Page 18 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I sip my fancy, and surprisingly tasty drink and resist the urge to snoop around his home. I look out of the window instead. The same window I was staring at in an Instagram photo not so long ago.

He rejoins me with his hair still damp. Wearing loose, soft, light gray sweatpants and a pale pink baggy sweatshirt that’s slipping off one shoulder.

“Sorry for keeping you waiting,” he smiles.

“No problem.”

He drifts over the kitchen area with more grace than a ballet dancer. Helplessly I follow him, mere debris caught in his orbit.

He moves around his own kitchen with an ease and familiarity that doesn’t match the careful, staged emptiness I noticed last time. Then he starts chopping something with real competence, one hip against the counter.

“You actually cook,” I say, and I don’t mean for it to sound as surprised as it does.

“I contain multitudes, Detective.” He flashes me a grin over the pan. “Sit. You’re making the kitchen feel like a crime scene, standing there with your hands in your pockets.”

I sit.

“So.” He doesn’t look up from the pan, knife still moving. “How was your day? Anything exciting. Arrest any baddies?”

“It was fine.”

“That’s not an answer. That’s a deflection.” He glances at me sideways. “Try again.”

I open my mouth to give him another nothing answer, and what actually comes out is, “I spent six hours knocking on doors on an estate in Brixton.”

“Sounds thrilling.”

“It wasn’t.” I turn my glass a quarter turn on the counter, watching the drink catch the light rather than looking at him. “There’s a boy. Fifteen when he went missing, three years ago. Nobody looked for him properly. Not really. He was the sort of kid everyone decided wasn’t worth the paperwork.”

The knife stops.

“That’s.” He sets it down, gives me his full attention in a way that feels different from every other kind of attention he’s given me tonight. “That’s awful.”

“It happens more than you’d think.” I hear myself say it flatly, the way I’ve trained myself to say true things that would otherwise have too much weight if I let them. “Kid from the wrong postcode goes quiet, and somewhere along the way somebody decides that’s just what happens to kids like that.”

“Why do you care so much?” He says it carefully, like he actually wants to know, not like he’s challenging me. “I mean that. You never knew him. He’s not even really your case, is he?”

“He’s somebody’s case. He should have been everybody’s case.” I look up at him properly. “Everyone matters. Even unwanted boys from council estates. Maybe especially them.”

Something happens to Micah’s face that I don’t have a name for. It isn’t quite shock and it isn’t quite grief, though it might be standing somewhere between the two. His jaw goes tight. For one unguarded second his eyes go very far away, somewhere I clearly haven’t been invited.

Then it’s gone, smoothed back over so fast I’d doubt I’d seen it at all if I hadn’t spent most of my life learning to watch faces do exactly that.

“You really believe that,” he says quietly. Not a question.

“Yes.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Just looks at me like he’s recalculating something, like I’ve handed him a piece of information he wasn’t expecting and doesn’t quite know where to file yet.

“Most people don’t,” he says eventually, turning back to the pan, his voice gone light again, performance sliding back into place. “Most people just want it to be someone else’s problem.”

“I’m not most people.”

“No.” He glances at me again, and there’s something underneath the smile now that wasn’t there before dinner started. “I’m starting to understand that.”

He plates the food with more care than the moment strictly needs and slides a dish across the counter at me. Sea Bass and asparagus and other things I’m not cultured enough to know.

“Eat. Tell me if it’s any good. I need the validation, it’s been a long week of strangers telling me to move on from a man I can’t forget.”