I JUST WANT YOU TO LIKE ME | ✓

Miles Hoàng's life is perfect.

He has the perfect best-friend-slash-boyfriend-slash-bane-of-his-existence, Ziri Meziani. They live in a perfect (if a little cramped) apartment above a Nepalese restaurant they get food from at a discount whenever they're both too lazy to cook. He has a perfect (meaning decent) job with a nice (meaning decent) boss and cool (meaning decent) coworkers at an Amazon warehouse - which means he has to listen to people's complaints about their deliveries being late every time he bothers to socialise as if that's something he has any control over.

And sure, his family still think being gay is a phase he'll grow out of. And he has to listen to debates about how queer marriage will irrevocably destroy British society every time he tries to watch the news. And panic attacks start pouncing on him without warning when he's supposed to be the normal one.

But otherwise, his life is perfect.

Miles has compartmentalised his mind with an efficiency his recovering-hoarder-become-neat-freak mother would be proud of. If somebody were to walk into his mind, they would find a clean house full of natural sunlight and not much else. His grandparents are in one room, his dad's coffin in another, his mother asleep in the third. Even Ziri - especially Ziri - is quarantined from the rest because sometimes there are roars in the basement no amount of music can cover up and Miles has no plan of inviting anyone down those stairs.

Until he crams the basement so full that demons start climbing out. Turns out, the walls between his compartments are paper mache.

[manxman]
[new adult general fiction]