Page 19 of Proof By Contradiction
I should leave.
I don’t.
When he comes back, he doesn’t say anything. Gets into bed again. Closer this time. Not tentative. Not performing. An arm across my waist like it has a right to be there.
I don’t move it.
That’s new.
‘You’re very quiet,’ he says. Not unkindly.
‘Thinking.’
‘Sounds dangerous.’
‘Usually is.’
A pause that doesn’t need solving.
His hand against my stomach. Just there.
The man is around thirty. Dark curly hair, a bit soft at the waist. Arms that have carried boxes, not weights. The cataloguing mechanism is running—same one I always run—and it’s cataloguing everything that this manis not. He’s not tall. He’s not held together. He’s not careful.
I stay ten minutes longer than I’ve ever stayed anywhere.
Beto says something—there’s coffee, if you want—and the wordcoffeeopens a door I didn’t know was in the wall. A real thing, proposed at eleven o’clock on a Thursday night by a man who has no stake in whether I accept. A whole ordinary future, offered without ceremony.
And I want. Not the coffee. Not him.
I want to be the kind of man who could accept a coffee at eleven on a Thursday night from a man he just fucked and say yes and mean it. Who could sit at a kitchen table with one hand around a mug and one hand on someone’s thigh and let the two ordinarinesses exist in the same body?
Then I leave too fast. Shoes on without sitting down, laces stuffed into the heels. Shirt misbuttoned, corrected in the stairwell. Athanksthat sounds wrong even as it leaves my mouth, becausethanksis what you say to the barista, not to someone whose arm fit across your waist like a brace.
Outside, the air on Wilmslow Road is cold enough to reset me. I walk without direction for two blocks before stopping.
The feeling hasn’t gone.
Emptiness is the control group, the constant that anchors every experiment. Every other hookup has ended in emptiness, and I’ve accepted the result and moved on.
This isn’t that.
Something that hasn’t cancelled itself out.
I stand on the kerb—a bus passes, the 42 towards town, nearly empty. A student on the top deck is lit blue by a phone screen.
I don’t get on.
I stand there until the feeling cools enough to classify, and when I finally name it, the name is worse than the feeling.
Comfort.
I walk home in the cold. Fast. Hood up. The whole way back, I’m running the proof in reverse, trying to find the step where the logic broke, the line where the wrong conclusion crept in. There isn’t one. The proof is clean.
That’s the worst part.
Every orgasm this week has ended in the same place. Different partner, different room, and my mind drifting to the same destination.
A lecture theatre, a whiteboard. Hands I’ve never felt, a voice I’ve played on loop until only the tone remains.
