‘The proof on the right,’ I say. Instinct, not strategy. ‘You’ve got a redundant step.’
He blinks, surprise cracks through.
‘Line four,’ I say. ‘You’re establishing a bound that’s already implied by the construction in line two. If you skip it, lines five through eight collapse into two.’
He turns to the whiteboard. Stares. His eyes move, tracking, checking, retracing the logic.
Twenty seconds.
‘Show me.’
I stand again. This time, he doesn’t flinch; he’s thinking, not defending. I take the marker from the shelf. I write on the board. Two lines. The shortcut, visible the moment I looked at it, was the pattern living in the negative space between his equations.
He reads it, reads it again. I can see his brain working, faster than the silence suggests, testing, running the logic against every objection.
The silence goes on long. Forty seconds, maybe. I’ve stood at whiteboards before, but I’ve never stood at one for forty seconds with a man in the chair behind me not speaking. The room’s gotthe acoustic of a held breath. My hand is still on the marker, the cap in my other hand, and neither has moved.
‘That’s—’ He stops. Takes off his glasses. Rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, and the gesture is so intimate, so unguarded, that I have to look at the carpet.
‘That’s not an Economics student’s observation.’
‘I’m full of surprises.’
‘You are.’ He puts the glasses back on, gaze sharp. ‘You’re wasting yourself in that programme. You know that.’
No shrug this time. The words hit somewhere I wasn’t prepared.
He reaches for a book on the shelf behind him, slim, navy, expensive. Opens it to a page near the middle. Places it on the desk between us.
‘This is the theorem your shortcut relates to. Published last year. Nobody’s found a practical application yet.’ He looks up. ‘Ewan, what you just did on that board, that’s the beginning of one.’
I lean in. Read. His finger is still on the page, and mine comes down next to it, tracing a parallel line, following the notation. Then, contact. The back of his finger against the side of mine. Neither of us planned it. We both stay still.
He’s still looking. At me, at me. How he looked at my solution in week one. The recognition, the hunger, except this time: Worry.
The name—not the surname kept like armour, butEwan, two syllables, his Lancashire vowels turning my name into something I’ve never heard it be before.
Everything stops—the gap betweenEwanandMr Carrick, a place I could stay.
He hears himself say it. He hears himself say it with the same half-second lag I do, the millisecond in which a word arrives at your ear and you register that it came out of your own mouth,and it is the wrong word, and it is the word you have been editing for three weeks. I watch him register it. I watch the micro-flinch. I watch him choose not to apologise for it, which is worse than an apology.
‘Thank you,’ I say. Also low. Also, not be the register it would be if a different word had just been in the room.
He shifts his attention: me, the board, his desk. Recalibrating.
‘Same time next week,’ he says. Something between a question and anif.
‘Same time next week.’
I leave. The door clicks, the corridor swallows me.
The bathroom holds no appeal. The urgency has relocated, away from my cock, straight to my chest, which is a worse place for it and a harder one to fix.
I’ve been to this bathroom twice in three weeks. Both times, I had to handle the aftermath of an office hour that had got ahead of me. Today my cock is quiet. Almost polite. Whatever happened upstairs wasn’t where my body is keeping score. My body is keeping score higher up and further in, and I cannot wank a man’s given name out of my sternum.
He said my name. Said it as if it weighed.
I walk the corridor, thirty steps. Fifty. Past the department office, past the noticeboard with its flyers for guest lectures nobody attends, past the vending machine where I stood watching him like a lunatic three weeks ago.
