridge was… I was good at it. The structure, the research. Hugo was part of that trajectory. We made sense on paper.’ Pause. ‘On paper is where we stayed.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He wanted a partner who was an extension of the work. Another academic, another brain. I wasn’t enough for him, not as a person. Only as a colleague who also happened to—’ He stops. ‘There was no mess. No chaos. No losing control.’ He tightens his arm around me. ‘I hadn’t planned any of this.’
I hear what lives underneath. This. Us.
‘Neither had I.’ My voice reduced to something essential. ‘I hadn’t planned… you.’
The words leave me, and they don’t come back.
Four words. Not I love you—the four letters are still at the window where I left them this morning.
But I hadn’t planned you is the closest I’ve come to saying what the letters spell, and Laurence hears it.
I feel him hear it, the catch of his breath against my spine.
His mouth on my neck. One kiss, devotional.
‘I know,’ he says. All of it in his voice. ‘I know.’
Cooling air. His breath against my skin, slowing into sleep.
Tomorrow: the airport, Manchester. The tram, the halls. The narrow bed and the corridors and the risk and the reality that Vienna suspended for four nights and can’t suspend forever.
But tonight: his arm, his breath. The words I said that can’t be unsaid and don’t want to be.
I hadn’t planned for you.
Solid. Stays.
Eyes closing. The rise of his chest against my back.
The last night of freedom, held in both hands.