The proof. The look when I wrote on his board, not the student’s whiteboard, his board, his actual research, and solved what had been eating at him. His seeing me, something past thearmour. The thing I’ve been hiding since I was a kid and realised I could do maths intuitively, as other people breathe.
My hand on his back. His eyes are on my work.
That’s the problem. Three weeks ago, I walked in wanting his body. Wanting to be the reason a grown man lost control. Simple. Clean. A project with a measurable outcome.
Now he’s saying my name, and he pulled a book off a shelf to show me where my mind fits.
Every Tuesday, the distance between us shrinks by an increment that resists measuring.
The campus is grey. My reflection in the glass door of the library. Eyeliner, chain, rings. I walked in planning a seduction. Came out holding an undefined thing—no shape for my hands.
Ewan.
Like that, exactly like that. The vowels open something in the middle of my name that nobody’s found before.
Pulse loud, too fast, cataloguing nothing. Hands obedient—for once. But the thing behind my ribs.
Still wild.
I make it as far as the bench outside the library before I stop. Sit down. Let the cold soak through the jeans. There are three students eating chips from a polystyrene tray on the next bench and a lad in a reflective jacket carrying a ladder, and nobody is looking at me, and I can’t, for a minute, work out what to do with my arms.
Wasting yourself in that programme.
My name is in his mouth. My mind is on his board. One hand’s worth of contact—an apology-shaped silence.
I’ve been paying attention to the wrong chapter of my own biography for eighteen years.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Fifteen minutes early. No strategy in it, just a body that’s stopped pretending it has anywhere else to be.
Three doors down, a postgrad is typing with the commitment of the soon-to-be-rejected.
Haldrey’s door is open.
A foot wide, maybe. Enough to show the slice of carpet between his desk and the wall and the back of a student’s head—blonde, a ponytail, a red hoodie with the sleeves pushed up. She’s leaning forward, speaking in the clear, unbothered voice of a girl who has no idea she’s standing in the room I’d fight a dog to sit in.
‘And the second term,’ she’s saying, ‘is where I lost it.’
‘Here.’ His voice. Public pitch. Warmer than I’ve ever heard it. ‘Look. If you rearrange this.’
The scratch of his pen. Her small grunt. The door was open the whole time. Corridor light spilling onto the lino between us. Anyone could walk past, anyone could see. This is what office hours are meant to look like: an open door, a lecturer being exactly what the job description says.
I position myself close enough to hear, far enough that he can’t see me from his chair. The fire extinguisher is inches from my hip, and I lean into it like a prop.
‘Oh,’ the girl says. ‘Oh. Oh that’s so obvious. Sorry. Thank you.’
‘Don’t apologise.’ Amused.Warm.‘That’s what this hour is for.’
She laughs. He laughs back, a short one, real but strained. Haldrey laughs for other people. Data point I could have lived without.
This is the Haldrey that a normal first-year gets. Thedon’t apologise, that’s what this hour is for, Haldrey. The one who helps. The one a department puts on the website, the one the mothers of the blonde students in red hoodies would approve of from across a kitchen in Cheshire, the one I am at no point going to experience in this lifetime because I am not a normal first-year. He is not giving me a normal office hour, and we both know that.
Chair scrape. She stands, gathers her things, the swish of a puffer jacket, the zip of a bag, and walks out of his office into the corridor and past me with a smile aimed at nothing in particular. Happy. A student who has been helped.
Stillness holds me, three beats pass. The door is still open.
Then I walk to it and raise my hand to knock on the frame, and before my knuckles have touched wood, he looks up from the paper he’s writing on, and everything shifts in ways I’ve never seen in public.
