Page 51 of Crave

And again.

So I had a blissful wank and fell asleep in my own mess.

* * * *

When I woke, it was late morning, and I was in that strange half-dream state where the room still felt foreign and everything from the night before hovered like uncleared smoke. And for a while I laid staring at the ceiling, replaying every second. The mark on my jaw pulsed in time with my heartbeat. I touched it. It still ached.

By ten-thirty, I’d made up my mind.

Henry had already gone. Another day at the hospital, another twelve-hour shift spent trying to make sense of other people’s pain. Zara was on the phone when I went downstairs to make coffee, she waved, not noticing, then grabbed her bag and slipped out to whichever module she was attending. So I pulled up Ollie’s timetable on my laptop. I didn’t need to check it, not really. I knew his routine better than my own.

He’d have a macroeconomics lecture on Mondays, ten till twelve, in the Drayton Building. He’d grab a flat white after, then cut across the main quad to pretend he’d forgotten my existence and how we usually had lunch together. Then tonight, he had rowing practice with the team and they all met in the Champion’s Arms for a pint after.

Some things, unlike people, were predictable.

I decided to avoid my own class on Criminal Justice and the Modern State, and the thesis update with Professor Calthorpe if I’d been feeling particularly masochistic, as I wasn’t in the mood to dissect sentencing disparity while half my brain replayed the sound of a man’s voice telling me I was a dirty little pretty boy. Plus the bruise was still angry.

As was I.

So I ditched class and went hunting instead.

I left Clerkenwell on foot, cutting up through Theobalds Road while London shook off its hangover. It was that odd lull between rush hour and routine when couriers shouted into traffic and cafés steamed up with the smell of burnt beans and wet coats. The pavements glittered with last night’s rain, reflecting the bleached grey of the sky. It was a twenty-five–minute walk, give or take. Long enough to sober my thoughts, not long enough to silence them.

By the time I reached Bloomsbury, the city had changed skin. University College London was its own small empire. Motion and noise and too many lives colliding at once. The quad thrummed with footsteps and laughter, coats brushing, coffee cups steaming in cold hands with pigeons lining along the steps waiting for scraps. The air smelt of rain, stone, and caffeine, and that dense, familiar London mix clinging long after I’d stepped indoors.

Inside, the corridors stretched in that familiar, maddening mix of old marble and glass, a campus halfway between history and progress, never quite choosing which to be. I found a spot near the Drayton exit, leant against the wall beneath a faded careers poster and pretended to scroll through my phone.

There, I waited.

Every echo of footsteps sounded like him. Every laugh in the hallway pulled at my nerves. The logic-driven part of me, the one trained to analyse motive and consequence, tried to frame this as interrogation. Information gathering. Nothing personal. But that was bullshit. Because underneath all the rationalising, the betrayal clenched harder. And by the time the lecture doors opened, my pulse beat louder. Colder. Measured.

I’d learnt a lot of things from my father, one of which was how to corner guilty parties.

Ollie appeared. Perfect hair, pressed coat, a smirk that had once felt like home, and every ounce of composure I’d built cracked straight down the middle. He laughed with his course mates, hands gesturing, voice smooth, as if nothing had happened over the weekend. As if he hadn’t walked out of a two-year relationship and left me picking up the pieces outside my own house.

He paused to hold the door open for someone, eyes sweeping lazily over the hall, then catching on me. “Tristan,” he said, as if it was a coincidence.

I pushed off the wall, slipping my phone into my pocket. “Oliver.”

His smile twitched, uncertain. “Well. This is… unexpected. I’d assumed you’d forgo our lunch ritual.”

“We have unfinished business.”

Ollie blinked. And his friends glanced between us, reading the air, before he dismissed them with a breezy, “I’ll catch you up.” They clapped him on the shoulder, muttered their goodbyes, and vanished down the corridor.

Ollie tilted his head towards a quieter corner, that same unbothered stroll he’d perfected. The walk of a man who’d never once been told no and actually believed it.

“You here to throw more of my things at me?”

I didn’t bother with the act. “Were you fucking Benji?”

He flinched, then laughed. A cruel, breathy chortle he used when caught out. “Oh, come on. Me? Benji? The man can barely stand unless someone’s filming him.”

“Performing’s exactly your thing.” I stepped closer. “You and he went to that club in Hackney before, didn’t you? What were you doing? Don’t lie to me, Ollie. What the fuck are you involved in?”

He rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Tris. This is exactly why we didn’t tell you. We knew you’d go full cross-examiner.”

“Tell me what?”