Chapter 16 Iris
iris
It’s been two days of bliss, the Vark twins all but moving into my space. Not that I mind. I love their scents tangled up in every damn space of my apartment. However, Milo can’t cook for shit but still wants to provide for us. Like now.
Milo is burning pancakes and he knows it and he doesn't care.
He's standing at the stove with a spatula in one hand and his phone in the other, scrolling through a recipe he's already abandoned while the batter blackens in the pan.
Smoke curls toward the ceiling and the kitchen smells like butter turning to carbon, but he's too busy arguing with Quentin about spatula technique to notice.
"You're supposed to flip when the bubbles pop," Quentin says from the counter where he's cutting fruit with the methodical precision of someone performing surgery. Each strawberry is quartered into identical pieces. Each blueberry has been inspected. "The bubbles popped two minutes ago."
"The bubbles are suggestions, Q. Not commands. I'm reading the batter. I'm feeling its energy."
"Its energy is charcoal."
"You don't know that. You're not even looking."
"I can smell it from here."
I sit on the counter next to the fruit cutting board with my coffee pressed against my chest as I watch them bicker the way I've started watching everything they do, with the private, specific pleasure of someone who gets to keep this.
Milo flips the pancake. The underside is black. He stares at it for a long moment, then slides it onto the plate with the other burned ones and pours fresh batter into the pan. "That one was a practice round."
"That's what you said about the last four."
"Practice makes perfect, Quentin. That's literally the foundation of athletics."
"You're making breakfast, not running drills."
"Breakfast is a drill. Breakfast is the most important drill of the day."
Quentin sets the knife down and looks at me. "How long do I let this continue?"
"Until he gets one right or we run out of batter. Whichever comes first."
Milo points the spatula at me. "Traitor."
My phone buzzes against the counter beside my hip. I pick it up expecting a notification from the athletic department about next week's budget meeting, but the name on the screen makes me pause.
Dad: Dinner next Sunday. Bring them.
Two sentences. No preamble, no explanation, no follow-up. Just the invitation and the assumption that I'll know what he means. I turn the phone toward the twins.
Milo reads it first. The sound that comes out of him isn't a word.
It's somewhere between a gasp and a squeak, the spatula freezing mid-air, a drop of batter sliding off the edge and hitting the stovetop with a sizzle.
Quentin leans over to read it, his eyes scanning the text twice before he nods once.
Milo grips both hands with the spatula, his scent souring a bit, what little I can gather beneath the blockers.
"Do I need to bring something? Should I bring something?
What does Coach eat? Does he have dietary restrictions?
Should I make something? I can't cook but I could buy something and pretend—"
"Milo." I set my coffee down, jump off the counter, and take the spatula from his hand before the current pancake joins its fallen brethren. "Just bring yourself. And scent blockers."
"Right. Scent blockers. Every day. Got it."
Quentin takes over the stove without comment, pouring fresh batter and producing a golden, evenly cooked pancake within ninety seconds.
Milo watches with open betrayal on his face.
I eat my fruit and my one acceptable pancake and let the morning settle around us.
Vague thoughts about pack and our future filter through my head but I push those away.
We’re not ready for those discussions and as much as I would love this to be more than just a college fling, I don’t want to jinx this.
The conversation drifts while we eat, the three of us crowded around my small kitchen table with our knees bumping underneath it.
Milo mentions that practice yesterday was the first one where he didn't have to pretend, where he could watch me on the bleachers and let his scent do whatever it wanted without panicking about who noticed.
Quentin snorts. “Bro, you’re wearing scent blockers. No one would have noticed.”
Milo glares at him, angrily shaking his empty fork. “Bro? When have you ever ‘bro’d’ me? That’s a Chad thing. Don’t ever bro me again.”
I snort, settling back in my chair as the reality of what we’ve started takes route.
Milo and Quentin filed all of their information yesterday morning, the three of us crossing our fingers that it would be enough to send Chad packing.
Of course, the moment he found out, he tried to submit some kind of appeal.
That failed spectacularly. And at 6:02 this morning, I got a text from my father that I’ve been dying to share.
"Chad's been removed from the team and the campus, effective immediately," I say, spreading cream cheese on the edge of my pancake. Milo scrunches up his face at my choice of condiment, before my words register with him
Milo's fork clatters against his plate. "Wait, what? Like for good? Like, fully gone? Like, gone-forever and ever?"
"My father texted this morning. Between my records and your statements, there was nothing to contest. That and the fact that apparently administration already had a case file on him and this was the nail in the coffin."
Milo's fist slams the table hard enough to rattle the glasses.
"Yes! Fuck yes! That's what he gets! That's what happens when you mess with—" His elbow catches his glass of orange juice on the backswing and sends it toppling sideways, the juice sloshing across the table and over my hand before either of us can grab it.
"Milo!" I pull my hand back, juice dripping from my fingers.
"Sorry, sorry, I'm sorry—" He grabs my wrist before I can reach for a napkin, his eyes locked on mine, and then he lifts my hand to his mouth and sucks my index finger past his lips.
My brain stops working. His tongue drags along the length of my finger, cleaning the juice off with a thoroughness that has absolutely nothing to do with the mess and everything to do with the way his eyes darken as he watches my reaction.
A moan slips out of me before I can catch it, my thighs pressing together under the table.
I pull my hand back. "We're eating breakfast."
"We were eating breakfast," Milo says, his voice innocent, his expression anything but.
Quentin hasn't moved from his side of the table. He picks up his coffee, takes a slow sip, and sets it back down. "Noted."
"There's nothing to note!" My cheeks burn, my scent betraying every word out of my mouth. "There is absolutely nothing to note, Quentin."
"Noted," he repeats, the grin that spreads across his face the most expressive thing I've seen from him in two weeks of dating.
Milo beams, orange juice still dripping off the edge of the table onto the floor.
He makes no move to clean it up. God, these two are hopeless.
I grab a napkin and dry off my hand, disgusted by the remaining stickiness.
"Kevin's been keeping his distance too," I manage, trying to wrestle the conversation back to where it was before Milo's tongue derailed it entirely. "I’ve heard he’s been pretty distant and hasn’t been his usual self since the game. "
"Good," Quentin pushes out. “Now, we don’t have to worry about protein shake proposals and flexing all fucking day.”
Milo immediately agrees, dabbing at the juice puddles which is doing nothing more than spreading it around my table.
Sometimes I wonder if he’d survive without his brother.
“Yes, we’re not going to be proposing with a protein shake so it won’t matter.
” His face flames crimson as he looks up at me.
“I mean… when we get there. If? Fuck, we haven’t done anything yet. It’s too soon.”
I snort. “Milo, take a deep breath. There you go. We are not that far yet, okay? I know we aren’t and we haven’t talked about logistics or where this goes once we graduate and what happens if…
” I trail off, realizing that since none of us planned this, there could be a very real possibility that Milo and Quentin end up signed to completely different teams. “Fuck.”
Milo and Quentin both tilt their head at the same time, searching my expression. It’s the first movement I’ve seen them mirror as twins and if I didn’t think so before, they’re definitely two parts of a whole.
Milo’s eyes widen as he catches on. He drops the soaked napkin and clasps his hands together.
"We’re still going to be together. Well, I mean…
you won’t have to worry about me. I wasn't going to keep playing after college so I can go wherever," Milo says, his voice softening toward the end, the nervous energy draining out of him.
He's picks up the juice-soaked napkin, his fingers working it into a damp knot.
"Football was always Q's thing. I'm good at kicking, sure, but it's not what I want to do for the rest of my life.
" He shrugs, but the gesture seems to carry more weight than he's letting on.
"I wanted to do the Sports Medicine thing.
Get certified, work with athletes. And honestly?
" His ears go pink again, but this time it's not from embarrassment.
"I wanted to do the Omega stuff. The nesting, the homemaking, building a space for the people I care about.
I've been suppressing that since I was fourteen because it didn't fit with being on a football team, and I'm kind of tired of pretending it's not what I want. "
Quentin sets his coffee down. He looks at his brother with an expression I haven't seen from him before, something soft and surprised and a little bit guilty, like he's hearing this for the first time and realizing he should have asked sooner. "You never told me that," Quentin says.
"You never asked." Milo's smile is lopsided. "Besides, you needed me on the team. Who else was going to nail forty-six-yard field goals?"
Milo doesn’t let the silence sit for long as he stacks the plates and carries them to the sink while Quentin wipes down the table and then the counter.
It feels perfect with them in my space, like something I was missing finally arrived.
And that’s when I realize there’s one more thing I haven’t told them.
One more thing that will show them just how much I want this.
"I want to show you something," I say when the kitchen is clean. Milo perks up a little, though, Quentin is wary as they follow me to the corner of the living room I've claimed as my studio space, the area between the window and the bookshelf where my easels sit.
There’s a bunch of other canvases that Milo has picked through and Quentin has made a few comments about over the days they’ve spent in my house but only just recently have I brought out a project I started a while ago.
Three easels, arranged side by side, hold a canvas covered with a drop cloth. They've been here the whole time, through every dinner and every movie night and every morning after, hidden in plain sight beneath fabric that nobody thought to lift.
"I started these before the auction," I say, gripping the edge of the first cloth. "When the feelings were still just feelings and I didn't have words for them yet."
I pull the first cloth.
Warm golds and honeyed light fill the canvas, the colors bleeding into each other at the edges in soft gradients. The palette is sunrise and amber and the deep golden brown of raw honey held up to the light.
I pull the second cloth.
Deep greens are painted in controlled strokes that follow a grid only I can see, the color contained within a structure.
But there are cracks in the picture, places where the paint pushed through the framework and bled outside the lines, rich bursts of emerald and pine breaking through.
The tension between control and what lives underneath it is the whole piece.
I pull the third cloth.
Teal and cream and dark blue is built up rather than brushed on, the paint applied in coats that create depth and texture, each layer visible beneath the one above it.
The structure of a nest, materials stacked and arranged and tucked into place, the architecture of a safe space rendered in pigment and medium.
My self-portrait, except it's not a face. It's a feeling.
The three canvases are designed to hang together.
Where Milo's gold meets my teal, the colors blend into a gradient that belongs to neither of us alone.
Where Quentin's green meets my blue, the edges sharpen and soften in alternating currents, pushing and pulling at the border.
And where all three meet in the center, the colors create something new, a mixture that doesn't exist on any single canvas.
Quentin studies them, his gaze moving across all three canvases in slow passes, reading them the way he reads everything. His hand hovers near his canvas. When he finally speaks, his voice cracks on the second word. "It's perfect."
Milo turns to me with wet eyes and a grin that breaks through his awe. "You started these before the auction?"
I nod.
His grin widens until it takes over his entire face. "You liked us first." His scent spikes, breaking through the blockers a little. “You did, didn’t you?!”
Quentin's composure, already cracked, threatens to collapse entirely. "She absolutely did not—"
"I absolutely did."
Quentin closes his mouth. Milo lets out a sound that's half laugh, half sob, and pulls me into a hug tight enough to lift me off the ground. Quentin's hand finds the back of my neck, his forehead pressing against my temple, his breath warm against my cheek.
Joining in on that auction wasn’t just for a night of freedom. It was a stupid idea, a chance that someone else might buy my dinner plans but I was hoping.
I guess the hoping worked.