When Hands Touch

9. heart to heart

CHAPTER NINE

HEART TO HEART

—

"Milo, no, we're not taking another break. We took one fifteen minutes ago."

Frustratedly pouting, Milo stared at the laptop in front of him as he let out a groan. "I can't do it! My brain genuinely can't fucking comprehend how to write an assignment and make it make sense, or how to use words that don't exist in my vocabulary, or how to fucking analyse the text without sounding like a pretentious piece of shit. With occasional spelling errors."

Xen sighed, turning Milo's laptop around so that it was facing him now. "Okay, fine," he relented. "I'll read through whatever you've done so far, and you can chill for a minute. Is that cool?"

Letting out a small cheer, Milo grabbed a pen from Xen's desk, balancing it between his upper lip and his nose, liking Jude's recent post on Instagram. For a brief moment, Milo wondered if Xen would accept his follow request if he did request to follow him. He literally said it was a private account with no followers. He's not going to accept your fucking follow request.

He decided to try his luck anyway.

"Hey, Xen?" Milo called, placing the pen back on the table. "What's your Instagram username?"

Lips twisting into an amused smile, Xen just said, "Why?"

"I wanna follow it. Can I?"

Xen shrugged, eyes still scanning Milo's laptop. "Type my name in. You'll find it."

So, that's what Milo did. Unsurprisingly, there was only one account with Xen's name, considering his name was literally Xen. Milo instantly clicked on it, but it was a private account. Unsurprisingly.

What was surprising though, was that he had over three hundred followers. On his so-called private account with no followers.

"You have three hundred and fifty two followers?"

Finally, Xen looked up from the laptop, eyes boring into Milo's. "Ray found my account— fucking stalker bitch— and soon, everyone else found it too," he explained. "And now, every fucking person from school follows this account. And suddenly, people from my old school are requesting to follow me too? What the fuck was I supposed to do? Block them all?"

"God, no," Milo muttered. "You could've just... Not accepted their requests. Anyway! Accept mine, I wanna see."

"I have zero posts," Xen deadpanned.

Milo huffed, watching as Xen accepted his follow request, before shifting his focus to the laptop again.

Considering the fact that Xen had no posts, Milo had to resort to going through his followers and his tagged posts, until he stumbled upon something that sent his curiosity jumping up.

"Are these your friends from your previous school?" Milo asked, squinting to look at Xen's face in the picture.

Xen sighed. "First, we're going to discuss your mistakes, what you could've added, etcetera. And then, you can stalk me on Instagram. Cool?"

"Fine," Milo mumbled, leaning forward to look at the laptop, where Xen had highlighted a few random sentences.

And honest to fuck, Milo didn't know how much research Xen had done on dyslexia, but it seemed to be helping, and for the first time, he could actually understand what was going on.

"... So, yeah. That's about it," Xen concluded. "You did a good job though, this is a lot better than when you first started out! And it's only been like, twenty days or so. Good job."