Page 70 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

He was very young. That’s all I’m going to let myself hold from what I saw. He was very young, and someone did that, and he survived it, and then he spent years becoming Micah Vee with his loft and his channel and his carefully constructed life that looks like a person and is a person, a real one, the realest one I’ve met, who learned to use the only weapon available to him and used it, and is using it still, because what else do you do with the thing that was done to you except decide what it means.

No wonder.

No wonder the list. No wonder every name on it. No wonder a young man looked at the men who did those things and decided that the law had had its chance and what was needed now was something older and simpler and more honest than the law.

No wonder he looked at a detective and decided to make him useful. A forty-four year old man who clearly liked what he saw. Why wouldn’t Micah use that? Why wouldn’t Micah use what he calls more of a curse than a blessing?

I find I can’t be angry about it. I’ve been sitting here all evening trying to hold onto the anger and it keeps dissolving into something else, something worse, something that has his face in it and the specific quality of light in my kitchen this morning and a note folded in my coat pocket that I’m not going to throw away.

I get up off the bathroom floor. I wash my face. I look at myself in the mirror for a long time.

What we had wasn’t real. I know that now, or I know that’s what I’m supposed to think, and I keep trying to think it and my brain keeps returning the note to me, the breakfast, the lamp at the wrong angle. I wish it had been real. That’s the honest truth I’m sitting with in the cold bathroom of my own flat at eight o’clock on a Tuesday, that I wish with everything I have that what I felt when he was here was something he felt back, that the man who made me eggs this morning and packed me a lunch and put a heart next to his phone number was doing it because it was true.

Maybe some of it was true. I don’t know anymore what’s allowed to be true.

I go back to the sitting room. I turn the lamp off, the one that’s still at his angle. I stand in the dark for a moment.

Wherever he is tonight, I hope he’s safe. I hope he finishes what he started and I hope it gives him whatever it is he needs it to give him, and I hope at some point after all of this there’s something soft waiting for him, something he didn’t have to engineer or perform or calculate, just something real that happened to him the way real things are supposed to happen.

He deserves that.

I go to bed.

The key is still on the counter when I pass it, catching nothing now the lights are off, just a small cold shape in the dark.

I leave it where it is.

Chapter thirty-two

Micah

The hotel room is beige.

Not interestingly beige, not beige that’s trying to be something. Just beige, the specific color of a room designed by committee to offend nobody and comfort nobody, with a carpet that’s a slightly different beige and curtains that are a slightly different beige again, and a television I haven’t turned on, and outside the window a stretch of central London going about its business at nine in the evening with complete indifference to me or the state of anything.

I paid cash at the desk. The man behind it didn’t ask questions because people who pay cash for single rooms in hotels like this one are precisely the kind of guests hotels like this one are built for, people who need somewhere anonymous and temporary and completely unconnected to anything traceable. He gave me the card key, and I rode the lift to the fourth floor and I’ve been sitting on the bed since then, and I’ve been checking the news every twenty minutes on my phone.

Nothing yet.

That’s what I’m watching for. The moment a description goes out, the moment Lennox decides that the man who was being played by the Vigilante has now become the detective who is going to bring him to justice. Lennox is too good at his job, too good of a man, for this to stay quiet forever. And he was furious, or the quality of his face when it went still was what fury looks like on a person who has spent years learning to keep it somewhere it can’t be seen, which amounts to the same thing.

He knows that I went looking for him. That after the hospital, after he let me go with his badge still warm in his hand and that specific quality of flustered attention that I’ve spent my whole life knowing what to do with, I went and found out where he sometimes went on Friday nights and I showed up there. The hospital was chance, a broken window and a cop arriving faster than I expected and a stranger I walked into in the dark as an exit strategy.

I flirted with the handsome detective, because I’m good at that. And because I assumed the gruff, older man would react with gay panic and it would all go to my advantage.

Except he didn’t react with gay panic. He reacted with just plain gay. And I liked it. A lot.

What came after the hospital wasn’t chance. After the hospital, I made a choice.

What he’s not going to believe, because why would he, because it sounds exactly like what a person who was still running a deception would say, is that the club was where the strategy ended. That he was so different from what I was expecting, so careful with me, so entirely without the thing I’d spent years bracing for in every interaction with every man, that I walked out of that night already knowing I was in trouble.

I look at my phone.

Nothing on the news. No alerts on the terms I’ve been searching. I put it face down on the beige bedside table and I look at the beige ceiling and I think about a comfortable sofa, in a flat not much bigger than this hotel room’s bathroom.

I think about a key.

Small and silver and warm from being in his pocket, placed in my palm with the weight of everything he couldn’t say out loud, and I left it on his counter in the middle because I didn’t know what else to do with it and I couldn’t take it and I couldn’t leave it somewhere careless.