Page 22 of Proof By Contradiction
‘Alright. Get some sleep. Text me tomorrow.’
‘Okay.’
I hold the phone against my ear for a second after the line’s dead.
I did not ring my brother. My brother rang me. And my brother does not ring on school nights. Ron rings on Sundays, a weekly confirmation of continued respiration. His ringingtonightmeans his radar is up, already picking up something that shouldn’t be transmitting.
I lower the phone, and it buzzes again.
Calendar reminder:Tuesday, 14:00. Office hours.
Tomorrow.
The glass is cold against my palm. Manchester crawls past, and I think about an office. Small books. A desk.
Him on one side of that desk. Me on the other.
Three feet of professional distance.
I’m already planning it. I catch myself at it before the bus passes Oxford Road, what I’m going to wear. Nothing too obvious—obvious is for Canal Street. The black jumper, the one that’s a size too small because I lost the receipt and never sent it back, and a clean pair of jeans. No aftershave, aftershave is a declaration, and I’m not ready to make one. Just soap. Skin. The kind of underdressed a student can plausibly be at two in the afternoon.
I’m planning what I’ll bring. The problem sets. A question I don’t actually need the answer to, so I can watch him explain it and watch the exact moment he realises I already know. The pen I’ll hold. How I’ll sit. Left leg crossed over right, the way that makes my shoulders square to him, the way that means my knee might, at some point, if the room is the size I’m imagining, brush his.
Eighteen years of default settings, and my brain has turned into a staging room for a man I’ve spoken to once for less than three minutes.
Stomach drops.
Tomorrow.
I’ve mapped him.
He arrives at 8:40 with coffee from the broken machine by the fire escape that only he knows works—black, no sugar, cup in his right hand because the left is on the phone, thumb movinginward across the screen the way only left thumbs do, the gesture nobody right-handed makes.
Lunch in his office. The door opens if he’s eating, closed if he’s marking. The sandwich is always the same, pulled from the Tesco Express, which suggests either loyalty or total absence of imagination. He eats at his desk. Pages spread around the food like he’s worried the equations will starve if he doesn’t keep them company.
Tuesdays: office hours. 14:00–16:00.
Open to all students.
I know his coffee order, his lunch routine, and the time his shirt starts to come untucked at the back (around 15:30, when the morning’s good intentions run out). I know he rubs the bridge of his nose when a question bores him and he’s trying not to show it.
This morning, I positioned myself at the vending machine alcove, pretending to choose between a KitKat and a Twirl. He walks past, smelling of coffee and laundry, pushes his free hand back through his hair, the shirt pulling across his chest. He bites the inside of his lip at whatever he’s reading, concentrated and distant.
He sees me. For half a second. A sweep of the eyes that has no business being as efficient as it is—the kind of sweep you do on a corridor, you know, when a shape’s off-pattern. His eyes land on me, clock me, move on. Don’t come back.
Don’t come back, but don’t pretend I wasn’t there either. There’s a difference. I spend the next forty-five minutes trying not to over-read.
He disappears around the corner.
The KitKat holds no appeal. Nothing in this machine does.
I buy the Twirl, eat it. Don’t taste it. Six hours till office hours.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tuesday 13:40. The second floor of the maths building smells of radiator dust and the faint chemical ghost of whatever the cleaners use on the lino.
I’ve been in this corridor before—checked it three times last week, once in the middle of the night when a fire door was propped open, and a cleaner let me walk through. His door is three doors down with a printed sheet taped at eye level:Dr L. Haldrey, Lecturer in Mathematics, Office Hours: Tuesdays 14:00–16:00. Please knock.
