Chapter 48
MYLES
“You okay?” Charlie’s sleepy whisper against the shell of my ear sends a shiver over my skin. God, it makes me want to shake my head and tell him no, I am completely not okay.
Tonight is hell, and it’s only the start of it. We’re here for a whole nother night after tonight, not to mention all day tomorrow and most of Sunday, and holy fuck, how am I going to survive?
While I definitely get that the two of us have to behave and keep our hands to ourselves while we’re here, there was no way to keep from kissing Charlie when we had finally climbed into his old bed in his old room where we’re staying. He’s Charlie, and I can’t not kiss him.
Trouble is, there’s no just kissing Charlie.
It really had started out with the plan of sticking to just kissing, but instead of either of us pulling back after the brushing of lips I’d meant for it to be, we’d just melded in closer together.
We could probably argue and I could try to say it was him whose lips parted first, but then he’d just blame me and say that that didn’t mean I’d needed to slip my tongue between them for a taste of his sweet, minty toothpaste tasting mouth.
Fuck, that is not a good place to let my mind go. Charlie and me arguing over who turned things hot and heavy first?
My already hard dick twitches at the thought of the two of us going back and forth with the blame. How easily it could get out of hand and end with us rolling around on the bed, Charlie trying to pin me down between his thighs, me throwing him off and pressing him into the mattress beneath me—
Oh fuck yes.
We can’t though.
Almost two fucking whole days.
And so, we’d made ourselves stop. Not that that means I’ve stopped replaying that kiss and what could have come after in my head…
“Myles?”
The obvious concern in Charlie’s voice cuts through the rampant horniness that’s taken over my thoughts.
Apparently, he’s not just thinking about the potential for death by sexual frustration like I am.
Even if the hard press of his dick against my (unfortunately) sweatpants-clad ass tells a different story.
“You were pretty quiet all evening,” he whispers, nuzzling the smooth-shaved skin of his cheek against the back of my neck.
Of course he’d have noticed.
Suddenly, it’s not my untamable physical need for him I’m thinking about.
Because he’s right. I was quiet all evening.
I hadn’t been able to get my mind off how Nora and Frank’s greeting had rewritten some major perceptions about all that time I spent at their house growing up.
It had me so up in my head, I’d barely been able to focus on the flow of the conversation or anything but my own thoughts.
That is, until Charlie and I had gotten into his bed. That was when I’d gotten distracted by his satiny pajamas and memories of what we’d done last night, and how, now that I’ve admitted to him that I want to try bottoming, it’s all I can think about. More than ever.
But that’s not what he’s asking about right now.
“Is everything alright?”
“It was seeing your parents,” I tell him honestly as that same lump that tightened my throat when his mom hugged me out on the porch pulls tight all over again.
“It…bothers you seeing them?” I can hear the worried hesitation in his question.
“No.” I shake my head firmly, rolling over and tugging him into my arms against my chest. God, I love how willingly and eagerly he snuggles in, tangling his legs between mine.
“I just—” a prickle stings my eyes, and I have to swallow hard and suck in a slow breath before I can go on.
“I’d never realized they cared about me as more than just your tag-along friend until today. ”
He pushes up to hover over me, and it doesn’t matter that it’s too dark for me to see the expression on his face. I don’t need to to be able to imagine the look of wide-eyed disbelief as he shakes his head at me. “They love you. They always have. You seriously didn’t know that?”
He’s not just throwing the word around lightly. His tone leaves no room for confusion. He means exactly what he’s saying.
As simple and easy as that. Like it’s something I should have always known.
My throat pulls tight at the exact same moment as something warm and beautiful settles in my chest, filling a crack I hadn’t even noticed existed until Nora’s hug this evening.
Maybe it should take more than those simple words from Charlie to do it, but it doesn’t. I could never not believe anything he says, and there wasn’t an ounce of question or uncertainty in his voice just now.
That his parents love me, have always loved me, is just a fact to him. An established, for granted thing that he never knew I hadn’t seen.
He lets out a sad, heavy breath when I shake my head.
“Myles.”
I can hear the catch in his voice as he whispers my name, winding his arm around the back of my neck and tugging me to the side, rolling us so that it’s me lying on him now.
His arms slip down around my waist as my face presses into the crook of his neck, and against the top of my head, I can feel the warm pressure of his cheek.
Like he knows exactly how much I need him right now as I squeeze my eyes shut, trying not to crumble as I process the fact that I’ve never been as alone as I’d always thought.
“So…”
I look up from my phone at the sound of Charlie’s voice. For the last forty minutes, I’ve been hanging out in his old room, waiting for him to come back from his shower and getting dressed for the birthday celebration at his aunt and uncle’s house.
It had taken me all of five minutes to get myself dressed, just in a pair of dark washed jeans and a white button up, which is pretty much my only non-flannel option that’s not a t-shirt or sweatshirt.
To keep my mind off how much I wish we could have showered together, which would of course have led to thoughts of everything besides getting clean we could have done in said shower, I’d first entertained myself by looking around Charlie’s room.
Just like his room in Riverside when we were kids, the light purple walls are artistically decorated with Broadway musical posters; Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserable, Wicked, Chicago, Moulin Rouge, Cats, Peter Pan.
Everything is neat and tidy. Obviously, this could be attributed to the fact that he hasn’t actually lived here for five years, but I know Charlie well enough to know that the space wouldn’t have been any different when he was a teenager than it is now.
Thinking about post-Riverside teenage Charlie had, as always, turned on that ever-ready stream of self-reproach over what I’d done to him and how different everything could have been if I’d only realized sooner that I’ve always been in love with him.
Only today, I’d suddenly seen those thoughts in a new light.
Yesterday, realizing how wrong I’d been about Nora and Frank seeing me as nothing but someone to put up with for Charlie’s sake for all those years really shook me.
They’d beamed at Charlie and me when the two of us had come down to breakfast this morning, eyes homing in on our held hands before flashing back up to our faces, and I’d felt it all over again.
Welcome. Cared for. Wanted as a part of their happy, functional family I’d always imagined I was seen as nothing but a trespasser in.
I’d known I’d hated myself for what I’d done to Charlie when we were fifteen. But what I don’t think I’d realized until that moment was that I don’t think I’ve ever loved myself enough to feel like I deserve anything long before that.
That was how I’d ended up on my phone, Googling queer-friendly, online therapists specializing in childhood trauma.
Charlie is the only person I’ll ever love and want and need as wholly as I do.
But if I want to be good enough for him, if he’ll have me, I have to see that I’m better than I’ve ever let myself think.
I can’t be what he deserves if I’m caught in a loop, beating myself up over how I fucked everything up ten and a half years ago, or believing that, just because my dad never wanted me and never wanted me to be who I am, no one ever will.
I know Charlie does. I feel it and see it in everything that’s in him, just like I always have. And just like it always has, sometimes it scares the hell out of me. Because I can’t get it out of my head that I can’t possibly deserve him.
I broke us. For a decade, I left him believing that he didn’t mean the absolute fucking world to me, and I know I can’t move past this on my own.
And mixed in through all of it, I know I have to make sure I don’t blame my identity on the aro-ace spectrum for any of this.
Unlike what I’d thought when I was a mixed-up kid with no idea what the hell was going on with me, I know now that it never made me broken.
I’d honestly thought I’d fully embraced it (or what I thought it was, back when I’d been under the impression that it was demisexual and aro) until my realization of my feelings for Charlie had cranked up that already crippling guilt over how I’d cut him out of my life.
It's not that I feel like I harbor any negativity over my sexuality now, but the harder I look at myself, the more I realize I can’t untangle how I feel about the fact that things could have been so different with how everything went between Charlie and me if I’d just known from the beginning that I’ve always loved him, which I can’t help feeling would have been an awful lot easier to see if I’d felt the kind of attraction to him then that I do now.
One of many things that clicked for me yesterday, along with the realization that Charlie’s family has always been my family and that any barriers between us had been ones I’d kept around myself, is that I’ve held onto a lot more from my childhood than I’d thought.
I need to sort through the shit cluttering up the corners of my subconscious.
“So…”