Page 13 of Two Who Live On

“I can guarantee no one will walk in.” Milo licked his lips. “Most likely.”

“Milo.” I cupped my hand under his chin, keeping him from kneeling.

“Fine,” he sighed. “Did you drive here?”

“Took the L.”

“Perfect.” Milo’s minxy grin filled his face, and he snatched my arm, dragging me down the hallway.

Next thing I knew, he’d whisked me outside, and we were flying through the night sky faster than I could move on my best day. Milo didn’t even need his arms for guidance, using the slightest twist of his ankles to take us back to my place. Pressed against him, my body warmed in anticipation, ignoring the frigid wind that whipped across my face.

It all blurred once we landed. Somehow, I unlocked the front door with Milo’s hand down my pants. The keys had fallen somewhere. Didn’t matter. Milo’s lips were on my neck, kissing me, nibbling, while he walked me faster into the bedroom. The moment we stepped through the doorway, I lost my shirt and fell back onto the bed with my pants pulled to my knees while Milo unbuttoned his shirt. His tongue slid along my stomach as his fingers tugged at my waistband. There was an explosive urge to please me, gratify my every—

“Fuck me,” Milo said, lifting his head.

He stood tall at the end of the bed, eyelashes fluttering ever so subtly.

“Didn’t realize you were feeling that excited, but I’ll gladly oblige.” I sat forward, smirking and unfastening his pants.

“Huh? What? No.” Milo sucked his teeth with an apologetic grimace. Every yearning desire he’d bombarded me with since my public announcement of our relationship poofed into thin air. “It’s not the end of the world, just the end of someone else’s.”

I frowned, catching snippets of his trailing mind drifting toward puzzle pieced scenarios wrapped into some vision he’d just had. Whatever it was, he worried that without his immediate action, it’d cost someone something awful—a few someone’s based on how his thoughts rifled through the core of his mind.

“Would I be the absolute worst if—”

“Yes, yes you would.” I slipped to the edge of the bed and tugged on the loops of his pants, pulling him closer. “But that’s why I love you.”

I raised my head to meet his gaze. His eyes stared down, bright and glazed as he bit back a thousand immediate surface thoughts. It wasn’t the first time I’d said I loved him. It wouldn’t be the last time. But I struggled with the words so much. However, every time I spoke them aloud to Milo, they came a bit easier, and I loved that he made me feel that way. Yanking his tie, I pulled him closer for a soft kiss.

“Not to rush your valiant efforts, but if you hurry up, I might reward your heroics.”

“Yes, sir,” Milo growled.

And then he was out of my bedroom as quickly as he’d thrown me into it. I laid back and sighed. Tracing my fingers along the fabric of my boxers, I considered the probability of his return. Since he’d started spending more nights at my place, there weren’t actually many when he’d stayed through the night. Always a new vision. An altered objective. A life in some type of need. Hell, once he bailed to literally rescue a kitten stuck in a tree. And sure, the little fella would go on to become some young witch’s familiar, and the potential of good they’d do together was apparently great, but like…someone else could’ve done that.

That was the thing about Milo, though. He never wanted to gamble someone’s future on a maybe if he had certainty on his side.

After sliding my boxers down and relieving a bit of my anticlimactic expectations for the evening, I dozed off. It was a restless slumber between the cycling thoughts of nearby minds and the constant buzz of my phone. Since the internal and external noises made lying in silence an impossibility, I dragged myself out of bed before the sun rose. I wobbled in the bathroom half-awake with a cigarette dangling from my dry lips.

The brightness of the phone stung, and the screen held a startling display. My jaw fell, and I dropped the cigarette into the toilet. The ember hissed, snuffed out. I skimmed through the 40+ notificationsdisplayed on my phone. And there was a lot more flooding the app.

My pulse thrummed in my ear. My face was hot, and I panicked. The comments were mostly about Enchanter Evergreen, but it hadn’t taken long for people to tag me, @AnnoyedObserver, in them.

Scrolling through the DMs made my skin crawl. Some of the half-displayed questions were as bold and intrusive as the thoughts I’d glimpsed at Milo’s ceremony last night. I couldn’t believe how many people had found me online considering I useda pseudonym across all platforms and rarely engaged with others. It was mostly curious musing or boredom when I hopped online. But damn, did they all care, and their opinions were strong.

She’d sketched a rather favorable animated version of Milo and I at the Cerberus event last night—though I could’ve lived without the artistic license to draw my leg bent and kicked back like some sixteen-year-old girl having her first kiss. Scrolling through the comments, most were curious eye emojis, compliments on Alyce’s piece, or a jumbled scrambling of letters stringed together to convey exacerbated glee. I huffed.

It didn’t take long to find the tags and added images of me. From my staff photos to candid yearbook pictures all the way to the occasional selfie I’d taken. Ugh. One person had even delightfully taken the time to highlight and draw attention to each and every flaw I possessed. My weak jawline. Eyes too close together. Stringy hair. Wrinkles. Yellow teeth. Crooked tooth. A thousand other assumptions. I exited the screen, unable and unwilling to glimpse any of the hundreds of other comments andthreads and apps.

Fuck all this. I deleted every single app connecting me to the outside world from my phone. Social media. Gone. Local news. Gone. Weather—I already knew it would suck. Gone. I didn’t know how Milo managed these hellscapes with ease, but I wouldn’t be the hot topic of the day. Or if I was, I wasn’t going to stick around for it.

Geez. If this was how people who didn’t know me reacted, how was everyone at the academy going to act? The questions. The thoughts they would blurt out. Worse, the thoughts they wouldn’t ask. All of it was so overwhelming I hovered over the sick app for work. It’d be so easy to take a day…

Nope. This would pass. Like anything, I just had to ignore it.

After showering away the exhaustion and frustration, I dried off and covered the bags under my eyes with eyeshadow. The broken blood vessels were so vibrant that I would’ve loved the look if my eyes weren’t so wide and twitchy. I crinkled my forehead and finished my morning routine before flying to work.

A part of me wanted to text Milo, see what he was doing or how he was handling the barrage, but another part just wanted to get to work. Considering the lack of sleep, I should’ve driven—well, maybe taken the L—but Enchanter Evergreen wouldn’t stop training from one restless night, and neither should I. Besides, the icy wind helped shock me awake.

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