Milo
Author’s note:
In case you were wondering, I did not set out to write a book about grief.
The Canon story mentions Anabelle’s death, but it was up to every author to decide how much or how little they would feature that in their story.
I got to chapter six before going “oh god, this is a grief book, isn’t it?
” and then had to come back and rewrite this entire chapter.
So, now he rented a tiny studio apartment on the floor above Ray, and it was the best of a not-so-great situation.
Ray blinked at him once and then again until, finally, a small smile curved his lips. “How convenient.”
“I hardly think memory loss is conven—” Milo shrieked with laughter as Ray dug his fingers into Milo’s sides. “Ray!” Milo cried, scrabbling at his arms and shoulders, trying to push him away, while also holding him even tighter.
Ray was decidedly the best thing to happen to Milo in years.
Yes, they’d been some pretty craptastic years, but still.
Ray was every bit the ray of sunshine his parents had named him after, even if he let worthless guys get him down sometimes.
Milo truly didn’t know what would have happened to him if he’d gone from losing Anabelle to losing Andrew six months later without meeting Ray in the process.
He still would have had Ethel, but she’d pulled away from Milo for almost a year after Anabelle’s death.
Milo had done everything in his power to stay close to her, but Andrew had been less than helpful.
If anything, he’d kept Milo from visiting Ethel as much as he should have.
One of the first things Ray did after they’d dropped Andrew’s dead weight was request to visit the infamous Ethel.
She’d been so proud of Milo for throwing pies that she’d written him a check that helped cover his portion of Ray’s rent until he got back on his feet.
To this day, Ethel still tried to sneak twenty dollar bills into Milo’s clothing and bags.
He appreciated it, more than he could say, but he didn’t need the money now, so he usually used it to pay for their outings or fun things like the extra-large blue raspberry slush they’d shared the night before.
“I’m going—” Milo wheezed, basking in the giggles coming out of Ray, even as he dug his fingers relentlessly into Milo’s sides. “—to pee on your couch!”
Ray gave his sides one more good squeeze before releasing him. Milo stretched his gangly arms up over his head and kicked his legs up onto the sofa. He had to bend his knees a fair amount to fit on the loveseat, but he didn’t mind.
The room fell into a soft, comfortable silence, and Ray began tracing patterns into Milo’s chest through the bright purple sherpa hoodie he’d found at a consignment store.
He and Anabelle used to go thrift shopping together, and it was the only way Milo knew to still feel connected to her.
Did it mean he had a closet full of random, sometimes hideous clothing? Yes. Did that stop him? Absolutely not.
“So,” Milo said, after several minutes had passed, “do you want to tell me what happened with Tristan?”
Ray gave him an unimpressed look. “You mean Travis?”
Milo held both hands in the air. “Ugly po-tay-to,” he said, rolling one wrist. “Ugly po-tah-to,” he said, rolling the other wrist.
“He wasn’t—”
“His attitude sure was.”
Ray bit his lip, and Milo's pony whinnied, pawing at the ground in agitation. He loved Ray with his whole equine heart, just like Milo did. The problem was that whereas Milo had a habit of pushing those he loved, his pony didn’t want to risk losing him, just like they’d lost everyone else in their life.
Milo refused to do that, though. One day, his nagging would get through Ray’s thick skull. It had gotten Anabelle to move into the retirement community where she met Ethel, after all.
“Yeah, I…I guess you’re right,” Ray said with a sigh. “His attitude was pretty crummy.”
Ray went on to tell Milo how they’d gotten in a big fight over where to eat dinner the night before, and Travis had walked out. When Ray tried to call him, the phone rang once and went straight to voicemail.
“So, basically, he blocked me, and I blocked him back, so I guess we’re done,” Ray said, slumping sideways until he was wedged between Milo and the back of the couch.
“I’m sorry, sweet pea,” Milo said, taking over the hair petting duties and deploying Anabelle’s favorite endearment.
“It is what it is,” Ray mumbled before tucking his head under Milo’s chin.
Ray was an omega black cat shifter, and he and his cat loved nothing more than curling up and being pet.
If Milo kept this up for too long, Ray would probably shift, and he’d be stuck pulling the purring cat out of Ray’s clothes and carrying him around like a baby for the next six hours.
While he didn’t mind that, he was feeling a bit antsy.
Or maybe his pony was. It had started the second they’d looked up from the floor at the large alpha.
Milo didn’t usually have crushes. Andrew had been the one to pursue him, and since then, Milo hadn’t even looked at another shifter. It wasn’t that he was in mourning over Andrew. No, the only person in his life he should be mourning was Anabelle, but…
Just as it always did, a white fog appeared in Milo’s mind’s eye, whiting out his pony and making his thoughts go quiet. This happened almost anytime Milo got too close to the edge of “the cliff.”
Almost two years ago now, the retirement home had offered Milo a session of grief counseling.
The counselor had described grief as a chasm that slowly fills in over time but would always leave a visible scar, almost like proof that the person had lived and been loved.
The metaphor had stuck with Milo because anytime he even tried to reckon with the fact that Anabelle was really and truly gone, he felt like he was stepping right up to the edge of a cliff and preparing to jump.
He’d only cried once, on the phone call from the retirement home letting him know she had passed away in her sleep.
After that, he’d been so busy dealing with all the impersonal, stressful processes that came with death that he’d turned away from the cliff entirely.
Then he’d discovered Andrew was a lying liar who lies, and he’d had to deal with the six-month-long fallout from that.
Now, any time he tried to approach the edge of the cliff—or even got near it—he felt like Anabelle’s old analog TV, all crackling white fuzz.
For the most part, that was okay. He’d thrown himself into his new, somewhat sadder and duller life without Anabelle.
Ethel was great, and Ray was everything he’d ever wanted in a friend.
The chasm Anabelle had left in his heart definitely wouldn’t be healed by dating, though, so he hadn’t even tried.
And yet, his pony had felt something when he’d stared into Rowan’s hazel eyes. He wasn’t sure whether it was awe at just how big and beautiful the man was…or something more. Maybe, like Ray, Rowan had come into Milo’s life for a reason.
He didn’t necessarily believe in fate. Anabelle had claimed to have met her fated mate when she was younger, and he’d turned out to be a proper douche nugget, so she’d given up on dating. She was a beta shifter, like Milo, and she said fated mate bonds weren’t that intense for betas.
Milo didn’t know if his parents had been fated mates.
He knew very little about them, except that they’d both died in a car crash that had miraculously left Milo unscathed.
Maybe fate was real, and that had been his one and only pass.
If that was the case, he would take it and do with his life what he could.
Like keeping his best friend—who sadly very much believed in fate—from turning into a sad lump on the couch for the next two weeks.
Ray’s whiskers were just beginning to sprout from the sides of his nose when Milo shouted, “Hey!”
Ray startled, and his ears popped out, parting his hair and bumping up against Milo’s hand.
Not one to be easily deterred, Milo began stroking one of his ears while he said, “Wanna hear about this really handsome shifter I met last night?”
Ray—or, more likely, his cat—pawed at Milo’s other hand until he used it to rub Ray’s other ear. “Was that before or after Ethel supposedly declared her love for Anabelle to the entire movie theater?”
Gods, Ray was such a beautiful soul. If Milo was attracted to omegas, he would offer to mate with Ray right this instant and spend the rest of his life showing Ray exactly how he deserved to be treated.
Unfortunately, he was only attracted to alphas.
He would just have to keep drowning Ray in all the platonic love he had to give and hope that one day Ray would find someone who saw him for the treasure he was.
“You know, I totally forgot that happened until you mentioned it. There is just the slightest possibility I fell asleep during the egregiously long intro and dreamed that whole thing up. I guess we’ll never know,” Milo said, using his thumbs to massage the insides of Ray’s ears.
Ray shifted around, and his fluffy black tail popped out of the back of his sweatpants.
He rolled over, flopping down on top of Milo and going completely limp.
Milo often accused him of secretly being a ragdoll, but Ray swore he was one hundred percent British Bombay, like his mother and father.
Ray had been born here, so he didn’t have the accent, but he had the distinct piercing green eyes British Bombay were known for.
Apparently.
Milo only knew the bare minimum about cat breeds.
Anabelle had several housecats over the course of Milo’s life, but they were strays she found in her garden.
Milo’s favorite had been a floppy, fluffy girl he’d called—appropriately—Fluffy.
That was how he’d learned the term ragdoll, even though Anabelle had said she wasn’t actually a ragdoll either, she just liked to flop around.
Some of Milo’s happiest memories were sitting with Anabelle and Fluffy on her couch, watching the staticky TV and…
Milo’s hands stilled as his head filled with fog, and he lost sight of his pony. This was the worst part, feeling utterly disconnected from his inner beast.
“So,” Ray murmured, butting Milo’s chin with the top of his head. “Did you meet the handsome shifter in your dream, too?”
Milo’s thoughts snapped back into focus, and he began petting Ray’s ears again.
Ray was used to Milo getting lost in thought—or lack thereof.
He said Milo would sometimes stare into space for over an hour, not saying a word.
Ray always claimed he didn’t mind. He liked having Milo around, whether he was talking or not, but every once in a while, Ray would throw him a concerned or pained look.
Oh well. Milo would deal with all that at some point.
“No, I met the gorgeous ginger giant—ha, GGG? Like triple G? Wait…isn’t that the name of a boxer?
” Ray butted Milo’s chin again, and Milo laughed.
“Well, while he looked like he could definitely take on ten men in a fight, he also seemed really gentle. My gentle gorgeous ginger giant. My quadruple G. My 4G, if you will.”
Ray lifted his head, his green eyes pinched at the sides. “Your ginger giant?”
Milo waved one of his hands in the air. “It’s just a figure of speech. Anyways,” he said, bringing his hand to the back of Ray’s head to gently push it back down onto Milo’s chest. “He was waiting for his brother while I was waiting for Ethel—oh my god, apparently Leonard blew up a toilet!”
Ray sighed but listened anyway as Milo detailed the wild story Ethel had told him. Even though Milo and Ethel weren’t related, they both had a similar habit of embellishing stories and being a little bit fantastical.
“Also, she sent me a doctored recipe for muffins, and I almost killed Rowan!”
Ray’s ears twitched. “Is Rowan your—”
“The 4G, yes,” Milo said, his pony swishing his tail happily. For some reason, he liked the way it sounded when Ray said “your.”
Which was all fine and dandy, except Rowan wasn’t Milo’s.
He wasn’t his boyfriend, his friend, or even a contact in his phone.
The second Ethel walked into the movie theater, Milo had lost all sense and ran over to grab her oxygen canister so she wouldn’t drop it on the linoleum floor and break it, like she had the last one.
That had resulted in a ruined chest of drawers when the canister shot off like a rocket.
While it was funny in retrospect, it had come within a few inches of hitting Ethel.
There was absolutely no way that would ever happen on Milo’s watch again, so he had all but flown out of his seat to her side and completely spaced on getting Rowan’s number.
“Am I to assume,” Ray said knowingly, “that because he’s a giant, he’s an alpha, and therefore—”
“You know, assuming just makes an ass out of you and me, and I like being a pony much more than a donkey, so we should avoid that at all costs,” Milo said, and his pony whinnied in agreement.
Ray’s hands crept down Milo’s sides in warning, but Milo didn’t want to talk about Rowan anymore. He would chalk it up to a missed opportunity and go on with his life.
“Speaking of asses, we have that huge board meeting all the rest of this week and next, right?”
“What does that have to do with asses?” Ray asked, his fingers pausing on Milo’s ribs.
“Well, our asses are going to be so sore from sitting in those horrific conference room chairs all day. Do you think we can sneak away for coffee at some point? I fear my survival may depend on it.”
Ray snorted and shook his head, even as he said, “Yes, my sweet, ridiculous Milo, we can get coffee.”