Page 111 of Proof By Contradiction
The door opens. The light from inside is warm and low, and his hand comes through the gap and grabs my wrist and pulls.
Inside. Door shut, lock turned—his back against it, my front against his. The deadbolt sliding home is the most obscene thing I’ve heard all day, including the bloke at dinner who pronounced ‘Wiener’ like a body part.
Kissing him. Both hands in my hair, pulling, angling, and the kiss is different here. No countdown in it, no one-ear-on-the-stairwell. No tram to catch, no hallway to check, no risk calculusrunning in the background like a programme that never closes. Just warmth and mine. Vienna outside, nowhere else to be.
I push him harder against the door. His shirt, the blue one, the one I’ve been undressing in my head for three hours, comes untucked, and I find skin beneath, and it’s warm and taut, and his stomach contracts under my touch, and the sound he makes is.
A sound I haven’t heard before. Open. Unguarded.
‘We have all night.’ Against his neck. The stubble. His pulse is going faster than mine, and mine is.
He pulls back, holds my face.
‘We have all night,’ he repeats. Tasting the concept rather than correcting it. The concept. As if he’s never—as if we’ve never.
We haven’t. Every time we’ve fucked, it’s been stolen from the timetable like a library book you know you’ll have to return.
Tonight there’s no due date.
His hands are on my belt. My hands are on his buttons. The blue shirt falls, and there he is, the dark hair I’ve traced with my tongue enough times to draw from memory, the body I know in the dark. But in this light, in this room, without the ambient dread, tonight it’s different.
We make it to the bed. I push him back, straddle his hips, grind down. His cock strains against his trousers, and I reach between us and press my palm flat against it, and his head drops back, and the sound that comes out of him fills the room because the room can hold it. No thin walls. No woman crying to her mum next door. Just us and the chandelier city beyond the curtains.
Clothes gone, all of them. A tangle on the floor, his and mine, indistinguishable.
I reach for my bag. Condom. Lube. The plug, already in me since the shower two hours ago, because I spent the dinnersitting on it with schnitzel on my fork and a straight face, and the thought of Laurence seven seats away not knowing, and the thought of that thought made the whole evening bearable.
I pull it out, and he watches. The reaction there, how his lips part, how his cock twitches against his stomach, that alone is worth thirty minutes in the hotel bathroom, the prep I never bother with for the lads I pull in smoking areas.
He takes the plug. Sets it on the bedside table. His fingers replace it, two, slicked, patient. Because Laurence does everything in sequence and the sequence includes this: the slow push of his fingers inside me, the curl, the Fuck. That angle. The?—
My hips jerk. My cock leaks against his stomach, and he finds my neck, and his fingers keep going, and the patience of this man is either his greatest quality or a war crime, depending on how close I am, and right now I’m?—
‘Now,’ I say.
He rolls the condom on. I sink. Control the angle, the pace, the depth, my palms flat on his ribs, his fingers digging into my thighs, and we’ve done this enough times to know the mechanics, but we’ve never done it without the clock running, and the difference is, everything.
I ride him slowly.
His hands climb my ribs. He traces the obliques with his thumbs, the muscle that brackets my hips, and his hips rock up to meet mine, and the rhythm is unhurried. Nowhere to be.
I come with his name in my mouth, notHaldrey, notDr.Laurence.Against his skin. He follows. The grip on my hips is hard enough to bruise, and I want the bruises, want proof that lasts longer than a deleted text.
The floor happens because the bed gets too warm.
The window happens because Vienna’s lights are ridiculous, and I say so. He looks at them. Then at me. Crosses the room, his hands on my hips, before the decision has been made verbally.
He pins me against the glass. The pane is cold, and the cold travels through my palms and into my shoulders. My breath fogs a patch the size of a plate. Behind me, he finds the angle, slow, testing, his cock already hard again because apparently thirty-one is not sixty and he has opinions about Vienna too.
The curtains gap just enough. A sliver of the city visible—the lit spire of something Baroque, the tram lines glinting, a lamp on three floors down. The city can’t see me. I know it can’t. The silver makes my cock behave as if it could.
He starts slow. Matches the rhythm to the condensation spreading on the glass. I try to say something clever, and my mouth produces a consonant, a vowel, a sound that isn’t either. His hand comes around, takes my cock, the grip that already knows the speed and the pressure. The rhythm shifts. Faster. Not rushed. Deliberate.
I come against the glass. A stripe of it, warm, quickly cooling. It’s been barely thirty minutes since the last time. Eighteen and relentless, and he’s still catching his breath from round one, and the disparity makes him laugh.
A real one. Surprised.
‘You’re going to kill me,’ he says, still inside me. Still pressed against my back.
