Divine Milking System

Chapter 452: 452 | Delinquent Romance

"I’m fine." Her voice steadied a fraction. She hadn’t let go. "I don’t. I’m not usually. This isn’t."

"I know."

"I don’t do this."

"I know."

"I thought you were dead." She said it small, and the crack was back, and her fingers tightened in my jacket one more time. "You promised. You said we. You said we’d figure it out. And then you jumped off a cliff on the news and I sat in this apartment for three days and I couldn’t tell anyone why I was. Why it mattered. Because who would I even. Everyone thinks you’re just my roommate."

The graft pulsed once, slow and warm, and somewhere in a Santa Barbara workshop I imagined a pale blue ring on a crystal plate flickering, ticking up, occupying a frequency range none of the others covered.

"I’m right here," I said. "I came home."

She went still against me. And I felt the exact moment it happened, felt her body catch up to the same information my body had been screaming about, felt her go rigid as a corpse when she registered that there was no bandage between us, that she was pressed full and soft against my chest with nothing hiding what the binding hid.

She pulled back so fast she nearly knocked her tea over. Fast enough that the ceramic base wobbled once, twice, then settled before toppling completely.

The reading glasses had gone crooked on her nose, one arm twisted up near her temple. Her face, which I had never once seen do anything warmer than a slight mouth-twitch, was going through an entire year of color in about two seconds flat. Red climbing from the collar of her sleep shirt to the tips of her ears in a way that matched her eyes so completely she looked like she was about to catch fire. Like someone had started at her throat with a paintbrush and just kept going.

Her arms crossed over her chest. Too late. Way, way too late. But she did it anyway, gripping her own biceps, hunching in on herself like she could fold the last thirty seconds back into a box and seal it. And she looked down at the front of her thin cotton shirt—which I had not been looking at, which I was not currently looking at, which my stupid fucking brain had nevertheless cataloged in perfect detail—and then up at me, and then down at herself again, and I watched the horror arrive in real time. Watched it land on her face like a physical object.

"I." Her voice came out strangled. "I’m not. I forgot to."

"I didn’t see anything," I said.

"You’re a terrible liar."

"I’m an excellent liar."

"Monroe."

"Jace," I corrected. Because she’d given me that, in her room, with the photo of her mother on the nightstand. My real name when we were alone. And using it now, gentle, took a fraction of the panic out of her spine. "It’s fine. Nothing happened. You were relieved I wasn’t dead. That’s allowed. Roommates are allowed to be relieved."

"Roommates don’t." She stopped. Her jaw worked. Her arms tightened over her chest, and even folded up and mortified and glowing red she was still, objectively, one of the most beautiful people I’d ever stood in a room with, and my exhausted lizard brain kept trying to file that observation somewhere useful and I kept slamming the drawer shut. "I have to go put on."

"You don’t have to do anything." I stepped back. Gave her the space. Held up both hands, empty, harmless, the same stillness Vale had taught me except aimed at keeping a person calm instead of a monster confused. "It’s your apartment as much as mine. You want to sit on the couch without the wrap and read your delinquent romance and drink tea, you’re allowed. I’ll pretend to be blind. I’m very good at pretending. It’s on my resume."

Her eyes narrowed. The mortification fought with something else, something that looked almost like the beginning of an actual, non-mouth-twitch expression.

"How did you know it’s a delinquent romance."

Oh, she’d fallen right into it.

Because I saw the shirtless swordsman and the sparkles on the cover, and I know your favorite trope is delinquent-falls-for-the-straight-laced-council-president, because I read a whole book about a girl who’s exactly like you.

I did not say that last part out loud, obviously, because that particular can of worms could stay very much closed. I said instead, "And because you have excellent taste. Those are objectively good. The angst-to-payoff ratio is unbeatable."

The red crept back up her ears for an entirely different reason.

"You read shojo," she said. Flat. Accusing. Delighted, underneath, in the exact way she got delighted, which was to say almost imperceptibly.

"I read everything. I have layers. I contain multitudes." I toed off my boots by the door, one at a time, buying us both the mercy of somewhere else to look. "Some of those multitudes cry at Chapter forty of the good ones. I’m secure enough to admit that."

Hikaru stood in the middle of the living room in a sleep shirt and crooked reading glasses, arms crossed, red as a stoplight, holding herself together by a thread, and the corner of her mouth twitched.

Then it kept going.

It went all the way up into an actual smile, small and real and startled, like it had escaped before she could recall it, and it hit me square in the chest harder than any leopard claw, because I’d been living in this apartment with the Ice Prince for six weeks and I had never, not once, seen the actual person underneath choose to show me her face on purpose.

"You’re insufferable," she said.

"I’ve been told. There’s a line for that too. It’s very long. You should get a number."

She turned toward her room, arms still crossed, and paused with one hand on the doorframe. Looked back over her shoulder, red eyes catching the lamplight, glasses sliding down her nose.

"I’m glad you’re not dead," she said. Quiet. No armor on it at all. "Jace."

The graft pulsed. Warm. Full. Home.

"Yeah," I said. "Me too."

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