He’s at the table with a pile of papers I’ve already accepted; I’m losing his attention to them
I sit down. Put my bag on the linoleum. Take out the notebook.
‘Can I show you this.’
I’m doing this whether he says yes or not.
He puts his pen down. Pushes the papers aside. Watches me open the notebook without saying a word.
Because Laurence has learned, somewhere in the last weeks, when I’m about to hand him my mind instead of my body.
He likes my body. Fine. Established.
But this is the bit that keeps him still.
I find page forty-three. Slide the notebook across the table. Turn it so it’s facing him.
I have not done this before.
This specific configuration—leaning towards a man with a thing I made that has nothing sexual attached to it—is foreign to every part of my training. I have offered mouths and arses and heat and compliance. I have never put a page of myself on a kitchen table with the writing facing up and said look.
The notebook on the table between us is more naked than I have ever been with my clothes off.
‘I wrote the first three attempts when I was seventeen. I got stuck. The ones in blue I wrote on Sunday.’
He doesn’t say anything yet. His left hand comes up to the page. Index finger tracing; not touching, hovering, along the first line of the old handwriting. Then along the second. He reads in the pattern I’ve watched for weeks: top to bottom, once, quick;then top to bottom again, slow; then back to the line where the thing lives.
He doesn’t move. The face he uses when reading is the face he uses when not reading anything at all. Unreadable. One of the most annoying things about him, and also the thing I trust most.
I sit on my hands. Literally. Both palms under my thighs on the kitchen chair. If I leave them free, I’ll rearrange the mugs, pick at my thumbnail, reach across the table to physically reroute his attention back to my body, where I know how to be looked at.
He reads the old attempts. Then the new lines in blue. Then the final collapse, then the little square.
Then he reads it all again.
Then he looks up at me.
A third face under the lecturer and the lover. The eyes that looked at me in the office the first time I showed him a shortcut, but deeper, because now he knows what my hand feels like and what my mouth tastes like and what I sound like at three in the morning, and on top of all of that, he is still looking at the maths.
‘You tried this at seventeen.’
‘Yeah.’
‘With no supervisor. No reading list. No one telling you which direction was the right one.’
‘I mean, I couldn’t do it before. This is after your lectures.’
‘Ewan.’ The flatness in his voice. Thedon’t deflectflatness. ‘I know colleagues at Cambridge who could not have closed this at eighteen. Some of them still couldn’t.’
The words are so specific, my armour’s all wrong.
‘It’s just a convergence thing.’
‘Stop.’
I stop.
He’s looking at the notebook again. Moves his hand. The left hand is flat on the page now. The way a man puts his palm on athing he’s trying to memorise through the skin. The other hand is on the table. Fingers doing that small drum he does when the thinking gets fast, and he’s choosing which sentence to let out.
