Chapter Five
Jun_iper: Hey, it’s Jun
Jun_iper: you’re sweet to have messaged. Thnx for caring. Looks like I maybe went overboard with oversharing during that stream :P sorry to make you worry. I promise I’m okay. Just never been hung up on a guy like this before, and it’s messing with my head.
Jun_iper: Sorry to hear you’re going thru it, too. I hope things get better for you. What’s the situation between you and your guy, if you don’t mind sharing? No big deal if you’re not comfortable bringing it up. I get it.
Jun_iper: (I don’t check msgs often so if I don’t reply right away, it’s me, not you)
Miles stared at the screen, eyes roving over the lines of text over and over until they were etched into his brain.
He didn’t think he was even reading anymore, not really; instead, it was like he was tracing the lines and curves of each letter, trying to make new sense out of them after the words themselves left him aching with disbelief.
He had not expected Jun to actually reply to his DM.
He’d assumed that his inbox was so overflowing with fans trying to get his attention that he probably had a PR rep scouring through it constantly, just to make sure he didn’t miss anything important—but how could anyone, even a totally new hire, have deemed his silly little “woe is me, let’s commiserate” message as worthy of Jun’s time?
It seemed impossible.
But just as Jun had shocked him to his core by showing up at his doorstep, looking all ethereal and delicious, here were his words on Miles’s screen, composed in a message made specifically for him.
No PR rep had written that response, he was sure of that much.
Miles could read between the lines enough to feel the underlying thread of desperation that wove itself throughout Jun’s request for more information about Miles’s “guy.” Sure, it was possible he was just being polite, feigning interest, but he didn’t think that was the case.
To him, it seemed that Jun wanted to talk to someone who understood what he was going through.
Miles, of course, understood even better than Jun knew. But there was no way he could tell him that. Especially not now, since he had already presented himself as a stranger who just happened to relate.
Christ, why had he even sent that message in the first place?
What was he hoping to gain from digging this cavernous hole even deeper than it already was?
Maybe there was a part of him that hoped that Jun would be able to magically tell who was on the other side of the message and would know exactly what to say to calm Miles’s unrelenting anxiety.
Maybe he was hoping that Jun would make it all okay.
But it wasn’t okay, because here he was, sitting in the same place on his bed as he had the night before, when the plus sign on that godforsaken test had glared up at him so menacingly, and there was no way he could reveal himself to Jun now.
He couldn’t lay this burden on his shoulders. He wouldn’t.
However, leaving him on read felt equally wrong.
This game he was playing felt as dangerous as pulling the trigger during a round of Russian Roulette, but he hadn’t been using his common sense since this whole thing began, so he didn’t see much point in starting now.
He let himself give the message one last read-through, the words already committed to memory, then clicked to reply.
x_kilometers_x: Oh wow, I sent that message hoping you’d reply, but I must not have expected you to because now I’m all tongue tied lol.
Is it called tongue tied if it’s via chat?
What would you even call it? Typing tied?
Fingertip frozen? Keyboard stalled? Whatever, that’s probably not important, huh?
Oh dear, I’m rambling. Can you tell I’m the most awkward person alive?
? And I wonder why I have trouble with my love life…
x_kilometers_x: I don’t mind you asking, tho!
I mean, I’m the one who brought it up, right?
There’s not a whole lot to tell, anyway.
Similar to you, I guess, in that it was supposed to just be a hookup, but I had to go and get invested.
It’s so stupid, bc I am totally not the hookup type usually, but I was…
well, let’s just say, I wasn’t exactly thinking with my upstairs brain.
The only reason I did it was bc I was dying to get off (tmi, sorry), but then the guy was so sweet and gentle and GORGEOUS omg, and now he’s in my head 24/7 like a brain parasite, even though I’ll probably never see him again. So. That’s great haha.
Agonizing over every part of his reply down to the last comma, Miles finally decided that he wasn’t going to do much better than that.
He had made himself seem more pathetic and anxious than he probably needed to, but with the shield of anonymity at his disposal it wasn’t like he had to pretend to be well put together.
Frankly, he wasn’t sure he had enough imagination to pull that off convincingly, anyway.
Of course, the second he hit send, he panicked, because despite the tedious and detailed way he’d crafted his message, he had already found a flaw.
He’d depicted himself in such a way that Jun was going to see him as a bumbling fanboy, which hadn’t been Miles’s intention.
Hadn’t Jun said in his stream that it was nice to have been with someone who didn’t know who he was?
(Or, rather, who had pretended not to know who he was.)
Miles quickly typed up and sent a brief addendum:
x_kilometers_x: (Oh, and btw, I don’t mean I’m all tongue tied/fingertip frozen/whatever bc you’re famous. Like, that doesn’t HELP obviously, but rest assured, I would be just as awkward and embarrassing no matter who you were. I’m all about equality, you know.)
Grimacing, he closed his laptop a little harder than intended. Pathetic and anxious indeed, but it would have to do.
Miles managed to leave his laptop alone for a whole day before temptation took over. Twitchy from nerves, he opened it back up that evening and refreshed the page only to see that somehow, miraculously, Jun had replied.
Jun_iper: Brain parasite is such a good way to put it.
It’s been about a month now and I can’t shake him, and it’s not like I haven’t hooked up with guys and moved on without issue before.
There was just… something about him, you know?
We didn’t even talk for all that long, but I still feel like I know him.
Like I want to get to know him better. Like somehow, our souls already knew each other, and when we got together and got down to business, it was like coming home.
It’s messed up, especially knowing he doesn’t feel the same way about me.
Jun_iper: You have any tips for how to extract a parasite like this? Because I can’t keep simping forever, and rn it feels like I’m going to without some kind of intervention
Maybe Jun wasn’t talking about Miles. That was entirely possible, right?
Probable, even, right? If you thought about it?
Despite all evidence to the contrary? That had to be the case, because the alternative was that Jun—gorgeous, talented, funny, sex god Jun—was “simping” over a man whose personality essentially amounted to a sad and scared wet puppy shoved inside a human body.
God, he really needed to work on his self-esteem. What was it his therapist kept telling him to do? Rephrase. He needed to rephrase his thoughts to be more positive.
Miles, sitting cross-legged on his bed with his computer balanced on his lap, stared off into the middle distance for a moment, trying to think of a way to describe himself that wasn’t “a sad and scared wet puppy shoved inside a human body,” but he was coming up blank.
He’d worry about rephrasing tomorrow.
Right now he had bigger concerns, anyway.
Like the fact that Jun had replied to him again, which meant that he now had to send a reply back.
Again. Weren’t humans supposed to be fundamentally social creatures?
Hadn’t he heard that in his Sociology 101 class back in college?
If that were true, then you’d think that being able to have a simple conversation—one that wasn’t even in person, for fuck’s sake—would be considerably more intuitive to him than it was.
This wasn’t exactly a “simple” conversation, though, was it? This was a balancing act, and one slip off the tightrope would send him barreling down toward a series of confessions he did not want to make.
Yes, I am the guy you slept with.
Yes, I do know who you are and have since the start.
Yes, I have been longing for you like a wife standing on a pier staring out at the horizon after her husband has been lost at sea.
Oh, and while we’re at it, I should probably also tell you that we accidentally made a… Well, actually, maybe I’ll still keep that one to myself for now.
That last one made the back of his throat taste acidic, and he knew it was a warning to tread carefully.
His nausea had gotten bad enough that it was set on a hair trigger, and the slightest whiff of something would send him flying to the bathroom with his head over the toilet.
Work at the bakery had been hell. Usually the process of making pastries and cakes calmed him.
The act of kneading dough, measuring ingredients, decorating the finished products—all of it was soothingly predictable and routine.
It had been something stable and consistent his overactive, anxious mind could cling to, but now he dreaded it, because the smell of yeast and flour and sugar and the rest all made his stomach churn dangerously.
More than once, he’d come much too close to not making it to the bathroom in time, and god, the amount of bleach it would take to sterilize that whole kitchen if next time he wasn’t quick enough? It would not be a good time.