‘Lots of travel books,’ I say into the pillow. ‘Didn’t have you down as the type.’
A beat. Then his weight settles on the bed behind me. The arm, across my waist. Same place as that first morning.
‘I am not,’ he says into my hair, his voice close. ‘I keep meaning to go. I never go.’
‘Where.’
‘Oh.’ The small laugh that isn’t really a laugh. ‘Anywhere.’
The Loire stays unnamed. I lie still under his arm, counting the silences, and I understand.
Suddenly, as a proof breaker.
Loving someone older than you is this: discipline, devotion, grace offered for history I can’t touch.
His breathing slows against my neck, evening out.
I keep my eyes open in the dark for a long time after his have closed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
And the maths.
I can’t stop the maths from doing itself. This is what my head does in the dark when a new number has come into it. It runs the number against the other numbers. Until it balances or it doesn’t.
I am eighteen.
He is thirty-one. Thirteen years older.
Thirteen years during which he has been eighteen somewhere, and twenty somewhere else, and twenty-two, and twenty-seven. Thirteen years of rooms I have never seen, books I have never touched, people who knew how he took his coffee before I knew he existed.
And in one of those years, a boy older than me, with better handwriting than mine,wrote your Hugoin the front of a book and handed it over like it was nothing and everything at once.
That is the part I cannot do anything with.
Not Hugo, exactly. Hugo is only a name in ink. Hugo is evidence.
Evidence that Laurence has been known before me. Properly known. The Borges, the Cavafy, the vinyl shelf, the small privatesmile. Whatever it was that made Hugo decide that the man in a Cambridge quad was his, or close enough to sign for.
All of that happened before me.
All of that was catalogued, claimed, and written down by someone who was not me.
Then the maths of me.
Let me count.
No boyfriends.
One, maybe, if the boy who kissed me at thirteen in the changing room before PE counts. Behind the row of hanging blazers, with someone’s trainers wet from the field and the whole place smelling of socks. He kissed me like it was a dare he had given himself, then outed me a couple of months later to save himself in front of the whole school, so no. He does not count.
Hookups, mostly. An hour each, tops. A few that stretched into morning because we fell asleep and I missed my alarm. None of them asked for my number. None of them had a name I remembered a week later. None of them got further than a door, a mouth, sometimes a bed, and always a quick exit.
I have never had breakfast with a lad on purpose.
I have never learnt anyone from their bookshelf.
I have never signed myself into the front of anything with the wordyourand handed it over like I could afford to behis.
