Page 148 of Proof By Contradiction
His voice. Wrecked.
I go in.
The flat. Cold. The heating’s still off, and the mess is—Laurence doesn’t leave a mess. Laurence folds tea towels, and Laurence alphabetises his bookshelves. The sink has three days of mugs in it. A plate with toast crusts—a jumper on the floor.
He walks to the kitchen table, the table where the key was placed andcontaminated, and his palms flat on the surface, shaking visibly from across the room.
I sit.
He sits opposite. The three pages between us. Next to the key, which is still there. Brass on wood. Exactly where I left it.
Don’t look at the key. Look at him.
He’s red-rimmed. The glasses are off, and without them, he’s unfinished. Exposed. Every line. The one between his eyebrowsthat deepens when he’s thinking. Lines around his eyes that weren’t there before. He’s thirty-two and?—
‘You told me I have a rare mind.’ My voice. Not performance, the real one. ‘Believe me when I use it. This is real, we are real. And running away doesn’t protect me. It breaks both of us.’
He’s looking at the proof. The warm-up challenge is my handwriting.
‘The review board cleared my results.’ I keep going because stopping means losing it. ‘An old professor. Merton. Looked at my papers and said they wereelegant.’
His eyes close.
‘Ewan. Please.’
‘I’m not done.’ My voice stripped to its foundation. ‘You’re not repeating a pattern, Laurence. With Hugo it was comfort. Familiar. With me it’s a mess and you chose the mess. Every single time, you chose it. The office hours, the text at eleven. The key. That wasn’t a mistake repeated. That was a man who wanted me. Badly enough to risk it.’
I stop. Because his face breaks.
Tears, these are present tense. Active, silent. Tracking down his cheeks while that focus stays open and fixed on the piece of paper with the warm-up challenge proof and the wordsthis is minein my handwriting.
I watch the man I love cry, and the watching is the hardest thing I’ve ever done because every instinct I have sayscross this table, touch him, use the body, and the body doesn’t know how to do this. The body knows how to fuck and how to leave. It does not know how to sit in a kitchen chair and watch someone you love fall apart.
Stay.
I stay.
He cries. The tears and the tremor and the three pieces of paper and the brass Yale still sitting where I left it and the mugsin the sink and someone who spent a life being precise, failing here.
I reach across the table. Take him. The contact. Nothing electric, none of the words I’d have used in October when every touch was a detonation. This is the current that runs through a building so constantly you forget it’s there until someone turns the lights off.
We sit in the kitchen, the cold flat. Then a sound comes out of him, neither word nor sob but the hybrid, the wordless noise of a man reaching the edge and crossing it, and he stands, and I stand, and he’s against me. Arms around me. His face is on my neck—his weight?—
I hold him. Hold. My arms around his back, the wrinkled shirt, the spine underneath. His breath against my collarbone. Ragged. Wet. He smells of the same shirt and the same pillow and underneath it, faintly, the smell I know, coffee and paper and Laurence, still there.
We stand in the kitchen, and I hold this man, and the holding is more intimate than any sex we’ve ever had. More than the wall, more than the desk. More than Vienna.
Two people standing still.
He pulls back, his eyes wrecked. Red. He brings his hand up and touches me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Icall Ronan on a Tuesday.
His phone rings three times. I count them like I count everything, automatically, uselessly.
‘Ewan.’ His voice. Rehearsed.
