19. Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Micah
I’m editing footage. Or at least I’m trying to.
Nothing important, a draft of the lido piece, shaky on the opening, and I’ve been arguing with myself about whether it matters.
It doesn’t matter. I know it doesn’t matter, I know exactly what I’m doing, which is sitting at my desk in the fading afternoon light doing something ordinary with my hands so I don’t have to think about last night.
I’m editing footage and I’m not thinking about Lennox. Not the look in his eyes or the crack in his voice. Not the four precious words he said to me.
I’m also not thinking about how I’ve shattered the only good man I have ever known. I’m thinking about editing and YouTube and nothing else. My mind is a well of peace and tranquility.
How often do you have to tell yourself a lie before it becomes the truth?
My phone lights up.
We need to talk.
Four words. I read them four times. My hands have stopped moving over the keyboard and I don’t remember telling them to stop.
I much prefer the four words he said to me last night.
We need to talk is not get out of here. We need to talk is something else entirely, something with edges I can’t see yet, and I sit here in the quiet of the loft and feel the hope and the dread arrive simultaneously, which is the most exhausting thing a body can do, holding those two things at once, neither one winning.
I type and delete four different replies.
I send nothing. I put the phone face down on the desk and go and make tea I don’t want and stand at the window looking at London doing its daytime thing, all that ordinary noise and motion, and I think about the alley.
His face in the dark. The two seconds before he turned the torch off, where I watched a person fight everything they were and lose.
He lost for me. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. He is a good man, the best man I’ve ever known, and he lost for me.
My phone buzzes again.
Can I come over?
I pick it up. Yes, I type. Just that.
The wait is going to be the worst thing.
I know it’s going to be maybe forty minutes, the drive from Brixton on a weekday, and I think about making myself eat something and don’t, and I think about changing out of what I’m wearing and don’t.
I sit back down at the footage and stare at the timeline without seeing it.
I close the laptop. I open it again. I check my phone twice in case he’s sent something else, something that would give me more to go on, and he hasn’t.
I pace the loft in a way I’m certain I don’t pace, back and forth past the windows with London spread out behind me not caring at all about what’s about to happen in here.
The coffee table has a ring on it from his mug, from the morning he stayed and we ate breakfast on the roof and I showed him the lido photograph, and I look at it longer than I should.
I think about what I’ll do if the version that walks through that door is the cop.
If he comes in with a face I don’t recognize, professional and closed, and tells me it’s over, and I realize it was always going to be over because it was always going to come to this.
I try to picture it. I try to make myself sit with it the way I’ve made myself sit with difficult things before, get familiar with the worst version so it can’t ambush me.
It doesn’t work. Every time I reach for the image of that face, the closed professional one, my brain hands me a different one.
The one in the alley. The torch going off.
I think about that for thirty five minutes and it doesn’t help.
The concierge buzzes up to tell me I have a guest in the lobby, and I say send him up, and then I go and wait by the lift because I can’t stand still anywhere else. I watch the numbers above the door change. My heart is doing something I’d rather it wasn’t.
The doors open and he’s there.
He looks terrible, which is to say he looks like he hasn’t slept, which is to say he looks like something in him has been running at full stretch for hours and finally stopped, and the exhaustion of it is sitting on his face in a way that makes me want to touch him before he’s said a word.
He’s still in his coat. He looks like a man who came straight here without going home first, and I don’t know what to do with that.
So I don’t do anything.
“Not in here,” I hear myself say. “Come up to the roof.”
He doesn’t ask why. He just nods, and I lead him through the fire door and up the last flight of stairs, and neither of us says anything on the way, just the sound of our feet on the concrete steps and the particular quality of a silence between two people who have a great deal to say and haven’t started yet.
I push through the heavy door at the top and we come out onto the terrace into the thin afternoon light, and the city is doing its winding down before reviving for the night thing below us, that enormous indifferent sprawl of it, and I leave the door open behind us because that seems important, leaving the way out clear.
The terrace looks different at this hour. The plants are wet from a rain shower, the wooden furniture a shade darker with it, London pale and soft in the afternoon light in a way it never quite manages at any other time of day.
We stand on opposite sides of the small table where we ate breakfast what feels like an enormous amount of time ago. It was days ago. It was a different version of this, of us, before the alley.
It feels fitting somehow. This is the right place for what’s coming next. A changed place, somewhere where the light has been dimmed. A space without walls to contain what’s about to be said.
He looks at me for a long time without saying anything.
I let him.
The city does what the city does, that permanent low murmur of itself, and somewhere a pigeon is doing something with a piece of bread that requires a great deal of effort, and the sky overhead is the fading light of a day that hasn’t decided yet what kind of night it’s going to be.
Lennox opens his mouth.
Closes it.
Looks away, at the railing, at London below it.
Tries again. Something moves through his face, complicated and unresolved, and I can see him trying to find the sentence and not finding it, this man who has built his entire life on knowing the right thing to do and saying it, standing on a rooftop unable to get a single word out.
I wait. I’m very good at waiting. I learned early.
He turns back to me and tries again. His hands are in his coat pockets, and his shoulders are doing that thing they do when he’s holding himself very still against the urge to move.
I’ve watched him enough to know the difference between his stillness and his tension, and right now they’re the same thing.
He’s making himself stand there and look at me and get this right, and he can’t find it, whatever it is.
Then something changes.
It moves through him like weather, slow and total, and I watch it happen, the set of his shoulders dropping a fraction, the tightness around his eyes releasing, the particular quality of his attention shifting from the question he’s been trying to ask to something that’s already been decided without needing to be said.
His whole body settles differently. The cop steps back.
Something older and less armored steps forward in its place.
He looks at me the way he looked at me in the dark before he turned the torch off.
“Be careful,” he says.
Two words. He’s never been less efficient with language in his life and it’s the most he’s ever said to me.
I understand them all at once, every layer of them, the way you understand something you’ve been waiting to hear, because we need to talk was never going to be a verdict, not from him, not after the alley, not after everything.
Be careful means I know. Be careful means I’ve chosen. Be careful means I am giving you something I cannot afford to lose so please, please don’t be careless with it. Be careful means I’m choosing you. Over my conscience, my job, over everything that I am and all that I believe.
I don’t think about it. I don’t do the thing I always do which is calculate and weigh and perform.
I just move, around the table and the three feet of space between us, and I put my arms around him and hold on, and his arms come up around me so fast it’s like he’s been waiting to do exactly this for longer than I’ve known him.
He’s warm. He’s solid in a way that has nothing to do with size, just the specific quality of a person who is genuinely, actually present in their own body, and I press my face against his jaw and breathe him in, and something in me that has been braced for a very long time simply stops bracing.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me and then he kisses me, and it’s not like the other times, not the sharp spark of a hookup or the slow heat of a night we both knew was complicated, it’s something quieter and more serious than either of those things, the kind of kiss that says I see you and I’m here and I know what this costs and I’m here anyway, and I feel it from my mouth to the soles of my feet.
We stay there for a while after. On the rooftop with London below us, his coat around my shoulders because at some point he put it there without my noticing, my face against his neck, both of us looking at the city that doesn’t care at all about us or what we’re doing or what we’ve already done, and it’s cold and it’s the afternoon and it’s the most peaceful I have ever felt.
His hand moves slowly up and down my back.
Not suggestive. Just present. The way you’d touch someone you wanted to keep hold of, and I close my eyes and feel the city below us doing its city thing and let myself have this for a minute.
Just this. Just the weight of him and the sound of him breathing and the specific warmth of another person who is choosing, against every reasonable argument available to him, to be here.
“Micah,” he says quietly, after a while.
“I know,” I say.
And I do. I know all of it, the impossibility of it, the cost of it, what’s coming eventually whether either of us is ready or not. I know all of it and it’s still not enough to make me let go.
He holds on too.
For now, that’s enough. For now, that’s everything.