Page 121 of Proof By Contradiction
I look. He watches me watch him. The proximity of the eye contact is more than the cock in me. I never kept my eyes open, and here I am keeping them open for a man who is moving inside me as if measuring something only he can see.
His thumb brushes my cheek. ‘There you are.’
I come looking at him.
After. The sheets, the dark. Two bodies not separate for once, tangled.
‘What was your life like?’ I ask. ‘Before here. Before Manchester.’
It comes from somewhere I don’t recognise. Somewhere that isn’t strategy or conquest.
‘Controlled,’ he says. ‘Predictable. Cambridge was… I was good at it. The structure, the research. Hugo was part of that trajectory. We made sense on paper.’ Pause. ‘On paper is where we stayed.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He wanted a partner who was an extension of the work. Another academic, another brain. I wasn’t enough for him, not as a person. Only as a colleague who also happened to—’ He stops. ‘There was no mess. No chaos. No losing control.’ He tightens his arm around me. ‘I hadn’t planned any of this.’
I hear what lives underneath. This. Us.
‘Neither had I.’ My voice reduced to something essential. ‘I hadn’t planned… you.’
The words leave me, and they don’t come back. Four words. NotI love you—the four letters are still at the window where I left them this morning. ButI hadn’t planned youis the closest I’ve come to saying what the letters spell, and Laurence hears it. I feel him hear it, the catch of his breath against my spine.
His mouth on my neck. One kiss, devotional.
‘I know,’ he says. All of it in his voice. ‘I know.’
Cooling air. His breath against my skin, slowing into sleep.
Tomorrow: the airport, Manchester. The tram, the halls. The narrow bed and the corridors and the risk and the reality that Vienna suspended for four nights and can’t suspend forever.
But tonight: his arm, his breath. The words I said that can’t be unsaid and don’t want to be.
I hadn’t planned for you.
Solid. Stays.
Eyes closing. The rise of his chest against my back.
The last night of freedom, held in both hands.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Thirty-seven thousand feet. Clouds underneath like white static. Earphones in, volume low, bass-heavy, something I’m not listening to because the bass in my head is louder.
Vienna is already shrinking, but the city stays. The version of me that existed there, dissolving at the edges, a proof without its assumption.
Four nights. That’s all it was. Four nights in a hotel room. His face down on the pillow, reaching for me in his sleep, sayingI hadn’t planned youin a voice that.
The phrase won’t stop. It circles my skull like a bus route with no terminus.I hadn’t planned for you.And the answer I gave back, the echo of it.
I shift in the seat. My back aches in the places where his hands were. I don’t spin it. Don’t make it a receipt, don’t make it a joke about four-night packages or souvenir soreness. I let it be what it is: his hands, gone, the ache still there, and me at thirty-seven thousand feet carrying the evidence home because home is where the evidence will matter most.
Don’t.
Outside: cloud, cloud. More cloud. The occasional glimpse of brown flatness. Could be France or Belgium or anywhere thatisn’t a hotel room in Vienna where the curtains were gapped, and the dawn was grey-blue, and his hand found my hip while he slept and held on like.
I pull the earphones out. Put it back, pull it out again. My hands need occupation because the alternative is thinking, and thinking has been hostile since this morning.
