“Standing up to them at this point would make it worse!”
“And letting them trample him will make it better?”
“What else can I do?” she wailed. “I have only ever tried to do my best for him.” And dropping her head into her hands, Tina burst into tears.
All instinctive empathy, Miles reached out, but she waved him off. And with a mutter about needing some air, she hurried out, leaving us in silence but for the tennis match still playing on the TV. I watched her go, guilt twisting my stomach. I’d meant what I said, but she was the protective big sister and I’d as good as accused her of failing him.
With a heavy sigh, Miles leaned against the dining table, his shoulders slumped. He pulled me close, and not for the first time I found myself standing between his legs to wrap my arms around him, letting him rest his chin on my shoulder while he was hurting. I wondered if it was deliberate or subconscious, that when heneeded comfort, he didn’t want to feel his extra height. That he made himself small to be enveloped in my arms.
“You’re so fierce,” he murmured into my hoodie.
I huffed a laugh, able to remember when, not so long ago, he’d been the fierce one tearing into the comfortable ruts of my life. “You were the same for me.”
“Yeah, I guess I was.”
“We show up for each other.”
He hummed agreement, sliding his arms around me. “Because sometimes it’s hard to show up for ourselves. It’s not as easy as you make it sound though, this stuff with my parents.”
“I didn’t mean to make it sound easy. I’m sure it’s not. I just think placating bullies never gets anyone anywhere.”
Miles gently shook his head, his hair tickling my cheek. “Real life isn’t like your romance books, Mat.”
“How do you mean?”
“Happy endings that are neat and simple. There’s no neat and simple way this ends. Not with my family, not even with us. We are a mess and we always will be because we can’t just be this—” He slid his hands to my waist as though to indicate us here, our togetherness—“we also have to be that.” He gestured behind me, surely at the tennis on the TV, and I could feel the fragility in his words, like we were standing on cracking ice. One wrong move and it would shatter beneath us, plunging us into the frigid water where maybe he was never going to forgive me for New York, where maybe he was going to say he couldn’t keep doing this and leave me. Despite everything, the fear I had fucked it all up that night lived in my skin now, every day since nothing but a brief stay of execution I was somehow still clinging to. And I’d go on desperately clinging as long as my fingers would hold, no matter how much my arms were aching.
“Everything else might be hard and messy,” I said, the words thickening in my throat. “But loving you has always been easy. Looking at you and knowing you are my everything is the easiest thing I do every day.”
His arms tightened around me. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” he mumbled into my shoulder.
And I breathed out. Perhaps, I could cling on a little longer.
PART FIVE
AUSTRALIAN OPEN SWING
BRISBANE - MELBOURNE
Twenty-Seven
Miles Callahan
Truck is here!
wait, moving day is today? i thought it was tomorrow
why did i think it was tomorrow?
Because time zones are hard
bullshit!
it was past midnight your time when you said goodnight and you said TOMORROW
Oh my god and you think I’m a pedant
Miles Callahan
