‘There is an eight-page digression on a particular gate in a village called something impossible to pronounce. I cannot say it in my head without embarrassing myself. He knew the locksmith’s father. In the village. The locksmith’s father made the hinges. The hinges are described aspatient.’
I laugh into the pillow. My eyes are suddenly hot.
‘The locksmith’s father’s hinges,’ I say.
‘Patient hinges.’
Quiet for a beat. His breathing against the line, steady. Mine has been slower than it has been in hours.
‘Tell me where you grew up,’ I say into the pillow. ‘Not the whole of it. A street. A bus number.’
Another pause. On his end, he moves, a soft rustle of duvet against something. When he speaks, the voice is lower still.
‘The bus was the 40. Morecambe to Lancaster. I used to sit upstairs at the front and watch the coast come in and out of the mist. On a clear day from the left-hand side of the upper deck you could see the Lakes across the bay.’
‘What was the street.’
‘Clarendon Road. The front door was red. My mother repainted it every third year, a shade she maintained was Farrowand Ball but I have reason to doubt. There was a rowan tree in the front garden that predated the house. I once ate the berries. They are not edible raw.’
He’s talking to a phone at twenty past three in the morning and handing me a door his mother painted, and a tree he poisoned himself with when he was small, and my ribs do the thing ribs do when a man gives you a sentence he was never going to give anyone else tonight.
‘Did you get ill.’
‘I was green for a day. My mother gave me cream crackers and called me an idiot with such affection I have never forgotten it.’
Mother,notmum.A knight’s move. I log it in the drawer I am not keeping.
‘Go to sleep, Ewan.’
‘In a moment.’
‘Now.’
‘You first.’
‘Deal.’
The line stays open while my breathing slows to something my body recognises, and his does too, and somewhere around 03:52, my thumb loses its grip on the phone, and it slides sideways on the pillow, and my last thought is patient hinges, and I’m gone.
I wake at seven with the phone dead against my cheek. The call log saysLaurence—1 h 24m.The line just stayed open. He must have dropped off first. Or he waited.
Both options sit there. My reading of them is wrong.
I plug the phone in. Lie back down, stare up.
The first time I say it, we’re on his bed, and he’s inside me with my face in the pillow, and it comes out without consultation from any part of me that plans things.
‘Harder, Dr Haldrey.’
He stops completely. His hips flat against my arse, his hands on my waist, his cock buried to the root, and everything still because I’ve just used his title in bed and neither of us knew that was coming. Then he tightens his grip, pulls his hips back, and the thrust that follows rearranges my understanding of his self-control.
He fucks me harder, I say it again, and again, and each time the academic cracks wider and the sound he makes gets a little less human, and I’m grinning into the pillow because I’ve found the cheat code to the most complex system I’ve ever encountered.
I come first, he follows, as usual, the distance between us narrowing every time.
Afterwards, in the shower, his hands are on my back, soapy and slow, the water too hot, thumbs tracing the muscle running along my spine. I lean into the tile and close my eyes and surrender to this part—the part I have no instructions for.
The fucking I understand—the urgency, the mechanics, the competition of two bodies figuring out who wants it more. But the shower, his thumbs, the way he washes my hair without being asked, fingers in my scalp, my head tipping back against his neck, soap running down between us—nobody rushing, nobody performing. Another person has never washed me, never had just his lips resting on the bone where the muscle starts.
