The protocol is not what I want to do.
What I want is for nobody to name anything for a bit longer. Sit in his t-shirt. Drink a coffee that holds no appeal. Let the unlabelled silence stay unlabelled because the moment somebody labels it, one of us walks out of this kitchen with the smaller half of the thing, and the one with the smaller half is going to be me, because the one with the smaller half is always me.
So I do what I do when a situation is bigger than me. I perform smaller than it.
‘So.’ Slouch. The slouch, the one I learned on pub benches before I was legally allowed to be on them. Elbow on his table, mug turning lazy. The grin I use when I want a lad to not notice I’m nervous. ‘Dr Haldrey. This is a first for you, isn’t it?’
The eyebrow goes up. ‘Meaning.’
‘Breakfast with a guy like me. Bet the last bloke you had in this kitchen at eight had his own flat and an article to read.’
It’s out of my mouth before I’ve thought it.
Laurence doesn’t flinch, which is worse than if he had.
‘Ewan.’
‘It’s fine, I was just?—’
‘Put the mug down.’
I put the mug down. My hand does it before my face has decided whether to resent it.
He’s looking at me properly now.
A face I haven’t met yet, not the marking-face, not the lecturer-face, not the man-on-his-knees-in-the-shower face—all armour. The kindness has been stripped out like a nurse removing a blanket before a procedure.
‘I am thirty-one years old.’
He says it measured. The Lancashire underneath the vowels is very audible now.
‘I am your lecturer. I mark your work. I write your references. I stand between you and your degree. I slept with you last night, and I had sex with you twenty minutes ago in the shower, and I am going to ask you to hear me say a few things out loud in daylight before either of us moves from this table. Will you do that.’
The grin falls off my face. My hands go into my lap.
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you.’ One nod. ‘First. I am not going to pretend I did not know what I was doing. I knew. I knew at the office hours when you leaned across the desk and I let you. I knew it last night and I knew it this morning in the shower. At no point between week one and this kitchen was I a man who did not know. I am saying this to you once, so that you will not at any point in the next five minutes be able to comfort me by telling me I got carried away. I was not carried. I walked.’
He pauses. He flattens his hands on the table. He is not reaching for me. The not-reaching is part of the speech.
‘Second. You are eighteen.’
‘Eighteen and four months.’
‘Eighteen.’ Flat. No patience for the deflection. ‘And I am thirteen years older than you, and a member of staff at youruniversity, and the weight in this room is not equally distributed, and anyone looking at it from the outside would tell you—correctly—that the responsibility is mine. I am not going to dispute that with you. I am not going to let you sit there in my t-shirt and take the burden off me so I can ease my conscience. I am going to hold on to the larger half of it, because it is mine. Are you following this?’
‘I’m following.’
‘Good.’
Arousal, shame. Need. All of them at once. It is in my stomach, and it is, embarrassingly, stupidly, wrongly, in my dick. Because nobody has ever sat down opposite me and spoken to me in sentences that have main verbs and responsibility in them.
Nobody has treated me like a room whose weight matters. Not my dad. Not the Year 13 teacher who saidaim for Manchesterlike he was offering me a biscuit. Haldrey talking to me like this is making me hard, and I want to crawl into his lap for it, and I am appalled at myself, and I am not going to crawl anywhere, I am going to sit very still and take it.
But sitting very still and taking it is not my mode. My mode isdon’t let them see you flinch. My mode isto get the first word in before they can say the thing you don’t want said. My mode, for eighteen years and four months, has been to perform the version of Ewan Carrick that will let me leave the room with my edges intact.
This room is a room I cannot edge out of.
