Milo
ONE OF THE perks that comes with failing to kill yourself is seeing who shows up for you. It wasn’t my first time, but I knew now that it would be my last. The thought of leaving Jasper behind, of abandoning him—it made me fucking sick.
And I knew he wouldn’t let me, anyway.
Spring always felt like it was trying to mean something—the season of change, or whatever.
For me, new beginnings looked like two pieces of paper stapled together, the details of a new lease printed on each page.
My fingers trembled around the pen, black ink bleeding through the paper as I momentarily forgot my own name.
“What, sick of me already?” Jasper taunted.
“Shut up,” I muttered. “It’s a big deal.”
I wasn’t hesitating because I was unsure about living together again.
What I was struggling with was the overwhelming fear of being the one to screw it all up.
Like clockwork, I imagined all the ways future me would colossally ruin the single most important relationship I’d ever had.
The only difference was that this time, I was fighting it.
I resisted the way my body tried to convince me it was already happening, dragging the pen over every spot on the page that required my initials with determination.
My posture slumped as I stared down at my own handwriting, on par with that of a toddler from how badly I was shaking.
I cleared my throat.
“Your turn.”
I held the pen out to Jasper, searching his face for any sign of hesitation. When he reached for it, his fingertips grazed mine, and the contact made my palm itch. The memory of cutting ourselves open and bleeding for each other washed over me, making my chest tight.
Unlike me, Jasper didn’t hesitate. I watched with rapt attention as he signed the lease, pen strokes much more fluid and clean than my own. He set the pen down when he was finished, and for a beat, we simply stood there in the kitchen in silence.
“Soulmates? Is that what we say now?” I asked.
Jasper’s brow furrowed in confusion for a moment before the reference clicked, a lopsided smirk tugging at his lips.
“Real soulmates,” he supplied, slipping his hand into mine and smoothing his thumb over my scarred palm, the contact giving me goosebumps.
Not brothers. No word fully encompassed whatever this was.
But this one would have to do.
It felt like the end of a story, one where everything faded to black and the credits started rolling.
I was never good at imagining the future.
I navigated my teenage years under the impression that there was no future, because I was dead certain that I wouldn’t live to see a day past eighteen. There was no plan.
But now, I wanted there to be.
And that was scary.
Jasper let go of my hand finally and moved to grip my waist, turning me and pulling me closer until my back was flush with his chest. He wrapped his arms around me, lacing his fingers together in the front and resting his chin on my shoulder.
“What now?” he asked.
I didn’t know.
Over the winter, the storage closet had stopped being a bedroom. My bedroom was our bedroom, and all of his things had made their way from Mom’s house to here, too. The apartment was full. I was full.
I didn’t feel sick anymore when I entered the kitchen and looked at the sink. I didn’t go into the bathroom and get a visceral mental replay of the way I’d downed an entire bottle of pills. Every space that Jasper touched seemed to lose all of its weight.
There wasn’t a trace of Sofia left.
Almost.
“We haven’t fucked in the shower yet,” I said.
“Really? There, too?” He sighed.
I grinned, reaching down to cover his hands with my own.
“It’s going to have to wait,” he lectured. “You have an engagement shoot in an hour, don’t you?”
I glared at my camera bag on the kitchen counter, as though it had personally offended me.
“Excuses,” I argued. “You hate me.”
“Yes,” he said dryly. “Fucking you in every room of the apartment just to make sure I’ve marked my territory just screams ‘I hate you’.”
“Dick.”
“You like it.”
I loved it.
He slipped away from me and grabbed his keys off the kitchen counter, stuffing them into his pocket and heading into the hallway. It was there that he stopped and looked over his shoulder with one eyebrow raised, exasperated, like he’d been waiting for me forever.
And I supposed he had been.
I grabbed my camera bag and rushed after him, slipping my fingers into his.
He squeezed.
“Come on, loverboy.”