66. Milo
SIXTY-SIX
MILO
Iwake up at five. It’s not discipline—after all, discipline is for people whose brains have an off switch. Mine has a dimmer that slides back to full on its own, somewhere between two and four hours after falling asleep.
Which means I’ve been awake for the great philosophical question of the day—how do we calculate exactly how much of last night’s ejaculation was deposited inside Sage?
Approximately three tablespoons, I decide around five-thirty. Four healthy men with full deposits, has to mean at least three to six tablespoons of grade-A artisanal small-batch direct-trade Hangmen DNA is currently distributed across multiple chambers in our girl.
I nod once, satisfied I’ve solved today’s thought of the day.
She’s gonna need a big breakfast.
I extract myself from the pile of limbs, which requires the flexibility of a Cirque du Soleil acrobat.
We’re six people in a queen bed. Sage is in the middle.
Eli is curled around her back. Holden has her left hand in his, both hands resting on his chest. Micah is face-down with one leg thrown across Eli’s and is drooling into the pillow, which I file for future weaponization.
Knox is at the foot of the bed, sleeping on his back like a corpse at a wake, fully dressed in sweats he got from somewhere overnight, one enormous hand draped over Sage’s right ankle.
He fell asleep holding it and didn’t let go.
I love every one of these idiots.
I climb out over Knox because Knox is the structurally simplest exit—the man sleeps so still you could do a yoga flow on top of him and not wake him up—and I land in the hallway in my boxers feeling like I just completed a heist.
Cowabunga!
Amy’s door is closed at the other end of the hallway. Which is normal, since she’s hardly ever here. Or it’s purposeful because she did come home and locked herself in.
“Hm.”
I stare at the door.
We’ve got ourselves a case of Schrodinger’s Roommate now. Where both things can be true until I open that door to find out.
I decide I don’t really care and pad quietly past her door and head for my domain.
The kitchen.
I survey what we have to work with, rubbing my hands together.
There are six eggs, half a pound of bacon, a block of cheddar, some sad mushrooms in a paper bag, one tragic onion, butter, a loaf of something I refuse to call bread, and a bag of flour that I think has been in this kitchen long enough to have rights.
I need more eggs. I need more bacon. I need real bread, not the white sliced offense Sage buys. I need cream and sugar, and fruit because Holden secretly likes fruit at breakfast and will pretend he doesn’t. I need maple syrup because I have an idea, and the idea requires syrup.
The idea is dawning on me slowly and beautifully, the way the best ideas do, which is to say at five-fifty in the morning before any coffee, while I’m standing in Sage’s kitchen in my boxers contemplating the bag of flour.
Pancakes.
But not just any pancakes. Commemorative pancakes. Pancakes that honor the events of the previous evening. Pancakes that recognize what was accomplished. Pancakes that say we’re all in this together.
I steal Knox’s truck keys off the hook by the door and I head to the twenty-four-hour grocery on the corner in my jocks.
Won’t be the first time he’s gotten a glimpse of my six-pack.
I’m back in a half hour with three bags of groceries, a piping bag, two different food colorings, and a fine for public indecency.
The kitchen is still empty. The apartment is still quiet. I have time.
I make the batter from scratch because anything else would be an insult to the artistry I’m about to attempt.
Flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, eggs, milk, melted butter.
I whisk then rest. While the batter rests, I divide it into three bowls.
One stays neutral. One gets a dot of red food coloring, worked through until it goes a pale, ambitious pink.
One gets a more generous dose of red until it lands somewhere in the plausibly-tan-with-a-suggestion-of-sunburn range.
What can I say? I’ve done this before.
I scoop the neutral batter into a piping bag. The pale pink into a second. The shaft-toned into a third. I heat the pan as music plays in my head. Chopin, I think. Or Elvis, I’m not sure.
The first pancake is always the warm-up.
I pipe a generous blimp shape—generous being the operative word here, because this is not the time for false modesty.
I add two perfectly round companion circles at the base and let it set.
I flip it. The reverse side comes out golden. I plate it. I step back. I admire.
“I shall call you, Pan-cock.”
The next pancake is a boob. I pipe a circle, add a smaller filled circle in the center with the pink batter, let it set so the color catches, and flip.
The result is—let me be honest—slightly more abstract than I was aiming for.
Pancake batter doesn’t respect anatomical detail the way I’d hoped.
But the intention is clear. Anyone who sees this pancake knows exactly what I was going for.
I make a matching boob, because boobs come in pairs, mostly, and I’m not a barbarian.
By the time I’m on my fourth dick pancake—varying sizes, because the men have made their preferences known regarding representation, and also because I’m an artist and I refuse to be confined to a single dimension—I hear footsteps.
The front door clicks open.
Frowning, I look up as Amy comes around the corner into the kitchen in rumpled clothes. Her hair is pulled back, and most of her makeup has been slept off. She’s holding her shoes in one hand like a woman attempting a walk of shame into her own apartment.
Definitely not asleep in her room, then.
She stops when she sees me. She takes in the scene, me in boxers, the pan, the piping bags, the row of anatomically commemorative pancakes plated on the counter. Her eyes do the full circuit. Then they come back to me.
“Milo,” she says, carefully. “What are you doing?”
“Good morning, Amy.” I hold up the pan with my current dick creation. “Can I interest you in a pan-cock?”
She stares at the pancakes. The pancakes stare back, because two of them have chocolate chips for nipples now, which was a late addition I’m very proud of.
She looks at me. Her face does something complicated—half astonishment, half dawning realization that this might be her actual life now—and she sets her shoes down on the floor deliberately.
“I need coffee.”
“Absolutely. Coffee first. I bought the beans Knox likes. They’re some Portland direct-trade thing.”
“Okay.”
I pour her a cup. She takes it with both hands, and leans against the counter, watching me pipe another pancake.
“Were you out with Tyler?” I ask casually, forcing my voice bright because every time I think about that guy I imagine slitting his throat.
“Um, no.” She takes a sip. “Actually, I needed a break.”
“From?”
She looks at her coffee. Then at me. Then at the pancakes. Then back at her coffee. “From Tyler. From everything, I guess. I stayed at a friend’s.”
“Why didn’t you just come home?” I ask, sliding a pancake onto the stack. “Your bed’s right there.”
“I did come home.”
I pause, spatula aloft. “Oh?” And then it lands. “. . . Ohhh.”
“Yeah.” She takes a long, fortifying sip. “Got as far as the hallway, heard enough to last me a lifetime, and called a cab. I needed a night where I didn’t have to think about it anyway.”
“It?”
She hesitates. “My relationship.”
I don’t push. I just nod and slide an extra pat of butter into the pan. Then I think about other fun ways I could murder Tyler while I make Amy a non-anatomical pancake—a circle, regular, neutral batter—and slide it onto a plate with butter and maple syrup.
“For you,” I say. “Because the last thing you need right now is to eat a dick.”
“Why is mine a circle when everyone else’s is”—she gestures at the lineup—“that?”
“Because you’ve had a week and I respect that I’ve yet to ask you your preference about pan-cock and tit-cakes.”
She lifts her coffee. “I’ll take tit-cakes, thanks.”
I drop a single chocolate chip in the center. “There you go.”
She sips her coffee, taking in the little chocolate blob melting in front of her. “Sage is really gonna love these.”
“Yeah. They’re commemorative.”
“Commemorative?”
“The kind of pancakes you get after five men collectively deposit approximately three tablespoons of DNA-filled protein inside you.”
Amy chokes on her coffee. “Milo!”
“What?”
“You can’t just say that at seven in the morning!”
“It’s nearly seven thirty. And I can. I have. I will continue to. Eat your tit-cake.”
She eats her tit-cake. She is also, I notice, fighting a smile.
Knox appears in the doorway while she’s eating. His eyes scan the kitchen, perimeter first, exits second, threats third, what the fuck is on the counter fourth.
He stops on the pancakes.
“Milo.”
“Morning, big guy.”
“Why are there cock pancakes?”
“Cocks and tits, Knox. Inclusivity. Equal representation.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he walks to the coffee, pours himself a cup, takes a sip, makes the small involuntary sound he makes when something pleases him, and sits down at the table.
“I’m not eating one,” he says.
“You are.” I slide a plate in front of him. “You will eat the largest one. It’s been allocated to you specifically. It would be discourteous to refuse after I spent so long getting the size and girth right.”
He looks at the plate. The pan-cock representing him is, in fairness, substantial. It has heft to it. And it’s a little too long to fully fit on the plate. Perfect for a growing boy to choke down.
“Fine,” he grunts, reaching for the syrup.
“That’s the spirit!”
Amy is watching this exchange like she’s at a tennis match. He gives her the small chin-lift. “Amy.”
“Hi, Knox.”
“You sleep here?”
“No.”
That seems to be the extent of his vocabulary this morning because he goes back to his coffee.