Page 53 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

He doesn’t look at the flowers when we leave.

The drive to Brixton takes forty minutes in the traffic, and he spends most of it looking out the passenger window at London going by, which is fine. Once I feel him glance at me and decide against saying whatever he’d been about to say, which is also fine. We don’t need to fill the car. We’ve stopped needing to fill things a while ago.

At one point he reaches across and turns the radio on, very low, something with a piano in it, and then settles back and doesn’t say anything about having done it, and I don’t say anything either, and we drive through South London with the piano doing something quiet in the background and the city doing its afternoon thing on either side of us.

“This is your street?” he says, when I park.

“Yes.”

He looks at the terrace. Beige stone and white lintels, Victorian, the kind of street that’s been here long enough to have opinions about the newer buildings. My building is in the middle, groundfloor flat, nothing distinguishing about it from the outside except a window box that I keep meaning to do something with and never have.

“It’s nice,” he says.

“It’s small,” I say.

“Small is cozy.”

I let us in.

The flat is exactly what it is, which is a place I sleep and keep my things and haven’t thought very hard about beyond that. The sitting room has a sofa that’s been with me long enough to have formed a personality of its own, a bookshelf that takes up most of one wall, a television I rarely turn on, and a reading lamp that’s the only lighting I ever actually use. The kitchen is galley-sized, functional, the kind of kitchen that suits a man who eats to fuel rather than for pleasure, which I have been for most of my adult life. The whole place smells like coffee and books and whatever the previous tenant left in the walls, which is just how it is.

I’m aware, for the first time in a long time, of what this place looks like to someone seeing it for the first time. It looks like what it is, which is the home of a man who has spent twenty two years putting everything into his job and nothing into turnings walls into a home, and if that tells someone something about him that they could have probably worked out from other evidence, then here it is, all confirmed in one small ground floor flat in Brixton.

Micah walks in and looks around slowly, and I watch him do it, braced for something I couldn’t name if you asked me.

He goes straight to the bookshelf.

He runs his finger along the spines the same way I ran mine along his, and pulls out a history of the London docks that I bought fifteen years ago and have read three times, and turns it over and reads the back. Then he puts it back and pulls out another one, something about postwar housing, and does the same thing.

“Can I borrow this?” he says, holding a crime thriller book I failed to resist in a second hand shop.

“Yes,” I say.

He tucks it under his arm like he’s been doing this for years and turns around and looks at the sofa, and then he goes and sits right next to the spot where I always sit, and looks up at me with an expression that does something catastrophic to my ability to function as an adult.

“It’s a good sofa,” he says.

“It’s old.”

“Old sofas are comfy.” He pats the cushion beside him. “Sit down, Lennox. You’ve been standing in doorways since you arrived.”

I sit down.

He leans into me immediately, without preamble, the same way he does at the loft, the same way he seems to do everything now, like the distance between us is a problem that’s already been solved and he’s just waiting for me to catch up. He still has the book under his arm. He opens it on his lap and starts reading, or pretends to.

I look at the wall opposite and think about the flowers on his kitchen counter and the lock on his front door, and the concierge who didn’t make a call. I think about the morning shift worker whose name I wrote down in the lobby and what I’m going to say to him tomorrow. I think about the three layers of security that weren’t enough.

And underneath all of that, quieter and more insistent, I think about the fact that he is here, in my flat, on my sofa, reading my book. He turned the radio on in the car without asking and found the perfect music. He fit into this space so immediately and so completely that it feels less like an intrusion and more like something that was always going to happen, and I was just the last to know.

“Thank you,” he says quietly, after a while.

He doesn’t specify what for. He doesn’t have to.

“Don’t mention it,” I say.

Outside, London carries on. Inside, it is very small and very quiet, and the reading lamp is doing something warm to the room, and something warm is happening to my heart. And I like it.

Chapter twenty-five