Chime.
[PROGRESSION REQUIREMENT 2: MAKE EMILIANA WILLINGLY INITIATE ONE CONVERSATION WITH THE HOST.]
[STATUS: COMPLETED.]
No number attached. No cashback ticking up, no reward line underneath it. Just confirmation, plain as anything.
Garrett glanced at the screen.
She’d walked over to him. In front of everyone, with every phone in the square pointed her way, she’d crossed the whole distance herself. He hadn’t manufactured a reason, hadn’t gone looking for an opening the way he’d once tried to plan one in a lecture hall watching Brian lean over three rows. She’d simply come and found him.
Apparently that was enough for the System to count it as real.
He put the phone away, oddly pleased by that in a way he didn’t examine too closely.
[PENDING REQUIREMENTS:]
[CAUSE EMILIANA TO DEVELOP GENUINE ROMANTIC INTEREST IN THE HOST.]
[MAKE EMILIANA CHOOSE THE HOST OVER AT LEAST ONE ALTERNATIVE ROMANTIC OPPORTUNITY.]
[EMILIANA VALE MUST PERSONALLY ASK THE HOST ON A DATE.]
He looked at that one for longer.
They had something now, he wasn’t going to pretend they didn’t, not after the walk, not after she’d all but confirmed something without saying a single word to confirm it. But whatever that something was, it wasn’t the same as these lines asked for, and he knew it well enough not to confuse the two.
So that’s going to take a while, he thought, and left it there. Nothing to force. Nothing to schedule, Just a fact sitting next to the others.
He checked his balance out of habit more than need, standing in the queue for a sandwich he wasn’t sure he wanted anymore.
£5,184.67.
He did the maths without really meaning to ; food, the bus pass, a phone bill he’d forgotten about until it left, the odd thing here and there that hadn’t felt like spending at the time and clearly had been. Down from £9,501.12 in the space of what felt like no time at all.
The System hadn’t given him a penny of it back. This wasn’t cashback. This was just money, doing what money did when nobody stopped it — going out steadily, unremarkably, the way it always had before any of this started.
He wasn’t rich. He had, for the first time in his life, some breathing room. Those weren’t the same thing, and he wasn’t going to let himself forget it just because the number still looked enormous next to what he’d grown up with.
Daniel found him at the sandwich queue anyway, mid-complaint about a seminar he’d apparently slept through half of.
"You look thoughtful, Worrying sign."
"Just doing maths."
"Boring maths or interesting maths?"
"Rent maths."
"Ah...Truly the worst kind." Daniel grabbed a sandwich off the shelf without checking what it was. "You coming to the thing Thursday? Football’s on at the union, cheap pints, the usual."
"Maybe."
"That’s a no."
"That’s a maybe."
"Your maybes are always nos in disguise."
"Then why ask."
"Optimism." Daniel paid for both sandwiches before Garrett could stop him, which had become enough of a routine that neither of them commented on it anymore. "Come Thursday. You’ve been weirdly social lately. Don’t regress."
"I’m not regressing."
"You’re thinking about rent maths in a sandwich queue. That’s a regression symptom if I’ve ever seen one."
They ate on the low wall outside the union, and for a while nothing else about the day needed thinking about at all.
Brian called her that evening, not messaged.
"Hey You free?...Friday"
No preamble. No checking whether now was a good time. He asked it the way you’d ask something you already half-expected the answer to.
There was a pause on her end. Not long — a beat, maybe two, the kind that could have meant anything from thinking it over to simply finishing whatever she’d been doing before the phone rang.
"When?"
Not yes. Not sure, let me check. Just the practical half of the question, handed straight back to him.
"Seven. That new place on the high street, the one everyone’s been going on about."
"Fine."
"I’ll pick you up."
"Alright."
That was the whole of it. He didn’t need to ask twice, didn’t need to sell the idea, didn’t need to explain why Friday or why that restaurant. It was simply arranged, because that was how things between them tended to go — quickly, without much resistance, without either of them treating it as anything other than the obvious next thing.
"See you Friday, then."
"See you."
The call ended. Nothing about her voice, in the whole exchange, had given away more than the words themselves did.
Garrett spent that evening exactly the way he’d told Daniel he would — half-heartedly, then properly, once the football turned out to be worth watching after all — and didn’t think about Emiliana once the entire night, not out of any effort to avoid it, just because his attention had somewhere else to be for a few hours.
Garrett was already thinking of the next avaliable step to take, he was weirdly confident he could do something.
He wasn’t Daniel’s friend to her anymore, or the guy who’d helped her with school work, or even just the one who’d handled the spider. Two out of five, and the System had confirmed it without needing to attach a single pound to the confirmation.
He put the phone away and went to his lecture, entirely unaware that somewhere else, on a completely different track, something else had just been arranged.