Divine Milking System

Chapter 468: 468 | The Object Permanence of a Golden Retriever

I set the phone down on the table and let myself enjoy that last message for a solid three seconds, which is about two and a half seconds longer than I usually allow for gloating.

Already forgot it.

Absolute poetry. Four words, zero commitment, maximum psychological damage. Somewhere on the hill up to Summit House, Blair Davenport was walking with a crooked scarf and a face doing something she’d deny under oath, and I got to sit here in the dining hall with a smirk I hadn’t earned by being nice.

Then something jabbed me in the cheek.

"Hey."

Naomi. Finger extended, pressed into my face, expression doing the specific thing her face does when she’s decided to be difficult about something small. Her hair was still in the braid I’d put in at five that morning, a little looser now, pink and black strands falling loose around her jaw. She’d changed out of her uniform blazer into an oversized cream sweater that fell off one shoulder and definitely wasn’t hers, because the sleeve had a smudge of black nail polish on the cuff and Naomi didn’t wear black nail polish.

Addison. That absolute menace was distributing her wardrobe across my social circle like a raccoon spreading a very specific disease.

"You’re doing the smirk," Naomi said.

"I don’t have a smirk."

She poked me again. Harder.

"You have three smirks. This is the second one. It’s the one you make when you’ve said something awful and gotten away with it." She pulled her hand back and folded her arms on the table, chin dropping onto them so she was looking up at me from below. Big pink eyes. Absolutely lethal. "Who were you texting?"

"Nobody."

"Jace."

"A committee."

Naomi sat up, and here came the pout. Not the fake kind that girls deploy strategically, either. Naomi’s pout was a genuine engineering failure of the face, bottom lip pushing out, brows drawing in, the whole apparatus collapsing into an expression of profound personal betrayal over something that did not remotely warrant it. She’d been doing this more in the last four days. Ever since she carried my unconscious body out of a collapsing dimension on national television, she’d stopped being careful with me. Whatever restraint she’d been running on, that had burned up somewhere between the ravine and the medical tent.

She reached over, took a plastic cup off her side of the table, and shoved it at my chest hard enough to make the ice rattle.

"You didn’t try my boba."

"You have boba?"

"I’ve had boba for eleven minutes. I brought you a straw. I put the straw next to your hand." She pointed at the straw, still in its paper wrapper, sitting exactly where she’d apparently placed it while I’d been busy antagonizing an heiress. "I said your name. Twice."

Ah.

Here’s the thing about being a guy who runs a survival system built entirely out of paying attention to women. You get very good at reading rooms, tracking micro-expressions, cataloguing which of your girlfriends is about to become a problem and in what direction. You get genuinely elite at it. And then you spend four minutes texting Blair Davenport about a sex bet and completely fail to notice that the woman who dragged you out of a Void Gate has been trying to share her drink with you.

Six weeks of divine parasitic seduction training and I still had the object permanence of a golden retriever.

"Okay," I said. "That’s fair. I deserve whatever’s coming."

"You do."

"Give me the straw."

"You have to say sorry first."

"I’m sorry."

"Like you mean it."

I leaned in. Close enough that she had to tilt her head back to keep eye contact, close enough that I watched her pupils do that thing where they blow wide and she forgets to breathe. Her fingers curled against the tabletop.

"Naomi. I am deeply, genuinely sorry that I ignored your boba. It was the worst decision I’ve made this week and I’ve made some really stupid ones."

"You ripped a monster’s heart out with your hand."

"Second worst decision."

She laughed. It came out through her nose, undignified, and she immediately clapped a hand over her mouth like she’d committed a crime, which just made me want to say four more stupid things in a row. She unwrapped the straw and jammed it through the plastic lid and pushed the cup at me again.

"Drink it. Tell me it’s good."

"What if it isn’t good?"

"Then lie." She was already smiling. "But it’s good, so you won’t have to."

I took it. Cold plastic, sweating condensation, condensation soaking into my palm. I pulled a mouthful up through the straw and got brown sugar and milk tea, thick and dark, with three tapioca pearls that arrived at my teeth all at once and had the texture of something that shouldn’t legally be food and was somehow incredible anyway.

I have consumed some extremely strange liquids over the past six weeks. Silver-tier essence that tastes like vanilla cream. Butterscotch. Strawberries in champagne. Black coffee and dark chocolate with a ghost of cayenne underneath. I have become, God help me, a connoisseur. I have tasting notes. I have preferences.

The boba beat two of them, and I’m not saying which two.

"Okay," I said. "That’s excellent."

Naomi lit up. Her whole face did it, the same way it did the first day she sat down next to me in Cross’s class and apologized for taking the chair, except now there was nothing small about it.

"Right? There’s a place off campus by the ferry terminal. It’s run by this old couple and the wife yells at her husband the whole time in Taiwanese and then hands you the cup like nothing happened." She pulled the cup back and took a sip herself, straw in the same spot my mouth had been, which she absolutely noticed and absolutely did on purpose. "I go on Sundays. I’ve been going since orientation."

"You never told me that."

"You never asked." She said it without any bite, just a fact she’d been carrying around. "You ask me about my brothers. You ask me about my dad’s boat. You don’t ask me about the boring stuff."

The graft in my chest did the warm thing it does. That low, satisfied pulse that Yumi said was a resonance field and Vale said was a data point and that I’ve decided is just a divine parasite being smug about how bad I am at keeping myself detached.

Yeah. I know. Shut up.

"Hey," I said. "That thing Belle’s been cooking up with Aurora and Addison. Is that done yet?"

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