Someone, presumably he, has corrected a typo in blue biro—a single comma added, the amount of care he has for a piece of A4 that nobody else will look at twice. The knowing made the radiator dust taste like something I’ll remember later.
13:42. I’m fifty feet away, leaning against the wall between the lift and the noticeboard, pretending to read a flyer for a postgrad research symposium on spectral methods. I’ve read the flyer four times. I could sit in the symposium now. I’ve still got eighteen minutes to kill and no legal way to kill them because I cannot be seen hovering outside his door, and I cannot sit in the single plastic chair placed opposite the door for waiting students, because it’s directly in his sightline if he comes out.
The chair is empty, no other students. Of course, there are no other students; it’s Week 4, office hours on a Tuesday afternoon, and the degree hasn’t panicked anyone yet. The week the queue starts forming is Week 8, when people notice their first coursework is worth 40%. Until then, office hours are a wasteland. I’ll probably be the only visitor today.
That should feel like good fortune. It feels like being stripped.
13:47. I walk past his door, don’t look, don’t stop, keep moving, go to the far end of the corridor, and pretend to use the water fountain. The water fountain has one of those buttons you press and get two seconds of lukewarm chlorinated water, and I press it twice and don’t drink. My mouth’s dry in a way water won’t fix.
13:49. Walking back, I let myself glance at the door. It’s open a crack. Enough to suggest the occupant isn’t hiding. I catch the edge of a shoe, dark leather, polished once recently and not since, and the curve of a chair leg. He’s at his desk.
He’s in there, already, and I’m out here, and the inch of open door is the most charged inch of space that has ever existed in my body.
I am, I register with distant and genuine amusement, terrified. Not socially. Not about being caught—catching is something I’ve thought through, catching has a plan. Terrified in the way my body has been waiting to be terrified, a fear that’s been earmarked and saved up for this corridor and this door and this moment.
13:52. I find the student toilets, lock myself in a cubicle, count my breath: in for four, hold for four, out for four, as Ron taught me on the roof at thirteen. It does nothing.
I flush for cover, wash my hands. Check my face in the mirror. The eyeliner’s subtle today, on purpose. The chain’s tucked inside the collar. The rings are off, that’s the only real tell. I took the rings off in my halls room thirty minutes ago, and Ican still feel the absence on the first three fingers like phantom limbs. Haldrey has not seen me without the rings before.
He will, now.
13:56. I’m standing outside his office holding a problem set I solved three days ago and a facial expression I’ve been practising in the halls bathroom.
The expression says: struggling student. Eager but confused. A fresher who needs extra help and isn’t afraid to ask for it.
The problem set says: I have no idea what I’m doing.
Both are lies.
My heart’s too fast, too high. The beat before a bloke kisses you in a club. Eye contact, mouth. Nervousness is not something my body does.
A voice from inside, aimed somewhere that isn’t me. He’s on the phone, maybe, low, steady, the vowels going private the way they only do when there’s no theatre to fill, the sentence staying locked behind the wood.
Now.
I raise my hand to knock, and it’s shaking, which is new information about this body, and I can sort it out on my own time because I need it to perform the motor function of knocking on a door, and it needs to perform now.
Three knocks, even spacing. Not too hard, I won’t be the fresher who hammered. Three neutral professional knocks on a two-inch gap of oak.
Inside, the small sound of a chair moving.
‘Come in.’
The handle’s cold under my palm. I push the door open and step across the threshold like a boy with forged papers at a border.
He looks up from his desk, and I get three seconds of his face before the mask slips on—recognition, the tightness in his jaw.
‘Mr Carrick.’ He says it like he’s testing the sound. ‘Come in.’
The office is smaller than I expected—four steps wide, maybe five long. Books on every surface, piled to the radiator. A whiteboard with equations in handwriting I’d recognise from space. A mug of coffee that’s gone cold enough to have a skin on it. The window’s cracked open, and October comes through in a thin line of damp air.
It smells like paper and him: skin and cotton and the ghost of the coffee from the broken machine.
I sit in the chair across from his desk—it’s close, narrow, our knees almost touching, a handwidth apart, his heat reaching across when it shouldn’t be possible.
I sit the way I’ve decided to sit. Left leg over right, the slight tilt that opens my body towards him without making the opening obvious. My hands light on the edge of the chair, one on each side, relaxed. I know where my throat is in relation to the collar of the jumper. I know the jumper’s pulling across my chest in a way that cannot be accidentally corrected without drawing more attention than leaving it. The soap I used this morning has faded enough to be plausibly forgotten. I made a study of forgetting it.
‘I’m struggling,’ I say. ‘With the problem sets.’
