I look up.
Hugo Lockhart is standing over me, and his shadow crosses my trainers. White shirt, blazer draped over his arm, coffee in hand. He looks down at me with an expression I recognise. I’ve seen it on men in clubs, at parties, in the queue at Tesco. The look that measures and finds insufficient.
He studies me: the hoodie, the rings, the eyeliner, the cigarette. The result is: amusement. Not the kind you share.
‘You’re his student.’ A statement in the half-smile of a consultant delivering a prognosis. ‘Aren’t you.’
I don’t answer—the cigarette between my fingers. The fountain is not running.
‘How old are you?’
I look at him. Hold it steady, unblinking, the look that says I don’t break first. ‘Old enough to be here.’
Hugo laughs, short, nasal, pure contempt. ‘Christ. He’s really lost it this time.’
This time.
Stay. Hold.
‘He’s doing it again.’ Hugo takes a sip of his coffee. Casual. The casualness is the cruelty. ‘I recognise the look. How he watches you when he thinks no one’s looking.’ He stops. Recalibrates. ‘How long?’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘You’re a terrible liar.’ Another sip. The amusement lingers, and I want to smash it away with my fist.
‘He didn’t tell you.’ It’s not a question. Hugo says it like a weather forecast. ‘I was his student too. PhD, Cambridge, we were discovered. He resigned. I survived.’ Pause. ‘He didn’t.’
The courtyard, the fountain, the not-running water. The cigarette burned to the filter, and I haven’t.
‘Does he do the thing where he makes you feel like you’re the only person who ever understood him?’ Hugo tilts his head. Studying me, the specimen. ‘Yeah. He did that with me too.’
The fountain doesn’t run.
He straightens. Adjusts the blazer over his arm. Finishes his coffee and walks back inside. The door closes behind him.
The courtyard, the not-running fountain. The cigarette burned to nothing. Ash falls onto my jeans. I don’t brush it off.
The CV gap, the too-clean flat. Laurence saidI made mistakesand refused to specify which.
I’m not special. I’m a pattern.
Hands, shaking.
I stand up. My legs work because I’m telling them to. The courtyard is empty now except for the fountain that doesn’t run, and a pigeon doing that tilted-head thing pigeons do when they suspect a human is about to drop food.
No food. I leave by the side door instead of the main one. Don’t want to see the lobby, the conference crowd, Hugo’s tall body among the pillars, making small talk with someone whose career he’s gently measuring.
The service corridor smells of coffee and old polish. I take the stairs instead of the lift because a lift means thirty seconds of trapped mirror, and I can’t with my own face right now. Four flights. Third floor. Fourth. Each landing is a station where my brain offers a fresh variant of the same sentence.
He’s doing it again.
The maths of it runs itself without input.I was his student too.Twenty-four. Twenty-seven. The gap was smaller then, a PhD cohort gap, a shared-vocabulary gap. The gap with me is twelve, and a lecture theatre, and a man who moved to Manchester because Manchester was the only place still willing. Laurence’s photograph collection under bath towels suddenly makes a different sense. Not nostalgia. Evidence he couldn’t throw out and couldn’t bear to see.
Floor four, my corridor. I walk past my room without pausing. The body takes over, the body knowing the route it wants to take. The carpet swallows my steps, and my pulse is doing something unmathematical in my throat.
One second. Two. The hand raised, the knuckles. The sentence in my head:I’m going to go in there and fuck him until Hugo’s face stops being a face.
I know this. It isn’t healing. It’s nineteen and humiliated and finding the only tool I have. The only tool I’ve ever had.
