Page 35 of Loverboy

I heard her sniffle, and I could feel the guilt rolling off her in waves, regret for the parentified child. But I knew it wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t planned for life to turn out this way.

That’s why I had to work harder.

I patted her back and kissed her forehead, and then it was time to leave.

16

Jasper

I WORKED THROUGH the conversation in my head at least fifteen times in the span it took to warm the car, drive to the apartment, and climb up to the third floor. The stairwell reeked of cigarette smoke, and it was anyone’s guess which unit it was coming from.

In every version of events I imagined, Milo didn’t take it well. Nobody liked being asked if they were on their meds. It implied they seemed unstable, which he was. But I’d rather hear that he’d run out of them than know there was a loose end, something I’d missed. I hadn’t found any lying around the apartment yet, and that was a problem.

They were a liability. A danger when he fell into one of his moods. That’s what they were—moods. They weren’t long-term bouts of depression and suicidal ideation, not the way I’d experienced my own battles. They were sudden. Unplanned.

An intrusive little voice in his head with a surprisingly massive set of lungs.

It only took one bad split for him to decide to do irreparable damage.

The smell of tobacco thickened on our floor, mingling with the faint trace of pot I had a built-in radar for. Even though the place was a dump by my standards, it was enough for Milo. I never forgot what his birth mother’s house looked like when we started moving his things after taking him in—meth pipes, empty liquor bottles, and a hoarding situation so out of control that we couldn’t move a foot without nearly tripping over junk. From that day on, I never looked at my situation the same way again.

His life had been so normal for him that he found it amusing to show me around the biggest pain points in the home, from a broken keyboard that his mother had thrown at his head to a hole in the drywall from something even worse.

He always made light of it.

“You know this isn’t okay, right?” I asked, picking at a piece of drywall that was hanging on by a thread.

Milo stared at me, like he didn’t get why I wasn’t laughing, and instead was mortified.

“I know,” he said quietly. “But it’s a little funny.”

My chest wound tight, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him he was wrong.

“Yeah, I guess.”

It wasn’t.

The floor vibrated beneath my shoes, shitty punk music bleeding through the poorly insulated walls as I fished for my keys outside our door.

It was a good sign. He was alive in there.

There was no way he heard me come in over the music. I shrugged off my jacket and hung it up, squinting as the setting sun momentarily blinded me through the balcony door. I kicked off my shoes and headed to the kitchen for a glass of water.

As I filled it, I noticed a stack of papers in the waste bin by the sink. They were pristine, without a single fold or crease, meaning Milo hadn’t even looked at them. He’d tossed them without a second thought.

Normally, that wouldn’t bother me. The years I’d spent buried in mental health services were enough to make me sick of them, too. I might’ve done the same in his position. But this time was different—I wanted him to try.

I wanted him to stay.

I took a sip of water just as the music cut off. Milo peeked around the corner, his expression gloomy like it always was when he thought no one was watching. Whatever had been tormenting him melted away the second he saw me, and the way he perked up made my stomach flutter.

“Hey,” I said lamely.

“Hey.”

His hair was messy, but there was something aesthetic about it paired with the small army of freckles scattered across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. He was still living in the same sweatpants and pullover hoodie that never made it back to my room after our late-night coffee run, and the deeply unsettling territorial part of me practically sang.

If I didn’t know him so well, I might’ve thought he’d just woken up, but it was more likely the absence of sleep altogether. I refrained from asking what was haunting him on this particular day, not wanting things to sound like an interrogation from the get-go.