Page 80 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

And he’s here.

He’s here, on my sofa, in my flat, in my first aid kit’s worth of care, and he looked at me and smiled before anything else.

I reach for another blanket draped over the sofa arm. I put it over him, carefully, the way you do for someone you’ve decided belongs to you.

He doesn’t say anything.

Neither do I.

The rain comes down.

Chapter thirty-seven

Lennox

It’s morning now, and he’s still sleeping on the sofa.

He’s out properly, the deep unconscious sleep of a body that’s been running on empty for too long and has finally been given permission to stop. I crouch beside him, and I rest the back of my hand against his forehead the way I’ve done every hour since two in the morning, checking for heat I don’t want to find. His color is better than it was. The fever hasn’t broken, but it’s quieter, and under my hand he shifts, just slightly, and makes a small sound that isn’t a word, and settles again. I pull the blankets up over his shoulder where they’ve slipped.

I stand in the doorway for longer than I should, coat already on, watching him breathe, and then I leave him the spare key on the kitchen counter and a note that says Take the antibiotic at eight, then every four hours, there’s bread and everything for toast, don’t open the door to anyone. And I go.

I don’t want to leave him, but if I don’t show my face at work after yesterday’s events, it’s going to raise too many questions.

The morning is the longest I’ve worked in my entire life.

Not in terms of events. In terms of hours. Every hour is approximately the length of three, and I get through them by doing the smallest possible version of every task, the minimum of presence required to not be visibly absent while being absent in every way that matters.

There’s no way to check on him. I’ve thought about it a hundred times since I sat down at my desk, the reflex of it, my thumb already moving toward my phone before I remember there’s nothing there to move toward. No number. No thread of old messages to reread. His phone is gone, mine is a different phone with a different number, and the two of us exist to each other now only in the same room at the same time, nowhere else. I didn’t understand until today how much of loving someone happens in the gaps between seeing them, in the small check that says I’m thinking of you, and how much it costs to have that taken away in the middle of the one day I need it most.

Hendricks calls me in just after eleven.

Her office smells the same as it always does, something that claims to be linen and isn’t, and she doesn’t ask me to sit before she starts talking, which is never a good sign.

“Lab came back on the blood from the warehouse,” she says.

I keep my face still. I’ve had a lot of practice at this over the years, and none of it has ever mattered as much as it does right now.

“And?”

“Partial profile. Degraded by contaminants at the scene, not enough for a clean match yet, but enough that they’re running it again.” She’s watching me while she says it, the way she watches everyone, cataloguing. “If we get a name off it, we’ll have our man.”

“When will we know?”

“Days. Maybe longer, the sample’s not great.” She leans back. “You look like you haven’t slept.”

“Late night.”

“Mm.” She doesn’t push it, not today, and I don’t offer anything further, and I sit there with the specific, private horror of knowing exactly whose blood that is, of having washed it off my own kitchen table with my own hands less than twelve hours ago, and I say nothing, because there is no version of the truth I can give her that doesn’t end with a wanted man on my sofa and my own name on a different kind of report.

Farah catches me in the corridor afterward. “You look pale.”

“Didn’t sleep.”

“Right.” She studies me a beat too long, the way she’s been studying me for a while now, and then she lets it go, because that’s what Farah does, she lets things go until she doesn’t.

At noon, she puts a coffee on my desk without being asked. I drink it and think about a man on my sofa who has a wound on his ribs and an antibiotic schedule I made him promise to keep, and a blood sample sitting in a lab somewhere with his name already halfway attached to it, and no way on earth to warn him.

By half-past five, I can’t do it anymore. I drive home faster than I need to.