A body in a bathroom, a body in Chorlton. And now, a body behind a hotel door in Vienna, I will use to bandage a wound that doesn’t close with skin.
I know this, and I do it anyway.
I don’t knock. Three and two is over. I pound the door once, and he opens it, and I’m inside before he can.
My mouth on his. Teeth. The kiss is not a kiss, it’s a claim. I shove him backward, grip his shirt, bite his neck hard enough that he hisses, and the sound is mine.
‘Mine.’ I say it into his skin. Against his pulse. My hand on his cock through his trousers, gripping, not stroking. ‘Say it.’
‘Ewan. Fuck.’
‘Say it.’
His eyes. The composure hasn’t cracked. It’s dissolved.
‘Yours.’
I pull his shirt over his head. Push him onto the bed. Straddle him. The condom is already in my hand because the habit is older than us, and I roll it on and sink without prep, the burn sharp and deliberate, wanting the hurt to overwrite everything Hugo is. I ride him hard. Mark his collarbone, his neck, the line of his throat. Every bite is a word that lives in my teeth unspoken. He grips my hips, and the grip is desperate, and his face is wrecked, and nothing, none of it, is enough.
I come. He comes.
After. The dark. His breathing and mine are not in sync. Sweat and lube, the sheets tangled.
‘You need to trust me, Ewan.’
His voice in the dark.
‘Then tell me the truth.’ I stare at the ceiling. ‘About Cambridge. About Hugo.’
Silence. Long enough that I think he won’t. Long enough for the walls to start forming, the ones I’ve been constructing since Lewisham.
‘He was my student.’
Three words that collapse the space between us.
‘PhD candidate. Cambridge. He was twenty-four, I was twenty-seven. It started as these things do.’ He stops. Starts again. ‘We were discovered. I resigned. He was far enough along that his career survived. Mine didn’t. Manchester was the only place that offered me a position. Nobody else applied.’
The ceiling. The crack in the plaster. A city I can’t see.
‘I didn’t tell you because I was ashamed.’ His voice is the smallest I’ve ever heard. The Lancashire creeping in as it does when his control.’ And because I didn’t want you to think?—’
‘That I’m a pattern.’ I say it flat. No question mark. ‘That you have a type. Students who don’t know any better.’
Silence.
It is the answer.
I turn onto my side. Away from him. The marks on his chest will be purple tomorrow. The ones on his neck will show, and Hugo will see them, and it won’t be enough.
I stay. Neither of us moves.
The ceiling has a crack in it, and I trace it—diagonal, hairline. The kind of crack a hotel paints over every four years and never fixes. End-to-end. Back again. A geometry problem I can solve without feeling anything.
What I don’t solve: the problem of us.
The maths runs the same way no matter how I input it. Laurence Haldrey, twenty-seven, at Cambridge. LaurenceHaldrey, thirty-one, at Manchester. Same pattern, different decade. The move north wasn’t an escape. Relocation of the same behaviour to a city willing to ignore it. Different lecture theatre, same sightline. He found me in a corridor in September, and the muscle memory took over.
Except.
