Page 26 of Proof By Contradiction
But the other look came too. The one that wasn’t wanted.
Elegant.Nobody’s ever handed me that before—no frame for it.
I wanted to be a problem he couldn’t solve. I walked in planning to be exactly that: tight jumper, open knee, the plausible-fresher script. What I didn’t plan for was the other angle. The one where a man like him looks at a substitution I did in fifteen seconds and goes quiet, and the quiet is a different kind of noticing than the noticing I rehearsed for.
He saw me seeing him. That part was always on the cards.
He saw myhead—that one I didn’t send him an invitation to.
Next Tuesday.
CHAPTER SIX
I’ve spent forty-five minutes getting dressed, which is thirty-eight more than I’ll ever admit to.
The jeans are strategic. Dark, slim, cut high enough to give the illusion of a longer line, field-tested on every Lewisham dance floor worth the name. T-shirt: white, fitted, visible where the sweatshirt falls open because I’ve unzipped it to exactly the right point.
Cologne. The Tom Ford sample, not the cheap everyday one I nicked from a Selfridges counter in Year 12 and have been rationing ever since for occasions that matter. Which is not what this is. This is a standard, scheduled office hour with my mathematics lecturer.
I put the cologne on anyway. Wrists. Neck. Enough that in a room four steps wide, he’ll have no choice.
A third spray at the base of the throat, where a jumper collar pulls down when a man leans forward to look at a page. Not accidental. Designed.
I almost don’t do the chain. The chain’s a flag, the chain saysqueerto anyone with an eye for it. Then I leave it. If he notices the chain, he’ll notice the chain. If he doesn’t, he wasn’t going to anyway.
The rings go on last. Three. One for every provocation I’m walking in with.
My reflection in the cracked mirror: eyeliner smudged right, chain outside the shirt, three rings. Lewisham in Manchester, weaponised.
I look fit. That’s not vanity, it’s data.
I take one more look. Ask myself if this is too much. Ask myself whattoo muchwould even look like. What I have on is exactly enough to be deniable if he says anything and exactly enough to mean something if he doesn’t.
Which is to say, perfectly calibrated.
The problem set’s in my bag. Same trick as last week: real mistakes threaded through correct work, believable enough to justify the visit. Except last week, he looked at my solution, and the ground still hasn’t resolidified since.
Fourteen minutes past two. I’m late. Let him sit with it. Let him wonder if I’m coming.
Let him want me to.
His door isn’t closed.
I knock. Wait. Count the seconds because my pulse won’t let me count anything else.
The door opens—coffee from the broken machine, cotton, paper, and ink. My breath catches.
‘Mr Carrick.’ A beat. ‘You’re late.’
‘Sorry. Lost track of time.’
I didn’t lose track of anything. Time is the one thing I’ve been monitoring with the precision of someone counting down to detonation. But I say it easily, offhand, and walk past him into the office. Close enough that I nearly brush against him. Closeenough to leave a wake of Tom Ford in a room that’s four steps wide.
The chair across his desk. I sit. But not where I sat last week, further to the right, another inch closer. The desk between us is narrow, and if I shift my knee forward, contact.
His leg, my leg. Through two layers of fabric. Barely there. He doesn’t move.
He doesn’t move.
