When we’d been kids, his dad had had a weird sleep schedule, especially on weekends. He’d never been violent, but he had been loud a few times. It hadn’t taken long for most of our sleepovers to be at my house.
“Yeah. But he wasn’t all bad. He’d take us for pizza.” Weekdays, especially right after work, he’d been sober and sometimes he’d be the one to pick up Milo. He’d been funny then, joking around, a nice guy in that moment. And Milo had always alternated between being skittish around him and big-time hero worship. “You loved him, and that counts for something. And he built the car with you.”
“And he went to a ton of my soccer games.” Milo exhaled hard, and I wanted to pat him like I had at the hospital, but that had been a mistake. Touching him felt too good. Too familiar. Couldn’t risk it.
“He did.” His dad had been a sports nut, particularly for soccer, waking up in the middle of the night to watch the World Cup and cheering for Italian soccer teams with names I couldn’t pronounce.
“It’s weird. Missing some things but not others. Wanting the family back together, but also knowing it wasn’t all that.” Outside, there was a rogue flurry or two. I really hoped there wasn’t snow while we were in Philly. Milo seemed weirdly antsy about driving despite being, as far as I could tell, really good at it. Like, he used his signals and changed lanes responsibly—that sort of basic stuff—but unlike the other times when I’d ridden with someone who drove a stick, the ride itself was smooth, not all jerky and bumpy, which was even more impressive given whatever was up with his leg.
“I get it. Parents are complicated.”
Milo snorted at that. “Says the guy with the perfect sitcom family.”
My hands fisted. I resented the hell out of that assumption. Milo didn’t know squat.
“April almost died last summer. That…takes a toll. Jeff, he doesn’t call home much anymore. Guess that’s how he copes. And it’s not the same as drinking, but I’ve found my mom, more than once, scrubbing the kitchen at 2:00 a.m. Dad, he’s not perfect either. Works too many hours. Doesn’t talk enough.”
That toll was a big part of why I tried to help out so much. Seeing my parents so stressed made me feel helpless, and I hated that feeling. Any amount of chores or nice deeds was worth it if it made them smile a little more.
“I’m sorry about Jeff. That sucks.” Milo had always gotten along with my older brother, who was in Bruno’s year. Now he was out in Seattle working for a tech company, and we mainly had to use social media to keep up with him. “And you’re right. I didn’t know.”
“No, you didn’t.” My mom’s stress-induced cleaning fits and relentless insomnia could be particularly hard to cope with, but I didn’t kid myself into thinking that I’d had it worse than Milo. “But it’s not the suckitude Olympics either.”
“True. I…uh…picked up some doughnuts on my way to you.” He jerked his head in the direction of the back of the car, and I found a white bakery box right behind the console. As far as changes of subject went, that wasn’t a bad one.
“Lee’s?” Plenty of people in the area relied on chain places, but Lee’s was a Gracehaven institution, and a love of their doughnuts was one of the few things our dads had in common. When I was a kid, my dad often retrieved a box on Saturday mornings when Milo stayed over, and we’d bickered over our favorite flavors.
“Of course. Picked out a couple. One’s that chocolate-chocolate one you used to love.”
He’d remembered that little tidbit, too, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from beaming. It was a doughnut, not an engagement ring, and going out of his way to get them probably only meant he’d been hungry. “Thanks. You didn’t have to do that, but I’m not going to turn down chocolate-chocolate.”
“Eh. I needed coffee and didn’t want to wake Luther by rattling around the kitchen. He worked overnight.”
Poof. A lot of my good feelings toward Milo evaporated at the mention of his bully of a friend. Maybe Milo’s main sin was not speaking up, but Luther and James had been actively awful to me and my crowd in high school. Teasing. Pranks. Showboating. General assholery. Milo wanted me to believe he’d changed, but I wasn’t sure how to trust that when he was still associating with jerks and bullies.
“Luther has gainful employment? And let me guess, James lives there too?”
“Yeah. They both work for a janitorial company. And before you give me a lecture, I didn’t have a ton of housing options after my…accident. Their other roommate had recently moved out—”
“Probably wised up,” I grumbled. Outside the weather was equally bleak, with none of the sunny energy of my summer trip, and I again questioned the wisdom of trying to help Milo.
“Not gonna dispute that. They’re kind of shit roommates. But it was that or keep hogging my mom’s spare room. After Dad died, she found this little garden apartment over by the university. She can walk to work when the weather’s nice. It’s perfect. But small. She would have let me stay, but…”
“You felt bad. I get that. I’m glad my scholarship covers the dorm. But all my buddies were able to afford apartments for senior year, and I’m stuck in the oldest of the upper-class dorms. Still, though, I’d take my hole-in-the-wall over living with freaking Luther and James.”
“Trust me, I would too.” He gave me a little smile as we approached the outer limits of Philly. Somehow we’d killed an hour chatting. And that probably hadn’t been the smartest because now he was even more of an enigma to me—a grieving son and a nice guy who brought me my favorite doughnuts, but also a pushover still relying on Luther and James way too freaking much. But that smile…that was the biggest problem, the way it made warmth start at my toes and snake its way north. It was going to be a long day, and I needed to focus on winning cards, not earning more smiles from a guy I was supposed to hate.
Chapter Ten
Milo
“Whoa.” I stopped short as Jasper and I entered the hotel conference-center lobby. I’d been surprised enough when his directions led us downtown instead of to a strip mall in the burbs or something like that. And now we were surrounded by people. A lot of funny, nerdy T-shirts. Tons of deck bags like what Jasper was toting. More gender and age diversity than I’d been expecting—everything from little kids to clumps of teens to older adults. “This is a lot of gamers. I’d expected a game store like in our town.”
“Bigger tournaments are usually in conference centers like this. They need more room than a single game store can provide. But the local game stores get billing as sponsors.” Jasper joined a huge line waiting to get to the registration table.