Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Leaving is not an option.
I sit on the narrow bed at half five in the morning with the ceiling above me and an idea that came to me at night, like good ideas come, not built, not reasoned. Found. Like a proof that was always there, waiting for someone to look in the right place.
I pull a sheet of paper from the notepad Femi left on my desk. Plain. Lined. I pick up a pen.
And I write the warm-up challenge. The problem from the first lecture in September: two hundred freshers, Dr Haldrey at the board, just to see where you all are. I solved it in my head before his pen stopped moving, and I didn’t raise my hand.
I write the solution. The full proof. Every step laid out with the precision Merton saw in my exam papers, the elegance Laurence named before I understood what the word meant.
Clean lines. No wasted steps. The route from premise to conclusion that lives in negative space, visible only from the back row, and only visible if you’re thinking about his hands.
Below the proof, one line.
My handwriting. Not the careful version I use for exams; the real one, the Lewisham scrawl that leans left.
This is mine. You didn’t give me this.
But you gave me the will to earn it.
The tram to Chorlton at seven in the morning is a different species from the evening one: commuters, not students. People with purpose and early starts, and the resigned faces of adults who’ve accepted that consciousness at this hour is the price of rent.
I get off at the usual stop. Walk the route by body now, not by map, the left at the corner shop, the terraced houses, the particular crack in the pavement I always step over because it’s shaped like a lightning bolt.
His building, green door, I buzz. Hold. Nothing.
Buzz again, the intercom crackles. Nothing.
I crouch. The letterbox is brass, tarnished at the edges. The gap underneath the door is maybe an inch, just enough. I slide the paper through. Hear it land on hardwood
I stand. Don’t knock again. Don’t wait.
Walk.
A different sheet, a different proof, same plain paper.
You don’t get to decide what’s good for me. That’s my choice. It’s always been my choice.
The green door, the brass letterbox. The inch of gap, the paper sliding through. Landing. Silence.
I press my palm flat against the door. Hold it there, the wood is cold. Behind it: the table, the key. The kitchen where he drew his line.
Something moves. Inside. A shift of weight, a floorboard, the particular creak that happens between the hallway and the kitchen. I’ve made this creak at 2 am in bare feet, walking back to bed after a glass of water, the flat’s own language that I learnt without—
He’s there. On the other side of this door. Close enough that the wood between us is the only thing.
I take my hand off. Walk.
This paper took the longest. Two hours at the desk with the fairy lights leaking under the partition and the bloke next door snoring for once instead of wanking, the silence, generous for once.
I’m not Hugo. This is not Cambridge. And you’re not who you were then.
Took two hours because every other version was longer, and the longer versions were the old Ewan, the one who’d wrap a truth in so many sentences it arrived at a tolerable temperature—the one who’d explain, justify, perform.
The door, the letterbox, the paper, the sound.
My palm stays off the wall. The creaking doesn’t happen. Stand, turn, walk.
The tram back to Fallowfield. Rain on the windows, Manchester doing its thing. I press my forehead against the glass as I did in September on the bus home from the first lecture, watching the same terraced houses and Greggs and grey slide past.
Different boy, same glass.
Fourth morning.
The green door opens before I knock.
Laurence.
My—fuck.
He looks—I catalogue it before the thinking starts, as my brain always catalogues him, body first, analysis second. The stubble, he never has stubble—dark under the eyes, not shadows, cavities. Structural, architectural tired, shirt wrinkled—the same shirt, three days unwashed, unironed.
He’s holding the three pieces of paper.
Stacked. Read. The edges are slightly curled from being held too long by hands that shook.
‘Come in.’
His voice. Wrecked.
I go in.
The flat. Cold. The heating’s still off, and the mess is—Laurence doesn’t leave a mess. Laurence folds tea towels, and Laurence alphabetises his bookshelves. The sink has three days of mugs in it. A plate with toast crusts—a jumper on the floor.
He walks to the kitchen table, the table where the key was placed and contaminated, and his palms flat on the surface, shaking visibly from across the room.
I sit.
He sits opposite. The three pages between us. Next to the key, which is still there. Brass on wood. Exactly where I left it.
Don’t look at the key. Look at him.
He’s red-rimmed. The glasses are off, and without them, he’s unfinished. Exposed. Every line. The one between his eyebrows that deepens when he’s thinking. Lines around his eyes that weren’t there before. He’s thirty-two and—
‘You told me I have a rare mind.’ My voice. Not performance, the real one. ‘Believe me when I use it. This is real, we are real. And running away doesn’t protect me. It breaks both of us.’
He’s looking at the proof. The warm-up challenge is my handwriting.
‘The review board cleared my results.’ I keep going because stopping means losing it. ‘An old professor. Merton. Looked at my papers and said they were elegant.’
His eyes close.
‘Ewan. Please.’
‘I’m not done.’ My voice stripped to its foundation.
‘You’re not repeating a pattern, Laurence.
With Hugo it was comfort. Familiar. With me it’s a mess and you chose the mess.
Every single time, you chose it. The office hours, the text at eleven.
The key. That wasn’t a mistake repeated.
That was a man who wanted me. Badly enough to risk it. ’
I stop. Because his face breaks.
Tears, these are present tense. Active, silent. Tracking down his cheeks while that focus stays open and fixed on the piece of paper with the warm-up challenge proof and the words this is mine in my handwriting.
I watch the man I love cry, and the watching is the hardest thing I’ve ever done because every instinct I have says cross this table, touch him, use the body, and the body doesn’t know how to do this.
The body knows how to fuck and how to leave.
It does not know how to sit in a kitchen chair and watch someone you love fall apart.
Stay.
I stay.
He cries. The tears and the tremor and the three pieces of paper and the brass Yale still sitting where I left it and the mugs in the sink and someone who spent a life being precise, failing here.
I reach across the table. Take him. The contact. Nothing electric, none of the words I’d have used in October when every touch was a detonation. This is the current that runs through a building so constantly you forget it’s there until someone turns the lights off.
We sit in the kitchen, the cold flat. Then a sound comes out of him, neither word nor sob but the hybrid, the wordless noise of a man reaching the edge and crossing it, and he stands, and I stand, and he’s against me. Arms around me. His face is on my neck—his weight—
I hold him. Hold. My arms around his back, the wrinkled shirt, the spine underneath. His breath against my collarbone. Ragged. Wet. He smells of the same shirt and the same pillow and underneath it, faintly, the smell I know, coffee and paper and Laurence, still there.
We stand in the kitchen, and I hold this man, and the holding is more intimate than any sex we’ve ever had. More than the wall, more than the desk. More than Vienna.
Two people standing still.
He pulls back, his eyes wrecked. Red. He brings his hand up and touches me.