Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Ronan’s been withdrawn for three days. That’s the part that should worry me.
The interrogation was predictable, Ron doing what Ron does, the questions sharpening. That I can handle, I grew up handling it. But the silence after—that’s different.
Don’t think about it.
Today I’m going to the library. I told Femi I’m going to the library.
I told the ceiling I’m going to the library.
The library, in my mouth, means a flat in Chorlton where a man with Lancashire vowels is marking papers with a cup of coffee going cold beside him, and the library has a bed, and the bed has been the most useful piece of furniture in my career.
I leave the halls at four. The air’s doing that Manchester thing; not raining, not not raining, just a suspended grey hostility that coats your face and never commits.
Hood up, earphones in. Deftones, the track that sounds like drowning.
I walk the route I always walk because I’ve stopped caring about evasion.
Tram to Chorlton. The Metrolink does its crawl through Stretford, past the retail parks and the roundabouts and the terraced rows that blur like smeared paint. None of it registers; my knee bounces. My stomach clenches. Wanting somewhere so badly, the journey becomes an insult.
His street. The Victorian terrace with the green door. I let myself in with the key, cold brass against my palm, still not ordinary.
The flat smells like him. Always does. Coffee and paper and ironed shirts. His orderliness is so complete it looks like love.
Laurence is in the kitchen.
‘You’re early.’
‘Couldn’t wait.’
He almost smiles.
I drop my bag and cross the kitchen. His chair scrapes back when I reach him, and then his hands are on my hips, and mine are in his hair, and we’re doing the thing we always do—the collision, the urgency—thirty-six hours, too many.
He tastes of apples, his fingers hook under my shirt. I’m already hard—possibly I’ve been since the text this morning that said the flat’s cold without you. The translation is mine, fluent by now.
His lips on my skin. My fingers on his buttons. We work our way to the bedroom through the hallway with the efficiency of practice and the gracelessness of need; my hip hits the doorframe, his elbow knocks a book off the shelf, neither of us stops.
The bed, his weight on me. My brain goes to the simplest sequence: his chest against mine, his hips pinning me through his trousers, warmth at my collarbone, and I feel it everywhere, the nerves lighting.
‘Off,’ I say. His shirt, his trousers, everything. He obliges, composed above the waist, shaking below it. He, like this, never gets old. The muscled frame, the dark line of hair disappearing south, how his cock curves slightly left, and the weight of him when I reach for it.
He exhales, that sound. I replay it on the tram home. Can’t delete it.
I pull him down. Kissing hard, my legs around his hips, the angle that says I want you inside me, we’ve been past words for weeks. He finds the lube with his fingers. I prepped at halls, the douche, the shower, the ritual I only perform for this man, and would rather die than admit to.
Two fingers, slow, the stretch that starts as too much and becomes not enough within the same breath.
He enters me, and I hate the patience and love it—the fullness that makes everything else irrelevant, his hips flush against mine.
He holds, watching me adjust, the attention nobody before him ever gave.
We move fast, then not, his hand on my jaw, turning my face so he can see me.
I don’t hide. His eyes behind the glasses he hasn’t taken off undo me, but the laugh dies because the angle shifts, and he hits the spot, and language goes.
I grip him, pull closer. Closer. The greed of wanting someone inside you and still wanting them deeper.
‘Laurence.’ I say it into his neck. Feel his rhythm stutter. ‘Laurence. I need to tell you this.’
He slows. Doesn’t stop. ‘What?’
The words are in my throat. They’ve been there for weeks.
‘I think I’ve—’ My voice. Smaller than I planned. His cock still inside me, his weight still on me, that focus still on mine. ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with you.’
His hips stop, his breath stops, the whole flat stops—boiler, rain, I love you hanging between us. His eyes change first. He traces my cheekbone with his thumb, always this thumb, always this cheekbone.
‘Me too, Ewan.’ Lancashire. ‘For a while now.’
The kiss is different—no collision, no urgency. This one is wordless, and I mean it.
He starts to move again. Slow. The rhythm has changed, deliberate, chosen, tender. He watches me. I don’t look away.
I come saying his name. Proper, not the surname, not the title, just Laurence, slipping out in a voice I don’t recognise, lower than performance, rougher than strategy, the voice under all the voices—the Lewisham in it.
He follows. Deep inside me, he was buried at my neck, the sound bitten off against my skin. My legs are around him. His hands were gripping the sheets beside my head. The shudder through him and into me, and somewhere it doesn’t stop.
After, still inside me, softening, his breath against my collarbone, my hand in his hair. The boiler, the rain, his heart against my chest.
‘Say it,’ I whisper. He lifts his head, looks at me, glasses fogged and crooked.
‘I love you,’ he says. Clear. ‘Is that sufficient, Carrick?’
It undoes me—the Carrick after everything, tenderness only this man could manage. ‘Sufficient,’ I say. ‘Barely.’
Both of us grinning like idiots, his cock slipping out of me, the gracelessness of that moment, and not caring.
He rolls off, and I curl into him. His arm around me, heavy, intentional.
His pulse under my ear. The flat, the rain, him, breathing.
I leave at eleven, the shower shared, him washing my hair, his kiss at the door slow. Chorlton at night, the cold hitting my damp hair and the shock welcome. Victorian terraces in their rows under amber streetlamps, the pavement wet and the air cold.
The smile won’t leave—stupid, uncontrollable—and I walk with time to kill and the fact of being loved still settling into place.
My phone buzzes, Laurence. Get home safe.
Three words. Someone is checking that you got home.
I type back: Already miss you. Send it. Don’t delete it. The old Ewan would’ve deleted it, too much like handing someone the coordinates to the vulnerable bit. Ewan presses send, puts the phone in his pocket, and walks through Chorlton with wet hair and a sore arse.
The tram stop. I wait. The rain starts properly now, committed, northern rain that means business. My hood stays down, let it come.
Behind me, fifty metres back, in the shadow of a parked car: the glow of a phone screen. A photo was taken. Another. Three hours in the cold, watching. This is Ronan’s patience.
The observation misses me.
I’m looking at the sky and smiling and thinking about it for a while now, in his voice.
The tram comes, and I get on. The doors close.
The phone screen behind the car goes dark.
Feet on wet pavement, walking away.
Towards the green door, where the name on the buzzer will answer every question a brother ever needed to ask.
The following day at four thirty-five on the clock is when the knock becomes real.
We’re still on the bed, him on his back, me propped on one elbow with my fingers still in his hair. The gold light dies. The afternoon has ended, and something is arriving to collect.
We’ve been here for two hours. The slow thing, the one where he held my face the whole time, and I let him.
We made love, and then we lay here. The afternoon went on without us.
‘We could go to the cinema Saturday,’ I say flatly. Ordinary. That’s the point. ‘That place in Glossop with the sofas.’
‘The one where you spilled popcorn in my lap and pretended it was an accident?’
‘It was an accident.’
‘You aimed.’
I grin. He sees it. He smiles, that surprised smile I’ve learned means I caught him off guard.
He finds my hip, thumb tracing the bone. A future counted in dreams. Both of us are pretending they’re allowed.
His phone buzzes on the nightstand. He ignores it. Three months ago, he’d have checked. Now the phone buzzes, and he stays.
‘I was thinking,’ he says, his thumb still on my hip. ‘Easter break. There’s a cottage in the Lakes. Belonged to a colleague’s family. She lets people use it off-season.’
Easter. Three weeks away, a cottage. The Lakes. It’s so normal, what he’s saying. Two people are planning a holiday, but they can’t be seen together.
I don’t say any of that. I say: ‘Yeah. That sounds proper good.’
The proper slips out. He notices. Doesn’t comment. He presses his thumb into my hip bone, once.
I press my face into his neck. Close my eyes. The heartbeat under his skin. The flat, the gold light. The.
This. Just this.
So, the knock comes at four thirty-five.
The green digits on Laurence’s alarm clock burn into my retina in the same second the sound hits the door.
Three hits. Fast, hard, knuckles that aren’t asking.
My stomach, ice. Instant.
Laurence sits up, I sit up, we look at each other across the sheets—every secret, every risk, every corridor and cupboard and night I shouldn’t have been here. He goes white all at once.
‘Are you expecting anyone?’
He shakes his head. He’s looked at the bedroom door, then the hallway, then back to me. Computing.
Three more. Harder. The door shudders in its frame.
‘Open up, Haldrey.’ Ronan’s voice. Cold. Flat. ‘I know my brother is in there.’
I’m off the bed. Jeans—where are my jeans? Floor. I grab them. Hands shaking so badly that the zip takes three attempts—shirt, inside out. Don’t care. Laurence is watching me from the bed, still shirtless, still pale, and the stillness in him is the kind that comes after deciding.
‘Don’t open it.’ My voice. Breathless, pathetic. ‘Laurence, don’t. Please.’
‘Ewan.’
One word. The same Lancashire as last night. The same steadiness.