Page 78 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I could drive around aimlessly. Or walk the streets. The city is huge and he could be anywhere, but I might run into him. Some instinct might lead me to him.

No, that’s a stupid idea. There has to be a better option. I just need to figure it out.

I eat half a biscuit I find in the kitchen and put the rest down on the counter and forget it.

I sit on the sofa and look at the lamp, still angled the way he preferred it, and I get back up because sitting still is worse.

The rain starts at half-past two. I hear it before I register it, just a sound underneath the other sounds, and then it’s properly raining, the kind that comes in fast and means it, drumming against the window and the pavement outside and the roof of the car I still haven’t parked properly.

I sit down on the sofa.

I get back up.

I go to the window and look at the street. Rain and orange light and nothing. Nobody out in this. Nobody with any sense would be out in this.

It would make looking for him easier.

I sit back down.

I hear it just before I would have given up on hearing anything. Barely a sound, barely audible over the rain, the specific quiet of someone who isn’t sure they have the right to make any more noise than they absolutely have to.

A tap on the door.

I’m across the room before the second one.

I open the door.

He’s there.

He’s soaked through in a way that says he’s been in the rain for longer than it takes to get from a cab to a doorstep. His hair is flattened against his forehead. Whatever he was wearing when he left wherever he was, has done its best against the weather and lost. He has one hand on the doorframe and he is holding himself upright with the specific and obvious effort of a man who is not going to be upright for very much longer, and he looks at me with the eyes of someone who has been running on the very last of themselves and just used it up getting here.

“I had nowhere else to go,” he says.

His legs go.

I catch him before he hits the floor, both arms coming around him, and he is heavier than he looks and colder than he should be, and he makes a sound when I grab his left side that tells me exactly where the wound is. I pull him inside. I get us both through the door somehow, his weight redistributed, and I kick it closed behind us and we make it to the sofa where I lower him as carefully as I can manage, and he’s shivering, soaked through and shaking, and I’m on my knees in front of him and I don’t know where to put my hands that won’t hurt him.

His lips have a color to them that I don’t like. His temperature when I put my hand to his forehead is a fact I’d rather not have, but I have it now.

“Micah.”

He opens his eyes. They find my face slowly, like they’re looking for it through something, and then they focus, and something happens in them that I’m not going to be able to think about too hard right now, something warm and specific and entirely directed at me.

He smiles.

It’s the real one. The private one. The one I have been cataloguing for months without knowing I was doing it, the one that isn’t for a camera or a room, the one that happens when his guard is down far enough that whatever’s underneath just surfaces on its own.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” I say, which is not the word for what I want to say, but it’s the word available right now, in this flat, at two thirty in the morning with the rain still going and a wounded man on my sofa who smiled at me like I was what he was hoping to find when he got here.

“How bad,” I say.

“Don’t know,” he says. “Couldn’t tell.”

“How long has it been bleeding?”

“Hours.” He closes his eyes. “Maybe stopped. Hard to tell.”