Sex.The words taste of nothing. They taste like the eggs tasted, of performance. The mirror saw through it this morning. The man in the corridor saw through it now. The only one still fooled is my hand flat on the wall. Eyes closed.
The wall I built this morning has a crack in it already. Two hours. Pathetic.
Someone passes in the corridor. A delegate with a lanyard and a folder casts me the half-glance you cast at a student leaning against a conference-hotel wall with his eyes closed and clearly not having the best day of his life. Sees me. Carries on. The Austrian politeness that does not inquire.
My fingers flat on the wallpaper. Embossed, Baroque print, an ornate floral repeating itself up and down the corridor. I trace one of the flowers. Ridiculous activity for a Tuesday afternoon.
I could turn around. Go after him. SayI lied, it isn’t just sex, and I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t that:three corridors, a lift, his room.
I don’t turn around.
The thing you build walls against doesn’t stop existing. It just has to find a different route. I’ll need a different route by dinner.
Wall. Breath. The flower under my fingertip.
I open my eyes.
Lunch. Last day. The conference restaurant with its cloth napkins and its civilized murmur and its belief that mathematics and Wiener Schnitzel belong in the same sentence.
Hugo sits next to Laurence.
Three tables away, fork in my grip. Tension is tighter than the situation requires.
They talk, and Hugo says something. Laurence responds, not the forced laugh from yesterday’s breakfast, not the professional performance. Something between them that predates me, a shared vocabulary I’ll never have. Cambridge. A bed, a secret.
Hugo leans in, close, familiar. Casual. Practised.
The jealousy is different today. Smaller than the territorial range of the courtyard. Sadder. Colder. No counter-claim. Hugo doesn’t need to touch him. He had him first.
Hugo has known Laurence at thirty-one. At twenty-seven. At the ages I won’t reach for years. Hugo’s got the reference points: the career, the shared citations, the life built at Cambridge before I existed. I’ll leave my degree in three years with a forwarding address, while Laurence stays forever.
I’m nineteen. With eyeliner, from Lewisham.
The fork bends in my grip. I set it down.
Laurence laughs at Hugo’s joke. I know the real one. It lives on a hotel floor in my memory and nowhere else.
Does he laugh like that with me? Or differently? And which answer would be worse?
Last night. Vienna’s final act. I go to him because the alternative is the untouched bed, the room, the silence. Staying away from him is a weight I’ve hit my limit carrying.
He opens the door. Doesn’t speak. Pulls me in by the wrist, and the grip is—not desperate. Tender. He’s had his fingers on my skin since the corridor, and now: permission.
We make love.
I’ve never used that phrase.
Sex has always been sex—a transaction with a defined output. You enter, you exit, you keep the receipt. But what happens in this room on this last night is not sex. What happens is slower than anything I’ve known, and every time I try to speed up. Instinct, habit, the nineteen-year-old reflex that saysfaster, harder, get there. He slows me down. His breath against my skin. The rhythm he sets is not the rhythm of want. It exists beyond my vocabulary. I try naming it anyway. Nothing fits.
I touch him. During. My hand on his cheek while he’s inside me. The gesture surprises me more than the sex. I’ve never done that, not with any bloke, not with anyone.
His face. Where the whole person lives, the why stops mattering, and the doing continues.
He catches my hand. Holds it against his face. Turns into it. His lips on my palm.
There’s no sound between us for a long minute. The only noise is the city beyond the window and the mattress giving with each of his slow pushes and my breath when his hips meet mine at the bottom of the stroke. He moves like someone who has all the time in the world and intends to use all of it.
‘Look at me,’ he says. Not the order from yesterday. Not the command. A request.
