Quentin hasn't moved from his side of the table. He picks up his coffee, takes a slow sip, and sets it back down. "Noted."
"There's nothing to note!" My cheeks burn, my scent betraying every word out of my mouth. "There is absolutely nothing to note, Quentin."
"Noted," he repeats, the grin that spreads across his face the most expressive thing I've seen from him in two weeks of dating.
Milo beams, orange juice still dripping off the edge of the table onto the floor. He makes no move to clean it up. God, these two are hopeless. I grab a napkin and dry off my hand, disgusted by the remaining stickiness. "Kevin's been keeping his distance too," I manage, trying to wrestle the conversation back to where it was before Milo's tongue derailed it entirely. "I’ve heard he’s been pretty distant and hasn’t been his usual self since the game."
"Good," Quentin pushes out. “Now, we don’t have to worry about protein shake proposals and flexing all fucking day.”
Milo immediately agrees, dabbing at the juice puddles which is doing nothing more than spreading it around my table. Sometimes I wonder if he’d survive without his brother. “Yes, we’re not going to be proposing with a protein shake so it won’t matter.” His face flames crimson as he looks up at me. “I mean… when we get there. If? Fuck, we haven’t done anything yet. It’s too soon.”
I snort. “Milo, take a deep breath. There you go. We are not that far yet, okay? I know we aren’t and we haven’t talked about logistics or where this goes once we graduate and what happens if…” I trail off, realizing that since none of us planned this, therecould be a very real possibility that Milo and Quentin end up signed to completely different teams. “Fuck.”
Milo and Quentin both tilt their head at the same time, searching my expression. It’s the first movement I’ve seen them mirror as twins and if I didn’t think so before, they’re definitely two parts of a whole.
Milo’s eyes widen as he catches on. He drops the soaked napkin and clasps his hands together. "We’re still going to be together. Well, I mean… you won’t have to worry about me. I wasn't going to keep playing after college so I can go wherever," Milo says, his voice softening toward the end, the nervous energy draining out of him. He's picks up the juice-soaked napkin, his fingers working it into a damp knot. "Football was always Q's thing. I'm good at kicking, sure, but it's not what I want to do for the rest of my life." He shrugs, but the gesture seems to carry more weight than he's letting on. "I wanted to do the Sports Medicine thing. Get certified, work with athletes. And honestly?" His ears go pink again, but this time it's not from embarrassment. "I wanted to do the Omega stuff. The nesting, the homemaking, building a space for the people I care about. I've been suppressing that since I was fourteen because it didn't fit with being on a football team, and I'm kind of tired of pretending it's not what I want."
Quentin sets his coffee down. He looks at his brother with an expression I haven't seen from him before, something soft and surprised and a little bit guilty, like he's hearing this for the first time and realizing he should have asked sooner. "You never told me that," Quentin says.
"You never asked." Milo's smile is lopsided. "Besides, you needed me on the team. Who else was going to nail forty-six-yard field goals?"
Milo doesn’t let the silence sit for long as he stacks the plates and carries them to the sink while Quentin wipes down the tableand then the counter. It feels perfect with them in my space, like something I was missing finally arrived. And that’s when I realize there’s one more thing I haven’t told them. One more thing that will show them just how much I wantthis.
"I want to show you something," I say when the kitchen is clean. Milo perks up a little, though, Quentin is wary as they follow me to the corner of the living room I've claimed as my studio space, the area between the window and the bookshelf where my easels sit.
There’s a bunch of other canvases that Milo has picked through and Quentin has made a few comments about over the days they’ve spent in my house but only just recently have I brought out a project I started a while ago.
Three easels, arranged side by side, hold a canvas covered with a drop cloth. They've been here the whole time, through every dinner and every movie night and every morning after, hidden in plain sight beneath fabric that nobody thought to lift.
"I started these before the auction," I say, gripping the edge of the first cloth. "When the feelings were still just feelings and I didn't have words for them yet."
I pull the first cloth.
Warm golds and honeyed light fill the canvas, the colors bleeding into each other at the edges in soft gradients. The palette is sunrise and amber and the deep golden brown of raw honey held up to the light.
I pull the second cloth.
Deep greens are painted in controlled strokes that follow a grid only I can see, the color contained within a structure. But there are cracks in the picture, places where the paint pushed through the framework and bled outside the lines, rich bursts of emerald and pine breaking through. The tension between control and what lives underneath it is the whole piece.
I pull the third cloth.
Teal and cream and dark blue is built up rather than brushed on, the paint applied in coats that create depth and texture, each layer visible beneath the one above it. The structure of a nest, materials stacked and arranged and tucked into place, the architecture of a safe space rendered in pigment and medium. My self-portrait, except it's not a face. It's a feeling.
The three canvases are designed to hang together. Where Milo's gold meets my teal, the colors blend into a gradient that belongs to neither of us alone. Where Quentin's green meets my blue, the edges sharpen and soften in alternating currents, pushing and pulling at the border. And where all three meet in the center, the colors create something new, a mixture that doesn't exist on any single canvas.
Quentin studies them, his gaze moving across all three canvases in slow passes, reading them the way he reads everything. His hand hovers near his canvas. When he finally speaks, his voice cracks on the second word. "It's perfect."
Milo turns to me with wet eyes and a grin that breaks through his awe. "You started these before the auction?"
I nod.
His grin widens until it takes over his entire face. "You liked us first." His scent spikes, breaking through the blockers a little. “You did, didn’t you?!”
Quentin's composure, already cracked, threatens to collapse entirely. "She absolutely did not—"
"I absolutely did."
Quentin closes his mouth. Milo lets out a sound that's half laugh, half sob, and pulls me into a hug tight enough to lift me off the ground. Quentin's hand finds the back of my neck, his forehead pressing against my temple, his breath warm against my cheek.
