Page 3 of Dream Girl

My heart lurches up to my throat, fear etching at the desperation in my voice as I try again.

“Milo?”

The rawness in them creates a barrier between us. His eyes convey a sense of threat and a brilliance of intellect as he watches me with depraved emotions.

I’m the enemy in his eyes.

As quick as it came, it’s gone the next second.

“Didn’t I tell you to stay over there?” he asks.

I open my mouth, voice struggling to speak because of the fear in my heart while I decide that the best, for now, is to ask him later. Milo doesn’t seem to know that he had tapped into the years of military training just then, but I have a feeling that he knows.

He’s aware of his body and his psychology better than anyone, but he’s acting like he didn’t just look at me as if I was at the end of his gun barrel.

It’s times like this that reminds me that Milo hasn’t always been caring, warm, and affectionate.

I swallow my nerves and quickly replace the anxiousness with a vibrant smile. His posture relaxes when he sees my smile, and I’m glad that I can help him relax.

He takes his thumb away from the sharp teeth of the cheese grater, brown eyes looking down at the red indent on his skin while staring silently at the gleaming sharpness of the grater.

“What were you doing?” I ask, closing the distance between us.

He puts down the grater and puts the block of cheese back into the packaging. Milo cocks his head down on me, searching my face for something as the indescribable blankness on his face remains.

I wanted to ask what he was thinking earlier, but I couldn’t find the courage to do so. He stands by his conviction that he doesn’t want to taint me with what he had done in his past, and that he would rather have this emotional barrier between us than have me see him as a monster.

From early on, he had warned me that he doesn’t know if he can ever let me into that part of his life and I was alright with it. I still am, but I want to help him. I can’t do that when he is adamant about the door to that chapter of his life remains a solid steel-reinforced gate.

“There was cheese stuck there,” is what he says.

I take that answer over silence. The oven beeps, signaling the finished product of the garlic bread before I turn to take it out.

His arm shoots out, tugging me back to his chest while burying his face into my hair. The heaviness in his muscled arm puts uncomfortable pressure on my stomach, and its rising ache travels up to my gut as I grimace at the lack of space.

The heat of his chest burns through the thick material of my long sleeve shirt, and the hotness is unbearable as I hold my breath. The wait for him to speak is long, longer than I had expected for whatever he wanted to do.

“I love you,” he says with a touch of vile sneer coating his love confession. “You know that, right?”

I do. I know he loves me. He tells me that every day and every night as if he is afraid that if he doesn’t say it, I’ll forget and leave his life. I don’t understand where this abandonment issue comes from, but I know that the therapist, that is mandatory attendance by the court’s order, had diagnosed him with abandonment issues.

I’m not sure if he’s supposed to share those things with me since the doctor and patient confidentiality exists for a reason, but he doesn’t tell me things that he talks about in therapy.

“I love you too,” I whisper back, tilting my head up.

His eyes are back to their usual impassive, cold, and uncaring façade. He’s searching for a reason to hold onto the Milo that he had found in himself; he needs a reason to not let this cold-blooded killer side of him out when he has me in his arms.

“I love you,” I repeat again, louder and clearer for him to hear.

If he can feel my blood turning hot, boiling beyond its normal level under my skin, then Milo either doesn’t notice it, or he doesn’t care.

A small smile appears on his lips, and his arm loosens the grip around my ribs. That hold is unbearably distinguishable from his usual hold, and it’s possessively terrifying as he was trying to physically be the chain that shields me from the world.

Then a smell of something burning hits my nose and I gasp in horror. The garlic bread is burning, and I’m searching for the oven mittens when Milo beats me to the punch. He swings the oven open and snaps his hand on the scorching tray to pull it out. There is a loud clanking sound on the counter when he drops it and looks down at his hand before looking at me with an eyebrow raised.

He acts like he just didn’t use his bare hands to take out the extra golden garlic bread from a four-hundred-degree oven.

My boyfriend is crazy.

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