36. Chapter 36
Chapter thirty-six
Lennox
I’ve been home for three hours and I have not stopped moving.
Not going anywhere. Just moving, the specific agitated circuit of a man who can’t sit still and has nowhere useful to be.
Kitchen to sitting room to hallway to kitchen.
I’ve made tea I haven’t drunk. I’ve turned the television on and off twice without registering what was on it.
I’ve checked my phone eleven times for any update on the blood under the rafter, anything from forensics, anything from the hospital about a walk-in with a gunshot wound, anything at all, and the phone keeps telling me nothing.
Three drops of blood.
He’s out there somewhere with three drops of blood’s worth of injury and no way for me to find him, and I don’t know if that’s a graze or something deeper, and I don’t know if he got somewhere safe, and I keep running through the options for where he might be and coming up empty because I don’t know if he has found a hotel and I don’t know the name he’d have checked in under.
I could drive around aimlessly. Or walk the streets. The city is huge and he could be anywhere, but I might run into him. Some instinct might lead me to him.
No, that’s a stupid idea. There has to be a better option. I just need to figure it out.
I eat half a biscuit I find in the kitchen and put the rest down on the counter and forget it.
I sit on the sofa and look at the lamp, still angled the way he preferred it, and I get back up because sitting still is worse.
The rain starts at half-past two. I hear it before I register it, just a sound underneath the other sounds, and then it’s properly raining, the kind that comes in fast and means it, drumming against the window and the pavement outside and the roof of the car I still haven’t parked properly.
I sit down on the sofa.
I get back up.
I go to the window and look at the street. Rain and orange light and nothing. Nobody out in this. Nobody with any sense would be out in this.
It would make looking for him easier.
I sit back down.
I hear it just before I would have given up on hearing anything. Barely a sound, barely audible over the rain, the specific quiet of someone who isn’t sure they have the right to make any more noise than they absolutely have to.
A tap on the door.
I’m across the room before the second one.
I open the door.
He’s there.
He’s soaked through in a way that says he’s been in the rain for longer than it takes to get from a cab to a doorstep.
His hair is flattened against his forehead.
Whatever he was wearing when he left wherever he was, has done its best against the weather and lost. He has one hand on the doorframe and he is holding himself upright with the specific and obvious effort of a man who is not going to be upright for very much longer, and he looks at me with the eyes of someone who has been running on the very last of themselves and just used it up getting here.
“I had nowhere else to go,” he says.
His legs go.
I catch him before he hits the floor, both arms coming around him, and he is heavier than he looks and colder than he should be, and he makes a sound when I grab his left side that tells me exactly where the wound is.
I pull him inside. I get us both through the door somehow, his weight redistributed, and I kick it closed behind us and we make it to the sofa where I lower him as carefully as I can manage, and he’s shivering, soaked through and shaking, and I’m on my knees in front of him and I don’t know where to put my hands that won’t hurt him.
His lips have a color to them that I don’t like. His temperature when I put my hand to his forehead is a fact I’d rather not have, but I have it now.
“Micah.”
He opens his eyes. They find my face slowly, like they’re looking for it through something, and then they focus, and something happens in them that I’m not going to be able to think about too hard right now, something warm and specific and entirely directed at me.
He smiles.
It’s the real one. The private one. The one I have been cataloguing for months without knowing I was doing it, the one that isn’t for a camera or a room, the one that happens when his guard is down far enough that whatever’s underneath just surfaces on its own.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say, which is not the word for what I want to say, but it’s the word available right now, in this flat, at two thirty in the morning with the rain still going and a wounded man on my sofa who smiled at me like I was what he was hoping to find when he got here.
“How bad,” I say.
“Don’t know,” he says. “Couldn’t tell.”
“How long has it been bleeding?”
“Hours.” He closes his eyes. “Maybe stopped. Hard to tell.”
“I’m going to take your jacket off,” I say. “It’s going to hurt.”
He nods, which costs him something.
I do it slowly, working the wet fabric over his arms with the focused care of a man who needs something useful to do with his hands.
His shirt beneath it is dark on the left side in a way that isn’t just water.
I peel it away from the wound as carefully as I can, and he breathes in sharp and holds it and doesn’t make another sound, which is its own kind of devastating, the specific bravery of someone used to going through things quietly.
I look at the wound.
It’s a graze, long and deep along the side of his ribcage, the kind that bleeds significantly and looks terrible and probably isn’t going to kill him, probably, if it doesn’t get infected, if the fever breaks, if I can clean it properly and he stays still and I don’t take him to hospital.
I can’t take him to hospital. A gunshot wound creates a mandatory report, and a mandatory report creates exactly the kind of paper trail that connects dots that haven’t officially been connected yet, and I’m not ready for those dots to connect, and neither is he.
I get the first-aid kit from the bathroom cupboard.
I’m already reaching for it, when I see them on the shelf behind it, a box of amoxicillin from three months ago when Farah refused to accept any more excuses and physically escorted me to a walk-in clinic about a cough I’d had for six weeks and was absolutely certain would resolve on its own.
The GP disagreed. I started the course, the cough got better, I stopped after four days because the packet was inconvenient and I felt fine, and I’m a grown adult who makes his own medical decisions.
I look at the box. I do a rapid mental calculation about expiry dates and dosage and the specific bacterial complications of untreated gunshot wounds, none of which I’m qualified to assess and all of which I’m going to attempt anyway. I take them with me.
I come back. He’s watching me move around the flat from the sofa, tracking me with those eyes, and every time I look over at him he’s looking back.
“This is going to sting,” I say, crouching beside him with the antiseptic.
“I’ll survive,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “You will.”
The cleaning takes time and isn’t pleasant, and he goes very still throughout it in the way he goes still when something costs him.
I work carefully, methodically, the way I do everything that matters.
I’m aware of his breathing the whole time, the rhythm of it, the way it changes when something hurts and steadies when I give him a second.
He doesn’t make a sound. Not one. The specific quiet of someone who learned young to manage pain without an audience, and I find I have to look at what I’m doing rather than at his face because his face is going to undo me if I let it.
When the wound is clean and dressed, I hold up the antibiotics.
“These are technically for chest infections,” I say. “Broad spectrum. I should have finished the course three months ago and didn’t because I’m an idiot. Two now, one every eight hours after, and I need you to actually finish these.”
He looks at the box. Then at me. Something moves in his expression, tired and fond and slightly broken all at once.
“Okay,” he says.
I get him water. He takes the tablets without argument, and I watch him do it because I’m apparently the kind of person who supervises antibiotic intake now, which is entirely new information about myself.
I run and fetch him a blanket because putting him in dry clothes would hurt him more than I could bear.
I bring the softest blanket I own to the sofa. Then I carefully, delicately pull his soaked trousers and underwear off of him. His lower half isn’t injured, but every movement jolts his chest, and I hate myself for it.
Eventually, it is done. The wound is clean, he’s taken antibiotics, and he’s tucked up on my sofa under a blanket.
He flashes me a grateful smile. Eyes watering as if my basic human decency is a kindness too much for him to cope with.
My heart does something in my chest.
Everything that happened is still there.
The text, the video call, the three seconds of him searching for a sentence.
The club, the engineering, the careful construction of an opportunity out of an accident.
All of it still between us, not gone, not resolved, sitting in the room exactly as large as it’s ever been.
And also this. His eyes on my face while I dressed his wound. The rain against the window. The way he said hi with what was left of himself, and the way I said hi back, and the way neither of those words came close to carrying what they were carrying.
I sit back on my heels, and I look at him.
He looks back at me. His color is slightly better than it was. The shivering has eased. He still has a fever, and he needs sleep, and probably more than I can give him here, and tomorrow is going to be a conversation I don’t know how to start yet.
He reaches out. Very slowly, with the careful effort of someone conserving what they have left, he puts his hand over mine where it’s resting on the edge of the sofa cushion. He doesn’t say anything. He just leaves it there, warm, light, not demanding anything.
I turn my hand over.
He’s a serial killer who seduced me. He used me. Played me.
But the men he killed deserved it. More than deserved it. And what we had, what we have, feels so damn real.
And he’s here.
He’s here, on my sofa, in my flat, in my first aid kit’s worth of care, and he looked at me and smiled before anything else.
I reach for another blanket draped over the sofa arm. I put it over him, carefully, the way you do for someone you’ve decided belongs to you.
He doesn’t say anything.
Neither do I.
The rain comes down.