Lust Meter System: Conquering Beauties

Tasha looked at the table for another moment.

Then she said it.

"For some reason I don’t feel like kissing you right now," she said. Her voice was flat and observational, like she was reading something from a list. "Or having a complete steaming sex on this table with you. Which is strange because that has been a consistent thing for me. Without fail."

The cafe continued doing what it was doing around them.

The man two tables over who had been passing with his coffee in one hand and a paper bag in the other slowed his step almost imperceptibly, his eyes moving sideways toward their table, and then he kept walking with the specific forward-facing expression of a person who had heard something and was pretending they had not.

Tasha watched him go with those flat eyes.

Then she turned and looked at Liam.

Her eyes were dry but cold in a way that was worse than wet. The specific cold of something that had been warm and was not anymore and the person wearing it knew the difference.

Liam looked at the space above her head.

Empty.

All of it.

Every heart she had accumulated across every moment they had shared, the amusement park, the Ferris wheel, the closet, all of it sitting dark and absent like it had never been there.

’How is that even possible,’ he thought, looking at it. ’How do you just cancel something like that. How does a person reach into something that belongs to someone else and remove it.’

"Why do you look so shocked right now," Tasha said. Her voice had not changed from the flat observational register. "Did you actually do something to me?"

Liam looked at her face.

He thought about how to answer that and then thought about how not to answer it and then he said what he actually felt.

"I’m more shocked by the specific words you just used," he said. "Because I thought you wanted to do it with me because of." He paused. "Because of me. Hearing you frame it like something was done to you. Like a substance. That’s a different thing and it’s not a comfortable thing to sit with."

She looked at him for a moment.

’What do I do here,’ he thought. ’Do I start all over. Is this reversible. Is there even a version of this that goes back to what it was or is this just how it ends and I watch it end in a coffee shop over finished plates.’

"This isn’t the time for games," Tasha said. She said it without heat. Just clearly.

"I’m not playing anything," he said. "I need you to tell me more. What exactly are you saying happened."

She looked at him.

"You’re trying to make it sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about," she said. "But I know what I felt before. And I know what I feel now. And they are not the same thing." She looked at the table briefly and then back at him. "It changed when a woman touched me. A woman who said she was looking for you."

Liam went very still.

"A woman," he said.

"She said something about her master," Tasha said. "And then she touched me. Right here." She raised one finger and pressed it lightly to the center of her own forehead. "And after that everything felt different."

’Stella.’

The name arrived in his head with a weight that was not surprise but was worse than surprise because he had known something was wrong with Tasha since the missed calls and the period text and he had filed it and moved on and the filing had been a mistake.

His jaw tightened.

’I didn’t know she could do this. I knew she was something different. I knew she had abilities that operated outside of anything I had a framework for. But this. Reaching into someone and removing what was there. I did not know that was in her range.’

"So you can’t tell me I’m wrong," Tasha said. "Because I know how I feel now compared to before. And it’s not the same."

She said it without anger. That was the part that sat the heaviest. If she had been angry it would have meant something was still firing underneath it. The flatness was worse. The flatness meant she had already accepted the change and was simply reporting it.

’What kind of position is this.’

Time stopped.

The cafe went flat and silent. The espresso machine mid-cycle. The man with the tablet frozen with his eyes at the page. Tasha mid-breath across the table.

A notification appeared.

[Option 1: You’re right, something is wrong. | +10 Lust Points]

[Option 2: Say nothing. | 0 Lust Points]

Liam looked at both of them.

Then he looked at them again.

’I am sitting here with a system that has bailed me out of genuinely difficult situations,’ he thought, staring at the options with the specific feeling of a person who had expected a door and found a wall, ’and right now it is giving me you’re right something is wrong versus say nothing. I need an actual option. Something useful. Something that helps. I’m still waiting.’

Nothing else appeared.

He looked at Option 1.

He looked at Option 2.

He looked at Tasha frozen mid-breath across the table and thought about what both of those options actually produced and found neither of them adequate.

Then he looked up at the space above her head where everything used to be.

Then he looked across at the other occupied tables in the cafe, at the frozen people sitting in their frozen positions.

He looked at Grace’s space in his mind.

Gone. Her progress, everything he had built with her across every session and every honest conversation and every morning on her yoga mat.

Gone.

He felt it land.

And then, like the system had been waiting for exactly the right moment to deliver the worst possible news in sequence, he watched one of Miss Kelly’s hearts go dark in real time, the light leaving it while he was looking directly at it, the system showing him what was happening somewhere across the city right now.

One. Then stillness. Like it was waiting to see what he did next before it took the second.

He selected Option 2.

Time resumed.

He stood up from the chair.

Tasha looked up at him from the table.

He was already moving toward the counter, signaling for the tab, paying without looking at the amount, and then he was through the door and on the pavement and running for the M4 before Tasha had fully processed that he had left the table.

He got in.

Started the engine.

Pulled out into the street and pressed the accelerator in a way that the car responded to immediately, the rear end settling and then launching forward, the sound of it splitting the morning street open, and he was gone before the smoke behind him had finished forming, leaving two people on the pavement outside the cafe coughing into their sleeves.

He drove.

His hands were at ten and two on the wheel and his knuckles were pale and the city moved past him in a blur of light and color and he was not seeing any of it. He was seeing Kelly’s door. Kelly’s hallway. Kelly’s apartment in whatever state Stella had left it in after deciding to have some fun.

’She worked through them,’ he thought, a car horn sounding somewhere behind him as he moved through a gap that had been wide enough by about six inches. ’She went to Tasha first.

Then Grace. Now Kelly.

She is going through the people connected to me and she is removing whatever is there. Systematically. With the patience of something that has been doing this for a long time and finds it entirely manageable.’

He came off the main road and into Kelly’s street and parked in the way that left the least possible distance between the car and the building entrance, not a legal space and not a space by any reasonable definition but a location where the car would be stationary while he was not in it.

He got out.

He activated Silent Stride.

The sound of him vanished. His footsteps against the pavement, his jacket against his arms, his breathing, all of it gone, the ability wrapping around him and taking every piece of sound he produced with it.

He moved.

Through the building entrance and up the stairs, taking them two at a time, his body moving fast and completely silent through the stairwell, the floors passing, the landing outside Kelly’s floor arriving and then behind him as he came out into her corridor.

He went to her door.

He stopped.

It was not fully closed.

Not open in any obvious way, not something you would notice from the end of the hallway, just not fully latched, sitting a few millimeters from the frame in the way a door sat when the person closing it had not finished the motion.

He looked at the frame.

At the side of it. Down toward the lower section where the wood met the wall.

Scratch marks. Deep ones.

It was the kind that went through the paint and into the wood beneath, four parallel lines running diagonally across the frame as if something had gripped it and been pulled away from it at the same time.

He pushed the door open.

Kelly’s apartment was dim, the curtains not fully open, the lamp in the corner off. Everything inside it at first glance looking like the apartment he had been in many times before, the couch, the coffee table, the plant on the windowsill.

Then he saw her.

Kelly was on the floor beside the couch, on her side, her blonde hair spread around her, wearing a shirt that had been partly torn at the shoulder, her legs bare. She was not moving.

"Kelly."

He was across the room before the word finished leaving his mouth, down on one knee beside her, his hand on her shoulder, turning her carefully.

"Kelly."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!