Divine Milking System

Chapter 456: 456 | The Naomi Forecast

Something in her tone made me look at her. Naomi’s pink eyes held mine for a beat longer than normal, and the corner of her mouth pulled in a direction that I recognized as the Naomi Forecast: incoming weather, seek shelter.

Belle Fox appeared at the cafeteria entrance forty-five seconds later.

She wore the Obsidian uniform with her standard modifications. Blazer open. Yellow shirt with two buttons unfastened, showing a sliver of the black bralette she wore underneath. Skirt hemmed a full inch above regulation, which no faculty member bothered enforcing anymore because the battle had been lost weeks ago. Her light blue hair was down, falling past her shoulders in loose waves that caught the morning sun from the windows and turned translucent at the edges.

She looked good. She always looked good. Belle Fox had turned looking good into an applied science, a field she’d mastered before puberty and continued refining with the dedication other people gave to combat training.

But her face was wrong.

Her mouth was set in a line so flat it could have been drawn with a ruler. Her amber-brown eyes, which normally moved through a room cataloging threats and opportunities and the price of everything within reach, were locked on me with the focus of a crossbow bolt that had already decided on its target.

Belle crossed the cafeteria with the stride of someone who had rehearsed this confrontation, bought the outfit for it, and was now collecting on an emotional invoice she’d been drafting since I left the hospital.

She stopped at our table. Set down her tray with a thunk that made Jordan’s water glass jump. Sat in the chair to my left. Arranged her napkin, her fork, her knife, and her phone with the organizational care of someone preparing a courtroom exhibit.

Then she turned to face me.

"Hi Belle."

"Don’t you dare."

"How was your morn—"

"Don’t." Her voice dropped to the register she used when she was furious and wanted to make sure I understood how much restraint she was exercising by not throwing her oatmeal at my head. "You got discharged from the hospital yesterday. You left. You drove to Ventura. You drove to Santa Barbara. You came back to campus at"—she checked her phone—"seven fourteen PM. You went to your apartment. You did not come to my room. You did not knock on my door. You did not text me that you were home. I found out you were alive from the group chat, Jace. The group chat."

"I texted the group chat."

"The group chat is not my face. The group chat is not you standing in front of me so I can confirm with my own eyes that you still have a pulse and all your organs remain inside your body where they belong."

Naomi’s palm pressed harder against my thigh. A warning or a comfort. Possibly both.

"Belle, I was exhausted. I could barely walk up the stairs."

"You walked up five flights of stairs?"

"My Endurance is almost B-rank. The stairs are training."

"The stairs are five floors that passed my door on the way to your apartment. My door is on the same floor. Four doors away. You walked past my room to go home and you didn’t stop."

She was right. I knew she was right. The math was simple. Five flights of stairs, fifth floor, Belle’s room was 5C and mine was 5E, and I had walked past her door at approximately seven seventeen PM without stopping because I was running on empty and the graft in my chest was pulsing with the satisfied warmth of Hikaru’s unexpected hug and the shojo manga on the coffee table and I’d forgotten that Belle Fox measured love in proximity and presence, not in group chat messages sent from a Charger on the 101.

"You’re right," I said. "I should have stopped."

"Yes."

"I’m sorry."

"You should be."

"I am."

Belle held my gaze for four more seconds. I could see the anger burning down to its foundations, leaving behind something rawer. Her left hand disappeared under the table and found my other thigh, her grip fierce enough that her nails dug through the uniform pants.

"I spent three days thinking you were dead." Her voice stayed flat but the corners of her mouth had started doing the thing they did when she was about to cry and refused to permit it. "I wrote your injury report at three in the morning because I couldn’t sleep and I needed to do something useful or I was going to lose my mind. I sat in that hospital chair for six hours watching machines beep and counting your breaths because I was terrified that if I stopped counting they would stop happening. And then you left the hospital and drove around California with Vale and came home and went to your apartment and fell asleep and I found out from a text message that said, and I quote, ’alive and hungry, bring burger.’"

Jordan lifted his head from his arms. Looked at Belle. Looked at me. Put his head back down.

"Smart man," Naomi murmured.

I turned in my chair so I was facing Belle fully. Her amber-brown eyes glistened but no tears fell because Belle Fox had made a deal with the universe at age eleven that she would never cry where people could see and she had honored that contract with the ferocity of someone who treated emotional vulnerability as a line item expense she could not afford.

"Belle."

"What."

"I’m here now."

"Obviously."

"I’m sitting right next to you."

"I have eyes, Monroe."

"And I’m sorry I didn’t stop at your door last night. You deserved better than a group chat notification. You deserve someone who shows up at your door before he shows up at his own."

Something shifted in her expression. The flat line of her mouth softened into a curve that wasn’t a smile but wasn’t a weapon either. She blinked once, hard, and the glisten in her eyes retreated behind the fortress she kept between the world and whatever Belle Fox actually felt about anything.

"You owe me chips," she said. "Barbecue. Every day this week. The good ones from the East Tower vending machine, not the stale garbage from the Vault."

"Done."

"And you’re buying me a chicken salad sandwich."

"With chips on the side."

"Separate. Nothing touches."

"Nothing touches."

Belle released my thigh. Picked up her fork. Started eating her oatmeal as if the previous ninety seconds had been a business negotiation that had reached a satisfactory conclusion. But she scooted her chair one inch closer to mine, and when her knee pressed against my leg under the table, she didn’t move it away.

Naomi’s hand remained on my other thigh. Warm and patient.

I sat between them and ate my eggs and thought about how six weeks ago I was a dying man in a body I didn’t recognize, invisible to everyone, counting hours instead of days, and the only woman who would talk to me was a gold digger from Burns, Oregon who put her phone face-down on the table because I made her laugh twice during dinner.

Now I had Naomi’s palm on my right leg and Belle’s knee against my left and a table full of food my enhanced metabolism demanded and a cafeteria full of people who knew my name and a death timer still ticking in the corner of my vision that nobody could see.

Seven days. Give or take.

But Naomi was here and Belle was here and Jordan was sleeping in his eggs and somewhere across campus Misato was doing whatever Misato and Blair had been doing for the last several days that neither of them would explain, and the graft in my chest hummed warm and full and hungry and alive.

I reached for my orange juice and caught my reflection in the glass.

The kid staring back looked nothing like Jace Monroe, lottery winner, rank two hundred fifty, dead last, invisible.

He looked like someone worth coming back from the dead for.

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