He pulls back.
His hand reaches for the pen I’m already holding. A professional reflex,my pen, thank you.It stops halfway. He remembers, presumably, that I’m going to have to hand it to him, and that handing means contact, and that contact was the last thing that made him recoil. He chooses to let me have his pen rather than touch me twice in five minutes.
The pen is in my hand. The pen is a small, cheap Bic biro, and it is currently holding more information than it was manufactured to hold.
‘You make everything so…’ I pause. Let the silence fill. ‘…clear.’
He tightens his jaw. The vein on his neck, the one I’ve mapped, catalogued, imagined running my tongue along, pulses.
‘That’s enough for today.’ Tight. The voice of a man pulling a fire alarm in a building that’s already burning. ‘You’ve got the concept.’
I stand. Slowly. My knee withdraws from his space. He doesn’t acknowledge that it was ever there.
‘Same time next week?’
He doesn’t nod. Doesn’t say yes. What he says is: ‘If you need it.’
Theifis doing so much work; it should unionize.
‘I need it,’ I say. And I leave.
I hold the door handle for half a beat before I open it. I know what’s on the other side—a corridor, a lift, the rest of an ordinary Tuesday—and I know what’s on this side, and the choice to walk through is a choice I’m making in front of a man who has stopped breathing in order to watch me make it.
I walk through.
When my knee touched his, he didn’t move.
When I bent for the pen, his attention scattered, and he didn’t move.
Last week was the mind. This week was the body. Two data points form a trajectory.
But the look when I bent down. Clinical for half a second, and then the other kind. Fast, stolen.
Hands. Nails in my palms.
I can still feel his knee.
I’ve had men look at me the way he looked at me. Blokes my age, tattooed bouncers, post-rugby types, a married lad at a wedding in Deptford, the entire back half of Canal Street on a Saturday. None of them looked at me like they were going to beaccountable for it later. His look had accountability written all the way through it. Guilt not of theI shouldn’t want thiskind. Guilt of theI shouldn’t be allowed to want this, and I dokind—the guilt of a man who thinks about consequences and has already calculated them.
That’s the look I’m going to think about, with my hand in my pocket or on my cock or wrapped round a pint in a pub telling Femi I’m fine.
The pub is the one near campus, carpets that predate optimism, a telly showing football nobody’s watching, lager that tastes like it’s endured a hard life. Femi’s already at a table. Pint in hand. Glowing.
Glowing is understating it, the lad is radioactive.
‘He met my mum on FaceTime last night,’ Femi says, before I’ve even sat down.
I set my pint on the table. ‘Your mum.’
‘She loves him. She said he has kind eyes.’ He’s beaming so hard his whole body can’t contain it, the excess leaks into every movement. ‘She never says that. She told my last boyfriend he looked shifty.’
‘Your last boyfriend was shifty.’
‘That’s not the point.’ He takes a sip. Sets the glass down hard. ‘The point is she used his name. She only uses names for people she’s decided to keep.’
Femi exists in a world where you meet someone’s mother on a screen and she comments on the quality of their eyes, and this is considered progress towards permanence. A world where Tuesday night means FaceTime with parents, not engineering aknee-touch under a desk with a man thirteen years older who won’t say your first name.
‘That’s proper good, Femi.’
