Page 59 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

He glances at me. Just for a second, just long enough to do the calculation, and then the easy warmth is back, the version of him that’s made me forget, more than once, that I’m supposed to be suspicious of him.

“You don’t know them,” he says. “Old friend. They’re going through something.”

I don’t know any of his friends. In all his online photos he is always alone. But someone as charming and handsome as he has, must have friends. That bit can’t be a lie.

I put down the tablet. “Do you have to go tonight?”

“They need me tonight.” He says it gently, which is the part that gets me, the way he manages to be gentle about the things he won’t move on. He comes to where I’m sitting and leans down and puts his hand on my jaw, and I look up at him, and we hold each other’s gaze for a moment with everything unsaid between us and both of us knowing it’s unsaid.

“I’ll be fine,” he says quietly. “I promise.”

I put my hand over his, just for a second.

“Be safe,” I say.

He kisses me. It’s thorough and unhurried and has the quality of something that means more than it’s saying, and then he’s gone, and I sit in the quiet of my flat and listen to the door close, and I don’t move for a while.

I think about the laptop on my desk in the corner. The one with access to systems I’m not supposed to use for personal reasons. I could open it. Because if I was still a good cop, it wouldn’t be for personal reasons at all. It would be investigating my active case.

I could run his phone, find out exactly where he’s going and how long it takes to get there. I could know, properly and specifically, exactly what tonight is.

I don’t open it.

I make tea I don’t particularly want and sit back down and turn the television on, and I watch something that I am not going to be able to describe tomorrow, and I wait.

The flat is very quiet around the television noise. I’ve never noticed how quiet it is before, which means I’ve never noticed the opposite, how much noise one other person makes just by existing in a space, the small sounds of being alive that you stop hearing after a while because they become part of the background of things. He was here for one day, and apparently that was long enough for the absence to be loud.

The clock moves the way clocks move when you’re watching them, which is to say barely at all and then all at once. At half-past nine I make more tea. At ten I put the television off and sit in the quiet with the reading lamp and the news I’ve now read twice. At quarter past ten, I pick up my book and read the same page four times without retaining a word of it.

I think about calling him. I don’t. I think about texting something brief and casual, a nothing message that’s really just a way of knowing he answers, knowing he’s somewhere with a signal and a working phone. I don’t do that either. I have decided he’s not a suspect I’m surveilling. He’s the person sleeping in my bed and making my flat feel different when he’s not in it, and I’m not going to treat him like a lead I’m running. Not tonight. Tonight I need to make peace with my decision.

At half-past eleven, I stop pretending I’m doing anything other than waiting.

He said he wouldn’t be late, which is not the same as saying he’d be back by a specific time, and I’ve been in enough interviews to know how much work a vague promise can do when you need one. I sit in the lamplight and I think about the list, which is apparently not finished. I think about the names on it that nobody official has ever managed to identify, the ones that exist only in the knowledge of the people who were there, the ones that no database I have access to can find because they were never connected to anything on paper. I think about whoever is next on that list, out there tonight, entirely unaware that anyone is coming for them, because nobody in any official capacity knows enough to warn them.

Then I stop thinking about it, the way I’ve been stopping thinking about it for a while now, the deliberate turning away from the thing that’s right there.

I hear the buzzer at twenty past one.

I’m off the sofa before it finishes sounding. I press the door release without checking the intercom, because I know, and I stand in the hallway and listen to the sound of the street door opening and closing and footsteps on the path, and then a knock, and I open it.

He’s there. Dark jacket, hands in his pockets, and he looks at me standing in the doorway of my own flat at twenty past one in the morning, and something crosses his face that I don’t try to read.

“You waited up,” he says.

“I was reading.”

He looks at the book still in my hand, which I have been holding upside down. He doesn’t say anything about it. He comes inside and I step back and he moves past me into the living room, and I close the door, and by the time I’ve turned around he’s already taking the jacket off, folding it over the back of the sofa with a deliberateness that suggests his hands need something to do.

He looks tired. He also looks like a person who has done what they set out to do, and I know what that looks like too.

His face is the particular closed-off version I’ve only seen a handful of times, the one where the door is shut and the window is covered and everything that matters has been put somewhere I don’t have access to. He looks up from the jacket and finds me watching him and holds the look for a moment, and there it is between us, the thing we don’t say, sitting in the small living room of my small flat at twenty past one in the morning, enormous and entirely unspoken.

“How’s your friend?” I say.

“Better,” he says. “They’ll be able to rest now.”

A beat.