I unwrap it, inside: a pen. A proper one, weighted, the barrel dark green, the clip silver, the nib gold. I know his. He writes with a fat black Lamy that has a left-handed nib ground flat to stop the ink pooling at the wrong angle. This one is different. The nib is a different shape. Bought for a right-handed person.
I turn it in my hand.
‘I saw how your hand sits when you write,’ he says. ‘You grip the pen like it’s a crime scene. I wanted to see what it would do with one that was interested in you back.’
Interested.
‘Haldrey.’
‘Use it on a proof. Don’t waste it on a lecture note. Proofs earn it.’
He goes back to his food. Professional. Except his thumb is tracing the side of his wine glass, and the thumb is not composed.
I roll the pen between my fingers. Green and gold, and bought for a right-hander by a left-hander. The specificity of it. A gift that saysI have been thinking about how your hand moves.
We eat, we finish. I insist on washing up. He lets me, which is a first. He stands behind me at the sink and puts a hand at my nape, thumb on the notch below my skull, and leaves it there for the length of two rinse cycles. The hand. The staying.
After: the sofa, the lights dimmed. His legs crossed mine. A glass of wine, I don’t drink. He’s back at his marking, week nine papers, the Lamy in his left hand. He annotates somebody’s incorrect use of a supremum, and I think: I am nineteen and I am in a flat in Chorlton and the world out there is red and pink and queuing for tables. I have never spent a February fourteenth anywhere that felt like a place before.
He catches me watching.
‘What.’
‘Nothing.’
He caps the Lamy, sets the marking aside.
‘Ewan.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thirty-one minus nineteen.’
The answer arrives before I ask my brain to do it. ‘Twelve.’
‘Twelve,’ he says. He says it like he’s trying the word on. Like he’s been doing the same subtraction all day and decided to say it out loud once, so neither of us has to pretend it didn’t shift.
Twelve. A small accounting done in the dark by a universe that doesn’t ask you about it.
I don’t say any of that. I reach up and take him in both hands and kiss him like the kiss is a thank-you card and a birthday card and a love letter and a receipt and a confession all at once.
He kisses me back. Right hand in my hair. No hurry at all.
Nobody’s getting to say any of this out loud tomorrow.
Tonight the flat is saying it for us.
‘Department trip,’ I tell Ronan on the phone. ‘Academic conference. Four days.’
‘Where?’
‘Vienna.’
Silence. Ron processing. I can hear the construction of the next question, the load-bearing beams being positioned.
‘Who’s going?’
‘Students. Staff. Normal thing.’ I keep my voice level. Bored, even. The voice of a boy reporting admin, not a boy about to spend four nights in the same hotel as a man he can’t stop.
