Page 92 of Proof By Contradiction
I get into bed, pull the duvet up. He finds me with his arm, automatic, unconscious. Heavy and warm and certain.
I close my eyes, and he tightens his arm.
Morning. The flat is grey through the curtains, and I’m awake before he is, and my body knows where it is and whose.
He’s behind me. Plug still in him. I can feel it through the small of his back where his hip presses against mine, the slight unyielding shape of it shifting whenever he breathes. His cock is half hard against my arse. Sleep architecture. No instruction from the upstairs.
He shifts. The shift presses him into me with a small, unconscious intention that the conscious part of him is going to be embarrassed about in about ninety seconds.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbles, into my shoulder. Not very sorry.
‘Don’t be.’
I roll over. Bedside table. The lube is still where I put it last night. He watches me through half-shut eyes, glasses a million miles away, hair a disaster, and the look on his face is one I’ve never seen on him before nine in the morning.
‘Take it out,’ he says.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
I do. Slow. The base, the curve, the give. His breath catches the way it caught last night. I drop the plug on the towel and reach for the lube, and he’s already turning, opening his thighs, watching me the way you watch someone hand you the next thing you wanted before you’d said it.
My fingers, two, then three, slick. His body, already open, almost no resistance. He makes a sound into the pillow that isn’t Lancashire and isn’t English and isn’t anything I can identify, just want, low.
Condom. Fast. The cap of the lube again because there’s no quiet way to do this and there shouldn’t be.
I push in.
It’s easy. Easier than anything has any right to be. The long slow give of a body that’s been opened all night and is asking for the next thing. He exhales like he’s been holding the breath for a year and the year ended forty seconds ago.
‘Christ.’ Lancashire, finally, the syllable I was waiting for.
I move. Slow at first, then not slow. He’s already gone, the way the body goes when it’s had no time between one thing and the next, when there’s no boundary between the man who fell asleep inside you and the man who’s inside you now, just one continuous warm thing the body has agreed to.
He comes against the sheet without a hand on him. I come into him a few strokes later, quiet, my forehead at the back of his neck.
After. He turns onto his back. Looks at me sideways. The half-smile.
‘I’d write you a thank-you note,’ he says. ‘But I think we’re past the formal stages.’
‘Coffee will do.’
He goes to make one. Doesn’t bother with trousers. Kettle, kitchen, November light. I lie in the bed and listen and decide that this man is mine in a way I haven’t worked out the maths for yet.
The next day. Campus. The concourse between the maths building and the library. Students everywhere, scarves and coffees, the organised chaos of a January that’s decided to rain sideways.
Femi falls into step beside me. Doesn’t say hello. Doesn’t smile. His expression is the one I’ve only seen once before—the night he told me about the lecturer, and I laughed it off, and he looked at me like I’d failed a test he’d set on purpose.
‘You were out yesterday.’
Cold, immediate. A blade, no handle.
‘Library,’ I start, and the word tastes like ash because I’ve used it too many times and it’s worn through.
‘You weren’t anywhere near the library.’ He doesn’t slow down. Eyes fixed ahead. ‘I was on the Chorlton tram. You came out of Beech Road. At ten at night, with your hood up. Like you’d prefer not to be seen.’
My blood—no, lower. Gut. The drop you feel in a lift, except the lift hasn’t moved.
