The shower in my dorm was exactly hot enough to strip away the smell of Felicity’s perfume and not nearly hot enough to strip away the memory of her mouth.

Water ran down my back in sheets. Steam fogged the mirror I couldn’t see from here anyway. I braced one hand against the tile and let my head drop forward, breathing, trying to organize the last three hours into something that made sense inside my skull.

It didn’t make sense. That was the whole point.

I’d gone to class this morning as a candidate. Come out a representative. Delivered an impromptu speech that apparently hit harder than I’d intended. Got kidnapped by a blonde with territorial seating habits and zero respect for my Combat Theory attendance record. Made out in a movie theater like a horny teenager, which, technically accurate, but still. Almost got caught by campus security while Felicity generated a discussion about cinematography using my exact voice.

And now I had a date with my actual girlfriend in forty-seven minutes and I smelled like vanilla and sin.

The System chose that moment to remind me it existed.

[TEMPTATION GAUGE UPDATE]

Felicity Hardy

Previous: 14%

Current: 38%

Stage: Curious → Attached

+24% in single encounter

Note: Host has achieved the fastest single-session Gauge advancement recorded for a non-primary heroine. The System is... impressed? Concerned? Both seem applicable.

I stared at the notification through the steam, water plastering my hair to my forehead.

Twenty-four percent. In one afternoon. From a girl I hadn’t even slept with yet.

The yet sat in my mind like a promise I hadn’t technically made but absolutely intended to keep.

[Additional Context]

Felicity Hardy has crossed the Attached threshold. Her thoughts will now drift to the Host in contexts unrelated to immediate interaction. She will begin engineering reasons for proximity. Protective instincts may emerge. Physical boundaries have softened significantly.

Current emotional state: Satisfied. Vulnerable. Terrified. Hopeful.

The combination is noted as volatile.

Volatile. The System’s word for it, not mine, but accurate in the way most of its observations were when they weren’t being deliberately obtuse.

Felicity Hardy had walked into that theater as the girl who called herself my best friend first lady with a grin that never quite reached her eyes, the one who performed warmth so convincingly that most people never questioned whether it was real. She’d walked out as someone different. Someone who’d asked me twice if she was too much, who’d needed to hear the answer both times, who’d believed me when I said no in a way that suggested not many people had ever made her believe it before.

That was the part that sat heavy in my chest now, water dripping down my spine in the cooling air. Not the physical stuff. The physical stuff was spectacular, I wasn’t pretending otherwise, I could still feel the phantom pressure of her throat around me and the way her nails had bitten into my stomach through my shirt, but that wasn’t why the Gauge had jumped twenty-four points in a single session.

She’d believed me when I said she wasn’t too much. When I’d called her perfect exactly as she was. When I’d told her the messy parts were the parts worth keeping.

The loneliest girl in Class 1-B, the one who’d learned to be charming because the alternative was being alone, who’d spent years suppressing the hungry parts of herself to stay acceptable, had looked at me in a dark theater and decided I was safe. Decided that the real Felicity, the one without the performance, could exist in my presence without being judged or abandoned or treated like a thing.

That was worth more than any amount of physical contact. The System knew it too, the cynical little algorithm, and it had adjusted her Gauge accordingly.

I turned the water to cold. Let it shock my system for ten seconds, skin tightening, thoughts sharpening, before I killed the spray and stepped out onto the bath mat.

The mirror was fogged. I wiped a streak through the condensation with my palm and looked at myself.

Tall. Too skinny. Sharp features that would fill out eventually if I kept eating at the cafeteria rate I’d established. The scar through my left eyebrow from Hiro’s elbow three days ago, healing but visible. Amber eyes that didn’t quite match anything else on my face.

The body of an Unmarked kid who’d gotten very lucky with a System nobody could detect.

"Forty-one minutes," I told my reflection. "Get dressed. Don’t be late. Don’t smell like Felicity."

The reflection didn’t argue.

I toweled off, pulled on clean boxers, and was halfway through selecting a shirt when my phone buzzed on the desk.

Sloane.

still coming right

yes

good

wear the blue thing

which blue thing

the one felicity picked

you remember that?

i remember everything you wear

that’s either sweet or terrifying

both

omw in 30

I set the phone down and looked at the blue shirt hanging in my closet. The one Felicity had selected during a shopping trip I’d been coerced into three days ago, before the election, before today, before everything had gotten complicated in ways I was still mapping.

Felicity had picked it because she said it brought out my eyes. Sloane wanted me to wear it because she’d noticed I looked good in it and filed the information away like she filed everything, tactical and precise and so obviously in love with me she couldn’t see how obvious it was.

The Heroine Bond Resonance hummed at the edge of my consciousness. Sloane’s emotional signature, warm and steady and currently spiked with anticipation that tasted like cinnamon and electricity through our connection. She was getting ready too. Probably staring at her own closet, debating between the cropped top she wore when she wanted to be comfortable and the dress she wore when she wanted me to suffer.

Knowing Sloane, she’d pick something that combined both.

I pulled on the blue shirt. Dark jeans. The beat-up low-tops that had survived two months of Halloran’s campus. Nothing fancy, but Sloane didn’t do fancy, and showing up overdressed would read as suspicious anyway.

The walk to her building took twelve minutes at normal pace. I did it in nine, cutting through the faculty garden using Percy’s shortcut, and arrived at her door with three minutes to spare.

I knocked.

"It’s open."