‘We had a fight. Stupid, pointless. I said my course was harder and he heard criticism and I got defensive and he shut down and now he won’t even look at me.’
He breaks.
‘He’ll answer,’ I say. ‘It’s two AM. He’s asleep.’
‘What if he’s not asleep? What if he’s awake thinking I’m a terrible person? What if this is the thing, Ewan, the thing that.’
‘Femi. Listen. You said a dumb thing. He’ll be annoyed. You’ll apologise. It’ll be fine.’
Silence. Then: ‘How do you know?’
I’m the wrong person to answer that. My entire romantic CV is a man whose existence is classified and a collection of bathrooms I’d prefer to unsee.
But I say: ‘Because it’s you two. You’ll figure it out.’
‘You’re being weirdly wise for three AM.’
‘Don’t get used to it.’ Laughter surfaces but doesn’t break, catches in his voice instead.
‘Thanks, Ewan.’
‘Go to sleep, Femi. Text him in the morning. Not now; morning. People forgive better in daylight.’
He exhales. Long.
After he hangs up, I lie in the dark, and the question sits with me.Is this what relationships are? This pain?And I think: yes. Not the fight. Femi and Allan will be fine by morning, making up over yoghurt and gentle apologies, two people who know how to fix what they break.
The pain I know is different. That one morning, Laurence will wake up and decide that the risk isn’t worth it. The drawer will be emptied. The toothbrush removed, the emails stopped. That a man with everything to lose will look at the maths, the probability of ruin, the expected cost, and conclude that I’m not worth the calculation.
That fear. That’s the pain. The tax on loving someone you can’t.
I roll over. Face the wall, the corridor hums. Someone’s music bleeds through three doors and a fire exit.
I choose the pain. Apparently, every time I walk to the tram stop in Chorlton, I leave my trainers under his bed. I chose it.
I didn’t know that’s what choosing looked like.
Friday. His flat. The marking’s been abandoned, the coffee’s cold, and we’re on the sofa in that post-sex sprawl where moving and dissolving are equally valid options. My head on his chest. His heartbeat. Steady.
Outside: rain. Inside: the radiator clicking, the fridge humming, the flat doing its impersonation of a life.
‘What are we doing, Ewan?’
His voice. The serious one, the register he doesn’t use in the bedroom. The first time he saidyou have a rare mind, and my entire body reacted like he’d.
The stillness holds. His heartbeat under my ear is still steady, but his breath has changed. Shorter. Shallower. A world that has review boards and brothers and consequences. The old Ewan would fill this with a joke, a deflection, verbal armour at arm’s length. This Ewan holds it.
‘I don’t know exactly.’ It comes from somewhere I didn’t know I had, somewhere the four letters have been living unspoken, the evidence accumulating like sediment. ‘I know stopping isn’t an option.’
His breathing changes.
He finds my neck with his hand, fingers gentle at the base of my skull, and the pressure says: just this, everything.
His pulse, my ear against it. Steady.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Departmental drinks. The foyer’s been repurposed with committee-level effort; trestle tables, paper napkins, wine in plastic cups, a cheese platter that peaked two hours ago and is now entering its Baroque period. The Head of Department is telling a story about a conference in Oslo that four people are pretending to find interesting. Postgrads cluster near the wine. Staff cluster near the door. The hierarchy is spatial, and nobody’s broken the treaty.
