Tom crawled out of the bathroom some minutes later, his legs still a little unsteady, and pressed his ear to the bedroom door before daring to open it. Quiet.
He cracked it just enough to check the hallway was empty, then slipped back in and locked the door behind him from the inside, even knowing fully well Sienna could get a spare key whenever she pleased.
It wasn’t real security. It just felt like something, a thin line drawn between himself and a world that had stopped making sense somewhere around lunchtime.
He couldn’t bring himself to face the chef yet. Not after what she would have heard through these walls if she had lingered even a minute longer than she had. He knew her schedule well enough by now to know she wouldn’t be back until the weekend - she would already have packed the fridge full of prepped meals in foil containers before heading out.
That gave him a few days to figure out what he’d even say to her, assuming he ever worked up the nerve.
"Now I can breathe well." Tom muttered with relief.
Then he went to sit on the edge of the bed, his elbows on his knees, and let himself finally think about what had just happened.
He had never done that before. Not once, in his twenty-six years of existence. He had never even had a girlfriend not to talk of having sex, whether oral or whatever.
"I finally did it...?"
He thought back, unable to stop himself now that the memory had been dragged loose.
He’d never even made it to university - his mother had gotten sick the same year he graduated high school, and there hadn’t been money for both her treatment and his tuition, so the choice hadn’t really been a choice at all.
He had picked up shifts instead. Dishwashing first, then bar-backing, then finally behind the bar itself once he had learned enough to be trusted with a shaker and a till. Every dollar he made went straight into keeping her alive a little longer.
There hadn’t been room in any of that for a life. He remembered nights standing behind the bar watching other guys his age - regulars, barely older than him half the time - lean across the counter and strike up conversations with women who actually looked back at them, easy, unbothered, like it cost them nothing at all.
Tom had never once managed it. He had rehearsed a hundred opening lines in his head over the years, standing there polishing the same glass for the fifth time, and every single one had died somewhere between his chest and his throat the second a woman actually looked his way.
There’d been one girl, years back, a regular who used to order the same drink every Friday and always said thank you like she meant it.
Tom had spent three months building up the nerve to ask for her number. By the time he’d finally worked out exactly what he wanted to say, she’d stopped coming in - moved cities, another bartender told him, gone just like that, and Tom had gone home that night furious with himself in a way he hadn’t been able to explain to anyone.
Then Sienna had walked into his bar for the first time, loud and glittering and entirely out of reach, and Tom had done exactly what he always did. He’d looked. He’d wanted. And he’d said absolutely nothing, for six straight months, until the night she’d said it for him instead.
Davina had moved exactly like the woman in that one video his friend had made him watch, years ago now, three of them crowded around a phone screen laughing while Tom sat rigid with embarrassment at how much attention everyone was paying to his reaction rather than the screen itself. He hadn’t understood then why it had stuck with him so clearly. He understood a little better now.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand, cutting the thought off clean.
A transaction alert. He unlocked the screen, already braced for good news, and found something closer to relief instead.
All of the day’s reward money had been automatically deducted and routed straight toward his mother’s old hospital loan - the one that had been hanging over him for years, the one he hadn’t been able to touch a single payment on since the wedding had swallowed his ability to work at all.
**Loan balance remaining: $35,000.00**
Down. Really down, for the first time in a year. Tom stared at the number, something loosening in his chest that had nothing to do with anything Davina had done to him an hour ago.
It wasn’t paid off - not even close - but it was smaller than it had been that morning, and for a debt he’d resigned himself to carrying for the rest of his life, smaller felt like a miracle.
He checked his actual account after, and found it sitting close to empty again, everything he’d earned already swallowed by the deduction. He didn’t mind. He lay back against the pillows, exhausted, and let himself feel something close to hope for the first time in longer than he could remember.
He drifted off without meaning to, the day finally catching up to him all at once.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept when his eyes opened again, the room gone dim, evening light slanting low through the curtains. He lay there a moment, blinking at the ceiling, and something nagged at him before he could name it.
It had been hours. Hours since he’d heard a single word from the system.
No taunt. No teasing notification. No smug little aside about his stamina or his charm stat or any of the dozen things it had needled him about every few minutes since the moment he’d woken up beside Davina’s penlight.
"Hey," he thought, testing it, waiting for the familiar cool blue voice to answer back the way it always did, instant and amused.
Nothing.
"System? Are you there?" He sat up properly now, his heart picking up pace.
Silence answered him, complete, nothing behind his eyes but the ordinary dark of his own skull.
Panic climbed up his throat, fast and cold as he thought;
What if it was gone. What if whatever had saved him, whatever had turned his life inside out in a single day, had simply decided it was done with him and vanished as suddenly as it had arrived - leaving him exactly as powerless as he’d been that morning, except now with a memory of what it had felt like, however briefly, to matter?
"No... God, please no!" Tom prayed desperately.
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