‘May I keep this open for a minute?’
‘It’s yours for a minute, ten. Forever, if you want it,’ I say, and realise I mean it.
The words stay out.
He reads the page a fourth time. Slower. Pauses at the substitution, pauses at the collapse. His mouth moves, a tiny, private shape. The shape of a man sayingohin his head.
Then he closes the notebook. Very gently, both hands.
He pushes it back across the table to me.
‘Who has seen this.’
‘Before tonight?’
‘Before tonight.’
‘Nobody.’
He flinches. Subtle, but there.
Looks at the closed notebook on the table between us. Then at me. Then at the notebook again.
‘Who told you you could do this?’
I don’t answer.
‘Not pass exams. Not be clever. This. Who told you you could think in structures? See the shape before the method? Close a problem because you understood what it wanted?’
He looks at the notebook again.
‘You think like a pure mathematician.’
Nobody.
The answer is nobody.
My Year 11 teacher saidyou’re clever, but you don’t apply yourself. I sat in the back row, didn’t put my hand up, did the minimum to pass, and learned how to go unnoticed.
No one ever said the wordmathematicianabout me.
Silence is the answer.
He watches understanding dawn as if I’ve said it.
He reaches across the table. His left hand covers my palm. No grip, no squeeze. Just warmth, skin to skin.
‘I am telling you now.’
Three seconds. Four. His hand on mine, and the kitchen clock that he’s never bothered to fix, ticking two minutes behind the real time.
‘Laurence—I?—’
‘Don’t deflect. Not about this. You can deflect about anything else in this flat. Not this.’
My hand stays under his. The notebook full of seventeen-year-old me sits closed on the table, and my sternum’s doing a thing that has nothing to do with sex.
Then, because I am who I am, and because what he just said is too heavy to hold, I turn my palm up. I lace my fingers through his, and I hold on.
