I let it retreat. Saying it, even letting the four letters form, would mean meaning it. And I don’t know what comes after that. I’ve never been on the other side. The blokes were bodies. Laurence is in the bed behind me, his breathing the only evidence that the last three nights happened outside my head.
I get dressed fast—the jeans from the floor, the t-shirt, the hoodie. My hand is on the door handle when I hear him shift—a murmur. He’s reaching for me in sleep.
I don’t turn around.
I don’t turn around because if I turn around, I’ll get back in the bed, and if I get back in the bed, I’ll stay, and if I stay, I’ll have to face it, and it will.
The door, the corridor. The carpet is swallowing my footsteps. Room 412, my key. My room, my untouched bed.
The mirror, when I wipe it, shows a face I don’t recognise.
The features are mine. The architecture behind them has been rearranged.
‘Get a grip.’
The mirror doesn’t flinch.
Today I’ll sit at a different table. Today I’ll be the version of myself that doesn’t need this—sharp, detached, the boy who doesn’t raise his hand. I’ll rebuild it. I’ve done it before. I know exactly how to.
My hands are on the sink. Gripping.
The face in the mirror is not convinced.
Vienna outside, bells. Trams. I stand dripping in a bathroom deciding whether to run towards something or away from it and already knowing, already knowing before the towel hits the rack, that running is the only race I’ve never.
Mirror. Steam. The outline of a word I won’t say.
I pick the table furthest from the academics. Sit with my back to Laurence’s section of the room. Order eggs. Laugh at something the PhD student from Leeds says about Hilbert spaces, laugh too loud, laugh like a boy having a brilliant time at a conference who hasn’t spent the last hour staring at a bathroom mirror trying to disassemble his own face.
The wall is up, brick by brick. I’ve been laying it since Lewisham—different face for every room, every bloke, every version of a city that needed a different Ewan. The Lewisham version, the Manchester version. The version that sits in a lecture theatre and doesn’t raise his hand.
This morning: that version. The one who doesn’t need.
Femi sits beside me. Doesn’t say anything. Eats his yoghurt, and I eat my toast—the eggs. The chandelier does its job.
Laurence is staring. Don’t turn around. Eat the eggs, be the version.
He catches me in the corridor outside the conference room, between panels. The foot traffic has thinned, and the corridor is all thick carpet, muted light, and walls that swallow sound.
‘Everything alright?’
His voice. The one he uses when he’s trying not to sound like he’s asking what he’s asking. He’s wearing a different shirt, grey, buttoned to the collar, covering the marks. His eyes aren’t where they usually are.
I did that. I’m the absence he reached for.
The knowledge settles, deep, immovable.
‘It’s just sex.’ I say it flat. Level. The line I assembled in the shower this morning, pre-fabricated, load-tested. ‘Don’t make it weird.’
Pain flickers across him. Fast. A flinch he catches before it finishes. His face hardens. The control I’ve mapped, the one I’ve. Don’t.
‘Right.’ He nods. Steps back. The professional distance clicks into place. ‘Of course.’
He walks away, and the corridor swallows him. His posture is rigid.
But I see it because I put it there.
My hand goes to the wall. Stays there.
