Divine Milking System

Chapter 469: 469 | The Bacon and the Lie

Naomi’s straw paused halfway to her mouth.

It was a small thing. Half a second, maybe less. But I’d built an entire survival strategy out of noticing exactly these kinds of tells, and Naomi Love could not lie to save her life or mine.

"What thing?" she said.

"The thing Belle mentioned in the group chat and then immediately deleted."

"Belle deletes a lot of things."

"She does. She usually deletes threats. This one had an emoji."

Naomi took a long pull off the boba, which is what she does when she needs a second to figure out how honest she’s allowed to be. Her ears went a little pink at the tops. She set the cup down, adjusted it so the logo faced her, adjusted it again.

"I don’t know anything about a thing," she said.

"Naomi."

"I’ve been with you all morning."

"You have. Which is convenient, because it means you’re the one who happened to be free while the other three are doing something they specifically want me not to know about."

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Reached over and stole a piece of bacon off my plate with the air of someone establishing an alibi through unrelated behavior.

I let her have it. Both the bacon and the lie.

Because here’s the thing. I knew. Of course I knew. I’d known since roughly nine minutes after Aurora sent me a voice note from inside a B-rank gate that ended with her saying "don’t make plans Thursday" and then screaming at a lizard. I’d known since Belle spent twenty minutes yesterday interrogating me about my dinner preferences under the flimsy cover of a "meal-planning initiative." I’d known since Addison texted me the words "cake or pie, non-negotiable" and then, when I said cake, texted back "wrong, but noted."

I am a professional. I read desire, insecurity, and hidden agendas for a living. I once figured out an entire heiress’s daddy issues from the way she adjusted a ribbon. The idea that three of my girlfriends could plan a surprise party without me piecing it together was frankly insulting to everyone involved.

But Naomi thought I didn’t know.

And Naomi was so proud of herself for keeping the secret. She had the look. The one where she thinks she’s being subtle and is actually about as subtle as a Wave Motion blast to the face. She’d been drafted as the distraction, the innocent one, the girl who’d keep Jace occupied with boba and pouting while the real operatives handled logistics, and she was giving it everything she had.

So I was going to let her win.

Six weeks ago I would’ve had a spreadsheet on this. Optimal move: reveal knowledge, redirect timeline, control the variable. Six weeks ago every conversation was a con and every girl was a resource and the whole thing was a numbers game I was very good at losing slowly.

Now I looked at Naomi trying to hide a surprise party behind a bacon strip and my whole chest did something I’d stopped fighting somewhere around the moment she carried my dead weight out of a dimension.

The old man in the library would’ve called it the point. Yumi would’ve called it a resonance spike. I called it being screwed, in the least fun sense of the word.

"You’re right," I said. "Belle just deletes stuff. I’m being paranoid."

Naomi’s shoulders came down half an inch. Relief, poorly hidden, and the flash of triumph underneath it that she thought I couldn’t see.

"You’ve had a hard week," she said, generously. "Paranoia’s normal. You almost died."

"Twice."

"Three times, if you count when Peterson healed you and you screamed."

"I did not scream."

"Belle recorded it."

"Belle records everything. It’s not admissible."

Naomi laughed again, and this time she didn’t cover her mouth. She just let it happen, head tipping forward, braid sliding over her shoulder, and I watched her and thought about how the entire academy had spent six weeks calling this girl the nice lottery kid who apologized too much, and none of them had ever seen this version. The one who lied badly and stole bacon and threatened to withhold boba as an interrogation tactic.

This version was mine. She’d chosen to become it somewhere in a farmhouse that smelled like wildflowers, with a bell around her throat.

Her phone buzzed on the table. She grabbed it fast, angling the screen away from me with the deftness of someone who’d never once successfully hidden anything.

I caught it anyway. Not the words. Just the color of the message bubble and the way her thumb moved, and the specific tension that came into her jaw when she read whatever Belle had sent her.

Probably a status update. Probably something like twenty minutes, keep him there. Probably followed by an instruction to be casual, which Naomi was now attempting to execute by turning the phone facedown and picking her boba back up and saying, at a volume slightly too loud, "So. What are your plans for the rest of the day?"

Oh, she was terrible at this.

"I don’t know," I said. "Vale’s got me until winter evals in about six ways. Misato wants me on the field at six tomorrow. I figured I’d rest, but resting seems to be a concept nobody around me respects."

"You should rest."

"Should I."

"You should rest at, like, your apartment." Naomi took a sip. Set the cup down. Picked it back up. "Or, no. Not your apartment. Hikaru might be there. You’d want somewhere with more space."

I looked at her.

She looked at the table.

Somewhere with more space. Where, exactly, did she think we were going to go rest that had more space than my apartment. The Obsidian common room? The rec center? Was she going to try to steer me toward a specific building at a specific time while pretending it was about my orthopedic needs?

The answer, apparently, was yes. Because her phone buzzed again, and this time she read it and physically brightened, that whole-face thing, before she could stop herself.

"Hey," she said. "Do you want to see the rec center? The new mats came in. Misato said they’re really good for stretching."

"You want me to go stretch."

"You’re recovering!"

"Naomi. It’s four in the afternoon. You want me to go to the rec center to stretch on new mats that you have, at no point in six weeks, ever mentioned caring about."

"I care about mats."

"Since when?"

"Since always. I have opinions about mats." She was leaning into it now, chin up, that stubborn set to her mouth that showed up when she decided to commit to a bad plan and ride it into the ground. She got it from her dad, probably. The kind of person who’d refuse to leave a sinking boat out of spite. "Good mats are important for recovery. My physical therapist said. Back home."

"You’ve never had a physical therapist."

"You don’t know my life."

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