Page 3 of Tender
But Oliver deserved it, and it wasn’t like Miles had to pay for food or gas or utilities. Selene’s parents covered all of her expenses, and everything else she spent went on some credit card he knew she also didn’t pay for. He could lean on her a little heavier this month and make up for it the moment his summer classes started up.
“Thanks,” he said quietly. He took the cuffs to the register, and the tired woman said nothing as she rang him up. The transaction felt a little surreal as he watched her silently put the cuffs in a bag, then point to the credit card machine.
Maybe she couldn’t speak.
Or maybe she thought his CIs meant he couldn’t hear her at all.
There was no point in finding out. He just tipped his fingers from his chin and signed, ‘Thank you,’ before taking his things and heading out. Nancy was close at his heels, rambling again too fast for him to understand, but he knew she didn’t care. She liked having someone to talk at, and he liked having company.
It was a win-win.
Even if his life right then felt like a giant loss.
Miles was lying on the couch with his processors off. He had a docuseries on about EMTs in Australia playing on his laptop, the captions not the best, but not the worst. Not that he was paying much attention anyway. He had a mountain of work to finish and two chapters due in for edits for his dissertation and he was behind.
Like usual.
He’d been trying to write for the last two hours, but he hadn’t gotten more than fifty words down before he gave up. He was going to get told off for being late with his most recent chapter submissions, but he was struggling to give a shit these days. Half of him wanted to quit and find a job somewhere—something with a steady paycheck and some sort of financial security.
He felt like he’d been fed a lie when he was a kid and the caregivers at the group home would feed them all bullshit that all they had to do was work hard and believe in themselves.
He learned very quickly that not everyone could follow their dreams and be successful. No one had warned him that trying it would lead him to living with a girlfriend who seemed to hate his guts ninety percent of the time, hoping and praying he’d get lucky after he graduated and managed to find a job that paid the bills.
He had been warned that teaching wasn’t the most lucrative career and reaching a big, important job—like teaching at the Boston Theological Institute or at Duke—wouldn’t happen until he was old and grey, published five times over, and doing voice-overs for History Channel documentaries.
And he wasn’t sure he would look good with grey hair, and he didn’t think he had a face for TV.
He was half asleep when something near him buzzed and he scrambled up, realizing it was his phone. The silence around him was pressing, comforting, and he settled into it as he looked at the screen and saw Selene requesting a FaceTime.
He answered and watched her face before the captions began to scroll across the screen. “What are you doing? Are you asleep right now?”
“Obviously I’m not sleeping right now.”
“Were.” He saw her lips and chin stress the word. “Were you asleep. Your ears off?”
He’d always hated when she called his CIs ears. He had ears on his head, even if they didn’t work without tech. But he didn’t bother arguing about it. He held up a finger, then fumbled around in his bag for the case. He didn’t look at the screen until he got his hearing back online. He wasn’t in the mood to watch her impatience.
He had a feeling it was going to be one ofthosedays and God, he was so tired ofthosedays.
His head swam a little as his right ear fluttered into sound. His left stayed stubbornly silent and he realized the battery was dead. It was fine. One was enough. Sitting back, he picked up the phone again and saw the screen had gone black. She’d hung up and sent a text.
Selene: I’m going out with friends for the weekend. I’ll be back Wednesday.
He wondered what life would feel like if his weekends went from Thursday to Wednesday. But that would never be him. He never wanted that to be him. Even if he’d chosen an absurdly rich man to settle down with, he wouldn’t want that life. He would never feel secure or safe if he couldn’t take care of himself. It had been the one thing he promised himself when he left foster care: he would never again have to rely on someone for food or shelter.
And now look at him.
But it was temporary, he told himself. It wasn’t forever. Even if he and Selene lived together for the rest of their lives, he was determined to be able to support himself without her help. No matter what.
Flopping back to the cushions, he scrolled through his contacts and stared at Oliver’s name. He couldn’t call him, even if he knew for sure Oliver would pick up. His best friend was on his honeymoon, and he would be damned if he interrupted that.
He scrolled back up and settled on Juno’s name. After years of mostly silence, Oliver’s wedding had rekindled the flame that had been their unbreakable friendship. They settled in together like nothing had ever changed—like they’d never been apart.
They hadn’t talked much since Miles had made his great escape thanks to Selene, but there had been texts, and memes, and Instagram reels that allowed Miles to feel connected to the people Juno and Oliver had become.
He missed them. He’d always missed them, of course, but now he felt it like a sort of burning in his chest. Without really thinking, he hit Juno’s contact, and then the little camera.
The FaceTime music pinged, and just when he thought the call was going to end, his friend’s face appeared in the screen.
