Chapter 9
Callum
I've rearranged the monstera twice, and I'm seriously considering a third time. That's how I know I've officially lost my mind.
The plant has been in that corner since I brought him home.
He's doing great. Moving him is going to stress his leaves, but his pot is slightly off-center from the window, and it's been bothering me for the last twenty minutes.
It didn't bother me this morning. It didn't bother me yesterday.
But right now, it's a fucking emergency.
Dinner's in the oven. Pasta's on the stove.
I bought the oat milk Milo puts in his coffee—I know it's oat milk because I've watched him order it at three different coffee shops like a deranged stalker—and it's sitting in my fridge right next to the regular milk.
It looks extremely deliberate. I should probably move it behind the ketchup so it doesn't look like I went out and bought it specifically for him.
Except I did. And I'm done lying to myself about Milo-related things.
This is the third night this week he's coming over.
His bag lives in the corner by the door now—the canvas one with the fraying strap.
Jude texted him yesterday about subletting his room since he clearly doesn't use it anymore.
Milo showed me the text with pink cheeks and a nervous laugh.
Three nights this week, and it's only Thursday.
My phone buzzes on the counter. Ava sent a photo of a golden retriever puppy in a raincoat with the caption I NEED ONE.
I text back you can barely keep a cactus alive, which is true, and will buy me at least three angry emojis and a four-paragraph defense of her plant parenting skills.
I put the phone face-down. Looking at my sister's name while I make dinner for the best friend she doesn't know I'm sleeping with makes my stomach clench.
She texted two days ago too—a casual haven't seen you in a while, we should do dinner this weekend—and I responded with a thumbs up and then did absolutely nothing about it.
Every night Milo spends here is another night I'm being weird with Ava, another gap she's starting to notice, another conversation I'm deferring. Just not tonight.
I'll tell her. Soon. I've been saying that, and the week keeps moving along without me telling her.
I'll deal with it. Just not tonight. Tonight is for Milo.
Tonight is for proving that this apartment can be something other than a place where we end up naked.
I mean, it's been very good at that, but I need it to be more.
I need a quiet Thursday night. An evening where we eat food and sit on the couch and exist in the same room without someone's pants coming off.
The intercom buzzes. I wipe my hands on a dish towel, hit the button, and say, "Come up," trying to sound like I haven't been fussing over a goddamn fern for half an hour.
He comes around the corner of the hallway carrying a Tupperware container against his chest with both hands like a shield.
The sight of him—not desperate and flushed like last time, not provocative in my shirt like the time before, just Milo in a soft sweater and jeans, a beanie shoved over his curls—hits me harder than any of those other versions. He smells like butter cookies.
"I brought cookies," he says when he reaches the door. "For your crew. Or for us. Whatever."
"Get in here."
He grins and ducks past me. His scent follows him inside—sugar, something soft, and underneath it, a trace of my own scent from the shirt he took home. He's been sleeping in it. The possessive satisfaction that floods my chest is immediate and uncomplicated.
He kicks off his shoes at the door without being asked. Last time he kept them on because he was being ambushed by biology and didn't plan to stay. Tonight, he's barefoot on my kitchen tile within thirty seconds. He sets the Tupperware down and gravitates toward the stove.
"Can I help?" he asks, but he's already picking up the wooden spoon and stirring the sauce. He finds it on his second try this time, which means he's learning my kitchen. I have to check the oven just to process how that makes me feel.
I pass behind him, and my hand goes to his lower back. It's automatic. Just the flat of my palm against the dip of his spine as I move past. He leans into it for a half-second without pausing his stirring. Easy. Like we've been doing this forever.
This is starting to feel less like Milo visits here and more like Milo lives here. The thought lands soft and warm. It doesn't scare me at all.
He tastes the sauce with his pinky, which is disgusting and adorable, and adjusts the burner.
He knows it runs hot on the left side because he was standing in this exact spot two days ago while I had him bent over this counter and the eggs caught fire.
The overlap between those two images—Milo stirring my pasta, and Milo gripping the edge of this counter while I fucked him—exists in my head without any conflict.
"This is good," he says, turning to look at me with a red smudge of sauce on his bottom lip. "Did you put wine in it?"
"A little."
"Fancy." He licks the sauce off his lip. I have to look at the oven timer. Bare feet, pasta sauce, and the bite mark peeking out above his collar is a lot for a man who promised himself no pants would come off tonight.
The bite mark is healing. Less raw than two days ago, the edges settling into a scar.
Through the neck of his sweater, the dark, reddish-brown curve of it against his skin.
The possessive thrum in my blood is different tonight.
Not the feral mine of the bathroom or the desperate mine of my bed.
Just... mine. Settled. Factual. Like looking at my own name on a mailbox.
We eat on the couch because I don't have a dining table.
It's never been a problem before, but now it goes on my mental list of things to buy, right between bookshelf and second set of towels.
Plates on our laps, bread on a cutting board between us.
Milo sits cross-legged, his socked feet tucked under him.
I've got my arm stretched along the back of the couch behind his shoulders.
He tells me about a woman at the library who tried to check out a reference dictionary and got pissed when he explained it couldn't leave the building. The way he tells it makes me laugh. I haven't laughed like this in this apartment in a long time.
"Tell me another one," he says after a while. The conversation shifted without either of us steering it. The pasta is pushed aside, and his body is leaning into mine.
"Another what?"
"Another time you almost—I don't know. Another time you wanted to say something and didn't." He's not looking at me. He picks at a loose thread on the couch cushion. "You told me about the flour on my cheek. And the KnotMe thing. I just... I want to know all of them."
I'm quiet for a second. All of them would take the rest of the night and most of tomorrow. But he's asking, and it costs him to ask, so the least I can do is give him an honest answer.
"Ava's movie night," I say. "About a year ago.
You showed up in that green sweater, the one that falls off your shoulder.
" His hand stops on the thread. "You sat on the floor in front of the couch with a blanket over your legs.
I was behind you on the couch. I could see the back of your neck the entire movie, and I have no fucking idea what we watched.
I spent two hours staring at the ceiling trying not to think about putting my mouth there. "
"The green sweater," he repeats quietly.
"And there was the time you texted Ava a photo of some banana bread you made.
She showed me, because she shows me everything.
You took the photo in your kitchen and you were in the background, blurry, in a T-shirt.
I saved it. I screenshotted it off Ava's phone when she wasn't looking and saved it and felt like the worst person alive. "
"You saved it?"
"It's probably still on my phone somewhere.
" I take a breath. "And the KnotMe thing.
I told you the short version, but the real version is I was lying in my bunk at the firehouse after a twelve-hour shift.
I was scrolling because Marco made me download the app months ago.
Your photo came up. I recognized the birthmark and I just..
. sat there staring at my phone for twenty minutes.
My hands were shaking. I swiped right and immediately wanted to throw my phone into the wall.
Then you matched back and I almost threw up. "
He makes a sound that's halfway between a laugh and a whimper. When I look at him, his eyes are bright. He's biting his lip. It's the look Milo gets when someone gives him something he didn't think he was allowed to want.
"Your turn," I say.
He's quiet for a long time. His fingers find the hem of his sweater and pull at it. My hand moves from the back of the couch to the back of his neck without my permission. My thumb rests against the edge of the bite mark, feeling his pulse beat steady under my skin.
"The first time I saw you carry Ava's groceries," he says, his voice so small I almost don't hear it. "You had like six bags in each hand and you didn't even look like you were trying. I had to sit down on the curb and pretend I was tying my shoe."
I stare at him. "Groceries."