Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ronan closes around my arm. It’s a claim, not a grab. Ron’s fingers wrap the bicep as they have since Lewisham. Muscle memory.
‘You’re coming with me.’ Low. The register of an order. ‘Now.’
His grip is strong. Ron has always been stronger, with more muscle and a heavier frame. I feel the pull. Towards the door, towards the corridor. Towards a train back to London.
I plant my feet.
‘No.’
It comes out wrong, too loud, too much, the vowel distorted by pain.
I wrench my arm free. The force of it surprises both of us. Ron’s hand opening, my body stumbling half a step back, the space that opens between us. Two Carricks, the hierarchy has shifted. Neither of us agreed to it.
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
Ron stares at his own hand. ‘I’m an adult.’ My voice is shaking, but the words aren’t—the steadiest things in this room. ‘I make my own choices. And I choose Laurence.’
I turn. Not fully. I won’t give Ron my back, not now, the instinct won’t allow it. Half-turn. Enough to find Laurence’s eyes.
He’s by the bookshelf. Hasn’t moved since the confrontation started. His face is white, drawn, the professional mask reduced to its framework. But he’s looking at me and looking at me with the look I’ve only seen once before—the morning after our first night.
‘He’s important to me,’ I say. To Ron, to Laurence, to the room. ‘Very important.’
The nights, the key. How he washes my hair. How he says my name when nobody else is listening. Ron’s face collapses inward. Something worse. Watching a door close from the wrong side.
Then Laurence speaks.
I’ve heard this man lecture to two hundred students without a tremor. I’ve heard him take apart a colleague’s argument without raising his voice. I’ve heard him come apart in my arms, voice cracking, vowels spilling out of the fractures.
This voice is none of those.
This voice is soft and certain. The shame has run out—what’s left: defiance.
‘What I feel for your brother is real.’
Ron turns, slowly, addressed by the defendant. Didn’t expect testimony.
‘It’s not a whim.’ Laurence’s hands are at his sides.
Still, the stillness is chosen. I can see the effort in his forearms, the tremor suppressed.
‘It’s not a phase. It’s not a midlife crisis or a power trip or whatever framework you need to make this make sense to you.
It happened. I didn’t plan it. I fought it, I failed. And I can’t take it back.’
He finds my eyes, holds them.
‘I choose him. I won’t take it back.’
I choose him. Three words filling the room with no caveat, no qualifier, no professional hedging. Laurence Haldrey, the man who measures every syllable, proofreads his own emails, once corrected my grammar while I was going down on him—choosing me.
Ron looks between us. He opens his mouth. Closes it. The argument has left him, not the conviction, that’s still there, hardening in his jaw, but the words have gone. There’s no room.
‘I don’t recognise you anymore.’ Ron. To me, aimed and absolute. He means it—no performance, no strategy. That Ewan, who drove to Manchester in September, wouldn’t have planted his feet in a lecturer’s living room and said important. That Ewan didn’t care about anything.
‘Maybe you never really knew me.’
The words surprise me as they leave. It’s true. Truer than I love him. Ron knows the Ewan who shrugs at everything. He doesn’t know the Ewan who preps for a man because the man matters.
Ron’s eyes change. He’s looking at me and seeing, for the first time, that the rescue isn’t wanted.
‘When it all falls apart,’ Ron says. He’s at the door now. Jacket on, the zip, the pockets. The body is leaving before the mind has decided. ‘And it will fall apart, Ewan. Remember, I tried to protect you.’
Protect. There it is again, cracked open twenty minutes ago, still bleeding.
The door.
He opens it, doesn’t look back. Pulls the door shut behind him—not a slam but worse. Controlled. The click echoes through the flat. Two mugs on the counter. The flat still smells of him.
Laurence’s hand finds mine, fingers lacing through fingers, the thing couples do.
We stand there—the flat around us and the absence inside it. My brother has walked out with photos on his phone and an address memorised and a conviction that will harden into action. The logic is inescapable; the only variable is time.
‘Are you okay?’
Laurence, his voice. Low. Lancashire. No good answer, asked anyway.
And here, this man. And his first word isn’t about himself. It’s not about Monday.
Are you okay?
‘No.’ My voice. Honest. Because no is just the truth with nowhere left to hide. ‘But I’m here.’
He tightens his grip on mine.
The flat, we sit. The rain is starting again.
The light moves across the room. We don’t move with it. His hand on mine on the sofa. Mine on his. Two grips arguing for the same thing—don’t let go—in the same direction, so the argument cancels and the hands just stay.
It gets dark. He stands once to put on a lamp. Sits back down.
‘Eat something,’ he says, the way he says things he doesn’t believe.
‘Not hungry.’
‘Me neither.’
We sit until ten. Until eleven. Until the silence stops being shocked and becomes just silence—the kind that knows itself, the kind I’ve heard him produce at his desk while he marks—a familiar quality of attention.
‘Bed,’ he says.
I follow him. He turns the lamp on at the bedside. Domesticity continued on autopilot while the world pulled the rug out.
We undress. Slow. Not the slow of want, the slow of attention. He folds his shirt because he always folds his shirt, and the small ritual of it is what undoes me.
I get into bed. He follows. The lamp is off—the dark.
For a long minute, neither of us moves. His breath on my shoulder, mine through my nose. The flat outside the bedroom door makes its night sounds—radiator click, fridge hum, the low buzz of a city continuing.
Then his hand is on my hip—a question.
‘Yes,’ I say into the dark. Yes for everything. Because if this is the last weekend, the word matters more than usual.
He kisses my shoulder. The lips are warm, dry, and careful.
He maps me like this is a thing he wants to remember.
Collarbone. Sternum. The dip below my ribs.
He doesn’t speed up. Doesn’t reach for what he could reach for.
Just hands and mouth, slow, the kind of attention I used to think was a story straight people told themselves.
I touch his face in the dark. His jaw under my palm. The stubble at the corner.
‘Don’t think,’ he says.
‘Are you?’
‘Trying not to.’
‘How’s it going.’
A breath that might be a laugh. Might not.
He moves over me. His weight, familiar, the angle his elbows take to spare my chest the full press of him. He’s been doing that for months. The body’s vocabulary, the small kindnesses I’ve stopped noticing because they’ve become baseline.
We don’t fuck. Not exactly. We do something slower than fucking and longer than it. His mouth on my neck. My hand finds the place at his lower back where the muscle dips. His cock against mine, the friction unhurried, the dark holding us. Both of us are hard. Neither of us is racing.
The condom stays in the drawer. Not because we plan it that way. We don’t get there. The arrival isn’t the point.
When I come, it’s into his hand and he comes breathing in my ear, saying my name, the Ewan he uses when he’s not performing anything, the quiet one—into my hand, into the dark, the sound barely above a breath.
After both of us breathe, his weight moves off, his hand back on my hip, the position we sleep in. The familiar position.
‘Stay, Ewan.’ His voice. Lancashire all the way through it.
‘Where else would I go.’
He doesn’t answer. The silence has that question in it, and we both leave it there.
I close my eyes. Not sleep.
The rain starts again. Or hasn’t stopped—either way.
Monday is wrong. I can feel it before I see it, like knowing a proof is broken before finding the error; the logic running sideways.
Coffee in one hand. Phone in the other, screen dark, no messages, the silence from Laurence a bruise I keep pressing.
Two girls from my econometrics tutorial are standing outside the entrance to the maths building.
They see me, stop talking. The stop is surgical, mid-syllable, mouths closing in unison, eyes cutting sideways.
Walk past. Don’t look.
I look.
One of them is scrolling on her phone. The other has an expression I’ve worn. Someone torn between sympathy and entertainment.
The corridor is worse.
Fragments. The acoustics carry whispers. You catch sound without meaning. ‘…Haldrey…’ from a cluster near the vending machine. ‘…first year… a proper slag…’ from a bloke I’ve never spoken to with his mate, both of them tracking me as I pass.
Stomach. Cold.
I keep walking. The rhythm, left, right, left, mechanical.
Ronan. His touch is everywhere now. Friday night, the door closing. The deliberate click. The promise that wasn’t a promise: remember, I tried to protect you.
Protect. Meaning report. Meaning emails, meetings, concerns raised behind closed doors. Whatever he said three days ago has escaped containment now. I can feel it in the turned heads, the interrupted conversations, the way people stop talking when I come into view.
Protect.
I want to stop. Want to ask: what did you hear? Who said it? How much do you know? Instead, I walk. The walking is a performance because underneath it, my hands are shaking around a cardboard cup, and the campus I’ve been crossing for eight months has become foreign territory.
Three postgrads near the noticeboard stop talking when I approach. Coordinated. Rehearsed.
My feet keep going, they have to. The body does its job when the chest can’t. Somewhere behind my sternum, a small thing I’ve been carrying for eight months, the sense of being a person in a place, unclips and drops, and the sound is swallowed by the corridor’s roar of unspoken things.