35. Chapter 35 #2
Milo leans across me to reach the arugula, one palm braced beside mine as his body presses along my side.
He gathers the leaves without giving me back an inch of space. Each time he reaches, his ribs shift against mine, and the hard line of his thigh nudges between my knees. By the third leaf, I’m gripping the spoon too tightly and he’s breathing through parted lips beside my temple.
I load both rounds onto the peel and slide them into the oven. When I straighten, Milo has closed the space I left. He plants a hand beside my hips and boxes me in.
“You keep doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Finding out what I’ve never had.” His knuckles graze the strawberry stitched into my apron. “No one has taken the trouble to learn what I might want. You built a whole counter out of it.”
The denial comes out on reflex. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It is to me.”
I mean to say something sarcastic. Instead, I fist the front of his flannel and pull his mouth down to mine. He answers with a rough inhale, one hand locking around my hip.
“The pizza,” he gets out against my lips.
“Has ten minutes.” I drag my teeth along his throat.
His restraint doesn’t hold. He turns me in one swift movement and walks me backward without breaking the kiss until the counter catches my spine. Milo hooks one hand beneath my thigh and lifts just enough to open me around him, fitting his hips closer between mine.
“I can be extremely efficient with ten minutes.”
“That sounded suspiciously confident.”
His glasses slip lower on his nose. “Evie, you’re making it very difficult to remember that efficiency should still involve removing clothes.”
He kisses me until the counter digs into my spine. When I turn my face for air, his lips follow the line of my jaw and settle on my shoulder, nudging the apron strap aside with his nose.
“You’re the cleverest person I’ve met on either side of the veil,” he whispers into my skin.
“That’s a suspicious thing to say while your hand is under my shirt.”
“It remains true under highly distracting conditions.”
His mouth travels further up my neck, his tongue tracing the place his teeth grazed earlier. I arch into him, and his hips answer with a measured roll. The friction draws a moan from me.
“I’ve thought about your lips an unreasonable number of times,” he confesses, rocking into me again. “Usually while you were speaking, which feels disrespectful in retrospect.”
Milo stops moving with his lips against my shoulder, his cock pressed exactly where I need him.
I slide my hand beneath his shirt and drag my nails down his back. “You can make it up to me.”
His mouth curves against my throat. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
The timer erupts before his hand slides any higher.
Milo stares toward the oven with a scowl. “I may have overestimated what can be accomplished efficiently in ten minutes.”
He releases me with visible reluctance. I pull the pizzas from the oven. One of his hands lingers at my waist until the heat from the oven makes me nudge him back. I barely get them down before he’s reaching over me for a slice. He takes one bite and groans.
“Good?”
“Evie.” He opens his eyes. They’re glazed. “I need you to understand that I’d burn Hell to the ground for this.”
“I’ll take that as approval.”
“This is a spiritual event,” he says through the bite. “Don’t interrupt.”
We lean against opposite sides of the counter, letting food and breathing room settle the heat into something quieter. He eats three slices in rapid succession before stealing a slice of my pizza. He takes a bite of his, then mine, with a studious expression.
“Yours is better.”
“Obviously.”
He hands my slice back, his fingertips grazing my palm before he lets go. “You were right, about everything.”
“I generally am.”
“Tell me something,” he says, halfway through his fourth slice. “The measuring. Needing to have control of everything. Were you always this way?”
“Yes.” I reach for a piece of his pizza because fair is fair. “I wish there was a fascinating origin story, but there isn’t. I just came wired for systems. Give me any space and I’ll organize it. Hand me any task and I’ll build a process around it.”
“Even when you were young?”
“Especially then. I used to label everything in our kitchen. My mom thought it was hilarious.” I smile at the memory.
“And cooking?”
“That’s the best version of it. A recipe is a promise. You do these steps, in this order, with these measurements, and the outcome is guaranteed.”
“It’s a certainty.”
“And then you get to give the result to someone and watch them enjoy it. Double payoff.” I shrug one shoulder. “Daisy says it’s my love language—planning and feeding people, making their world a little easier. I don’t really argue with that anymore.”
Milo sets his pizza down and turns to face me. It hits me that this is the first conversation we’ve had where I’ve talked about myself without deflecting into sarcasm. He never pushed for it. He just waited until I got here on my own.
“Your turn,” I say. “What was your childhood like?”
Some of the warmth leaves his expression. “My upbringing was structured. Everything oriented around training. My father teaching me negotiation tactics, contract language, the psychology of mortal desire.”
“That sounds bleak.”
“It was.”
“All of it was like that?”
“Not all of it. My parents used to argue.”
“A strange way to begin a happy memory.”
He chuckles. “Not violently, but intellectually. My father would bring home cases, contracts he was working, and talk through them at dinner. There was a designated hour when my parents would sit together and discuss strategy.”
“And that was good?”
“Once.” His voice lowers. “I was young. Small enough to sit between them without being noticed. My father was explaining a particularly complex contract: the loopholes, the ways humans try to outmaneuver the language. And my mother said something that cut through his entire argument, and he . . .”
His jaw works once before he continues.
“He laughed. He looked at her with something that might have been admiration. She answered with what could have been affection. I was sitting between them, and for one minute, maybe less, I belonged somewhere.” He smiles at me, embarrassed. “Small memory, but I’ve kept it.”
My hand finds his wrist and squeezes. “It doesn’t sound small.”
His smile fades, and I reach for a distraction.
“Come on. I promised you cookies.”
The batter doesn’t require much instruction. I’ve done this a thousand times, and muscle memory takes over. When I hand him the spatula to fold in the chocolate chips, his fingers brush mine.
Milo looks at me across the bowl, and neither of us has quite shaken off what we just told each other. I don’t want to give him another memory that ends with someone pulling away.
I set the vanilla down. My palm slides into his curls, and I fit two fingers around the narrow curve of his horn, drawing him toward me with steady pressure.
The spatula drops from his hand. Milo catches himself, his nails lengthening into claws and scoring pale lines into the wood. His other hand closes over mine. Instead of loosening my grip, he drags it down the horn until my palm cups the heavier curve and every ridge presses into my skin.
“Evie.”
“Like this?”
His forehead lowers until the horn rests fully in my hand. His breath spills hot across my mouth as he presses deeper into my palm. “More.”
I stroke my index finger over the ridged underside while I kiss him.
His mouth opens on a broken breath. I tighten my grip.
The texture changes nearer the base, smoother beneath my thumb and so much more sensitive that his knees spread to brace around me.
When I repeat the stroke, his tongue loses the rhythm against mine.
“We have . . . cookies. We’re making cookies.”
“We are. Am I distracting you?”
“You’re dismantling me.” His hand catches my wrist, and he brings it to the other horn. This time he doesn’t guide me. He bends until both horns rest in my hands, trusting me with them without another word. “If you touch both at once, I can’t promise to remain interested in baking.”
“That sounds more like an incentive.” He makes a sound too deep to sound entirely human. I pull him down until his mouth hovers over mine. “I’m done waiting.”
He doesn’t make me repeat it. His hand closes around the back of my neck. “Thank Hell,” he breathes, and kisses me.