Page 87 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

There’s a domesticity to the whole scene that still catches me sideways sometimes, the fact of it, the ordinary miracle of this incredible man standing in our kitchen making dinner like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It is the most natural thing in the world. It’s taken me a while to actually believe.

“You’re staring,” he says, without turning around.

“I’m appreciating.”

“Mm.” He glances back at me over his shoulder, and whatever he sees in my face makes him grin, quick and a little smug. “Sit down, this is nearly done.”

I sit. He plates up a few minutes later, two plates, something that smells considerably better than anything I ever managed to make myself in the small kitchen of my old flat, and sets one down in front of me with a small flourish that’s half performance, half genuine pride.

“Coq au vin,” he says.

“This looks amazing.”

“Good. Eat.” He drops into the chair across from me, already reaching for his own fork, and for a while we don’t talk much at all, just the sound of cutlery and the music still low from the other room and the particular quiet of two people who’ve stopped needing to fill every silence with something.

It’s a good quiet. The kind that used to make me restless, back when silence in a room meant something was being withheld, and now just means we’re both exactly where we want to be. Micah tops up my water without either of us asking. I pass him the bread without him reaching for it. Outside the window, a blackbird is making a considerable amount of noise about something, and neither of us bothers finding out what.

I get the wine.

It’s nothing special, a bottle from the shop in the village that we’ve started buying without ever quite discussing it, the way couples end up with a bottle that’s just theirs without either of them deciding it should be, and I pour two glasses and bring them over and sit down across from him in the last of the evening light coming through the window, the same window Micah picked this house for, the light doing something soft and gold to the whole kitchen, and for a second I just look at him, properly look at him, the way I used to look at scenes, except there’s nothing here I need to read, nothing hidden, nothing I have to work to understand. Just him. Just this.

I lift my glass.

He picks his up too, easy, unthinking, already smiling before he’s even asked the question, and then something shifts behind his eyes, quick and small, a flicker of recognition arriving a half second before the words do, like he already knows exactly what I’m about to say and can’t quite believe I’m about to say it here, tonight, in this kitchen, less than a year after a small warm restaurant in Richmond with a candle between us.

“What are we toasting?” he asks anyway, because some things you ask even when you already know the answer. Maybe especially those things.

“This,” I say.

He looks at me for a moment, the smile settling into something quieter, something that reaches all the way to his eyes the way it didn’t used to, not at the start, not before either of us learned how to let it, and I watch him hold the whole memory of that first proper date in his face at once, the wine, the candle, the sound our glasses made, the version of the both of us that had no idea yet how far this was going to go.

“This,” he agrees, and clinks his glass against mine, the sound of it small and clear and exactly the same as it was the first time, and for a moment neither of us says anything else, because there’s nothing left that needs adding to it.

There is just this.