Page 67 of What We Become

Family. The word lands weird, like furniture I’m not sure I’m allowed to sit on.

“The noisy and the quiet,” I repeat. “Sounds like a deeply unsuccessful folk duo. They open for Simon and Garfunkel and get booed.”

“Milo.”

“I know, I know. Deflection. It’s my primary export, I’m the world’s leading supplier⁠—”

“Milo.” His fingers slide into my hair and hold. “Try it.”

“Try what?”

“The quiet.”

The quiet . . .

That’s the problem. Eli gets his monster tattooed on his back, literal ink-based acceptance. Sage gets the knife and the name and the whole savage redemption arc. My monster doesn’t do anything cinematic. He just sits very still and waits. And when the noise gets too much, too intense, he comes out so I don’t have to feel anything, which is way more crazy and significantly less marketable.

“I don’t like quiet,” I whisper, meaning it.

“I know.”

Holden shifts off me—about time, because the jizz situation has officially crossed from “hot evidence” into “structural concern”—and drags me with him so my head ends up on his chest. His heart is going faster than I expect. I take petty comfort in that.

“Try it. I’m here. You won’t be alone.”

That shouldn’t make my eyes burn. I blame the altitude.

So I do it. I shut up.

The first ten seconds are fine. Twenty, and my skin starts humming, the jokes queuing behind my teeth like commuters at a gate with no plane. Thirty, and the warehouse slides into frame—blood on concrete, knives swinging, music playing. The version of me that revels in the destruction and leaves others to deal with the consequences.

My whole body goes rigid.

Holden doesn’t say breathe. He just breathes—slow and audible, loud enough to copy—and lets proximity do the work. His thumb moves once over my skin. Here.

And the warehouse me doesn’t take the wheel. He sits there, small, one passenger among many, while the women in the files keep their own faces instead of my brain loading Sage’s into every frame. Progress. Apparently.

“He’s not so bad to hang around,” I whisper, “when I’m not alone.”

Holden’s mouth presses to the top of my head, and it’s not a kiss so much as a signature.

“Also,” I add, because the lid is sliding back into place and we both need it to, “just so we’re clear, I am now pillow-talking with a cop while coated in forensic evidence. It’s crystallizing.”

“I’ll get a washcloth,” he says, rolling away from me. I make a bereft sound at the loss of contact.

When he returns, he cleans us both up with an efficiency that shouldn’t be as intimate as it is, then he pulls the duvet over us and—this is the part that actually breaks me—tugs me back against his chest like it’s automatic. Like it’s reflex. Like I’ve been sleeping there for years and he’s just correcting a temporary error.

“For the record,” I murmur into the dark, “if I ever go quiet for more than five minutes, someone should probably come check.”

“Someone always will.”

“I love you, Holden.”

“I love you too.”

SIXTEEN

SAGE