Brilliant. Between us we can solve abstract algebra and apparently nothing else.
The distance between the door and the kitchen is four metres, roughly. I’ve crossed it desperate, crossed it at 2 am in bare feet. Four metres of hardwood floor that I’ve covered at every possible speed except this one.
Slow.
I walk to him. Close enough to see the pulse in his throat. Close enough to smell the coffee and the aftershave and under both, the warmth that is just him. The skin and the soap and whatever chemical arrangement makes this particular man’s proximity rearrange me entirely.
‘The flat looks good,’ I say, because the alternative is standing here counting his eyelashes.
‘I cleaned.’ He half-smiles. The muscles are pulling, rusty, like a mechanism that’s been out of use. ‘Twice, actually. And then I ironed a shirt. And then I ironed a different shirt. I may have ironed all of my shirts.’
‘That’s a lot of shirts.’
‘It’s a stupid thing to focus on.’
‘It’s not.’
We stand in the kitchen, the table between us. The table is clean now—just wood. Two mugs of coffee on it, steaming. Strong. Milk, one sugar. He remembers.
I pick up the mug. Drink, too hot. Don’t care.
‘Sit?’ He gestures at the chair.
‘In a minute.’
I put the mug down. Step around the table, he watches me come. He tracks me with that focus, but the calculation is gone, and now there’s just?—
I kiss him.
No collision. No seizing. Slow. The stubble gone and the skin smooth and warm and the angle of his lips against mine a thing my body remembers like muscles remember a stretch.
He exhales into the kiss. Releasing all he’s been holding.
His hands are on my hips. Tentative. The precision is gone and replaced with a slower, less certain touch, the hands of someone relearning a language they were once fluent in.
We kiss in the kitchen. The coffee is going cold behind us.
The duvet changed, fresh sheets, new pillowcases. Like the flat, prepared. As if new linen could make this new. We’re kissing, and my shirt is halfway up, and his fingers against my skin are?—
Fuck. The same touch, the same fingers. The same pressure that I’ve dreamed about and wanked to and missed with a specificity that borders on clinical. He traces the ridge of my hip bone with his thumb. The tendons in his forearm shift when he grips.
I pull his shirt up. He lifts his arms. His chest, the hair, everything I’ve been starved for. My cock is already so hard it’s painful, and my body wants what my body always wants.Now, now, right now.But something’s shifted.
I get his belt undone. He gets mine. Trousers off, both of us. The choreography of two people who know each other’s buckles and buttons and zippers, the fluency of it.
His cock against my hip, half hard. The heat of it through his boxers, and I push against it because the friction is the only language my body trusts, and he makes a sound, low in his throat, the vowel that only comes out when he’s, and then his left hand locks on my waist. The fingers are rigid, the tendons standing, the grip of a man whose body has refused an instruction.
‘Wait.’ He stops. ‘Sorry. I just—’ He closes his eyes. Body locked. The muscles in his forearms freeze. His whole body is rigid in a way I’ve never seen before. Not the tension of control but the tension of machinery jammed.
‘Laurence.’
‘I want to—I want.’ He opens them. They’re glassy. Not tears yet, the pressure behind the dam is about to give. ‘My body won’t cooperate.’
I stop. Everything. My hands lift from his waist. My hips pull back. The urgency switches off, and the silence that’s left is.
He sits on the bed. Hands on his knees, head down.
‘Every time I close my eyes I hear it.’ He swallows hard. ‘I hear myself saying it.I’m the worst thing.And my body won’t stop believing it.’
