Page 25 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“I will.”

“Mm.” She doesn’t believe me, and she’s right not to, and she leaves anyway, because that’s the kind of partner she is, and I’m grateful for it in the same complicated way I’ve been grateful for most things lately.

By the time I leave myself, it’s properly dark, and I drive home on autopilot, and I don’t go inside.

I sit in my car outside my flat. Lurking outside a property for the second time this week, which is becoming enough of a pattern that I should probably be concerned about it independently of everything else currently wrong with my life.

I take the note out of my coat pocket, the one with the heart drawn next to eleven digits I haven’t used yet, and I look at it for a long time without dialing.

He still doesn’t exist before six years ago. That fact keeps circling back no matter how many times I try to set it down, and there’s almost nothing else to weigh it against, no childhood photos, no old friends, no family anyone’s ever mentioned. The only record of who he actually is sits behind a paywall I’ve spent two weeks pointedly not crossing.

I tell myself it’s research. I tell myself it might be the only available window into who this man was before he became Micah Vee, and that a detective who refuses to look at available evidence because it makes him uncomfortable isn’t doing his job properly. I do not examine the other reasons too closely, the curiosity, the low, ugly thread of jealousy at the thought of strangers paying to look at someone I want to keep for myself, because examining them would mean admitting they’re there.

I pay for the month. I tell myself it’s for the case.

It’s tasteful. That’s the first thing that strikes me, scrolling through months of it in the dark of my car like a teenager. No filthy captions, no overt performance, nothing that reads as desperate or transactional the way I’d half braced myself for. Photographs mostly, soft focus, careful light, the same expensive minimalism as the rest of his life. And he’s alone in every single one. Not a single photo with another person in it, not a hint of anyone else ever having been in that loft with a camera, just Micah, on his own, looking at the lens like it’s a person he trusts.

He looks sweet in most of them. Bashful, almost, caught mid-laugh in a few, biting his lip in others with an expression that’s coy rather than confident, shy rather than sultry, exactly the way he looked at me across his own kitchen counter two nights ago. It’s the same Micah. That’s what eases something tight in my chest that I hadn’t fully noticed was there until it loosened. If I’d found a different man entirely behind that paywall, someone hard-eyed and knowing, fluent in a performance I’d never once seen from him in person, I think it would have frightened me more than anything Farah’s records search turned up. A person capable of playing an entirely different role for money is a person capable of playing one for me too.

But there isn’t a different Micah. There’s just this one, soft and a little shy and clearly more comfortable being looked at than being known, which is its own kind of sad if I let myself think about it for too long.

I close the app, feeling something that isn’t quite relief and isn’t quite shame, but sitting somewhere uncomfortably between the two, and finally let myself dial.

He picks up on the second ring, and his face fills the screen looking soft and lamplit, hair damp like he’s just out of the shower, and something in my chest loosens before he’s even said a word.

“Detective.” He’s smiling already. “You used the number.”

“I used the number.”

“I was starting to think you’d lost it on purpose. Very on brand for a man who won’t even use police systems to text someone.”

“I had a long day.”

“You look like it.” His expression shifts, something genuinely soft moving in behind the teasing. “Bad one?”

“There’s been another.”

I watch his face carefully when I say it, the way I’ve trained myself to watch faces, and what crosses it is exactly what should cross a normal person’s face. Concern. A flicker of something darker underneath it. He doesn’t ask who. He doesn’t ask where. He just asks if I’m alright, properly alright, in a tone that makes me want to tell him the truth more than I’ve wanted to tell anyone the truth in a long time.

“I’m fine,” I say, which is a lie, and we both let it stand as one.

“You carry these like they’re yours to fix single handedly.” He pulls a blanket up around his shoulders, settling deeper into the sofa he’s curled up on, and for a moment he just looks young and tired and entirely too pretty for a weekday night. “You know that’s not sustainable. Even for someone as stubborn as you.”

“Comes with the badge.”

“Doesn’t mean it should.” It’s almost exactly what he said to me over dinner, the same words, and I don’t know if it’s because he genuinely means them that much or because he’s said them to enough people that they’ve worn a groove. I hate that I can’t tell anymore. I hate more that I’m not sure I want to be able to.

“Was it near here?” he asks, light, almost idle, already reaching for something off-screen. “London’s so big I never have a sense of where anything actually is relative to anything else.”

“South. Walworth.”

“Walworth.” He says it like he’s placing it on a map in his head. “Isn’t that near the park with the bingo hall on the corner? I filmed there once, ages ago, before any of this. Funny how a whole part of the city can just be background until it isn’t.”

It’s nothing. It’s the kind of throwaway local knowledge anyone who’s lived in London long enough picks up without trying. Except I never told him where in Walworth, and he placed it within two streets of a lockup nobody’s named publicly yet, and I sit there with my own face reflected faintly in the corner of the screen, watching myself not react, twenty two years of training holding my expression exactly where I need it to stay.

“You know London well,” I say, careful, light.

“I know London’s empty buildings well. That’s a smaller, weirder map than most people’s.” He laughs at himself, easy, unbothered, already moving on to something else, asking if I’ve eaten, telling me about a video he’s editing, the conversation sliding back into something soft and ordinary so smoothly I almost let myself follow it.