Archive of Our Own

August, 2022.

God; the sky, the warmth, the heat.

If he takes a moment to close his eyes, Phoenix can feel the whole swollen summer leaning up against him, scratching its cheek on his sleep-stubbled chin - insistent: Stay! Stay! Stay! The swelter is smooth against his skin; high and dry, and so airless that his armpits are beginning to stick to the freshly-washed softness of his shirt. The sun, itself, is a tease. High-heel clad and breezy in a clouded dress - long streaks of butter-yellow light stretched out across the water like bare legs and skinny knees - slowly dipping down just low enough to slip into a soft, lipless orange. Phoenix stretches out into it like a child in the tallest part of a tree. The glare crosses over his hands in three bright little x’s. 

“Wright.” Miles calls from behind, “Come inside.” 

He turns and watches as Miles wipes at a tomato stain on the counter with delicate, craftsman precision - ah! Gotcha! The August air rolls over and yawns through the kitchen’s open, patio doors, kissing both men soundly on the backs of their necks. Miles is fussing by the stove, wiping down the granite counters and pushing crumbs into his hand which he throws into a basket bin by the fridge. There’s dishes by the sink that he doesn’t touch; this is supposed to be Phoenix’s job while Miles cleans up the rest of the kitchen. He’ll do them tonight. He’ll do it later. 

“How was the call?”

Phoenix bobs his head and pita-a patt-a’s in from the French windows, unhurried. With a hand to the headboard, he scuffs the kitchen stool back against the terracotta tiles - if he leaves a mark on the floor in its place, then, he supposes, that is neither here nor there. He scuffs everywhere he can. Each room presented before him encourages a new opportunity for scuffing; scuffing into the room, just like he’ll scuff around it, and scuff out of it right after he’s done. Dragging his feet along the finely polished floorboards so it may leave a mark. Scuff, scuff, scuff. “Good,” he says, with a light smile. “Everyone’s good.”

“Was the connection alright? It can be rather rocky at times.” 

“It was fine.”

Miles nods. He keeps his back to Phoenix, clutching the dish-towel in his hand and letting sudsy liquid drip down onto his fingers and against his hip; he’s wearing casual clothes, ones that Phoenix has never seen before today. There’s a damp spot gathering on his beige shorts from the towel. He’s adorned this blue button-up, which has been rolled up to his elbows so that his first sunburn of the summer is visible on pink, pink skin - peeking out through dusty, grey hairs. His hands and wrists are wet. He’s bare-footed. Everything about this is morbidly fascinating to Phoenix, who finds himself staring at the sock-lines on his ankles in periodic interludes of the day. 

Sometimes, in the days that he’s been here, Phoenix becomes intensely self-aware of his own physical body when he takes the time to consider Miles’ properly; how unwashed he must appear, how dirty he seems in comparison. At night, when he can’t sleep, he has these strange, long-winded fantasies of lining both of them up side by side and recording their differences down on a scrap piece of paper, or with a sharpie on a mirror. At what point does leanness start to bleed into soft muscle? Where do their shoulders stop and their necks begin? What are their shoe sizes, their hand sizes? How long is each finger?

Phoenix leans backwards on the stool and says, “Does it hurt?” 

“No.” Miles puts the towel down and considers his peeling arms. “It’s a little burn-y, but I think that’s supposed to happen.”

“I actually meant your finger.”

“Oh. Yes. A bit.”

Privately, Phoenix misses - with a newfound contemplation borne only through three years of awkward acceptance into his new condition of cynic living - the time when they were children together. Before, his yearning for their boyhood had existed as a frenzied, manic need to regain the kind of faithful stability that can only exist when you are nine-years-old and tugging at your best friend’s hand along a street-crossing each morning; Complete, church-like, childish faith that comes from knowing they are your friend, knowing they are safe with you on the other side of the road. 

Now, however, he examines this time of his life with a sense of reverent detachment, as though he were considering his memories from a number of angles outside of his own body, appraising. It was such a long time ago. His recollection is smudged by sun-spots; he remembers evenings spent together, sitting at Mr Edgeworth’s kitchen table, sprawled out on top of the concrete walls overlooking their school with Larry. Miles would sit between them and put his hand on Phoenix’s knee, gripping at it lightly in a sequence, which Phoenix would later spend the rest of the night trying to decode. It felt good. It felt so good that he used to stick his leg out just for Miles to do it again, and again. The innocent feeling of skin on skin. Of that chaste, pale shade against his own exposed browning, and it would dawn on Phoenix that the lines of his own hands were much different to Miles’: thicker and deeper and his fingers were shorter and his nails bitten to the quick, filling him with a private kind of thrill that he struggled to place at the age of nine. Phoenix used to keep discoveries like this to himself, and, after a while, he would write it all down clumsily in one of those letters. 

He has always considered Miles in a reflection of his own self. How could he not, when his personality is so soundly constructed by his ongoing activism to maintain this one relationship? To examine him singularly, Phoenix is sure, would likely kill him; imagining himself without the chalky outline of Miles Edgeworth to compare to brings to the surface a light-headed, vertiginous feeling that reminds him of being twenty-five again and an idiot. 

Now, Phoenix tilts his head to the side. “C’mere then,” he says, softly. 

He lets the stool fall back down onto its four legs and, when Miles walks by the table to put his left hand out in front of him, he takes it lightly between his thumb and forefinger. There’s a deep gash across Mile’s middle knuckle when he turns it over; the skin has reddened around the cut and the flap of dying skin hangs sadly to one side. It’s too sore for him to pull it off just yet. He runs a finger over it instead and Miles hisses. 

“Sorry.” Phoenix murmurs, and rests their hands on the table between them. He inspects it lightly with a thumb. “I didn’t realise you didn’t know how to cut mushrooms. I would’ve just done it myself.”

“I do know. It’s mushrooms.” 

“There’s an art to it-”

“My finger simply slipped.”

“Should’ve used a different knife, then.” 

“At least I helped this time.”

“Mmm,” Phoenix hums and brings their hands closer to his face. It’s still hot inside the villa, it’s warm and sweating right out of the surrounding vineyards in streaks as summer settles its weary head on the coastline. It’s good. On his back, on his face, on his knees, like a thousand human eyes staring at him, bearing into him. He curls his hand around Miles’ fingers and presses his mouth to the cut gently, looking up at Miles to watch him, shuddery, breathing heavily out of his mouth. “That was nice of you.” 

Miles whispers, “I can be nice.” 

“I know.” Phoenix says, smiling against his skin. It’s pinking up a little on the knuckles, but the under groove of his fingers are still light and pale, almost chaste, where the sun hasn’t beaten down on them yet, like the soles of his feet and the soft line of his waist. Miles has these long, slender, bend-y hands with short-clipped nails - a surgeon’s hand, maybe. They’re easy to hold, when Phoenix is given agency to; he likes to slip his fingers along the second knuckle and fold his palm alongside Miles’ when they walk to and from the town. He holds onto them like you might hold the rope of a ship or the handles of a ladder: with a tight, gripping pressure that makes both their palms sweat. 

Now, he lets their hands drop away from one another and leans forwards onto his elbows instead. “What’s next, then?” 

Miles stands silent by the table for a moment before answering. He does this sometimes; Phoenix doesn’t mind it. His eyes close and his eyelashes flutter down to press against the delicate skin underneath, flushed a little with the heat and bagged in all these lovely blues. He is quiet, unmoving, and Phoenix likes to look at him. Finally, Miles says, “We have left-over tiramisu from yesterday.” 

“The one from that lady down the road?”

He nods his head. 

“God,” Phoenix groans and tips back on his stool, pressing his arms into the counter. “Yes, please.” 

///

The journey there was painless. It went like this: 

His train ticket was tucked into a book he’d brought to read on the trip, but had no real intention to. It was starting to tear slightly at the edges from where Phoenix was fraying it away with his fingers, and the cheap, blue ink came away on his thumb: ONE WAY L/S: MILANO CENTRALE - COMO NORD LAGO. He was too distracted to read, anyway, watching where the world faded into one, seamless line through the window and where the light was coming through the panes in three separate places, like long, yellow strings tied up to the horizon. He’d never been to Italy before. He felt he had to dwell in it; all the newness of it.

On the plane, he’d tried to fall asleep but couldn’t, and started to read a long-winded, confusing, academic paper on his phone instead. Franziska had sent it to him on the principle that he reference her written law work in his final proposal for the Jurist System; she sent him lots of law texts, actually, and usually he read them sideways in bed, letting the syntax wash over him until he felt disoriented and tired, as if his limbs had melted and he could no longer lift them in any way that was useful. Miles sent him papers that were much easier to read and often more relevant: “You should write one of these,” Phoenix said over the phone once. “You’d be great at it. All those big words.”

“I’m not much of a writer.” 

“I don’t believe that.” 

“You don’t have to.” He’d said back, the mobile connection bubbling up and splitting his voice into two. “It’s still true; I don’t have the patience for it.” 

Before his train left, he found himself engaged in short conversation with a young woman over the coffee kiosk; Phoenix knew no Italian what-so-ever, but he tried as best he could at communicating with his face and made up for his poor attempts at translating by smiling a lot. She gave him his coffee and later, when he was on the train, a man with wrinkly eyes pointed at the cup and winked at him with two thumbs up - it was only then that he noticed her number scrawled on the back of it in crawling cursive. It panicked him suddenly, that himself and his life were so easily observable and had been acknowledged outright by other people, in a country whose language he could not speak, by people he could not defend himself to. In LA, he was used to being almost completely ignored by the greater public. The idea that he is a real human being, in real danger of facing the consequences of his own actions, frightens him. Phoenix looked once more at the phone number with a blank expression. How would that work anyway? Language barriers. 

He threw it away at the next station. 

There were only two other people in the train carriage with him after that man had left, and they talked most of the way there in breezy Italian; two young women with fringes, leaning forward in their seats and throwing their hands about in vague gestures. It was early. When they yawned, Phoenix yawned, and he rested his head against the cool glass, watching the passing vineyards and coast with an easy kind of contentment. It lay across his shoulders like a cat dozing off in the midday sun, like all his bones had been liquidated and were moving about his body in a lazy river of plasma and cells. He pulled out his phone once, to text Trucy, and slipped it back into his pocket after he was done. 

Me: Hey Trucy-roo

Me: In Khurain yet? How was the train? 

Truce: all good here ;P !! just waiting w/ pearls for Auntie Maya to come back with dinner

Truce: miss you already!! kiss uncle miles for me! (>‿◠)

He’d helped Trucy pack her own things for Khura’in and in the morning he’d sent her off on a train, alone, with a kiss on the forehead and a promise of a call when she reached the other side. Her hair had been loose and she was very warm and she had looked so sweet buttoned up in her coat - so girl-like and daughter-ish - that he’d taken a picture before she’d left and made it his phone wallpaper. She waved from the window until he couldn’t see her face anymore. Then he looked at his phone screen for a long while afterwards. 

When he arrived, Miles was waiting for him at the station, just before the fields bled out into the coastline. He was wearing an old, white, billowy shirt that blew to the left and opened up at his collarbone. The skin there was pale and looked very soft, and he stood against the station with his arms crossed as the wind kicked up dust by his feet. There was an old pair of aviator sunglasses perched in his hair. He looked pretty, which was a default by Miles’ standards, but it felt important to take notice of at the time, when he’d finally taken off the napkin around his neck and was wearing sandals.

“I like those,” Phoenix said when he stepped off the bus and over to Miles. “I’ve never seen you in sunglasses. I didn’t think you owned any.”

“I didn’t. I had to pick these up in town.” 

He peered up at the chipped metal frames. “They’re new?”

“It was a second-hand shop.” 

“Bit lowly for you, isn’t it?” 

Miles glared at him sideways and slid the sunglasses down onto the tip of his nose, as if to make a point. There were faint pink marks pressed into the skin, where the nose pads had dug into the mealy flesh there. “Don’t be cruel, Wright.” 

///

They eat the tiramisu outside on the patio and Miles brings the radio with them, where voices chat lightly in Italian, sometimes laughing or playing music. Occasionally, Phoenix asks for a translation, and Miles slips in and out of the two languages seamlessly - he doesn’t even care much for what they’re saying, Phoenix just likes to hear Miles repeat the words back to him. “Pirla,” he says, spooning at a layer of cocoa-powder, “it means ‘idiot’ or 'stupid person'.”

“Pirla.” He repeats, in full-blown American. “And what are they saying now?”

“They’re talking about how much they hate their husbands.” 

“Jesus. Why does everyone always hate their husbands?”

“Lazy, apparently.” 

“Hmm. I’ll keep that in mind when my time comes.”

Miles glances up at this but doesn’t say anything. The women on the radio have stopped talking; they’re playing a slow, instrumental piece of music that hums out into the open fields. The sky has turned into a painterly chlorine-blue, lidded with pink, taut overtop the rain-silver length of Lake Como. It’s true, Phoenix feels out of place aside Miles on his garden table, but it’s not an unpleasant feeling, or even anxious. In fact, he feels a particular child-like sense of joy knowing that he has been invited, no less, into this new, fantastical land of Italia, and can ask Miles as many questions as he pleases before the novelty wears off and his friend grows bored of his ever-grating presence. Phoenix makes good use of his time now, while he’s still held in Miles’ good favour: “Can you sing in Italian too?”

“The real question would be if I could sing or not.”

“Can you?”

“No. Not really. I’ve not given any effort to it.”

“Would you sing now? To this?”

Miles puts down his bowl and stares at Phoenix levelly. There’s a charming smudge of chocolate in the corner of his mouth that makes Phoenix go gooey; he’s so sweet when he’s messy. “Maybe. If you ask nicely.” Miles says, lowly. 

Phoenix cocks his head to the side, “Please?”

“Hm.”

“Please? Pretty please?” He holds out his dessert bowl, “You can have the rest of mine if you want.” 

Miles considers the half-eaten tiramisu with a laissez-faire attitude. Only part of the coffee-sponge is left; Phoenix likes to eat his by the layer, whereas Miles eats it with tiny spoonfuls of everything piled together. The Proper Way, so he tells Phoenix, but the woman who had made it - an elderly lady who lives on the same stretch of road as the villa, with wispy grey hair and laugh lines like rings around her mouth - had confessed to him that the only ‘proper’ way to eat a tiramisu was to enjoy it however one liked. So, ha!

“For you and your handsome guest.” She said when she’d brought it round, smiling and stretching out those lines on her mouth even further, pushing the plate into Miles’ hands. “Eat, eat, eat! For you, mio amico , for you and for him!” 

“C’mon,” Phoenix says now, shaking the bowl. “It’s my favourite bit, too, so it’s worth at least two verses of singing.” 

 Miles hums. 

“Serenade me, Miles.” 

“You’ve deduced that a half-mauled tiramisu is ample exchange for a serenade?”

“Pretty sure serenades don’t usually operate on an exchange basis, do they?” 

“Oh? You’re the expert. What do they operate on?”

He strokes his thumb over his chin in mock-exaggerated thinking, “It’s a one way system. Serenades are all give, no take. I shouldn’t even need to offer an incentive.”

“The system in question being?” 

Phoenix shrugs, “Love, I guess.”

Miles rolls his eyes. “Love isn’t a system.”

“I don’t know about that. It’s all reciprocity, right? To, like, make a structure. To carry out a function.”

“You make it sound so clinical. It’s a feeling. It’s passive.”

“Yeah, sure, it can be. It is. But it’s an action too, right? Loving someone with intent, just to give, that’s active. That’s a choice that people make all the time.”

Miles stares, and looks down at his bowl. His own dessert sits almost fully intact right in the centre, eyeing him back. “I can’t sing.”

“Give it a go? For me?” 

He considers this; his fingers tap absent-mindedly, one, two, three , on his chin as he looks into Phoenix’s gingerly presented bowl, and away again, to the setting sun. 

“No,” Miles clips, humming lightly. 

“No to the singing, or no to the tiramisu?” 

“No to both.”  

“I can’t believe it.” Phoenix murmurs and leans back in the chair, defeated. “What a tease. ”

It’s very easy to talk to Miles like this, when he’s wearing little to nothing and snapping back to him with chocolate smudged on his lip. Phoenix likes the playfulness of it, the ease that comes with the fantasy. It’s as if he is living in a constant haze like a poorly-wired television set, letting things happen to him, letting everything in, letting everything out. Letting, allowing. He feels compliant to it all; a few words from Miles, and his LA apathetic cynicism morphs, quick, into yes, I’ll sit with you in your monster Italian villa and cook with you and eat with you and and talk to you until my mouth is hoarse and full of sand, until you tell me to go, until this isn’t enough for you anymore, god, I will, I will, I will, for you. Anytime. Anything, for you.

In these moments, he is so malleable and yielding. It feels as if his body and his mind has developed a ductility of sorts, an ability to bend and evolve into new forms that might adhere to Miles’ own wants and needs in the transient moments just before he realises them. His thoughts, which have always belonged to Miles in some way or another, return to him now in a precious circle, and Phoenix feels pleasurably crushed underneath the weight of his feelings for him. Each nerve in his body is reactive to Miles’ presence; when he talks, they flutter in active attention; when he walks behind him, they bristle up on the defensive; when he looks at him, they flush an angry-red. His will to please him appears vast and bottomless; so much so that just the idea that Phoenix might be in service to him sends a deep gratifying ache below his pelvis bone, along his spine. Though, in LA, his mind had been misused and taken for granted, he returns it now to Miles, who meets him one-for-one across the length of the garden table. 

When they’re apart, Phoenix sometimes imagines Miles meeting somebody on his travels, and he imagines in full what that kind of person might be like, look like, who might persuade The Miles Edgeworth to begin a relationship in heartfelt seriousness. Phoenix loves him. But everyone has known that for a very long time, haven’t they? Phoenix will always love him; but Miles’ own reciprocity is unknown to him, to anyone. So, Phoenix experiences these vivid flashes behind his eyelids of a much older Miles, with wrinkles set into his face, sitting in his Italian villa and complaining to Phoenix about his husband, probably. Who, in this fantasy, is a dentist. And very unattractive and dull. 

“I should have married you,” Dream Miles says to him. “Why didn’t I?” 

“Money?” Phoenix says in the fantasy. “Or maybe I’m just lazy,” and Dream Miles laughs and laughs and laughs. 

In the present, they sit in silence for a while, just like this, listening to the radio and watching the sun disappear slowly behind a layer of smoothed water. Pess comes out to wind her way around their legs, scrounging for scraps, until eventually she relents and rests her head beside Miles’ chair leg, bored and peckish. Every now and then, Phoenix will catch Miles’ bare foot underneath the table, and slide his own up along his ankle. Miles is taking a sip of coffee when he does this first, and he pauses instantly with the cup at his mouth, the liquid sloshing dangerously close to the edges. Phoenix grins and retreats, only to appear again a minute later. 

When the sun is completely gone, and the only light is coming from the inside of the villa, Miles stacks the bowls up and hands them over to Phoenix, who takes them with one hand. “I’ll be in the bathroom,” he says, yawning. “Clean these up for me?” 

Phoenix drags the foot of his chair away from the table, scraping it harshly against the stoneware, and keeps his thoughts to himself: of course, of course, he thinks as the china bowls clink together when he turns the tap on in the kitchen, anything for you, anything at all.

///

The clock on Miles’ phone lights up, a quiet 1:12 AM, on the wall beside the headboard. It flickers out with the sound of their breathing, the gentle creak - squeak, squeak, squeak - of the mattress below them. 

“Yes, yes, please ,” Miles sighs into the juncture of his shoulder. “My god, that’s so good.” 

“Miles,” he sighs back, “Miles, Miles. ” 

At night, they have slow, painless sex. Phoenix likes to get as deep as he possibly can inside of Miles, and watch the expression of bliss pool onto his features, putting a tentative hand to his stomach and pressing, “there, god yes, fuck, there.” He likes it when Miles leans his head back and wraps his legs around his waist and says things like that, swearing: stay, here, right here, exactly where I want you. 

There is never an explicit invitation and, if there ever was one, Phoenix was oblivious to it. If Phoenix decided, one night, that sex was no longer a viable option for the two of them - that it was too painful for them both - he could easily stay and sleep in his own designated room, and Miles would do the same, and they wouldn’t need to discuss it ever again. But as it is, right now, Miles is always ready, waiting, either already in bed or finishing up in the bathroom. Phoenix comes in anyway. There is no invitation, just an assumption. 

Miles never initiates any of their touching, either; he is passive to Phoenix’s tactility during the day, and at night, he appears to be overwhelmed by it. He makes lots of noises and tries to hide them by shoving his face into parts of Phoenix’s body; this is true whether or not he’s giving or receiving, it doesn’t seem to matter. He presses his eyes tightly shut and runs those short-clipped nails right down to the lower curve of Phoenix’s back and says things like, “I like this part of you. I like this part of you so much.” Phoenix keeps all of this tucked away at the back of his mind to fantasise about later, to play back during slow nights at the Borscht Bowl when he’s dealing failing hand after failing hand to one Kristoph Gavin and hating himself for it. 

He likes it so much when Miles says these things to him, it feels good, it feels so good, that he makes plans during the day to recreate and force them out of him later, now, again, and again. Turnabouts to make him speak, ways to make him talk: talking, it’s all he wants. To touch him and be touched by him, verbally, physically, anything he can get; these are the only things that matter now, as he works his way into Miles’ body, which accepts him easily, gently and softly, these are the only things he thinks about. 

I like it when you do that. 

        I like you. 

               I like this.  

Normally, Phoenix slips into his room just after Miles’ comes out of the shower and is mid-way through putting on his pyjamas. He does this on purpose. He likes pulling the t-shirt back over Miles’ head, stopping his routine like a loose silver cog in the clockwork, forcing him back onto the bed and pinning his thighs apart with his knees. Sometimes he leans down to whisper things into Miles’ skin, “good, god, you’re so pretty, so lovely, so good for me,” and sometimes he goes, instead, straight for what he wants: kissing, biting, whatever, however. Sometimes, he passes between the two like a dog starved for water and draws it all out for hours, not stopping, never stopping.  

Phoenix kisses him the way he thinks about kissing him during the day; while they make dinner, or work outside on the patio. He takes all the times he thinks about kissing Miles and saves them up for the night, confessing, one, two, three times against his mouth: Here’s when I thought about you in the shower, and here’s when I thought about you at breakfast, and here’s when I thought about you, again, by the gardens in town and here and here and, 

“There,” Miles breathes out, sharply. “There. Again.” 

Phoenix shifts his weight, curling a hand around his hip. “Is this okay?” 

“More than, just- fuck, Phoenix, there.” 

///

The first time anything happened, it was late into a Thursday evening. The second night. Phoenix had made dinner. Pasta. Salmon. Together, they’d had to move a stack of unopened mail off of the stool to make space for the both of them, so that Miles could watch the steam rise as Phoenix took a wooden spoon to the heated pan of penne. One hand on the handle, the other gripping the counter. He rolled up his sleeves to the elbow and stirred the pot with a lax determination; lazily, but intent on getting it right. 

“You get a wrinkle,” Miles will say to him later in the night, pressing a thumb between his eyebrows, “right here. When you’re concentrating. You’ve done that for years. Even when you were little, I think. When you were cooking, I wasn’t sure where to look. I didn’t know how to look at you then. At that point, I wanted you so badly, I was scared you could already tell.” 

After dinner, he took a phone call out in the front room where it had begun to get dark and Phoenix was listening, pretending not to listen, leaning up against the wooden door frame that led into the main study. He’d crossed his arms in a tight X and pressed his ear to the white-painted wood, watching the hair fall from behind Miles’ ears to the front of his face, where he would push it back stubbornly, agitated, tone all clipped. Snappy. Nonono. It was getting longer. Nonono. He needed a headband to keep it away from his face.

“No, no, no,” he kept saying, shaking his head. “Kay, however much you need, I’ll send it through. You know I will. I’ll do it now, yes, yes, of course I will. Darling, don’t keep these things from me again.” 

“Everything okay?” Phoenix asked when he’d hung up, shaking more strands of hair into his face. 

“Fine. It’s,” Miles waved a hand, “fine. It’s Kay. She’s…stubborn.” 

He looked down, kicking the floor, “Hm. I get it.” 

“It’s…” 

“Yeah.” 

“Girls,” Miles sighed. 

“Girls,” Phoenix agreed, nodding. “But she’s okay?” 

“She’s okay.” 

“And you?” 

Miles looked at him, confused, “I’m fine?” 

“Mm,” Phoenix put his hands on the top of the doorframe, leaning forward, letting the old wood take his weight. Miles’ face was close, his eyes all pointed and narrowed, like a disgruntled deer. It was charming. He leaned up onto the tips of his toes so that he could see more of it, “I’m just making sure. You look angry.” 

“That’s just my face.” 

“And what a face it is,” he’d hummed. 

Miles didn’t say anything. Outside of court, he is a surprisingly quiet person. Shy. In this way, exchanges with him feel precious and hard-won. Talking to Miles always made Phoenix enjoy conversation in a way he usually didn’t; when they spoke, he felt thrilled, engaged in a competitive back-and-forth in which he was privately committed to one-upping the last thing that was said. If he made a joke, Miles would scoff. In rare moments, he could draw out a laugh. If he countered a point, Phoenix would be met with yet another argument; a new number or statistic or, sometimes, something entirely physical - the sudden challenge of hardening brows or the pout of a lip. It was a hobby. He wanted to elicit as many reactions from Miles as possible, so he could later figure out which ones he liked the most, and how to make them happen again. 

Phoenix reached out and pushed a stray strand of hair behind his ear, carding his fingers downwards. 

“Phoenix-” Miles warned without breathing. It came out lightly, quietly, as though the word itself was blushing. Phoenix, resolute, pulled his hand away but pushed his weight forward, smiling, as though he could lean all the way into Miles’ space without much consequence for the outcome. 

“What? What did I say?” 

“You just-” he sputtered, nervous, “you always…”

“I always-”

“Is this…” Miles asked suddenly, eyebrows pinched at the top, “Are we flirting right now?” 

Gently, he said: “I think we’re always flirting a little bit.” 

Miles seemed to consider this. 

“I can stop if you want me to.”

“I didn’t say that.” 

And so, Phoenix kissed him then. Just lightly - just by leaning forwards - he was already so close. It was a continuation of their flirting rather than a promise to take anything further. His relationship with Miles always felt complicated in a way he could never articulate to anyone; how to explain that a kiss was merely just a comma in a sentence pulled from their arguing, a brief pause, a playful acknowledgement. An agreement: This is pretty funny, isn’t it? He could have pulled away then, and that could have been that. They could have never spoken of it again. Their time together is like that. For a few seconds, it fills all the holes. 

“Okay?” Phoenix asked afterwards, softly, almost inaudible against his mouth. 

Miles nodded. “Okay,” he whispered.

“I’m not reading this wrong, am I?”

“No.”

“I just don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“I’m not uncomfortable. Why would I be uncomfortable? It’s not the first time we’ve kissed,” he pulled at his fingers, yanking at the joints there. “You’re making it sound like this is a big deal.”

“Is this not a big deal? It feels like one to me.” 

“I don’t know.” Miles paused, “I don’t know what this is.”

Before Italy, Miles and Phoenix hadn’t seen each other for nearing eight months. The odd phone call. An email chain. A text chat, primarily pioneered by Trucy. The weight of their missing one another lingered on their bodies in a way that was not entirely unpleasant; as if they were both slipping off their socks before bed, or peeling a heated blanket from their forms in the height of summer. It was relieving. Sometimes, in Europe, they don’t kiss at all. Sometimes, it’s all they can do. They can’t explain it. Perhaps, if things had been better, they would already be living in a modest apartment together buried into the corner of University Hills and Miles wouldn’t be here; many, many uncountable zip codes away. 

Phoenix dreams about better. He idolises it. Some days, better is all he wants. Standing this close together, he could almost smell the inside of Miles’ old Los Angeles apartment on his clothes. He breathed in audibly. That was better. 

Miles put a hand to the back of his head. His fingers were cold, his nails sharpened into neat squares that dug into the pudge at the nape of his neck, and as he did it, Phoenix found he no longer had a reason to miss him anymore: “Just- kiss me again? Please?” said Miles. 

And he did. He did, and he did, and he did. 

///

After they dispose of the condom and wipe one another down with the washcloth, they lie on their backs in Miles’ bed, or facing each other, and talk in low voices until one of them falls asleep. Phoenix has slept in his room exactly once, on the first night. He jokes about this a lot, smiling to himself like it’s a particularly amusing indulgence that only he is privy to or some hard-won accomplishment.  

“You can if you want to.” Miles says quietly, voice buffered by the covers. 

“What?”

He twists his head to burrow deeper into the fabric of his pillow. His hair splays out in strands across his face, and Phoenix pushes them back loosely with his knuckles. “Go back to your room. You can, if you would like. I don’t want to keep you here if you’re uncomfortable or if you find it unpleasant in some way.” 

“Miles.” 

“Hmm?”

“I’m literally still holding your cock.” 

He harrumphs against the fabric, blowing air into Phoenix’s face. “I only meant-” 

“Do you want me to go?” 

“That’s not what I said.” 

“Okay.” Phoenix adjusts his hips slightly, and he can feel Miles twitch against his palm. Sometimes, when the sun rises, he wakes up beside Miles and they’re so close together that, if he’s awake too, they move until Phoenix can put his fingers inside of him again, where he is still wet and loose and open. It’s so good then. They don’t have to say a word and afterwards they go straight back to sleep. “So tell me you don’t want me here, and I’ll go.” 

Miles shakes his head against the fabric. “No. You can stay. If you’d like.”

“I do like, actually.”

They shift on the bed. Miles rolls his weight onto Phoenix, bodily, and slips down to press light, butterfly kisses to his chest and stomach. He tugs at the smattering of dark hairs. He holds onto him tightly, and Phoenix can feel his body adjust to the new weight like a deflating air mattress; he goes with him, slowly, and they both soften almost instantly, the soft animals of their bodies curled up together under the sheets. He is uncharacteristically sure of what he is doing. He is certain that this is right. The feeling floods him with a sharp sense of responsibility. 

What don’t I know about you? Phoenix thinks, finding his hands in Miles’ hair. Am I the only person who knows this much about you? 

There is a scar on the under-groove of Phoenix's knee from a tree-fall in his childhood. In the moon-burned light of the bedroom, Miles runs his hand up and over his naked calves, the length of his body settled between them in the central dip of the mattress, until his fingers catch on the tough, mauled skin there. Then, and only then, does he bend his leg up at an angle and duck his head to kiss at it, lightly. It erupts a weighted sigh from Phoenix, who feels as if his whole self has just been expelled suddenly and gently from his own body. In Miles’ arms, he slowly unfolds like a note passed in secret underneath a school desk. 

“How did you know I wanted to be touched there?” He asks with an outwards breath, and Miles leans up instead to kiss him fully on the mouth. 

“I didn’t,” he says, nosing his chin, “I just wanted to touch you.” With the press of lips to his jaw, he continues, “Anywhere. That isn’t exclusive to your knee.” 

“God, I hope not!” 

Miles draws away, considering, “It is a very nice knee.” 

Phoenix laughs, “Thanks. I worked really hard on it.” 

“Was this,” he asks, tapping the scar in quick succession, “before or after me?” 

“Before, I think. You weren’t at our school yet.” 

“Hmm,” Miles hums and kisses it again. “And this one?” He drags his fingers northward along his leg, to the curve of his hip. Dog bite. 

“After. I was fourteen.” 

“Here?” Further upwards, parallel to his ribcage: A raised length of white skin slashed across his left side. 

“After. That’s from the bridge, I think.”

“And here?”

“Before. Larry pushed me off a swing in first grade.”

“What about here?”

“Tiger.” Miles raises an eyebrow at him, “So, that’d be after, too.” 

His fingers move until he reaches Phoenix’s collarbone, where two dark, purple marks stand out against the stretch of his tan skin. Miles hovers over it, pillowing his head on his stomach, “These ones?” 

Phoenix peers down at him over the soft lip of his gut. He brings a hand up to his hair and threads his fingers through it. “Taser,” he says, quietly enough that he hopes Miles will pass right over them in favour of the angry scorch marks from the coffee. 

“After?” 

“Yeah,” he breathes. “Yeah, it was after. I mean, who’s running about and hitting a little kid with a taser?” 

“Was it after the first time?”

He drags the hand already in his hair around and around, petting it lightly. “It was after I met you again. For the second time.” 

“Von Karma used to carry a taser,” Miles says absently, as if the thought had only now occurred to him. “In his inside pocket.”

“Lots of people carry tasers, Miles.”

“He made Franziska carry one, too.” 

“Was that before or after the whip?” Phoenix jokes lightly, but Miles' hand drifts over to a faint cross-hatching of thin lashing scars before he can distract him further, on the right side of his ribs. 

“I’m sorry.”

Phoenix shakes his head, and says in a rough voice: “Not your fault.” 

“Why do the people in my life always want to hurt you?” 

“Not always.” 

His voice sounds oddly cool and distant, as if Phoenix is talking to Miles on the phone or playing back a voicemail after he himself has gone elsewhere or left for somewhere new entirely, “I wanted to hurt you, once.”

“Nah, you didn’t. You were just mad at me. I’m like that. I piss people off all on my own.” He cradles Miles’ jaw in his hand, “I don’t think it’s about you, really. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. I’m just pretty polarising, I guess.” 

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey, hey. Really, Miles. It’s not your fault. None of it was. It’s okay,” His voice sounds thick in his own ears. His face feels hot and damp. “It’s okay. Just, come here.” 

Miles doesn’t raise his head, but he looks up from his place on Phoenix’s stomach with his eyes turned upwards. They are shallow and white, almost as if he has no irises at all. He says again, “I’m so sorry.”

Phoenix sighs, defeated, “Yeah. Yeah, I know. It’s okay. It’s okay.” He tugs him upwards, so that he may look at him properly when he says it, but Miles doesn’t relent. He buries his face into the curve of his shoulder. So, Phoenix turns his head and mouths by his ear instead, almost inaudible, “I love you.”

“Yes,” Miles sniffs quietly into the crook of his neck. He squeezes his hand, but it’s a very sad gesture. Suddenly, white-hot with onsetting panic, Phoenix almost can’t believe the enormity, the stupidity of what he’s just said, “I’m sorry about that, too.” 

///

Later, when Phoenix’s breathing slows until the only tell-tale sign of his continued life is the gentle rise and fall of his chest, Miles turns his cheek against his own and says to a stray eyelash fluttering on the bridge of his nose, “I just can’t say it.” He whispers, nosing at the soft skin of his cheek, “I can't even think it. But I do. I do, too.” 

///

“Will we need a basket?” 

Phoenix looks up from his phone, distracted, “I dunno. It’s just stuff for risotto.” 

The local grocery store is a ten minute walk from the villa, nestled into the beginning of a hill behind a line of stone-laid walls. Afternoon light spills out on the shop front in a bright, yellow square, saturating the colour-block houses with a pop-art palette. Today, the sky is featureless, stretched out across the world like silk. The undergrowth that emerges from the foot of the grocers hums with crickets and an orange cat stretches out by the crates of fresh vegetables and fruit, its back arched in a high C. As they enter, Phoenix reaches out to pet its furry head and the cat rolls its neck sideways to observe him with feline indifference.

“Hello,” he says, rubbing a few circles around its brow until he pulls away. “I know someone who would like you a lot.” 

“Meow,” says the cat, who probably hears this all of the time. 

When they push open the door, a bell rings - tinny in the shaded alcove of the shop. “Ciao,” a woman greets them from behind the counter, her back turned as she pulls a cigarette packet from her pocket. 

“Ciao,” they respond in kind, and Phoenix smiles privately to himself. Is he the kind of person who can say Ciao now, and mean it, without his obvious inexperience with the language betraying some level of personal insecurity? He must be. Ciao, he thinks, as Miles picks up a basket, ciao, ciao, ciao. 

As he grins, a wave of anxiety licks up his ribcage, suddenly, reminding him that there is nothing right now to smile about. He stumbles, scrambling for his phone in his pocket and then feels silly. You’re All Caught Up! his messaging interface tells him. He puts it away. 

They walk along the aisles and Miles examines their pickings with manicured nails and a practised eye. His fingers nick a groove on a sweet pepper and he puts it back down alongside its other, neglected brethren. Not good enough. Phoenix, impatient, walks past him, flip-flops smacking on the terracotta floor. The entire length of the shop takes up no less space than a school bus, and the produce is all contained in crates or spread out on the wooden shelves. There are lace curtains strung up on the windows. He feels as if he has walked into the front of somebody’s house, where they keep all of their kitchen items out on some godly display for guests, instead of a grocery store. Something about this makes him itchy. He circles the shop two times and comes back with milk. 

“Did we need milk?” Miles asks as he places two cartons in the basket. 

“Yeah,” Phoenix lies, and isn’t sure why he does it. He has no idea if they need any milk. His hands feel empty. Like he just needs to do something with them. 

“Do we need more butter?” 

“Sure,” he agrees, absently. “Or, no. Uh- I don’t know.”

“Have you checked the list?” 

“There’s a list?”

Miles looks up at him, unconvinced, “Is everything alright?” 

“Yeah, yeah. All good. Where’s the uh- where’s that list?”

Quietly, with a hand on his bicep, Miles asks in a low voice, “Have you still not heard from Trucy?”

“Nope,” Phoenix replies quickly, popping the ‘p’ with a pucker, patting his pockets down for a list he didn’t know he had. “I really don’t remember you giving me anything.”

“Phoenix-”

“I’m sure you did, I’m not arguing that. But I just can’t remember-”

“Phoenix.” Miles says, firm. He stops. “She’s alright. She’s only with Maya.” 

“I know,” He says, and reaches for a vine of tomatoes instead, beginning to pull them from their stems and into a small, cardboard punnet. “I know.” 

He has a folder on his phone that automatically saves the photos Maya sends him to his camera roll. On there, is a curated collection of Trucy-photos: selfies, videos, pictures of her throwing an arm around Pearls’ shoulder and grinning up into the camera. She has just lost her last baby tooth. He can see the gap there when she smiles with her gums. 

“It must be hard being so far away from her,” Miles tries again, and his attempts at friendly empathy, though endearing, are spoken with the clumsy awkwardness of someone who does not have many friends and so has been forced to improvise his way through honest conversations. Phoenix wishes he would lay it to rest. “It’s the first time she’s not come with you, after all.” 

“Yeah. I know. She’s pretty big now, though.” 

“She’s only eleven.” 

“I miss her,” he shrugs with finality. He knows Miles isn’t probing him to justify his feelings, but he feels the need to evidence them all the same. Bad habit. “I’m her dad.” 

Miles nods, “You’re worried about her.”

“Not even,” Phoenix says, and means it. “I just miss her.” 

Trucy had confessed to him, not long before this trip, that she’d never felt like a daughter before she met him. “I was always just, like, the kid,” she’d said into his shoulder, bluntly and without apology, in the way young children often do when they are about to admit something heartbreakingly sad. “I’d never been anybody’s daughter before, y’know. And I actually feel like I’m your daughter. It’s nice that you always want me around.” After that, he had tucked her into bed and proceeded to cry quietly in the kitchen for a good forty-five minutes. 

He misses her. Trucy has given Phoenix a new way of life. In law, he could not always protect people in the exact ways he’d wanted to, but as a father, he is granted all that protection-giving and more. He is commended for it. It’s as if a heavy weight has been lifted from his emotional life and he can finally love someone the way he has always dreamt of; freely, and the feeling breathes a new breadth of fresh air into his lungs. It is no longer an unthinkable idea that he wakes each morning to an: I love you! In fact, it is stunningly easy to accept as simple fact and Phoenix can evidence it all by the messages on his phone. When she touches him spontaneously, with a tight hug around his middle, or by a squeezing pressure to his wrist, he feels completely solidified in the real world and finds himself hoping that people can see them, that they are watching them together, as father and daughter. To be known as her father grants him a sense of giddy delight, establishing him as someone who is needed, wanted even; whose continued existence in her life is understood to be completely necessary and outwardly praised.  

He’s never spent this long without her. It’s not wrong to miss her, Phoenix doesn’t think.

“Yes,” Miles takes the punnet of tomatoes from his hands. “I can understand that, too.”

After fifteen minutes of treading around the shop and reading the back of risotto rice packets, they approach the counter with their haul and pay for it with cash. The woman coos at Miles, who responds not unkindly with hurried politeness.

“Spero che porterà la tua borsa?” She asks, leaning forward on the counter, her eyes gleaming. 

“Sono sicuro che lui farà,” Miles replies, smiling. “E' un bravo ragazzo.”

Once they’ve packed everything away, Phoenix slings the canvas bag over his shoulder and makes to leave when Miles is handed his change. The cashier raises her arms out to him, seemingly thrilled, “Ah! Benissimo! Fine, fine!” 

Miles holds out a hand, “Che ti avevo detto?”

“Si, ed è davvero un bell'uomo,” She points to them both as they finally turn to go, “Che bella coppi! Ben fatto,” She chimes, and Phoenix watches helplessly as Miles' ears heat up pink, muttering, “Si, si, grazie,” under his breath. 

They bumble out of the store in a haze of ciaos and grazies, waving and nodding until they reach the threshold of the open door. Phoenix likes that about Europe; he likes that you can never say goodbye just once. 

“Ciao!” Phoenix says again, just before they walk out of the door. “Grazie!”

The cashier waves back, grinning, “Si, si! Ciao.”

When they step out into the mid-afternoon light, Phoenix’s eyes take a moment to adjust. The lakeside wind hits them across their faces, and he turns his head with it, watching where a woman’s long summer skirt kicks up playfully around her ankles as she moves past them. He pulls the strap of the bag further up his shoulder. 

“Should we-” He begins to say at the same time Miles suggests, “Would you like some ice cream?” 

Phoenix blinks at him, “Ice cream?” 

“Your daughter usually demands one by now,” He says, reaching into his pocket and sliding his sunglasses into place on the ridge of his nose. “And you miss her. I thought we might honour her.” 

His throat tightens and he stalls at the suggestion. 

At this moment, Phoenix takes a second to look at him. Really look at him. He knows Miles Edgeworth so well, he can picture him almost perfectly at any given second of the day: In a doorway, at an airport gate, behind the prosecutorial bench with the light behind him; how well-crafted he is, how well-executed he looks, and what a formidable, elegant person he is, unlike anybody else Phoenix knows. And he knows, in turn, how poorly he handles any kind of emotional vulnerability - or so Phoenix had believed. But, watching him now, perhaps his earlier assumption had been too soon-ly mischaracterized. Perhaps it’s not always improvisation on Miles’ part - at least, not anymore. Perhaps, in the last three years of his absence, Miles’ social ineptitude has developed, keenly, into a real, capable, empathetic consideration for other people. He had always been a kind kid. It makes sense then that, with a small push in the right direction, he would grow into a kind adult; despite everything. 

Phoenix watches him and he feels suddenly jealous of this newly discovered naturalness, of Miles’ easy consideration for Phoenix’s frantic, fatherly feelings and his even easier proposed solution: ice cream. Back in court, during that first year, things had been quite the opposite. Phoenix had been the one who understood how to navigate people, how to solve things, and Miles had just angered everyone around him. What had once seemed so disproportionally unbalanced appears to have swung blindly in the other direction. At the same time Phoenix is in awe of Miles’ kindness, he finds himself violently envious of it and wishing that his own capacity for tenderness would simply return to him after three years of disuse. 

He says none of this out loud. Instead, he swallows, “Yeah, sure. I could go for some ice cream.” 

“Alright. I know a Gelateria we can stop by on the waterfront.”

And so, they walk. While they wait in the line, Phoenix asks: “What did she say, by the way? The lady in the store, I mean?” 

Miles looks ahead, “She said that you were handsome.” 

“Oh,” he says, and finds himself surprisingly, vainly pleased with the association. Handsome. Giddiness bubbles up over the lip of his old anxiety. He doesn’t think anyone has ever described him as handsome before. “And what did you say?”

“I said, I know,” Miles huffs, and moves up to survey the ice cream flavours. “I’m the one that has to look at you all the time.” 

///

One night, lying horizontal together on the couch, Phoenix had asked, “Will you ever come back to California?”

And Miles had replied, smoothing down Phoenix's hair, twisting his cowlick around, and around his finger, “That depends. Will you ever come back to law?” 

“That’s not entirely fair, Miles.” 

“Well, then,” he’d turned his palms outwards, as if to say there you go. “Don’t ask me unfair things.” 

In silence, they’d laid back against the quilt and Phoenix resumed his earlier position of resting his head against Miles’ chest, pressing his face into the fabric of his shirt so as to not experience the world as it inched slowly forwards through time. Miles touched the back of his thigh. Almost unconsciously, blindly, mechanically, Phoenix moved to undress them both until Miles had his hand wrapped around him. When he moved up and down, Phoenix could hear his own voice crying out into the room again and again; raw, animalistic cries of someone who is hungry for care and a gentle hand. His body, which often felt as if it existed outside of other people’s ability to see, hear or even comprehend, was engaged in a sensation so intense it almost felt faint. 

“Do you miss me when I’m not here?” He’d gasped, in a sudden moment of heightened insecurity.

“All the time,” Miles said into his hair, whispering so as to not let it escape into the air, not until the sentiment sinks fully through his scalp and into his brain. “But that’s not a new thing. I think I was probably brought up missing you.”

“Oh my, god-”

“Do you like me saying that?” Miles asked. 

“Yeah, yes, yes, I do-” 

“I miss you all the time. I think about you,” he pulled himself up so that they could kiss one another, open-mouthed in the quiet of the longue, “all the time. Phoenix-”  

At that, he cried soundlessly into Miles’ neck and slumped down against him, panting sickly. They didn’t say anything else for a long while afterwards. 

///

They sit on the edge of the marina, legs dangling off the side, ice cream cones in hand. Strawberry and chocolate; Larry always used to get vanilla. Phoenix remains quiet as he watches the boats bob up and down on the water like large, metal ducks. Miles is talking. He’s talking about Kristoph Gavin, so Phoenix has chosen not to listen. 

“I don’t find it strange, by the way,” Miles says, in a far-off voice that indicates some level of psycho-analysis. Of what, Phoenix doesn’t know. He sometimes sounds like that when he is trying to decode his own emotional outlook on something, as if Miles has to root around in some filing cabinet of his brain to find the kind of reaction that might be considered normal in any given situation. “That he’s your ex.” 

Phoenix barks a laugh, taken aback. Something about Miles Edgeworth and the word, even the concept of, ‘ex’ is so startlingly unserious that it makes him giggle nonsensically, “He’s not my ex.” 

Miles regards him sideways, “No?”

“It’s not like that. We’re,” he fishes for the right word, “friends.” 

“But you have slept together.” 

Phoenix covers his face with his spare hand. Miles laughs, toeing the line between amused and cruel, “You’re so funny,” he says, by way of explanation. “You can say the most outrageous things to me in bed but as soon as we’re outside, you can’t even discuss your own sex life without getting embarrassed.” 

“It’s not that. The contexts are different. It’s like, it’s different when I’m, y’know-”

“Inside me?” 

Phoenix huffs into his palm, “I thought you were usually shy about this stuff.” 

“I am when it’s actively happening. But I feel like, right now, you won’t pass judgement if I say the wrong thing,” he licks a sticky stripe up the side of his cone. “And it’s different when we’re just talking about it.” He grants Phoenix some mercy and stops talking for a moment, lapping up his ice cream. Until finally, he appears to grow bored with the quiet and turns his head to ask, “Does it help if I tell you I find it quite charming?” 

“No. That doesn’t help.” 

“Well,” he says, and sucks off a stray dollop of strawberry from his fingers. “I do. Find it charming, I mean.” 

They don’t talk about Kristoph Gavin, as a rule, unless they’re discussing the MASON system or Phoenix’s disbarment on some distant, abstract level. In the rare times his name is brought up outside of those designated topics, Miles regards his existence with a story-book kind of interest. As if Kristoph is a character from a doomed novel, or television show, and Miles can talk about him with the confident, absent hatred of someone who has never met the real person. He doesn’t even appear to feel threatened by him. For Miles, he exists only in one dimension. Any other facets of his personality are irrelevant, and Phoenix doesn't bring them up. He doesn’t need to. The unspoken consensus is that Miles does not like Kristoph Gavin very much but thinks about him often. If Kristoph has any outstanding feelings of his own towards Miles Edgeworth, then; Phoenix is not about endanger his friend by asking. 

“But you did have sex,” Miles asks again.  

Phoenix brings his hand away from his face, sighful, “Yeah. Sure. We had sex.”

“Only once?”

“A few times. In the first year.” 

“Was it good?” 

It was not. If he’s being honest, Phoenix remembers very little from the first year of his disbarment, and he remembers even less about the sex. It was the awkward kind borne from too much drinking and a passive acceptance of where the night might be headed, rather than a blatant need to touch somebody because you must touch them; because you need the person attached to the hand you’re holding and the skin you’re kissing; because you need to keep touching them, or how else will they know that you are still here, moving, existing, alive? Phoenix had hated himself and Kristoph was good looking and washed his hair often and obsessed with him in some tragic, sadistic way, and there was very little else to it. It was sex, but it was not good. There was nothing behind it. Like painting white over an already white room. The result was nothing more than a few stains on his couch covers. 

“It was fine. It was sex.”

“Better than me?”

Phoenix turns his head, “What are you asking me, Miles?”

Miles doesn’t look at him. His head is angled out towards the boats. Phoenix feels a flaming hot sense of irritation bubble up in his chest. At times, Miles is blunt and bold and seemingly unafraid to question Phoenix about what kind of partners he has previously indulged in, and at others, he is shy and unknowable. He permits Phoenix openness but only when it’s on his own terms. He is learning to be compassionate but when the moment does not call for the application of this new aptitude, he is frustrating and confusing. Phoenix wishes they were back in the villa, so he could just go down on him and no longer think about any of this. 

Miles, for one, appears to come back to himself, his cheeks spotted with two dots of pink. Still, he is nothing if not committed to a line of questioning once it has been breached. Quietly, he says, “Did you think about me when you were fucking him?”

“What do you want me to say to that?” Phoenix asks, leaning forwards to consider the fat drops of chocolate that run down to his fingers in rain-trails. 

“I want you to say yes.”

“Yes.” He pauses. He admits it out towards the water’s front, truthfully, “Yeah, I did.” 

“Every time?”

“All the time.”

Miles nods once, satisfied, and runs his tongue over the lip of his cone.

///

In his arms, Miles holds a laundry basket.

He is out in the garden, among the lemon trees, hanging up their shared laundry on a line that stretches from the back of the house to a fence post at the end of the yard. He is wearing a white linen t-shirt that exposes the pink dip of his shoulder blades. There is a faint mole in the centre of his neck. Phoenix walks over to kiss it. 

Miles yields, and lets his head fall sideways like a ragdoll, allowing Phoenix to pull the lip of his collar down and pepper kisses along his shoulder. He bites the meat of his neck. Miles gasps.

“Not here,” he chastises. Phoenix lays the flat length of his tongue against the jut of his spine and licks at him anyway, cat-like.

“No one can see us.”  

“They can hear us.” 

“Hmm,” Phoenix hums, and skims his palms up the side of Miles’ waist, under his shirt. “I thought you’d like that. After yesterday.” 

“I was uncharacteristically bold yesterday.” Miles sounds tired as he says it, lightly irritated, but he makes no move to push Phoenix away or to stop his ministrations, so he continues. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.” 

Phoenix says nothing. His eyes flutter closed and then open up again to tickle Miles on the back of his neck. The breeze picks up in their ears and whistles. It is seven o’clock in the evening. 

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No. I just don’t want you to think that I’m…” Miles stalls, and cradles the laundry basket closer to his chest. “That I’m oblivious to your feelings. I shouldn’t have brought up Kristoph yesterday. That was unfair of me.” 

Phoenix leans around to kiss him properly. They come away, wet-lipped. “I haven’t slept with him in two years. I don’t even want to.” 

“I know you don’t.” 

“I was just surprised you were so interested.” 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Miles confesses, so quietly his words are almost driven away by the gentle, whipping wind. “I suppose I just don’t understand it. I can’t do this with other people.”

“This?”

“I can’t have sex like that. It’s different, with anyone else, and I hate it.” 

Reaching around, Phoenix pulls the basket from his loose-knuckled grip and places it on the floor by their feet. Then, in a series of motions he has wanted to carry out for six years - maybe more - he turns Miles to face him, takes his jaw in between his thumb and forefinger, and kisses him, long and slow in the balmy air. He angles his head up to find the exact moment where Miles goes pliant against him. Finally, after a few minutes, he sinks, effortlessly, in his hands and against his chest. 

“I get that. I’ve only ever really wanted you, I think,” he admits, openly, and unapologetically. He is tired. Miles already knows he loves him, anyway. Whether or not the sentiment is returned in full, or even in the same way, hardly matters now. “I used to think about you all the time in college.” 

“You didn’t even know me properly.” 

“Didn’t have to,” he dips his head and presses his lips to his jawline. “Wanted to fuck you then, too.” 

“Just fuck me?” 

“Well, I had this grand scheme to see you again. You probably don’t remember that, though.” 

This makes Miles laugh out loud, his shoulders shaking as its sounds out into the garden. A ladybird appears at the seam of his t-shirt. Phoenix puts his finger out and lets it crawl onto his nailbed, scrabbling upwards with its minute, itchy feet. As his laughter dies down, Miles sighs, “Maybe everything would be easier if we had never been together.”

“Yeah," Phoenix responds automatically, without having processed the full meaning of his words properly. His verbal agreement leaves him instantly, and once it's out there, he can't take it back. It leaves his mouth with a dirty after taste, like burnt coffee, or a tea left out to brew for too long. "Maybe.” 

“I don’t mean better, either, before you jump to any conclusions.” 

“I wasn’t jumping.”

“I can feel you jumping.”

Phoenix turns and looks away from him. Instead, he directs his full attention to the ladybird. It settles comfortably on his knuckle and then flutters its wings, flying off. He hopes that his poker face can save him here, too, and he wonders if he can step away from him without his panic being too-obviously on show, “Actually, no. I can’t even imagine that, if I’m being honest. I can’t imagine not having you in my life. I can’t-”

“It’s better,” Mile says, stopping him mid-spiral, wrapping his arms around his waist. “My life is much better for you being in it. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.” 

“Yeah,” he says, wetly. “Yeah.” 

Phoenix reaches back around for his hand and Miles gives it to him without thinking. He is driven, suddenly, by a depth of emotion so intrinsic within him that it moves his body on its own accord. For a second, he simply holds it, his finger stroking up and down his knuckles. Then he raises his hand to his mouth and kisses it. Then again. Then again. “I don’t want you to go,” Miles says, quietly. 

Another press of lips, to his pulse point. “I don’t have to go yet.” 

“We need to make dinner.”

“We can make dinner later,” Phoenix whispers, and leans in to kiss his mouth open. “We’ll do it later.”

///

They sleep with each other on the garden chairs, half-dressed. Miles grabs the back of his neck and rolls his hips down, his own head thrown back as Phoenix pulls at the slick-skin of his hips, again and again and again. The sun shocks his features into a heavenly glow. Phoenix takes the time to stare at him, deliberately; Miles’ appearance, though unchanging, is like a good, cherished song from childhood. He returns to it every now and again with a newfound reverence and appreciation for its familiar loveliness. 

“I want this so much.” 

“Yes, god,” Miles moans, seemingly forgetful of his feared potential for voyeuristic neighbours. 

“Thank you,” Phoenix gasps out with each downward turn of Miles’ hips. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

With a press forwards, Miles drapes his whole body along Phoenix’s chest and pushes both of them backwards along the line of the chair. He knocks their foreheads together, so that their breathing intermingles in the inch of space between them. In a tiny voice, locked out from the rest of the world, he says: “I love you. I love you.”

///

"Did you mean it?"

"Did you mean it?"

They look at each other over the pink, waxy rims of their eyes; and suddenly, in that moment, they are conspirators.  

"I have to go back to LA."

"I can't go back to LA."

"So," Phoenix smacks his lips as they fold away the laundry, white, damp sheets creasing in his hands, "what do we do?"

"I don't know." Miles shakes his head, "I don't know."

///

When he was younger, Phoenix has vivid memories of watching his mother put together big, flat sheets of omelette in the mornings and serving it between them from a large sgraffito bowl, the one with the cautionary crack down its centre. Usually, she cooked it savoury and used chicken fat. On weekends, she would heap generous amounts of butter and oil into the pan and put a finger to her smiling lips: a treat, okay? It was a routinely reiterated rule that, to help yourself to seconds, you have to finish the plate in front of you first; they used to pass the spoon between each other, dishing it out equally between scattered seconds of conversation, until the bowl was emptied completely.  

These are the things he thinks about as he cooks. 

He wants his daughter - his pseudo-sister, and Pearls, and Ema and the lot - to share in these kitchen memories of their own making, and there is so much he can’t do for them, so much he couldn’t do in those first three years: a good, comfort meal is sometimes the only thing he can give to people. So: He makes Miles dinner. He calls Trucy on the phone. 

“Yeah, sweetheart,” he says into the receiver, cracking eggs into the pot with his free hand. “I miss you too, Trucy-roo.”

Is this what he does now? Is this how he spends his days: walking down dusted, tree-lined Italian lanes, he swings a set of eco-friendly canvas bags in one hand, the other in his pocket. He buys carb-y bread from a local bakery with a serif-font and he wakes up late in the mornings. He makes eggs. He reads legal scripts and argues deeply and talks loudly and plays Mario Kart in the evenings, loser does the dishes.

Here, he wakes in a beautiful place. He eats beautiful food. He looks at beautiful things, art and people, and he calls his daughter everyday at six. Is this who he is? Is this what he does now? This: Miles, phone calls, and spooning out butter in a terracotta-tiled kitchen? He has two more days left in Italy. What then? 

“Wright,” Miles calls out to him from the patio when he’s done on the phone. “Can I come inside?” 

Phoenix brings it out to him instead. They eat it over the sound of the radio. 

People like to talk about love as the primary point of a moment rather than the result. Phoenix considers this when he watches Miles send a blue-shell his way from his increasingly-frustrating rank in fifth place; he thinks that, maybe, it’s less about looking at them and more about looking with them. The first time they attended an art gallery together was on July 5th, 2020. He remembers it. When they were looking at Monet’s Water Lilies, Phoenix knew he was in love with Miles, because they were present together underneath the painting and Phoenix could still feel him there without having to turn his head; in that moment, his love for him wasn’t the subject of his gaze but simply the result of their shared looking. A rare moment of trust, where no one was leaving and no one was left behind. He thinks, what it really is, was the fact that they were together for a while, and he liked it. 

“Yoshi,” Miles scorns, teeth gritted. “It’s not my fault I’ve been unfairly threatened by red shells since we’ve started playing.” 

Phoenix watches him. How could his feelings for Miles be related to any other person in quite the same way; he is to him what nobody else is. He loves him, and it matters. That very fact terrifies him as much as it invigorates him - as much as it comforts. Part of that feeling is knowing the extent of the debt Miles feels he owes to him, and Phoenix often worries that the plane tickets, and the sex, and the dinners are all a stacking total to fulfil this final outstanding payment. 

But, it has been a very long time since Phoenix has idolised him. And, another long stretch of time, since Miles has idolised Phoenix in turn, or owed him anything at all. Now, neither of them can really say with certainty which one is more deserving of love. He’s not sure that’s even the point, anymore. Before, Phoenix had always thought love was meant to make you a better person, but perhaps it can also give you the space to be the kind of person that you already are. He hopes so, at the very least. He hopes. 

That feeling will remain here, buried beneath the shirt he will purposefully forget for Miles in the laundry pile, until he returns: again and again and again, for however long it may take. Next year, he will see more of Italy and they will talk and, for a week, life will be good. 

“This is such shit,” Miles yells, stampeded suddenly into sixth, seventh and eighth. “This whole thing is rigged, Phoenix Wright!” 

There will be yet more time for growth, later. In two days he will go back to LA, and he will go back to the phone calls and the emails and texts. Tonight; they let themselves be, as they are, together under the glow of the television light. 

“Don’t worry about the dishes, loser,” Phoenix laughs, leaning over to kiss his temple, just once, just lightly. “We’ll do them tonight. We’ll do them later.”