9. Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Lennox
Idon’t decide to drive to Hackney. I just find myself doing it, the way I’ve found myself doing a lot of things lately, my hands on the wheel before the rest of me has signed off on the plan.
I tell myself it’s for air. I tell myself a lot of things these days that don’t survive contact with daylight.
I park across the road from the warehouse, two pool cars in one week, which is its own small professional offense I’m choosing not to examine too closely on top of all the others.
I don’t get out. I just sit, engine off, watching a building I have no legitimate reason to be watching, like a man who has fully and completely lost the plot, because that is exactly what I am.
I tell myself I’ll give it five minutes.
Five minutes turns into fifteen, which turns into me composing increasingly pathetic justifications for my own presence on this street, none of which would survive being said out loud to another human being, least of all the one I’m currently parked outside the home of.
I’ve been there twenty minutes, maybe longer, working up to either driving away or making a fool of myself, when the Micah comes around the corner at a jog, earbuds in, kitted out for a run in shorts that have no business being that short in this weather.
He makes it about ten feet down the pavement before he clocks the car. Clocks me in it.
He stops dead. Pulls one earbud out. And then his whole face does that thing again, lighting up like I’m the best thing that’s happened to his evening, before he’s even decided whether he should be alarmed.
I get out of the car because there’s no version of staying inside it that doesn’t look worse.
“Detective.” He’s grinning, jogging back over, slightly out of breath in a way that does something unfair to my concentration. “Are you stalking me?”
“I was in the area.”
“No you weren’t.” He says it cheerfully, like he’s delighted to have caught me in it rather than offended. “Why would you be in Hackney?”
“I had a thing nearby.”
“What thing?”
“A thing.” I hear how it sounds the second it’s out of my mouth. “I’m not going to dignify that with further detail.”
“You’re a terrible liar for a man whose entire job is catching liars.” He’s still grinning, hands on his hips, getting his breath back, clearly enjoying this far more than the situation warrants. “It’s actually a little bit wonderful.”
I don’t have a good answer for that, mostly because he’s right.
“I don’t have your number,” I say, which is true, and also possibly the saddest sentence I’ve said out loud in years.
Something shifts behind his eyes, soft and a little startled, like that admission landed somewhere he wasn’t expecting it to. “Yes you do. I gave it to you when we first bumped into each other. You called me to ask me to come to the station.”
“I’m not supposed to use police systems to get a personal number for someone, especially someone I’m meant to be keeping a professional distance from.”
He blinks at this, as if I’ve surprised him and he’s having to recalibrate.
“But driving to my flat and sitting outside it in an unmarked car is fine.”
“No,” I admit. “It’s considerably worse. I’m aware.”
He laughs, properly laughs, head tipped back, and it’s such a good sound that I’d probably commit several more professional offenses just to hear it again. “Come up,” he says. “I’m about to cook. You can keep me company while I pretend I was always planning to make enough for two.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?” He’s already turning back toward the building, clearly assuming I’ll follow, which is, infuriatingly, exactly what I do. “Am I a suspect again?”
“Not exactly.”
“Officially?”
“Officially, no. You’re off the board.” I follow him through the lobby, past the same concierge who clocks me with the same weary, knowing look as last time. “There’s nothing currently connecting you to anything.”
“Then there’s no problem.” He throws it over his shoulder, light as anything, the same trick he pulled on me in a club booth that started all of this, and it works exactly as well the second time.
The loft smells good, like he has been baking, and for one disorienting second I forget every reason I had for not coming up here.
He makes me a cucumber and mint soda, hands it to me with a wink and then leaves me to my own devices while he showers and changes out of his jogging clothes.
I sip my fancy, and surprisingly tasty drink and resist the urge to snoop around his home. I look out of the window instead. The same window I was staring at in an Instagram photo not so long ago.
He rejoins me with his hair still damp. Wearing loose, soft, light gray sweatpants and a pale pink baggy sweatshirt that’s slipping off one shoulder.
“Sorry for keeping you waiting,” he smiles.
“No problem.”
He drifts over the kitchen area with more grace than a ballet dancer. Helplessly I follow him, mere debris caught in his orbit.
He moves around his own kitchen with an ease and familiarity that doesn’t match the careful, staged emptiness I noticed last time. Then he starts chopping something with real competence, one hip against the counter.
“You actually cook,” I say, and I don’t mean for it to sound as surprised as it does.
“I contain multitudes, Detective.” He flashes me a grin over the pan. “Sit. You’re making the kitchen feel like a crime scene, standing there with your hands in your pockets.”
I sit.
“So.” He doesn’t look up from the pan, knife still moving. “How was your day? Anything exciting. Arrest any baddies?”
“It was fine.”
“That’s not an answer. That’s a deflection.” He glances at me sideways. “Try again.”
I open my mouth to give him another nothing answer, and what actually comes out is, “I spent six hours knocking on doors on an estate in Brixton.”
“Sounds thrilling.”
“It wasn’t.” I turn my glass a quarter turn on the counter, watching the drink catch the light rather than looking at him. “There’s a boy. Fifteen when he went missing, three years ago. Nobody looked for him properly. Not really. He was the sort of kid everyone decided wasn’t worth the paperwork.”
The knife stops.
“That’s.” He sets it down, gives me his full attention in a way that feels different from every other kind of attention he’s given me tonight. “That’s awful.”
“It happens more than you’d think.” I hear myself say it flatly, the way I’ve trained myself to say true things that would otherwise have too much weight if I let them. “Kid from the wrong postcode goes quiet, and somewhere along the way somebody decides that’s just what happens to kids like that.”
“Why do you care so much?” He says it carefully, like he actually wants to know, not like he’s challenging me. “I mean that. You never knew him. He’s not even really your case, is he?”
“He’s somebody’s case. He should have been everybody’s case.” I look up at him properly. “Everyone matters. Even unwanted boys from council estates. Maybe especially them.”
Something happens to Micah’s face that I don’t have a name for. It isn’t quite shock and it isn’t quite grief, though it might be standing somewhere between the two. His jaw goes tight. For one unguarded second his eyes go very far away, somewhere I clearly haven’t been invited.
Then it’s gone, smoothed back over so fast I’d doubt I’d seen it at all if I hadn’t spent most of my life learning to watch faces do exactly that.
“You really believe that,” he says quietly. Not a question.
“Yes.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Just looks at me like he’s recalculating something, like I’ve handed him a piece of information he wasn’t expecting and doesn’t quite know where to file yet.
“Most people don’t,” he says eventually, turning back to the pan, his voice gone light again, performance sliding back into place. “Most people just want it to be someone else’s problem.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No.” He glances at me again, and there’s something underneath the smile now that wasn’t there before dinner started. “I’m starting to understand that.”
He plates the food with more care than the moment strictly needs and slides a dish across the counter at me. Sea Bass and asparagus and other things I’m not cultured enough to know.
“Eat. Tell me if it’s any good. I need the validation, it’s been a long week of strangers telling me to move on from a man I can’t forget.”
I nearly choke on the first mouthful.
We eat at the counter rather than the table, shoulders almost touching, and somewhere between the first glass of white wine and the second I stop keeping track of how unprofessional this is and just exist in it instead.
“Where did you actually learn to cook like this?” I ask.
“YouTube, mostly.” He shoots me a grin. “There’s a certain irony in that, given my whole career.”
“You taught yourself to cook from videos about derelict buildings?”
“No, Detective, I taught myself to cook from cooking videos. Try and keep up.” He pours us both more wine with a flourish that’s clearly half for my benefit. “I just like learning things properly. Whole thing or nothing. Drives Pinky mad.”
“Pinky.”
“My old housemate.” He says it lightly, already moving on.
He asks about my job in a way that isn’t fishing for anything, just curious, and I find myself telling him things I don’t usually tell anyone, about the weight of cases that never close, about Callum Doyle’s name still sitting behind my eyes some nights.
He listens like it costs him something to hear it, his hand going still around his glass, and for a moment the charm drops away entirely and there’s just a young man looking at me like my grief actually matters to him.
“You carry a lot,” he says quietly.
“Comes with the job.”
“Doesn’t mean it should.” He reaches over, brief and light, and touches the back of my hand, and the gesture is so simple and so unpracticed that it undoes something in me far more thoroughly than anything filthy he’s said to me yet.
“What about you?” I ask, because turning the question back on him feels safer than sitting in my own answer any longer. “Family. Friends. The people who knew you before any of this.” I gesture vaguely at the loft, the followers, the version of him that exists on a screen.
Something flickers across his face, there and gone before I can properly name it. “Nobody worth boring you with.” The smile comes back online half a second too late to be entirely convincing. “I’m a self-made man, Detective. Tediously so.”
I let it go, because pressing feels like it would cost more than it’s worth tonight, and because some small, cowardly part of me doesn’t actually want to know yet, not while the wine is good and his hand is still warm against mine.
By the time the plates are empty, I’ve forgotten, almost entirely, why any of this was supposed to be a bad idea.
He pours the last of the wine and moves close enough that our shoulders touch properly now, no pretense of distance left in it.
Through the floor to ceiling windows, night has fallen and London’s doing that thing it does at night, scattered and gold and entirely too pretty for a city that spends most of its daylight hours being gray about everything.
Neither of us says anything for a while.
It’s the first silence all evening that doesn’t feel like it needs filling.
“This is nice,” he says eventually, quiet in a way that’s different from every other register I’ve heard out of him tonight. “I don’t really do this. Sitting. Talking properly. People mostly want the polished version of me that’s on their screen.”
“I noticed.”
“You’re the only person who’s asked me a real question in longer than I’d like to admit.” He glances at me sideways. “That’s rarer than you’d think.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I don’t do anything with it, just sit there in the quiet and let it settle somewhere I’ll have to deal with later.
He clears the plates, comes back, and doesn’t sit back down. Just stands there in front of me, close enough that I have to tilt my head up slightly to keep looking at him.
“Stay,” he says. Not a question this time. “The whole night.”
The look in his dark eyes is pure, practiced seduction. Sultry. Full of naughty promise. But there is also something else there. Something vulnerable. Lonely. Someone asking to be held because the night is too dark.
I should say no. I have a list of reasons as long as my arm, every single one of them still true, the case, the rules, the twenty-two years of being exactly the kind of man who doesn’t do this.
My head wants to say no. My heart is screaming to say yes.
I open my mouth, and I genuinely do not know, even as I do it, which word is going to come out.