Not with anyone.
Afterwards. His sheets, his ceiling. Two bodies not touching because neither knows the protocol.
‘We said once a week,’ his voice says to the ceiling in the dark.
‘Yousaid once a week.’
‘We agreed on that.’
‘You agreed. And when you called me, I showed up.’
Silence stretches before: ‘It’s been less than five days.’
‘I can count.’
He puts his hands over his face, raw. He stops. Stares at the ceiling. ‘I’m lost.’
‘Do you want me to leave?’
‘No.’ Too fast. He hears it, closes his eyes. ‘No.’
I let that sit. The no that came before the thought. Satisfaction arrives without guilt attached.
His hand finds mine under the sheet, tight and unconscious, and I don’t think about that.
I get up anyway. His breathing has reached that edge of sleep. ‘Stay,’ he says, half-asleep, muffled into the pillow.
‘I can’t. Halls. They’d notice.’
True. Also, not why.
The door clicks behind me. Chorlton at half twelve is empty in a way Lewisham never was. My reflection stares back from the black glass of the tram.
My chest feels weird.
Don’t think about that either.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The key is a Yale, brass, small—held out between his index finger and thumb like a pin just pulled, his eyes on the hallway beyond, not looking at it, not looking at me.
‘So you don’t have to ring the bell.’
I take it, the metal cold from his pocket and heavier than a key has any right to be.
He drops his hand to his side, turns back into the flat, eyes forward—the conversation over because it was never a conversation. I close my fingers around the key, the teeth biting into my skin: trophy, evidence, admission of what we are.
I put it in my wallet, next to the condoms.
The routine builds itself. Nobody designs it; it just accumulates.
Every surface, every room. The flat is mapped differently now, not by furniture but by what we’ve done on it.
Other things, too. Things I didn’t know how to track when I was there.
He makes coffee on a hob moka, one tablespoon for the basket, waits for the gargle to drop half a register before he turns the gas off. Forty seconds of gargle. Not thirty. Not fifty.
He won’t use the microwave for anything hot except porridge.
