AN
I've rewrote a few chapters to take off the old aristocratic behaviors of the evergreens and the world, as I hadn't realised it was pushing the story into a weird and 'sterile' direction. (Chapters 9, 11, 12 & 13) sorry for the rewrite.
***
The glass doors of Palais Noir swept shut behind us, leaving the cool afternoon air of the Grand Galleria to wash over my heated face.
The instant our shoes cleared the threshold, Sophia spun on her heel, her tailored jacket swishing with sharp aristocratic precision. She gave my arm a hard, stinging swat.
“Jason!” she hissed under her breath. Her eyes darted frantically left and right across the bustling promenade, checking every passerby, before locking onto me with pure, scandalized mortification. “Are you out of your mind?! You groped my... my rear in the middle of a boutique!”
“Looked like two people leaving a store to me,” I said, offering an unbothered shrug even though my chest was still thumping like a kick drum from the sheer adrenaline of actually doing it. “And for the record, you didn't pull away until we were out the door.”
Sophia’s mouth opened, snapped shut, and she let out a breathless, strangled squeak, slapping both hands over her flaming cheeks. For all her polished, heiress posture, she looked like a high-schooler who had just been caught making out behind the bleachers.
“You are unbelievable,” she groaned into her palms, her voice muffled before she peeked out with one narrowed blue eye. “If someone from St. Jude’s had been standing by the window, that would be all over every group chat by the time we hit the parking deck!”
“Let them talk,” I laughed, feeling my swagger settle back into my bones. “They’ll just wonder what kind of luck you had to find a guy who doesn't treat you like fragile glass.”
Sophia lowered her hands, blowing out a long, shuddering breath. She tried her best to look imposing, her chin lifting with that patrician pride she’d been trained in, but the corners of her lips twitched upward with a helpless, fascinated smile.
The breeze picked up again, carrying a rich, intoxicating wave of warm vanilla, buttery crust, and spiced baked apples straight into my face. My jaw clicked as I swallowed hard. The scent was practically radiating off her collarbones, thick enough to make my stomach give an audible, ferocious rumble.
Sophia’s eyes flicked downward at the sound, her brow furrowing with genuine concern. “Was that your stomach?”
“I told you, teasing you burns serious calories,” I grumbled, rubbing the back of my neck. “Come on. Point me toward real food before I start taking bites out of your jacket. It literally smells like a bakery.”
“You are so strange, Jason,” Sophia murmured, though her tone was warm and amused as she turned toward the grand central arcade.
Jodie fell into step a few paces behind us, handing the boutique bags to one of the waiting knights before continuing to follow us. A calm, smug grin of a mother thoroughly enjoying the show. A little further back, the four female knights in runic power armor kept their distance, a discreet, silent buffer against the crowd.
We reached the sweeping mezzanine at the top level of the Grand Galleria. Up here on the second floor, the layout was designed for communal indulgence beneath the soaring iron-and-glass skylights. The center of the hall was an expansive, marble-tiled dining plaza filled with wrought-iron tables, plush booth nooks, and low boxwood hedges. Around the wide perimeter ran a curved crescent of high-end culinary storefronts. Each eatery catered directly to the cluster of tables fronting its entrance, but with overlapping service zones—meaning people sitting in the shared middle could comfortably mix and match dishes from neighboring kitchens.
“Mother usually makes reservations at L’Hiver when we come here,” Sophia explained, gesturing toward a quiet, candlelit terrace tucked behind velvet ropes. “They do an exquisite chilled quail consommé, or we could try the tea salon on the second tier.”
I glanced at the tiny, delicate porcelain dishes being served under silver cloches. “Sophia, I just did two hundred push-ups, wrestled an entire boutique stylist, and survived getting hit by a cosmic beam. Strange bird broth is not going to cut it.”
Sophia paused, blinking in mild confusion. “Then what did you have in mind?”
My eyes locked onto a wooden facade tucked between a high-end patisserie and an espresso bar: Emilio’s Wood-Fired Hearth. A brick oven glowed cherry-red in the open kitchen, and the smell of blistered sourdough crust, bubbling mozzarella, and roasted garlic cut right through the air.
“Pizza,” I said, pointing.
Sophia stared at the kiosk, then at me, as if I had just pointed at a garbage bin. “Pizza? In the middle of the promenade?”
“Wood-fired, thin-crust, fresh out of an oven,” I countered, taking her by the elbow and steering her toward the counter. “Trust me, Duchess. Real food.”
We were cutting across the central plaza toward the tables nearest the pizza oven when a crisp, lilting voice called out.
“Sophia? Is that actually you?”
Sophia paused, her posture instinctively snapping into that practiced, aristocratic poise before she smoothly pivoted toward the sound.
Just two tables over—seated right in front of The Pearl Terrace, an upscale raw bar serving platters of shaved ice and chilled oysters—was an auburn-haired girl in a pristine cream blazer over an emerald silk blouse.
Bethany Harper.
Beside her, seated across a table littered with oyster shells and champagne flutes, was Edward. He was wearing a ruffled lilac shirt that practically swallowed his slender neck. The instant Edward’s eyes landed on me, his fork slipped from his fingers, clattering softly against his porcelain plate. His knuckles went white against his napkin, his gaze darting in raw, quiet panic between me, Sophia, and Bethany.
Bethany didn't notice her date's sudden freeze. She had smiled, about to say something casual to Sophia, but her eyes naturally slid from Sophia’s shoulder across to mine.
Her words died in her throat.
Her head tilted, her brow furrowing in utter, genuine perplexity. At St. Jude’s, Bethany had seen Sophia and Jason standing together dozens of times. In every memory she had, Catherine’s heir had been a frail, reclusive boy with his chin tucked to his collar, eyes glued to the floor, standing easily half a head shorter than his fiancée.
Now, she was looking at someone who looked like he belonged on a varsity rugby pitch.
I was standing right beside Sophia, broad-shouldered and squared-off, and I was clearly half a head taller than her. There were no baggy, oversized sweaters to hide behind today; my crisp white tee hugged the wide taper of my chest, leaving zero mystery about the thick cords of muscle in my arms.
“And... Lord Jason?” Bethany’s voice trailed off, her fork lowering slowly to her plate as she blinked rapidly, trying and failing to bridge the gap between memory and reality. “Heavens... What on earth have you been doing to yourself? Is this something to do with what happened at your house this morning? You look... completely different.” The source of this chapter is novelping(.)com.
“Oh, you heard. Mother brought some strange green glowing cereal called Tachy’O’s,” I said, offering an easy, relaxed grin. “Good to see you, Beth.”
Bethany froze for half a heartbeat before a loud bark of genuine laughter burst from her throat. She slapped a hand against the table, shaking her head as a wide, appreciative grin spread across her face.
“Tachy’O’s?” she chuckled, thoroughly amused by the audacity of both the pun and the casual nickname. Her eyes swept over my shoulders with an approving gleam. “God, Catherine must have spiked the whole box. What did she do, dose you with horse steroids between crunches? You look like you could bench press this table.”
Across from her, Edward did not find it funny at all. In fact, all the color drained from his face.
“Gl-glowing green cereal?” Edward squeaked out, his fork trembling in his grip as his eyes went wide with pure, sheltered horror. “Jason... that doesn't sound healthy, did you not question it before you ate them?!”
Bethany rolled her eyes fondly at Edward’s panic, reaching across the table to give his trembling hand a reassuring pat. “Breathe, Eddie, it was a joke. His cells look plenty stable to me.”
She turned back to us, flashing an easy, good-natured grin. “Come sit with us, make it a double date. There’s plenty of room.”
I looked at Sophia and shrugged. “Do you wanna?”
Sophia responded with a faint shrug of her own, though the corner of her mouth softened. “Sure.”
“Oh, wait—what about Mom?” I looked over my shoulder, scanning the promenade, only to spot Jodie already laughing at a table two rows over with a slender, neatly dressed man. Tim—Edward’s dad. When Jodie caught me looking, I pointed at the table with Beth and Ed to show we were joining them. Tim gave a warm, polite wave and pulled out a seat for Jodie to join him.
Turns out I wasn't the only guy out here being shadowed by a parent.
We walked over to the table. Reaching out, I caught the back of the wrought-iron chair beside Bethany and pulled it out smoothly so Sophia could sit.
The casual hum of the table died instantly.
“Err... Jason, what are you doing?” Sophia asked, stopping dead in her tracks.
“What? I’m pulling the chair out for you,” I said, shrugging.
Sophia froze.
Across the table, Edward’s jaw went completely slack, his linen napkin slipping straight off his lap onto the floor. Bethany’s champagne glass paused an inch from her lips, her eyes darting from me to the empty seat as if waiting for a hidden camera crew to jump out of the hedges.
Sophia hesitated, her pulse visibly fluttering against the delicate hollow of her throat as she stared at the chair, then up into my eyes.
The social reality of what I’d just done finally clicked in my head. Just because I’d been told this was a matriarchal world didn't mean my everyday muscle memory had caught up. In this society, the woman pulled out the chair, handled the reservations, paid the bill, and ushered her delicate fiancé into his seat. A broad-shouldered boy in a fitted tee pulling out an heiress's chair on a high-society terrace was an absolute, head-spinning inversion of etiquette.
A slow smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. A blunder? Maybe. But it was way too good of an angle to waste.
I leaned down just an inch, holding her gaze with a lazy, arrogant smirk, and dropped my voice into a low, playful murmur.
“Be a good girl, take a seat, and maybe I’ll give you that goodnight kiss later.”
A blazing, incandescent flush exploded across Sophia’s face, painting her cheeks and ears bright crimson. “Jason! I swear to God—”
She shot a desperate, mortified glare at Bethany, who was leaning back in her chair, practically vibrating with silent, ecstatic mirth. Beth wasn't rescuing her; she was eating up every second of the spectacle.
Edward, on the other hand, was staring at me with wide, starry-eyed wonder, looking like he was about to faint from a secondhand scandal.
“You promised we’d do today my way,” I reminded her smoothly, tapping the top of the iron chair.
Sophia glared daggers at me. For three long seconds she held out, her aristocratic pride waging a brutal war against the boy looking down at her. Finally, blowing out a sharp, defeated breath, she relented. She stepped forward and lowered herself into the seat.
The exact second her backside hit the cushion, Bethany chimed in without missing a beat:
“Whipped.”
Sophia’s head snapped toward Bethany, her knuckles whitening as her fist clenched on the tabletop, promising pure physical retribution.
Bethany’s only response was a blinding, dimpled grin.
I took the seat beside Edward, pretending not to notice the laser beams shooting between them. Reaching across the marble top, I plucked Emilio’s laminated card from the table stand, pulled out my phone, and scanned the QR code to pull up the artisan pizza menu.
Sophia cleared her throat, frantically smoothing her skirt and trying to resurrect whatever shreds of high-society composure she had left. She fixed Bethany with a sharp, pointed stare, desperate to change the subject.
“Mother had business with the district magistrate downstairs, so she dropped us off to kill an hour,” Bethany explained breezily, tapping a manicured nail against her flute.
Her sentence trailed off as her eyes drifted past Sophia, landing on me. Her gaze did a slow, bewildered double-take as she watched Catherine’s six-foot heir casually scrolling through wood-fired pizza toppings and ordering his own lunch on an app.
“Soph, what are you having? Still want Pizza?” I asked casually. Then I turned to the other two, with their lite plates filled with salad and shrimp. “What about you two, want something other than grass and insects.”
Bethany choked on a sip of her champagne, coughing into a linen napkin while a delighted, wicked grin fought its way onto her face. “Grass and insects? That’s wild-caught Atlantic prawn and baby arugula, you heathen.” She leaned over the table, peering greedily at the glowing screen of my phone. The high-society veneer vanished in an instant, replaced by pure teenage gluttony. “Wait, do they have that spicy sausage one? The one with the hot honey and smoked provolone?”
“Bethany!” Sophia hissed, scandalized all over again. “You’re on a date with Edward!”
“Edward can stick to prawns and salad if he wants,” Bethany fired back cheerfully. “And I skipped breakfast because Mother wanted me to fit into this blazer without looking bloated. If Jason is buying, I’m getting three slices.”
Across from her, Edward just stared at the glowing phone screen in my hands, his throat bobbing as he swallowed hard. His fingers curled tightly into the crisp linen napkin on his lap, knuckles whitening with an anxiety that went far deeper than table etiquette.
“Jason, are you... Are you sure you can just do that?” His voice was barely above a whisper, hesitant and fragile, like someone peering over the edge of a balcony he’d been told his entire life would collapse under him. He cast a hurried, nervous glance toward the servers polishing silver by the counter, then back at me. “Without... asking first? What if someone says something?”
“Who the fuck do I need to ask? It's pizza.” I looked at Edward in confusion.
Edward blinked, transfixed. There was a quiet, desperate ache in his eyes—the look of a caged bird watching another bird fly straight through an open window and realize the cat wasn't even looking. It explained so much in a single heartbeat. This was why he had secretly reached out to the previous Jason. He had wanted something real, something outside the rigid little box high society had built around him. But while the old Jason had retreated into the shadows when things got complicated, I was sitting here blowing right through the walls in broad daylight.
Edward’s eyes flicked to the steaming wood-fired oven two storefronts down, his lower lip trembling slightly as the aroma of blistered dough and melting cheese drifted across our table.
“Just grab a few slices of mine.” I continued looking down the menu, “Aw, spicy chicken wings. Oh, Soph, you haven't told me what you want.” I offered her the phone.
“A margherita slice,” she said stiffly, tilting her chin up to salvage her dignity. “Just fresh basil and buffalo mozzarella. And if you dare smear tomato sauce on that white shirt after Monique spent forty minutes tailoring it, I am leaving you here to walk home.”
I looked at her incredulously. “Are you a vegan?” I asked sharply. Informing her that I would find one of those possible answers deeply offensive.
“No! Well… the other Jason was… what are you having?”
“Emilio’s Spicy all-meat special,” I stated flatly.
In the end, Sophia just sighed in defeat and asked for a slice of that. I didn't really get the concept of ordering a single slice of pizza, so I went with an XL, a Large for Beth and Ed, and a basket of garlic-parm wings for good measure.
Once the buzzer went off and the spread hit the table, Bethany leaned in across the steam, her eyes alight with curiosity. “Alright, cough it up. What actually happened this morning?” She looked between Sophia and me. “And what did you mean by ‘the other Jason’?”
What followed was the abridged, carefully sanitized version of the morning’s chaos.
Sophia and I tag-teamed the explanation while I systematically dismantled Beth’s plate of chilled jumbo shrimp—much to her mock outrage. Neither of us understood the quantum physics behind tachyon containment fields, so we stuck to the bare essentials: an experimental accident on Catherine’s street, a blinding green flash, and a displacement event that pulled me from a parallel reality into this one, while sending their Jason to mine.
I deliberately left out the societal differences between our worlds, and Sophia knew even less than I did. To them, I was simply an alternate version of Catherine’s son who hadn't spent his life cooped up in a sickbed.
Bethany listened with rapt attention, her fork frozen mid-air. “So... you really are an alternate version of him? Not just hopped up on metahuman combat stimulants?” She leaned back, whistling low under her breath as she took in my shoulders again. “Unbelievable. The Department of Metahuman Affairs usually sweeps containment leaks under the rug within an hour. Having Catherine’s heir physically swapped across realities is an absolute nightmare for the PR board.”
Across the table, Edward was completely still.
He wasn't looking at the shrimp. His eyes were fixed on me, dark with a quiet, fragile ache. He didn't say a word about his past with the former Jason—with Sophia and Bethany sitting right beside us, he wouldn't dare breathe a syllable—but the silent question in his gaze was deafening.
What happened to him? Is he safe?
I caught his eye over the rim of my water glass and gave him a single, subtle nod. He’s okay.
A tiny, almost imperceptible breath slipped past Edward’s lips, his tense shoulders sinking an inch. “A parallel world...” he murmured softly, keeping his voice carefully neutral so the girls wouldn't read into it. “It must feel... completely surreal, being pulled out of your entire life like that. Having to start over in a place you don't even recognize.”
“Surreal is one word for it,” I replied, keeping my tone light. “A lot to adapt to. But the food here holds up.”
The arrival of the main spread shattered whatever quiet mood had settled over the table.
If my interdimensional origin story was hard to swallow, watching an 18-year-old with a hypercharged metabolic engine eat in real-time was an entirely separate shock. High-society boys were supposed to delicately nibble on greens and daintily dab their lips with linen.
By the time Edward had carefully lifted his first slice of spinach-and-parm with both hands, I had folded a dripping slice of spicy sausage in half, inhaled it in three bites, and was already reaching for a garlic knot while eyeing a second slice.
Bethany stared, transfixed, an oyster shell paused halfway to her mouth.
“Sweet mother of God,” Beth breathed, looking from my empty plate to Sophia with sheer, unvarnished amazement. “Forget the tachyons. Did Catherine accidentally summon a feral wolf?”