Page 76 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Micah

The bathroom floor is cold.

I don’t remember lying down on it. I remember the mirror, and my reflection doing something I didn’t like, and the towel going red faster than I wanted it to, and then I’m on the floor with my cheek against the tiles and I’m not entirely sure how much time has passed.

This is not ideal.

I press the towel harder, and the pain brings things back into focus. The bathroom ceiling. The fluorescent light flickering slightly in the left corner, the way it’s been doing since I arrived, and that I keep noticing and forgetting and noticing again. The wound is still bleeding. Slower, I think. Or possibly I’m just getting used to it, which is a different thing entirely and significantly more concerning.

I don’t know if the bullet is still in there. That’s the thing I keep arriving at. I don’t know if what I have is a graze, a long hot line of damage that will close and scar, or something that went in and is sitting somewhere quiet, doing something I can’t feel yet. Bodies are good at not feeling things for a while. They save it up. I know this from experience I never wanted to have.

I’m hot.

Not bathroom hot or exertion hot. The other kind, with an edge to it, the kind that has a name I don’t want to say out loud even to myself in an empty hotel bathroom at two in the morning. Fever. My hands are shaking in a fine continuous tremor that means something is wrong in a way that isn’t going away on its own, and I’ve been pressing the towel against my side for I don’t know how long and the towel is dark and I can’t remember if it was always this dark or if that’s new.

I should get up.

I know I should get up. The floor is worse than the bed and the bed is worse than a hospital and the hospital requires a decision I keep circling and not making, and from down here on the cold bathroom floor the decision feels very far away, a thing belonging to a version of me that is more capable of vertical movement than I currently am. There was a moment earlier, after I got back here, when getting up felt possible. That moment has passed. The window for easy decisions has closed, and what’s left requires an effort that the floor is making very difficult to locate.

I think about calling him.

Not as a plan. Not yet. Just as the thing my brain keeps producing when I ask it what the options are and it runs through them and comes back empty. Him. Lennox. The specific, impossible, completely available option of calling the one person in the world I know would pick up. Not because he’s waiting for me. Because he’s the kind of man who picks up.

I think about a rooftop.

Mine. The communal one at the top of the building, the one with the terracotta pots that nobody ever uses, the one where I took him for breakfast and it was cold and the food was good and he asked questions about my work like it actually mattered and I gave him real answers without deciding to, and somewhere between the coffee and the fruit I understood I was in a great deal of trouble.

I think about a restaurant in Richmond.

A table in the corner and a silver-haired man taking our coats and a candle between us and a handwritten menu and the specific particular sound a wine glass makes when it touches another wine glass and both of them held by people who mean it.

What are we drinking to, he said.

This, I said. And meant it completely, and knew I meant it and didn’t care that I meant it, which was new.

This, he agreed, and held my gaze, and I felt the key in my jacket pocket, warm from being close to me all evening, and I let myself believe, just for that night, that everything was going to be alright.

I think about a sofa.

My sofa. At the loft, in the flat that doesn’t feel like anything except a place I keep my things, except that night it felt like somewhere, and he was on it and I was on it and he put his arm around me without making any kind of event of it, and the television was doing something neither of us was watching and his thumb moved once against my shoulder in a small absent way that I don’t think he knew he was doing, and I held my breath because I didn’t want to disturb it.

I think about a kitchen counter.

Him on one side of it and me on the other and between us a conversation about a boy nobody went looking for, a boy from a council estate who fell through every gap the system had to offer, and Lennox saying, with his face absolutely uncomplicated about it, everyone matters, even unwanted boys from council estates, maybe especially them, and me having to look at the pan.

Nobody has ever said that to me. Not to me. Not about boys like me. Not with that look.

He would let me in.

Even now. I believe this with the specific certainty of someone who has spent their whole life reading people and has only ever been wrong about this one, in the beginning, before I knew what he was. He would open the door and he would see me and he would let me in, and there would be horrified and there would be furious and there would possibly be handcuffs at some point, but there would also be gentleness, because that’s what he does, he is gentle even when he doesn’t want to be, gentle even when everything he knows about a situation says he shouldn’t be, gentle in the specific way of a man who decided a long time ago what kind of person he was going to be and has kept that decision even when it costs him.

Even now it would cost him.

He’d do it anyway.

He would make sure I was seen to, and even the arrest, whatever comes after the arrest, even that would be done with the specific gentle thoroughness he brings to every single thing he does that matters.

It would be alright.