Begin Again(28)

“Are you alright?” I ask instead, giving him the option to dig into it or deflect in that Milo way of his.

He goes for option B. “As alright as a person whose blood is surging at half its usual caffeinated rate can be,” he says wryly.

The immediate skip in my step makes it easier to keep up with his absurd pace. “You tried my blend!”

“I tried your . . . concoction,” Milo concedes. “And it’s not bad for only being semi-eternal.”

I shrug. “I considered ‘Light in the Dark,’ but that seemed too off-brand for you.”

“Well, so is being this tired at ten o’clock at night.”

“I think that’s called a circadian rhythm,” I say, with just enough slight sarcasm that I can tell Shay and Milo are rubbing off on me. “Anyway, if you like it, I’ve got the rest of the test batch in the kitchen at Bagelopolis. Also, I did some quick research, and apparently there’s a roasted tea that has the same consistency of coffee you could try.”

I wait for Milo to take a cheap shot at tea drinkers like he usually does, but he’s gone quiet, his pace slowing. Just as we’re about to hit the part of campus where the tree line hides the main road from sight, Milo casts another glance toward Bagelopolis, then back down to the ground.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask.

We stop at the crosswalk, and instead of answering, he looks me directly in the eye. “Shay said you have a fix-it thing.”

“Oh,” I say, my cheeks burning. She’s not wrong. It’s been so ingrained in me that I can’t remember a time I wasn’t like that. One of my earliest memories was petitioning the teachers to lower the tire swing in the recess yard so the pre-K kids could play on it, too. “I mean, yeah. That’s fair.”

“So I’m warning you right now, this is the kind of thing that can’t be fixed.”

I nod carefully. “That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth talking about, if you want to.”

The walk signal comes on, but it takes a moment for either of us to move. Milo slouches against the cold, but his eyes are still on me as we trudge onward.

“Why do you care so much?”

He doesn’t ask it out of annoyance, but genuine curiosity.

“You’re my . . .” “RA” seems too clinical, but “friend” seems too presumptuous. At least when it comes to Milo, who seems to put a lot more stock in action than words. “I care about you.”

This time Milo’s the one to look away. “I meant the rest of it,” he says, pulling one of his hands out to gesture vaguely at the air in front of us. “The whole fix-it thing.”

I clear my throat.

“Oh—I don’t know.” I flash him a smile, giving an answer that feels safely general, pulling myself out of it as far as I can. “We’ve all got stuff we’re going through. Seems like we could all use an extra friend now and then.”

Milo tilts his head at me, his curls picking up with the slight breeze. “Huh.”

I tilt my head back. “Huh?”

He shifts his gaze back to the sidewalk. “That . . . smile you did just there,” he says, gesturing at it without looking at me. “It didn’t look like your usual one.”

It was, in fact, my syndicated-talk-show smile. I suppose I haven’t had a reason to pull it out in front of Milo before—I’m happier squeezed into that recording closet with him and Shay than I am anywhere else.

I rub my chin with my wrist, scratching some invisible itch as the smile slides off my face. “Well. Offer still stands, if you ever want to talk brother stuff.”

Milo reaches up and rubs the back of his neck. “I appreciate it. But this thing with Harley—our dad died a few years back. Car accident. So. That’s kind of tangled in this whole mess, too.”

My heart reacts before I do, pinching in my chest and stopping my breath. “Oh.” I look up at him, and when our eyes connect, I am taken back to how familiar he seemed when we first met. Maybe it wasn’t just that I knew his voice. There’s a specific kind of grief that comes with losing someone you love, the kind that is always skimming just under the surface; the kind so universal that you can’t help recognizing it in someone else, even if you don’t know what you’re seeing yet. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

His tone is cautious. “But you get it.”

I suck in a breath to deflect or change the subject, the way I’ve done whenever parents come up since I got to campus. But this isn’t like that. For the first time, I don’t worry about the distance it might put between us, telling him about my past. I worry about the distance it will put between us if I hold it back. If I swallow down the words that I want to tell him, knowing he’s one of the few people here who can understand.

I let the breath go. He’s trusting me with his own hurt. I can trust him with mine.

“Yeah. My mom died when I was eleven. Cancer.” I almost shrug, trying to ease some of the bluntness of it, but there’s something about this walk—the quiet in the chill, the way we seem so separate from everything else—that takes all of the tension out of me. “And my dad . . . just never really dealt with it. Put away all her stuff. Got a job two hours away, so he didn’t really have to deal with me. My grandmas raised me, mostly.”