Page 40 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Then I thought about him more or less constantly.

I told myself it was tactical. I knew there was a detective on the case, I knew the case would eventually point at me, I knew having a detective inspector in my orbit was either going to be my undoing or my insurance depending on how well I played it. That’s what I told myself. I also went and looked him up on the police website and found a photograph that was deeply unflattering and somehow still made something in my chest do a thing I didn’t consent to.

Lennox, who looked at me in an alley tonight with blood on my hand and a dead man on the other side of a wall, and turned the torch off.

Who believed me about a cut I didn’t get from brickwork.

Who looked like it was destroying him to let me go and let me go anyway.

I stop walking. I’m somewhere I don’t immediately recognize, some ordinary London street that looks like every other ordinary London street at two in the morning, and I’m standing in the middle of the pavement and my eyes are doing something I don’t permit them to do as a general rule.

He knows.

Not the details, not the list, not the names or the places or any of the specific things I’ve spent long years being careful about. But he knows the shape of it. He’s known the shape of it for a while. I’ve watched him know it and choose not to look directly at it, the way you don’t look directly at the sun, and I’ve been grateful for that, and I’ve also hated it, because Lennox is the best person I’ve met in my entire life and he deserves to look directly at things.

He’s going to face it soon. Going to remember that he is a good cop, a good person. Properly. Eventually. Maybe soon.

I don’t know what happens then.

I do know that I’m standing on a London pavement at two in the morning thinking about a man who lets me go when he should arrest me, and something in my chest hurts in a way it hasn’t hurt since I was young enough to still believe that people were basically good and the world was going to be okay.

I’d forgotten that feeling.

I think that feeling might be hope, which is the most inconvenient possible thing to feel right now, given everything.

I start walking again, toward home, toward the loft with its London skyline and its too-expensive everything and its empty rooms that don’t feel quite as empty as they used to, because somewhere in the last few weeks I started imagining a tired detective drinking my coffee at my window in the morning, and now I can’t stop.

Now my list has an after hanging over it.

And after is a problem. After wasn’t supposed to exist, and now it’s all I can think about, this vast inconvenient territory called after, full of things like a man who cares about people he’s never met, and I want to be in it. I want to be in after so badly it changes the shape of everything.

The loft comes into view eventually. The concierge nods at me with the mild professional neutrality he applies to everything, and I take the lift up, and I stand in the middle of the room in the dark for a moment with London laid out behind the glass, all that gold and scatter, and I think about Lennox standing at this window with a coffee in his hands and the particular expression he gets when he thinks no one is watching him, the one where he looks almost peaceful.

I would like him to stand at my window again. I would like it so much it frightens me.

Get out of here.

Four words.

I’m going to think about those four words for a very long time.

Chapter nineteen

Micah

I’m editing footage. Or at least I’m trying to. Nothing important, a draft of the lido piece, shaky on the opening, and I’ve been arguing with myself about whether it matters. It doesn’t matter. I know it doesn’t matter, I know exactly what I’m doing, which is sitting at my desk in the fading afternoon light doing something ordinary with my hands so I don’t have to think about last night.

I’m editing footage and I’m not thinking about Lennox. Not the look in his eyes or the crack in his voice. Not the four precious words he said to me.

I’m also not thinking about how I’ve shattered the only good man I have ever known. I’m thinking about editing and YouTube and nothing else. My mind is a well of peace and tranquility.

How often do you have to tell yourself a lie before it becomes the truth?

My phone lights up.

We need to talk.

Four words. I read them four times. My hands have stopped moving over the keyboard and I don’t remember telling them to stop.