Then he pulls away, stands—the chair scrapes. Coins on the table, he digs them from his pocket and drops them like they’re burning, doesn’t count.
‘I can’t.’
Two words. His voice cracks, the second one breaking with feeling caught there.
He does not look at me when he says it. He says it to the table, to the coffee he hasn’t touched, to the coins he’s just left. He says it the way you’d say it to a thing you’d agreed not to want.
NotI won’t. NotI shouldn’t.I can’t—the grammar of a man already halfway to the word he’s trying to use to stop it.
He walks out. Quick. The door swings and the street takes him, and I’m sitting in a corner of a café in Chorlton with two coffees, one empty chair, and the ghost of his pulse still beating against my palm.
CHAPTER NINE
The words he chose:I can’t.
No,I don’t want to. No,I’m not attracted to you. Notthis is wrong.
I can’t.
Can’tis a wall with a crack in it.Can’tknows exactly what you want.
I pick up my cup. Drink. The coffee’s gone cold.
The chair’s still warm where he sat. The coffee’s still full. The coins he threw down are scattered like shrapnel.
I pick one up—a two-pound coin, still warm from his pocket.
Warm from his?—
Right. We’re doing this.
I stand. The second shower, the humiliating thoroughness. And the man I did it for left his coffee and walked out.
The café staff haven’t cleared his cup. Nobody’s noticed he’s gone. The double espresso has cooled into a skin, and beside it sits a teaspoon he never used.
A man who leaves his coffee is a man running on something other than protocol. I know that much.
I know I did this. I know I pressedI need itinto his face in a public space until the only move he had left was to stand upand walk out on a £3.40 drink. I have, in six weeks, dismantled a thirty-one-year-old lecturer in pure mathematics by leaning across a café table and saying the one sentence I had that wasn’t a lie.
There should be a win in that. A flat, clean one—the kind that stays in the muscle.
There isn’t.
There’s just the coin in my palm, still warm from his pocket, and the sound in my head of him sayingI can’t, which is what people say when they meanI will, and also what they say when they meanI won’t, and I don’t yet know which one he meant. He walked out. It could go either way.
Through the window: Chorlton High Street. He is in a navy shirt, moving too fast for a walk. He’s not running, though his legs move like he doesn’t know it.
I grab my jacket.
I follow at a distance. Two streets back, matching his pace, letting the residential roads do the narrowing for me. Victorian terraces, sycamores dropping the last of October, a cat on a wall that doesn’t bother to watch me pass.
Two streets back is the right distance. Far enough that he can’t hear me if he stops and turns. Close enough that I don’t lose him at a junction, I’ve done a version of this before. Sixteen, Lewisham, a lad in a gilet who said he was popping out for his cigarettes and was walking the other way. I remember thinking halfway down the road that catching him wouldn’t help, and turning round.
This isn’t that.
The man in front of me doesn’t want to be caught in a state ofapprehension. He wants to be caught in the sense offound. In the sense thatsomebody has decided, on my behalf, that I am worth the decisionin the sense ofnot having to do it.
I am eighteen, and I am walking behind a thirty-one-year-old maths lecturer along a street whose name I don’t know, and I am making that decision on his behalf.
