Jason’s feet found the building on autopilot, which was the first sign something was off, normally he counted doors, checked the number plate twice, treated his own apartment like a stranger he had to reintroduce himself to every single night.
Tonight he just walked. Straight past two doors that weren’t his, straight up to 192 like his legs had memorized the route without consulting the rest of him.
He stood in front of it for a second before actually reaching for his keys, replaying the last ten minutes on a loop he hadn’t consciously started.
Her shoulders under his hands. The half-second where she’d gone rigid before her arms came up. The way she’d said goodnight like she was testing whether the word still worked.
I actually did that
Not the thinking about it version. The version where he crossed a sidewalk, said something real out loud, and followed through before his nerves could organize a counterargument.
He was still standing there, key half-raised, mentally replaying it a second time because apparently once wasn’t enough when the panel bloomed in front of him.
[QUEST COMPLETE: Hug Sarah]
[Reward: $500 Deposited]
Jason blinked at it.
Oh. Right. That happened too
His balance flashed beneath it. His phone buzzed and he pulled it out to confirm if the numbers in front of him were real and they both displayed the same numbers
Account Balance: $500.43
And for a second the two facts sat side by side in his head, refusing to merge properly.
He had genuinely, voluntarily hugged a girl he liked, or rather felt connected to and gotten paid five hundred dollars for it, and he wasn’t sure which one his brain was supposed to be more stunned by.
He settled on being stunned by both at once, which felt like the responsible choice.
"Five hundred dollars." He said it out loud to the empty hallway, mostly to confirm it wasn’t a typo.
It wasn’t
The number just sat there, smug and correct, the first time all day the system had actually rewarded him instead of assigning him homework or humiliating him in front of a cashier.
This is new. I don’t hate it. I don’t entirely trust it either, but I don’t hate it
He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and was in the middle of congratulating himself quietly, privately, the kind of victory lap only he’d ever know about when the panel shifted again.
Sarah’s profile floated up beside her name, the same layout he’d half-memorized by now.
Attraction Level: 31%
Jason stopped with one shoe half off.
Thirty-one?!
He’d checked it what, hours ago? It was at twenty-seven percent, a number he’d spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to interpret like tea leaves.
Now it had jumped an entire ten percent in one afternoon, and unlike the money, unlike the quest, unlike literally everything else the system had thrown at him today this was the number that actually knocked something loose in his chest.
He stood there in his socked feet, one shoe still dangling from his hand, staring at a percentage like it had personally rearranged his evening.
A ten percent increase in attraction
Not from money. Not from a strategic purchase or a clever line he’d rehearsed in the mirror. From a hug and just genuinely being himself and talking to her like a normal person.
He had come a long way in just less than 24hrs of trying to change
For the first time since the whole ridiculous system had shown up in his life, Jason didn’t reach for a joke to cover the moment. He just stood there, quietly, letting it be exactly as big as it actually was.
Jason changed out of his tracksuit and tossed it toward the hamper and missing by a comfortable margin, the same way he’d missed every single day this week. Some things, apparently, the system had no interest or way of fixing.
He caught himself in the mirror halfway through pulling on a t-shirt and paused, actually paused, in a way he wouldn’t have bothered doing a week ago.
Look at you
Not smug, not particularly proud, just noticing, the way you’d notice the weather had changed without remembering exactly when.
A week ago he hadn’t run further than the length of a hallway. A week ago the idea of buying a girl a drink without spiraling into a four-minute internal crisis would’ve sounded like fiction. A week ago he definitely hadn’t hugged anyone on a sidewalk and meant it.
I’m actually doing this. Me, Jason!
Not perfectly. Not without flinching half the time. But doing it.
He dropped onto his bed face-first, fully clothed except for the missing shirt situation he’d apparently abandoned mid-thought, and let his body announce, loudly and without negotiation, that it had had enough of today.
His limbs felt like they belonged to someone who’d been productive, which was a foreign and slightly suspicious sensation.
His phone buzzed against his hip. Then again. Then a third time, in that specific rhythm that meant a backlog had been quietly stacking up all evening probably from the stretch at Max’s shop where he’d been too busy negotiating his own solvency to notice a signal.
He rolled onto his back and thumbed it open.
Ben: bro you coming to school tomorrow or nah
Ben: 👀 👀 👀
He smiled faintly and scrolled past it, making a mental note to actually answer that one before Ben assumed the worst.
Marcus: class got moved to 11 tomorrow, professor emailed
Fine. Normal. Boring, blessedly boring, the kind of message that didn’t require an emotional response.
A group chat, mostly noise, two hundred and something messages he wasn’t going to read individually, the usual chaos of people arguing about nothing important.
And then, near the bottom, sitting there like it had been waiting patiently for him to scroll all the way down to it
Amanda
Jason’s thumb stopped moving.
He stared at the name for a full second before his brain caught up to what he was looking at, like it needed a moment to confirm the letters weren’t rearranging themselves into someone else’s
Amanda
He hadn’t heard from her, hadn’t expected to hear from her, not since the restaurant, not since the laughter in the park, not since her name had become something he actively steered his thoughts away from.
He sat up slowly, phone held a little too tight, and opened the message.