Page 112 of Proof By Contradiction
‘You’re thirty-one, not ninety. Keep up.’
The laugh again, warm against my neck.
New.
We end up on the floor eventually. Blanket pulled off the bed, his back against the radiator, me in his lap, his cock in my hand, slow, while he tells me about the time he got lost in Vienna at twenty-three on a conference trip and ended up at a jazz club that didn’t serve anything except schnapps and disapproval. I’m stroking us off while he tells this story. His voice keeps breaking mid-sentence. The combination of the anecdote and the hand job is so absurd that I laugh and he laughs, and we’re both laughing with our cocks in my fist, and this—this graceless moment on a hotel floor in Austria—this is the thing.
He comes laughing. I didn’t know that was possible. Pressed against mine, his breath hot and ragged and the sound halfway between a groan and a laugh, and I catch it, and he catches my mouth, and the kiss tastes of everything I’ve been pretending this isn’t.
Four AM, the curtains still gaped. Vienna’s glow through the glass, amber and distant, a city asleep while we refuse to be.
He’s on his side. I’m on my back. His arm across my chest, heavy. He draws small circles on my sternum with his thumb. Conscious.
Last time we shared a bed, I didn’t mean to. Fell asleep by accident, bolted before dawn. Dressed in the dark. The click of the door behind me was like a period at the end of a sentence I didn’t want to finish.
This time I don’t move. Technically, I could—the door’s right there, my clothes on the floor, my room four doors away. I don’t.
The laugh is still in the room, so the stillness holds.
He breathes slowly, almost asleep. Almost. He tightens his arm.
‘Stay.’ Murmured. Half-conscious.
Same word he used every time. Same voice. Except usually I put my jacket on and walked out into the cold and pretended the leaving was the point.
This time Vienna holds its breath, his heartbeat beneath me.
Eyes closing, letting it happen.
‘What are you thinking?’ His voice is a rustle. Close to sleep. Closer to honest.
‘I’m not.’
‘Liar.’ Almost a smile in it.
The arm tightens. The thumb resumes its circle on my sternum. I listen to him breathe. Count six breaths. Eight. Ten. The slowing of it, the way his ribcage settles against my side. A body doing the arithmetic of trust without asking permission.
‘Laurence.’
‘Mm.’
Nothing after that. I meant to say something. The name was meant to go somewhere. It didn’t. He hums acknowledgement anyway, the syllable that meansyes, here, whatever it is.
Tomorrow: panels, keynotes, page eleven, Hugo Lockhart at a podium. Tomorrow, everything I’m not thinking about tonight will.
Tonight, I’m staying.
Tonight: the circles on my chest. The breath is slowing. The arm that doesn’t let go.
Staying.
I leave at half past five. The corridor is grey at pre-dawn. Four doors, my room. The bed untouched, the pillow cold, the whole scene staged for a forensic team that’ll never arrive.
Shower. My hair still smells of him. The bite mark on my neck is purple, thumb-shaped. I’ll wear it under my collar all day.
Breakfast is performance art. I sit with Femi, eat toast, drink coffee that tastes of hotel and dust. Laurence is three tables away. Professional mask, colleague small talk. He was exhausted because I kept waking him.
Don’t look. Eat toast.
