Chapter 638 | I’m Not Making Rules Tonight

Chapter 638: 638 | I’m Not Making Rules Tonight

I stared at the photo of my thumb obstructing Dralun’s raccoon report and considered whether this represented my photographic peak or whether the protein bar wrapper visible in the corner added artistic depth.

"Goodnight, hero."

Felicity Hardy had typed those two words with a period at the end, which from her was the equivalent of a fourteen-page letter sealed with wax. Felicity did not use periods. Felicity used exclamation marks the way other people used oxygen. A period from Felicity meant she had started to type something longer, deleted it, retyped it, deleted that version too, and settled on something small enough to send before her brain could edit it a third time.

I knew this because I had watched her text beside me on a cafeteria bench for three weeks and her thumb moved in a pattern Percy would have documented if Percy were not too busy documenting literally everything else about the people around him.

I should have left the message alone. Goodnight meant goodnight. A period meant the door was closed. Going to sleep was the correct play given that my body had been awake for twenty hours, my ribs still remembered a twelve-foot creature’s opinion about my structural integrity, and I had a call with Odette Reyes in the morning that Diane had specifically warned me not to attend while looking tired.

I typed: "Interesting enough for you?" and attached a second photo, this one of the bat stickers spreading across the office window frame, their little paper wings catching streetlight in a way that made the glass look haunted.

She responded in six seconds.

"OKAY THAT’S ACTUALLY CUTE. Where is that?"

"Office. My supervisor’s receptionist decorates."

"The goth parasol girl from the drool photo."

"Her name is Ophelia."

"I know her name. I have her account bookmarked. She posts aesthetic crime and her eyeliner could cut glass and she sat on your shoulder for forty minutes and you let her. I have OPINIONS about Ophelia."

"She has opinions about you too. She called your outfit from Monday quote a war crime against cotton."

"She’s WRONG and I’m going to FIGHT her."

"She would enjoy that. She has bats."

"Bats?"

"Ghost bats. They fly through your chest and make you sad."

"Lukas."

"Yeah."

"When are you back on campus."

I looked at the clock on the laptop. Eleven minutes past ten. Route 31 ran its last eastbound at ten forty-five, which meant I needed to leave in twenty minutes if I wanted to catch the connection at Central Station. The alternative involved calling a rideshare at surge pricing, and the coffee can behind Dralun’s desk did not cover my transportation budget.

"Bus gets me back around eleven thirty."

"Come to my room."

Three words. No exclamation marks. No emojis. No qualifiers about wanting to hang out or watch a movie or discuss the French toast place she had been suggesting all week.

Come to my room.

My thumb hovered over the keyboard while the laptop hummed its dying-battery song and the scanner blinked red in the dark and the raccoon report sat at two hundred and one words, compliant and honest and completely irrelevant to the electricity running up the back of my neck.

Through the bond, Sloane slept. Her frequency had settled into the deep, steady register that meant she was dreaming about something warm, and the Devotion’s Echo carried that warmth into my ribs from fourteen kilometers away without asking permission.

"Felicity."

"Don’t make it complicated. I just want to see you."

"You saw me six hours ago." ℯℯ𝘭.

"I saw you exhausted and smelling like dim sum. That doesn’t count."

"What counts?"

"You. Sitting somewhere I can reach. Not behind a desk or across a cafeteria or three buildings away while I pretend I’m not checking whether you texted back yet."

Her typing bubble appeared and vanished four times before the final message arrived.

"I have French toast supplies and a speaker and I stole Caden’s good blanket. You can sleep here if you want. Or not sleep. I’m not making rules tonight."

The interface chose this moment to inform me that Felicity’s Temptation Gauge sat at forty-one percent and climbing, her emotional state read as vulnerable and determined, and the probability of tonight generating what the System called a Progression Event exceeded something I did not read the rest of because I closed the notification with my whole hand flat on the screen.

"I’ll text when I’m at the gate."

"Good boy."

She sent a heart emoji after that. Pink and simple, the kind of thing she sent to forty people a day without any particular meaning attached, except I had watched Felicity Hardy deploy those hearts for three weeks and she sent them to everyone except me.

Shoulder bumps. Stolen fries. The way her knee pressed against mine under desks when she wanted me to know she was there without announcing it. She had developed an entire dialect of physical contact that bypassed words because words carried weight she wasn’t ready for yet, and the heart meant she had run out of room for the dialect tonight.

Rather than construct something clever, something with plausible deniability attached, she had sent the simplest thing in her vocabulary and trusted me to hear the rest.

I saved the raccoon report.

Closed the laptop.

Turned off the desk lamp that Ophelia had decorated with a tiny bat mobile made from black cardstock and dental floss, dangling just far enough into my peripheral vision that I registered it every time I leaned back to think. One of her more restrained installations, which meant it only occupied approximately fifteen percent of available lamp surface rather than the full hundred she clearly aspired to.

The office sat dark around me. All pressed tin and red pins and the lingering scent of five-spice drifting up from Grandma Lin’s kitchen, layered over the faint musty smell of old paper and older wood that every building in this district seemed to carry in its walls.

I felt the second heartbeat under my sternum press once. Warm and patient and already settling back into its waiting rhythm before I finished processing that it had moved at all.

Sloane was still asleep.