Out of Character by Annabeth Albert

Chapter Nine

Jasper

“You didn’t warn me that gamers get up at the ass-crack of dawn.” Milo was waiting where we’d arranged to meet, at the campus parking lot near my dorm. However, instead of me needing to search out his car, here he was standing in the cold on the sidewalk, stamping his feet and looking down at his phone. His knit cap, same one he’d had at the game store, was out of place on his usually stylish head. One of his many aunts undoubtedly knitted it. And maybe it was the cold or the early hour, but I was oddly touched that he’d left the car instead of waiting for me to find him. As a result, I kept my tone light as I followed him across the parking lot.

“Gamers do when they want to win prizes. Or stand in line for new releases. We’re killer at standing in line.”

“I’ll keep that in mind for the next Marvel movie.” He came to an abrupt stop between a beat-up Toyota and a classic Mustang.

“You still watch superhero movies?” I reached for the passenger-side door of the Toyota, but to my surprise, he unlocked the Mustang instead.

“You don’t?” Smiling like he knew he had me, he gestured at the car. “You getting in?”

“Okay, now this is a car.” I slid into the passenger seat as he went around to the driver’s door, which also had a manual lock. The leather upholstery was butter-soft, and the car was super clean. Even the gear shift was dust-free and shiny. A car guy would probably call it pristine, and it seemed about as unlike the rest of Milo’s life as one could get.

“It’s all right.” Milo shrugged like he didn’t have the coolest car in the parking lot. Hell, simply the fact that he could drive a stick was impressive. His easy coordination as he backed out of the space and put it in gear made my body hum with awareness. But I didn’t need to be finding anything about Milo sexy, so I tried to keep my attention on the car. I’d learned to drive on a minivan with a wonky starter, but Milo would have had his pick of cool cars.

“Is this the one your dad was always tinkering with?” His dad had been a mechanic at a garage in the next town over and had always had a restoration of some kind going. Growing up, I’d liked going over to Milo’s, especially when his dad wasn’t home and we could sneak into the garage to check out what he was working on.

“One of them. First one he finished that wasn’t a job went to Bruno. Next one we fixed up together all through high school. All my cash went into parts. Got the keys graduation day.”

“Wow.” That was a lot of time and effort that I hadn’t realized Milo had in him. And cash. I wasn’t a car guy, at all, but I did know collectible items and this certainly had to qualify as one. “You know…this car would probably fetch a whole lot of cards. Just saying.”

“Nothing doing.” Milo’s voice hardened. “Dad wouldn’t let me or Bruno sell our cars. The whole eighteen months he fought that liver disease, he kept saying they had the bills under control. But they didn’t.”

I groaned at the all-too-familiar tale. “Oh, how I know that dance. My parents have been there with April’s medical bills more than once. Luckily, they’ve had resources like a fundraiser Dad’s work did and the foundation from the hospital to keep from total bankruptcy.”

“Yeah, well, not a lot of resources for my folks. Mom couldn’t even keep the house. But they both insisted we keep the cars since we built them with him and the titles were in our names. It was like…the only thing he could leave us.” Biting his lower lip, Milo didn’t glance my direction as he made the turn that would take us to the highway. Damn. That was terrible. Simply thinking about one of my folks dying made my stomach twist.

“Bruno kept his car too?” I found myself strangely invested in this tale, wanting Bruno to have kept that last link to his dad, too, wanting him to value it as much as Milo clearly did.

Milo nodded sharply as he merged onto the highway. “Yeah. His is in special storage with a buddy of Dad’s who collects classic cars and stores some for people. He almost… Never mind.”

“What?” I hated when people did that. They’d get all pensive and stare off into space and then try to act like they hadn’t been on the cusp of some big revelation. Spill already.

“Nothing.” Predictably, Milo didn’t finish his thought, but his expression stayed distant and sad. “Just that I owe Bruno for a lot. That’s all.”

“I get it.” I stretched to try to stay awake. This was weird, too, being on the road to an Odyssey event, especially without any of my usual crew along. The previous summer I’d had a trip cut short by April’s illness, and that missed chance made me more determined to get a win here for Milo. Play hero, like I did at the hospital and with my family. “Katie and Brenda have both paid a couple of bills when my folks couldn’t. It’s what family does.”

I probably should have let Milo stew in quiet, but I figured I could give him some conversation since he was the one doing the driving. Might be rude to fall asleep before we were even out of Gracehaven’s city limits.

“Yeah. Family’s good that way.” Milo didn’t sound all too upbeat about that. Probably still thinking about Bruno and his dad.

“I’m sorry about your dad. He…” I searched for a compliment that wouldn’t sound false. “He was a good guy.”

“You don’t have to pretend. Everyone knows his liver went because of the drinking. And he yelled at you personally. More than once.”

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.