Page 31 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I think about Jordan. About Bilal. About all the boys who didn’t have the luck or the someone, boys who went quiet and stayed quiet because nobody outside those walls cared enough to keep looking. I think about a boy called Daniel from two floors down in my own block.

I don’t say any of that. I just sit in the soft light of his expensive loft and look at this man who used to be a different kind of boy entirely, and feel something I’ve been trying to outrun for days settle quietly into my chest and decide to stay.

“Stay,” he says eventually. Not suggestive. Not a performance. Just a man who doesn’t want the evening to end yet, asking another man the same thing.

“The letter is almost certainly nothing,” I say. “You’re probably perfectly safe.”

“I know.” He meets my eyes. “Stay anyway.”

The city glitters beyond the floor to ceiling windows. Somewhere out there is the board with his name on it, and Farah’s careful eyes, and twenty-two years of being a man who knows right from wrong and does right anyway.

I think about all of that.

“All right,” I say.

His smile does something to the room.

“Good.” He reaches for the remote. “There’s a second film. You’re going to hate it and then admit you didn’t.”

“Probably,” I agree.

And we settle back into the sofa and the blanket and the quiet of it, and for a little while I manage, almost entirely, to stop being a detective and just be a man sitting next to someone he has no business sitting next to, and it turns out that’s more than enough.

Chapter fifteen

Lennox

Iwake up on the sofa.

This takes a moment to process. Not where I am, I know where I am, the loft with its floor to ceiling windows and its too-expensive everything. What takes a moment to process is the fact that I’m horizontal, covered with the blanket that has been tucked around me with evident care, and the television is off, and it is morning.

I fell asleep.

I never fall asleep anywhere that isn’t my own bed. This is not modesty or preference, it’s just my wiring, the side effect of decades of seeing the very worst of humanity. Part of the same alarm system that keeps me on guard all ‌the time.

I’m a light sleeper even at home, a car alarm three streets over is enough to pull me up, and here I am on someone else’s sofa having apparently slept so deeply I didn’t stir when the second film ended, when someone turned off the television, when someone picked up the blanket we had been sharing and tucked it around me with enough gentleness that I didn’t register any of it.

A few nights ago, I fell asleep in his bed. Now I’ve fallen asleep on his sofa.

I sit up. My neck complains about it in a way my neck has never complained before, because I am forty-four and sofas are not beds. I choose to consider it a reasonable price.

The loft is quiet. Morning light is doing something clean and generous through all that glass, London visible below looking almost innocent at this hour, which is a lie London tells every day before the rest of it wakes up and starts proving otherwise.

I hear the sound of a door, and then Micah appears from the direction of the bedroom.

He is wearing pajama bottoms in a soft dark plaid and a cream waffle knit top that looks like it would be offensive to wash. His hair is doing something extraordinary, which is to say it’s doing nothing at all, just existing in complete morning chaos, and there is a crease on his cheek from his pillow, and his eyes are still soft with sleep. He looks young. He looks completely, devastatingly adorable, and I have no business noticing either of those things as acutely as I currently am.

He sees me sitting up and his whole face goes warm.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” he says.

“I fell asleep.”

“Spectacularly. Halfway through the second film. I was offended on its behalf.” He pads across to the kitchen, bare feet on the wooden floor, and puts the kettle on with the ease of someone who does this in his sleep. “How’s your neck?”

“Fine,” I say, which is not entirely true.

“Liar.” He doesn’t look up. “There’s ibuprofen in the bathroom cabinet if you want it.”