‘Nobody can know.’ The professional voice is back, but it is different, quieter now, resting against the top of my head, a thing being said into my hair instead of from the other side of a desk. ‘Absolutely nobody. They would fire me, Ewan. No hearing, no second chance. I am not saying it to frighten you. I am saying it because you need to hear it properly, with me holding you like this, so that later you can’t pretend you didn’t understand.’
‘I know.’
‘I am serious about this.’
‘I know.’ I tilt my head up so my chin is on his sternum, looking up at him. ‘Our secret. Our whole secret. I don’t have anyone I’d tell anyway. Not my best friend. Not my brother, not my mum, not a soul. Nobody in this university gets to know what this is until you decide they get to. I’ll call you Dr Haldrey in the corridor and not smile and not look at your mouth. I can do all of that.’
He moves his hand fractionally in my hair. The closest thing to a full exhale I have had out of him all morning.
‘I should have been stronger.’
‘You don’t believe that.’
‘I do.’
‘You believe you should have been. You don’t believe you could have been. Different equation.’
A crack, the ghost of a real smile. ‘You’re infuriating.’
‘So I’ve been told.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Manchester. Cold. November that finds every gap in every layer.
His joggers against my legs. His t-shirt is under my jacket. His smell on my skin and the tram to Fallowfield rattling through streets I’m starting to know by name and accidentally learning them.
My head keeps circling.
The wall, the dark. His hands. The sound he made when his voice cracked. I understand that—the win, the chase, everything I’m built for. File it.
The shower. His knees were on the tile. How patient. How he held me up when my legs gave out. Nobody has ever treated me like that, and finishing the thought terrifies me because what happened in the bathroom wasn’t sex. It was a surrender. I’m not looking at it.
Surrender is a word I have not used about myself. Surrender is what happens at the end of a war I have not agreed to be in. I have, on every mattress and every tile floor of the last two years, been the one who leaves first. Leaving first is the only version of power available to a lad who does not have the luxury of being the one left. I am good at it. I have made an architecture of it.
He went to his knees last night.
And when my legs went, I let him hold me.
That is not a thing I have a file for. The filing cabinet in my head opens to an empty drawer. The label on the drawer saysthings other people have done for me that I did not earn and did not refuse, and the drawer has been empty for eighteen years ans counting, and now there is one thing in it, and I am sitting on a tram with the shape of it pressed against my ribs.
An… the flat. Silent. Bookshelves full and walls bare. And a bottle of aftershave behind the towels.
Who were you before the gap? Before Manchester, before the empty walls.
The tram jolts. Someone sits down across from me with a takeaway coffee and a free newspaper. Normal hits like a slap.
His joggers against my thighs. His t-shirt against my ribs, the collar wide enough that the bite mark shows.
I pull the fabric closer. Press my nose into the collar where his smell is thickest.
I try to be normal for an entire day. Lecture at nine, not his, someone else’s, a boring woman who talks about macroeconomic policy like she’s reading her own obituary. I sit in the third row, take notes, and my hand writesaggregate demandwhile my body remembers a wall and the sound a man makes when six weeks of principles collapse.
Lunch with Femi follows. He’s talking about Allan, a restaurant, a weekend plan, something domestic and public. I nod, eat chips, and my neck itches where the bite mark sits under my collar, my fingers finding it beneath the fabric, tracing, remembering.
The library after three hours. I read the same paragraph of a textbook eleven times and retain nothing. I’m back in that hallway, and his hands are under my shirt, and the radiator is ticking, and his breathing is?—
Stop—different paragraph.
