Divine Milking System-Chapter 25 | My Mom Knows I Like Him Before I Even Admit It To Myself

Chapter 25: 25 | My Mom Knows I Like Him Before I Even Admit It To Myself

The shower had been exactly what Naomi needed.

Fifteen minutes of hot water and she felt almost like herself again, which was saying something considering the morning had included a mile run, a pull-up bar that had nearly killed her, and a mana sphere that glowed embarrassingly dim compared to Yuki Hoshizawa’s near-blinding output.

She sat on the edge of her bed now, towel wrapped around her hair and nothing else, working a wide-tooth comb through the wet sections while her phone propped against her pillow played the ringtone her mom had assigned herself three years ago. A little steel drum riff that immediately made Naomi think of Sunday mornings and fish stew.

She picked up on the second ring.

"Baby!"

"Hi, Mom."

"How’s my girl? You eating? You sleeping? Did you make friends yet? What are the professors like? Is the food good?"

Naomi laughed, the comb catching a tangle. She winced and worked through it carefully. "One question at a time."

"I only got one question. It just has a lot of parts."

"Yes, I’m eating." She glanced toward the kitchen, where she’d already scoped out which cabinets were hers and which belonged to her roommate, a quiet girl named Dana who’d been perfectly pleasant and immediately gone to sleep.

"The food’s actually really good. Like, really good, Mom. They have these eggs in the morning that taste heavenly."

"Good eggs. Okay. Friends?"

"Yeah, actually." Naomi pulled the towel off her hair and shook out the long wet stripes of black and pink, draping the towel across her shoulders to catch the drips. The room’s air conditioning hit her bare skin immediately, and she reached automatically for the body lotion on her nightstand, tucking the phone between her shoulder and her cheek. "There’s this girl Belle, she’s really sharp. Funny too, once you get past the front she puts up. And some Sapphire girls in my gym class who seem cool. We haven’t hung out yet but they seemed nice."

"What about the teachers?"

"Nice." She smoothed lotion up her arms, the AC raising goosebumps along her collarbone and the tops of her shoulders. "Well, one of them is nice. Dr. Cross. She’s got this way of explaining things where you actually care about the answer." She paused, thinking about the Hollow Crawler description, the part about forty-five seconds. "The other one, Garrett, is terrifying."

"Terrifying good or terrifying bad?"

"Terrifying I-might-die-in-his-class. But also probably good."

Her mom laughed, that warm sound that Naomi had been hearing her whole life. It made the twelve hundred miles feel bigger.

"I miss you," Naomi said quietly.

"I miss you too, baby. Your dad’s been walking past your room three times a day pretending he’s checking the water heater."

Naomi pressed her lips together. She knew. Her dad didn’t talk about things like that, but he had a very specific way of being sad quietly, and the water heater story tracked completely.

"Tell him I’m okay."

"You tell him yourself, I’ll get him."

"No, Mom, I have lunch soon, I don’t want to—"

"Devon! Get your father!"

Naomi closed her eyes.

She spent the next seven minutes reassuring her father that yes, the island was safe, no, she hadn’t been in a real gate yet, yes, she was wearing sunscreen, she didn’t know why that was relevant but yes.

When she finally got back to just her mom, she was mostly dressed, pulling her uniform skirt up over her hips one-handed while the phone balanced against her ear. The skirt sat high on her waist. She checked the mirror on the back of her closet door and smoothed it down, which did almost nothing, given that her legs made the regulation length look like something else entirely.

"Okay," her mom said, in the particular tone that meant something was coming.

"Any boys?"

Naomi’s face went warm immediately. She was glad her mom was twelve hundred miles away.

"Mom."

"I’m just asking!"

"It’s been one day."

"It was one day when I met your father."

"That’s a completely different—"

"I knew before he finished his first sentence that I was gonna snatch him up before any other hussy got ideas. One day is enough time to know things, Naomi Grace Love."

"Well—"

Her phone buzzed.

She glanced at the screen.

Jace Monroe. Text message.

Her heart did something abrupt and unasked for.

She read it fast.

Can we call?

Three words. That was it. No context, no explanation, nothing attached.

She stood there in her too-short skirt and her half-buttoned shirt and stared at those three words for a beat too long, and her brain immediately started running through every possible interpretation.

Study plans. Obviously. They had two shared classes and it would make sense to coordinate on materials, except Jace wouldn’t text "can we call" to set up a study schedule.

A study schedule was a text. A study schedule was "hey same classes want to share notes" not a request for a phone call, which was different, phone calls were for things that needed a voice, things that were harder to explain over text, things that—

"Naomi?"

"I have to go," she said. "Love you, Mom. Tell Dad I’ll call him Sunday."

"Is it a boy?"

"Bye, Mom!"

She hung up before the answer got anywhere near her mouth.

Stood there for exactly three seconds.

Then called Jace back before she had time to build the overthinking into something architectural.

It rang twice.

"Hey."

"Hey." Her voice came out normal. She counted that as a win. "You wanted to call?"

"Want to walk to the cafeteria together?"

Naomi blinked.

Then she laughed. "Is it so you don’t get lost?"

A pause. Then, "No."

The easy tone didn’t change. But something in it did. Something small.

"I just wanted to spend time with you. Is that so bad?"

Naomi looked at herself in the mirror.

Pink and black hair still slightly damp, curling at the ends. Pink eyes wider than necessary. Uniform skirt that she’d already resigned herself to. The shell necklace from her mom sitting against the collar of the yellow shirt she’d only just finished buttoning.

She should have been used to people wanting to spend time with her, except she really wasn’t, and that was a longer conversation she was not going to have with herself right now.

"No," she said. "That’s not bad."

"Good. Five minutes?"

"Five minutes."

She hung up and took a breath.

Then grabbed her bag from the desk chair, checked that her academy ID was in the front pocket, and took one last look in the mirror.

Fine. She looked fine. Her hair was a little wavy from air-drying but that was just what her hair did, and there was nothing to be done about her legs or the skirt length or the way the uniform fit across the chest.

She headed for the door.

Jace was already in the hallway when she stepped out, leaning against the wall with his hands in his blazer pockets. The uniform still didn’t fit quite right across the shoulders, the blazer pulling slightly, and his tie was maybe two centimeters off-center.

He looked her over once. Not in a gross way. Just the way people look at each other when they’re checking that the other person actually showed up.

"Ready?" he said.

"Ready."