Miles Lindgren's Arc

Chapter 2 of 13

Chase set a coffee down in front of him without being asked, black, the way Miles always took it, and dropped into the chair across from him. Outside, the sky was doing that thing it always did here in winter, staying grey and undecided until well past nine, like the sun couldn't be bothered to commit either way. "Talk to me," Chase said. Miles wrapped both hands around the cup instead of drinking it. He watched the steam curl up and thought about how many mornings just like this one they'd had, different rooms, different cities, same two cups of coffee, one black, one with too much sugar, made without asking because after five years you stopped needing to ask. It was strange, how the small mechanics of loving someone outlasted the actual loving. "We need to go see my parents," he said. "Before anything else today." Chase went still in the particular way he did when he was recalculating something. "That wasn't on the schedule." "I know. It should've been." Miles turned the cup slowly on the table. "I want to see them before we film anything." "Then we go." Chase was already up, already reaching for his jacket off the back of the chair, and something about the speed of it, no hesitation, no debate, loosened something in Miles's chest just slightly. They filmed a short segment in the driveway anyway, Chase's call, quick and unscripted. "Before anything else today," Miles said to the lens, "we're headed to see my parents. It's been a while." He paused, and this part he didn't have to fake. "Dani's mother still lives next door. I haven't seen her since before I left. I'm not sure I'm ready to yet, but I know I will have to." Chase didn't say anything clever back this time. He just put a hand on Miles's shoulder, and let the camera sit on it a beat too long, and for once the silence between them on camera was the realest thing they'd filmed in years. Then he clicked it off, and the walk up to the door was just the two of them again. Miles's mother opened the door before he'd even knocked. She must have been watching the driveway. The sound she made, half laugh, half something breaking open, was one Miles felt in his sternum, and then she had both arms around him hard enough to knock him a step back. "Ten years since you've stood in this doorway," she said into his shoulder. "Ten years, Miles." "I know, Mom." "I don't care how many times you fly me out there or how many Christmases I get you for. This house is different, and you know it." She pulled back to look at him properly, both hands on his face, cataloguing him the way mothers do, the new lines, the tired eyes, whatever else she was reading that he hadn't meant to show her. Then her gaze found Chase behind him in the doorway and her whole face opened up again. "And you. Get over here, don't just stand there." Chase stepped into it, into her arms, easy and warm, murmuring something about how good it was to see her, which was true, and strange in its truth, since he'd seen her three months ago at his own place for dinner. This house clearly meant something different to all of them, Miles included. His father came around the corner from the kitchen, drying his hands on a dish towel slung over one shoulder, and the grin that broke across his face made Miles feel sixteen again, in the good way, the way that had nothing to do with any of the things twelve years and a manila folder had done to that particular age. "There he is," his father said, pulling him into one of those handshake-into-hug things men do, gripping the back of Miles's neck for a second like he was checking he was solid. "Back where he belongs. Finally." They ended up in the kitchen, which hadn't changed, same yellow curtains, same chipped mug his father used for coffee that his mother had threatened to throw out every year for two decades and never had. Miles sat where he'd always sat, and Chase sat beside him without thinking about it, close enough that their knees touched under the table, and Miles let it happen because pulling away would have needed an explanation neither of them had ready. His father wanted to talk about the show, a case from eight months back he'd apparently rewatched twice, asking sharp, genuinely curious questions that made Chase light up in the way he always did when someone engaged with the actual work instead of the persona. His mother kept finding reasons to touch Miles's arm, his shoulder, brush his hair back once like he was eight, checking he was solid too, in her own way. "When I called you about the case," she said, setting a plate down in front of him he hadn't asked for, "I didn't have much to tell you. But I talked to Carol down the street yesterday, and she heard from someone at the station, they found bones out at the old ice-cutting operation. Human. That's confirmed. They just don't know whose yet." Miles's hand went still around his fork. "Nobody told us that." "I figured you'd find out today anyway, filming out there. I didn't want you walking into it blind." His mother's face had gone careful, the way it did whenever she had to say something that might hurt. "I'm sorry, baby. I know what you're hoping it isn't." "We don't know anything yet," his father said, gentler than his usual tone. "Could be anyone. Anyone who ever went missing out this way." Miles nodded, and didn't say anything. Under the table, Chase's hand settled on his knee and squeezed once, gentle, no words attached to it. Miles leaned into it before he'd thought about doing so, shoulder finding Chase's, some old instinct answering before he could stop it. He caught himself half a second too late. Pulling away now would mean explaining why, with his mother two feet away and already watching him too closely, so he stayed where he was and let it happen. At one point his mother reached across the table and squeezed Chase's hand too, easy, automatic, the gesture of someone who'd folded a person permanently into her family years ago and never once revisited the decision. "We're so glad you two are doing this together," she said. "That helps, doesn't it? Having each other for something this hard." "It does," Miles said, and let himself lean into it, into the story of it, because some days the line between playing devoted and needing exactly that blurred until he couldn't find the seam. "I don't know how I'd do any of this without him." Chase's hand went still on his knee for half a second, like the sentence had caught him off guard, before his thumb started moving again, slow, absentminded, an old habit neither of them had thought to retire. Miles covered his hand with his own, and didn't examine too closely which parts of the last thirty seconds had been true. His father, oblivious, chose that exact moment to lean back in his chair with the particular satisfaction of a man about to say something he'd clearly been saving. "Speaking of which. Your mother and I keep saying, five years now, and no ring yet. What are you waiting for?" Miles's stomach dropped somewhere near the floor. "Dad." "I'm just an old man who wants a wedding to go to." "We're not engaged," Miles said, and heard how strangled it came out, and beside him felt Chase's hand tighten fractionally around his own before Chase smoothly took over, laughing, easy, effortless. "Not yet," Chase said, throwing Miles a look that would have read, to anyone watching, as fond and teasing. "He knows I'm saving it for the right moment. Don't rush art, Dad." His father laughed, delighted, and his mother swatted his arm and said something about giving the boys space, and the moment passed the way Chase always managed to make moments pass, smoothly, believably, at no visible cost to himself. Except Miles felt the cost. He felt it in the half-second too long Chase held his own smile after the joke landed, the muscle memory of performance running a beat past where the real feeling had already left the building. Under the table, Miles didn't let go of his hand. Later, while his father showed Chase old photo albums in the living room, Miles at nine, Miles at Homecoming, Miles and Dani at fourteen sitting on the porch steps that made something in Miles's chest clench when he heard his father land on that page, his mother pulled him toward the sink under the pretense of drying dishes. "You look tired, baby," she said, quiet, just for him. "I'm fine, Mom." "You don't have to be fine with me. You never did." She handed him a plate to dry, studying him sideways the way she'd done his whole life, like she could see straight through whatever arrangement he was making with his own face. "Is it the bones? Or is it something else?" Miles looked past her, into the living room, where Chase was laughing at something his father had said, unguarded, warm, exactly like a man who hadn't spent the last two years learning how to be careful. "Both, I think," Miles said. "And Chase, is he doing all right? He seems a little quiet today. Not himself." Miles's hands went still on the dish towel. "He's fine, Mom." She studied him a second longer, and whatever she saw, she let it go, the way she'd let a hundred things go over the years without ever fully believing them, pressing his hand once, warm, and turning back to the sink. "Well. I'm glad you have each other," she said. "That's all I've ever wanted for you." Miles didn't correct her. He wasn't sure, standing in his mother's kitchen with a dish towel in his hands and Chase's laugh drifting in from the other room, that he entirely knew how to. They didn't talk in the car until they were almost back at Frost Inn, the town sliding by grey and familiar and strange all at once. "Thank you," Miles said finally. "For today." "Of course." Chase kept his eyes on the road, both hands at ten and two, more careful than the empty road required. Miles almost said more. He didn't. "You're good with them," he said instead. "My parents. Still." "I like them." Chase's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "That was never the hard part." Miles didn't ask what the hard part was. Neither of them said anything else the rest of the drive. Miles looked out his own window, watching Cutter's Bend go by, and told himself the ache in his chest was about the case. About the bones. About anything other than the fact that somewhere in that kitchen, for just a second, it had felt like nothing had changed at all.