Page 58 of Proof By Contradiction
That is the whole point.
He buys these. Not for class. Not for office hours. Not for the version of him with chalk on his fingers and a room full of students pretending not to stare at his mouth. For home. Forafter dinner, maybe. For standing in a kitchen I have seen once and still think about too much. For a life that has shopping lists and clean counters and a packet of dark-chocolate biscuits in a cupboard I am not supposed to imagine.
Now I have one too.
Not his. Not even close.
Just the same green box from the same shelf in the same Sainsbury’s, carried under the same strip lights and out into the same Manchester rain.
It is stupid.
It is possibly the most eighteen-year-old thing I have ever done.
I keep my hand on it all the way to the tram stop.
The 142 is full of damp people staring into their phones. I stand, even though there’s a seat, and hold the packet against my ribs through the jacket. My thumb finds the seam where the plastic meets. I press it until the man next to me flinches at the crinkle. I stop.
Proof I was in the same shop. Proof I bought what he buys. A receipt for a contact he doesn’t know happened.
The packet stays sealed. I put them in my desk drawer, close the drawer, stare at it for a minute, and then I go and lie face down on the bed.
His joggers are in my room. Washed. Folded. Returning them is the obvious move. I won’t do it.
I won’t.
The soap-and-cotton smell is gone. My detergent replaced his. They’re still his.
I lie on the narrow bed in my narrow room and stare at the ceiling, thinking about how I used to be bored here. The carpet, the Greggs, the distance from anywhere that mattered—all of it unbearable four days ago. Four days ago, I was a boy with a zipped bag and nothing I wanted from this city. Now I’m someone with an answer to all of it, and the answer is him.
Eleven PM. The phone screen in the dark:I need to talk to you. Not by message. If you want to come.
Three words, no question mark.
Stomach low, tight.
My dick follows a beat later, and I’m already pulling on jeans before my brain has finished reading.
He broke first, him, not me. He’s… thinking about me.
The tram takes thirty-two minutes; I’ve timed it. Thirty-two minutes of dark windows and my own reflection.
He opens the door, and his hand is on my shirt before I’m through it—no preamble, nowe need to talk, just his fist in my fabric and lips open against mine, the door closing with the same click as last time. Except last time he was shaking, and this time he’s not; his hands are sure, pulling me down the hall like he’s been rehearsing the route since he hit send.
The bed—first time we’ve made it to the bed without a wall involved. He pushes me down, and the mattress gives under my back, him on top of me, horizontal, different, heavier. His hips against mine, his cock hard against my thigh through two layers of fabric, and my hands go straight for skin, under the cotton, up his ribs, the warmth I spent all day not thinking about.
We undress each other—shirt, shirt, belt, belt—in his bedside lamp’s warm, low glow, the first time I see him in full focus.His chest is broader than it looks dressed, dark hair scattering between his pecs and trailing down, thickening into the V of muscle at his hips.
He flips me onto my stomach, his lips on the back of my neck, his body pressing me into the mattress, and I feel his cock against my arse through his boxers, my spine arching before I’ve thought it.
Then I’m on top—his back on the sheets, my thighs either side of his hips—and I grind down on his cock straining against the cotton, the sound he makes new and deeper than the hallway. Certain now, past desperate.
The condom, the lube. From his bedside drawer this time, not my back pocket, which means he put them there. He planned this.
I sink onto him. Slow. Control the angle, the depth, the pace, my hands on his chest, the hold on my hips, and his face looking up holds something I’ve never learned to read. Past lust, past the glossy hunger I’ve seen a hundred times. Underneath that. No name for it yet.
I move. He moves. The rhythm builds, and palms climb my ribs, and I lean down and kiss him, and the angle shifts and his cock hits the spot, unmaking my vision, and I groan into his mouth, and he swallows it.
I come first. He follows, close enough that I feel him start before I’ve finished, and I’ve never felt?—
