No punctuation, no follow-up—just the one line, which is the most un-Laurence text message the man has ever sent, which is itself the answer to the question I wasn’t quite asking. I didn’t text back. I just kept going.
Outside the tram windows, Manchester is doing its thing. The rain isn’t falling so much as being thrown. Slanted, insistent, already finding the gap between collar and skin in the first three seconds, and lives there for an hour. The pavements are sheets of running water.
Thirty-two minutes. I know because I’ve counted before. I count again.
I walk from the tram stop with my jacket over my head, which is pointless; everything is wet now, shoes squelching, socks going cold around the ankles. The wallet in my back pocket has the key in it. The key has the teeth biting my thumb when I reach for it.
I let myself in, no doorbell.
He’s in the kitchen in a dressing gown worn at the elbows—something he’s had longer than me, longer than I’ve been sexually active, a garment belonging to the man who lives here when nobody else is watching. Coffee in front of him, a book open at the table. His hair’s still damp from the shower, sticking up on one side, and his glasses sit on the kitchen counter instead of his face, which means he was reading without them, which means he has a prescription he doesn’t wear all the time, and I didn’t know that.
He looks up when I come in, but doesn’t stand.
‘You’re drenched.’
‘Raining.’
‘Evidently.’ His mouth twitches towards speech. ‘Why are you not in lecture, Ewan.’
My name, regular use now, and I still feel it at the base of my spine every time.
‘Because I’m here.’
I cross the kitchen, drop my bag by the table, stand in front of him with water running off my jacket onto his lino, and my jeans heavy with rain, and my hair plastered down. He takes stock: the wet, the eighteen-year-old skipping a morning and the look that crosses him is half despair and half the thing underneath it.
‘You’re going to catch your death.’
‘Then warm me up.’
It’s a line. A terrible line. A rehearsed, inauthentic line. I absolutely mean it anyway.
He finds nothing to say.
I lean down. Place my palms flat on the kitchen table, either side of his book. The words upside down under my fingers. Myface is six inches from his. Water dripping from my fringe onto the page. One drop hits a word, and the ink blurs.
‘Tell me to go.’ I’ve started doing this. It started the first night in his hallway, and it hasn’t stopped being the only sentence I know how to offer him that he can refuse. ‘Say you want to be left alone, finish your coffee and read your book, and I’ll go. Right now. I swear.’
A pause. Then the name that’s been living behind my teeth for five weeks just walks out of my mouth, this time looking at him.
‘Laurence.’
It falls between us like a ring hitting tile.
I’ve said it in my head since the first office hours. I said it once into his mouth. I’ve never said it across a kitchen table with both of us dressed.
He changes, revealing the word before he speaks it.
He looks at the drop on the page. At my palm, at me.
He closes the book.
He reaches up, and he fists my wet t-shirt in both hands, and he pulls me down into his lap.
His dressing gown falls open. The cord was never tied. Underneath: nothing. A naked man was reading in his own kitchen on a Tuesday morning when his student let himself in with a key and dripped rainwater onto his book.
By the time I stand, the kitchen is warm, the chair still warm, his dressing gown still open, and he’s looking at me like he’s afraid of the next sentence.
‘I’ll make you more coffee,’ he says.
