Allan appears from the bar. Same grin. He puts a drink in front of Femi, remembers what he likes again, the bastard, and slides into the booth close enough that they brush. Easy. Automatic. The way furniture finds its place in a room you’ve lived in for years.
They talk. I drink. A film they watched together, a housemate of Allan’s in crisis, and a plan for the weekend that involves cooking and staying in. The domestic architecture of two people building a life in daylight.
I am happy for him—the thing underneath, the happiness. Allan touches Femi’s knee. Casual, unthinking. Thumb circling once, and Femi’s face does the thing it does, the softening—the opening.
Nobody touches me like that.
A tightness behind my ribs.
The closest I’ve got to what’s happening at that table is forty-five minutes in a four-step office with a pen on a desk and a knee that did not move. That’s the comparison I’m making, in a pub near campus, watching the lad I’m closest to be touched by a man who is allowed to touch him in front of me. My knee againsthisunder a desk is the thing I’ve got to put next to Allan’s thumb on Femi’s kneecap in a pub booth on a Thursday night, and they don’t belong on the same scale of measurement, and I know it.
And still. Still. If you asked me, right now, would I swap—would I swap the knee for the pub, the four-step office for the cooking-in—I don’t know what I’d answer.
I take a drink, a long one.
‘You alright?’ Femi asks, because Femi always asks.
‘Yeah. Tired.’
Awake. Thinking about a desk. A knee that didn’t move.
I replay the office hour in pieces: the pen, the look.If you need it,every fragment is a confirmation. Every silence was a gap he could have closed and didn’t.
But then: Femi’s face. The glow. Allan’s hand. The circle.
Two worlds. Femi walks through his in the open, parks, and pubs, and FaceTime with mothers. Mine fits inside a bathroom, a four-step office with the door shut and no words.
The bus hits a pothole. My bag slides, and I catch it. Zip still done up.
The knee is still burning where he touched it.
The bus turns onto Oxford Road. Streetlights count me home.
I’ve been looking at Ron’s text for three days. The one that saysText me when you’re not in the library, which is Ron’s way of sayingI don’t believe you went to the library, which is Ron’s way of sayingI’m here when you want to stop lying. I haven’t answered it. Haven’t deleted it. I hold the phone against my thigh now, and I don’t type anything, and I don’t put it away.
A lad two seats up is on FaceTime with somebody, and they’re laughing about something I can’t hear properly. Normal noise. The ordinary sound of ordinary people being in contact with the people they love.
The phone goes dark in my hand.
I put it away.
The seminar room empties in under two minutes. Chairs are slightly misaligned—someone’s bag was forgotten under a desk.The air still holds the shape of voices arguing about convergence, and now holds none.
I stay.
Not deliberately. Or not in a way I’d testify to.
I’m putting my notebook away at a speed that would embarrass a glacier when Haldrey says, without looking up from his papers, ‘If you’re staying to argue, you’ll have to be quick. I’ve got the third-years in ten minutes.’
I don’t move closer. Don’t lean on the desk the way that saysI belong in your space, with your attention.I stay where I am. Distance measured. Controlled.
‘I wasn’t going to argue.’
‘No?’ He glances up. Brief. The look that catalogues and files and moves on, except it doesn’t move on, because his pen stops against the paper and stays stopped. ‘That would be a first.’
The almost-smile. The one that creates the illusion of a shared frequency.
‘I had a question,’ I say.
