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Chapter 29: Three-fold Repayment

Chapter 29: Three-fold Repayment

He raised his hand.

Knocked.

A few seconds passed before the lock clicked and the door opened.

Rose stood there in an oversized sleep shirt, messy hair pulled up and mismatched socks peeking out beneath it. She clearly hadn’t dressed for anyone, which somehow made the casual confidence of it all more disarming.

She looked at him. Then at the container in his hands.

Neither of them said anything for a second, then.

"I brought you something." He held it up slightly, like the gesture explained more than the sentence did.

She looked at it, then back at him, and understood exactly why he was standing there without needing it spelled out.

"Is this meant to be an apology?"

He straightened slightly.

"Leaving like that was on me." No windup, no ten-minute preamble. "I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t."

She didn’t let him keep going with it.

"I already know why you left." Simple. Not unkind. "I saw your face before you bolted. Something was wrong. I’m not stupid, Adrian."

That landed somewhere he hadn’t fully braced for.

"You were still a jackass about it, though."

"Yeah." No argument in him. "I was."

She held the door a beat longer, studying him, then stepped aside without making a production of it.

He walked in. He’d almost left this at her door instead. Glad, quietly, that he hadn’t.

"So." She leaned against the counter, arms loosely crossed. "You want to know what happened after you left, or should I let you guess."

"Tell me."

"Daniel and his entire crowd think you’re actually my boyfriend."

He waited for the part where that got worse. It did.

"I didn’t correct them."

"You didn’t correct them."

"I improvised." She said the word like it deserved credit on its own.

"What did you tell them?"

"That you got an urgent call."

He looked at her. "From who?"

"I didn’t think that far." She shrugged.

He almost laughed, mostly at the confidence behind an excuse with zero supporting details. "So if Daniel sees us again..."

"I can’t exactly say ’actually, I made him up.’" She shrugged, completely at peace with the corner she’d painted them both into. "That’d be worse than just letting it stand."

"And you’re fine with that."

"I didn’t hate the assumption, if I’m honest." Plain, no drama attached, like she was reporting weather. "So. What happens now?"

He didn’t have an answer ready. She apparently did, though it took her a second to actually arrive at it.

"You know," she said slowly. "you kind of owe me for this morning."

"I already apologized."

"Apologizing and owing are different things."

"Are they."

"One." She held up a finger. "You left me to deal with Daniel alone."

"That’s one thing."

"Two." A second finger. "I had to explain where you went."

"Same thing, different sentence."

"Three." A third finger, entirely unmoved by his objection. "I had to keep maintaining the lie after you were already gone, which is significantly harder than telling it the first time."

"Those are all the same crime wearing different hats."

"They’re not." Total conviction, the kind that didn’t invite further debate. "Three separate offenses." A pause, clearly enjoying the number more than she needed to. "Three-fold repayment."

"That’s not a real thing."

"It is now."

He studied her, already fairly sure he’d walked into something without noticing the door close behind him.

"And what exactly does that involve."

Rose smiled. Small, satisfied, entirely too pleased with herself for someone inventing the terms in real time.

She ate standing at the counter, fork moving steady, and by the third bite she still hadn’t said anything, which he was choosing to interpret as a compliment until she actually spoke.

"I’m hungry. So the first repayment is the food."

"It better be." Adrian smirked. "Give the chef his flowers."

"It’s decent." A pause, suspiciously too measured. "Tasty. Mid, compared to mine."

"Mid."

"Mid." She said it again like the word needed no further defense.

His smile stayed exactly where it was, although the compliment had somehow arrived with a small knife attached.

"Second repayment," she said, setting the empty container aside. "If we’re doing this, the whole fake-boyfriend thing, we’re doing it properly."

"Define properly."

"No disappearing when things get uncomfortable. If someone asks, we’re together. No contradicting the story in public, no matter how weird it gets." She counted it off like a contract clause, not a favor. "You don’t get to opt out the second it’s inconvenient."

He sat with that for a second, and it landed easier than he expected, mostly because none of it actually asked anything new of him. He’d already agreed to worse for less.

"Fine." A beat. "Rules accepted."

Somewhere in the back of his head, a thought surfaced that he had no business having right now. If this whole thing was official now, technically, did that come with benefits worth negotiating for later.

He shut that down almost as fast as it arrived, mostly out of self-preservation.

"You went somewhere just now," she said, watching him too closely.

"Nowhere."

"Hentai somewhere?"

"...Maybe."

"Knew it."

"Third repayment," she said, nodding at the empty container. "You scraped the bottom, by the way. Barely anything left."

"You finished it."

"I was hungry."

"That proves my point."

"That proves nothing." She crossed her arms, though the argument had already lost most of its conviction. "I could make something better than this in my sleep."

"Prove it."

That landed somewhere she apparently hadn’t expected, because her expression shifted fast, sharpening into something with actual stakes attached.

"Fine. We cook. Both of us, tomorrow, or whenever you’re free next. Same ingredients."

He shrugged. "I’m free now."

"Great." She smiled. "So we cook, and you judge mine against yours."

"I’m judging my own competition?"

"You’ll be fair. You have to be, or I’ll know." She said it with total confidence that he wouldn’t dare cheat, which was somehow more effective than any actual threat could’ve been.

"And the stakes?"

"Winner gets to ask the loser for one thing. No limits."

He thought about that for exactly as long as it took to run through every possible way a girl who already called him hentai on a regular basis might interpret "no limits," and decided the risk was worth it purely on principle.

"You’re on."

She grinned, already halfway to the door before he’d finished agreeing to anything.

"Good." She grabbed the door knob. "We need groceries, then."

She was talking about ingredients before she’d even reached the door, garlic, better cheese than whatever he’d bought, something about a spice he apparently didn’t own, checking her phone once, quick, before pocketing it and glancing back at him.

"You coming?"

"Apparently I have a debt to pay."

"You have three, hentai."

Her satisfied smile came back. She opened the door. He followed her out, pulling it shut behind him, and his phone buzzed the second the latch clicked.

He stopped.

She was checking her own phone a few steps ahead, unaware anything had happened at all.

The system window was still sitting there in front of him, unmoved by his halting.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

TARGET CONSENT DETECTED.

Target candidate: Rose West

Relational arrangement detected.

Consent condition satisfied.

Would you like to register Rose West as an Investment Target?

[YES / NO]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Rose. He hadn’t seen that coming, not even a little.

He hadn’t even been thinking about the system when he agreed to her rules two minutes ago. Was it the fake relationship? Only possible explanation.

He didn’t have an actual theory for why that qualified. Filed it under things to figure out later, same shelf as everything else the system had never bothered explaining.

"Adrian?" She was a few steps ahead now, half-turned back toward him.

He looked at the screen once more. Then at her.

"I’m coming."

He tapped YES, taking a step forward.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

TARGET REGISTRATION CONFIRMED.

Rose West has been registered as an Investment Target.

Initializing Investment Analysis...

Analyzing target...

Investment Potential: 43%

Potential category: Romance

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He read the number twice, half-expecting it to change. It didn’t.

43%.

His eyes flicked toward Rose. She was already halfway down the hall, checking something on her phone.

Romance. Rose likes me.

He stopped for half a second.

A sophomore likes me. That was... unexpectedly good news.

Definitely wasn’t going to be stupid enough to screw this up.

He started walking again, but his eyes stayed on the number.

43%.

Forty-three percent.

Somehow, seeing it written down made it feel more real.

Then a second line loaded in underneath it.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

FIRST INVESTMENT REGISTRATION COMPLETE.

Registration Bonus Awarded: $5,000

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He stared at the reward. Then at Rose. Then back at the reward.

"What..." His thumb stopped moving. "What the fuck."