Stillness claims me. Malfunction. My body has received information it cannot parse. His warmth along my spine, the slow rhythm of his breathing, the knee slotted between mine like it was built to go there.
I’ve woken up next to blokes before. Disentangle, dress, leave. I had memorised it since I was sixteen.
This isn’t choreography. This is his face between my shoulder blades and his arm holding me. A sentence that holds.
He tightens his arm fractionally in sleep.
But yesterday the hallway became the bedroom, and I must have—fallen asleep. Inside the arms of a man I was only supposed to fuck.
I extract myself like I’m defusing ordnance—millimetre by millimetre, breathing through my teeth.
He slides his arm off and makes a sound, low, unconscious, a body registering absence, and rolls onto his front. Face in the pillow. One arm off the edge of the mattress.
He looks younger. The tension is gone, the mouth open instead of set. Give him twenty seconds after those eyes open. The guilt will arrive like a fire alarm in a library.
My body is filing reports.
My arse aches, deep, muscular.
My thighs are bruised where his fingers dug in. The bite on my neck throbs. I can feel where his cock was inside me like a shape my body has memorised and is already asking to have back.
Clothes, door, tram, halls. File it.
Instead, I’m standing in the hallway of his flat in my boxers at half seven in the morning, staring at his bookshelves as they owe me answers.
The flat is a small, terraced conversion on the first floor. Everything is controlled, not tidy, controlled. Books are arranged by subject, then alphabetically within each section. Pure mathematics on the top shelf. Applied maths. Then physics, philosophy, a novel sitting sideways like an escapee. The desk in the corner: papers stacked, edges aligned, a mug with a Möbius strip joke that I’m annoyed to find funny. Thekitchen: a kettle, a single banana turning brown in the fruit bowl. He doesn’t stay here; he visits.
A guitar in the corner. Acoustic, well-used, the fretboard is worn smooth where the chords live. The thought of those fingers on the strings, the same ones inside me last night—move on.
Vinyls on a shelf by the window. Two rows. Top: Nirvana, Pixies, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins. Bottom: Portishead, Massive Attack, Mogwai.
What I notice: what isn’t here.
No photos. No postcards, no birthday cards, no framed anything. A thirty-one-year-old man with no visible past. No family, no friends, no evidence. The books tell me what he thinks. Nothing tells me who he is.
Bathroom. His toothbrush, his razor, his soap. And on the bottom shelf behind the towels, a bottle of aftershave. Expensive. Nearly full, I uncap it. Citrus. Amber underneath, bitter, nothing like the soap-and-cotton smell I fell asleep pressed against.
This isn’t his.
Someone left this here. Maybe Hugo, who stayed enough mornings to claim shelf space. Who isn’t here anymore but hasn’t been fully forgotten?
I recap it. Put it back exactly where it was. Exactly where it was, I’m good at this. I’ve been picking things up and putting them back in houses I shouldn’t be in since I was fourteen and dated a lad with divorced parents and a panic threshold. You learn fast. The memory for the angle of a toothbrush in a glass. The shelf-edge where a bottle has worn a faint ring on the wood.
Hugo’s aftershave has worn off a ring. It has been on that shelf long enough.
And for a second I hate him for that—for the ring, for the certainty, for having had long enough to leave a mark—and then I remind myself I am eighteen and stood barefoot in thebathroom of a man I really didn’t know, and hating exes I have never met is not a good look and not a thing I have earned.
I fold the towel back over the aftershave.
The medicine cabinet above the sink is worse. Not because of what’s in it—plasters, paracetamol, a single pack of painkillers three years past their date—but because of what isn’t. No second deodorant. No contact lens solution. No evidence that the occupant of this bathroom has ever needed to be more than one version of himself in front of another person. The flat is rehearsed for solitude. Hugo was, at some point, an interruption to that rehearsal. So am I.
‘Oh God.’
I’m back sitting on the bed when he wakes. He opens them, sees me, and the twenty seconds I predicted compress into three. Confusion, recognition. Horror.
‘Oh God. What have I done?’
Notwe. Notwhat happened. What haveIdone?
