Page 2 of Proof By Contradiction
The answer arrives before his pen stops. Substitution, rearrange, solve. Obvious.
Don’t volunteer. Just not playing the same game anyway—if I answer, the room shifts weight, all two hundred pairs of eyes landing at once, and I won’t have it.
I slouch lower in my seat, pick at a thread on my jeans.
Forty-five seconds pass, a minute. Someone in the front row has a go at an answer that’s so wrong it circles back to creativity. Dr Haldrey listens, that perfect professor smile, the one hiding the calculation, then corrects.
He rolls his sleeves up while he talks. One fold. Two.
Don’t look. I look.
Fuck.
The ceiling. The floor. Anywhere else.
Nobody else tries.
‘Don’t worry. This was designed to be a challenge.’
He leans against the lectern—that hip.
He turns back to the room, and that focus sweeps the rows. Passes through me like I’m not here.
Right. Two hundred freshers, why would he stop?
The sting arrives without warning. My dick, fuck, these jeans are not forgiving. I cross my legs, think about bus timetables, the carpet, anything that might help. Nothing does.
All of it, every button done up, every word measured, and I want to watch that control come apart. Want to be the reason it does.
The rest of the lecture is noise. Integration. Integrals, anti-derivatives, and notation I don’t retain. Thirty seconds is all the listening I can manage before his throat pulls everything else out of the room.
I’m not taking notes or stopping.
Femi nudges me. ‘You alright? You’ve gone quiet.’
‘I’m listening,’ I say. ‘This is me listening.’
The lecture ends. People funnel towards the doors. I stay.
I’m watching Haldrey at the front: sorting his papers, exchanging a word with a colleague—the anti-me.
He laughs—quiet, contained—and reaches up to grab a marker from the top of the whiteboard. His shirt comes untucked at the front: a sliver of skin above the waistband, the shadow where his belly dips, the muscle bracketing his hips.
The trail of hair thickening, the V sharpening, the heat. I’ve had my mouth on enough blokes to fill in the blanks, and my brain does it now with a focus my A-levels never got.
Leaving is the obvious move—Femi’s waiting. The lecture’s over. Normal people are already gone.
Leaving feels impossible. I want to stay in this seat and watch this man tidy up for another forty minutes. Pathetic.
‘Ewan.’ Femi stands in the aisle, irritated. ‘Coming?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Coming.’
Femi gives me a sideways look on the way out. ‘You were staring.’
‘I was thinking.’
‘You were staring and thinking. At the same time. At the lecturer.’
