The wiring behind my sternum rearranges itself.
He slides a paper towards me. Our fingers brush. In any other context, it wouldn’t register.
His knuckle against mine, a half-inch of contact. Warm. The kind of warm a body is when it’s been sitting still inside a coldroom for two hours. His skin has a tiny raised thing on the index finger, a callus I hadn’t clocked from the front row—pen callus, almost certainly, the price of a man who writes everything in longhand before he types it.
He recoils, too fast, and looks at the desk.
The recoil is the whole thing. The recoil is information I did not earn and am not entitled to, and now possess. A man who was unbothered by accidental contact would not recoil. A man who felt nothing would not look at the desk. I watch him re-sort his own face. It takes him three breaths. I count them.
Stillness keeps me together, and breathing stops being automatic.
‘Same time next week?’ I say.
He nods, once, stiff. Doesn’t look up.
I stand. Walk to the door. My legs work, which is a miracle of engineering.
‘Mr Carrick.’
I turn.
He’s looking at me now. The mask is on, but the eyes behind the glasses aren’t.
‘You’re not struggling with the problem sets.’
It’s not a question.
I hold his gaze, one beat. Two.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not.’
The door clicks shut behind me.
The departmental bathroom is three doors down, and I make it there in eight seconds, lock the cubicle, and get my hand around my cock.
Hard already. Embarrassingly hard. The kind of hard that’s been sitting under a desk for fifty minutes and doesn’t care that I’ve only just found a cubicle to address it in. My jeans were tight, and I could feel the imprint of the zip along the underside of me as I free myself, the stripe of cold where the metal sat against skin. One hand against the door to brace. The other working, fast.
The look, the mask dropping. His face when he saw the solution, the recognition, the hunger. I come thinking about being seen and being seen like that, as my mind mattered.
Spurts across my hand and into the tissue. I stay folded forward with my weight on the door for ten seconds, panting quietly, the taste of iron in my mouth where I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound.
I clean up, flush. Wash my hands. Soap twice, because my skin smells like me, which is to say it smells like a man who just came thinking about a maths lecturer. The face in the mirror is flushed, pupils blown. A face that screams what I did.
I wait three minutes, splash cold water. Breathe.
I feel like I’ve swallowed a live wire.
He knows. He said it,you’re not struggling.He looked at my solution and jerked away when our fingers touched. The plan worked—next Tuesday.
But.
That look.
The other look. The one when he saw the maths. The curiosity, the recognition.
Nobody has ever looked at me like that. The blokes I’ve fucked haven’t. The teachers who gave up didn’t. Ronan tries too hard; Femi tries right. But this is different.
I wanted his composure in pieces. I got that.
