Still here, not leaving.
I wake up, and the first thing I feel is not his body. It’s the absence.
Vienna has church bells and trams and the smell of coffee from the Café Hawelka downstairs and the low hum of a city that doesn’t rush, but it’s a different emptiness that fills me. Internal. The first peace I’ve had in months. My body aches in places. The small of my back, the inside of my thighs, the skin he bit two nights ago that’s layered now. His mark over his mark, evidence stacked on evidence. But the ache is distant.
The curtains are still gapped. Vienna’s pre-dawn is grey-blue. Undecided. The glow finds the room, and I lie still and catalogue.
The floor: his belt, coiled where it fell. My jeans, his shirt. A condom wrapper next to the bedside table, one of four, if I’m counting, which apparently I am. The sheets tangled off the foot of the bed, one corner still caught under the mattress.
The man beside me.
He sleeps face down. One arm under the pillow, the other reaching across the bed into the space where I was and finding my hip.
The window. I stand there in my boxers with the dawn filling the courtyard and Vienna waking up in stages, a tram bell, a shutter, a pigeon on the cornice.
I’m not thinking about the sex.
The smart move is thinking about it. Three nights. The freedom of the first, the laugh, the window, the plug, and his hands. The possession of the second, Hugo’s name still lingering like acid, the marks I put on him and meant, the way he turned over for me without being asked, his thighs around my hips and his Lancashire under my mouth and Hugo’s name driven out of both our heads at the same minute. Last night—the battle, the belt, the prove it, how his breath—no. I’m not thinking about any of it.
I’m thinking about the moment between the third and fourth time on the first night when he told me about the jazz club in Vienna and his voice kept breaking, and we were laughing on the floor with him in my grip, and it was stupid and graceless and the funniest thing I’ve.
And the moment when he saidlook at meand that focus was wet, and I looked, and there wasn’t a lecturer or a conquest. There was a person. Asking.
The glass is cold, and I lean into it. Good.
It’s sex.
Except it isn’t. The knowing has been in me since the first night he stayed inside me after he came and held me and didn’t leave, and I didn’t know what to do with myself because nobody had ever.
Femi. The book.All my love, H.Written in blue ink on a flyleaf that anyone can read. The obscene simplicity of that, loving someone in a way that has evidence.
Could I want that?
I don’t like it. It brings with it a life I haven’t designed—a life where I introduce someone to Ronan, where someone leaves a toothbrush at my flat, where the contact in my phone has a name instead of a letter.
With Laurence.
It crosses my mind, I let it cross. Don’t look at it directly. With Laurence. Sat across from Ronan at a table. With Laurence, walking somewhere, in daylight. My arm through his like Allan’s through Femi’s. Public. Like it’s allowed.
The wanting won’t come. It would require admitting something I’ve spent nineteen years building walls against. That the distraction, the hookups, the blokes, the transactional accumulation of bodies, was never freedom.
And then.
It’s there. At the edge. Like a shape forming in fog before you can name it.
Lo.
The two letters form at the base of my skull. They want more. They want theveto follow, the completion of the word, the click of it into place like a door I’ve been holding open for years, finally allowed to close.
My breath on the glass. The condensation I left there is a small proof—I was here. I stood here thinking this.
Nineteen years of definitions. Ewan Carrick, the one who doesn’t. The lad from Lewisham, the middle of three, the version Ronan checks on and worries about. The Ewan in the photograph on Mum’s fridge is eight and has ice cream on his face, and in the photograph, he hasn’t started yet. The one who started is the one standing at a Viennese hotel window in his boxers, watching dawn happen to a city that doesn’t care. This Ewan is about to form a four-letter word, and he knows- he knows like a man knows the train is coming before he hears it- that saying it completes a circuit that cannot be broken.
Consequence. Ronan’s face. Mum’s face. The version of me my family built for themselves, replaced by a version they’ll have to learn.
No.
I pull back from the glass. Vienna doesn’t care.
