Page 164 of Proof By Contradiction
It rains, of course it rains. This is Wales.
We fuck with the windows open and the rain hitting the glass. My legs around his waist. His mouth on my throat. The angle that makes me grip the headboard and the headboard hits the wall, and the wall is stone, so the sound carries, and if the sheep outside have opinions, they can write a formal complaint.
After: his fingers on my ribs. Slow. Counting them, I let him.
Used to squirm. Used to deflect. Used to make a joke and reach for my jeans. Now I lie still and let someone touch me like I’m worth being careful with.
It’s during that first holiday as a couple that our first real argument happens.
It starts with the email, still pending, still no decision, still the bureaucratic silence that Laurence reads as rejection and I read as process. He’s at the kitchen table with his laptop, staring at the same wall he’s been staring at for months.
‘Maybe it’s not going to happen.’
‘It’s going to happen. Merton.’
‘Merton is eighty-two. His influence isn’t what it used to be.’
‘His influence got my results cleared.’
‘That’s different. That was justice. This is hiring.’
He shuts the laptop. Calmly, which is worse.
‘And I have a misconduct resignation on my record, Ewan. That doesn’t go away.’
‘So what, that’s it? You just stop trying?’
‘Ewan—’
‘You’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and you’re acting like your life’s already over.’
‘Don’t.’
Sharp now. The sharpest he’s been since the kitchen, sincedon’t come back.His eyes harden.
‘Don’t turn my survival into something contemptible because it disappoints your idea of me.’
It hits and hurts because it’s right. What I said was wrong. I said it wrong. I said it like the boy who didn’t raise his hand.
I sit down. Across from him, the table.
‘I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.’
‘What did you mean?’
‘That you’re brilliant. And it scares me to watch you wait for people to notice what I already know.’
I stop. Because I hear Laurence in it, and the echo hurts.
Silence. The rain, the cottage creaking. Two people sitting in the wreckage of a fight without filling the silence with bodies.
‘I know,’ he says. Quiet. ‘I’m scared too.’
A pause. He rests his thumb on the rim of the mug.
No apology, no performance of resolution. Just the truth. And the truth is enough.
We don’t fix it. We sit with it, drink tea. Later, cook badly.
