Funny Story

I PLAN TO dart into a bathroom and catch my breath, convince my brain to quit spinning. But I don’t pass a bathroom, so instead I find myself bursting through the front doors so forcefully that the valet yelps in surprise.

“Sorry!” I stammer, moving toward the dark parking lot.

“Daphne!” Miles calls, jogging after me. “Daphne?”

I slow to a stop and try to seem and be as normal as possible. “I’m okay,” I say, facing him. “Just got a little dizzy.”

“Shit.” He comes closer, touches my waist as he hunches to peer into my eyes. “You’re probably dehydrated. Let’s sit down and I’ll get you some water.”

I shake my head. “No, it’s fine. I think I should just head home.”

“I’ll get the keys from the valet,” he says.

“No,” I insist. “I’ll grab a cab.”

He studies me with the wary concern of a veterinarian examining a dog who just scarfed down a full espresso chocolate cake. “If you’re leaving, I am too.”

Oh, right.

Because while my brain was claustrophobically swirling with Miles, he hasn’t forgotten that the love of his life is in there with another man.

“So you’ll wait here?” He ducks his head again. “You won’t run if I go get the keys?”

I shake my head. He lets go of my elbow and jogs back across the lot. By the time he gets back, I’m a little calmer.

He opens my door for me first, then goes to get in the driver’s seat, starting the engine. “When did it start?”

“When did what start?” I say.

Creases rise from the insides of his brows. “The dizziness.”

It takes a second to remember what he’s talking about. “Oh. Just while we were dancing. I already feel a lot better.”

He studies me for a long moment, then nods and backs out of the parking space. We drive in silence for several minutes, winding down the curve of the peninsula toward town, and I keep my eyes fixed out the window on the moon, watching it sparkle and vanish behind the tree line before popping back into view.

The truck slows, drifting toward the dirt shoulder, and I face the windshield, expecting to find a deer blocking our way, but the road is empty, still.

Miles puts the truck into park. “Will you tell me what’s going on, Daphne?” he asks in a gravel.

“Nothing,” I say.

“It’s not nothing,” he says. “Did something happen? With Peter?”

“No,” I insist.

“You can tell me,” he says.

But I can’t. That claustrophobic feeling is back, embarrassment and want mixed together. I push open the truck door and stumble into the dark.

Miles climbs out too. “Where are you going?”

“I just need some air.” It’s the simplest version of the truth.

He rounds the hood of the car to stand in front of me. “Did I do something?”

“No.” I’ve never been a good liar.

“Daphne,” he says gently. “Please just tell me what I did.”

And despite every intention of keeping all these feelings a secret until the end of the summer, I blurt, “You kissed me.”

His brow shoots up. “I thought that was what you wanted. I thought that’s what we were doing.”

“No, I know.” I step back, my spine meeting the side of the bench seat. “We were. I just—it’s different now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to play that game anymore,” I say. “I don’t want you to say things you don’t mean and do things you don’t want to do. It’s confusing.”

“Who says I did anything I don’t want to do?” he asks.

“You did,” I fire back. “You’re the one who told me you don’t want anything to happen between us—”

“I never said that,” he argues, stepping closer.

“—and I don’t want to be a prop to make your ex jealous, and I know I started it—”

“You’re not a prop,” he says, looking hurt.

“That’s exactly what I just was,” I counter. “You only want to kiss me when they’re there to see it. And I know I started it, but things are different now.”

Miles’s gaze drops on a hoarse laugh, a shake of his head. He steps in closer, our hips brushing.

Then he looks back up, takes my face in both hands, and kisses me again.

Rough, deep, messy, breathless.

With no one to see it.

Nothing to stop us.

His hips pin mine back to the side of the passenger seat. His hands move around to my back, spreading out over my bare spine, our chests pressing together, his heat cutting through the cold night. “I want to kiss you,” he murmurs, drawing back a mere inch, “every time you take a sip of something and make that sound.”

I pull him back to me, that sound slipping from my mouth into his. My hands climb into his hair. His scrape down over my sides, his thigh pushing in between mine. “I want to kiss you every time I walk past your bedroom and hear your laugh through the door,” he says, and his hands steal beneath the hem of my dress, all the way up to cradle my hips, my skin prickling like every cell wants to be a little bit closer to him.

I untuck his shirt from his waistband. My hands skim up over his back, greedily touching every warm curve I can get to.

“I want to kiss you every time I hear the shower turn on and know that you’re in there,” he rasps.

I touch his stomach, his chest, the muscles tightening as my fingertips brush over them, and he takes hold of my hips, lifting me up into the truck.

“I want to kiss you all the time, Daphne,” he says. “Sometimes it’s just easier to find an excuse.”

I pull him closer by the belt loops, his hands grazing over my thighs as he pushes in between them. The curves of our bodies melt together. His parted lips run along my neckline. I scoot deeper into the truck, drawing him in after me, then climbing across his lap.

His hands trace down my sides, his eyes dark. “Daphne,” he says, a throaty rumble.

I reach back and undo the clasp at my neck, let the front of my dress fall to my waist.

He groans, lightly cupping my breasts, lowering his mouth to lick me, then take me between his lips.

I gasp, grip the back of his neck, my body arching into his.

“What are we doing?” he murmurs against my skin.

“What do you want to do?” I ask.

A slow, testing thrust of his hips, the friction dividing my thoughts into fractals.

His mouth drags back up my throat, his breath hot. “I want,” he says raggedly, “to undress you. And taste you. I want to hear you come again, and feel it too.”

The fractals become fireworks, a kaleidoscope of sensations and needs.

Miles’s silky dark hair between my fingers.

His rough hands up under my dress, finding the lace of my underwear.

The pressure of his warm mouth on my chest, and the cool air kissing every other inch of exposed skin as the need and pleasure build together.

“Miles,” I gasp, moving myself against him.

His eyes slant up, his mouth still on me, his eyes nearly black. It’s an unbearably sexy image. “Tell me to stop,” he says.

“I don’t want you to stop,” I pant out. “I want to undress you. I want to taste you. I want to feel you come.”

“Fuck, Daphne.” He presses his forehead against my shoulder, his heart slamming into me, his hands braced lightly against my ribs, holding himself back from me. His low groan turns into a pained laugh.

He straightens up, redoes the clasp behind my neck, and lets his hands slide down to my thighs. “I’m not good at this,” he says roughly.

“Good at what?” I ask.

“When things get complicated,” he scratches out, “I panic and shut down, and I don’t want to do that right now. I can’t.”

My stomach sinks. “It doesn’t have to be complicated.”

“It already is,” he says.

“Because of Petra?” I ask.

“No,” he says, tenderly tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “Not just that.”

I slide out of his lap, blushing furiously.

“Hey.” He reaches out, takes my hand.

“It’s okay,” I say quietly. “You don’t owe me any kind of explanation.”

“Daphne,” he says, his voice heartbreakingly soft.

I look up and meet his eyes, all dark now, without any kind of glimmer.

“There’s a lot of shit I don’t like to talk about.” His voice splinters. “The thing is, I have a bad habit of letting down the people I care about. I don’t always think things through, and my feelings aren’t something I can trust.”

“What is there to trust?” I shake my head. “You feel however you feel.”

He looks down at our hands, folds his fingers into mine. After several seconds, he clears his throat, but his face stays torqued, his eyes hyperfocused on our hands.

“Growing up . . .” He hesitates for a long moment, visibly weighing his next words. “Our feelings—mine, Julia’s, my dad’s—those didn’t matter much.”

His jaw muscles flex as he swallows. His pulse speeds against my palm. “All that mattered was how it affected our mom,” he says. “If we made her look good, then she loved us. And if we didn’t, then we were ‘out to get her.’ Once I had a stomach bug, and she was so mad at me for throwing up in the night. Said I was faking to get out of school, and if I kept pretending, I’d be grounded for a month, so I just went to class the next day, and every time I went to the bathroom, I threw up as quietly as I could. So the school wouldn’t make her come get me. Whenever I did anything that she thought made her look bad, it turned into this huge thing about how I must hate her, to try to hurt her like that. If I was upset, or anxious, or hungry, or even sick, she acted like it was something I was doing to her, and I believed it.”

“Holy shit, Miles.” I pull his hand into my lap, cup it between both of mine.

He drags his eyes up to mine. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” I say.

“That’s the thing, though,” he scratches out. “I need it to be okay. Because I need to be okay. As a kid, I just felt so fucking scared and powerless, all the time, and now I just need to be okay.” He shakes his head. “I honestly think that’s partly why Petra and I worked together. I’ve never met someone who was so . . . ‘in the moment,’ and that’s where I have to be, because if I think too much about the past or the future, I come apart. So I mostly just keep all of that stuff where I don’t have to think about it.”

I drop my eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to pry.”

His eyes come back to mine, his voice a scrape. “You’re not,” he says. “I want you to know. I just . . .”

“What?”

He looks over my shoulder. “I don’t want you to look at me like I’m broken.”

“Miles.” I touch the sides of his neck and pull his gaze back to mine. “You’re not broken. You’re okay. But what happened to you isn’t. It’s fucked up.”

“It’s over,” he says quietly, his hands ringing my wrists.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t still have feelings about it,” I tell him.

The corners of his lips flutter, for just a second. “That’s the problem, though. Whenever any of us had a negative emotion, it only made things worse. She turned it around on us, and we’d end up apologizing for being hurt or angry or sad, and I never knew what was right or normal. I mean, everyone who met my mom loved her. Teachers, the other parents, my friends.

“If she wants to, she can make you feel like the center of the universe, like her favorite. I used to love having friends over, because she’d turn into this different person. This funny, warm mom who loved me.

“All I wanted was for that version of her to stay. So I stopped showing it when I was upset, just went along with whatever she said and did. And eventually, I just sort of . . . stopped getting upset. Stopped feeling the bad stuff. And things got better. For me, anyway.”

He looks down, his eyes dark and glossed.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, running my thumb over the hinge of his jaw. “I get why you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“It’s not just that. I mean, I do hate dwelling on this shit, but . . .” His Adam’s apple bobs. “I let her really fucking hurt Julia. And when Julia’s around, it’s hard not to hate myself. All those feelings, they just come back. And my mind starts to feel so loud, and dark. I just want to escape.”

A dagger spears through my heart. I wrap my arms around him and burrow my face into his chest. I don’t want to make him keep talking, but he is, like he’s been uncorked and now it’s all coming out.

I picture it spiraling down a drain, hope that’s what this confession is doing for him, rather than scraping at an old wound.

“She was way worse with Julia than she ever was with me. She’d compare Jules to our cousins, tell her who was prettier and smarter, or better behaved. She’d compare Jules to herself at that age, shit that probably wasn’t true.” His voice wavers. “She’d scream at her for the dumbest shit, as long as I can remember. And I let it all happen.”

I rear back. “What were you supposed to do?”

“Stop her,” he says immediately, like he’s thought this through, knows with certainty the right answer. “Stand up for Julia instead of shutting down. Not run away to the city the second I turned eighteen, and come back once a week like it made any fucking difference.”

“It did make a difference,” I say, “or she wouldn’t be here right now.”

“Maybe.” When he looks up at me, his eyes are stark, tired. “But I don’t even know why she’s here, because she won’t tell me. No matter how hard I try, I always make the wrong decision. I fuck it up and people get hurt.”

“Miles.” I grab his shoulders, turn his upper body toward me, and scoot in close, nearly into his lap. “She got out.”

“On her own.” He shakes his head. “She saw through the shit way before I did. Chose an out-of-state college, and when our mom tried to tell her she couldn’t go, she went anyway. Applied for her own loans, had me cosign, moved to Wisconsin. Mom stopped talking to her to punish her, which completely backfired, so then she did her version of an apology. Sorry I wasn’t perfect, but you’ll understand when you’re a mother someday. You can’t do everything right, and your kids will hate you for it.”

“God,” I say. “I’m so sorry. Is that when you stopped talking to her?”

He laughs coarsely. “No. I wanted everything to be okay so badly. So I tried to broker peace. Just one more bad decision. My mom kept trying to pit me against Julia, and it didn’t matter how many times I tried to set a boundary, she wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t take any blame. Won’t say she’s sorry, or admit she did anything wrong, so eventually I had to cut her off too.”

“And your dad’s just okay with this?” I say.

“Not okay,” Miles says. “Just avoidant as fuck. Travels a lot for work.”

“So he left you guys to deal with all that on your own,” I say, “and you think you’re the bad guy for finding a way to survive. For ‘only’ going home once a week, to spirit Julia away to a McDonald’s?”

His brows draw together. “How’d you know it was McDonald’s?”

“Because she told me, Miles,” I say. “She told me you rescued her, and took her to a filthy play-place and let her be an obnoxious kid and were completely unflappable no matter how terrible she was.”

“I’m not unflappable.” His voice takes on a damp gravel. “Honestly, it’s hard to even look at her sometimes, because it makes me think about everything I should’ve done differently, all the shit I try not to think about, and I just start feeling like I’m about to self-destruct.”

“You weren’t the adult,” I say.

“I was what she had,” he argues.

“And you did what you could,” I tell him.

“That’s the thing, though.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know if I did. I don’t trust my perception of things. That’s what my childhood did to me. Made my brain into a fucking fun house where I might think I’m standing on the floor, but really I’m stuck to a wall. I never know if I’m feeling the right thing, and I’m tired of fucking things up for the people I care about.”

“I don’t think there’s a right way to feel,” I say. “And you can’t control it, anyway. Feelings are like weather. They just happen, and then they pass.”

He rubs his face again. “I’m sorry. This is why I don’t talk about it.”

“Don’t apologize.” I wrap my arms around his waist, and his eyes lift back to mine. “I’m your friend. I want to know all this. I want to be there for you.”

I knew it was true, but when I say it, some crank inside my abdomen is slowly turning, pulling my heart tight against my chest. That’s what Miles needs right now. A friend.

And now I understand what he meant, how risky this really is, not just for me but for him too.

This isn’t just a fun distraction or a rebound anymore. He matters to me, and if this thing between us blows up, there’ll be nowhere for either of us to run right now.

“You should talk to your sister about all of this,” I tell him. “Because I know you think you failed her, but from the outside, what I see is, something’s going on with your sister, and she got on a plane straight to you. Didn’t even ask first, because she knew you’d make space. You’re where she ran when she needed to feel safe.”

“Maybe she just didn’t have anywhere else to go,” he murmurs.

“Maybe,” I allow. “But neither did I, and you took care of me too. That’s who you are. If I had to be marooned, I’m glad it was with you.”

“Me too,” he says quietly, then after a second, “I don’t want to fuck this up. Things are already a mess right now, for both of us.”

“I don’t want to mess it up either,” I promise. This time, I mean it. Not just because now I know him so much better, care so much more about this friendship. But also because I can admit what I couldn’t before: I like Miles Nowak enough that he could really hurt me.

“So,” he says, unsticking a strand of my hair from my eyebrow and tucking it behind my ear. “That was my complaint. What have you got?”

Despite the ache in it, my heart flutters at this piece of evidence that he knows me, that I matter to him like he does to me. “Are we playing Whiny Babies now?” I ask.

He nods. “Any grievances to air?”

“Well.” I think for a beat. “I’m not a huge fan of global warming.”

The corners of his eyes crinkle, my heart leaping in response. “I hear the Great Barrier Reef is in trouble,” he says.

“The wealth gap is ridiculous,” I return.

“And insurance is way too fucking expensive,” he adds.

“Not to mention, all day long, my sock kept getting caught under my heel,” I say.

He laughs a little, touches my chin. The moment feels like the meniscus of a glass, like any second it might spill over. “I guess we should go home.”

I nod. His hand falls away. “Thank you,” he says.

“For what?” I ask.

“Just, thank you.”