Friday night settled over the city, and Garrett never noticed when the system quietly dropped a completion notification.
He was already asleep, still in his clothes, one arm hanging off the edge of the bed. The kind of sleep that came easily after a day he hadn’t expected to enjoy as much as he had.
Sunlight found the gap in his curtains sometime past nine.
Garrett groaned, rolled over, and reached for his phone out of habit before he was even fully awake. The screen lit up his face in the dim room.
One message.
Emiliana: I had a really good time yesterday. We should do that again sometime.
He read it twice before his brain caught up with the rest of him.
Huh.
The tired half-smile came on its own, before he’d even decided to have one. He lay there for a second, staring at the ceiling, then looked back down at the phone.
That was when he saw the second thing, Asked he unlocked the phone, a notification from the system.
[PROGRESSION REQUIREMENT: CAUSE EMILIANA TO DEVELOP GENUINE ROMANTIC INTEREST IN THE HOST.]
[STATUS: COMPLETED]
Garrett sat up.
He read it a third time, just to make sure he wasn’t still asleep and inventing things. He wasn’t.
So what happened at eleven?
He had no idea.
He thought back over the afternoon. The park. The conversation that had gone on longer than either of them planned. The things she’d told him that she clearly didn’t tell everyone.
He hadn’t been trying to impress her. He hadn’t been running some elaborate plan. He’d just been himself, mostly because pretending to be anything else was exhausting.
And apparently, that had been enough.
Whatever had changed for her, it had happened without him even knowing.
The thought sat there for a second before Garrett realized he was smiling.
Actually smiling.
Alone in his room, at nothing in particular.
He typed back.
Garrett: Yeah...It was fun, We should. Good morning
Three dots appeared, few minutes later.
Emiliana: Good morning Garrett Good. I’ll hold you to that.
Garrett: looking forward to it.
No reply followed. Just a small heart reaction to his last message.
Garrett set the phone down on the mattress and leaned back against the headboard, staring at the ceiling with a grin he didn’t bother hiding.
There was nobody around to see it anyway.
Eventually, his eyes wandered around the room.
The curtains hung crooked on a rod that had never quite fit. The duvet had a stain near the corner he’d stopped noticing months ago. The chair by the window wobbled whenever he leaned on it.
He’d been meaning to fix some of this for a while.
Now he actually could.
And, although he wasn’t going to admit it too quickly, there was another thought sitting quietly behind that one.
If things with Emiliana kept going this way, there was a chance she’d eventually see this place.
Maybe it was time to make sure he wouldn’t have to apologize for the furniture when she did.
Garrett glanced at the clock.
Saturday had just started.
He got out of bed.
Garrett showered, threw on the least embarrassing T-Shirt he owned, and left the flat
Just over five grand. Still more than he’d ever had at once in his life, and somehow it already felt smaller than it used to.
He wasn’t doing this for anyone. That was the thing he kept circling back to as he locked the door behind him. It wasn’t about Emiliana possibly seeing the place someday, though the thought had crossed his mind once, unbidden, before he’d shoved it aside.
It was simpler than that.
He had money now. Actual money. And he was still living like a guy whose curtains didn’t match his walls because matching curtains had never been an option.
Why keep living like that when he didn’t have to anymore?
The market was busy for a Saturday, which meant he spent the first twenty minutes just getting his bearings and ignoring three separate salespeople who clocked him as an easy sell the second he wandered too close to their stalls.
The duvet was first. He picked one up, actually thick, not the thin two-ply pretending to be substantial, and held it against himself like that would tell him anything useful about how it’d feel at 2am in January.
"This one," he muttered, and moved on before he could talk himself out of it.
Bedsheets next. A set that didn’t come from the clearance bin, soft enough that he ran his thumb over the fabric twice just to confirm it wasn’t a trick.
Curtains that actually blocked light instead of just being clothes hung on the wall. He held them up to check the length and immediately understood why his current ones hung crooked.
Wrong size the whole time.
Nobody had told him, Nobody was going to.
The lighting aisle nearly lost him for good. He stood there longer than he meant to, comparing warm white to daylight to something called "ambient," which sounded like a scented candle pretending to be a lightbulb setting.
He grabbed a floor lamp that didn’t flicker like the one he currently owned and a couple of smaller lamps for the bedside table he didn’t have yet either.
Coffee table came next, low and simple, nothing that screamed money, just something that wouldn’t wobble every time he set a mug down on it. He tested it with his elbow right there in the store, ignoring the look from the guy stacking boxes nearby.
By the time he reached the small stuff, a couple of plants he had no intention of successfully keeping alive, a rug, a picture frame he had exactly nothing to put in yet, he’d stopped thinking about why and just started thinking about whether it looked decent.
That, he realized, was probably the point.
He wasn’t trying to become someone else.
He just wanted the life around him to stop looking like it belonged to the version of him who’d been struggling to get by.
At the till, the total came in lower than he expected. He still had enough left to not panic about it.
He caught a cab back instead of the bus, mostly because carrying a rolled-up rug through public transport sounded like a specific kind of humiliation he didn’t need today.
Standing in the doorway of his flat afterward, bags stacked around his feet, he looked at the place with something between satisfaction and mild disbelief.
Nothing had changed yet.
____
Morgan Gilbert picked up on the fourth ring, which meant he’d been busy, which meant this call was already starting off wrong.
"Brian. Make it quick."
"There’s a situation with Emiliana..." Brian kept his voice level, the way he’d learned to when talking to his father about anything that mattered. "...Someone else is in the picture."
A pause on the other end. Not concern, Just the sound of a man deciding whether this was worth the next thirty seconds of his life.
"Who."
"Some guy from school. Nobody important."
"Then why am I hearing about it."
Brian shifted the phone to his other ear, standing at his window looking down at a street he’d never had to worry about walking. "Because he’s around her more than he should be. I don’t like it."
"You don’t like it," his father repeated, and Brian could hear exactly how flat that sounded coming back at him. "Brian. If he’s a nobody, he’s a nobody. That’s not a problem, that’s a non-issue. You don’t call me about non-issues."
"I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m just..."
"You’re calling your father about a boy you just told me doesn’t matter." A short exhale, more tired than angry. "Do you understand how that sounds."
Brian didn’t answer right away.
"Handle it," his father said, already sounding like he was reaching for something else, some other call, some other problem that actually deserved his attention. "If he’s nothing, make sure he stays nothing. I don’t need to hear his name again unless there’s a reason I should."
The line went dead before Brian could decide whether that had been permission or a dismissal.
He stood there a moment, phone still against his ear, replaying the conversation and not liking how small it had made him feel.
A nobody. He’d said it himself. And somehow saying it out loud had made it worse, not better, like admitting Garrett didn’t matter only made it more obvious that he was starting to matter anyway.
Handle it.
Fine.
He’d handle it.
Across the city, Garrett stood in his flat still figuring out where to start from, entirely unaware that Brian had just decided to make him a problem.