21. Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
Lennox
The first thing I’m aware of is that it’s dark.
Not the hostile dark of three in the morning when a case is pulling at me and sleep has given up pretending it’s going to happen.
This is a different kind of dark, thick and warm and deliberate, the curtains doing their job for once, and I lie in it for a moment before I’m fully awake, registering sensations in order.
Warm. Comfortable. Not my bed, which has a spring that’s been threatening to become an issue for three years and is working up to making good on that threat.
And the smell of coffee, actual coffee, not the machine at the station but something that smells like it was made by someone who cares whether it’s good.
I open my eyes.
Micah is standing at the side of the bed with two mugs, still in his pajamas, hair doing that catastrophic morning thing that shouldn’t work and does.
He’s watching me wake up with an expression I’d find embarrassing if I had the energy to be embarrassed by anything at this particular moment, which I don’t.
“Good morning,” he says. “It’s seven. You’ve been asleep since eight last night.” He tilts his head slightly, the way he does when he’s working up to something. “You looked like you really needed it, so I left you to it. But I wasn’t sure if you had work today.”
I process this slowly. Eleven hours. I have slept for eleven consecutive hours in another person’s bed without once surfacing.
I don’t do that. I haven’t done that since I was a different person entirely, some earlier version of myself who hadn’t yet learned that the world requires constant vigilance even when the lights are off.
The fact of it sits in my chest alongside the coffee smell and the dark and Micah’s face, and I don’t quite know what to do with it.
“What day is it,” I ask.
“Thursday.”
Thursday.
“It’s my day off,” I say.
Something happens to his face. The watching expression gives way to something warmer and considerably less composed, and he looks down at the mugs in his hands like he’s suddenly not sure what to do with them, and then back up at me, and there it is, the thing I see sometimes when the charm drops and something younger and less certain takes its place.
The bashfulness of it. The specific vulnerability of a person asking for something they’re not sure they’re allowed to want.
“Then you can stay?” he says. Quietly. Like he’s not entirely sure of the answer and is trying to prepare for whichever way it goes.
My heart does something I’m going to have to have a serious conversation with it about later.
“Yes,” I say. “I can stay.”
He smiles, and it is the real one, the private one, the one that isn’t aimed at a camera or a crowd, and I realize I’ve been cataloguing the versions of his smile without knowing I was doing it, the way a detective catalogues everything, automatically, compulsively, even when the evidence is just a man standing in his own bedroom at seven in the morning with two mugs of coffee and hope all over his face.
I take the mug he holds out. He sits on the edge of the bed, close but not pressing the point, cross-legged with his own mug, and we drink our coffee in the dark and neither of us says anything for a while, and it is one of the most comfortable silences I have ever sat in.
I want to stay.
That’s the thing I notice next, underneath the comfort and the coffee smell and the thoroughly unreasonable amount of good feeling currently occurring in my chest. Not I can stay, which is logistical, a function of Thursdays and rosters and twenty two years of knowing my own schedule.
I want to stay. The wanting of it is specific and not small, the kind of wanting that rewrites the shape of a day before you’ve even properly started it.
There is nowhere else I would rather be right now than in this bed in this dark with this man, and that is a sentence I couldn’t have said about any specific location or any specific person in a very long time, and I let it sit for a moment without pulling it apart.
“Breakfast,” Micah says eventually. “I’m making it properly this time. Not ordering in.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.” He unfolds himself from the bed with that specific grace of his that I’ve stopped trying not to notice. “But I want to.”
He goes, and I lie there in the warm dark listening to the sounds of him in the kitchen, the particular domestic soundtrack of someone who is comfortable in their own space and not performing it for an audience.
Cupboard doors. The tap running. Something being set down on the counter.
I have lain in a lot of mornings in my life and I have rarely found the sounds of another person in them anything other than a reminder that a stranger is nearby.
This is different. The sounds of him are easy to be near.
I get up eventually, find my way to the bathroom, locate a spare toothbrush still in its packaging that he’s left out on the edge of the sink, and stand there for a moment looking at it before I use it, because it means he thought about this, quietly, in advance, without making it a thing, and that matters in a way I couldn’t fully explain.
He’s made eggs. Proper eggs, the kind that take actual attention, with toast that’s the right side of dark, more coffee, and a small pot of something orange on the counter that might be marmalade, and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s homemade.
“You really cook,” I say.
“You’ve said that before.” He slides a plate across without looking up. “Sit down, Lennox.”
I sit down.
We eat. He tells me about the edit he’s been putting off all week, something about the color grading on the lido footage that isn’t coming out right, and I listen to things I don’t entirely understand with more interest than the subject warrants, because it’s his voice and he’s talking to me like I’m someone he tells things to, and that is a different feeling than I expected it to be.
He asks about my flat. What it’s like.
“Small,” I say. “Functional.”
“Books?”
“Some.”
“What kind?”
“History, mostly. Some fiction.” I pause. “Crime, occasionally. For professional reasons.”
He laughs at that, the wheeze of genuine surprise, and I find myself smiling into my coffee in a way that is almost certainly undignified.
“Do you have any books?” I ask, glancing around the minimalist, stylish space.
His dark eyes light up. He jumps up from his chair, with a speed that says terrible things about the age gap between us, and bounces over to a smooth gray door. One I assumed covered a cupboard.
He swings it open with a flourish, revealing a large, very stuffed, very chaotic stacked bookshelf. “Ta da!” he says.
I chuckle and finish my second coffee.
He waves me away from the dishes afterward in a way that brooks no argument, so I find myself drifting toward the bookshelf instead, running a finger along the spines while he works at the sink behind me.
The collection is not what I expected. Photography books, architecture, a battered atlas with a cracked spine, a whole section of history that somebody has clearly actually read rather than arranged for effect, and then, tucked between a book about London’s underground rivers and something on urban decay, a well-worn paperback that appears to have a romance sounding title on it.
I pull it out. It is indeed a romance novel. One with a shirtless man on the cover whose hair is doing things that defy both gravity and reason.
“Interesting,” I say.
He glances over his shoulder from the sink. “What?”
I hold it up. The man on the cover appears to be on a clifftop in a storm. His shirt, what remains of it, is losing the battle with the wind. His hair is not.
Micah looks at it. Looks at me. “That’s a classic.”
“Nobody’s hair does that in a storm,” I say. “It’s absurd.”
“His hair is magnificent.” He goes back to the dishes, unbothered. “It’s a wonderful book. It’s funny and romantic, and the hero is ridiculous in the best possible way and I have read it three times.”
“Three times.”
“Three times and I will read it again. You can borrow it if you like.”
I look at the cover once more. The man on the clifftop gazes into the middle distance with the expression of someone who has never once questioned a decision in his life. I find this vaguely aspirational.
“I think I will,” I say, and take it to the sofa.
It is, in point of fact, extremely good.
I will never say this out loud, but the hero is exactly as ridiculous as advertised and the whole thing moves at a pace that makes my usual reading feel like standing still, and I am three chapters in before I surface properly and realize I’ve been holding the book at an angle to catch the light from the window like a man who is invested in finding out what happens next.
Which I am.
Micah is now at his desk with headphones on, leaning toward the monitor with his chin resting on his hand in a posture that looks profoundly uncomfortable and that he doesn’t seem to notice at all. His lips are moving slightly. A commentary track for footage nobody else is hearing yet.
I watch him for a while before I go back to my book.
Ten minutes later the headphones come off and he makes a sound that could charitably be called frustration.
“Problem,” I say.
“The whole thing reads too warm. I want it to feel like winter, I shot it in March, and every time I try to correct it the shadows go green.” He swivels the chair to face me with the expression of a man who knows his audience can’t solve this but needs to say it out loud anyway.
“You don’t know anything about color grading, do you? ”
“Not a single thing,” I confirm.
“Right.” He turns back. “Just needed to tell someone.”
“Happy to help.”
He laughs, quiet and real, and puts the headphones back on.
I watch the shift in him as he does, the specific change that happens when he stops performing and starts actually working, something in him settling and sharpening at the same time, and it’s so different from every other version of him I’ve encountered that I sit there with the book face down on my knee just looking for longer than I intended.
He glances over and catches me at it. His eyes drop to the book, then come back up to my face. One eyebrow rises very slightly.
“Well?” he says.
I look down at the cover. The man on the clifftop. The hair.
“It’s good,” I say.
Micah’s smile is enormous and entirely without mercy. “Told you.”
“You did,” I agree. “Don’t make it a thing.”
He turns back to his screen, but the smile is still there in the set of his shoulders, and I go back to the book, and neither of us says anything else for a while.
And it dawns on me that I’m not content.
Not adequately occupied. I’m happy, the specific active version of it, located here in this room on this Thursday morning with this person, and it’s been long enough since I felt it that I recognize it the way you recognize somewhere you used to know well and thought you might not find again.
He glances over at me and catches me looking. “What?” he says.
“Nothing,” I say.
He studies me for a second with that particular attention of his, the one that sees more than most people’s does, and then a slow smile spreads across his face and he turns back to his screen without saying anything else.
I go back to my book.
Outside, London carries on. The case is out there.
The one I’ve already solved but decided to keep secret.
Farah is out there. Hendricks and Greaves and all the things I’ve done and chosen and will have to live with are out there, waiting with the patience that difficult things have, the certainty that they’ll still be there whenever I come back to them.
I know that. I’m choosing this morning anyway. I’ll make that bargain as many times as it’s offered.
I turn the page and I stay.