Page 138 of Proof By Contradiction
And here, this man. And his first word isn’t about himself. It’s not about Monday.
Are you okay?
‘No.’ My voice. Honest. Becausenois 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, theEwanhe 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.
