Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Departmental drinks. The foyer’s been repurposed with committee-level effort; trestle tables, paper napkins, wine in plastic cups, a cheese platter that peaked two hours ago and is now entering its Baroque period.
The Head of Department is telling a story about a conference in Oslo that four people are pretending to find interesting.
Postgrads cluster near the wine. Staff cluster near the door.
The hierarchy is spatial, and nobody’s broken the treaty.
I shouldn’t be here.
Ewan Carrick, fresher, economics, no reason to be here except the one reason currently standing across the room in a navy blazer with a glass of red he hasn’t touched—a man who makes you understand why anyone wears one at all.
Laurence. Professional mode engaged, the posture, the smile. He’s talking to a postdoc about topology or geometry or whatever involves hand gestures and the occasional precise nod. The collar is done up. The cuffs are buttoned. Every inch of him says I am a serious academic with serious thoughts.
The blazer, Christ. Navy, fitted, sitting across his shoulders like architecture on a skyline.
I’ve seen this man naked, had him shaking apart in a hotel room in Vienna with his hands in my hair.
The blazer is worse—I want to peel it off him like evidence.
My dick has opinions about everything this man wears since week one, but the blazer is going straight to the top.
I lean against the wall. Beer in hand, the cheap lager they’ve put out for the students brave enough to attend. Sip. Watch.
He feels it, the stare. His whole frame shifts, not a flinch, subtler. He scans, finds me, and flicks away.
I don’t look away.
He scans again. Finds me. Flicks away. The muscle in his cheek is working against the mouth that wants to. His glass comes up, and he doesn’t drink, a prop, a hand busy.
I watch the blazer. The clean line across the shoulders that wouldn’t survive a hand on it.
The lapel. The millimetre of the shirt cuff on each sleeve.
Someone ironed that shirt this morning. He did.
He stood in his kitchen at seven with his hair wet and pressed a shirt he’d wear to this reception, knowing he’d wear it for my benefit too.
Now he’s watching me watch him from twelve metres across a foyer with a cheese platter between us and a regret he didn’t fully clock when he buttoned it up.
The Head of Department asks him something. He answers. His mouth moves in complete sentences while the rest of him is logged in to the part he’s been trying to run offline for a year.
I sip beer that’s gone room temperature—the lager tastes of plastic and of watching. I’m enjoying this. He knows. That’s half the charge—he’s in professional mode, and I’m against a wall and between us is the agreement that we both know exactly what we’re doing to each other.
Forty minutes. That’s how long he lasts. Forty minutes of me against this wall, beer going warm, staring at him. He laughs at the right moments. Nods at the right moments. Shakes the right hand. And every thirty seconds, his gaze slides back to me. Can’t stop himself.
Nobody notices—two hundred conversations, the clink of plastic cups. Nobody sees what runs between us. My wall, his blazer, twelve metres of departmental carpet that might as well be nothing.
Nobody except maybe the colleague. The module coordinator. She’s near the cheese, watching. She’s always watching.
Laurence puts down his untouched wine. Excuses himself.
Walks towards the corridor with the stride of a man going to the toilet or checking his phone.
Any plausible reason a lecturer might leave a room other than I’m about to compromise everything with the student who’s been eye-fucking me for forty minutes.
I count to sixty. Give the wall one last lean. Follow.
The corridor is empty, fluorescent light, scuffed lino. He’s standing by the fire exit. Waiting. Not leaning. Standing.
‘You need to stop looking at me like that.’ Low. Tight. His whole frame locked against what his body wants. ‘People will notice.’
‘Then stop wanting me to look at you like that.’
He flares. The exact second the professional loses.
‘I mean it, Ewan.’
First name, in the corridor. Where anyone could hear, the slip is its own answer, the mouth saying stop while the voice says Ewan, and both of us hearing which one is louder.
He grabs my arm; his hands are shaking. Three steps. A door hidden from view, a room nobody enters unless they’re mopping or making a terrible decision.
We’re making a terrible decision.
The door shuts. Dark. For a second, neither of us moves; he’s against the door, hand still on the handle, and I understand: he’s leaving me the out. Even here, even now. Thirty-one years old with his career three metres from his back, and he’s still waiting for me to say it.
‘Yes,’ I say, into the dark. ‘I’m here. Come on.’
My back hits the shelving. Something rattles, a bottle, a spray can.
He kisses me. Hungry. This is fast, reckless, forty minutes of holding it together, detonating against his teeth. He finds my belt, my hand finds his. We work in the dark, by feel.
‘Quiet.’ His breath against my ear. ‘They’re right there.’
Right there. Through one wall: the murmur of the reception, glasses, laughter, the Head of Department’s Oslo story entering its third act. Colleagues. Students. Professional respectability, three metres from where his hand is wrapped around my cock.
I bite my lip. He tightens his grip, the friction is—fuck. The friction of a hand that knows the speed and the pressure and the exact—
He turns me, face to the wall. My palms flat against the plaster.
His chest against my back, the blazer still on, the belt undone, but the shirt still tucked.
His hips grind against me in short, controlled thrusts, his cock hard and insistent against my arse through the fabric of our trousers.
We don’t have time for more. We don’t have, his hand comes around, covers my mouth.
I breathe against his palm. His other hand on my cock, the rhythm escalating. His mouth behind my ear—and this—
His blazer button presses into my shoulder blade through my t-shirt, brass cold through cotton. He hasn’t taken the jacket off. Collar done up, cuffs buttoned, belt undone, and everything else in place. He is conducting the whole surrender from inside the uniform.
He’s humping me in a cupboard between mops and bleach bottles.
I come into his hand. Silent except for the sound against his palm, the bitten-off noise that he absorbs. My legs shake, the shelving rattles. We both freeze, his hand still on my mouth, his cock hard against my arse through his trousers, neither of us breathing.
The reception continues on the other side of the wall; nobody heard.
I turn around, drop to my knees on the cold, gritty industrial tile, his cock in my mouth and his hand in my hair, the sound he makes filling the dark.
My hands find his thighs through the wool.
He’s still in his trousers, the fly open, the rest of him intact.
I work him with my mouth and the hand that’s not braced on his hip, his weight shifting against the door, his other hand in my hair, tightening, loosening, tightening again as if he keeps remembering not to grip and forgetting to remember.
His thigh trembles under my palm. The wool is warm now. His breath above me catches, an indrawn syllable that doesn’t make it to a word.
He comes with his head tipped back against the door. I feel it, the shudder through his thighs, the hand tightening in my hair, the sound locked deep in his throat. I swallow, stand. Wipe my mouth.
Dark. Both of us are breathing bleach, floor wax, sex, three metres of wall, and whatever comes next. His breath slowing, mine not.
‘This is insane,’ he says. The composure gone, nothing left but the accent and the breath and the man.
‘Yeah.’
‘We can’t keep—’
‘I know.’
We know, and we keep.
His hand on my face, thumb across my cheekbone, the kiss in a cleaning cupboard among mops—tenderness that doesn’t care where it is.
I leave first, smooth the shirt. Run a hand through my hair. Walk back into the foyer like I’ve been to the toilet and definitely haven’t been on my knees in a cupboard.
Laurence follows five minutes later. The blazer’s buttoned. The collar’s straight, almost. The top button is one millimetre wrong.
I see the colleague sees it.
She’s by the cheese platter. Cup in hand. Her eyes track Laurence as he re-enters, and the scan takes two seconds—the collar, the flush still visible, the hair slightly rearranged at the temple. Her attention shifts to me. Back to him, the triangle completes.
She doesn’t speak. That’s the worst part. But the look she gives him is knowing and complete.
The look has a department behind it. A career.
Years of colleague history—shared supervisions, end-of-term meals, handovers at the printer.
She’s been collecting evidence not to use, the way decent people in offices collect evidence not to use, and tonight she’s logged another file under Laurence Haldrey, not my problem until it is.
He knows she knows. She knows he knows she knows. The silence between them isn’t new. Only the specificity is. Before, she had inferred. Now she has a top button one millimetre wrong and a flushed student across the room and the triangle of a glance that connected them.
She turns back to her wine. The cheese platter enters its final act. The reception carries on.
Laurence’s eyes find mine across the room. In them: the same knowledge. We’re being seen. And neither of us can stop.
Outside. Manchester is doing its thing, dark, wet, the streetlights making the pavement look like a noir film set. I check my phone.
Ronan.
Arriving Friday. Want to see your campus properly this time.
Properly. Loaded. He means I’m going to find out what you’re hiding. The code I’m fluent in now.