Page 122 of Proof By Contradiction
The bloke from a few months ago, the one who fucked in bathrooms and didn’t leave his number and called everything transactional because the word kept the architecture standing, that bloke feels like a character in a book I read once. Recognisable but remote.
Who the fuck is this?
It doesn’t fit. It’s the wrong shape. Too soft. A question for people who journal and do yoga and have therapists who nod at them.
But I sat on a hotel floor and laughed with him in my grip. I touched him during sex—hisface.I said words that sit in my mouth like I’ve swallowed them forever, in a voice I didn’t know I owned. The boy who does those things is not the boy who zipped his bag in Lewisham and left it packed, because unpacking meant arriving, and arriving meant staying.
Three rows ahead and across the aisle: the back of his head. Laurence. Reading. I can see the angle of his hand holding the page, the tilt of his neck. Treating a paperback like a primary source.
He turns, slightly, a quarter-turn. He knows where I’m sitting. Our eyes meet across three rows and an aisle.
The look lasts two seconds—maybe less.
In those two seconds: the corridor.Just sex.The lie that tasted of nothing. Last night, touch against his cheek. The three words I won’t speak.
He turns back, the paperback goes up. The mask goes on.
Mine goes on too. We’re very good at masks, the pair of us. Professionally qualified. Could offer a module in it. Advanced Pretending 301, pass guaranteed.
An hour in, he stands for the toilet. The aisle is narrow. Of course it is, narrow and straight and built for a single file, which is the opposite of what bodies want when the bodies are ours. He comes past my row. Two inches of clear air between his hip and my shoulder. The smell of him—the hotel soap, still—hits me before his trousers do. His hand grips the seatback in front of mine to steady the lurch. I see the vein in his wrist that I bit on Friday. He doesn’t look down. Walks on. The lavatory door folds shut behind him with that cheap plastic clack.
I don’t breathe for the count of four. When he comes back the other way, I keep my eyes on the seat pocket like it’s a primary source.
I swallow it. The sound would be wrong up here. Too loud, too much.
The clouds carry on being clouds. The plane continues to be a tube of recycled air and pretense.
Throat, tight. Leave it.
Femi gets me at the gate. He falls into step beside me, rucksack strapped on. He’s been waiting to speak for approximately six hours.
‘So. Whatever’s happening between you and Haldrey?—’
‘I told you, nothing’s happening.’
Another warning.
‘There are feelings involved, Ewan.’
I stop walking. A woman with a wheelie case swears and swerves around me. The airport noise, tannoy, footsteps, and the beep of the luggage carousel fill the gap between us.
‘What the fuck do you know?’
Flat. Harder than I mean it. Femi doesn’t flinch. He never flinches—the most annoying thing about him and the only essential one.
‘I know you.’ He adjusts the strap of his rucksack, patient about it. ‘I’ve never seen you this invested. In anything. Now you’re—’ He pauses. Chooses. ‘And he’s risking everything.’
Laurence has already paid for this once. The career, the department, and the life he built at Cambridge were dismantled because he crossed a line with a student. And now he’s crossing it again. With me. The same line in a different postcode. And the consequences won’t be different because the postcode is.
I’m the reason. I walked into that office with a problem set full of deliberate errors, and I touched him and I.
Stomach. Low. The weight you can’t put down.
‘I’m not going to hurt him.’
It comes out before I can test it. Before I can check the structural integrity.
His eyes on mine, then away. More request than demand.
