I was already slowly dying, and if I kept going on the way I was, I knew I wouldn’t last another year.
So, after days of pacing and tearing out my own hair, I’d finally caved and sent Milo’s resume through.
I had to meet him.
And if I couldn’t go to him, he had to come to me.
‘It was the only way,’I’d told myself as I finally hit send.
I’d spent the weeks waiting for his arrival, devouring everything he’d ever written for school with starving eyes and a frantically beating heart.
His admissions photo for MIT was horrible. The flash had lit up his lenses, and I could barely see his face properly.
He didn’t have a social media presence, so all I had to cling to in those first few weeks was that overexposed, blurry admissions photo.
It didn’t do him justice.
That first day, when that asshole clipped him, causing him to fall… I hadn’t been one hundred percent sure it was him.
I should have known from the way my heart started pounding and my scalp began to tingle.
He was so fucking perfect.
His plush, cherubic cheeks sprinkled with the lightest dusting of freckles sent me into fucking orbit.
His unsure, wide brown eyes stared up at me like he thought I was some sort of god sent down to punish him.
His soft, caramel locks, his round frameless glasses that magnified those gorgeous eyes, making them look twice as big as they actually were…
‘Murph? Is that what I heard you call yourself?’
‘N-no… Milo. Milo Murphy.’
The name of the boy who was going to change everything, spoken from his own lips.
Fuck.
It had been over for me right then and there.
That had been the first time he’d saved me…
And look at how I fucking repaid him…
“Mr. Reynolds, Milo Murphy is here to see you,” NOVA chimed, her pretty voice cutting through the irresponsible amount of whiskey I’d already consumed.
Shit.
I should have known he would come find me when I didn’t go to him.
Since he’d let me inside him, there hadn’t been a moment that I hadn’t wanted to be close to Milo.
Things were different now. If what Seb had said about the chip was true and I’d been the one responsible for trapping him here indefinitely… I didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do.
“Tell him I’m busy, and I’ll come see him in the morning,” I croaked, taking another swig of whiskey straight from the bottle.
“He seems pretty adamant, sir,” NOVA replied, her artificial voice sounding amused. “He stamped his foot and everything.”
Despite the fact that I was currently teetering on the edge of tumbling into the dark, familiar chasm of despair that lived deep in my mind… my lip twitched. The image of my adorable little brainiac having a tiny tantrum outside my door because I was being a little bitch and hiding from my problems was enough to bring me back.
