“Something like that,” I say, giggling as I fight against the desire to cover my face and hide from the giddy, gloating expressionhe’s wearing. “I think my heart is going to explode,” I say, placing a hand on my chest. “Is it supposed to feel like that?”
Milo climbs up the bed then collapses on his back next to me, his arms underneath his head. “Now Ihateto say I told you so…but…”
“You were right,” I reward him, my eyes dipping down his body and holding on to the tattoo on his right hip. “It’s definitely my new favorite thing.” My voice is vacant and far away as I read the tattoo once again, to be sure.
Milo chuckles, moving one hand from under his head to brush the hair next to my ear. “Good, because it’s mine too. I couldn’t help but fuck myself against the mattress when you started making all those nasty, filthy noises. Jesus, Prue, you sounded—”
“Milo,” I interrupt, reading the tattooagain.I sit up, wrapping myself in the knitted blanket that had been tossed against my headboard. I place two fingers on the script, underlining the tattoo as my mind swirls and spins and tries to come up with a reason.
“Uh, yeah?”
On his hip, Milo has the wordsgo, question, and find,which Icouldconsider coincidence—it’s not an impossibility that those words have been written elsewhere—until I notice the tattoo is written inmyhandwriting. “Milo, how…Whydo you have this?”
“Is something—” Milo’s voice slows to a complete stop. “Oh, that one? I mean, I told you your mom was important to me.” I turn my face to his, and he’s staring back at me, his head tilted with a half-lifted smirk. “You seem upset. I don’t—”
“This is…” I crawl off of the bed before further cocooning myself in the blanket.No, this is fucking weird.“Where did you see this? How did you…?”
Milo’s eyes narrow on me as I pace in small circles. “It was in a poem Mrs. Welch kept in a frame on her desk. I took a photo ofit, showed it to the tattoo artist…Why? What am I missing here?”
I cover my crazed laugh, realization washing over me.
“What is happening?” He laughs too, nervously, sitting up against my headboard. “Prue, is something—”
“I wrote that,” I say, pointing to his hip. “I wrote that poem. That ismyhandwriting.”
He rolls his eyes. “No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.” I pick up the blanket from where it has started to slip down my chest.
Milo’s smirk grows lopsided, with a keen set of eyes held on me. “Don’t fuck with me.”
“I amnotfucking with you! Look!” I say, walking over to my collection of notebooks. I take one off the top and throw it at him. “See! Same handwriting,” I say as he flips through the first few pages.
“I thought…” he says, eyes widening as he closes the notebook in his hand. “I thought it was like…some random art print or something.”
“And you got it tattooed on your body? Forever?”
“I was eighteen! I—” He stops, looking at me. “I wanted to remember Mrs. Welch and I liked the phrase and…”
“Milo, I’m going to ask you thisonce.” I still, crossing my arms as I fight off a wide grin. “Did you want to fuck my mother?” A laugh breaks free, but I suppress it between two tightly pressed-together lips.
“Oh my god!” he shouts, horrified. “No!” He shakes his head with a deep belly laugh. “No, I—You sick fuck, no!”
“Okay, well, I’m glad we cleared that up.”
“She just, she waslikea…mom to me, at the time. I didn’t—” He throws his head back. “You wrote this? You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” I say, grabbing one of the many postcards off the wall and tossing it at him. “See?”
I had written the poem on the back of a postcard my aunt Lucy sent me from Normandy. She wouldn’t send them the traditional way, but rather a dozen at a time in a large envelope so I could mail them back to her with poems for her to read. My mother insisted on keeping this one for herself, and I let her.
“You have this now?” he says, flipping it over to reveal the blank side that has my writing on it. “Wow, yeah…there it is….”
“When Mom retired early, Dad went to clear out her things. He left it in this massive pile of stuff on the studio floor and I took it to hide away up here. I didn’t know she’d had it on her desk.”
“You didn’t ever see it?”
“No, I didn’t go to Lakeview.”
