I shouldn’t be here.
Ewan Carrick, fresher, economics, no reason to be here except the one reason currently standing across the room in a navy blazer with a glass of red he hasn’t touched—a man who makes you understand why anyone wears one at all.
Laurence. Professional mode engaged, the posture, the smile. He’s talking to a postdoc about topology or geometry or whatever involves hand gestures and the occasional precise nod. The collar is done up. The cuffs are buttoned. Every inch of him saysI am a serious academic with serious thoughts.
The blazer, Christ. Navy, fitted, sitting across his shoulders like architecture on a skyline. I’ve seen this man naked, had him shaking apart in a hotel room in Vienna with his hands in myhair. The blazer is worse—I want to peel it off him like evidence. My dick has opinions about everything this man wears since week one, but the blazer is going straight to the top.
I lean against the wall. Beer in hand, the cheap lager they’ve put out for the students brave enough to attend. Sip. Watch.
He feels it, the stare. His whole frame shifts, not a flinch, subtler. He scans, finds me, and flicks away.
I don’t look away.
He scans again. Finds me. Flicks away. The muscle in his cheek is working against the mouth that wants to. His glass comes up, and he doesn’t drink, a prop, a hand busy.
I watch the blazer. The clean line across the shoulders that wouldn’t survive a hand on it. The lapel. The millimetre of the shirt cuff on each sleeve. Someone ironed that shirt this morning. He did. He stood in his kitchen at seven with his hair wet and pressed a shirt he’d wear to this reception, knowing he’d wear it for my benefit too. Now he’s watching me watch him from twelve metres across a foyer with a cheese platter between us and a regret he didn’t fully clock when he buttoned it up.
The Head of Department asks him something. He answers. His mouth moves in complete sentences while the rest of him is logged in to the part he’s been trying to run offline for a year.
I sip beer that’s gone room temperature—the lager tastes of plastic and of watching. I’m enjoying this. He knows. That’s half the charge—he’s in professional mode, and I’m against a wall and between us is the agreement that we both know exactly what we’re doing to each other.
Forty minutes. That’s how long he lasts. Forty minutes of me against this wall, beer going warm, staring at him. He laughs at the right moments. Nods at the right moments. Shakes the right hand. And every thirty seconds, his gaze slides back to me. Can’t stop himself.
Nobody notices—two hundred conversations, the clink of plastic cups. Nobody sees what runs between us. My wall, his blazer, twelve metres of departmental carpet that might as well be nothing.
Nobody except maybe the colleague. The module coordinator. She’s near the cheese, watching. She’s always watching.
Laurence puts down his untouched wine. Excuses himself. Walks towards the corridor with the stride of a man going to the toilet or checking his phone. Any plausible reason a lecturer might leave a room other thanI’m about to compromise everything with the student who’s been eye-fucking me for forty minutes.
I count to sixty. Give the wall one last lean. Follow.
The corridor is empty, fluorescent light, scuffed lino. He’s standing by the fire exit. Waiting. Not leaning. Standing.
‘You need to stop looking at me like that.’ Low. Tight. His whole frame locked against what his body wants. ‘People will notice.’
‘Then stop wanting me to look at you like that.’
He flares. The exact second the professional loses.
‘I mean it, Ewan.’
First name, in the corridor. Where anyone could hear, the slip is its own answer, the mouth sayingstopwhile the voice saysEwan, and both of us hearing which one is louder.
He grabs my arm; his hands are shaking. Three steps. A door hidden from view, a room nobody enters unless they’re mopping or making a terrible decision.
We’re making a terrible decision.
The door shuts. Dark. For a second, neither of us moves; he’s against the door, hand still on the handle, and I understand: he’s leaving me the out. Even here, even now. Thirty-one years old with his career three metres from his back, and he’s still waiting for me to say it.
‘Yes,’ I say, into the dark. ‘I’m here. Come on.’
My back hits the shelving. Something rattles, a bottle, a spray can.
He kisses me. Hungry. This is fast, reckless, forty minutes of holding it together, detonating against his teeth. He finds my belt, my hand finds his. We work in the dark, by feel.
‘Quiet.’ His breath against my ear. ‘They’re right there.’
Right there. Through one wall: the murmur of the reception, glasses, laughter, the Head of Department’s Oslo story entering its third act. Colleagues. Students. Professional respectability, three metres from where his hand is wrapped around my cock.
