Divine Milking System

Chapter 346: 346 | The Lawn Mower and the Gravel [PS BONUS]

Belle straightened up. Tossed her blue hair into a messy bun with the retrieved hair tie. Turned around with an expression that contained exactly zero surprise at where my eyes had been.

"You coming to bed?" She patted the mattress. "Naomi’s already claimed her side and if you take too long I’m giving your pillow to her."

"I." My brain rebooted from the brief system crash her bent-over silhouette had caused. "Yeah. I’m coming."

"Finally." Belle climbed onto the bed, pulled the covers back, and slid underneath with the practiced ease of someone who had already decided this was her bed now. She arranged the pillow, adjusted the blanket, and settled onto her side facing the center of the mattress. "Naomi, get in. He’s going to stand there processing for another thirty seconds and I refuse to wait."

Naomi laughed. The sound was quiet and warm and real, the kind of laugh that happened when someone felt safe enough to find things funny instead of worrying about whether laughter was appropriate. She climbed in from the other side and mirrored Belle’s position, lying on her side facing the center, leaving a Jace-sized gap between them.

I stood at the foot of my own bed looking at two women wearing my shirts in my apartment waiting for me to get in between them.

Six weeks ago I weighed two hundred and forty pounds and had seventy-two hours to live and the only woman who’d spoken to me since transmigrating was a blue-haired gold digger who wouldn’t put down her phone during our first conversation.

Now Belle Fox had voluntarily asked to stay the night, was wearing my clothes, and had just flashed me on what appeared to be deliberate purpose while bending over to retrieve a hair tie she absolutely could have left on the floor until morning.

The universe had a sick sense of humor and I respected that about it.

I killed the overhead light. The room went dark except for the faint glow of the essence bottles on the nightstand and the ambient California light filtering through the curtains. I stripped off my shorts and pulled on a clean pair of boxers, then crawled into the gap between them.

The mattress was a standard academy twin-and-a-half, generously sized for one person and optimistically sized for two. For three people it required the kind of spatial negotiation that would have made Vale proud. Belle pressed against my left side immediately, her back against my arm, her head finding the hollow of my shoulder with the unerring navigation of someone who had already mapped this specific destination. Her hand rested on my stomach, fingers spread possessively over the abdominal definition that hadn’t existed a month ago.

Naomi settled against my right side. Her approach was different from Belle’s, slower and more deliberate, as though she wanted to make sure each point of contact was chosen rather than accidental. Her forehead pressed against my jaw. Her hand found mine beneath the covers and interlaced our fingers. The shell necklace from her mother sat cool against the skin of my chest.

The room went still.

Outside, campus sounds filtered through the window. Distant laughter from students returning from evening study sessions. The mechanical hum of the building’s climate system. A door closing somewhere down the hall.

Inside, the only sounds were three people breathing.

Belle’s thumb traced a lazy circle on my stomach. Naomi’s fingers tightened around mine once and then relaxed.

"Set an alarm for five." Belle’s voice was already drowsy, the words muffled against my shoulder. "If we’re not up before Hikaru gets back I will commit actual murder and it won’t be staged as a training accident."

"Five. Got it."

"And if you snore I will smother you with your own pillow."

"I don’t snore."

"You snore." Naomi’s contribution came from my right side, delivered with the gentle authority of someone who had witnessed the evidence firsthand on multiple occasions. "You’ve snored every night I’ve stayed here. It’s not loud. It’s kind of cute actually."

"It is not cute." Belle’s protest was immediate. "It sounds like a lawn mower eating gravel."

"It does not."

"It absolutely does."

"You’re being dramatic."

"I am never dramatic about anything ever."

I lay between them while they argued about the precise audio quality of my alleged snoring, Belle’s hand warm on my stomach and Naomi’s fingers wrapped around mine, and I let the sound of their bickering fill the dark room like something I hadn’t known I’d been missing until it arrived.

Tomorrow I would enter a C-rank gate with abnormal readings alongside a rival team led by a woman who wanted to destroy me. Tomorrow I would carry four bottles of essence as emergency fuel for an Overclock that could save our lives or waste irreplaceable resources. Tomorrow Hikaru would fight through a medical clearance on a body still recovering from a wound that nearly killed her, and Misato would hold two broken squads together through sheer force of personality, and Vale’s impossible vision of hunters as deterrence would face its first real stress test.

Tomorrow was going to be terrible.

But tonight Belle Fox asked to stay. Tonight Naomi Love laughed in a dark room wearing my shirt. Tonight I had fourteen days of life, a maxed vault, two buffed teammates, and a stolen death-aspected ability that carved through reinforced training equipment like warm butter.

Tonight was enough.

Belle’s breathing evened out first. She fell asleep mid-sentence, her critique of my respiratory patterns dissolving into a soft exhale that tickled the skin of my shoulder. Her hand went slack on my stomach but stayed where she’d placed it, fingers still spread, still claiming.

Naomi lasted a few minutes longer. She brought our joined hands up to her lips and kissed my knuckles once, a gesture so small and private that it existed only in the dark space between us and meant more than anything that had happened in the Sanctum.

"Goodnight, Jace."

"Goodnight."

"Don’t snore."

"I’ll do my best."