Page 109 of Proof By Contradiction
To Femi, who makes every adventure better just by being in it. Four days is too long. Come back to me—all my love, A.
The ink is pressed hard.
I stare at it, evidence on the page.
All my love.
Written down. Permanent. In a book, Femi will carry through airport security and leave it on a bedside table in ahotel room, and nobody will look at it and thinkit’s dangerous.Nobody will delete it. It’s there—a man’s love, handwritten, where anyone can see it.
Something adjacent to pain.
I close the book and hand it back.
‘That’s nice,’ I say. My voice sounds right. I’ve checked.
‘Is it too much?’ Femi looks at the dedication again. ‘We’ve only been together six months. Is “all my love” too much at six months?’
‘No. It’s good.’
It is good. It’s everything locked away. Laurence’s handwriting exists in one place. The margins of my problem sets, red ink, and professional commentary on differential equations.Good approach. Check line 4.That’s what I get. That’s the written record of us. Notall my love.Notcome back to me.A correction and a grade.
If I died tomorrow, the evidence of us would be nothing. A contact saved as A. A key with no label. Marks on my wrists that’ll fade by Friday.
I turn to the window. Press my palm against the plastic. The clouds are white now, clean. The filthy grey of Manchester was replaced by bright unhelpfulness.
My phone. Type:Can’t wait.Send.
Delete the thread, both sides. The habit of a boy whose love lives in the gaps between messages that no longer exist. Two words.Can’t wait.Gone. As if I never.
As if.
Seven rows ahead, on the other side of the aisle, Laurence reaches into his pocket. Pulls out his phone, glances at the screen.
The tension in his frame. The pull and release. He puts the phone away. Doesn’t look back.
Doesn’t need to.
Vienna’s airport has marble floors and signs in German and the confidence of a city that’s been important longer than England has been a country. The light is precise. The crowds move with an order that Manchester’s Piccadilly would find personally offensive.
Baggage claim, the belt crawls. Students cluster, academics stand apart.
I position myself at the belt. Laurence is four bodies away, watching like a man who’s never mislaid anything. Careful. Precise. His bag appears; he reaches for it.
I reach for mine at the same time. The movement puts us side by side. His elbow, my forearm. The contact is brief, accidental, and plausibly nothing.
I lean in. Close enough that only he hears.
‘Just a few more hours.’
He swallows. He tightens his hand on the handle of his trolley, and that focus goes everywhere except to me.
‘Dr Haldrey.’ Salgari’s voice is behind us. Bright. Professional. ‘Shall we get the group together for the bus?’
He pivots. ‘Of course.’ The mask snapped back on. But his knuckles on the trolley handle are white.
He walks away towards the group. The blazer, the perfect posture. The institutional formation that protects him from everything he wants.
Tomorrow I’ll sit in a room and watch the man Laurence fucked stand at a podium. Tonight first. Tonight is ours.
