15

MILO STARTLES AT THE SOUND OF KNOCKING ON his bedroom door. The knock is unnecessarily embellished and complicated in a way that Milo immediately identifies the person on the other side as Anais.

"Come in," he says pushing himself up to sitting, moonlight pooling on his lap from his window. He had been tired enough to fall asleep both in his clothes and with the curtains wide open.

The door creaks open and Anais slips in. Milo finds his glasses - he'd at least managed to ditch them on the bedside table before passing out - and frowns at Anais.

"Are those... Valerie's clothes?"

Anais looks down at the oversized Led Zeppelin shirt and baggy tracksuit pants hanging from her slight frame and with a theatrical note in her voice says, "Who's to say this isn't my new style? I call it...'Ex-groupie chic'."

"What happened to your clothes? And what's that on your arm?"

Anais' eyes go wide, ignoring Milo's as she says, "Don't tell Val I said that, please. I don't actually think she's a groupie-"

"I won't as long as you answer my questions."

"Dirt," she replies, flicking said dirt from her arm. "And to answer the first part of that question: dirt."

"Anais-" Milo starts and then stops.

Nothing about this night feels correct. Milo can't help but feel like he's stumbled into the wrong dimension or is trapped in some lucid dream. He wants nothing more for it all to be over. Wake up tomorrow, start again.

Anais continues for him.

"Okay let me save us some time," she says, counting each point on her hand, "I accept your apology, just answer your phone next time. I was walking through that jungle of a front yard you have and got caught up in some possessed vine and your mom and sister had to rescue me. And I heard that you had a reading tonight which is why you stood me up so I'll forgive you for that too, as long as you give me some details."

Milo blinks unwieldingly at her for several moments until he finds his words again. "Wow. Okay, um... Do you want to take a seat? I feel like we have a lot to unpack here."

Milo shifts over on his bed and Anais sits beside him, crossing her legs. Her tracksuit pants ride up her shins revealing several small, but angrily red scratches cross-hatched up her leg.

"Does it hurt?" he asks, gesturing to the cuts.

"A little," she says truthfully. "Just stings a bit. Do you want to hear what happened?"

Milo nods.

As Anais tells the story, a sinister image emerges from Milo's subconscious; Anais sitting across from him at the diner, thorns slowly coiling around her cheeks and jaw, her neck, dark blood marring her pallid face like viscous tears.

But her face is fine. It had been her arms and legs that had been tangled up in that wretched vine, and she shows no signs of bleeding.

Still. The image creates a nausea curl in his gut, accompanied by some unnameable guilt.

"Sorry if that was too much detail," Anais apologises, sensing Milo's disquiet.

"No, no it's fine. I was just... thinking."

"Oh. So you weren't actually listening to my story?"

"No! I mean, I was. Yes, I was, I promise-"

Anais laughs, bumping Milo's shoulder playfully. "I'm just teasing you Mi. I know you probably have a lot on your mind right now."

I do, he thinks. You have no idea.

"I'm still sorry," he says. "I shouldn't have ignored your calls, I was just... processing."

Milo pauses, expecting Anais to press about the reading. She doesn't. She watches him with a patient smile and nothing but kindness and understanding in her forest-green eyes. It makes Milo feel infinitely worse for ghosting her. If there had been anyone who could have helped him in that dark moment, it would have been Anais.

Milo avoids meeting her eyes as he continues, focusing on picking at his threadbare sweater instead.

"The reading; it wasn't great."

"I gathered as much."

"I- I don't really know how to say this."

"Hey," Anais says softly, draping an arm across his shoulders and pulling him into a messy side hug. "You don't have to tell me right now if you don't want to. I can wait until you're ready."

Milo closes his eyes. "Someone's going to die, because of me."

He braces himself for Anais to recoil, for her to leap up from the bed and freak out that she has her arm around a future murderer. When nothing happens, Milo opens his eyes and finds Anais frowning, not cornered, but puzzled.

"Is that how it was worded?" She asks.

"What?

"The wording," she repeats. "How was it phrased when you were told this?"

"I don't see how that matters-"

Anais looks at him meaningfully. "Milo. I've had a reading before too. The wording matters."

"It was something like, this is the year you will have death on your hands."

Anais frowns again and Milo can tell she's thinking this through like an equation to be a solved, a riddle to decipher. Though Milo has always appreciated her pragmatism in moments where he's let his emotions get the better of him, now feels like the wrong time for her logical side to be driving their conversation.

"Anais," he says. "I love and appreciate you, but I really don't need 'Solutions Anais' right now."

He just needs someone to understand how undone he feels.

Anais continues. "The phrasing is important. Your mom told me once that death comes up a lot in people's readings because it can be used metaphorically so it's possible that you might just be responsible for someone having to let something of meaning go. A sacrifice, or something. Maybe you have-"

"No," Milo says, his tone colder than he intended. "Stop trying to make this less of a big deal than it actually is. This is someone's life were talking about Anais!"

"Milo, you should know better than anyone else not to take these warnings to heart. When I spoke to Valerie she didn't seem too worried-"

"That's because this isn't about them! They haven't seen all the shit that I've been seeing! They don't know how real this all feels, and neither do you!"

"Milo," Anais repeats, and though she doesn't raise her voice, her tone shifts perceptively. "Don't be like Cerus."

Cerus.

In the humble beginnings of their friendship, Milo had spent many a conversation explaining a Greek myth to Anais in order to provide context to the obscure references he made - a quirk that Anais had the good grace to be charmed by rather than repelled.

The story of Cerus had been one of her favourites. It was a short tale about a powerful bull lead by its emotions that decimated small villages and could only be tamed by the calm and patient reasoning of the Spring goddess Persephone.

Of course, she had identified as Persephone, leaving Milo as the unhinged bull in need of someone to herd him back to his sanity.

Milo slumps back down on his bed, defeated and admittedly ashamed. "You're right," he says into his hands, "I'm being a dick. Sorry."

"Don't apologise. You're allowed to feel things, Milo, but you don't have to let them control your thoughts like that. It'll just make you spiral."

She's right, Milo thinks. He had let himself spiral and it's becoming far too easy for his thoughts to gallop ahead him and take on a life of their own.

Without warning, his father's words echoed in his subconscious; 'Your mind is the most wonderful and dangerous labyrinth, Milo. It'll do you good to learn your way around it.'

His father had always had a way with words, which had made him an exceptional writer and a boundless source of paternal wisdom. Arthur had been an emotional dictionary of sorts, helping Milo find the words to decipher the feelings that got all tangled up inside him.

Milo longs for him now. To have his father tell him in his calm, storytelling voice that his anxiety will pass. Only now, there seems to be no end in sight.

He can do nothing but continue on.

"I really hope you're right," he says eventually. "About the death not being a physical thing."

Anais places a hand on Milo's back and massages gentle circles just like she had done that night after the diner incident.

"I hope so too."

They stay like that for an indeterminable amount of time, Milo hunched over like Atlas with the weight of the heavens on his shoulders and Anais doing her best to ease the pain.

Milo sits up again, quickly wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his sweater.

"So, we're good now?" he asks.

"Of course," Anais says softly. "We're good."

They hug and Milo finds himself enveloped with the artificial citrus scent of disinfectant mixed with earth and Anais' musky perfume.

"You smell like a chemical cleaner," he murmurs into her hair.

"I would never use that stuff; it's terrible for the environment," she replies, "More people should be using vinegar."

Milo laughs and feels the coiled tension inside him ease slightly. The change in conversation feels like letting go of a breath he's been holding.

"You know my mom still thinks we'd be cute together."

Milo smirks. "So she hasn't been keeping up with the game then."

"The game?"

"Yeah, the one where I'm batting for the other team and you're not even on the field."

Anais laughs and the world rights itself for a brief moment and Milo swears the room brightens a little.

"Permission to use that metaphor in every future conversion involving my sexuality?"

"Only if you give me credit," he says, "I've been waiting a while to use that."

Anais shakes her head, clicking her tongue in mock disapproval. "You are something else, Milo Piers."

They continue back and forth, joking and chatting into the early hours of the morning, Milo's fate and the sinister plant incident nothing more than background noise that becomes easier to ignore.

Anais is the first to fall asleep, leaving Milo alone with his thoughts. His subconscious drifts to cars and thorns, owls and radio static. He thinks about the boy from the diner, Cas. An image comes to him, blurry and almost like a memory. One of him knelt by a river that runs red. It's forked at every turn, forming a crimson labyrinth as it carves its path through the forest.

He disbands the vision as best he can and try to think of his father instead, reading a novel under the garage light after hours spent tinkering away. He had taken great care to remove the grease and oil from his hands before he read, making sure the book was always left pristine.

Eventually, Milo let himself sleep, and he dreams of nothing at all.