He stops. The words gather behind his teeth. Then he swallows them.
‘I’m not telling you what to feel. I’m telling you what’s at stake.’ He looks at his hands. ‘Watching you destroy someonewould break something in me. And I can’t watch someone destroy you.’
The first half I’d rehearsed a defence for—the second.
‘Nobody’s getting destroyed.’
‘Good.’ He stands. Brushes off his jeans. He’s said what he had. ‘Tuesday, yeah? Pub after your, um. Office hours.’
Theumhas a blade in it.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Tuesday.’
He goes, the fire door shuts—the bins, the wind.
Femi’s words have a half-life. Still there.Sacking offence.Stays.
Stomach. Something cold. The lid doesn’t fit.
The bus passes a Greggs. Then another Greggs. Then a gap where a third Greggs used to be before it died of loneliness.
My phone holds his staff photo, screenshotted weeks ago—not stalking, strategic awareness, the glasses, the hair pushed back, the face of a man who didn’t want his photograph taken. I scroll to the saved ones from Hugo’s Facebook—the kitchen, the beach, the body I want despite everything.
Femi’s voice, still buzzing:he loses his career. His reputation. Everything he’s built.
My thumb hovers over the beach photo. The V of those hips. The swim shorts.
I’ve been through this album enough times to have a favourite. I have a favourite. I know which photograph I go to when it’s too late at night and my body won’t settle, and it isn’t the beach one.
That’s the photograph. I can’t defend it. I don’t try.
Tuesday is in two days.
The responsible move is skipping office hours. Steer clear—hearing room.
I zoom in on his staff photo. His collar. The triangle of skin where the top button is undone.
I lock the screen, but the face stays, burned into the glass like a constant in a proof.
Tuesday. 13:47. Thirteen minutes early because fuck strategy.
Femi’s voice has been doing laps in my skull for days.Sacking offence, sacking offence, sacking offence.I’m here early because the alternative is another hour of pretending I’m not coming.
The problem set’s in my bag—real this time, no planted errors, no wrong turns. After what he pulled last week, dissecting my forgeries with surgical calm, I’m not insulting his intelligence again. He’s too sharp. The man I want sees straight through me, and that’s the problem.
Which should be a problem. Shouldn’t be the hottest thing about him.
I knock. Twelve seconds, the door opens.
He’s different—shirt the same, office the same. Cold coffee is still developing a civilisation on the desk. But the posture’s rigid, controlled, every tendon engaged.
‘Mr Carrick. You’re early.’
Two seconds of held eye contact, the two of us in a corridor nobody else is in, at thirteen minutes to two on a Tuesday afternoon, and the thing we are not saying is louder than the thing I came here to say.
‘Sit down.’
I sit. The same chair, the same desk. The dangerous space between us hasn’t changed, but I do, holding back, not pushing. Strategy, not surrender.
