Page 32 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I do want it. I go and get it and come back to find him making tea, two mugs, without asking whether I want any, which I find I don’t mind at all.

He slides one across the counter when I sit down, drops into the seat across from me, curls his feet up under him, wraps both hands around his own mug, and looks at me over the rim with an expression I could look at for a very long time without getting tired of it.

“Hungry?” he asks.

“Somewhat.”

“There’s a place around the corner. Brilliant eggs. They do this thing with sourdough that is actually life-changing.” He’s already brightening at the prospect. “We could walk, it’s only five minutes, the weather looks decent for once.”

Something in my chest does a complicated thing.

I open my mouth. What comes out is something about having to get back. About work. About there being things I need to do this morning, which is technically true on any given morning and therefore technically not a lie, and I watch myself saying it with the detached horror of a man listening to himself babble like an idiot and not sound convincing at all.

Micah’s face does something I wasn’t prepared for. The warmth doesn’t disappear exactly. It just goes careful. His smile stays, but the life goes out of the back of it, the way a room looks the same after the sun goes behind a cloud, but everything is somehow slightly less.

“You don’t want to be seen with me,” he says. It isn’t accusatory. It’s quiet in a way that’s worse. “Is it the OnlyFans thing? Because I know some people think that means…”

“No.” I’m on my feet before I’ve decided to stand up. “That’s not it. That has never been it, not for a single second.”

He looks at me steadily. “Then what is it?”

I stand there. The honest answer and the safe answer are not the same answer, and I’ve been navigating that gap for weeks, and I’m tired. I’m tired of the gap. I’m tired of being careful in the one place I keep forgetting to want to be careful.

“My boss wanted you named as a suspect,” I say.

The color goes out of his face so completely and so fast that I take a step toward him without deciding to. He’s very still, both hands still wrapped around his mug, but I can see it, the slight tremor in them, the effort of keeping his breathing even.

“A suspect,” he repeats.

“It doesn’t change anything. It’s politics. The press got the story, there’s pressure from above, she needed to say we have a suspect.” I close the remaining distance between us, reach out, rest my hand on his arm, and feel him steady slightly under it. “It means nothing in real terms. It’s okay.”

He looks up at me. His eyes are very bright in a way that isn’t entirely composed.

“People think I’m a serial killer,” he says. “How is that okay?”

“Because luckily, you happen to know the lead detective. And he knows you’re innocent.”

Something moves through his face then. He lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh. His eyes are glassy, and I watch him blink it back, and for just a fraction of a second, in the space between the tears and the smile, there is something else in his expression. Something quick and dark and not quite right, gone before I can name it, replaced so seamlessly by the watery, grateful smile that I’m already doubting I saw it at all.

Maybe I didn’t.

I’m tired. My neck hurts. I am standing in a man’s kitchen at eight in the morning in yesterday’s clothes, and I am possibly projecting.

“Okay,” he says softly. “Okay.” He straightens, takes a breath, and I watch the performance slide back into place like a coat he’s very practiced at putting on. But this time I catch something underneath it that wasn’t there before. Something that looks, if I’m being honest, very much like it costs him something.

“Right.” He sets his mug down, and his energy shifts the way weather shifts, fast and total, bright breaking through where gray had been. “If we can’t go out, I’m ordering in. And we’re eating it on the roof.”

He is already reaching for his phone, already scrolling, already entirely decided, and I find I don’t have any objection left in me.

The roof terrace is one floor up and through a heavy fire door that Micah opens with the practiced ease of someone who has done it many times. I follow him out into the morning.

It’s nothing like I expected. I was expecting concrete and steel, and maybe a sad potted plant. What I get is something closer to a garden, a proper one, terracotta pots clustered in corners trailing things I can’t name but that are green and apparently thriving, a pergola strung with lights that would look something at night, wooden furniture that’s clearly been chosen rather than just put out, a long stretch of railing with all of London spread beyond it, glittering even now, even in the blunt honest light of a weekday morning.

“This is communal,” Micah says, dropping into one of the chairs like he owns it, tipping his face up toward the sun. “Technically for the whole building. But I’ve never once seen anyone else up here.”

“Their loss,” I say, and mean it.

It’s cold. The British weather doing that thing where it promises spring and then reminds you it’s still in charge, the air with a bite to it that goes straight through yesterday’s shirt. I don’t mention it. I sit across from him and wrap both hands around my tea and let the sun do what it can.