Infinite Cashback: My Wealth Rebate System

Jason stood in the middle of his living room for a while after the door clicked shut behind Sarah, doing absolutely nothing with the silence except letting it happen to him.

Yeah. I definitely messed this up somehow.

The movie still kept on running on the TV, dialogue and swelling strings scoring a scene nobody was watching anymore, and he made no move to pause it. He didn’t have enough drive to do that or even want to in the first place.

There was something almost useful about the noise. It filled the specific gap in the room where a person had just been standing, the gap her voice usually would’ve filled if she were still arguing with him about chess or accusing his television of being ancient, something that should be kept in a museum with a little plaque that read do not touch, still technically functional.

He sat back down on the couch. The blanket was still there, half collapsed exactly where she had left it, and he didn’t touch it either.

Just looked at the shape of it for a second, the way it still held a rough outline of her, and thought that this was an unreasonably dramatic thing to be noticing about a blanket.

Great. Now I’m emotionally invested in laundry.

Okay. Let me walk through it.

That was the thing about Jason’s brain. It didn’t do panic well, didn’t really know how to sit in a feeling without immediately trying to organize it into something with edges. So he did what he always did. He laid it out, piece by piece, like he was setting up a position on a board he already knew he was losing.

Time to convene the meeting nobody asked for.

The first fact: she had kissed him first. Not the other way around. He’d waited, hand slow enough that she could’ve stopped it at any point, but she hadn’t. She’d leaned in. That part hadn’t been ambiguous.

So far, so good, actually. Gold star for me.

The second fact was the confusing one. Two seconds later, she’d pulled back like something had physically startled her from inside her own chest, and the look on her face afterward hadn’t been regret exactly, but it also hadn’t been nothing. Somewhere between wanting and bracing. He’d seen both at once and hadn’t known what to do with either.

Cool. Very normal amount of information to process at eleven p.m. on a Friday

The third fact was that she had lied about the roommate. Cleanly, almost convincingly, except for the detail she’d forgotten she’d already told him. Cancelled classes, no exam, no group to study for. He hadn’t called it out.

At the time it had felt like the wrong move, cornering someone who was already halfway out the door with evidence of their own inconsistency. Now, sitting here, he wondered if that had been generosity or cowardice. Possibly both. He was rarely sure anymore where one ended and the other began.

Cool detective work, though. Somebody give me a badge.

So run the numbers he told himself, because that was easier than sitting with the plain shape of it.

Best case, she needed air and this resolves itself by tomorrow.

Worst case, you just did the thing you apparently do. Find something that’s working, get close enough to actually want it, and then watch it leave anyway, except this time you can’t even blame the other person for making the first move, because she made the first move and left regardless.

Truly an impressive new failure mode. I’ve never tried this exact flavor before.

He’d read this book before. He just hadn’t expected the sequel to arrive this fast.

There wasn’t a satisfying way to phrase it, so he didn’t dress it up. He’d found a person who made his apartment interesting for the first time in a year, who bullied him into a spotless kitchen and somehow made that entertaining, who beat him at deflection and lost gracefully at chess adjacent banter.

And within roughly six hours of meeting her properly, he’d managed to be standing alone in his own living room, wondering what he’d done wrong.

Congratulations he thought, dry even inside his own head, especially inside his own head.

You’ve somehow figured out how to ruin something in less time than it takes to properly wash a set of dishes.

He let that sit for a second, turning it over, deciding whether it was actually funny or just something his brain was using to avoid the less funny version of the same thought. Landed on a bit of both. That felt about right for tonight.

The blanket was still there. The movie was still playing. Somewhere out there, Sarah was presumably walking home, maybe thinking about this, maybe not, and there was nothing productive he could do about either possibility from his couch at eleven at night.

That was roughly the point where the notification arrived, cutting cleanly through the loop he’d been running for the better part of ten minutes.

[Daily Quest Reward Calculation Complete.]

[Total Accumulated Reward Ready for Claim.]

[Claim Now?]

[Yes] [No]

Jason stared at the words for a second, half convinced his own brain had summoned them out of pure spite, some cosmic sense of humor deciding that the worst possible moment to interrupt a man mid spiral was also the perfect one.

Oh, good. You’re still here. Showing up with real considerate timing like always

He almost laughed. Actually laughed, once, short and mostly at himself, at the absurdity of a billionaire making system politely knocking on the door of his evening like it hadn’t noticed he was in the middle of feeling something.

Can’t this wait? I’m currently workshopping the exact moment my life fell apart. Ten minutes tops. Take a number.

Set it aside he told himself, about Sarah, about the notebook, about the entire tangled evening. Not gone. Just filed, the way Sarah herself had filed things earlier tonight.

A growing list of things to deal with eventually, when he had more information and fewer feelings clouding the math.

"Yeah," he said out loud, to an empty apartment that had gotten used to not being empty faster than he wanted to admit. "Let’s see it."

Might as well let something in my life go well tonight.

He chose YES to confirm.

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