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It’s silent in the room between them. They’re half a bedroom apart, overlaid in the deep blue of night and the sharp yellow of the bedside lamp. Phoenix sits on the bed, rolling his shoulders under the tense fabric of a well-worn white button-up shirt. Miles has shed his entirely, standing with his knuckles brushing the long curtains hung across the window, looking out through the two inch sliver of exposed glass out into Los Angeles.
He looks down at his hands in the moonlight. Pale, cold, crisp ivory, long and pristine. Miles can imagine Phoenix’s hands well, tense, calloused and worn, but overwhelmingly warm. He glances over to see them loop around Phoenix’s tie and pull it over his head.
There’s words in the silence. Miles can see them written on the walls, in the shadows, crawling under the door and leaking like a faulty pipe past the drywall. They’re whispering, drip, drip, drip, and he shivers as one sweats down his back. It’s freezing. Phoenix pays this no mind.
Miles feels the fulfillment of a workday well-spent shed off as the distance overwhelms him. His therapist told him he needs to stop running from conversations, to learn from them, accept his analytical mind and supply it with oxygen from a breath of dialogue, but right now he feels less like he’s running and more like he’s stuck in freefall.
Regardless, Miles tries. Progress, he thinks.
“You know,” he begins, the other man’s name caught in the enamel of his teeth. Too vulnerable. Phoenix jolts regardless, back still turned to him. “I think you need a vacation.”
Phoenix scoffs. “Never thought I’d hear that out of your mouth, Miles. I just got back into the swing of things and you’re already trying to get rid of me?” he jabs back, turning his head so Miles can get a look at the side of his face. He isn’t looking Miles in the face, his eyes scanning somewhere between his chest and the floor. “Thought you said you missed me?”
“I do,” Miles sighs, turning his face back out to face the night sky. Less distracting. “Or, well… I did, I am very grateful to have you back with us. It’s more so that I have been considering the grand-scheme of your situation and I have realized that, despite your time apart, you never truly got a break.”
He isn’t interrupted, and Phoenix is still, so he continues. “You need some time away from your responsibilities. From law, political disputes, the agency, me, I feel that I ha-”
“What do you mean, you?” Phoenix interjects, causing Miles’s attention to snap back around. He’s rigid, head turned straight forward, away from Miles.
Swallowing the tangle of words in his throat, Miles says, “I mean… maintaining the position we are in requires energy, input from both sides, yes? It isn’t effortless, it is as straining as anyone else’s… endeavors down this path would be, and it is not expected of you to be able to perform those expectations to your best ability at all times. A break is not an unreasonable request.”
Phoenix clicks his tongue. Under his breath, Miles hears him ask, “Did I do something wrong?”
“Heavens, no, Phoenix, you haven’t done a single thing wrong,” Miles frowns, taking a deep breath to look back outside. He locks eyes with the moon. “That’s… that is the problem , you haven’t done anything wrong, not a single thing since you’ve come back to me, and that is not… the burden of that is a heavy one. I do not want to put you in a position where you feel you must take that on alone. We are but human, after all.”
“I feel… an immeasurable level of guilt, for all the things I have done to you. Please-” Miles raises his hand gently in the direction of Phoenix’s inhaled breath, fingertips facing his partner as he closes his eyes for a brief moment. “Let me finish.” He lowers his hand and continues when there is no resistance. “I am proud of where I am now, but I fear the cards I have dealt to you in the past still linger, and I am… ashamed to say, I’ve thought very little prior as to how that could be hurting you.”
“You have shouldered so much of my pain, Phoenix. So many of my concerns, my wants, and my needs- you have taken care of them, of me , and I… I’ve done so little for you. I know you would probably say otherwise, but I know myself. I don’t find it easy to give, it has always been in my nature to… to take.”
“I…” Miles steadies himself with a slow, steady inhale. Phoenix has gratefully followed his request to stay silent, and Miles doesn’t want to let this moment slip from his fingertips. There’s so many things he needs to say, needs to get out into the air. To show him he cares. “In a way, I feel that I am the worst kind of person for you. You deserve someone who will not only refrain from burdening you with their own concerns, but also lift some of your own in return. I…” Miles hears his own voice go quiet. “I fear that I have done neither.”
“It is not that I do not love you enough to do so, I love you so, so much, I am just… I never learned how to love someone in that way. You taught me so much about weakness and vulnerability, and I am so grateful, but I know so little about how to be strong in the ways you need of me. You complete me, and you’ve told me the same in return, however… the way we are now, I think the ways in which we are completing each other is by filling in the remnant craters of our own decay. I do not want you to lose yourself in the process, dear.”
He hears no response in the minute to follow. Finally opening his eyes, Miles looks out across the quiet, the gap between himself and Phoenix. He expects to see him deep in thought, perhaps with his eyebrows drawn in that way that makes his nose scrunched up, maybe with his lips pursed against his thumb. That beautiful flash that passes over his eyes when he’s pondering something so thoroughly it is almost as though he does not exist within space and time itself, so familiar to Miles from across an even greater distance.
Instead, Phoenix is staring him down, his expression pure vitriol. The spark in his eyes is almost threatening now, like a lit cigarette dangling over petrol, entire body tense.
Through clamped teeth, Phoenix grits out, “Go to bed, Miles.”
Caught off guard, Miles knows he must look like a fox in headlights, fur bristled and ears flat in the face of a nearly assured death. He isn’t good at reading faces, but Phoenix’s entire demeanor is screaming You fucked up. He’s fully aware that if he lets this drop now, they will never mention it again, or he’ll run the risk of Phoenix walking out on him forever.
The scales they’ve balanced are tilting, not in either favor, but instead at the base. Unsure. Unstable.
So Miles steps out of the crossfire.
“Alright,” he whispers, body creaking as he slowly moves to sit on the edge of his own side of their shared bed. His hands are shaking when he reaches up for his glasses, setting them on the bedside table. The world blurs, but he still can’t bring himself to look back at Phoenix’s face, distant and out of focus. “Goodnight, Phoenix.”
There’s no reply from the other side, only an answerless shuffle of blankets and dropping of clothes. Miles isn’t sure how long he sits there, staring out into the wordless bedroom, but he watches the world fall to darkness as Phoenix shuts off the lamp with a resolute click .
Miles doesn’t come to until he hears something tap against the window. He can barely see it through the fog of his vision and mind, but something in him processes it as rain, drip, drip, dripping down the glass.
He isn’t sure how he missed the storm clouds. They must have been right in front of him.
Miles feels the rain on his face.