Page 46 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“Interesting,” I say.

He glances over his shoulder from the sink. “What?”

I hold it up. The man on the cover appears to be on a clifftop in a storm. His shirt, what remains of it, is losing the battle with the wind. His hair is not.

Micah looks at it. Looks at me. “That’s a classic.”

“Nobody’s hair does that in a storm,” I say. “It’s absurd.”

“His hair is magnificent.” He goes back to the dishes, unbothered. “It’s a wonderful book. It’s funny and romantic, and the hero is ridiculous in the best possible way and I have read it three times.”

“Three times.”

“Three times and I will read it again. You can borrow it if you like.”

I look at the cover once more. The man on the clifftop gazes into the middle distance with the expression of someone who has never once questioned a decision in his life. I find this vaguely aspirational.

“I think I will,” I say, and take it to the sofa.

It is, in point of fact, extremely good. I will never say this out loud, but the hero is exactly as ridiculous as advertised and the whole thing moves at a pace that makes my usual reading feel like standing still, and I am three chapters in before I surface properly and realize I’ve been holding the book at an angle to catch the light from the window like a man who is invested in finding out what happens next.

Which I am.

Micah is now at his desk with headphones on, leaning toward the monitor with his chin resting on his hand in a posture that looks profoundly uncomfortable and that he doesn’t seem to notice at all. His lips are moving slightly. A commentary track for footage nobody else is hearing yet.

I watch him for a while before I go back to my book.

Ten minutes later the headphones come off and he makes a sound that could charitably be called frustration.

“Problem,” I say.

“The whole thing reads too warm. I want it to feel like winter, I shot it in March, and every time I try to correct it the shadows go green.” He swivels the chair to face me with the expression of a man who knows his audience can’t solve this but needs to say it out loud anyway. “You don’t know anything about color grading, do you?”

“Not a single thing,” I confirm.

“Right.” He turns back. “Just needed to tell someone.”

“Happy to help.”

He laughs, quiet and real, and puts the headphones back on. I watch the shift in him as he does, the specific change that happens when he stops performing and starts actually working, something in him settling and sharpening at the same time, and it’s so different from every other version of him I’ve encountered that I sit there with the book face down on my knee just looking for longer than I intended.

He glances over and catches me at it. His eyes drop to the book, then come back up to my face. One eyebrow rises very slightly.

“Well?” he says.

I look down at the cover. The man on the clifftop. The hair.

“It’s good,” I say.

Micah’s smile is enormous and entirely without mercy. “Told you.”

“You did,” I agree. “Don’t make it a thing.”

He turns back to his screen, but the smile is still there in the set of his shoulders, and I go back to the book, and neither of us says anything else for a while.

And it dawns on me that I’m not content. Not adequately occupied. I’m happy, the specific active version of it, located here in this room on this Thursday morning with this person, and it’s been long enough since I felt it that I recognize it the way you recognize somewhere you used to know well and thought you might not find again.

He glances over at me and catches me looking. “What?” he says.