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Chapter 14: A Late-Night Invitation

Chapter 14: A Late-Night Invitation

Adrian dropped into the driver’s seat and just sat there for a second, door still open, one leg still outside the car.

The diner sat lit up through the windshield, half its sign buzzing at a pitch he was too tired to find annoying anymore.

He pulled the door shut. Sat with his hands on the wheel, doing nothing, which felt like the first productive thing he’d done in an hour.

Right. The mission.

The thought arrived slow, dragging itself up through the exhaustion. Starter Reward, unclaimed, sitting there since sometime around dinner and completely forgotten in everything that had happened since.

He was tired enough that curiosity should’ve lost this fight easily. It didn’t.

He pulled out his phone.

The Starter Reward icon sat waiting. Same clean gold trim as everything else the system produced. He tapped it, expecting a screen as always. Instead...

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

FACIAL AUTHENTICATION REQUIRED

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The front camera kicked on before he could react to that sentence. He stared at himself on the screen, looking exactly as wrecked as he felt, while a thin scanning frame crawled slowly across his own face, top to bottom, then back up once more like it wanted to be sure.

SCANNING... ⏳

FACE ID: VERIFIED ✅

USER CONFIRMED: ADRIAN HAYES

Well. That was new.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Starter Reward is ready to be opened.

Would you like to open the pack now, Adrian?

▶ YES ✅

▶ NO ❌

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

His thumb hovered over YES without much of a plan behind it.

Well. A beat. Now I’m curious.

He looked up from the screen before committing to anything, glancing around the lot on pure reflex.

One a.m. Diner mostly empty behind him. Streets empty in both directions. Not the comfortable kind of empty, the kind that made a parked car feel a lot more exposed than it had any right to feel.

This was, objectively, the worst possible place to find out what a supernatural reward pack actually did.

A dark lot. No one around for blocks. And a new neighborhood, too. He probably should’ve been more worried about getting mugged than he currently was.

He locked the phone, started the car, and pulled out of the lot without looking back at the diner again.

The city kept sliding past the glass, streetlight after streetlight, and somewhere in the gaps between them the drive home mostly happened without him.

His hands held the wheel on autopilot, turns happening on autopilot, like his body had done this enough times today that it no longer needed his permission.

One thought surfaced anyway, uninvited, from wherever thoughts went when he was too tired to screen them at the door.

He wondered if she was asleep already. Rose. It sat there for a second or two, quiet, undemanding.

Not my problem.

He didn’t chase it any further than that. Didn’t need to, didn’t have the energy to if he’d wanted to.

He was pulling into the lot before he’d fully registered leaving the last one.

Parked. Killed the engine. Sat there a second. Not from exhaustion this time, more the specific disorientation of a body that had covered ground his brain hadn’t clocked.

He got out, locked the car, and headed in, legs moving on autopilot up toward the stairs, mind still mostly somewhere else entirely.

Third floor. Same narrow stairs that had wrecked his arms this afternoon, though tonight his legs barely registered them. One kind of tired had apparently replaced another.

He reached 206, keys already out. And with a tingle, he opened the door and stepped in into the welcoming darkness of his place. Then.

His foot caught something on the ground before he noticed anything else.

He stopped. Looked down.

A folded piece of paper, sitting square inside his place like it had been placed there on purpose and not just slipped in.

Hmm. A beat. The hell?

He picked it up. Unfolded it. And read.

About dinner.

You still on?

His hands didn’t move for a moment. He reread it again just to be certain he was seeing exactly what he thought.

Rose. He didn’t even consider the possibility of anyone else for a second. He remembered their conversation. More specifically, he remembered what came after it.

She kissed him in front of her ex. Then told him not to think about it. Now there was a note on his floor asking about dinner.

What the hell was he supposed to do with that.

He turned the note over, chasing a small arrow drawn near the bottom edge. On the back, in the same handwriting, smaller:

If you are...

I’m waiting.

201.

He stared at that longer than the sentence probably warranted.

I’m waiting did most of the damage. He read it again anyway, like a third read might change something.

He glanced toward his own door. Then toward the stairs.

He was tired. He could go inside, put this off until tomorrow like a reasonable, well-adjusted person with functioning boundaries.

But now he knew exactly where she was, and exactly what she was doing while he stood here deciding.

He folded the note back along its crease.

We’re just two neighbors having dinner.

Beat.

At one in the morning.

Beat.

That’s not weird.

It was, in fact, at least a little weird. He was aware of that. Filed it under problems for a version of himself that cared more than he currently did.

He ducked into the bathroom first. Splashed water on his face. Dragged a hand through his hair until it looked less like he’d spent the day getting rejected by a parking lot. Not that it mattered. He told himself it didn’t matter, and went anyway.

Second floor. Her floor. He scanned the numbers as he walked.

203.

Kept going.

202.

Then apartment 201, and he stopped moving before he’d consciously decided to.

The girl who kissed him. The same one who told him not to think about it. Apparently also the same one leaving notes on his floor with little arrows pointing to "I’m waiting." None of that fully squared with itself, and he didn’t have the energy left tonight to make it square.

He raised his hand. Paused. One more second spent confirming, again, that this wasn’t weird. It was. He knocked anyway. A soft knock. A beat passed. No reply.

He let another moment pass, then knocked again, a little harder. Still nothing.

He checked his phone. 1:46 a.m.

Made sense, honestly. She’d probably left the note a while ago expecting him back sooner, while he was staring down a facial scan in a dark parking lot.

Of course she was asleep. Anyone reasonable would be.

He sighed. Lowered his hand. Turned back toward the stairs.

Not disappointed, really. Nothing there to be disappointed about. She’d waited, he’d taken too long, that was just math. Mostly he just wanted to be horizontal in the next ten minutes, and this had been worth the two-flight detour either way.

Better luck next time, maybe.

He got two steps toward the stairwell.

Click.

He stopped. Turned around. The door had opened, just a few inches, stopped short by the chain.

Rose was looking through the gap, hair pulled loose from wherever it had been earlier, sleep nowhere to be found behind her eyes. And a smile already in place.

"Hi."

He looked back at her. Something in his chest loosened that he hadn’t noticed holding tight.

"Hi."

She pulled the door wider, chain sliding free.

"Don’t you want to come in?"

~~~

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