Divine Milking System-Chapter 34 | "You’re My Girl" And Other Complicated Things To Say After Extraction
Naomi’s brain short-circuited.
"You’re my girl now."
He said it so casually. Like he was commenting on the weather or confirming a lunch order. Like those four words hadn’t just detonated something inside her chest.
"Y-you can’t just say that!"
The words came out before she could stop them. Too loud, too high-pitched. A bird startled from a nearby bush and flew off in protest.
Jace looked at her. Calm. Those amber eyes steady in that round face, not a trace of embarrassment anywhere on him.
"I said it," he replied simply.
"You—" She pressed both hands against her cheeks. They were burning. "You can’t just say something like that and then stand there looking normal!"
"Would you prefer I say it while looking abnormal?"
"I would prefer you explain what it means!"
He tilted his head, watching her the way someone watches a cat discover its reflection. Curious. A little entertained. "It means what it means, Naomi."
That was not helpful. That was the opposite of helpful.
She turned and started walking back toward the dorms, mostly because she needed somewhere to put her legs before she did something embarrassing like sit down on the grass and cover her face. He fell into step beside her without being asked, hands in his blazer pockets.
The California evening was warm and orange. The path back to Building C cut through a stretch of open lawn, empty at this hour, and normally Naomi would have noticed how pretty it was. Right now she could barely process the ground under her feet.
His girl.
She was his girl now.
Except—was she? What did that mean at this school, with this boy, after what they’d just done in a pocket dimension that shouldn’t exist? Her mother talked about meeting her father and knowing in a day.
That had seemed romantic and slightly delusional right up until twenty minutes ago, and now Naomi was walking through the dark with a boy who had his mouth on her chest not an hour ago and called her his.
She pressed her hands harder against her cheeks.
His lips. Warm and deliberate, closing around her nipple with a pressure that had made every coherent thought she’d ever had evaporate instantly.
The way he’d used his tongue, slow and thorough.
The way milk had flowed from her like her body had been waiting for exactly this, which was biologically impossible before tonight, which had happened anyway.
Her skin prickled under her sports bra. A ghost of heat concentrated in both her breasts, the specific sensitive ache of being touched somewhere that had never been touched before. She could still feel the shape of his mouth. The suction.
The way he’d looked up at her once, briefly, amber eyes dark in the low light of that fake cityscape bedroom, and she’d nearly lost her mind completely.
She was getting warm again just thinking about it.
This was a problem.
She was tired. Her arms felt heavy and her legs moved like they were packed with wet sand, which he’d warned her about, the twelve-hour fatigue thing.
She was horny.
She was confused.
She was walking next to the boy who had done all of this to her while he looked completely unbothered, and somehow that made it worse, because how was he not affected? She was falling apart at the seams and he was just walking.
They passed the corner of the recreation center. The path narrowed. Their arms almost touched.
She thought about his fingers.
"Stop thinking so loud," Jace said.
Naomi startled. "I’m not—I’m not thinking loud."
"You’ve made that face four times since we left the field."
"What face?"
"The one you’re making right now."
She deliberately smoothed her expression into something neutral. He glanced at her sideways and the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile.
"Better?" she asked.
"Not really."
They reached the path that curved toward Building C. Naomi counted her steps. One, two, three, four. The shell necklace from her mother rested against her collarbone, the familiar weight of it, and she touched it without thinking.
He’d kissed her forehead.
She’d almost cried when he did that. She hadn’t, because she would have died of embarrassment, but it had been close. A forehead kiss was different from everything else they’d done. Everything else had been about his survival. The forehead kiss had been for her. She was almost certain of it.
The Building C entrance appeared ahead. Glass doors, lobby light warm and yellow inside.
Naomi stopped walking.
"Am I your girl?"
Jace stopped two steps ahead of her. He turned around.
"Yes," he said.
Just that. One word.
Naomi’s stomach dropped three floors.
"We’ve known each other for two days," she said, because someone had to be the reasonable one.
"I know."
"That’s not normal."
"None of this is normal, Naomi." 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞
She opened her mouth. Closed it. He was right. He was obviously right. Normal was not the framework that applied to their situation. Normal girls didn’t have boys activate space-bending pocket dimensions to extract magical milk from their bodies to stave off death.
"If we’re together," she said carefully, "that means you’re not going to do this with other girls."
Something shifted in his expression.
Her stomach dropped again. Lower this time.
"Jace."
"It’s complicated," he said.
"Uncomplicate it."
He exhaled. Looked out toward the ocean for exactly two seconds, then back at her. "I need to keep extracting essence to stay alive. From multiple sources. Your Silver tier milk bought me five days, which is incredible, genuinely, but five days isn’t permanent. I need more."
She heard what he was saying.
She didn’t like what he was saying.
"So I’m not your girl," she said flatly.
"I didn’t say that."
"You said you need other girls."
"I said I need other sources." He took one step toward her. "That’s not the same thing."
"It sounds the same."
"Naomi." His voice was patient. Not gentle exactly, but careful with her. "I’m not going to pretend I’m not going to do this with other women. I’d be lying, and you deserve better than a lie. But what happened between you and me tonight wasn’t just extraction. You know that."
She did know that. She wished she didn’t.
"So what are we then," she asked.
"Something real," he said. "Just not something simple."
Naomi looked at him standing there in the lamplight, blazer slightly rumpled, looking like a boy who ate one pull-up and lived to tell about it, who had a death clock behind his eyes and had told her the truth about it when he didn’t have to, and had kissed her forehead after.
She wanted to be angry. She had all the materials for anger—the exhaustion, the vulnerability, the two-day timeline, the sheer absurdity of standing outside a dormitory at eight PM having a conversation about being someone’s girl when she’d never even been kissed before tonight.
Instead she thought about his mouth on her breast and felt heat bloom from her collarbone to her stomach.
This was a serious problem.
"I need to think," she said.
"Okay."
"That means you stop talking while I think."
"Understood."
They went inside. The lobby was empty except for a second-year Obsidian student who didn’t look up from her laptop. The elevator came quickly. They rode it to the fifth floor in silence, standing an arm’s length apart.
The doors opened. Their rooms were four doors apart. She knew this.
She walked to her door. Room 5C. Pressed the code in.
"Naomi."
She looked back.
Jace stood in the hallway, hands back in his pockets. The overhead light made him look older than eighteen. Or maybe that was just how he always looked, like someone who’d seen more than his face suggested.
"For what it’s worth," he said. "You’re the only person at this school who’s been genuinely kind to me." He paused. "I notice things like that."
She turned back to her door before he could see her face.
"Good night, Jace."
"Good night, Naomi."
She went inside.
The room was dark. Her roommate wasn’t back yet. Naomi dropped her bag by the door, sat on the edge of her bed, and pressed both palms over her face.
He noticed things like that.
She thought about her two brothers at home, probably asleep by now since it was three hours later in North Carolina. She thought about her mother asking about boys on the phone. She thought about the journal under her mattress where she wrote letters she’d never send, and what she would write in it tonight.
Dear Mom. Something happened today and I don’t know how to explain it. I met a boy who’s dying and I think I’m in trouble.
She lay back on the bed without changing out of her athletic clothes.
Her breasts still ached. Both of them, a low persistent throb that wasn’t quite pain. Sensitive in a way they’d never been before. When her sports bra fabric shifted against her left nipple she actually had to bite her lip.
She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum and stared at the ceiling.
He’d said yes. She’d asked if she was his girl and he’d said yes, and then immediately told her he needed other women, which was confusing and painful and somehow also honest in a way that she couldn’t dismiss.
She’d grown up watching her parents, twenty-three years of her father stopping by her mother’s stall at the market every morning even when they didn’t need to buy anything, and she’d always assumed that was what love looked like. Simple. Exclusive. Known.
This was not that.
