Divine Milking System

Chapter 273: 273 | Acceptable Belgian Truffles

I climbed the steps, shifted the chocolate box to balance on top of my coffee jelly cup, freed up one hand, and knocked.

The door opened fast. Like she’d been standing right behind it waiting.

Aurora wore a cropped white sweater that ended three inches above her navel and grey lounge shorts that had no business being that short on legs that had no business being that long. Her orange hair was down, loose, falling past her shoulders in waves that caught the string lights and turned copper and gold. No shoes. Bare feet on hardwood. Toenails painted dark red to match the lipstick she’d put on for a night in.

She didn’t say hello.

She grabbed the front of my leather jacket with one hand, pulled me through the doorway, went up on her toes, and kissed me.

Her mouth was warm and tasted like strawberry lip gloss and something sweeter underneath that might have been champagne or might have been her Sensory Hijack playing tricks on me again. Her free hand slid around the back of my neck, fingers curling into the hair at my nape, pulling me down to her height. The kiss lasted exactly long enough to make me forget I was holding a box of Belgian chocolate and a cup of coffee jelly in a doorway where anyone walking by could see us. Then she pulled back with green eyes that glowed with satisfaction. fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓

"You wore the jacket."

"Addison picked it out. Seemed appropriate."

"Smart boy." She took the chocolate box from my hand, opened it without breaking eye contact, examined the Belgian dark truffle slice inside, and nodded once with the gravity of a sommelier approving a wine selection. "This is acceptable. Come in."

Aurora’s apartment was bigger than mine by at least four hundred square feet. Two stories. The bottom floor had an open living room that connected to a kitchen through a wide archway, with a staircase against the far wall leading up to what I assumed was the bedroom. The furniture was nicer than anything in Building C. Real leather couch, not the synthetic stuff. Actual bookshelves along one wall, filled with a mix of textbooks, romance novels with shirtless men on the covers, and a few volumes on combat theory. A flat screen mounted above the couch displayed a paused anime frame. Framed photos on the wall of Aurora with various people at various ages. One of her and Addison, arms around each other, both flipping off the camera.

The coffee table held empty candy wrappers, two open energy drinks, and a battered recipe book with sticky notes protruding from at least thirty different pages.

Not Elite Ten luxury. Not even close to what Blair’s Summit House looked like. But compared to my cramped situation with a roommate who slept with a knife under her pillow, this was a palace.

"Nice place," I said.

"It’s a dump compared to Katt’s, but the kitchen has a gas range and that’s all I care about." Aurora set the chocolate in the fridge and turned back to me with her arms crossed beneath her chest, which did structural things to the cropped sweater that I catalogued without comment. "Addison’s been cooking since five. She gets territorial about the kitchen when she’s in a mood, so don’t touch anything on the stove unless you want to lose fingers."

"What kind of mood?"

"The kind where she listens to death metal at full volume and threatens the food with a chef’s knife."

From somewhere deeper in the apartment, past the archway into the kitchen, guitar distortion hit me like a wall. Not regular rock. Not even hard rock. Full-bore, double-bass-pedal death metal that rattled the picture frames on the wall and made the candy wrappers vibrate on the coffee table. The vocalist sounded like a man gargling gravel at the bottom of a well while someone kicked him repeatedly in the ribs. Bass notes traveled up through the hardwood floor and into my feet.

Aurora patted my arm. "She’s in a good mood, actually. This is her cooking music."

I followed Aurora through the archway into a kitchen that was objectively twice the size of mine. Gas range, granite countertops, a real oven instead of the combo microwave situation that Building C offered. A window over the sink looked out onto the north ridge with a view of the ocean in the distance, though right now the glass was fogged from steam rising off whatever Addison had going on the stovetop.

And there she was.

Addison Baxter stood at the gas range with her back to us, black hair piled in a messy bun with purple highlights catching the kitchen light. She wore a black tank top that hung loose off one shoulder and revealed the strap of something dark underneath and the pale skin of her upper back where two small scars from training sat parallel to her spine. Black bike shorts rode low on her hips. Barefoot on the tile, toenails painted black. The portable speaker responsible for the sonic assault sat on the counter next to a half-eaten cherry lollipop balanced on its stick against a coffee mug.

She held a chef’s knife in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, commanding two separate pots on the range with the focus of someone who treated cooking the same way she treated combat. Total commitment. Zero mercy.

The volume in the kitchen was apocalyptic. I could feel the bass drum pattern in my sternum.

"SUP!" I yelled.

Addison didn’t turn around. Either she couldn’t hear me over the vocalist’s impression of a garbage disposal consuming a cat, or she was deliberately ignoring my existence to establish dominance. Both options seemed equally likely given what Aurora had told me about her personality.

I tried again, louder. "HEY! ADDISON!"

She raised the wooden spoon without looking and pointed it at the speaker. Aurora reached over and turned the volume down from "structural damage" to merely "aggressive." The sudden reduction in noise left my ears ringing. The kitchen felt weirdly hollow, like the room itself was confused by the absence of punishment.

Addison glanced over her shoulder. Violet contacts. Heavy eyeliner that had smudged from the kitchen steam. Full lips painted black. A cherry lollipop appeared from somewhere and went into her mouth, balanced in the corner while she talked around it.