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Friday, May 12th, 2017: Littlejohn Coliseum, Clemson
"I've got my whole bright future ahead of me," Miles tells his Ma after he’s walked across that stage and gotten his diploma, the little scrap of paper that proclaims Miles Brown is free, finally free, of Clemson and its energy-sapping humidity and its soul-sucking good ol’ boy football culture. He’s free at last. Free to stop hiding who he is. Free to move forward, and god knows, Miles needs to move forward and leave these past four years behind him – five years, if he really wants to get down to the heart of it. The heart. That’s enough to make Miles chuckle to himself.
He was redshirted his freshman year, and a lot of folks pressured him to stay on at Clemson one more year, to use that remaining season of eligibility. Miles told them all, very politely, that no thanks, he was on his way to law school at George Washington, which is completely true. Equally true is the fact that Miles would take a hot poker up any of his bodily openings before he would voluntarily spend so much as one more semester at Clemson, but he keeps that truth to himself and smiles for his Ma, his arm around Alicia, while she snaps graduation photographs.
Four long years, parts of which Miles wishes he could do over, skip over, or erase entirely, but he did it. He survived it all and made it through to the other side. Maybe it didn't happen like he wanted it to, but he made it.
Miles Brown is a survivor. He gets by, no matter what gets thrown at him. Call it the philosophy major's little life philosophy. Somehow and someway, he'll make this world what he wants it to be, even if it's not what he wanted once upon a time.
Thursday, September 29th, 2016: “Death Valley” Memorial Stadium, Clemson
After a good two-and-a-half hours of scrimmages, everybody trots off the field towards the locker room and the showers, except for Lyles, who lags behind and gestures for Adcock, Miles, and Echols to come walk with him.
“So I’m going home for a coupla days after the game,” Lyles announces.
“Yeah? So?” Echols says with a little snort, like he’s trying not to laugh at Lyles.
"Gonna ask my girl to marry me," Lyles says. "Got a ring and everything."
“Yeah?” Miles asks. “Well, good for you. Guess she never did find out about that Amber girl from ADPi?”
“Or Dana of tri-Delt,” Echols says, now openly grinning. “Or Miranda. Which one was she from?”
“She was the one from the cheer squad,” Adcock says. “Tits like God’s gift to man.”
“Nah, that was Natasha. I never forget a cheerleader,” Miles says.
“Aw, fuck y’all,” Lyles retorts. He doesn’t exactly sound bothered by the list of his exploits, though. “No, Jennifer don’t know about any of that and what she don’t know won’t hurt me.”
“You’re a real class act, you know that?” Miles says, shaking his head.
“Hey! I’m making an honest woman out of ’er!” Lyles protests.
Echols shakes his head, still grinning. “Too bad no one can make you honest, Lyles!”
“Lyles has proved his manhood, at least,” Miles says, raising his eyebrows and putting on a sincere face. “Maybe a little too often, if you get what I mean.”
Adcock and Echols chortle along with Miles, then Adcock says, “Yeah, what’s the problem, Lyles? You been overcompensating all these years for some reason?”
“The real question is, what’s he compensating for? Tiny dick or where he really wants to stick it?” Miles asks.
“Dammit, Brown!” Lyles says.
“Just calling it like I see it,” Miles says, with an exaggerated shrug. “For somebody with nothing to prove, you sure do work hard trying to prove it, is all I’m saying.”
“I have seen his truck,” Echols says. “I definitely vote tiny dick. We should get his truck some nuts.”
“Oh, I don’t know, he might like that a little too much,” Miles says.
“Brown, you crack me up,” Adcock says. “So what’re you doing after the game?”
Miles is tempted to say that he’s driving down to Atlanta and getting fucked in a club—which is the god’s honest truth—by the biggest, most-leatherclad bear he can find—which isn’t even close to the truth—but instead he just says, “Going to a concert of another band you’ve never heard of.”
“You and your shitty city hipster music,” Adcock mutters, shaking his head. “Let me know if you manage to nail one of the groupies this time.”
“Nah, I’m shooting for the bass player,” Miles says.
“Chicks who play bass are hot,” Lyles concedes.
“Still overcompensating,” Echols says mock-sadly, his head shaking back and forth. “Why did we not realize this sooner?”
“Oh, fuck all of y’all,” Lyles grumbles, stomping off towards the showers.
“Sorry, baby, but you’re not my type,” Miles calls after him, and Adock and Echols both laugh all the way to their lockers.
Saturday, October 31st, 2015: Rainforest nightclub, Atlanta
Skin, sweat, the way their mouths taste against his mouth, the way fingers sliding under his clothes feel in the hot half-dark of the Atlanta night. This is what Miles is now, a few stolen hours of a stolen weekend, lies on a bye week, lies to cover a mid-week trip out of town. Boys in Atlanta, boys during a brief summer break in Lima, boys against a wall in a club with Miles’ chest against their backs, his mouth against the backs of their necks. Not in Clemson, never in Clemson, never in South Carolina at all. No club in South Carolina is low profile enough for Miles now, not with two more seasons to go.
None of that matters in Rainforest, not Clemson or the faux superhero secret identity Miles wears underneath the orange and purple. Who would connect Miles, shirtless and grinding against some beautiful dark-skinned boy, with any of that? What Atlanta offers him is something beyond anonymity; it's the fantasy of who Miles could be, will be in less than two years. That's why he'll come back someday, find a way to land here for good. The promise of that future-Miles, that's what it is. That's all it is, because it can't be anything else.
Clemson won't break him. Miles is so much stronger and better than that. He knows how to play that game, and he has played it beautifully for over two years now. He can lie with a song in his heart, spit the taste out of his mouth like bile, because he's black and queer in South Carolina, and he's making it out in one glorious piece. Not everybody can play that game as good as he can, but Miles is the goddamn master.
Miles dances that beautiful boy towards the back of the club, whispers "You fucking me, or’m I fucking you?" into his ear as he crowds that boy against the dark wall. The beautiful boy turns his back to Miles, sweat rolling down the valley of his spine. Miles kisses his neck as he works the boy's tight pants down past the curve of his perfect ass, pulls his own dick out of his pants and rolls on a condom from his back pocket, squirts on a handful of lube from a little single-use package. Miles pushes inside that boy with his lips still pressed against the smooth, salty curve of his neck.
"Oh goddamn," Miles whispers. His hands travel up and the boy's chest, one of them finally sliding low enough to stroke the boy's dick in time to Miles' thrusts, in time to the bassline of the music. Miles can't hear anything over that beat, so if his pretty friend makes any noises before coming in Miles' hand, Miles is none the wiser. It doesn't matter, either, since Miles comes just a few more thrusts after.
"I love this goddamn town," Miles says, resting his chest against the beautiful boy's sweaty back and lazily wiping his hand on the boy's only-slightly-less-sweaty chest.
"What?" the boys asks, turning his head to better shout the question at Miles over the noise of the club. His teeth are so white they glow blue under a passing sweep of blacklight.
"I said I fucking love this goddamn town!" Miles shouts back. He grins and closes his eyes, feeling himself pulled back into the thrum and spin of the dancing. As he lets himself be swept right back into the mass of grinding bodies, he adds, just for himself to hear, "Everything about this goddamn town."
Saturday, November 29th, 2014: Chimney Ridge, Clemson
The funny thing about loving the wrong person is how, at each new reminder of how misplaced his love is, Miles is still perpetually surprised by his capacity for gritting his teeth through the heartache and keeping on smiling like nothing’s wrong.
Miles sees the video clip on ESPN just before he gets the text from Rick that wants to know did you see that brown? Was that casey & karofsky? Yes and yes, though he doesn't text Rick back. Instead he watches as ESPN loops the video, memorizing the details: Casey's hair flying behind him like a long red flag; how pale his skin looks and how cold he must have been, to make his freckles that visible on the television; the way Casey leapt, and how Karofsky opened his arms like that kind of leaping was something he was entitled to; the yellow smudge of Casey's facepaint transferred onto Karofsky's face. Miles sees these things over and over, but he can't make himself turn off the television or his own brain.
Let nobody say Miles isn't a gracious loser, though let nobody say Miles willingly accepted it as a loss until Casey ran through that crowd with his hair flying. It's not like the end of a dream, because Miles Brown is no fool and doesn't dream that big. It's not even the end of any great hope, either; holding on to that kind of hope would have dragged him down like a stone, drowned him in Clemson's orange and purple sea. All it does is snuff out Miles' tiny little wish for just one more time, and it snuffs it out in such an in-his-face way. He's had nearly a year to get over it, and plenty of opportunity, and he is over it, really he is, except for that one, pitiful little wish.
Miles considers just ignoring it, or sending some kind of snide message to Karofsky about how it took Casey literally jumping him to make it finally happen, or sending something similarly hurtful to Casey. Lashing out has never been Miles' style, though, and while he might derive some small bit of pleasure from hurting Karofsky, hurting Casey won't do anything to make Miles feel better, and Miles concedes that hurting Karofsky would just hurt Casey, too, or piss him off.
So Miles takes the safe road, which is like the high road, but more self-preserving, and falls back on what he does best: humor. Yellow isn't your color, Cherry, Miles texts.
Casey’s answering text doesn’t come that night. Miles tries not to think about why.
Saturday, October 11th, 2014: North Avenue South dorm, Atlanta
Their mouths don’t quite touch as Miles backs the both of them into Coop’s room. Coop’s breath smells like soy sauce and the faint ghost of the shots they did back at the bar, and his voice is a soft slur that’s half Southern, half vodka, “’M not…”
“No, ’course you’re not,” Miles agrees. He’s no more sober than Coop is, maybe even less so, the room spinning around them. Miles paws down Coop’s chest and stomach, stopping at the waistband of Coop’s cutoffs and thumbing at the button. Coop’s hands flutter awkwardly at his sides, then come to rest on top of Miles’ hands.
“But I’m not, I’m not—” Coop mumbles. His hands stay lightly on top of Miles’, fingers restless.
“And you still won’t be tomorrow,” Miles assures him. “Alright?”
“A’right,” Coop says, nodding. “Yeah.” He moves his hands away, holding them to the sides, slightly raised, like surrender. Miles pops that button open like it’s nothing, skins the cutoffs off Coop easy as a hot knife through butter, hand around Coop’s dick and already moving.
“Won’t hurt my feelings if you want to make this go both ways,” Miles suggests. He undoes the front of his own pants, just in case a button and a zipper are too much of a deterrent. “It’s just friendly, right? Nothing to it.”
Coop nods again, his hand scrabbling at the front of Miles’ black briefs, rookie-awkward. Miles quells the no doubt booze-fueled desire to ask Coop how he manages to play football with clumsy mitts like that, because there’s no point in pointing it out, and besides, Coop finally manages to get his hand around Miles’ dick. There’s no skill to it, but there’s nothing much to their whole interaction at all besides a mutual drunken desperation, so why criticize the boy’s technique on his first and probably only try?
Miles doesn’t really want to dwell on first tries, though. He keeps moving his hand on Coop’s dick, nudging at Coop with his other elbow to keep Coop’s hand going. Miles’ face is a mere half inch from Coop’s, but they don’t close the distance, don’t make it anything other than two guys jerking each other off in a dark dorm room that smells like stale laundry and Cheetos. Miles can already see the ‘oh shit’ creeping into Coop’s face, and he hopes the both of them can come before Coop really processes what they’re doing, because Miles needs this, needs it, needs to take this one tiny thing away from Karofsky and Casey’s perfect self-enclosed little bubble of a world.
“Aw, fuck,” Coop groans. Miles feels Coop spurting all over his hand, and hopes Coop won’t be the kind of guy whose hands go limp-fish after ejaculation.
Luck or booze or whatever gods watch over Miles are on his side, because Coop doesn’t stop his hand’s rough movement on Miles’ cock. Miles moves his hips into it, gripping at Coop’s arm as he comes, finally. Only then does Coop freeze, fingers spread like he’s not sure what to do with the mess on them.
“Here,” Miles says flatly. He picks up the first dirty T-shirt he finds, wipes his hand on it, then hands it over to Coop. “It wipes off easy.”
It takes Coop a couple of seconds to snap back to enough awareness to take the shirt and clean off his hand. “Uh. Thanks?”
“Yeah, same to you,” Miles says. The two of them stand there, staring at each other until it starts to become uncomfortable. “Listen, don’t know about you, but I’m pretty damn tired.”
“Yeah,” Coop says, nodding.
“So, I’m gonna lie down here, and you join me or don’t join me, ’s up to you,” Miles says. He lies down on Coop’s bed, his face to the wall and his back to Coop and Coop’s stale room. After a minute or so, Coop climbs in next to Miles, rolling so they’re pressed back to back in the narrow bed. Coop drops off into drunken, snoring sleep almost immediately. Miles stays awake for a long time, fighting the nausea threatening to creep in, calling what he’s feeling anything but guilt. Anything else but guilt.
Friday, November 13th, 2013: McCabe Hall, Clemson
Adcock’s not a bad guy, really. He’s just a product of the culture, not that Miles is particularly interested in enculturating him any differently. Miles has managed to successfully fly under the radar thus far. He hasn’t even had to lie too much yet; nobody so much as asked any questions about his trip down to Atlanta in October. Still, Miles knows he has to keep up the front, the bright and shiny straight front, and being buddy-buddy with “No Homo” Adcock is as good a continued confirmation of Miles’ abounding heterosexuality as any.
Which explains the mess with the twins, naturally.
It’s not that Miles has a problem with blonde, leggy twins. Given a free weekend, especially in light of the fact that Miles’ll be back in Lima and enjoying some up-close-and-personal time with Casey in two weeks, Miles could have an excellent time with a set of twins. It’s more that Miles would appreciate the twins a lot more on his own than as part of a hetero-affirming double date with Adcock.
Miles isn’t honestly sure if the one he’s supposedly on a date with is Lindsay or Laurie, and under other circumstances, he’d probably feel bad about that, since they have different majors, activities, and interests, and only seem to have a face in common.
"There a problem, Brown?" Adcock asks, tossing Miles another can of shitty domestic beer that'd probably make Taylor judge the hell out of all of them. "You not having a good time?"
Laurie—or maybe it's Lindsay, and it shouldn’t bug him that much that he can’t tell the difference—mock pouts at him, and Miles shakes his head. "Nah, it ain't that."
"Yeah?" Adcock asks, and maybe the look on his face isn't suspicion, but it could be. It might be. Miles can't let it be, not two months out from that blind item, so he turns up his smile, bright and a little predatory-feeling, shining it at those twins like a spotlight.
"It's just, when you told me you'd planned a night out with twins, I assumed you meant both of ’em were for me," Miles says, winking at the pouty twin, who laughs like something out of a porno. The other twin doesn't laugh so hard, but looks genuinely amused, so Miles decides that's the twin he's on the date with, whether she was supposed to be or not.
"Shit, Brown, you are some kinda hound dog," Adcock says, shaking his head. "Both for you."
"What can I say, man? It is a Friday night!" Miles says with an exaggerated shrug.
"To Miles Brown," Adcock says, saluting with his beer. "The man, the myth, the legend."
Miles salutes back and chugs his pissy-tasting beer in a few fast swallows. So what if Clemson’s not anything Miles had hoped for? So what if Miles has to work double-time to keep everything under wraps, especially now, with folks watching the NCAA so close for any hint? So what if the locker room’s the way it is, and he’s going to have to make a big show of going out with pretty blonde twins and drinking shitty beer and acting like he’s the guy they can count on to play smear the queer with them? Miles can do this for four years, no problem, as long as he can keep getting a break like he had at Pride, like he'll have at Thanksgiving. Four years ain’t nothing Miles Brown can't handle.
Sunday, July 23rd, 2013: I–75 Southbound, Ohio/Kentucky border
Miles isn’t much in the mood for chit-chat, but he doesn’t try to stop Alicia from talking. She starts talking as soon as she’s buckled into the passenger seat, some kind of gossip she heard from Maci, who’s stuck out in Idaho or Iowa or someplace, and she keeps on talking as Miles follows their parents’ car—Ma’s driving, of course—onto I–75.
“Taylor made me hold the camera while he sung her a song. I told him, we’re in glee club, do we really have to sing everything? But he pointed at me and said, well, yeah. Do you ever sing to people over the Internet, Miles?”
“Uh huh,” Miles responds, not really paying too much mind to what she’s even saying.
“Are you paying any attention to me at all, Miles Brown?” Alicia demands.
“Uh huh,” Miles repeats, then shakes his head a little. “No, wait a second. Huh? What was that last part?”
“Singing on the Internet.” Alicia sighs. “Miles, are you sad to be leaving?”
“Who, me? Sad?” Miles makes that pfft noise Ma makes when she thinks something’s nonsense.
“Mmmhmm, that’s what I said. Just let it out and then move on, I say.”
“Now, why on god’s green earth would I be sad, Alicia Brown?”
“Because you’re packing up and leaving, maybe?” Alicia says, almost incredulously.
“Well, and who wouldn’t be excited about that, leaving Lima behind?” Miles asks. “Isn’t that supposed to be the whole point of college, going on to bigger, better places?”
“Like South Carolina?” Alicia snorts. “I’d be sad, if I was leaving Lima for upstate South Carolina. So you’re not upset at all?”
“Are you kidding, Alicia?” Miles says, giving her the widest, toothiest smile he can manage. "I've got my whole bright future ahead of me."