I turn around and kiss him because kissing is a thing I’m good at, and standing still under someone’s hands is not, the pivot happening so fast he doesn’t notice. Or he notices and lets me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ileave things.
A charger, first, plugged in behind his bedside table, wound neatly, like it fell out of my bag—and the next time I’m at his place it’s still there, still plugged in, socket switched on.
A hoodie draped over the arm of the sofa as if I forgot. I didn’t. The grey one, too big, smelling like my laundry, destined to smell like his flat.
A book—Hatcher’sAlgebraic Topology, not for any course, just brilliant and something I want him to see on his shelf next to his books. Know I was here.
A bookmark. A bakery receipt from a shop in Withington I’ve never been to, tucked into page 112 of the book he keeps on his bedside table, marking a line I read over his shoulder and wanted him to come back to. I don’t tell him. He’ll find it or he won’t.
He doesn’t remove them, doesn’t move them. The charger stays, the hoodie migrates from sofa to the hook by the door—not hidden, not folded, just hung with a place found for it—and my book appears on his shelf, slotted between Munkres andMay, alphabetically wrong but thematically right. I stare at it for thirty seconds before realising I’m staring and turning away.
And then, one Tuesday evening, I’m on the tram back to halls with my hand in my bag feeling for a pen, and my fingers close on an object I did not put there. I take it out—a pencil. HB, wooden, sharpened recently to the point a mathematician sharpens. Along the shaft, in faded white, a Cambridge crest and a college name I can’t read without sitting up straighter. A pencil that has lived on a shelf or in a drawer for a decade, minimum, and has now transferred, unremarked, into the rucksack of an eighteen-year-old who lets himself into a Chorlton kitchen on weekday mornings.
I sit with it in my palm for three tram stops.
He didn’t say. He won’t. The only window he had was when I left the bag by the table while I was in the shower.
I put the pencil in the pocket where the key lives—brass and graphite, together in denim against my thigh.
I find a bruise on my hip shaped like his thumb, study it in the bathroom mirror, purple with yellowing edges, and when I press it, the ache connects directly to everything.
On campus, we’re strangers who share a building.
I wear crew necks, he keeps his collar buttoned, and in lectures I sit in the last row eyes forward while he talks in that careful voice, the performance requiring more energy than either of us has left after what we do with the evenings.
Tuesday morning in the corridor, we pass each other, his eyes forward, mine forward, and between us the echo of what those hands were doing at midnight. A first-year walks between us, asking about an extension deadline, completely unaware she’s standing between us.
‘Of course,’ he says, professional and perfect. ‘Email me the details.’
The girl leaves, neither of us looks back, and the bite mark under my collar pulses with my heartbeat.
On Wednesday, he’s got a conference call that runs past eleven. I’m in my room staring at a problem set that should be done by now, reading the same line about Lagrange multipliers for the seventh time—every time my brain hits the wordconstraint, it translates it into his hand on my?—
I throw the pen across the room. It hits the wall and the bloke next door thumps back because it’s wanking o’clock and he doesn’t appreciate the interruption.
Friday lecture, he’s at the board, I’m in the last row, and we haven’t touched in thirty-six hours. His voice does the thing where it drops half a register when he turns away from the room, and I swear to God if he rolls his sleeves up, I will cause a scene.
He rolls his sleeves up.
My fingernails bite crescents into my palms, and the notebook in my lap earns its keep.
He stumbles on a proof, recovers, but the pause is there—the beat where his gaze fixes on my row and he loses his place. Nobody notices except for me.
I haven’t gone out in a long while, and Femi forces me to.
Saturday night, a bloke from a house party in Fallowfield: twenty, chemistry, a flat in Rusholme with a mattress on the floor and a Bob Marley poster doing heavy lifting for his personality.
Fit enough, willing, and knows the choreography.
We get as far as his lips against the corner of my mouth before I check out completely. He reaches for my belt, and I let him. His fingers are quick and practised, his right hand wrapping around my cock, and the technique is fine. Good, even.
But it’s the wrong hand.
The wrong grip. The wrong pressure on the upstroke.
