4. Chapter 4
Chapter four
Lennox
I’m home, slouched on my own sofa with my own laptop, doing the thing I told myself this morning I wasn’t going to do again.
I clicked the link this time. I didn’t pay for it, because apparently a few scraps of dignity survive even a week like this one, but the preview alone tells me everything I need to know.
Sixty thousand likes on a photo that’s mostly just his collarbone and a strip of golden light.
Comments stacked three deep with strangers begging for more in language I am not going to think too hard about while sober.
The boy is popular. Spectacularly, deservedly popular, and I hate that some small, petty part of me wanted there to be a reason not to think so.
There isn’t one. I scroll through three more photos looking for it anyway.
A shot of him stretched out on rumpled sheets that are probably more expensive than my entire bed frame.
Another of him biting his lip at the camera with an expression that should be illegal for a man his age to aim at someone my age.
I close the laptop. I open it again to check the time, which is a lie I tell myself, and then I close it for good and sit there in the quiet of my own flat feeling exactly as pathetic as I currently am.
This is ridiculous. I am a forty-four-year-old man with absolutely no reason to be sitting here white-knuckling a laptop over somebody else’s Instagram.
It’s been a while. That’s all this is. Too long a while, if I’m honest, and I’m trying to be, even when it costs me.
The last person I let into my flat for anything resembling intimacy left over a year ago and didn’t bother leaving a note.
I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t exactly giving him much to stay for.
I slam the laptop shut hard enough that the sound startles me, grab my coat, and head out before I can talk myself back onto the sofa.
I don’t do Grindr. Never have. If that makes me old-fashioned, or just plain old, I’ve made my peace with it a long time ago.
I prefer somewhere I can see a person’s face before I decide anything, somewhere with music loud enough that I don’t have to make conversation I don’t want to make.
There’s a place I’ve been going on and off for the better part of a decade, the kind of club where nobody asks what you do for a living and the lighting is forgiving to everyone over thirty.
It’s loud when I get there, properly loud, the kind of bass that lives in your chest instead of your ears, and the air is thick with sweat and cheap cologne and the particular hopeful energy of a Friday night that hasn’t decided yet whether it’s going to be a good one.
I don’t plan on staying long. In and out, find someone, remember I’m a person with a body and not just a job, go home before the part of my brain that still thinks love is an option wakes up and ruins it.
I’m two drinks into not finding anyone when I see him.
Micah is on the dance floor, and the boy can move.
Properly move, hips and shoulders working together like he’s never once in his life worried about looking ridiculous.
He’s wearing next to nothing by my standards, a mesh tank in a silver that catches every flash of the lights, sheer enough that I can see the lean lines of his torso straight through it, tucked into leather trousers that fit him like a second skin and almost certainly cost more than my last three paychecks combined.
A thin gold chain sits at his throat, another loops low across his hips, both throwing light every time he moves, and there’s a careless, glittering confidence to the whole outfit that says money was never the question, only whether it looked good enough to bother.
People are watching him. Of course they are.
I stand there in my plain dark coat, jeans and ironed shirt, beige and forgettable and twice his age in every way that matters, with my drink halfway to my mouth, just watching too, hypnotized in a way that should embarrass me a great deal more than it does, my whole evening’s plan quietly evaporating without my permission.
Somewhere distant and increasingly quiet, a small sensible part of my brain points out that I have never once seen him here before, in a decade of coming to this exact club, and that the odds of him turning up here, tonight, of all the nights, are not odds I should be comfortable with.
I hear it. I don’t listen to it. The rest of me is already moving.
I don’t remember deciding to walk over. I just notice, somewhere around the edge of the dance floor, that my feet have carried me right up to him without consulting the rest of me first.
He twirls, sees me, and his whole face lights up like Christmas.
For one unguarded second, before either of us says anything, he just looks delighted to see me, the way you’d look at someone you actually wanted to run into rather than someone you’d merely tolerated bumping into twice already this week.
I don’t have time to decide what to do with that observation before he’s already talking.
“Detective Inspector Lennox.” He has to half shout it over the music, and even then I’m not entirely sure I’ve heard him right. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”
He doesn’t wait for me to answer. He just grabs my hand and tugs me toward a booth in the corner, away from the worst of the noise, and I follow him like a dog on a lead I never agreed to wear.
The booth is dim, lit mostly by the strobing edge of the dance floor lights spilling in whenever someone moves the wrong way, and it does something unfair to his face, catching his cheekbones in flashes of color before plunging him back into shadow.
He looks like something I shouldn’t be allowed to look at this closely.
“That’s better,” he sighs, dropping into the booth and pushing his hair out of his eyes with both hands. He smiles up at me, slow and easy. “I only bottom, by the way.”
“What.” It comes out far less composed than I’d like.
He raises one eyebrow, entirely unbothered. “That’s what we’re both here for, isn’t it?”
I open my mouth. Nothing useful comes out of it.
Every instinct I have left, the ones not currently drowning under several drinks and a long week, is screaming at me that this is a spectacularly bad idea, the kind that doesn’t end well for anyone wearing a badge.
“I can’t,” I manage eventually, which isn’t even true, just the only sentence my brain hands me in the moment.
“Am I a suspect?” he smirks, fluttering his eyelashes coyly, as if he’s thoroughly confident he isn’t.
“No.” Not officially, I think, and don’t say.
“Great. Then there’s no problem, is there?” The smirk widens into a full grin, flashing perfect, white teeth.
I fight myself on this for exactly as long as it takes to lose. It isn’t a long fight. “No,” I say. “There isn’t.”
Somewhere underneath the want, a small flat voice points out that I have just talked myself out of every reservation I had in the space of about four sentences, which is not exactly a personal best for professional judgment. I ignore it. I’m getting good at that tonight.
He beams like he’s just won something, which, fair enough, he has. “Perfect. So, do you top?”
I nod, because apparently I’ve lost the ability to form words entirely.
“Your place or mine?”
“Yours.” It comes out fast, faster than it should, and I tell myself it’s because if I’m already doing something this stupid, I might as well get something useful out of it. A look at how he actually lives. The kind of detail you don’t get from a file, or from OnlyFans.
I don’t examine that excuse very hard. I’m not sure it would survive the attempt, and there’s a meaner, quieter possibility underneath it that I like even less, that I’d have said yes to his place regardless, evidence or no evidence, just to see where he goes when nobody’s watching.
He orders the car on his phone while I’m still finishing my drink, scooping a cropped leather jacket off the seat beside him and shrugging into it like an afterthought, and we wait for the Uber outside, shoulder to shoulder in the cold, not talking much.
He hums something under his breath that I don’t recognize, still riding the leftover energy of the dance floor, and twice I catch him glancing at me sideways like he’s checking I’m still actually there and not having second thoughts.
I am having second thoughts. I get in the car anyway.
Twenty minutes later we’re climbing out in front of a converted warehouse that’s clearly been turned into flats for people with significantly more money than detective inspectors.
Glass and steel, a concierge desk that’s somehow still staffed at this hour, a lift that opens directly into his apartment instead of a corridor like a normal building.
I tell myself I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve seen the follower count.
I’ve seen the comments. Of course this is what that kind of popularity buys.
It still grates, walking into his place.
The exposed brick, the floor to ceiling windows with half of London’s skyline laid out behind them, the kind of open plan loft space that costs more per month than I make in three.
He’s half my age, and he’s doing significantly better than I am, and I don’t know what to do with that except resent it quietly while pretending I’m not.
I look for the things a detective looks for without quite meaning to.
Photographs. Post. A coat rack with more than one coat on it.
There’s nothing. No framed pictures, no fridge magnets, no clutter of the kind every other home I’ve ever walked into accumulates without trying.
It looks less like somewhere a person lives and more like somewhere a very expensive photograph of a person’s life was staged.
I file that away somewhere I’ll regret not examining sooner, and then he’s peeling off the cropped leather jacket he grabbed on our way out of the club and tossing it over a chair, and the thought scatters.
“Want a drink,” Micah asks, dropping his keys onto a counter that’s bigger than my entire kitchen, “or would you rather get straight to it?”
I wince before I can stop myself.
I’m a forty-four-year-old gay man. I know how this works. I know romance and hand-holding aren’t on the menu, and I should be used to the way hookups unfold. Easy and transactional, with no pretense either side has to keep up. I am used to it. I tell myself that very firmly.
It still stings, somewhere I don’t examine too closely. Maybe because some idiot, optimistic part of me had hoped tonight might feel like something other than a transaction, even knowing better, even after decades of knowing better.
My gaze drops to his mouth without my permission. Plump, slightly parted, curved up at one corner like he already knows exactly where I’m looking.
Micah smiles, slow and coy, and winks at me.
“I knew you were a man after my own heart.”
Then, with unwarranted, astonishing grace, he drops to his knees.