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“Yeah,” Phoenix says into Miles’ mouth, soft and half-conscious and hot with their mingled breath. “Yeah, c’mon.”
Miles says something hard to hear then kisses him. It’s load-bearing, pressing Phoenix’s head back into the sheets as Miles finally gets the hang of his hand around Phoenix’s cock. It’s still dark out. They’re in their nightshirts, Phoenix’s boxers somewhere on the floor, Miles’ silky sleep pants caught above his knees. Phoenix’s ass aches in a way that’s good now and will be less good on his upcoming ten-hour flight, though still a little bit good. He drags a hand across the hot back of Miles’ shirt, clasping his neck, digging his thumb behind one flushed ear. He pulls Miles to him. They’re already pretty close. Miles makes it work, laying himself over Phoenix, straining to jerk him off between the flat weights of their bodies. His free hand cradles Phoenix’s head, holding him steady and unshrinking.
“Yes,” Phoenix says, “yes,” gasping it, a little desperate, more desperate than he expected for Miles’ tight hand on him.
“Love you. I love you,” Miles says.
“Oh, fuck me,” Phoenix says, whole body going hot and tense and starry. “Fuck, I love you, too. Christ, I do.”
And then he comes all over Miles’ hand and bangs their heads together really pretty hard and feels quite a lot like a bumper car that’s just had its brains fucked out. Then Miles kisses him again. Phoenix kisses him back. His forehead doesn’t hurt as much as it could, with Miles’ bangs brushing his skin and Miles’ hand stroking his throat.
“I’ll miss you,” Miles says, in the last moment in which it’s possible to say, and then rolls to the side of the bed and lets Phoenix stand and start for the shower.
Miles’ bathroom, like every other room in his apartment, is substantially too large for one guy and the dog he watches for his coworker three times a year with a secret, covetous glee. It’s all hip European Airbnb chic, with a wide white tub and dark marble walls and windows so tall they seem to dare Phoenix to stand bare-assed before them until some startup geek down in Mitte catches sight of his willie. The temptation is real, but so is the temptation of an absolutely wasteful amount of time spent in Miles’ shower. No water use restrictions in the European heartland, baby.
The water heater’s instant. Probably the size of a postage stamp with the power of a Saturn V. Phoenix steps under the spray and washes away sleep-sweat and sex-sweat and all the threads of Miles’ love. He takes his time with the fancy soaps and shampoos—he likes that they’re different every time he comes to stay, because Miles doesn’t actually know shit about haircare and just buys whatever’s got a nice serif font and a suitably high price tag. This shampoo smells intriguingly like a latte. Phoenix massages it in, water thudding down his back, and thinks about Trucy, and his shift schedule at the Bowl, and what time he has to be at Union Station to meet Trucy’s train down from Kurain after his flight lands. It’ll cut close if the flight’s delayed, but he likes going straight to the station from LAX when he can. He likes them returning to the apartment together, bags in hand, both starving for a pot of pasta and three unbroken hours of gossip.
Trucy is grounding. He’s gotten as practiced at this as he has playing cards—packing away the Germany thoughts, leaving them behind on the nightstand and bringing only the important stuff home. The new bits of research, the cute little anecdotes for Maya, Franziska’s latest professional accomplishments. Everything else goes white and sudsy as it circles the drain. No need to carry it back, like the commemorative snowglobe you panic-buy on the way to the airport because you’re afraid you’ll forget whole weeks of your life without some cheap piece of plastic to sit on your shelf and slowly degas. Who has the money. Who has the time?
They say this shit to each other at the end of the trip because it’s the end of the trip. They won’t see each other until the next transatlantic flight, until the new year. It doesn’t count and it’s not real. They say it, they do it, maybe Miles will take Phoenix’s hand from Phoenix’s lap and hold it at all the red lights between here and the airport—they can allow themselves these things, when everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.
They’ve had the sex, Phoenix has taken his shower, maybe Miles will get soppy and do the thing with the hand in the car but—now they’re done. Until next time.
When Phoenix comes out of the bathroom, hair dripping and towel crisp, Miles is still sitting on the bed in his pajamas. He’s scrolling rapidly through his phone, squinting without his glasses. Phoenix frowns and hikes the towel higher. “What’s up?” he asks.
Miles’ head snaps up like he’d forgotten it wasn’t just him in the apartment.
The dried come-stain on his shirt is comical, his expression isn’t. “Phoenix,” he says. “Your flight’s been cancelled. There’s a fire. You should call Trucy.”
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Phoenix shouts when the fifth call to Pearl’s emergency cell phone connects. “Is Trucy safe? Are you together? Where are you?”
“Hello, Mr. Nick!” Pearls replies with a Defcon 5 warble. “We are well! I am with Trucy and Maya and everyone else from the village, as well as the deputies and everyone’s dogs. We are in Glendora, but I believe they are about to evacuate us again. We have already been to Mt. Baldy Elementary. Would you like to speak to Trucy?”
She sounds like it’s 3:00 AM local time and she’s been on the run from a wildfire for several hours. It makes her voice creak like a paddle boat under strain. Phoenix comes very close to feeling guilt. “Yes,” he says. “I’m glad you’re safe, Pearls.”
“I’m glad, too,” she says, a little prim. “Don’t swear at me again, please!”
The guilt prevails. “Sorry,” Phoenix says, “I’m sorry—“ but she’s already passed over the phone.
“Daddy,” Trucy says from several thousand miles away and Phoenix goes limp.
“Honey,” he replies, “hi. Are you okay?”
Miles glances up from the couch, laptop balanced carefully but confidently on his knees. He traded the crusty pajamas for a shirt and slacks some time ago—he’s also showered, made coffee, and poured much of that coffee down Phoenix’s throat. Phoenix changed in between giving up on calling Trucy’s phone and beginning his furious pursuit of Maya’s. Miles’ cell ran out of charge around that point and Miles went scrambling for the cord as Phoenix realized, in a little picosecond of lucidity, that he was still wearing just the towel. Miles had come back from the bedroom with a dangling Lightning cord, a shirt and pants.
“I’m fine, Daddy, we’re all fine,” Trucy says, sounding tired but fantastically alive as Phoenix continues to go boneless over Miles’ sofa. “Did you yell at Pearls?”
“I did, honey. Just a little.”
“Okay. That was mean.” It’s baby-ass scolding, no heart in it at all. Phoenix wants to pick his daughter up and carry her to another planet entirely.
“I know. I’m sorry. Will you tell her I’m sorry?”
Trucy makes a noncommittal noise. “Are you still in Germany?” she asks.
“Yeah, still in Germany. They cancelled my flight. The smoke.” Phoenix casts an eye to Miles, typing industriously on the other couch. “We’re figuring it out. I’ll see you soon—like sooo soon.”
She laughs when he dips into the valley girl, West Covina, 120° vocal fry. Good. Excellent. That’s his girl. “I know, Daddy,” she says, “and Maya’s got us all covered in the meantime. She knows what she’s doing.”
“Bribed all the deputies to take you to the fancy rich people evac center?”
“Obviously,” Trucy laughs, and Phoenix presses the phone to his cheek like it’ll keep him warm and breathing.
She can’t stay on the phone long—3:00 AM, the charge left on Pearls’ emergency phone, Maya calling in the background, the beginnings of the move to the next evacuation center that next crucial distance from the fire line. He lets her go with as much dignity as he can.
He loves her so much, he’ll see her soon.
When he lets the phone drop to the sofa cushions, he’s still in Berlin. All the liquid relief goes skipping away.
“She’s fine,” he says to Miles before Miles can ask, “tired and pissy and scared, but she’s safe. Maya’s got her.” He presses his palms into his eyes.
“Scared?”
“Wouldn’t you be?” Phoenix snaps. Way sharper than he’d intended, purple pressure spots swimming in his vision. Miles acts like he didn’t hear the tone at all, which Phoenix won’t thank him for.
“I would,” Miles agrees, “but your daughter has always sounded much braver than me.”
“You don’t have to flatter her. She’s not here.”
“I’m not—“
“She’s fourteen, Miles, not a fucking commando. Of course she’s scared! She’s on the run from a natural disaster, it’s the middle of the night, her aunt’s village is probably burning down, her dad’s stuck in Europe on his fucking annual sex-cation—“
Miles flinches and tries immediately to suppress it, back straightening in that old adolescent response. Phoenix notes it but keeps his eyes fixed elsewhere. “I should be there,” he says.
“You’re doing all you can,” Miles says.
“Right, yeah, which is exactly jack shit. I should be there.”
Not here, obviously. Not with you.
“Not even you can fix a wildfire, Phoenix,” Miles replies, the kindliness of his tone starting to strain.
“And so I shouldn’t feel bad because my daughter is stuck in one? Is that this morning’s thesis statement?”
“Obviously not,” Miles grinds out, the you jackass left implied.
Here’s a fucking thesis statement: the sex-cation probably should have ended when they got done having the sex!
Phoenix stops himself from goading Miles further, which requires just fistfuls of effort. He knows what mood he’s in and how unbecomingly he’ll react to anything else Miles tries to say to him. He knows Miles’ patience for his bullshit, extended only so long out of sympathy for Trucy, will run dry. After that Miles will give as good as he gets, and then they’ll be like they always are when they’re bad to each other, which is feral. Dogs after the same scrap of meat, cats after each other’s stomachs, whatever it is that the raccoons are doing when they’re making those godawful noises out in the street.
He’s suddenly itching in the clothes Miles brought him from his own dresser. The intimacy swells like a spider bite. He should have just left Phoenix to shiver in the towel, which is definitely one of Phoenix’s more rational thoughts. But then at least Phoenix wouldn’t have to deal with this: Miles’ feelings for him, plain as the clothes on his back.
Miles’ phone rings—not the one sliding under Phoenix’s neck on the sofa cushion, but another one by Miles’ lap, with a nicer case and bigger screen. Work phone, for impressing work people. No Steel Samurai episodes saved to video at all.
Phoenix doesn’t mean to be a catty little prick, but he says “Go on, I’m sure all your students are dying to know why Professor Edgeworth is late to class,” anyways.
Miles would be well within rights to smack Phoenix down for that. Not like Phoenix isn’t asking for it. But he just Phoenix gives this tired, baleful look instead.
“It’s Dick Gumshoe,” Miles says as the phone buzzes steadily in his wide hand. “We think he might be able to drive you up from San Diego if we can find you a flight in.”
“Oh,” Phoenix says.
“Mm-hmm,” Miles replies, not half as smug as he’s earned, and picks up the call.
By lunchtime they’ve gotten Phoenix the flight and the ride. The flight’s going to suck his soul right out of his mouth—connecting through Dublin, connecting through JFK, connecting through Dallas, landing at San Diego at a ball-shriveling 1:02 AM the following day. Gumshoe will grab him there and get him up the 5. Phoenix doesn’t know how to thank Gumshoe for this kind of altruism, so he’s gonna see if you can name a guy your child’s godfather when she’s already 14 or if that’s a time-limited, baptism-only kind of deal.
Miles prints out the tickets while eating his 12:30p super salad. When he’s eating his 2:40p super salad (ask Phoenix how much he’s learned about intuitive eating and also chia seeds this trip), Phoenix gets a call from Trucy: she and Pearls are in the apartment. Maya got them a ride into the city. They’re safe.
Phoenix sets the phone down and puts his head to Miles’ cool grey countertop, sucking down air. He cries a little, not really stressing about his audience. Trucy’s safe. She’s safe! She’s safe. It’s really, really good.
Miles keeps eating his antioxidants. One eye on Phoenix, free hand twitching against the marble, but not making a move. He would have early this morning, had Phoenix been crying for some reason. He in fact did, because Phoenix did totally cry during the sex, and Miles had pushed his hand across Phoenix’s skin, anchored his arm around Phoenix’s chest, murmured lovely immemorable things into the flat heave of Phoenix’s shoulders. But now Miles is busy knowing what Phoenix knew this morning: that the sex is over, but Phoenix is still here. And thanks to the San Gabriel Complex Fires, they’ve got 9 more hours of this situation headed their way.
“Thanks,” Phoenix mumbles wetly into the countertop. “Thank you, Miles.”
Miles makes an uncomfortable back-of-the-throat noise. “Of course,” he says, and goes back to his salad.
For the rest of the afternoon, Phoenix has no idea what to do with himself.
Miles usually spends down his vacation time when Phoenix is in town—not everything can be rescheduled, especially if he’s consulting on cases, but for the most part he hands over his classes, gives the clerks a bit more to do, and spends the time with Phoenix. They get a lot of work done on the Jurist system, which last year graduated from the white paper stage and is now firmly entrenched in the pitch-fundamental-criminal-reform-to-state-policymakers stage (the Hell Stage, as Phoenix calls it. Miles loves to point out that Phoenix has called every stage the Hell Stage). Sometimes they also go to dinner and see shows and have sex. It’s a great little system when the San Gabriels haven’t caught fire. As the San Gabriels have, Phoenix sits on his €600 breakfast bar stool and watches Miles try to live the life Phoenix is never around to see.
He has all these responsibilities. When did he get all these responsibilities? To institutions so huge and foreign they’re like other planets—universities full of LLM students, bureaus full of attorneys, MNCs and professional associations and Interpol. It makes Phoenix feel about eight years old as Miles sits at the clean kitchen table and speaks three languages in three minutes on the same conference call.
It’s funny—whenever they fail to talk about all the things that keep them from having a relationship outside the careful bounds of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region, Phoenix always thought they were failing to talk about the changed nature of Phoenix’s life. How he diverged so neatly and conclusively from the future they once hesitantly imagined could be possible. (He doesn’t remember what that was, frankly. Something without Trucy, which robbed meaning of the rest.) He should have noticed, shouldn’t he, that Miles’ life changed, too.
The first time Phoenix flew out, almost four years ago now, it had been totally different. Night and day shit. Wheels hit the tarmac and six hours later Phoenix was pressing Miles against the arm of the couch and running his hand up the side of Miles’ neck with the kind of reverence he barely gave his own paycheck. Miles breathed like he’d been running. He had looked at Phoenix like—well.
Phoenix tracks a little spill of condensation across the countertop with the tip of his finger. The look had been pretty good. It had felt for one long, dark and rosy evening like everything that had happened in the three years since the disbarment was some goofy little joke they’d let run too long. The first trip was the first time they had sex, was the thing. Not the first time they’d kissed. Time became something they could make up for, in Miles’ apartment, over the arm of the couch and deep in his bed—something they could stitch cleanly and make whole. They could pick up where they left off.
The delusion didn’t survive the next few days, when all the obvious shit muscled its way through the honeymoon phase. Phoenix had a daughter, Phoenix didn’t have a real job, Miles had an amount of money that had suddenly become alienating, Miles flinched from memories of Los Angeles like he flinched from memories of von Karma. Also there was the fact that they knew each other so well every perceived slight could be met with the discursive equivalent of nuclear annihilation and, frequently, was. Some fundamentally troubling shit. The trip ended viciously, they didn’t text for months, and when Phoenix did finally come out again, they settled, by mutual agreement, into the current pattern. Bewildering, crabby terror was traded for peace. Bounded and agreed upon. Something that was safe to expect of each other.
Miles is starting to look frayed by 5:00 PM—church bells ringing up and down the river as his computer pings its own little noises from Outlook and Zoom and Teams and iMessage. His glasses inch down the long slope of his nose, the short hair behind his ears starting to push into tufts with the motion.
What they do now, it’s better. Keeps the peace, keeps them sane, lets them keep alive something that should have died a long time ago. A long, long time ago, if they had any sense. If either of them had ever once known when to quit.
It all makes sense but—that first trip. When they really let themselves feel it. When they didn’t know how to stop. Phoenix thinks, for a moment, that that had been pretty good, too.
“Alright,” Miles says, “that’s it,” closing his laptop carefully but definitely, “I’m done. Nothing will actually catch fire until working hours resume tomorrow morning.” He says that bit with his eye still on the computer, like his inbox might start getting ideas.
“Great,” Phoenix says. “Wanna get the fuck out of here?”
Miles looks up, eyebrows raised, like he’d forgotten Phoenix could do things besides fiddle with his phone and wait for Trucy to wake up and call. “We have to get you to the airport,” he says.
“Yeah, in like six hours,” Phoenix replies. “What, you wanna just hang around here until then?”
Miles considers the apartment. “No,” he says, in the same tone with which he addressed his laptop. “Let’s not.”
“Right. Where should we go?”
“Leaving was your idea, Wright.”
Phoenix rolls his eyes. “Yeah but I don’t live here, Mr. Big Shot Berlin Attorney. What, you’ve run out of overpriced fusion restaurants to drag me to?”
Miles doesn’t hide his smile. Never ever known when to quit. “Not yet,” he says. “It’s Thursday, isn’t it?”
“No idea. Days of the week don’t exist when I’m on other continents.”
“It’s Thursday. Let’s go down the river.”
The Alte Nationalgalerie, perched with its fellows at the tip of Museum Island like a pack of sultry old cats in the moonlight, is up to the eaves with people enjoying culture. Most of the tourists are gone—it’s some sparkly once-a-month after-hours thing where everyone’s got a paper cup of good-ish wine and a local post code. Miles sips at his free Chardonnay as he and Phoenix walk the galleries, winter coats hung like matching sables over their arms.
Miles really likes going to art museums with Phoenix. He’s never said as much, but Phoenix knows the annual memberships don’t get much use when he’s not in town—Franziska’s never been one for a quiet afternoon with portraiture. It’s something for the two of them, rarely planned but always sincerely enjoyed.
“Thoughts?” Miles asks when they stop in front of the next sculpture, a man-sized wooden owl carved in a pose of perfect undignified outrage.
“I love it,” Phoenix says. His voice is rapturous. “I want to bundle it in your coat and ship it to Franziska immediately. It looks just like the time Maya told her about the sick American ritual of wet willies, Miles it is the spitting image, you have to let me steal this owl.”
Miles is laughing helplessly into his arm, fine European repression trying to muffle the sound even as the gallery bounces with the noise of a happy crowd. For some reason he’s against Phoenix stealing the owl.
“All I’m saying is that if she made this her LinkedIn profile picture, literally no one would know the difference.”
“Phoenix, Christ—she’ll hear you!”
They stop at a painting of a woman from behind, leaning out the window of her husband’s studio as the light and the afternoon turn her green dress into inlays of bronze. Miles leans in when Phoenix does, following his pointing finger to the tortoiseshell comb in the woman’s hair—the pattern a suggestion, the teeth picked out only in light. “That,” Phoenix says. “That I love.”
Miles nods, quiet, fingers careful around his emptied paper cup. “I would never have noticed it.”
They stop again at the first of the Menzels, Phoenix’s favorite shit in the whole of the National Gallery. He didn’t stick with his art degree long enough to reliably tell a Realist from a Romantic but there’s nothing he loves like a good draftsman. Pure ex-professional envy. The German public agrees with him—Adolph Menzel’s work was so popular it basically never left the country, so Phoenix never saw a Menzel displayed until the first of his German sex-cations. This one, of some ponce playing the flute in a lavish salon, is the size of a wall and lush with light.
The crowds stream around them as they stand and look, everything loud and warm and smelling like someone spilled their Chardonnay and maybe like it’s started to snow outside. The people, the bustle, the lights and sounds and the heavy imposition of casual, Thursday night joy—it’s dizzying, like a nice bit of Chardonnay used to be before Chardonnay stopped being nice. A group of friends, four of them, in their 20s with exciting hair dyes, join Miles and Phoenix in front of the Menzel.
Miles bumps his shoulder to Phoenix’s, giving them room. His hand brushes Phoenix’s, then again, and Miles starts to flush, like he wants to apologize but realizes it’d be ludicrous to do so. Phoenix swallows. They’re close and Phoenix says low enough that maybe not even the dust mites hear him, “Yeah, c’mon. It’s okay.”
Between their bodies, he takes Miles’ hand in his. Miles, eyes on the oil paints, squeezes tightly back.
They stand a minute or two, shoulder to shoulder, and then Miles says, “This has been a strange day.”
“Oh, yeah,” Phoenix replies. He looks at the expression of the painting’s central figure, the smiling, knowing way he eyes his sheet music.
“I’m sorry Trucy has been put through so much,” Miles says, “and sorry you weren’t able to be with her, but—I’m glad. Selfishly. That you could stay a little longer.”
Phoenix grips Miles’ hand on reflex, a pressure immediately returned. “Yeah,” he says, then clears his throat. “Yeah, I’m—me, too. If I had to, I suppose.”
“Right,” Miles says, and then as the 20-somethings move on and someone’s trailing scarf brushes across both their backs, “I miss you.”
Phoenix closes his eyes. His chest contorts powerfully, a fish trying to throw itself off the line. “Yeah,” he says. It was so much easier this morning, when he knew what they were doing. It’s been so long since he went without a map. “Yeah. Me, too.”
At the next push of the crowd they let themselves be carried. The hands stay held. The next Menzel is just a few rooms away, even bigger than the last, a massive scene of a king addressing his generals, except the king was never finished and neither were half the generals. Menzel left them like ghosts, skinny pencil lines on bare canvas, silhouettes cut into an otherwise perfect crowd. Everyone’s looking to the shape of the king, though, expressions intent, like they know he’ll be ready soon.
Phoenix feels three degrees of separation from the guy he was this morning. He’s having these vivid, full-body flashbacks to the experience of being 26, when he used to worry that he didn’t have a real personality, just an ongoing reaction to the state of this one relationship. That changed, it must have, that was no path to a long and happy life, but he doesn’t know when the change came. He doesn’t know where that puts him now.
“Miles, I—we’re really not great for each other,” he says as the both of them look at the canvas, two more half-finished generals waiting for the speech. “Like, I think I tried to break your nose three times this morning and all you were doing was trying to get me home to Truce. There’s a reason we stopped trying to do this, right? It didn’t work—we didn’t work. There’s a reason.”
Miles nods, not looking at Phoenix but not letting go of him, either. If he’s still flushed, Phoenix isn’t about to turn and look. “I know,” he says, steady.
“Right, yeah, obviously you know,” Phoenix says. “And even aside from the ground-level personality shit, we—we’re different people now, we’ve got lives, you’ve got a whole career here, I’ve got Trucy—it’s nuts. We live an ocean away.”
“You’re right,” Miles says, sounding a little more ‘stubborn’ than ‘steady’ now that Phoenix thinks about it.
“And, you know,” Phoenix adds, “the real kicker is that I’m so scared all the time. Like for Trucy, and Maya and Pearl, and about wildfires, and earthquakes, and the Jurist system, and god knows what the fuck Kristoph is up to right now, and sometimes all I want is ten fucking seconds of the day where I’m not worried about something, like just ten seconds for myself in my own head—”
Miles squeezes his hand, hard, like he can press away the shakes.
“—and you can’t leave Germany, obviously, you have your job here and Franziska, so it’s ridiculous to even bring this up, but I guess if you came home, and were there, and then you left again, or something changed, you had to go—I don’t know what I’d do.” Not an idiomatic cry for help but a simple statement of fact. He just hasn’t got the foresight for it. “I’d probably just lose it completely.”
Miles nods. Their fingers are threaded together, Miles’ thumb stroking down Phoenix’s knuckle like a metronome.
“You’re right,” he says again.
“Yeah,” Phoenix says. He exhales, shoulders flattening. “I am.”
Miles hums. He inhales. “Someday I’m going to marry you.”
Phoenix looks at him. He’s gorgeous, always has been, profile like an emperor and the silky locks of a man who only buys the good stuff. Phoenix says, hoarse, “Yeah?”
The crowd buffets them, huge and friendly, a tide keeping the boats safely in harbor. “Yes,” Miles says. “Not…not yet. As you say. But someday.”
“Oh,” Phoenix says.
Miles nods, face pink as his rosy sweater.
“Well, cool,” Phoenix says. He turns back to the Menzel, setting his head to Miles’ shoulder. “Sounds like a plan.”
