Forty-Three Metres

"Your body makes the decision. The pause beforehand is just theatre — the mind pretending it was consulted."

I didn't check the phone until I'd cleared the camera.

Twelve metres. That was the distance between the junction and the point where the corridor's single security camera lost its sightline — the angle blocked by a ventilation duct that jutted from the ceiling just past the staff-only door. I'd measured it once, not with a tape but with my steps, counting the paces the way a prisoner counts the distance to the blind spot in the exercise yard. The comparison wasn't lost on me. It just wasn't useful enough to change anything.

Past the duct, the corridor narrowed into the spur that led to the T-junction and the supply closet. No cameras here. No foot traffic unless someone needed cleaning supplies or had taken a spectacularly wrong turn out of the admin wing. The fluorescent tube above the junction was still flickering its slow death. The air was still and chemical-warm, sealed off from the terminal's recycled atmosphere.

I stopped the cart. Took out the phone.

The app loaded in less than a second — the grid rearranging by proximity, squares shuffling as the GPS recalculated my position. Faces and torsos and blank silhouettes, the usual mosaic of men sorted by distance from my body. Most of the grid was familiar. The regulars — locals whose profiles I'd been scrolling past for months without ever messaging, because fucking someone you might see at Foodland on a Saturday was a complication I didn't need. A few blank squares, probably closeted, their profiles stripped of any identifying detail so that even the ghost of visibility felt like too much risk. I understood those men. I'd been one of those men, before I'd calculated that a headless torso photo was the minimum viable product for getting responses and had crossed that particular threshold without ever deciding to cross it.

Near the top of the grid, something new. Close. Inside the building.

TravellerDan. Forty-three metres away.

No face — just a cropped shot from the neck to the belt. Lean build, fitted charcoal jumper pushed up to the elbows, forearms that I noticed before I noticed anything else because I always noticed forearms, the way some men noticed tits or arses, the particular fixation that my sexuality had assigned me without consultation. His stats said thirty-six, five-eleven, visiting. Bio: Passing through.

Two words that told me everything. He was in the terminal — probably the food court — waiting for a connection or killing time before a departure, and he'd opened the app the way travellers did when they were bored and alone in a strange building with time to fill and no one watching. The aeroplane icon on his profile confirmed it. Transient. Temporary. Here and then gone, which was the only kind of man I was interested in, because the only kind of man I could afford was one who'd be thirty thousand feet in the air by the afternoon.

He'd already messaged: Hey mate. Flight's not for a while. You look good. Know anywhere quiet?

I read it twice. Not because I needed to — the message was straightforward, the intent unambiguous, the choreography as familiar to me as the basin-spray-wipe rhythm I'd been performing twenty minutes ago. I read it twice because there was always a pause here, a beat between the notification and the response where the two versions of myself faced each other across the gap that defined my entire existence. The version who knew this was stupid, reckless, self-destructive — a thirty-year-old man arranging to suck off a stranger in his own workplace, again, despite every promise he'd made to himself in every shower and every kneeling session beside every bed he'd ever slept in. And the version who was already composing a reply, whose thumb was already moving, whose blood was already redistributing itself southward with the mindless efficiency of a system that had been running this programme since puberty and had never once responded to a manual override.

The pause lasted about three seconds. It always lasted about three seconds. Just long enough to pretend there'd been a decision.

Yeah. Know a few spots. When are you free?

His reply was immediate. Now? Bored shitless here.

I leaned against the corridor wall. The concrete was cool through the back of the vest. My cock was already thickening in my work trousers — not fully hard, not yet, but the preliminary stirring that my body produced at the first confirmation of intent, the physiological equivalent of an engine turning over. It happened every time. Before the photos, before the logistics, before any of the negotiation that separated the message from the act. My body didn't wait for the details. It just started preparing.

There's a bathroom near the Virgin lounge, I typed. Quieter than the main ones. Accessible cubicle, lock works. Left past the coffee cart, second corridor on the right, last door before the bend.

I sent it and looked at what I'd written. The specificity was obscene, when you thought about it. The precision with which I could direct a stranger to the most fuckable bathroom in the building. Not because I'd researched it — not consciously, not with a clipboard and a floor plan — but because two years of working here while carrying this particular need had produced a comprehensive mental database of every private space in the terminal, ranked by accessibility, sightlines, lock quality, sound insulation, and proximity to the nearest security camera. I could have drawn the map from memory. I could have annotated it with dates and names, if I'd bothered to learn the names, which I mostly hadn't.

He sent a photo. Angled downward from what looked like an airport chair — his lap, his hand resting on his thigh, fingers slightly spread, the fabric of his trousers pulled taut in a way that drew the eye exactly where it was intended to. Not explicit. Just enough. The visual equivalent of a handshake that lasted a beat too long.

I sent one back without hesitating. The exchange was ritual — the mutual proof-of-goods that preceded every encounter, so routine by now that I could manage it one-handed while keeping the other on the cart, the phone angled away from the corridor in case someone turned the corner, my face as blank as if I were checking a roster update.

Nice. Give me ten.

Ten minutes. I pocketed the phone and stood there for a moment, breathing, feeling the shift in my body's priorities with the same detached awareness that I'd have noticed a change in air pressure. The hum was fully operational now — the low, insistent vibration that sat in my groin and my chest and the base of my skull when the programme was running, when the compartment was open, when the version of me that did this had taken over from the version that cleaned bathrooms and counted soap cartridges and kept his face arranged for public consumption.

I had ten minutes. I needed to restock before the next circuit anyway — the paper towels were running low and I was down to my last pair of gloves. The supply closet was right there, twenty metres ahead at the T-junction. Restock, then loop back through the terminal toward the Virgin lounge. The route would look unremarkable to anyone checking the CCTV later — a cleaner heading to supplies, then continuing his circuit. Nothing unusual. Nothing that didn't belong in the daily pattern.

That was how I'd always managed it. Fold the encounters into the work. Make the route accommodate the detour. Keep the cleaning cart visible, keep the tasks plausible, keep the surface so thoroughly ordinary that the thing happening underneath it remained invisible. I'd got good at it. Better than good. The double life wasn't a burden I carried alongside the job — it was threaded through it, the two so tightly woven that I sometimes couldn't tell which one was the fabric and which was the pattern stitched into it.

I pushed the cart forward. The front-left wheel squeaked its familiar complaint. The corridor stretched ahead, empty, the flickering fluorescent tube casting its stuttering light across the concrete block walls. My body was warm, primed, the anticipation sitting in my muscles like potential energy — the specific physical state of a man who knew exactly what was coming and whose only remaining task was to get there without being seen.

The T-junction appeared. Left toward the admin offices, right curving back to the terminal. Straight ahead, slightly recessed, the supply closet door — the same door I'd opened thousands of times, always expecting nothing but shelves and chemicals and the dense, astringent smell of industrial cleaning products.

I reached for the handle.

The door swung open. The closet was dim, lit only by the spill from the corridor, the shelves crammed with the usual inventory — paper towels, spray bottles, bin liners, the heavy-duty detergent that smelled like something designed to strip paint rather than clean floors.

There was a man standing inside.

My brain stalled. Not froze — stalled, the way an engine stalls when you feed it the wrong input, a momentary failure of processing that left me standing in the doorway with my hand on the handle and my mouth half-open and absolutely no thought in my head except the blunt, stupid recognition that there was a person in my supply closet who should not be there.

He was pressed against the shelving, as though he'd been trying to make himself smaller. Civilian clothes — jacket, jeans, no uniform, no lanyard, nothing that explained his presence in a staff-only area of the building. Young. Younger than me, or close to my age, hard to tell in the dim light. Tall, well-built in a way that registered before I could stop it registering, my brain running its involuntary assessment even in the middle of confusion — broad shoulders, strong jaw, eyes that caught the corridor light and held it.

His face was doing something complicated. Surprise first, then the rapid calculation of someone caught somewhere they shouldn't be, the options visibly narrowing behind his eyes as he processed the situation and found no good exits.

My mouth opened. I don't know what I was going to say. What are you doing in here would have been the obvious choice — the reasonable, appropriate response of a staff member finding an intruder in a restricted area. Or maybe I'd have said nothing, just stepped back and let the door close and walked away and reported it to Linda or security or whoever you were supposed to report these things to.

I didn't get to find out.

He moved faster than I could process — a lunge forward, his hand grabbing the front of my vest, bunching the fabric in his fist, and then his mouth was on mine.

The kiss was hard, graceless, a collision that tasted of panic more than desire. His lips crushed against mine with a force that bent my head back, his other hand gripping my shoulder, holding me in place as though he expected me to fight.

My brain went white.

Not blank — white. The way a screen goes white when it's overloaded, too many inputs arriving simultaneously for any single one to resolve into coherent thought. A stranger was kissing me. A stranger in my supply closet was kissing me. I should push him off. I should shout. I should do any of the things that a normal person would do when physically grabbed by an unknown man in a confined space.

My body had a different opinion.

My body, which had spent the last ten minutes preparing itself for exactly this kind of contact — which was flushed and primed and redirecting blood to exactly the places that were now being activated by the pressure of another man's mouth on mine — my body did not consult my brain. My body recognised the situation with the speed of fifteen years' practice, bypassed every rational objection, and responded the way it had been trained to respond: by leaning in.

My hands came up to his chest. Not to push — though that's what they should have done, and for a fraction of a second I felt them hesitate at the boundary between defence and participation, trembling against the fabric of his shirt with the particular indecision of a body that knew it was making a terrible choice and was going to make it anyway.

His heart was hammering beneath my palms. Or that was mine, the pulse so loud in my own ears that I couldn't separate his from it.

I pulled him closer.

The decision — if you could call it that, if the word decision could be applied to something that happened in the space between one heartbeat and the next with no more conscious deliberation than a reflex — the decision tipped me over a line I'd crossed so many times that the line itself had worn away. There was no line. There was just the familiar gravity, the pull toward contact that had governed my body since I was sixteen years old, and the equally familiar surrender to it.