‘How old you are.’
‘Yes.’
‘He didn’t ask because he’s already chosen an answer he can live with.’
Laurence doesn’t move.
‘He thinks you’re like twenty-three. A PhD lad, maybe a postdoc. Someone clever and slightly older and not technically anyone’s fault. That’s the one he can explain to himself. Every time he doesn’t ask the real question, it’s because he’s already built a version of you that doesn’t make him have to look too hard.’
My thumb catches on the rim of the cup.
‘And I’m letting him build it, because the version I haven’t told him is the one where his little brother?—’
I stop.
‘—is fine. I was going to say. But the word won’t come.’
Laurence’s left hand hasn’t moved. Hasn’t closed on mine. Hasn’t pulled away.
‘Ewan.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I would rather not be the reason you lie to your brother.’
I look at him properly for the first time since he said,Who raised you?
‘You’re not the reason,’ I say. ‘I’ve been building versions of myself for my brother since I was thirteen. You’re just the latest one.’
A beat.
‘And the hardest.’
He doesn’t answer.
His thumb moves once, very slightly, across the wood of the table between our hands. Not touching me. Thinking something he won’t say aloud.
I pick up my cold coffee. Drink it anyway.
My phone is face down on the table beside the notebook, and for the first time all evening I am aware of it as a physical object. A small black rectangle full of a brother whose Sunday call I haven’t picked up yet this week.
The phone stays dark.
The kitchen empties of the conversation we just had, and neither of us moves to clear the cups. We sit in the residue ofwho raised youand let it cool.
After a minute, Laurence speaks, voice changed register—the lover, the one I’m starting to learn.
‘There is something I have not done in a long time.’ Eyes on his cup. ‘I would like to talk about it before I propose it.’
I sit with this. He’s not a man who lengthens his sentences for nothing.
‘Go on then.’
‘Restraint.’ He looks at me. ‘Cotton rope. Wrists, primarily, possibly arms. You bound, me not. I haven’t asked anyone for this in some years. I would not ask if I did not trust both of us with the talking that has to happen first.’
The kitchen does the small electric thing it does when a sentence has weight. I run the words over the back of my teeth before I answer.
‘Have you done it before.’
