I push through the double doors. October. Rain. Manchester is doing its one trick. The cold hits my face, and the thing is stillthere, and I walk through the wet car park with my hood down because the rain accomplishes what my body cannot.
The smile comes back, weaker. Still there.
Out of the office, out of the fortress, where he’s a lecturer, and I’m a student, and the desk between us is a DMZ.
A café. Coffee. Two men at a table like it means nothing.
I cross the road. A bus goes past, wrong number, wrong direction, doesn’t matter.
The sigh stays. He saidit properly, like a prayer he’d already stopped believing in.
Keep walking. Towards the coffee. Towards the daylight. Towards the place where nobody knows what two men at a table means, and I can pretend, for an hour, that the distance between us is a choice rather than a sentence.
I’m not going to tell Femi. That’s the first clean decision of the afternoon. I’m not going to walk into halls with this under my tongue and let him read it off my face. Femi’s been giving me one piece of eye contact per day for three weeks, the calibrated kind, the kind that saysI am still waiting for you to choose to tell me. If I tell him there’s been a coffee invitation, he will ask me a question I don’t want to answer, which is:and you said yes. And I did. Flat. Textbook-casual. Like it was what I’d come in for.
Which, if I’m honest with myself, and I am, on this stretch of Oxford Road between the maths building and the number 42 stop, I was.
The bus shelter is empty. I sit under it because sitting is closer to the pavement than standing, and I need to be close to the pavement for a minute.
The rain keeps going. A man on the other side of the road is shouting at a pigeon.
I breathe.
My phone buzzes.
Of course he’s sent it already. Of course he has.
Saturday. Eleven o’clock. A café off the student circuit, off Didsbury way, the kind of place a lecturer would go on a weekend to read the paper without being seen by the blonde girl in the red hoodie or the lad who types like he’s already been rejected. A real place, on a real map, that I am going to walk into on Saturday at eleven o’clock like a person keeping an appointment.
Four days.
I spent forty minutes in the bathroom this morning, which is thirty-eight more than I’d spend for any bloke I pulled on a Friday night.
Douching first. The shower attachment, the patience, the tedium of making sure everything is right. Clean. The kind of clean nobody notices unless it isn’t there.
This is not a hookup.
This is someone who owns hardback books and drinks his coffee black and calls me by my first name in a voice that makes the syllables sound like they belong to him. Someone who will notice.
So I’m thorough. Then the shower twice, because the first time I can still smell the halls on my skin, and I’m not bringing Fallowfield’s eau de institutional carpet to this. Soap in the places where soap matters. Then the razor, the bits I’d normally leave. Then lotion, because he has the kind of hands that would notice the difference between a man who moisturises and a man who doesn’t.
Then the plug. Small, silicone, the one I bought online and hid in my sock drawer because some things don’t needexplaining to a flatmate. I put it in—the first cold spike of lube, the stretch, the adjustment, the dull pressure once the base settles—and stand in front of the mirror, naked and flushed, counting breaths until the flush fades.
Get dressed. Sit on the bus for fifty minutes and feel it shift every time we hit a pothole, which in Manchester is every four seconds, and my cock has thoughts about this that I file under later.
The plug is for him. Only for him.
And this feels like empty hope. I wore it once for a hookup in Lewisham, and it was stupid; the bloke lasted three minutes, the prep wasted on a sprint.
For Laurence, I want to be ready. Ready for whatever he—if he—wants.
Laurence.
When did he stop being Haldrey?
Don’t get ahead of yourself.
Lube, condoms in the backpack. Those are standard. That’s anyone. I’ve carried them since sixth form, like house keys, part of the kit, check before you leave.
