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Chapter 28: No Excuses

Chapter 28: No Excuses

Adrian pulled into the supermarket lot mostly because his stomach had made the executive decision for him, no vote required.

He’d barely touched the chicken back at the gym, and apparently emotional exhaustion wasn’t a substitute for actual food, whatever his body had been hoping for this morning. He killed the engine.

His phone buzzed once, quiet, before he’d even reached for the door handle.

NUTRITIONAL MULTIPLIER: C-RANK

Nutritional absorption increased by 200%.

Absorption complete!

Warning: Increased nutritional efficiency also increases metabolic demand.

He stared at it a second.

So the skill that made every meal count for more also meant he burned through it faster. Of course it did. Nothing this system handed him came without some fine print attached to quietly cancel out half the win.

He got out before his stomach could file a formal complaint about the delay and headed inside.

He moved through the aisles without much of a plan.; a few basics, enough to stop his fridge from looking like a crime scene, whatever looked edible and didn’t require decisions he wasn’t in the mood to make at the moment. Cheese, milk cartons, some rice...

Then he hit the pasta section.

His eyes landed on a tray of baked pasta for sale, cheese browned at the edges under the store lighting, and his feet stopped moving before the rest of him caught up with why.

Rose’s pasta.

The one she’d handed him at two in the morning, still warm, still tasting like she’d actually thought about what he’d want instead of just what was easy to make.

He remembered the deal they’d struck over it. Her showing up, calling herself his girlfriend in front of an audience without so much as blinking. And him walking straight out of that room without a word, leaving her standing there to explain his absence to two people she’d met ten minutes earlier, and Daniel.

This one didn’t sit like Maya did. Maya was a wound he was still learning the shape of. This was something dumber and more fixable, the specific discomfort of knowing exactly whose fault something was, because it was his.

He’d handled Maya badly. That didn’t exactly give him a free pass to handle everyone else badly too.

He looked down at the basket already half full in his hand.

Apparently walking away from one problem came bundled with three smaller ones, free of charge.

He didn’t love the pattern. Couldn’t fix all of it today, wasn’t going to pretend otherwise standing in a supermarket aisle at whatever hour this currently was.

But he could fix the part that was actually his to fix.

He kept moving through the store, cart filling with the usual; enough for himself, nothing fancy, just a few things he hadn’t planned on buying till his allowance dropped.

Then, without much deliberation, he doubled back toward the chicken.

If he was already cooking, might as well make enough for two. That was the whole justification, and it held up fine right up until he caught himself reading a pasta sauce label specifically to check whether it had mushrooms in it. Those tasted best to him. Might as well hope she likes it.

Apparently one bad morning had turned grocery shopping into a moral exercise.

He almost laughed at himself, quiet, right there in the sauce aisle, and bought the ingredients anyway. Cream, chicken, pasta. Something she could actually eat when she got back.

Before heading to checkout he grabbed something simple for himself too, some instant ramen since his hunger had begun making itself impossible to ignore

He paid for the groceries. $28.99. A number that would’ve made him reconsider half the cart yesterday. Then he made his way back home.

He put the groceries away before he let himself sit down anywhere.

The fridge looked less like a crime scene than it had yesterday, which felt like a small, stupid victory worth noting.

He started cooking almost immediately after; chopping, seasoning, checking the oven timer twice for no real reason, tasting the sauce and deciding it needed something he couldn’t quite name until he added more garlic and it suddenly made sense.

His thoughts drifted while his hands stayed busy. Maya surfaced once, briefly, and he let her go without much of a fight this time. Drew and Jenna deserved an actual explanation eventually. He’d get to that once his head wasn’t doing quite so much at once.

Rose was the one still sitting there, unresolved, mostly because she was the one thing he could actually do something about.

He portioned the food out once it was done; one plate, one container with a lid that actually sealed properly this time, unlike whatever he’d been using before.

He ate at the counter, standing, mostly out of habit. Cleaned the kitchen after instead of leaving it for future-him to deal with, which felt like a second small victory nobody else was around to witness.

Then, he checked the system’s daily task out of growing habit more than urgency.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

DAILY TASKS

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

☑ Eat one proper meal.

☐ Maintain personal hygiene.

☑ Accumulate 90 minutes of physical activity.

☐ Get at least 7 hours of sleep.

☑ Have at least one meaningful social interaction.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Almost a clean sweep. Sleep would sort itself out shortly, given how the day had gone. The part that needed work was the hygiene.

The shower actually helped. More than he expected.

He came out clean, tired, fully expecting sleep to just take him the second his head hit the soft cushion of his couch.

It didn’t.

The apartment was quiet enough now that his brain apparently felt entitled to start working again, and lying there on his couch, he found out that staying busy all day hadn’t actually made anything disappear. It had just been postponed, patiently, waiting for exactly this moment to resume the conversation.

He braced for Maya. She didn’t show up first.

Rose did. That was new.

The girl he’d made a deal with, then abandoned like an idiot in the middle of it. The one he’d apparently just cooked an apology for without fully deciding to.

He glanced at the container still sitting on the counter, sealed, waiting.

He could leave it downstairs. Let her find it in the morning, no conversation required. Easier, probably, for both of them.

That was the same thing he’d done a few hours ago. Just dressed up nicer.

He didn’t need a speech. Didn’t even need to know exactly what he was going to say once he got there. He just knew that if he was going to apologize for something, doing it from two floors away with a note taped to a container didn’t count.

He got up, grabbed the food, and headed downstairs.

He reached her floor and stood outside her door, container in hand, the old instinct to turn around showing up right on schedule.

Maybe she was tired. Maybe she didn’t want to see him right now, after everything what he’d done to her.

He’d already made that exact choice once today. Wasn’t making it twice.

He raised his hand.

Knocked.