Chapter fifteen
Lennox
Iwake up on the sofa.
This takes a moment to process. Not where I am, I know where I am, the loft with its floor to ceiling windows and its too-expensive everything.
What takes a moment to process is the fact that I’m horizontal, covered with the blanket that has been tucked around me with evident care, and the television is off, and it is morning.
I fell asleep.
I never fall asleep anywhere that isn’t my own bed. This is not modesty or preference, it’s just my wiring, the side effect of decades of seeing the very worst of humanity. Part of the same alarm system that keeps me on guard all the time.
I’m a light sleeper even at home, a car alarm three streets over is enough to pull me up, and here I am on someone else’s sofa having apparently slept so deeply I didn’t stir when the second film ended, when someone turned off the television, when someone picked up the blanket we had been sharing and tucked it around me with enough gentleness that I didn’t register any of it.
A few nights ago, I fell asleep in his bed. Now I’ve fallen asleep on his sofa.
I sit up. My neck complains about it in a way my neck has never complained before, because I am forty-four and sofas are not beds. I choose to consider it a reasonable price.
The loft is quiet. Morning light is doing something clean and generous through all that glass, London visible below looking almost innocent at this hour, which is a lie London tells every day before the rest of it wakes up and starts proving otherwise.
I hear the sound of a door, and then Micah appears from the direction of the bedroom.
He is wearing pajama bottoms in a soft dark plaid and a cream waffle knit top that looks like it would be offensive to wash.
His hair is doing something extraordinary, which is to say it’s doing nothing at all, just existing in complete morning chaos, and there is a crease on his cheek from his pillow, and his eyes are still soft with sleep.
He looks young. He looks completely, devastatingly adorable, and I have no business noticing either of those things as acutely as I currently am.
He sees me sitting up and his whole face goes warm.
“Morning, sleepyhead,” he says.
“I fell asleep.”
“Spectacularly. Halfway through the second film. I was offended on its behalf.” He pads across to the kitchen, bare feet on the wooden floor, and puts the kettle on with the ease of someone who does this in his sleep. “How’s your neck?”
“Fine,” I say, which is not entirely true.
“Liar.” He doesn’t look up. “There’s ibuprofen in the bathroom cabinet if you want it.”
I do want it. I go and get it and come back to find him making tea, two mugs, without asking whether I want any, which I find I don’t mind at all.
He slides one across the counter when I sit down, drops into the seat across from me, curls his feet up under him, wraps both hands around his own mug, and looks at me over the rim with an expression I could look at for a very long time without getting tired of it.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“Somewhat.”
“There’s a place around the corner. Brilliant eggs. They do this thing with sourdough that is actually life-changing.” He’s already brightening at the prospect. “We could walk, it’s only five minutes, the weather looks decent for once.”
Something in my chest does a complicated thing.
I open my mouth. What comes out is something about having to get back.
About work. About there being things I need to do this morning, which is technically true on any given morning and therefore technically not a lie, and I watch myself saying it with the detached horror of a man listening to himself babble like an idiot and not sound convincing at all.
Micah’s face does something I wasn’t prepared for. The warmth doesn’t disappear exactly. It just goes careful. His smile stays, but the life goes out of the back of it, the way a room looks the same after the sun goes behind a cloud, but everything is somehow slightly less.
“You don’t want to be seen with me,” he says. It isn’t accusatory. It’s quiet in a way that’s worse. “Is it the OnlyFans thing? Because I know some people think that means…”
“No.” I’m on my feet before I’ve decided to stand up. “That’s not it. That has never been it, not for a single second.”
He looks at me steadily. “Then what is it?”
I stand there. The honest answer and the safe answer are not the same answer, and I’ve been navigating that gap for weeks, and I’m tired. I’m tired of the gap. I’m tired of being careful in the one place I keep forgetting to want to be careful.
“My boss wanted you named as a suspect,” I say.
The color goes out of his face so completely and so fast that I take a step toward him without deciding to. He’s very still, both hands still wrapped around his mug, but I can see it, the slight tremor in them, the effort of keeping his breathing even.
“A suspect,” he repeats.
“It doesn’t change anything. It’s politics. The press got the story, there’s pressure from above, she needed to say we have a suspect.” I close the remaining distance between us, reach out, rest my hand on his arm, and feel him steady slightly under it. “It means nothing in real terms. It’s okay.”
He looks up at me. His eyes are very bright in a way that isn’t entirely composed.
“People think I’m a serial killer,” he says. “How is that okay?”
“Because luckily, you happen to know the lead detective. And he knows you’re innocent.”
Something moves through his face then. He lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh.
His eyes are glassy, and I watch him blink it back, and for just a fraction of a second, in the space between the tears and the smile, there is something else in his expression.
Something quick and dark and not quite right, gone before I can name it, replaced so seamlessly by the watery, grateful smile that I’m already doubting I saw it at all.
Maybe I didn’t.
I’m tired. My neck hurts. I am standing in a man’s kitchen at eight in the morning in yesterday’s clothes, and I am possibly projecting.
“Okay,” he says softly. “Okay.” He straightens, takes a breath, and I watch the performance slide back into place like a coat he’s very practiced at putting on.
But this time I catch something underneath it that wasn’t there before.
Something that looks, if I’m being honest, very much like it costs him something.
“Right.” He sets his mug down, and his energy shifts the way weather shifts, fast and total, bright breaking through where gray had been. “If we can’t go out, I’m ordering in. And we’re eating it on the roof.”
He is already reaching for his phone, already scrolling, already entirely decided, and I find I don’t have any objection left in me.
The roof terrace is one floor up and through a heavy fire door that Micah opens with the practiced ease of someone who has done it many times. I follow him out into the morning.
It’s nothing like I expected. I was expecting concrete and steel, and maybe a sad potted plant.
What I get is something closer to a garden, a proper one, terracotta pots clustered in corners trailing things I can’t name but that are green and apparently thriving, a pergola strung with lights that would look something at night, wooden furniture that’s clearly been chosen rather than just put out, a long stretch of railing with all of London spread beyond it, glittering even now, even in the blunt honest light of a weekday morning.
“This is communal,” Micah says, dropping into one of the chairs like he owns it, tipping his face up toward the sun. “Technically for the whole building. But I’ve never once seen anyone else up here.”
“Their loss,” I say, and mean it.
It’s cold. The British weather doing that thing where it promises spring and then reminds you it’s still in charge, the air with a bite to it that goes straight through yesterday’s shirt. I don’t mention it. I sit across from him and wrap both hands around my tea and let the sun do what it can.
We talk. About nothing that matters. About everything that is. He tells me about the building he wants to film next week, an old lido somewhere in South London that’s been shuttered since the nineties.
Breakfast arrives faster than it has any right to.
Micah disappears to collect it from the concierge and comes back with a bag that smells extraordinary, and for a few minutes we’re both just occupied with the business of it, cartons and cutlery and the small domestic negotiation of working out who is having what, and it’s so ordinary I nearly say something and then don’t, because saying something would make it a moment and right now it’s better than a moment, it’s just a morning.
“Here’s the lido,” he says, holding up his phone so I can see a photograph.
An outdoor pool, glass and steel roof long since caved in, the water inside it turned the color of old jade by decades of algae and rain.
It’s genuinely beautiful in the way only truly ruined things manage to be.
“I’ve been trying to get access for months. ”
“Will you get it?”
“Probably.” He sets the phone down, picks up his fork. “I’m very persistent.”
“I’ve noticed.”
He grins at that.
We eat. He tells me about the narrow window of time he’s found where the security guards are between shifts and a quiet visit might go uncontested.
He says all of this with a complete absence of guilt that I find I’m unable to replicate even as an audience, because I am a police officer and what he’s describing is technically trespass.
“Don’t tell me the details,” I say.
“I already have.”
“I’ll forget them.”
He laughs and I feel it somewhere it has no business reaching.
He asks me then about the best case I ever worked that ended well.
It takes me a moment to find one, not because there aren’t any, but because the ones that ended well tend to be complicated in their own ways, justice and outcome not always being the same thing.
I tell him about a case from eight years ago, a woman who’d spent eleven years waiting for justice for her son, and the look on her face in the corridor outside the courtroom the afternoon it was over.
He listens the whole time. Properly listens, his fork set down, his eyes on my face, not waiting for his turn or composing a response. Just listening.
“You remember her face,” he says when I’ve finished.
“I remember all of them,” I say. “The ones who got something at the end. There aren’t as many as there should be.”
He’s quiet for a moment, looking out over the railing at London doing its morning thing below us. The light catches the side of his face and does the unfair thing it always does.
“You’re a good man,” he says. He says it simply, the same way he said remarkable yesterday, like a finding rather than a compliment. “I don’t think you know how unusual that is.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I look at my coffee instead.
We don’t touch. No hands finding each other across the table, no knees touching, nothing that could be called anything other than two people sharing breakfast on a roof in the early spring cold.
We didn’t touch last night either. Not so much as a kiss. Nothing more than a chaste brushing of shoulders as we sat under a blanket on a sofa together.
This is the longest stretch of time I’ve spent with another person in years without either of us trying to be anything in particular, and I have no idea what to do with that except sit here and let it keep happening.
I’ve gone home with a fair few men over the years.
Every one of them a transactional evening that ended in the same careful transactional way, everyone getting what they came for and nobody getting anything else.
I’ve always told myself that was fine. That’s how hookup culture works.
And I’m not built for more than that. The job takes too much and leaves too little of me for anything softer.
But now, sitting here with the sun on my face and Micah’s voice in my ear and a completely unremarkable morning doing something remarkable to me without any effort at all, I think perhaps I was wrong about that.
Perhaps I’ve been wrong about that for a very long time.