Picking "truth" in Truth or Dare was always a bit risky for Miles. There were too many things in his past that ought to embarrass him, but he usually didn't care all that much about revealing them. Tonight, however…
"What is the… hmm.. what's the thing you've done that you regret the most?"
Miles went completely still.
"Cheery subject," he joked.
"Come on, you have to answer," his roommate said laughingly, clearly too drunk to detect how uncomfortable Miles was.
Well, he might as well get it over with:
"Cheating on my boyfriend when he was in a coma."
"What the fuck," he heard someone mumble but he couldn't be sure who.
"Good of you to remind me, really needed that," Miles said with an far from happy smile at the girl who'd given him such a question to answer.
"You're gay?" Someone else asked in astonishment.
Miles rolled his eyes demonstrably.
"Really?" He asked. "That's the part you care about?"
No-one said anything.
"No, I'm not gay, I mentioned my girlfriend two minutes ago, for fuck's sake."
"You're bi?" a girl from his literature class asked.
"Yes, I'm bi," He said. "Amazingly enough."
"Hey, no need to bite my head off, I'm bi too," she said. "Never cheated on my boyfriend, though."
Miles rolled his eyes and looked away.
"Look, I didn't know if he'd wake up at all when I did it and I put a stop to it as soon as I knew he would, can we move on now?"
When no-one protested, Miles picked a guy and dared him to kiss him, just for good measure.
"Dad, did you really… cheat on Tristan?" Emma asked when she got home from school.
Miles kept quiet for a while as he looked his daughter over.
"How do you even know that name?" he asked.
"Well, I… we've been reading your story about the bus crash and it said online that Hero was based on you and coma boy was based on someone named Tristan and… "
"Does Hero cheat on Coma Boy?" Miles asked.
He'd rewritten the play as prose many years after the fact and it'd been published as the main piece of his second short story collection.
"No, but…" His daughter wrinkled her brow. "We talked about it and how he might have considered it and some of the other said that… "
Miles didn't get to hear exactly what any of her fellow student had said, she just fell silent. Damn, that teacher had really meant it when she said she wouldn't treat Emma any differently just because of who her father was.
Miles sighed and decided on honesty.
"I did," he told her. "I did and I hated myself for it. I regretted it very much."
Emma looked at him with big eyes; she clearly hadn't expected him to just out and tell her. Then she looked down on her feet.
"Did you ever… cheat on mom?" She asked very quietly.
She didn't ask if that was why they broke up, but that didn't stop Miles from hearing the question as clearly as if she had.
"No," Miles said and got up. He put a hand on his daughter's cheek and made her look at him. "I never cheated before or after."
Ok, maybe he had cheat before that, Maya would probably claim so, but right now, Miles didn't give a rat's ass what Maya thought. Right in front of him, Emma was still looking a bit unsure.
"We make mistakes to learn from them, haven't you ever heard that?"
He smiled at her, hoping to get one in return. He didn't really, but Emma did seem to relax. He pulled her into a hug.
Not soon after, the front door opened and Miles' boyfriend walked in.
"Does he know?" Emma asked Miles.
"Know what?" the boyfriend asked.
Miles laughed.
"All about my dark past," he joked. "Yeah, I think Nate's managed to drag every embarrassing story about me from my friends over the years, God know's Winston isn't loyal enough to shut up."
Emma finally smiled.
