Page 50 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

He sits on the sofa and watches me cook.

I'm aware of it in the particular way I'm always aware of Lennox's attention, that torch-quality of it, but it doesn't feel like being assessed tonight. It feels like being kept company. Like I'm a fire he's sitting near because he's cold, and the idea of being warm to someone is so new and so large that I have to focus very hard on the pecorino for a moment.

The pasta takes twenty minutes. In that time he says almost nothing, just sits there with his elbows on his knees and his hands folded, watching, and occasionally I catch his eye and he gives me the look that isn't quite a smile but is adjacent to one, and that's enough, that's more than enough, that's the kind of thing that shouldn't be enough for a grown person and somehow is.

I'm plating up when he speaks.

"He died all alone under a bridge," he says. "And nobody went to his funeral."

I go still.

Tyler. I think about Tyler Cooke, who I knew for about two months, who was funny in a way that surprised you, who had a habit of making a particular face when he was pretending not to be frightened, a face I recognized because it was the same face I'd been making for years. Tyler who got out before me and got further under than I did, and who I hadn't been able to find when I went looking, later, which should have told me something and didn't, not until now.

The tears come before I can stop them. Not the careful kind, not the kind I'm practiced at managing, just the sudden overwhelming kind that arrives without warning and doesn't particularly care that I'm holding two plates of pasta.

I put the plates down. Carefully.

"He deserved so much better than that," I say, and my voice does something I'm not going to be able to fix quickly.

Lennox is off the sofa before I've finished the sentence. He's just there, suddenly, in front of me, and he reaches up and puts his thumb against my cheek and wipes the tear away, very gently, with the specific tenderness of a man who is choosing every movement. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't ask why I'm crying for a boy I'm not supposed to know. He just looks at me with those eyes that read everything and know everything and have chosen, deliberately, repeatedly, against all available evidence of their own quality, to keep choosing me.

We stand there for a moment in the kitchen with the pasta going cold and London doing its evening thing beyond the windows and something enormous sitting between us that neither of us is going to say out loud.

If I don't say it and he doesn't say it, then maybe it isn't quite real yet. Maybe we get to have this, just this, for a little while longer. That's what the silence is. Not an evasion, not a pretense, just two people agreeing without words to protect something for as long as they can.

I take a breath. I reach up and put my hand over his, where it's still resting against my face.

"Dinner's going cold," I say.

"Right," he says.

We eat at the counter like we always do, shoulders touching, and it's quieter than usual but not uncomfortably so. He takes his first mouthful and goes still for a second in the way he does when something is better than he was expecting, and he doesn't say anything about it but he also doesn't have to.

"What is this?" he says eventually.

"Cacio e pepe."

"It's very good."

"I know," I say, and he makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh and is adjacent to one, and that small sound in this quiet kitchen on this particular evening goes straight into the collection of things I'm keeping.

He eats properly. I notice it the same way I noticed it on the roof terrace, the way you notice when someone who probably hasn't stopped long enough to eat today finally does. I put a little more in his bowl without asking and he doesn't object, which is its own kind of conversation.

We talk about small things. A documentary he watched last week, that he claims was terrible and describes in enough detail to make it clear he watched the whole thing. Something funny that happened on the tube that I get the story of in two installments because he keeps circling back to add details he forgot. He asks about the lido footage, and I tell him how I fixed the color problem, and he listens in that way he has, like the information actually matters to him, which nobody has ever made me feel about my work before. I file that away too.

After, we end up on the sofa. Not in any planned way, just the natural drift of an evening that's decided what it wants to be. I put something on, a film neither of us has seen, and he settles back into the cushions and I settle into him, and he puts his arm around me without making any kind of production of it, just does it the way you do something you've decided belongs to you now.

For a while, the only sound is the television and the city and the occasional observation from one of us that the other acknowledges without really breaking the quiet. He says something dry about the film's logic around the halfway point and I laugh and feel his arm tighten slightly around me when I do, and I think, this is what it must feel like to be an ordinary person having an ordinary evening and not understanding how extraordinary that is.

His thumb moves, just once, against my shoulder. A small absent movement, the kind you make without knowing you're making it.

I stay very still.

On screen, two people are arguing about something in a kitchen. I couldn't tell you what. The kitchen is very yellow. That's as far as my attention gets.

His breathing slows down. I feel it happen, the gradual release of whatever today put into him, and then he shifts very slightly, settling deeper into the sofa, which brings me with him, closer, and I readjust without thinking and neither of us says anything about it.

"The geography of this film makes no sense," he says, at some point.