Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Miles
M iles lay on his front, his stomach pressed into the mattress and his face smooshed into his pillow, head tilted to the side just enough that he didn’t accidentally smother himself to death—although, truth be told, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. A little bit of suffocation was nothing compared to the fear, shame, and mortification that he was pretty damn sure was waiting for him in the bathroom.
He was, to put it simply, a complete and total idiot.
It had been roughly a month and some change since that drop-dead gorgeous alpha had graced his doorstep and proceeded to fuck him into another dimension, and with each passing day, Miles had begun to notice more and more that maybe a typed-out message and a phone number weren’t the only things Jun had left behind when he’d disappeared from his apartment without saying goodbye.
And no, okay, Miles hadn’t called him. He’d tried. He had really, truly tried. During that first week, he would regularly take out his phone and begin crafting a text message, only to quickly delete it and chastise himself for being ridiculous.
Miles
Hey, it’s Miles. We uh, had sex? Remember?
Delete!
Miles
I had a nice time too. Maybe we could meet up again? This is Miles, btw. Hope you remember me lol…
Delete!
Miles
I thought about you in the shower this morning and couldn’t help wrapping my hand around my?—
Delete, delete, delete!
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t reach out to him. This wasn’t something he did. The fact that he’d downloaded Grindr in the first place was surprising. The fact that he’d opened Grindr and actually pursued a hookup was unheard of. The fact that he’d actually hooked up with someone was “aliens have landed on Earth and are demanding Little Debbie’s snack cakes” levels of unbelievable. And with Jun, of all people! He had been so utterly certain that Jun would turn tail and run the second he saw him in person that he didn’t even feel all that anxious replying to his DMs, because it wasn’t like anything was going to come from it.
And yet.
Miles’s stomach churned, like it had been doing increasingly often over the past few days. It was officially getting to the point where he could no longer convince himself that it was because of a bug that was going around, or the questionable burrito from the back of his freezer that he’d eaten as a pathetic dinner last Sunday because he hadn’t felt up to going grocery shopping.
This can’t be what I think it is, he told himself for the millionth time.
All the signs are there! another voice in his head countered, also for the millionth time. He’d been having this internal argument on a near constant basis during all his waking hours, and he knew that he just needed to rip the proverbial Band-Aid off and find out for sure so he could stop going around in circles, but… what if it was true?
He’d been one hundred percent honest when he’d told Jun that he was on birth control. What he’d failed to mention, however, was that he’d recently switched types, his old one having caused a lot of annoying mood swings and night sweats… but he honestly hadn’t thought it was that big of a deal! Birth control was birth control, right? What difference did it make if it was just a different type?
But then—after his heat had started to fade earlier than he expected, and the stomachaches and exhaustion had begun getting more frequent—he’d gone and dug through the drawer in his room where he tossed things he didn’t particularly want, but that felt too important to throw away, and dug out the information pamphlet the new pills had come with. He’d read it from start to finish, making sure to read the fine print this time.
May take up to two full weeks to take effect. Use alternative preventative methods in the interim period to prevent pregnancy.
Yeah, the sad part about that was it wasn’t even in the fine print. It was right there on page two, clear as day, under the subsection “Important Information About Your New Birth Control.”
But who actually read those pamphlets anyway? Shouldn’t his doctor have told him the pills might not be effective right away, just in case? Frankly, if anyone was at fault here, it was his primary care physician, and not himself for being such a complete slut in bed, begging to be fucked raw by a total stranger. He had actually removed the condom from his cock for him.
But yeah, definitely the doctor’s fault.
His stomach churned again.
Lost in his anxiety spiral, Miles startled when he felt his phone buzz with a notification somewhere in the vicinity of his head. He patted around blindly until his hand found the device. He instinctively pressed the button on the side, illuminating the screen, and squinted at the brightness of it—he hadn’t bothered to turn on a light, and at some point during his lament, the sun had set without his knowledge.
Jun_iper is going live in fifteen minutes! the notification read, tone jaunty and excitable, totally oblivious to Miles’s internal woes.
“Hrrnggh,” Miles groaned, dropping his phone and smashing his face fully into the pillow, oxygen be damned. Perfect, he thought. Impeccable fucking timing.
Because that was the other Thing with a capital T that Miles had spent the past few weeks trying not to feel guilty about. It wasn’t as though they’d had an in-depth talk about their personal lives outside of Grindr when Jun had slid into his DMs—most of their conversation had been pretty singularly focused on what they wanted to do to each other that night—but still, Miles had felt then, and continued to feel now, that he had been lying by omission by not telling Jun that he knew who he was.
Actually, it was worse than that.
He had known who Jun was because he happened to be a diehard fan of his. Like “pay to receive exclusive content from his channel even though he could definitely be using that money for groceries” levels of diehard fan.
For the record, he had not sought Jun out, nor had he even known he was in town. The fact that he had reached out to Miles had been nothing more than a fluke. In fact, becoming a fan of Jun’s video game streaming channel had been a total fluke, too.
Since he was a young kid, Miles had always found comfort in video games. When his parents would argue about nothing and everything, he would escape to his room and turn on a game—usually something that required puzzle solving or world-building—and get lost in it for hours. He wasn’t a particularly skilled gamer—he wasn’t even sure if he would call himself a gamer , exactly, at least not in any serious capacity—but they were more than just entertainment to him. He associated video games with safety and contentment in his otherwise unstable world.
Because of this, when he discovered video game streams, he tended to stay away from streamers who had “holier than thou” personalities, or who took their rules so seriously that they forgot that games were supposed to be fun. Through a long process of trial and error, he had found the content creators he found personally appealing, but it always felt like a risk going outside his comfort zone to try out new creators. For a long time, Miles had known that Jun existed, but only tangentially. He’d known of him the way you would know of an extremely famous pop star whose music you’d never heard before in your life.
But then that chest cold happened. A nasty, vicious chest cold that then made a home in his lungs and confined him to bed with a serious case of bronchitis for an entire week.
Hacking up phlegm, unable to work or really do anything that required more than the baseline amount of cognition, Miles spent those seven days consuming more media than he had in the previous two months combined. Around day four, he’d officially run out of familiar content to keep his mind off his misery, and had decided to branch out, clicking on Jun’s profile as an act of desperation.
He’d been hooked ever since.
And that was why this whole… incident was more than a complete and total trainwreck. It was several trainwrecks at once. It was several trains, full of clowns, wrecking at a crossing and exploding into confetti and red rubber nose balls.
Because it was looking more and more like he had gotten pregnant by one of his favorite celebrities.
How could something that sounded like it had been plucked directly from his fantasies be such a nightmare in real life?
Fuck bronchitis, fuck Jun and his beautiful face and hilariously engaging livestreams, and fuck that pregnancy test sitting on the bathroom counter that he swore he could hear mocking him from across the hall.
Rolling onto his back, he scrubbed his face with his hands and blinked back the stars that formed in his eyes when he removed them. He couldn’t just lie there and hope this problem would go away on its own. He knew that, because he had already tried it, and it was clear that things were only going to get worse the longer he lived in denial. Best to just take the test and deal with things from there.
That, and he also really needed to pee.
Besides, there was still a chance that it wouldn’t be positive. That all the various symptoms he’d been experiencing were just psychosomatic. Right?
The gurgle that roiled through his belly seemed rather pointed, and he sighed.
Okay, let’s count down from five, he told himself.
It was a trick a therapist once taught him. When you’re stuck because you’re avoiding a task, start at five and count down, and on one force yourself up, like you’re a rocket ship taking off.
Five, he said internally.
Four…
Three…
Two…
One!
With a groan, he stumbled ungracefully out of bed and headed to the bathroom, flicking on his bedroom light as he went.
Once he was actually in motion, the act of taking the test was fairly quick and simple, the process delayed only when he read through the instructions a couple times more than necessary in one last attempt to stall.
He’d snagged the test from the drug store earlier, face burning the entire time, as if anyone around him gave even the smallest amount of fucks about what he was doing there in the family planning aisle. Even still, he had thanked every god he could think of for the advent of self-checkout.
It was the cheapest test they sold, and supposedly took five entire minutes to show results. Five. Whole. Minutes. That was like… a lot of seconds—whatever, he was bad at math—but the point was, despite the hours he’d spent avoiding the test, five minutes seemed like an impossibly long amount of time to wait. He only had so much willpower; he needed to know how screwed he was now.
After snapping the cap onto the test and washing his hands, he brought the stick with him back into his bedroom, where he took out his phone and opened his Twitch app. Jun’s stream was listed right at the top, and Miles clicked into it, put it on full screen, then pressed his volume button until it was at maximum. As he propped the phone up on one of his pillows and sat crisscross in front of it, Jun’s gorgeous voice filled the room.
“Someone in the chat just asked why I haven’t done a livestream in a while,” he was saying, eyes glancing at where Miles knew the constant stream of comments was filtering past on his screen, before turning back to the game he was playing—Miles wasn’t even sure what it was, nor did it particularly matter to him. All he was seeking right now was comfort, and although Jun was right at the heart of his anxieties, Miles couldn’t help the almost Pavlovian sense of calm that washed over him as he listened to him talk.
“Well, first off, I just got back from tour—big thanks to everyone who showed up, by the way, I had a great time,” Jun continued. He unconsciously brushed a strand of his jet-black hair out of his face, and Miles thought about how he had wrapped his fingers through those medium-length locks and tugged when Jun buried himself inside him all the way to the hilt. Jun shifted in his chair, his t-shirt riding up slightly, and Miles remembered the washboard abs that were currently hidden from view. They had glistened with sweat, making Jun taste like salt when Miles licked down his sternum.
His eyes wandered the screen and landed on Jun’s chest, and he smiled slightly to himself with the memory of the adorable Legend of Zelda flash tattoo that was inked into the skin of his left pec. It had been that tattoo—so tiny and innocuous, but so clearly full of memories and childish joy—that had made Miles a goner. That tattoo had humanized him, turning him from a famous celebrity to a sweet, albeit ungodly attractive man who was so diligent and thorough in taking care of him that Miles, a chronic insomniac, had slept like a fucking rock for the first time in ages.
“… also got a lot on my mind.” Miles, briefly distracted by his memories, tuned back in to whatever Jun was talking about. The corner of Jun’s mouth was in a slight downturn, and his thin, dark brows were knitted in thought. “This might be getting too personal, but have any of you ever felt a really intense connection with someone you’ve only known for a short time?”
Miles sucked in a breath, watching Jun scan the comments out of the corner of his eye.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean, Alyssa,” he said, responding to a viewer. “A situation where technically the two of you are strangers, but you have the overwhelming feeling that you… I dunno, are supposed to know each other for some reason. It’s hard to explain, I guess, but the point is, I experienced that a few weeks ago and I just can’t seem to stop thinking about it.”
His eyes skimmed the comments again and a moment later he barked out a laugh. “Casey says ‘how to tell your Twitch audience you caught feelings during a one-night stand without saying you had a one-night stand.’ Yeah, okay Casey, you caught me. He was a really sweet guy, though… Yeah, Devin, I gave him my number, but he didn’t call. He probably looked me up and got spooked. I didn’t tell him what I did for a living, which, I dunno, maybe was wrong of me, but I didn’t expect it to be anything but a fling, you know? Besides, it was kind of nice being with someone who didn’t know who I was. I think it would be hard to be with someone who knew who I was on here before meeting me, just because they’d already have all these opinions formed… Ha! You guys, stop with the crying emojis, I’m sure you can find some other streamer to date.”
Miles didn’t realize he’d been clenching his jaw until his back molars began to ache. Hastily, he opened his mouth and rubbed his cheek with a grimace. He tapped his phone screen to see the time. It had been well over five minutes. Closing his eyes briefly, he took a deep, steadying breath, and then turned the test over in his lap.
“Shit,” he said to the empty room.
What the hell was he going to do?
x_kilometers_x: Hey… Sorry if this is weird, and tbh I don’t even know if you’ll see this comment, but I heard what you said on your livestream about catching feelings for a guy you hardly know, and just… I can relate, ig, and so if you ever want to talk about it feel free to DM me. No hard feelings if not. Hope you’re doing okay. xo