18. Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Micah
Get out of here.
I run.
Not from fear exactly, or not only that.
My legs are moving and my lungs are working, and the city is rushing past me in the dark, and all I can hear is those four words in that voice, low and wrecked, like they cost him something real to say.
Which they did. I know they did. I watched him decide to say them and it was the bravest and most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen a person do.
I stop when I’m far enough away. Side street, quiet, a cat watching me from a doorstep with the profound indifference only cats can manage.
I put my hands on my knees and breathe, and my heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth, and I genuinely cannot tell how much of that is the running and how much is Lennox.
Lennox let me go.
There’s a version of tonight where I saw him in that alley and he took one look at my hand and called it in, and I’ve been sitting in an interview room for the last hour instead of standing here.
I know which version the man he’s supposed to be should have chosen.
I also know which version he chose, and I know what it cost him to choose it, because I watched his face while he was deciding and there was nothing easy about it.
The look in his eyes is going to haunt me.
I drag my sleeve over my sweaty brow. My arm is shaking. Adrenaline. From unexpectedly running into Lennox and the visceral shock of seeing his handsome face.
A chuckle bubbles out of me.
Jordan would have found this absolutely hilarious.
Jordan would have wheezed himself sideways at the idea of me, of all people, being more flustered by a detective with kind eyes than by anything I did tonight.
I can almost hear him, that specific laugh of his that sounded more like a wheeze, and now the grief is hitting alongside the adrenaline the way it always does, fast and quiet and almost unbearable, because Jordan isn’t laughing at anything anymore and that’s the whole point, that’s always been the whole point, and I’m standing in a London side street at two in the morning with blood on my hand and tears making it harder to see than the dark is, which was not the plan.
There wasn’t really a plan. Not a real one.
A list, yes. A list, and the knowledge of where to find the men on it, and the understanding that doing what I was going to do meant the end of things, my things, because you don’t go through something like this and come out the other side.
I was fine with that. I made my peace with that a long time before I started.
I wipe my face with the back of my wrist and look at my hand.
The blood is drying in the cold. I think about Lennox looking at it.
The way his eyes moved, that particular quality of attention that he has, a torch in itself, and I knew the second his gaze landed that he’d already read it as wrong, already clocked that the story didn’t fit.
Decades of reading crime scenes, and I handed him something that didn’t quite add up, and he still turned the torch off.
I pull my hoodie sleeve down over my hand and start walking.
He said everyone matters. I was standing at his kitchen counter watching him talk about a boy nobody had bothered to look for, and he said everyone matters, even unwanted boys from council estates, and his face was so completely uncomplicated about it, like it wasn’t a radical position, like it was just a fact he happened to live by.
I had to look at the pan. I had to do something with my hands or he was going to see exactly what that sentence did to me.
Nobody has ever said that to me. Not to me, not about boys like me, not with that particular look on their face that means they actually believe it.
Nobody says those names like that. Nobody who didn’t know them.
I knew Jordan. For maybe six months, when we were both in the same hell, and he was younger than me and quieter than me and considerably braver about things I’d already stopped fighting by then.
I carved his name because he asked me to, not out loud, not in words, but in the specific way a boy looks at you when you’re the only person who’s seen him and he needs someone to remember.
I remember. And I will never forget.
But why does Lennox care? Why is he so kind?
The first time he touched me, I was ready to flinch.
I always am. The thing in my body that learned that early and never quite unlearned it, the pre-emptive tightening, the waiting for it to go wrong.
It didn’t come. He was so careful with me without making it a thing, without making me feel like something that needed handling, and I lay there afterward in the dark listening to him breathe and thought, this is what it’s supposed to feel like.
I didn’t know that before. I didn’t have anything real to compare it to.
He made me feel safe.
I don’t know what to do with that even now.
I have been on my guard around men since I was eleven years old.
My body knowing what it knows and protecting itself the only way it learned how.
And there I was with him in my bed at some terrible hour of the morning, listening to him breathe, and my body thought it was safe.
My body, which has never been wrong about danger, had decided this man was not dangerous to me.
I nearly woke him up to check.
None of this was part of the plan.
The list is nearly done. I knew it would be.
I also knew that finishing the list was supposed to be the end of the story, my story, because I’d built this whole thing on the understanding that the end was acceptable, that the end was maybe even the point, a kind of justice for something that happened a long time ago to a boy who didn’t have anyone to turn the torch off for him.
And now there’s Lennox.
The first time I saw him, I nearly had a heart attack.
I was in that hospital and the window gave me away and I could hear voices below and I was genuinely, actually frightened, doing the mental arithmetic of exits and distances and how much noise I’d make if I went back down the stairs, and then I turned a corner and walked straight into him.
Solid and warm and startled, his hands catching my arms, and my brain did what my brain has always done when cornered by a man.
It went into performance mode.
I smiled. I made the eyes do the thing. I said something about being sorry and not being sorry, and I watched the flustered confusion move across his face, and I thought, okay, there it is, the look I know how to navigate, the look that means I can get this man’s attention pointing anywhere except at what I’ve actually been doing in this building.
Except.
Except he wasn’t flustered for long. The flustered burned off almost immediately and what came back underneath it was something I didn’t have a category for, sharp and wary and entirely unimpressed with me in a way that should have been a problem and was instead the most interesting thing that had happened to me in years.
He looked at me like he was reading something in a language he was fluent in and didn’t particularly like what the text was saying, and I remember thinking, oh, this one is different.
I still gave him the urban explorer story. Still smiled and let him take the number and watched him let me go, and told myself it was because he was attracted to me and attraction makes people stupid and I knew how to use that.
I tried not to think about him again for three days.
Then I thought about him more or less constantly.
I told myself it was tactical. I knew there was a detective on the case, I knew the case would eventually point at me, I knew having a detective inspector in my orbit was either going to be my undoing or my insurance depending on how well I played it.
That’s what I told myself. I also went and looked him up on the police website and found a photograph that was deeply unflattering and somehow still made something in my chest do a thing I didn’t consent to.
Lennox, who looked at me in an alley tonight with blood on my hand and a dead man on the other side of a wall, and turned the torch off.
Who believed me about a cut I didn’t get from brickwork.
Who looked like it was destroying him to let me go and let me go anyway.
I stop walking. I’m somewhere I don’t immediately recognize, some ordinary London street that looks like every other ordinary London street at two in the morning, and I’m standing in the middle of the pavement and my eyes are doing something I don’t permit them to do as a general rule.
He knows.
Not the details, not the list, not the names or the places or any of the specific things I’ve spent long years being careful about.
But he knows the shape of it. He’s known the shape of it for a while.
I’ve watched him know it and choose not to look directly at it, the way you don’t look directly at the sun, and I’ve been grateful for that, and I’ve also hated it, because Lennox is the best person I’ve met in my entire life and he deserves to look directly at things.
He’s going to face it soon. Going to remember that he is a good cop, a good person. Properly. Eventually. Maybe soon.
I don’t know what happens then.
I do know that I’m standing on a London pavement at two in the morning thinking about a man who lets me go when he should arrest me, and something in my chest hurts in a way it hasn’t hurt since I was young enough to still believe that people were basically good and the world was going to be okay.
I’d forgotten that feeling.
I think that feeling might be hope, which is the most inconvenient possible thing to feel right now, given everything.
I start walking again, toward home, toward the loft with its London skyline and its too-expensive everything and its empty rooms that don’t feel quite as empty as they used to, because somewhere in the last few weeks I started imagining a tired detective drinking my coffee at my window in the morning, and now I can’t stop.
Now my list has an after hanging over it.
And after is a problem. After wasn’t supposed to exist, and now it’s all I can think about, this vast inconvenient territory called after, full of things like a man who cares about people he’s never met, and I want to be in it. I want to be in after so badly it changes the shape of everything.
The loft comes into view eventually. The concierge nods at me with the mild professional neutrality he applies to everything, and I take the lift up, and I stand in the middle of the room in the dark for a moment with London laid out behind the glass, all that gold and scatter, and I think about Lennox standing at this window with a coffee in his hands and the particular expression he gets when he thinks no one is watching him, the one where he looks almost peaceful.
I would like him to stand at my window again. I would like it so much it frightens me.
Get out of here.
Four words.
I’m going to think about those four words for a very long time.