Page 62 of Proof By Contradiction
‘I’m not staying.’
He doesn’t move. Only his left hand closes around nothing on the table.
‘It’s raining.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Ewan.’
I’m already walking to the sink and rinsing off and pulling up my wet jeans over skin that’s gone warm and finding my t-shirt on the floor and putting it on inside out because I can’t be bothered to fix it. My jacket next. The key is in my wallet. The wallet is in my back pocket—nine fifty-eight on the clock above his cooker.
He hasn’t moved from the chair.
I’ve just sucked him off in his own kitchen, and he is still half-hard and breathing wrong, watching me put my clothes back on like each movement is a word in a sentence he doesn’t want to finish reading.
‘You skipped your lecture to come here.’
‘I know.’
‘So you don’t have to go. Rest a bit, make yourself some lunch later on.’
I stop at the door. Rain on the window. The key in my wallet, the wet denim at my ankles, him behind me in his dressing gown, I won’t turn around.
‘I have to,’ I say. It’s the only true thing I can make my mouth shape.
Eyes forward, I leave without looking.
The rain hits my face like an agreement. I pull the hood up, and I walk, and I walk past the tram stop without stopping at it because the walking is the only thing that’s telling me which way is home.
Twenty minutes to the next stop. Water in my shoes.
Leaving is what I know. The shaking has no explanation I can hold.
I leave. Every time: eleven PM, midnight, sometimes one, shoes on, jacket, the door closing softly behind me, the stairwell in the dark, the street, the tram back to Fallowfield. Back to the narrow bed and the walls thin enough to hear the bloke next door still wanking on schedule.
Leaving is the rule I keep. He’s never asked me to go, never saidyou should get back, if anything, the opposite—a hand finding my wrist when I reach for my jeans, a pause. Once, on Wednesday, his fingers close around my belt loop while I’m pulling on my shirt, and he holds—one beat. Then he lets go, and we let it hang.
But I go. The blokes at the back end of parties taught me the choreography—finish, leave, forget—except I remember. The tram seat is cold after his sheets, the bed when I get back smells like nothing, and I lie there staring at the ceiling, feeling everything.
The tram at midnight smells of wet coats. I lean my head on the window, let the cold help with what it helps with, leave the rest unexamined.
Friday lecture, week seven. He’s at the board, I’m in the last row, and between us two hundred students, a colleague taking notes for some module coordination thing, and approximately ninety-six hours since he had me on his kitchen table.
‘And asntends to infinity,’ he’s saying, ‘the terms of the sequence get arbitrarily close to L, but never quite reach it.’
He finds my eyes—the automatic scan that snags on the last row and sticks—his mouth moving but his voice trailing away. For a beat, Dr Haldrey is replaced by the man who left marks on my skin still visible under this shirt.
He recovers. Nobody notices except the colleague and me.
‘You alright?’ she says, during the pause while students copy down an equation. Leaning in. Low voice, but not low enough. ‘You seem a bit distracted lately.’
‘Fine.’ His professional voice, the one with all the bolts tightened. ‘Didn’t sleep well.’
The colleague nods. Looks back at her notes. But the look she gave him before the nod, the look lasting one second longer than concern, stays with me.
My dick’s too hard, and the notebook on my lap will have to hide it. This man, this composed, controlled man, can teach a room of two hundred without losing it because of me. That’s the most erotic thing that has ever happened.
I shift the notebook, think about macroeconomic policy. Doesn’t help.
