Page 45 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“Then you can stay?” he says. Quietly. Like he’s not entirely sure of the answer and is trying to prepare for whichever way it goes.

My heart does something I’m going to have to have a serious conversation with it about later.

“Yes,” I say. “I can stay.”

He smiles, and it is the real one, the private one, the one that isn’t aimed at a camera or a crowd, and I realize I’ve been cataloguing the versions of his smile without knowing I was doing it, the way a detective catalogues everything, automatically, compulsively, even when the evidence is just a man standing in his own bedroom at seven in the morning with two mugs of coffee and hope all over his face.

I take the mug he holds out. He sits on the edge of the bed, close but not pressing the point, cross-legged with his own mug, and we drink our coffee in the dark and neither of us says anything for a while, and it is one of the most comfortable silences I have ever sat in.

I want to stay.

That’s the thing I notice next, underneath the comfort and the coffee smell and the thoroughly unreasonable amount of good feeling currently occurring in my chest. Not I can stay, which is logistical, a function of Thursdays and rosters and twenty two years of knowing my own schedule. I want to stay. The wanting of it is specific and not small, the kind of wanting that rewrites the shape of a day before you’ve even properly started it. There is nowhere else I would rather be right now than in this bed in this dark with this man, and that is a sentence I couldn’t have said about any specific location or any specific person in a very long time, and I let it sit for a moment without pulling it apart.

“Breakfast,” Micah says eventually. “I’m making it properly this time. Not ordering in.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.” He unfolds himself from the bed with that specific grace of his that I’ve stopped trying not to notice. “But I want to.”

He goes, and I lie there in the warm dark listening to the sounds of him in the kitchen, the particular domestic soundtrack of someone who is comfortable in their own space and not performing it for an audience. Cupboard doors. The tap running. Something being set down on the counter. I have lain in a lot of mornings in my life and I have rarely found the sounds of another person in them anything other than a reminder that a stranger is nearby. This is different. The sounds of him are easy to be near.

I get up eventually, find my way to the bathroom, locate a spare toothbrush still in its packaging that he’s left out on the edge of the sink, and stand there for a moment looking at it before I use it, because it means he thought about this, quietly, in advance, without making it a thing, and that matters in a way I couldn’t fully explain.

He’s made eggs. Proper eggs, the kind that take actual attention, with toast that’s the right side of dark, more coffee, and a small pot of something orange on the counter that might be marmalade, and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s homemade.

“You really cook,” I say.

“You’ve said that before.” He slides a plate across without looking up. “Sit down, Lennox.”

I sit down.

We eat. He tells me about the edit he’s been putting off all week, something about the color grading on the lido footage that isn’t coming out right, and I listen to things I don’t entirely understand with more interest than the subject warrants, because it’s his voice and he’s talking to me like I’m someone he tells things to, and that is a different feeling than I expected it to be.

He asks about my flat. What it’s like.

“Small,” I say. “Functional.”

“Books?”

“Some.”

“What kind?”

“History, mostly. Some fiction.” I pause. “Crime, occasionally. For professional reasons.”

He laughs at that, the wheeze of genuine surprise, and I find myself smiling into my coffee in a way that is almost certainly undignified.

“Do you have any books?” I ask, glancing around the minimalist, stylish space.

His dark eyes light up. He jumps up from his chair, with a speed that says terrible things about the age gap between us, and bounces over to a smooth gray door. One I assumed covered a cupboard.

He swings it open with a flourish, revealing a large, very stuffed, very chaotic stacked bookshelf. “Ta da!” he says.

I chuckle and finish my second coffee.

He waves me away from the dishes afterward in a way that brooks no argument, so I find myself drifting toward the bookshelf instead, running a finger along the spines while he works at the sink behind me. The collection is not what I expected. Photography books, architecture, a battered atlas with a cracked spine, a whole section of history that somebody has clearly actually read rather than arranged for effect, and then, tucked between a book about London’s underground rivers and something on urban decay, a well-worn paperback that appears to have a romance sounding title on it.

I pull it out. It is indeed a romance novel. One with a shirtless man on the cover whose hair is doing things that defy both gravity and reason.