Page 155 of Proof By Contradiction
He stops.
Months ago, I would’ve climbed onto him and used the body to bypass the brain, as I’ve always done.
I don’t.
I sit next to him. Close enough to touch. The wall, the window, the Manchester night outside with its rain and its sodium glow.
‘It’s fine,’ I say. And the words sound strange. They sound like someone else’s words. Someone older. Someone who actually believes it. ‘We have time.’
He looks at me—the look of someone hearing a note they didn’t expect.
‘Say that again.’
‘We have time, Laurence.’
I lie back, he lies back. The fresh sheets and the clean pillowcase, and his weight beside me, and our fingers interlocked, and his breathing evening out. My shirt’s still on—one arm through, one arm not, caught halfway—his boxers, my boxers. The two of us half-dressed on a bed we’ve ruined and rebuilt, and here we are in it, and the sex didn’t happen, and the sex not happening is?—
More.
His arm comes across my chest. Heavy.
His breathing slows.
I close my eyes, and he’s there. Against me. The heat and the weight and the smell of coffee and paper and clean sheets and Laurence.
I stay awake while he sleeps—the rain on the window. The tram passing outside, late, the last one, the distant electrical hum.
The key is in my wallet on the bedside table. Brass, worn. Home.
Morning. Light through the curtains. He hasn’t moved, eight hours of stillness, the hold never wavering.
He opens them. Slow. Consciousness, in stages, first the pupils dilate. Then the frown. Then the recognition of where he is and who he’s with, and the frown dissolving into an expression I’ve never seen on him before.
No guilt, no caution. No internal calculus at all.
Just—
‘Thank you.’ His voice. Morning-rough, Lancashire uncorrected. ‘For not giving up.’
‘Thank you for letting me choose.’
He smiles. The real one. The one that changes the shape of everything.
He pulls me closer. Like a wall being reinforced. We stay like this while Manchester wakes up outside and the tram runs and the morning happens to other people.
Later: toast. Coffee. The kitchen table with the two mugs and the light coming in.
He tells me about the tutoring, private students, a consultancy that does statistical modelling, and a research position that Merton mentioned. Possible.
I listen, and the listening is different from before because before I listened half-tuned, the information was secondary to the frequency of his voice. Now I listen because the future he’s describing has me in it.
We’re a couple now. That changes the maths.
I go back to the halls. The place already feels temporary when I open the door.
Grab a box and empty my room into it.
The box on the tram. A girl next to me glances at it. The universal recognition of someone moving out in stages, sock by sock, hoodie by hoodie, until one flat stops being the place they come home to.
