Page 131 of Proof By Contradiction
I kiss him. His mouth is the only place the fear stops.
Slow. His hands on my face, my hands on his chest.I’m here. I’m not leaving—two bodies holding on against what’s coming.
After: his arm across me. The familiar weight. His heartbeat under my ear.
‘Whatever happens.’ Half-asleep, vowels blurred. ‘This was real.’
His breathing. The rain. The drawer with my things, the toothbrush, and the trainers under the bed.
Real.It settles into the dark like a key into a lock.
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Ronan’s been withdrawn for three days.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 saidthe flat’s cold without you.The translation ismine, 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 saysI 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.’
