Chapter 19
MYLES
I was having a dream I didn’t want to wake up from.
Hell if I can remember what it was, but what I can’t shake is how it left me feeling, even if I don’t know what was actually going on in it.
Whatever it was, I was happy. That deep, contented sort of happy that only comes when I’m far out in the middle of nowhere, just soaking in the feel of nature around me.
Or when Charlie and I were kids, and the two of us would lie out in the lawn of his parents’ house on a warm day, staring up at the sky and talking, and the rest of the world outside the two of us just faded away.
The feeling I got when he hugged me that night at his house, and I realized that I’d get to have my second shot at making our friendship right after all.
Too bad my nose is so stuffed up I can’t breathe, and my goddamn head’s pounding so painfully I don’t have a hope of falling back asleep to try to get back to whatever it was I was dreaming.
Plus, I’m cold, even under the blanket that’s pulled up around my shoulders.
One that I don’t remember getting, and am sure was folded up in the linen closet in the laundry room.
I can feel the warmth of my body heat trapped under it, but it doesn’t fix the kind of cold I am.
I’m cold like something warm is missing.
The memory of fingers stroking through my hair flashes through my mind. My head resting somewhere firmer than the couch seat cushions. Denim against my cheek. The rise and fall of someone else’s breath.
I sit up so fast, it makes my head spin.
“Fuck,” I groan, hands grabbing at either side as the pain doubles with the movement and position change. Slowly, I lower myself back down to the couch, waiting for the room to stop moving around me.
And oh fuck— Because those bits and pieces of memory are getting clearer.
Was I sleeping with my head in Charlie’s lap?
A weird feeling leaps in my stomach, kind of like panic and excitement, or maybe it’s just whatever shitty bug I have, but it doesn’t feel like I’m gonna be sick—
Maybe I wasn’t sleeping in Charlie’s lap at all. Maybe what I’m remembering’s all just part of a dream.
He was here though, so where is he now?
“Charlie?” I call, as loud as I can make my hoarse voice go, into the darkness.
Silence.
Last thing I actually remember was the two of us starting a new movie, and him teasing me about not being able to stay awake. Looks like he was right, because I must have fallen asleep somewhere in the middle of the movie, and he’s let himself out. Gone home.
I shiver under my blanket.
Why does the fact that he’s gone hurt?
A sound clicks through the darkness. The turn of a latch. The quiet rasp of hinges.
“Myles?”
Charlie’s voice is a whisper, like he doesn’t want to wake me up in case I’m still asleep.
Fingers stroking so softly through my hair—
My stomach gives another strange leap.
For one second, I almost pretend I am still asleep. My brain’s so messed up right now, all confused between weird dreams and reality that I can’t quite remember, that I almost don’t want him to know I’m awake.
It wasn’t like I did anything wrong by falling asleep and ending up with my head in his lap, if that’s really what happened, but what’s turning me upside down and making me feel like maybe I did fuck up somehow is that I want that back.
Whether it was real or just a dream, I want Charlie to hold me again. I want his fingers in my hair.
Soft footsteps creep close to the couch, and I open my eyes.
“Where’d you go?” I don’t mean to ask him that, but the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.
“Home,” he whispers. He’s just standing, kind of awkwardly at the side of the couch, like he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do with himself with me sprawled out over most of it. “I had to feed Cyril and grab a few things.”
“You didn’t have to come back.”
Through the darkness, I can’t see his face, but he takes a step back from the couch. “You, uh—” he clears his throat. “You asked me to? But I can go if—”
He sounds embarrassed, exactly the same as I’m feeling. Clocking that same emotion in him instantly has my need to put him at ease overriding my own discomfort.
“No,” I push up to sit, slower than before, and the world stays still, like it’s supposed to. “Stay,” I touch the space I’ve opened up for him beside me. “Unless you don’t want to. I don’t need you to but—” I want you to.
CHARLIE
Myles is asleep. On me. Again.
This time, the two of us have just sort of tipped to the side, me leaning against the corner of the sofa, him with his arm thrown around my waist, his body draped over my side, and his cheek resting on my shoulder.
He’s heavy and fever-hot, and I kind of think some of the dampness gathering on my shirt may be from him drooling in his sleep and not just because the heat he’s radiating is making me sweat under the blanket we’re both lying under now. If it is, I don’t care one bit.
I regret precisely nothing that’s happening here and wouldn’t give any of it up for anything.
Unless Myles wakes up and hates that I’ve let him sleep on me.
I might be panicking about that possibility quite a bit more if it wasn’t for my suspicion that he wasn’t totally asleep when he snuggled up to me and rested his head on my shoulder for the second time tonight.
Obviously, I’m still not letting myself read anything into any of this. I’d told Gemma that about a million and one times when I’d called her to update her on the situation as I’d run home to feed Cyril and grab some comfier clothes and my toothbrush.
(Weekend getaway with Rosa or no, what’s happening here totally constitutes as an urgent situation, even if I know nothing will ever come of it.)
She’d tried to claim that the fact that I felt the need to tell her that I know none of it means anything quite as many times as I did meant that I was the one who needed to hear it, not her.
Given how she’d only hummed consideringly when I’d said it the first couple times though, I think she has this all wrong.
A hum like that from Gemma means uncertainty.
If she full-on disagreed with me, there’s not a chance she’d leave me in any doubt about it, but she’ll never actually come out and say when she’s not sure about something.
Gemma loves to be sure about things. Unless they’re her own uncertainties, and then you can bet we’ll be talking whatever it is to death.
So a noncommittal hum from her? That’s as good as her saying she’s not so sure there isn’t something more going on here than Myles being sick and me being comfy to lie on.
I’m not going to let myself think about that for even half a second, and that’s final.
Not once have I ever actually let myself hope that Myles could feel anything more for me than friendship, and I’m not about to start now.
Especially not when, for the second time in my life, I get to fall asleep with him in my arms.
Just like that night when we were fourteen, I’m well aware that something like this may never happen again, and the last thing I want to do is waste a moment on pointless pining over something I’ll never have when, right now, what I do have is everything.
Moving carefully so I don’t wake him, I shift onto my back, pulling Myles with me so that he’s mostly on his stomach, his head resting on my chest and the upper half of his body draped over the upper half of mine.
His lower half isn’t on me, but the two of us are smushed pretty close together along the narrow space of the sofa.
As soon as he wakes up, I’m going to have to make a very quick evacuation.
A drooling, stuffy-nosed-snoring, feverish Myles is still Myles, and having him pressed along me the way he is right now is waaay too enticing for my exceptionally rude dick.
The poor man is sick, for god’s sake, but did that stop me from going halfway hard the moment his arm snaked around my waist and his hand brushed along the skin of my side where my shirt had gotten hiked up? No, it had not.
Rude, like I said.
The trick is just going to be making sure that Myles never finds out.
And ugh, why exactly I thought yoga pants were a good idea, I have no idea now. Totally useless for hiding completely inappropriate hard-ons.
My too interested dick is really only in the background of my thoughts at this point though, and it’s easy to keep it there as I focus instead on the contentment filling me at the feeling of Myles’s limp, heavy body in my arms and the way his rather noisy breathing seems to have synced up with mine so that his chest rises with each breath I pull in, and falls with each I let out.
I love this man. I’ve spent over half my life loving him, and too much of that time from afar. There are so many layers of my love for him I know I’ll never be able to show him, but holding him like this, even if it’s just for tonight, soothes the raw edges of some of them.
MYLES
Waking up halfway remembering that I’d fallen asleep with my head in Charlie’s lap was one thing.
Waking up with my cheek tucked away on his shoulder and my face sort of crushed up against his neck?
And the way both of us have ended up with our arms wrapped around each other and his leg thrown over mine?
Yeah, I fuzzily remember leaning into him last night before closing my eyes. Hell, I think I even remember him sneaking an arm around my shoulders to keep me from slumping off of him when I’d started to really drift off.
Connecting the dots now and realizing that we slept like this all night though is a whole nother matter. One that goes squarely in that category of the confusing, weird thoughts that just keep bouncing around my head whenever I think about Charlie.
Because why does cuddling up with him like this have me grinning like an idiot into the side of his neck? And why haven’t I moved my face off his shoulder, when another fraction of an inch, and my lips would be on his skin?