I sit down. Not because I want to, because standing feels like an admission that I’m ready to bolt.
‘He’s a lecturer.’
‘He’s a lecturer.’
‘He’syourlecturer. The policy is black and white. I checked.’
Stomach drops. ‘You checked?’
‘For me and Allan.’
He says it flat, no drama, like he’s reporting what he had for breakfast.
‘Before we made it official. I checked the university relationship policy. Wanted to be sure student-student was allowed.’
He pauses.
‘It is. Staff-student isn’t. Not if they’re marking your work. That’s not a grey area. It’s not case-by-case. It’s a sacking offence.’
Sacking.Stays.
‘I’m not—’ I start. Stop. What am I going to say? Am I not doing anything? Am I not interested? The flush on my neck is doing its own press conference. ‘It’s office hours.’
‘It’s not office hours.’ Quiet now. Not accusation, but concern. ‘You don’t dress like that for office hours. You don’t come back vibrating from office hours. I’ve known you since we were twelve and I have never—not once—seen you like this about anyone.’
I look at the bins. Grey. Industrial. Better than looking at Femi. He’s reading me in forty-point font.
‘He’s different,’ Femi says. ‘The others aren’t. The blokes on Canal Street, the lads at parties; none of them make you sit up.’
Silence arrives before I can stop it. I’m.
‘You walked into the theatre Friday in a jumper I’ve never seen you wear. You answered a question in front of two hundred people. You—you, Ewan—were the first person to put your hand up. I was sat next to you. I saw you pick the words.’
The courtyard gets smaller.
‘You go quiet. You check your phone. You space out in lectures and then you come awake when he walks in. It’s.’ He stops. Rubs his face with both hands. ‘It’s exactly what I did with Allan. Exactly. Except Allan’s a second year, not a forty-something-year-old man with a PhD and a duty of care.’
The wind picks up. A crisp packet skids across the concrete and hits my shoe.
‘He’s not—he’s thirty-one. And it’s not like that. What do you want me to say?’
‘I want you to hear me.’ He turns on the bench. Full body, facing me, the Femi who once sat outside the headteacher’s office for two hours because he wouldn’t grass on me, and also wouldn’t lie. ‘If this goes wrong, and it will go wrong, Ewan, because this kind of thing always goes wrong, he doesn’t lose acrush. He loses his career, his reputation—everything he’s built. You walk away with a story. He walks away with nothing.’
The words stick. The crisp packet blows on.
I hadn’t thought about it like that. Not in those words. I’d thought about what he might do if I pushed, and what he might not do. I’d thought about his face, his stillness, the recoil,ifthat was doing too much work. I had not thought about the filing cabinet. I had not thought about the letter on headed paper that would end a career a man had spent fifteen years putting together.
For a second, I can feel the shape of what Femi outlined, like touching the edge of it in the dark.
Then I put it away. Because if I hold it any longer, I’ll stop.
Something in me wants to tell him. The whole thing, the mapping, the schedule, the cologne strategy, how my knee touched Haldrey’s under the desk, and neither of us moved. The beach photos, the wanking. The name that fell out of my mouth while a stranger gripped me. Because Femi would listen, and it’s lodged in my ribs.
But telling him makes it real. And real has consequences that live in a filing cabinet somewhere with the university logo on the front.
‘It’s not what you think,’ I say, which is such a pathetic deflection that I nearly laugh at my own mouth.
‘Thinking would make it worse.’ He’s picking at a thread on his jacket, a nervous habit since Year 9, the one he falls into before calls with his dad. ‘I’m scared, Ewan. For you. And yeah, for him too, because he seems like a decent man and decent men make the worst decisions when they?—’
