Same words as the first time.
Different weight entirely.
The first time, it sounded like a rule.
This time, it sounds like grief with the volume turned down.
The words stay locked. The kettle ticks as it cools. He doesn’t turn round.
The tram stops at Chorlton. The rain doesn’t.
Campus. Thursday. The grey afternoon Manchester specialises in, the sky a single unbroken slab of nothing, weather that makes you understand why people invented pubs.
I see him from across the quad. Laurence. With a woman. Dr Gill, the number theorist from the second floor, the one who wears scarves like they’re a competitive sport. They’re laughing. She touches his arm. He leans in to speak, and she tips her headback, and the sound carries, bright, easy. A world I don’t have the postcode for.
The jealousy is immediate. Smaller. Nothing like the territorial rage at Hugo’s shoulder brush in Vienna. This is—different, colder. Worse. The specific ache of watching someone you love, of watching someone be comfortable with a person who can stand next to them in daylight without it being a disciplinary offence.
She can touch his arm. In public, in the quad. With the Head of Department ten metres away, eating a sandwich.
The arm stays untouched, everything stays untouched. I can stand in a back row and watch him write on a board and go home and fuck him until the room blurs, but I can’t do what Dr Gill is doing. Laugh with him in the open like a person who exists.
The ache settles, low behind the ribs. I turn away before he sees me seeing it.
Three in the morning, the halls room. Everything’s moved except the ceiling.
I dream about him. I’ve had those dreams; they’re straightforward, they have a plot and an outcome, and I wake up hard and handle it. These are different; these are terrifying.
Breakfast. The two of us are at his kitchen table. I’m reading something on my phone. He’s marking. His foot is touching mine under the table. Just there, the foot stays. We don’t move it.
A film on his sofa. My head on his chest. His hand in my hair. The boring, domestic weight of a night with nowhere to be.
I wake up gasping, panicked, never aroused. Because the boy who wanted those things, the breakfast, the sofa, the footunder the table, is not a boy I’ve ever been. That person wants permanence, a name in the phone instead of a letter, things to unpack.
I sit on the mattress. No one retching, no one wanking, no one crying to their mum. Just the hum of the building, the rain, and me.
It arrives like a door kicked open, no gradual approach. No buildup. Just the four letters, fully formed, impossible to unsee, and I’ve been stepping around them for weeks, months, since a man rolled his sleeves up in a lecture theatre and I forgot how rooms work.
Femi is right.
Love.
I love him.
None of the pieces I told myself I wanted, challenge, body, control, I meant to dismantle, authority I meant to seduce, hands I meant to put on my neck. Him. The man who drinks his coffee black and scalding and talks about a pier in Lancaster and pulls me closer in his sleep and calls his sister on Sundays and marks papers until midnight and said I hadn’t planned you and meant it.
I love Laurence Haldrey.
Terror. Immediate. Love means needing. Needing means the version of me that survived Lewisham has been.
But underneath: relief. Like a pulse under ice. The relief of naming a thing that’s been nameless for weeks.
The answer is love, obviously. Elegant. I’d have seen it instantly if it were numbers instead of this.
I lie back on the narrow bed. The ceiling doesn’t care. Manchester doesn’t care. The rain keeps doing what the rain does.
Something is rearranging itself and breaking apart and making room.
After Vienna, he starts leaving evidence.
