‘Stay, Ewan.’ His voice. Lancashire all the way through it.
‘Where else would I go.’
He doesn’t answer. The silence hasthat questionin it, and we both leave it there.
I close my eyes. Not sleep.
The rain starts again. Or hasn’t stopped—either way.
Monday is wrong. I can feel it before I see it, like knowing a proof is broken before finding the error; the logic running sideways.
Coffee in one hand. Phone in the other, screen dark, no messages, the silence from Laurence a bruise I keep pressing. Two girls from my econometrics tutorial are standing outside the entrance to the maths building. They see me, stop talking.The stop is surgical, mid-syllable, mouths closing in unison, eyes cutting sideways.
Walk past. Don’t look.
I look.
One of them is scrolling on her phone. The other has an expression I’ve worn. Someone torn between sympathy and entertainment.
The corridor is worse.
Fragments. The acoustics carry whispers. You catch sound without meaning. ‘…Haldrey…’ from a cluster near the vending machine. ‘…first year… a proper slag…’ from a bloke I’ve never spoken to with his mate, both of them tracking me as I pass.
Stomach. Cold.
I keep walking. The rhythm, left, right, left, mechanical.
Ronan. His touch is everywhere now. Friday night, the door closing. The deliberate click. The promise that wasn’t a promise:remember, I tried to protect you.
Protect. Meaning report. Meaning emails, meetings, concerns raised behind closed doors. Whatever he said three days ago has escaped containment now. I can feel it in the turned heads, the interrupted conversations, the way people stop talking when I come into view.
Protect.
I want to stop. Want to ask:what did you hear? Who said it? How much do you know?Instead, I walk. The walking is a performance because underneath it, my hands are shaking around a cardboard cup, and the campus I’ve been crossing for eight months has become foreign territory.
Three postgrads near the noticeboard stop talking when I approach. Coordinated. Rehearsed.
My feet keep going, they have to. The body does its job when the chest can’t. Somewhere behind my sternum, a small thing I’ve been carrying for eight months, the sense of being a personin a place, unclips and drops, and the sound is swallowed by the corridor’s roar of unspoken things.
Femi finds me behind the library, which is where I go when the building itself has become the enemy.
There’s a bench here that faces the car park. Maximum ugliness, zero foot traffic, the place where people go to cry. I’m not crying. I’m doing the thing Carrick men do instead of crying. Face set, breathing through the nose.
‘I’ve been looking everywhere.’ He sits. Doesn’t ask permission. Femi’s never needed permission for proximity—asking would give me the option of saying no, and I’m grateful not to have that choice.
‘It’s out. All of it. You and Dr Haldrey. Everyone’s—’ He stops. ‘It’s everywhere, Ewan. Someone told the department.’
Ron doesn’t slam. He builds. Methodically. The anonymous complaint form is buried three clicks deep. Or a phone call, or an email. Whatever tool the institution provides for turning love into procedure.
And Salgari. Probably. Two pathways converging on a single weekend, because institutions grind until someone hands them a reason to move fast, and I’d handed two people reasons. Ron submitted the form, and Salgari spread the whisper.
‘I’m in love with him, Femi.’
Between us on the bench, in the car park, in the rain. I’ve said it to Ron in a living room and said it to myself in the dark. Saying it to Femi is different. This one doesn’t need to justify anything—just state.
He nods. Slow.
‘I’m with you.’ Three words with no caveats, nobut you should’ve told me, orwhat were you thinking?His hand on my arm, heavy, warm, undoes the knot behind my ribs.
