Elijah #6
“I can be sorry that you’re missing out, and I can be sorry that you weren’t brought into the loop sooner.”
“Would you have told Eli to tell me if you knew what you know now?”
“No...like you said, it was up to him to talk to you about it, and he had to do it when he was ready...or until you came pounding on our door.”
“She’s tactful like that,” I said, knowing full well that I was going to find myself with a whole new set of problems. If she was okay with everything and willing to forgive me for dragging my heels longer than I should have, then she was going to end up cozying up to Milo at some point.
The idea of the two of them collaborating was enough to send a shiver down my spine.
Both liked to get up to trouble, and the two of them working together would result in a lot of trouble for me.
“How...okay are you with this?” Milo asked, and I was relieved that he asked the question.
If I had tried, she would have made me twist in the wind before she gave an honest answer.
Since she had outright admitted she wasn’t mad at Milo, which meant she was still feeling her normal ‘absolutely adore the little weirdo’ self, she would give him an answer that she’d make me dance and work for.
“With him? No, he’s in the doghouse for a while, and he damn well knows he deserves it.”
“Uh...not what I meant. You guys clearly have your own...ways of dealing with issues, and I’ve learned enough during this conversation to realize I should probably keep my nose out of it if I don’t want to lose it.”
“That is far smarter than most people in the world. I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you?”
“You’re welcome,” she said, all friendly and warm now that she’d had her tantrum.
An understandable and completely valid tantrum, but Jesus, sometimes the people in my life exhausted me.
“But if you mean, do I have an issue with you two being an item? No. A little weird, with you being brothers and all.”
“Step,” Milo and I both corrected, making Eva jerk back and laugh.
“Whatever, same thing.”
“This from the woman who ‘bagged’ identical twins as she so politely put it,” I said with a glare.
She thought about that for a minute and nodded.
“Alright, that’s a fair point. I’d like to rescind my judgment of it being weird, but I’m just one person.
It’d be a complete non-issue if you didn’t have that pesky ‘step’ word sitting between you.
Though I suppose it’s probably the ‘brother’ that’s really the tricky part, whatever, you know what I mean? ”
Milo heaved a sigh. “I do. And we both knew that would be an issue before we got as far as we did.”
“Well, it is what it is. Every relationship comes with difficulties. Yours is just going to come with a lot of ‘ew’ and ‘bro, that’s your brother’ thrown in. But?—”
Milo’s nervousness showed even more as he fidgeted, clearly anxious for her to finish before blurting out, “But...what?”
“But I’m sure the people talking the most shit are the ones who don’t know you two like some of us do,” she said with a shrug, taking another drink.
“I mean, I can’t speak for your family, I don’t know them like you do, but I don’t blame you for being nervous.
It’s a lot to take in, I’m sure. Of course, there’s also, you know, your fucking boyfriend. ”
Milo’s eyes dropped to the carpet. I frowned at her in confusion, while he avoided her gaze out of shame. “Yeah, I-I know. It’s not something I’m proud of.”
“I mean, cheating?” she asked wryly. “Just be glad I’m not him. Eli is in enough shit keeping this from me, I can’t even imagine how pissed Raf must be.”
Milo’s shoulders hunched. “It’s not...cheating. We were...open, are open.”
“Interesting that you’re correcting it to the present,” she said with a shake of her head, and I frowned at her. Something was...off.
“I don’t know why that’s weird. I haven’t spoken with him to break up yet,” Milo said with a sigh, no longer feeling relieved from her forgiveness and now focusing on his own problems.
One of her brows slowly arched. “I would think that would have taken care of itself.”
“Why?” Milo asked, and Eva stared at him...and something finally clicked.
“Eva,” I began slowly, telling myself I was wrong, that it was a slip of the tongue, a bit of misspeaking. “You said talking.”
“Huh?” Eva asked, looking at me as Milo’s face also scrunched up in confusion.
“You said you were sure people who were talking the most shit are the ones who don’t know Milo and I like you do,” I said, my heart hammering away in my chest. “As in the present tense. Currently, actively talking shit as if they know.”
“What?” Milo asked, his eyes going wide. “That can’t?—”
Eva looked even more confused. “I...well, yeah . How the fuck did you think I found out?”
I stared at her, unable to comprehend or think about anything other than the question she had just asked herself. “I don’t know Eva. How the fuck did you find out?”
We both stared at her, Eva’s eyes darting between us in growing confusion.
Her gaze shifted to stare at the point between us, confusion locked on her face before slowly easing into a horrified understanding that sent waves of terror and panic crashing through me.
That was the face of a woman who had come to understand something that I knew was about to sideswipe the hell out of Milo and me.
..and that was with me suspecting at least somewhat close to the truth.
“I...holy shit,” she said in a whisper that went to my core and froze it. “You don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?” Milo blurted out, panic etched into his features, and I let out a soft sound that was just shy of a whimper.
“It’s...” She set the bottle down again, this time with a hard thunk, and fumbled for her pocket. “Fucking...I’d ask if you have your phones off, but I know that’s not the case because Eli messaged me back earlier.”
“What do you mean?” Milo asked, twisting and trying to locate what I was sure was his phone. “What do you mean?”
“It’s been blowing up all day,” she continued, looking lost and upset. She stopped reaching into her pocket when Milo grabbed his phone. “Like... all over. All day.”
“We had our social media account notifications turned off,” I told her faintly, because where the hell did anything other than explosives blow up?
“We didn’t want to deal with...the world for a bit and turned it off.
I never turned mine back on today because I wasn’t feeling it, and I guess Milo didn’t either. ”
“Oh god,” Milo moaned as he fumbled to unlock his phone and find the app buttons. “I thought everything would be quiet after not seeing a post from us since Friday, people move on, and I wasn’t feeling in the mood to...holy shit.”
If I thought the color had drained out of his face before, it was nothing compared to the paleness bleeding through his face now.
The kind of pale that would make anyone look at him and ask if he needed to sit down and drink some water.
Right now, I thought he needed a drink of something, alright, but I had a nasty feeling that even the hardest liquor wouldn’t help either of us.
“So many messages,” Milo groaned, and despite wanting to walk right past him, enter my room, close and lock the door, and refuse to come out until I’d made sense of the shit, I walked up behind him and looked over his shoulder.
Messages was...one way of putting it.
“You’re so fucking nasty,” Milo read one, skipping to another. “That’s your brother, you sick fuck. Oh...wishing death and...dismemberment on us, and death threats and?—”
He kept scrolling, and my stomach rolled at the things we could see at a glimpse.
Milo didn’t open any of the messages, not that it was necessary; just scanning the preview of the first line was more than enough.
We didn’t need to read the whole message to know that people were spewing their disgust and hate into our private messages, and I could also see that we were being tagged in several different videos.
“God,” I said, closing my eyes and swallowing hard. “We’ve been stitched and tagged up one side, down the other, and back again. I don’t even want to know what those look like right now.”
“Holy fuck, I thought you knew,” Eva said with a horror that I couldn’t help but believe. “I would have...I would have never come at you so hot. I thought you knew and were just?—”
“How did this happen?” I wondered, and for a moment, the wretched part of my brain suspected Eva, but the rest of me balked at the idea and threw it in the trash where it belonged.
I agreed with Eva’s assessment of herself down to the letter; she really could be a royal bitch sometimes, but I had never known her to be cruel or spiteful, not maliciously anyway.
And even if she did have a moment of malicious pique, outing us wasn’t her style.
No, her style had been precisely what she’d done today, an aggressive, in-your-face confrontation where she made sure you knew exactly where you stood, but it was still ultimately between you and her.
No, Eva had not done this.
Eva hesitated. “I...Jesus, you know I’m bad at giving bad news.”
“We already have the bad news,” I said, taking Milo’s phone out of his hand.
I didn’t know if I should be relieved or worried that he’d let me take the phone without so much as a whisper of protest despite his desperate scrolling.
Either he was dealing with things well enough to know that continuing to read the messages was a faster path to hurting himself, or he was so dazed and lost in his own panic that he didn’t know what to do with himself and was letting me take control of the situation.
“You might as well just...give us the rest. Or at least where it started.”