Chapter Twenty-Eight Milo
Twenty-eight
Milo
“Milo?” Nadia calls out, looking at me across the brewery’s emptied parking lot. I walk toward her, not slowing my step as she tosses her cigarette to the gravel and extinguishes it under her shoe. “Mi, what’s wrong?”
I throw my arms around her and pull her to my chest, tucking my chin down to press my face into her smoke-soaked hair.
“Hey…” she whispers, tentatively reaching to hug me back.
She stretches herself, her hands finding my shoulder blades and holding steady.
“What’s going on?” The gentle way she rhythmically pats my back calms my aching heart for a second before I remember Prue’s last words to me all over again. “Mi, you’re scaring me. What’s—”
“I fucked up…” I sniff, tears breaking free. “I fucked up and I-I—”
“Hey, no, Milo, hey, don’t cry. Tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I say, my voice far more desperate than I’ve ever heard it.
I straighten, moving away from her until her hands fall to her sides, then cross in front of her chest as she nervously watches me pace.
“I don’t know how to fix it.” I wipe my face, looking up at the night sky as my sister stares up at me, clearly at a loss for what to say.
“I don’t know how…how to make it right. I need it to be right, Nads. I need to fix it. But—”
“Tell me,” she says, placing her hand on my arm.
“It’s okay. We can figure this out.” She turns to look over her shoulder, as if she’s looking for someone to help us both—as if we’re those same two idiot kids who needed adult supervision but had only each other and Nik. “We’ll sort it…Whatever it is.”
“I love her,” I say aloud for someone else to hear for the first time. “I love her and she—”
“Doesn’t love you back?”
I shake my head instinctively. No, right? She does, doesn’t she? I don’t know. Maybe she did. Maybe not anymore. “I don’t—”
“You two all right?” Nik’s loud voice booms from the entrance. He studies us both for half a beat before his boots sound off against gravel, jogging over to us. “Shit, what happened, man? You look…” He stops, eyes narrowed on my face. “Where’s Prue?”
“She’s at home,” I answer, my voice breaking. “She asked me to leave.”
He looks between Nadia and me, then nods, his brows inching closer and closer to each other by the second. “Okay,” he says calmly. “Why’d she do that?”
I tell them both everything that’s happened since the day on the dock with Tom, right up until the last ten minutes when my heart broke in a way I hadn’t imagined possible before moving here. Before her.
“Shit,” Nadia mumbles, her eyes shifting side to side. “That’s…”
“Milo, that’s hard…” Nik says, rubbing a hand over his face. “I’m sorry, man.”
“I know I fucked up. You can tell me.”
They share a quick, uneasy glance, then both look back at me.
“Should you have told her? Probably, yeah.” Nadia answers her own question, her head leaning side to side. “But I think all three of us can wager to guess why you may have not wanted to piss off a fatherlike figure…especially since you like his daughter so—”
“Love,” I interrupt, apparently not able to stop saying it now.
“Especially since you love his daughter,” she corrects, before rubbing her lips together. “I think he put you in a really fucked-up position, honestly.”
“Right. But—”
“Agreed,” Nik says, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “And, yeah, it’s not fair to Prue, and it’ll obviously affect her life too, but Tom is the one who’s sick, and he asked you to not say anything, so…
” He winces, looking at the ground. “I don’t know if I would’ve told her. I don’t know…. It’s hard.”
“She’s really, really mad,” I say, scratching at my jaw.
“Sh-she looked at me like…well, like she was disappointed, I guess. But it was more than that…. I’m used to disappointing people.
I’ve been seeing that sort of expression since I was a fucking toddler.
But Prue, she looked… surprised by her disappointment.
Like she’d expected more. Like she thought more of me. No one’s ever been surprised before.”
“Milo…” Nads whispers, uncharacteristically soft.
“An-and she wouldn’t even hear me out, you know? She kept interrupting and—”
“I mean, duh… ” Nik says. “How would you feel if you found out your whole life is about to change for the worse and the guy you’ve been screwing knew but didn’t give you a heads-up?”
“Fuck.” I press the heels of my palms into my eye sockets. “Fuck, this is bad.”
“It is,” Nik agrees. “But I don’t think it’s past fixing.”
“No?” I ask, unable to hide the hopefulness I pour into the single syllable.
“No?” Nadia repeats, obviously surprised.
I turn toward her, my eyes wide and urgent and searching.
“Sorry, Mi, it’s not…I don’t know. I think you deserve a second chance, don’t get me wrong.
But I don’t know if I could trust someone again after that.
Being vulnerable is scary as fuck.” She laughs, looking at the strung-up lights above us.
“I just think it would be really difficult to open yourself up to being hurt again…. Wouldn’t it? ”
“You’ve seen them together, Nads. There’s something there. Something big. That doesn’t just go away because of one argument, no matter how…messy it may be.”
“Doesn’t it?” she asks, two words containing a spark I well recognize.
“No, I don’t think so,” Nik answers. He looks down at his feet, the toe of his boots drawing a line between us.
“I have fucked up so many times with Sef.” He speaks slowly.
“A thousand times. Some of them big and some of them small, but almost always because of my own bullshit or insecurity or pride. And, god, that woman still fights with me, still reminds me of who she thinks I am—who I could be—every time I fuck up, even when I’ve hurt her.
Even when I don’t deserve it. She never stops trying to make me see myself how she sees me…
someone good and worthy of love. People like her exist. Kind, generous people who help you… heal.”
“I don’t know where to start,” I say, swallowing thickly. “Everything in me wants to go back there right now and try to fix this but—”
“You start by giving her some space,” Nik says. “Prue has got a lot to process and a fuck ton to discuss with her dad. And, well, she needs to be calm before you two can talk again. Otherwise, you’ll just go in circles.”
“But I want to be there for her. I want to help her—”
“You hurt her, Milo,” Nik says, placing a hand on my shoulder. “You don’t get to help fix what you broke right now…That’d be too easy.”
“Okay, right,” I say, dropping my head. “Fine…I give her space, and then what?”
“You tell her what you told us,” Nik says. “Tell her that you’re sorry and you realize what you did was wrong and try to explain yourself, your reasoning, without trying to justify it too much.”
“Tell her you love her,” Nadia says plainly, lifting her gaze from the distance and focusing it on me. “Tell her that won’t change, no matter what. Tell her you’ll wait for her, if you need to.”
I nod slowly, looking between my siblings. “But what if…” I hesitate, shutting my eyes tight at the awful fear I’m harboring inside of my chest. “What if she can’t forgive me? What if I lose her?”
I watch them both hesitate, Nik appearing deep in thought as Nadia picks at the skin around her fingernails, her eyes focusing over my shoulder on the fogged-up windows of the brewery.
“In that case,” Nik says calmly before offering me a soft smile, “you’ll still have us.
” He pats my arm twice before shoving his hand deep inside his jeans pocket.
“And we’ll get you through it, the Kablukov way—long drives, lots of alcohol, and emotionally stilted, uncomfortable conversations.
” Nik’s smile turns crooked, which I return. “No matter what, man. You have us.”
“Speak for yourself,” Nadia mumbles before Nik fires a disapproving glare at her. “Kidding, obviously,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Yes, you’ll have us. Always…”
“I love you both.”
“Love you too,” they reply at the same time. Nik wraps his arm around Nadia’s neck and drags her in as he brings me in too. We hug, for half a second, before Nadia makes a gagging noise and steps away.
“That’s enough of that, thank you,” she says, shaking out her limbs.
“Someday that heart of yours is going to soften, Зайка,” Nik teases.
“Well,” she says, a cool smile in place. “Today is not that day.”