Page 19 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I nearly choke on the first mouthful.

We eat at the counter rather than the table, shoulders almost touching, and somewhere between the first glass of white wine and the second I stop keeping track of how unprofessional this is and just exist in it instead.

“Where did you actually learn to cook like this?” I ask.

“YouTube, mostly.” He shoots me a grin. “There’s a certain irony in that, given my whole career.”

“You taught yourself to cook from videos about derelict buildings?”

“No, Detective, I taught myself to cook from cooking videos. Try and keep up.” He pours us both more wine with a flourish that’s clearly half for my benefit. “I just like learning things properly. Whole thing or nothing. Drives Pinky mad.”

“Pinky.”

“My old housemate.” He says it lightly, already moving on.

He asks about my job in a way that isn’t fishing for anything, just curious, and I find myself telling him things I don’t usually tell anyone, about the weight of cases that never close, about Callum Doyle’s name still sitting behind my eyes some nights. He listens like it costs him something to hear it, his hand going still around his glass, and for a moment the charm drops away entirely and there’s just a young man looking at me like my grief actually matters to him.

“You carry a lot,” he says quietly.

“Comes with the job.”

“Doesn’t mean it should.” He reaches over, brief and light, and touches the back of my hand, and the gesture is so simple and so unpracticed that it undoes something in me far more thoroughly than anything filthy he’s said to me yet.

“What about you?” I ask, because turning the question back on him feels safer than sitting in my own answer any longer. “Family. Friends. The people who knew you before any of this.” I gesture vaguely at the loft, the followers, the version of him that exists on a screen.

Something flickers across his face, there and gone before I can properly name it. “Nobody worth boring you with.” The smile comes back online half a second too late to be entirely convincing. “I’m a self-made man, Detective. Tediously so.”

I let it go, because pressing feels like it would cost more than it’s worth tonight, and because some small, cowardly part of me doesn’t actually want to know yet, not while the wine is good and his hand is still warm against mine.

By the time the plates are empty, I’ve forgotten, almost entirely, why any of this was supposed to be a bad idea.

He pours the last of the wine and moves close enough that our shoulders touch properly now, no pretense of distance left in it.

Through the floor to ceiling windows, night has fallen and London’s doing that thing it does at night, scattered and gold and entirely too pretty for a city that spends most of its daylight hours being gray about everything. Neither of us says anything for a while. It’s the first silence all evening that doesn’t feel like it needs filling.

“This is nice,” he says eventually, quiet in a way that’s different from every other register I’ve heard out of him tonight. “I don’t really do this. Sitting. Talking properly. People mostly want the polished version of me that’s on their screen.”

“I noticed.”

“You’re the only person who’s asked me a real question in longer than I’d like to admit.” He glances at me sideways. “That’s rarer than you’d think.”

I don’t know what to do with that, so I don’t do anything with it, just sit there in the quiet and let it settle somewhere I’ll have to deal with later.

He clears the plates, comes back, and doesn’t sit back down. Just stands there in front of me, close enough that I have to tilt my head up slightly to keep looking at him.

“Stay,” he says. Not a question this time. “The whole night.”

The look in his dark eyes is pure, practiced seduction. Sultry. Full of naughty promise. But there is also something else there. Something vulnerable. Lonely. Someone asking to be held because the night is too dark.

I should say no. I have a list of reasons as long as my arm, every single one of them still true, the case, the rules, the twenty-two years of being exactly the kind of man who doesn’t do this.

My head wants to say no. My heart is screaming to say yes.

I open my mouth, and I genuinely do not know, even as I do it, which word is going to come out.

Chapter ten

Micah