Femi would tell me to turn round. Femi would tell me thatfollowing a lectureris not a line the law has any nuance about. Femi isn’t here. I have, in the last seventy-two hours, stopped checking what Femi would say about any of this, because every answer isturn round, and every step I’ve taken has been the opposite.
He turns onto a tree-lined street. Bay windows. Hedges trimmed by people who own their own secateurs.
He stops at a door, blue, peeling, terraced conversion. Reaches in his pocket, fumbles the keys. Drops them. The tremor travels this far. Fifteen minutes ago.
I wait until he gets the key in the lock.
‘Dr Haldrey.’
He goes rigid, full-body lock. The key halfway turned. His frame tensing, climbing into itself.
He turns. Slow. The face I’ve been dismantling in my head for six weeks is white. Not pale—white.
‘What.’ He cracks on the word. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We weren’t finished.’
‘We are. I told you everything I needed to tell you.’
‘You told me you can’t. That’s not the same thing.’
His eyes. Behind the glasses, in the dim of the porch light, wide, furious, terrified. I’ve seen that combination before, never with this much voltage.
‘Leave.’ Low. Hard. ‘Now.’
‘No.’
The key is still in the lock. He grips it. The door is half-open like an equation he refuses to resolve.
I step forward, into his space. Close enough to smell the coffee he didn’t drink on his breath, the detergent on his collar, the warmth underneath that’s just him, sharp and living. His warmth presses through both our shirts. The plug reminds me it exists. My cock has been half-hard since the café. Now it’s not half anything.
He doesn’t step back. The door behind him swings wider.
I step through. Past him, into his hallway. The space he left was exactly wide enough.
The door closes; he closes it. He leans against the wood, pushing, and the click of the latch is deafening.
Dark. The hallway is narrow, dim, the last of the daylight through a frosted window at the end, his breathing, mine, and the radiator’s tick.
‘This can’t happen,’ he starts.
Stillness keeps me grounded, no touch—just the two of us in his hallway with the dark between us.
‘Tell me to leave.’ A beat. ‘Saythis is wrongand I’ll walk out and never mention it again.’
Silence. The radiator. He breathes, ragged, too fast.
The hallway is a narrow rectangle of choices he has not yet made. I stand in the part of it he hasn’t closed off. I do not move. Moving now would be a pressure he doesn’t need.
In the dark between us, a great deal is being weighed. The career variable. The eighteen-year-old who walked into his office hour with a strategic centimetre of bare neckline and stayed two minutes longer than necessary. The variable he’s been refusing to put on the board for six weeks—the one where he wants this. He is putting it on the board. I can hear it in the way his breathing has gone uneven in a pattern I haven’t heard from himbefore, a pattern the controlled version of him would have pulled back into line by now.
I keep my hands where they are. I do not look at his mouth. The last thing he needs, in the three seconds it will take him to resolve this, is somebody standing too close performing the answer for him.
And underneath everything: the thing I do not say, because saying it would be pressure and because it is, in any case, the wrong shape for this room.If you tell me to leave, I will leave.I’ll survive it. I’ve survived every other version of wanting something I wasn’t allowed to have. I will go home, and I will finish this degree, and I will, on some day a decade from now, remember the smell of his hallway and the tick of the radiator and the three seconds I stood in the dark waiting for a man to choose me or not.
Three seconds. Five.
‘Stay,’ he says. One word. Then he breaks.
