Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Thirty-seven thousand feet. Clouds underneath like white static. Earphones in, volume low, bass-heavy, something I’m not listening to because the bass in my head is louder.
Vienna is already shrinking, but the city stays. The version of me that existed there, dissolving at the edges, a proof without its assumption.
Four nights. That’s all it was. Four nights in a hotel room. His face down on the pillow, reaching for me in his sleep, saying I hadn’t planned you in a voice that.
The phrase won’t stop. It circles my skull like a bus route with no terminus. I hadn’t planned for you. And the answer I gave back, the echo of it.
I shift in the seat. My back aches in the places where his hands were.
I don’t spin it. Don’t make it a receipt, don’t make it a joke about four-night packages or souvenir soreness.
I let it be what it is: his hands, gone, the ache still there, and me at thirty-seven thousand feet carrying the evidence home because home is where the evidence will matter most.
Don’t.
Outside: cloud, cloud. More cloud. The occasional glimpse of brown flatness. Could be France or Belgium or anywhere that isn’t a hotel room in Vienna where the curtains were gapped, and the dawn was grey-blue, and his hand found my hip while he slept and held on like.
I pull the earphones out. Put it back, pull it out again. My hands need occupation because the alternative is thinking, and thinking has been hostile since this morning.
The bloke from a few months ago, the one who fucked in bathrooms and didn’t leave his number and called everything transactional because the word kept the architecture standing, that bloke feels like a character in a book I read once. Recognisable but remote.
Who the fuck is this?
It doesn’t fit. It’s the wrong shape. Too soft. A question for people who journal and do yoga and have therapists who nod at them.
But I sat on a hotel floor and laughed with him in my grip.
I touched him during sex—his face. I said words that sit in my mouth like I’ve swallowed them forever, in a voice I didn’t know I owned.
The boy who does those things is not the boy who zipped his bag in Lewisham and left it packed, because unpacking meant arriving, and arriving meant staying.
Three rows ahead and across the aisle: the back of his head. Laurence. Reading. I can see the angle of his hand holding the page, the tilt of his neck. Treating a paperback like a primary source.
He turns, slightly, a quarter-turn. He knows where I’m sitting. Our eyes meet across three rows and an aisle.
The look lasts two seconds—maybe less.
In those two seconds: the corridor. Just sex. The lie that tasted of nothing. Last night, touch against his cheek. The three words I won’t speak.
He turns back, the paperback goes up. The mask goes on.
Mine goes on too. We’re very good at masks, the pair of us. Professionally qualified. Could offer a module in it. Advanced Pretending 301, pass guaranteed.
An hour in, he stands for the toilet. The aisle is narrow.
Of course it is, narrow and straight and built for a single file, which is the opposite of what bodies want when the bodies are ours.
He comes past my row. Two inches of clear air between his hip and my shoulder.
The smell of him—the hotel soap, still—hits me before his trousers do.
His hand grips the seatback in front of mine to steady the lurch.
I see the vein in his wrist that I bit on Friday.
He doesn’t look down. Walks on. The lavatory door folds shut behind him with that cheap plastic clack.
I don’t breathe for the count of four. When he comes back the other way, I keep my eyes on the seat pocket like it’s a primary source.
I swallow it. The sound would be wrong up here. Too loud, too much.
The clouds carry on being clouds. The plane continues to be a tube of recycled air and pretense.
Throat, tight. Leave it.
Femi gets me at the gate. He falls into step beside me, rucksack strapped on. He’s been waiting to speak for approximately six hours.
‘So. Whatever’s happening between you and Haldrey—’
‘I told you, nothing’s happening.’
Another warning.
‘There are feelings involved, Ewan.’
I stop walking. A woman with a wheelie case swears and swerves around me. The airport noise, tannoy, footsteps, and the beep of the luggage carousel fill the gap between us.
‘What the fuck do you know?’
Flat. Harder than I mean it. Femi doesn’t flinch. He never flinches—the most annoying thing about him and the only essential one.
‘I know you.’ He adjusts the strap of his rucksack, patient about it. ‘I’ve never seen you this invested. In anything. Now you’re—’ He pauses. Chooses. ‘And he’s risking everything.’
Laurence has already paid for this once.
The career, the department, and the life he built at Cambridge were dismantled because he crossed a line with a student.
And now he’s crossing it again. With me.
The same line in a different postcode. And the consequences won’t be different because the postcode is.
I’m the reason. I walked into that office with a problem set full of deliberate errors, and I touched him and I.
Stomach. Low. The weight you can’t put down.
‘I’m not going to hurt him.’
It comes out before I can test it. Before I can check the structural integrity.
His eyes on mine, then away. More request than demand.
He walks ahead. I stand there with the tannoy announcing a delayed flight to Edinburgh, and I think, for the first time, the first actual time, about what happens to Laurence if this goes wrong.
The career-ending reality, not the abstract, there could be consequences: a disciplinary hearing, a termination letter, his name in a report, the second time.
Laurence, who laughs when he comes and tells me about a jazz club in a voice that kept breaking, sat across from a panel, explaining why he did it again.
Because of me.
In the game, the consequences belonged to him: his career, his risk, his choice. I was the prize, not the threat.
Except I’m not the prize. I’m the—
Don’t finish that.
Manchester. The arrivals hall smells of three centuries of rain.
I scan for him without deciding to. Automatic. How my eyes find him in a lecture theatre, in a corridor, in a room full of people who don’t know his taste at four in the morning.
There. By the taxi rank. Coat on, phone in his hand, bag slung across him. The mask is firmly in place. Dr Haldrey, returning from a conference, has nothing to declare.
He looks up. Finds me across thirty metres of the arrivals hall. Straight to me, no search.
The look, the last one. All the unspoken weight of four nights and a corridor and a promise I made. I see the question in it, and now?, and I don’t have an answer. I look away. The looking hurts more than the leaving.
My phone buzzes. Ronan.
Coming to Manchester next month. For a proper visit this time. We need to talk, Ewe.
The weight of what we need to talk about from a man who doesn’t say those words lightly. The Ewe at the end.
I stare at the screen. Manchester’s rain is already on the glass doors.
Chest. Tight. The pressure of two things closing in from opposite directions, the man behind me, the brother ahead, and nowhere left that isn’t one of them.
It’s raining. The tram window streaks with it. Droplets race each other down the glass like I used to on the 171. Except on the 171, I was bored, and on the Metrolink to Chorlton, I’m ruined.
Laurence’s flat. Third time this week. The routine has reassembled itself post-Vienna like a bone that’s been broken and reset.
We don’t talk about it. Not about Hugo, not about I hadn’t planned you, not about the corridor or the lie or the last night when I touched him, and the room shifted around it.
We fuck. That hasn’t changed. His hands on me, the specific pressure I’ve memorised, how his breath catches when I bite the spot below his ear. The sex is still good. Still desperate.
But I stay.
That’s the difference. Before Vienna, I’d come, clean up, check my phone, leave—the post-sex choreography, known steps.
Practised exit, now I stay. Laurence makes me coffee with milk and sugar, takes his own black, always, and talks about a documentary he watched, or a book, or a memory from Lancaster that involves rain and a dog and a pier that doesn’t exist anymore.
And I listen because I want to know—the man behind the desk, behind the composure.
The other day he told me about his sister. A nurse. Lives in Preston. Called him a disaster in the kindest possible way.
I laughed. He looked at me, the look of someone recalculating.
I’m still thinking about that look.
And I’ve started asking real questions. What were you like at eighteen?
Did you always want to teach? What’s the worst paper you’ve ever reviewed?
He answers at first with the wariness of someone handling a box he’s not sure is booby-trapped.
Then less cautiously. Then, with unguarded honesty, that the asking itself is a form of.
He stops mid-sentence sometimes, catches himself. The calculating silence before he decides: do I ask why you’re here at eleven PM with your trainers under my bed and your coffee going cold in your hands?
One night, it returns.
Different from the first time. First time it was the professional voice coming back online, after him in my hair, rules being stated because rules had to exist.
This time he’s at the sink. Rinse two mugs. I’m propped against the counter, watching him tense. How his whole frame braces when words he doesn’t want to speak are gathering.
‘Nobody can know.’ To the water, to the mug, to the fact of us standing in a kitchen at half eleven on a Tuesday.
Same words as the first time.
Different weight entirely.
The first time, it sounded like a rule.
This time, it sounds like grief with the volume turned down.