This was a bad idea. No way around it, it just was. Miles had made no shortage of decisions based on bad ideas, so his awareness of this fact didn't act as any kind of detergent, but as he pressed down the doorbell, he did feel terribly uneasy.
The house before him was familiar, but somehow less so than he felt it ought to be. He and Tristan had never spent much time here, he supposed. More room at Miles'. It made sense. Still, his relative unfamiliarity didn't help him feel any better.
"Miles…?" Tristan said as he opened the door, his brows drawn together.
"Hey," Miles said. "Can I come in?"
Tristan regarded him for a bit.
"I suppose so…"
No sooner than Tristan had said it than Miles was through the door.
"What's going on?" Tristan asked.
Miles didn't look at him as he answered. It was easier not to.
"My dad… he's at our house."
"Right…" Tristan said in a tone indicating a wish for elaboration, but Miles stayed quiet. He didn't want to elaborate, didn't know how to, and he certainly couldn't get himself to bring up whether he could stay over yet. It seemed like way too much to ask for.
Honestly, coming here at all seemed too much to ask of Tristan. They weren't truly at odds with each other any more, Miles didn't think, but the memory of when they had been was still too close. Or at least that's how Miles felt. Maybe Tristan still resented him. Or maybe he was over it ( ...yeah, fat chance of that ).
After a silence that must have lasted almost a minute, Tristan spoke:
"Right, so I need to work on my English assignment, but you're welcome to sit around while I do that, I guess.
"Thanks, yeah, that's, uh, that's fine… " Miles rambled.
For the first 15 minutes being in Tristan's room again was not just uncomfortable for Miles, it felt downright bizarre. He hadn't been here before or after they were together, and the memories of their relationship hang heavily in the room. Making out on the bed, working together at the desk, occasionally play-fighting on the floor… It was odd, how a place he hadn't been enough times to feel truly familiar with managed to be so full of memories.
Still, he got over it after those first 15 minutes of feeling on edge. He'd been scrolling through hastygram in an effort to make himself relax, and after a while the scrolling turned mindless and Miles relaxed. He even opened up his writing app and began looking through one of his unfinished short stories, hoping to use the time he was stuck here on figuring out the ending. He'd been rereading what he'd already written when Tristan broke the silence:
"So you're actually bisexual?"
Miles looked up to see that Tristan hadn't.
"What, do I need to go find a poster from my campaign?" he said, joking though there was nothing to joke about.
Tristan scoffed and rolled his eyes.
"Nevermind," he mumbled and went back to his document.
"Fine, okay," Miles said and put down his phone with an exaggerated motion. "Yeah, I probably am, what of it?"
A wave of… something - something bad, unpleasant, wrong - went through him as he admitted it, but he tried not to let on.
""Probably"?" Tristan repeated. "So you're not sure?"
Was he? He didn't want to be. It was easier, avoiding it. Not thinking about it, letting others do that for him, letting them think whatever was convenient for them, so long as they left him in peace… and yet, it hurt. Because he did know. Tristan's words during the campaign would not have hurt as badly if he hadn't known, on some level, that this was who he is.
"I am… I am, I just…"
Miles sighed in frustration, rubbing at his face as if that'd grant him a way out of this.
"Look, to be real with you, admitting it to myself isn't easy, so when I'm vague, that's probably why."
Tristan was quiet for a while, in a way Miles couldn't read. Sometimes he wondered how well he really had known Tristan. Well enough to hurt him badly, of course, he knew how to narrow in on his insecurities, his loneliness and low self esteem, and to use it to push him away, but… he hadn't seen Tristan get like this before. They hadn't been serious with each other often, most of their relationship had revolved around kissing and getting into fights. Contemplation hadn't really been a big part of it.
"Were you embarrassed to be with me?" Tristan asked.
"Tristan…" Miles groaned.
"No, I don't mean…" Tristan stopped to gather his thoughts. "This isn't about me, I'm asking if you felt embarrassed to be with a boy."
Tristan was meeting Miles' eyes head-on as he spoke and Miles felt sure that the small sweep of panic that the small wave of panic that went through him must be quite visible to Tristan.
"Because you never acted like you were," Tristan continued. "You never seemed to care when people gave us funny looks or yelled after us or whatever…"
Whenever such things had happened, Miles had laughed it off, just like he he did with everything else. Tristan had seems indignant yet resigned, so clearly used to it in a way that Miles was not. Miles had always felt that small wave of panic go through him - not just when people were bothering them, but any time his identity was brought up - but would pretend to be untouched by it. Scratch writing, maybe Miles should be an actor; his mask was firmly secured most of the time.
"So you won't be hurt if I say I were?" Miles said and broke eye contact. "Embarrased, that is."
Tristan didn't answer him. He frowned in thought, saved his document and then left his chair to sit down next to Miles.
"Of course I'm still hurt," Tristan said and Miles braced for impact, prepared himself to retaliate or flee at a moment's notice, "but… I get it. I used to be embarrassed about being gay."
"I just… I just can not imagine that," Miles said, a wry smile slowly finding it's way onto his features as he dare to look up at Tristan again.
"Shut up," Tristan said and laughed. "You're the one who got real."
Miles laughed too.
"Guilty as charged."
Miles had been dreading Dinner with the Milligans since Tristan had said he could stay, expecting it to become an exceedingly awkward affair, but it turned out only Tristan's dad would be home for dinner. He was a quiet man and didn't ask Miles any of the many questions Miles was sure Mrs. Milligan would have asked him. The most awkward thing that happened was how skeptically Mr. Milligan looked at the both of them when Tristan told him they weren't back together and Miles could live with that. Mr. Milligan didn't pry and that was the main of it. All he did was ask them to help clear the table.
When they got back to Tristan's room, Tristan had gone back to his assignment while Miles had gotten a book from his bag and started reading. It was a book Mr. Mitchell had insisted he read - well, actually it was a short story collection containing the short story Mr. Mitchell had recommended him, but same difference. His thoughts were too preoccupied for The Judgement by Franz Kafka to really hold his attention, though.
"You know," Miles said after a while, "back on that Paris trip, when you thought me and Winston were being homophobic…I think what you were really picking up on was me being curious about the fact that you were okay with acting gay."
"Oh, so I "act gay" now?" came the automatic, but ultimately biteless, response.
Miles sent him a wry smile and Tristan rolled his eyes in defeat.
"Whatever," he said. "At least I've never gotten in fights to prove I'm the big man."
Miles smile diminished a bit at that. His conflict with Zig was not something he liked to dwell on - or even remember happened, at all.
"Do you remember," he began, "back when we've just met and I told you about the dancing classes my dad made me quit?"
"Yeah," Tristain said with a softness that had to mean he'd already figured out what Miles was going to say.
"I think he suspected - or feared, probably, let's be real…" he sent Tristan a hollow smile before going on: "I tried to be who he wanted me to be, and… dating a guy was never going to be part of that."
Tristan was frowning and again Miles was hit by how rarely they'd been serious with each other in their relationship, how rarely they'd taken the time to talk with each other about deeper things, things that mattered… That was probably Miles fault, though. Even while dating Tristan, he'd preferred to keep that part of himself, the part of him that let him love Tristan, tightly locked up and ignored.
"He seemed super chill about it when were dating, though."
Miles laughed way too hard at that.
"Yeah, well, he's polite ," he finally said.
Tristan chuckled and rolled his eyes.
"God, your family are such WASPs."
"Now you're getting it!"
They riffed off of that for a bit, Miles telling stories about the ridiculous actions of his relatives and their WASP friends, before going on to simply make fun of every single way in which Miles was privileged. Tristan joined him on the bed soon enough, the almost-done-I-think-could-you-read-it-through? assignment forgotten for a while as they forgot their worries and their arguments and simply… had fun.
It felt good to laugh with Tristan again, to interact with him without venom and without worrying about every little thing he was doing wrong or about anyone or anything else than themselves and the moment they were sharing. Being close to him like this again, Miles was reminded of what a pretty boy he was and that reckless, hedonistic part of himself that never thought, never considered and never felt ashamed urged him to just close the distance between their mouths and seek pleasure where he'd found it before and knew he could find it again. He almost plunged on ahead, but then he found Winston's words from almost a week before playing on repeat in his head:
"You kiss your friends and you get together with them, because for some reason you seem think that's better than being their friend. Then you break up after some inevitable argument and after that you're not even their friend anymore."
Miles sighed internally. Why did Winston have to be right?
