“Good. I’ll see you then.”
She left as she’d come, squeezing hurriedly out through the smallest sliver of the open door possible. The door clicked shut in her absence, and Jun sat in silence for a moment, reflecting on all she had told him, and what he would need to accomplish before the landscapers arrived. When the moment ended, he swiveled around to face his gaming setup. All three screens were on, Steam up, OBS firing. If he started recording content now, hecould be done with his day by lunchtime and have all afternoon to work on side projects.
But…
Jun raked his teeth across his bottom lip.
He should get back to work. It was the most sensible course of action. If he didn’t replenish his well of banked content and got knocked on his ass by a bout of unexpected illness, his income would plummet, and if his income plummeted, his team would feel the impact. There wasn’t time to mess around. He needed to stay on track not only for himself, but for the people on his payroll.
It would be irresponsible to open Twitch and check his inbox…
But he did it anyway.
The whisper Stella had mentioned was waiting for him, sent by a user who went by x_kilometers_x.
Kilometers.
Not Miles.
Jun’s heart gave a painful throb. It was just a coincidence, but it was a coincidence that felt to his aching heart like a sign.
Responsibility be damned, his fingers met the keyboard, and he replied.
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.)
