Then, lower down on the page, small, tucked into the bottom corner like a footnote hidden there:
your Hugo.
I stop breathing for a second.
yourHugo.
The possessive does the damage. NotHugo. Notyours, Hugo, with the comma that keeps it formal.your Hugo.Lower case, tucked into a corner like a man giving himself to the reader as a thing already owned.
Four years and a different city ago, when I was fourteen and didn’t yet know what mathematics was for.
I’ve seen this Hugo once, on a Facebook profile photo I wasn’t meant to find.
I read the dedication again.I am not patient—the self-portrait in a single clause
I turn the next page.
There is a small thing pressed between page six and page seven. At first, I thought it was an old receipt. It is not a receipt. It is a ticket stub; flimsy cardboard, the print half-gone, but enough legible to tell meSNCFand a date and a route I can’t read because the ink has given up. Paris to somewhere ending in-eaux. A journey you save because you went together.
I think:four years later, he was reading this book in bed at three in the morning on the night I couldn’t sleep.
I thinkhe told me about the patient hinges, and he did not tell me whose book they were.
I close the book. My hands are shaking, which doesn’t match thejust-snoopingstory.
I put it back on the shelf in the same spot. Spine out, aligned with the neighbours. The small gap I made closes behind it.
From the bathroom: the water stops.
I stand up fast. The t-shirt rides up to the middle of my thighs, and I pull it down on reflex like the shelf has eyes.
The bathroom door opens. I hear his feet on the hallway tiles, wet, unhurried, a man walking barefoot across his own flat to his own bedroom without knowing I’ve spent the last minutes reading a dedication he never told me about.
The bedroom stays empty. I stand in the living room in the dark in his shirt with the bookshelf behind me, and I try to file what I just learned in a drawer I do not yet have.
Laurie.
I am not patient.
Whenever you can bring yourself to go.
A man who kept the book. A man who, at three in the morning on a night his eighteen-year-old fuckbuddy couldn’t sleep, picked up the unopened invitation from the ex and used the language in it to talk a boy in Fallowfield down off a ceiling shaped like Italy.
I choose not to ask.
I go back to the bedroom. He’s sat on the bed, toweling his hair, and he looks up when I come in and smiles. The small private smile. The one I am not sure he has ever shown anyone else in a while. I climb into the bed, and the bed is warm where he was, and I close my eyes and put my face against the pillow and my mouth against the cotton.
‘What were you doing.’ Quiet. Curious. No edge.
‘Nosing.’
‘At.’
‘Your shelves.’
A pause. ‘Find anything interesting.’
A hundred answers, a thousand.Yes. Your maths is alphabetised, and there’s a whole shelf of countries you’ve never been to. Someone once signed himself into your books as yours, small letter, bottom of the page.
