Chapter 76: Something Is Wrong? [FIXED!]
[Ding!]
[Transaction Recorded]
[Target: Sophia Reyes (Mid-Tier MILF)]
[Investment: $0]
[Base Value: $5,800 (First sexual encounter + strong emotional connection + high attraction)]
[300% Beginner Bonus Applied]
[Rebate Received: $23,200]
Liam lay on his back staring at the ceiling with his chest still rising and falling at a pace that hadn’t fully decided to slow down yet.
He hadn’t planned this, that was the thing about everything that had happened in just a few minutes.
The evening had been built around Mrs. Harriet, around documents and dinner and careful positioning, and somewhere between Mateo’s bedroom door closing and a loosely tied robe on a living room sofa the night had reorganised itself entirely. Liam knew Sophia had invited him for a reason, it wasn’t strictly because of Mateo even though that part seemed to be true.
However, Liam was careful as there were boundaries even he knew he shouldn’t cross when it came to Mateo or he might misinterpret Liam as something more of either a father figure or otherwise.
He turned his head and looked at the notification still hovering at the edge of his vision.
[$23,200.]
He ran the total quietly. Rachel across multiple encounters. Sophia’s shopping spree. The salon rebate. Mrs. Harriet’s first dinner meeting and tonight.
[$190,260.]
He exhaled slowly at the ceiling.
He had made close to two hundred thousand dollars in six days from a system that had activated in a parking lot while he was bleeding on the asphalt. The number didn’t feel real and it also felt entirely inevitable, which was a contradiction he had stopped trying to resolve. Liam had been a man with logic all his life but that no longer applied, he had no way to explain what was happening to him.
Sophia shifted beside him, propping herself on one elbow.
"You went quiet," she said.
"Don’t mine me, I’m just lost in thought," Liam muttered under his breath.
"About?" Sophia offered a penny for his thoughts.
"How unexpectedly good this evening turned out," Liam said with a grin.
She smiled at that — the unhurried, unguarded version he’d been collecting since the gym. "You came here to play video games with my brother."
"The night had other ideas," Liam said with a grin.
"It did." She was quiet for a moment, tracing something on the sheet without looking at it. "Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"What are you actually looking for? With all of this." She said it without accusation, just the honest curiosity of a woman who had let someone past a wall she maintained carefully. "Because you don’t feel like someone who does things without knowing why."
Liam thought about it properly before answering.
"Something real," he said. "I spent three years inside a firm that turned out to be built on other people’s agendas. I spent two years with a woman who was doing the same thing." He paused. "I know what performances look like now. I’m not interested in them."
Sophia looked at him for a moment.
"Okay," she said simply.
"Okay?" Liam expected her to try and stick a label on them.
"That’s a real answer." She lay back down. "I appreciate real answers."
They talked for another forty minutes after that — about Mateo, about what she was building, about the difference between the life you planned and the one you ended up actually living. Liam found himself more engaged than the hour warranted. She was perceptive in ways she didn’t announce, the kind of intelligence that operated quietly and surfaced in the questions she chose to ask rather than the statements she made.
He felt more connected to her leaving than he had arriving.
At the door she leaned against the frame with her arms loosely crossed, the robe retied, hair slightly undone from where it had been earlier.
She looked like a proper housewife, Liam noticed it right away and truth be told, it was a good look on her.
"Drive safe," she said.
"Really? I thought I would drive into the sea and drown."
She reached forward, took a small handful of his jacket, and pulled him in. The kiss was slow and passionate, not even caring about Liam’s silly response, the goodbye of someone who meant it rather than the reflex of someone who felt obligated.
She released him shortly after.
"Goodnight, Liam."
"Goodnight, Sophia."
He walked to the stairs without looking back, which took a small but definite act of will.
The drive home started fine.
It was somewhere around the third traffic light that he noticed it.
A heaviness sitting in his chest that wasn’t emotional. A faint ache behind his eyes that the evening’s events couldn’t fully account for. He rolled his shoulders and they responded with a stiffness that went beyond Mike’s workouts. His hands on the wheel felt slightly off, it wasn’t because of the night he just had either and noticed it was more like something that affected his muscles directly.
He ran a mental inventory.
The last six days had been, by any reasonable measure, physically extraordinary. The workouts. The late nights. The early mornings. The emotional intensity of multiple simultaneous situations running at full pressure without much in the way of actual recovery.
He thought about his system.
About what it meant to have something this valuable operating inside a body he had been treating like it was indestructible purely because the returns had been good.
"There is no version of this," he thought with sudden clarity, "where I let my health become the variable."
He turned at the next junction as his body had to be in pristine condition, he couldn’t risk anything else at this point in his life.
Away from home and right towards the hospital.
It was late but the emergency entrance would be open and he wasn’t taking chances with symptoms he couldn’t name on a body he now had very specific reasons to protect. He pulled into the hospital lot, killed the engine, and sat for a moment.
He had been given something extraordinary.
The least he could do was make sure he was still standing to use it.
He got out of the car.