Page 69 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I leave it where it is.

I sit down on the sofa in the wrong place, in the middle, in the place he sat, and I lean my head back and I look at the ceiling.

He used me. He identified me, researched me, went to the club knowing I’d be there and put himself in my path. It wasn’t a happy accident. I was a mark, a detective to distract and charm and keep pointed in the wrong direction, and everything that happened after was built on top of that first deliberate step.

I know that.

I also know that he stood in a kitchen he’d never been in and learned where the coffee beans were and how my cooker works and made me breakfast this morning and packed me a lunch with a note that told me I looked handsome in my coat. I know that too, and I don’t know what to do with both of those things being true at the same time.

I put my hand in my coat pocket.

The note is still there.

I take it out and I unfold it, and I read it, and then I read it again, and his handwriting is confident and looping and I can hear his voice in it the same way I can hear his voice in everything now, the specific frequency of him that I have apparently let in so completely that I can’t find the edges of it to push back out.

You look very handsome in that coat. I think you should wear it to bed tonight. With nothing underneath.

I fold it back up.

I should throw it away. That would be the rational thing to do at this juncture, given everything that happened today. I should put it in the bin the same way I should take the key off the counter and put it somewhere I don’t have to look at it and I should angle the reading lamp back to where it was before someone came and changed things and then left.

I put the note back in my coat pocket.

I sit in the quiet for a long time.

The flat sounds the way it used to sound, which is like nothing very much. The pipes occasionally, the street outside, the specific urban silence of a ground floor flat in Brixton at seven in the evening. I used to not notice this silence because it was just the background, the sound of my life, nothing to compare it to.

I notice it now.

I notice it the way you notice the absence of something you’d stopped noticing was there.

I sit there in the middle of my sofa in the angle of the lamp he preferred and I don’t do anything at all for a long time.

The new phone buzzes on the sofa cushion beside me.

Unknown number. And I know before I open it that it’s the same person, because who else would be texting a number they shouldn’t have at half past seven on a Tuesday evening.

I open it.

You don’t believe me. Fine. Here’s proof. Then decide if you still want to play house with him.

There’s a link underneath. Dark web, the specific format of it, and I know what that means before I’ve followed it, what kind of thing lives in those corners of the internet, what kind of person knows how to find their way around them.

I should not click it.

I click it.

It takes a long time to load, which gives me several seconds in which I could choose not to do this, and then it loads.

I look at what’s there for perhaps four seconds.

Then I’m on my feet and moving and I make it to the bathroom before I’m sick, which I am, thoroughly, my hands on the rim of the toilet and my whole body doing the thing bodies do when they’ve encountered something they need to eject, and when it’s over, I sit on the bathroom floor with my back against the cold tile and I breathe.

I feel dirty.

Not angry. Not even betrayed, or not only that. Dirty, in the specific way of someone who looked at something they shouldn’t have looked at, who saw something that was never meant to be seen by anyone, that existed only because someone had the power to make it exist and no one had the power to stop them. I feel dirty and I feel disgusted and neither of those feelings is pointed at Micah.

I sit on the bathroom floor for a long time.