091: Date?
**Chapter 91**
“You okay, Tyler?” Betty asked while we ate.
Her question made the whole table look at me. That was when they noticed the sweat on my forehead, the tightness in my jaw, the way I had been gripping my fork like it had personally offended me. Perfect. Exactly what I needed after putting three men on the mall floor.
I reached for the oldest lie I owned.
“I don’t know. My stomach hurts for some reason.”
The stomach excuse. Always worked. Back home I used it whenever I needed an hour behind a locked door so Mom wouldn’t knock and ask if I wanted tea. It sounded harmless. It bought silence. Right now I needed both, because the pink haze coming off Sara and Sasha was still sitting in my blood even after the food had gone cold.
“Should we go to a hospital?” Mira asked.
There was worry on her face, but not the soft kind. More like a father watching his son try to skip school. Man up. Endure it. Don’t turn a stomachache into a production.
“I’ll have it checked,” I said, forcing a smile. “But after I’ve dropped you all at home.”
“We can go in my car,” Betty offered.
She did not mean she would chauffeur the girls. She meant she would take me. That part got lost in the noise immediately.
“Great, then I’ll take Tyler to the hospital.”
Carol said it fast enough to steal the air out of the table. Betty looked like someone had snatched her favorite cake off her plate. Sara’s eyes cut to me with a silent order I understood too well.
Keep your hands to yourself.
The excuse backfired in record time. One minute I was inventing abdominal pain. The next I was in my own passenger seat, Carol driving because I was supposedly sick, heading toward a hospital I did not need. The further we got from the girls, the more the pressure in my body dropped. Without that pink fog chewing on my nerves, the so-called stomachache became exactly what it had always been, lust I couldn’t spend in public.
I told her I was fine. She insisted anyway. Better safe than sorry. If I fought too hard, I would look guilty of something worse than a cramp.
So we ended up at the hospital.
The nurses ran basic tests. Blood pressure. Temperature. Questions I answered on autopilot. Most of them were women. Charm did the rest. Extra glances. A second temperature check that had nothing to do with medicine. One of them laughed too easily when I said I probably just ate too fast.
Then a beautiful lady doctor suggested a “more thorough” exam in her office. Alone. Naked. Door closed.
Yeah. I knew where that was going.
I shut it down before she could dress it up as protocol. Unnecessary. I said no even when she pushed, even when she smiled like she was doing me a favor.
Back in the waiting area, Carol watched me with a look that was half amused and half impressed.
“God. One would say you were her dinner.”
So I wasn’t the only one who saw it.
“Well, I am that cute.”
I meant it as a joke. She didn’t treat it like one.
“No argument there.”
That was the first time I looked at her without stacking her father over her face. Without thinking about poaching, partnerships, and people trying to peel pieces off my money. Just Carol. Tall. Blonde. Skin so fair it was almost alabaster, the rare kind you didn’t see unless somebody’s bloodline had been picky for generations. Hourglass, and she didn’t hide it. The shirt wasn’t a crop top so much as something borrowed from a smaller sister. Once the denim jacket came off, her chest pressed against the fabric with no shame at all. The jeans were looser than the shirt, but they still made it obvious her ass was not average.
Objectively, she sat one level under Sara.
And that was me being as fair as I could, because no one was more beautiful than Sara to me. That thought should have made the rest of this easier. It didn’t.
“I had fun today,” Carol said out of nowhere.
“I’m glad.”
I’m glad?
The words came out polite and empty. They were not the whole truth. Part of me had fun watching Sara empty stores. Part of me had fun breaking those men. Part of me was still waiting for the system to stop flashing red warnings in the back of my skull.
“So tell me about your future, Carol.”
I changed the subject the only way I knew how: ask someone else to talk until the danger passed.
She thought for a second, fingers tapping the side of her cup. “I want to become a journalist.”
“Really? What inspires you?”
“Wow.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Usually everyone just says, ‘What for?’”
She didn’t need to explain the rest. Rich girl. Boarding school. A fortune already sitting in a room with her name on the door. And she wanted to run the streets for scoops instead of sitting still and looking decorative.
“Why would that be a question?”
“Because people say I’m not up for it. That I should enjoy the comfort given to me instead of chasing stories.” She made a cute annoyed face with it, like she had heard that line so many times it had worn a groove in her.
“Haha.”
“See? Even you find it funny.”
She was only half defending herself. The mood had loosened. That was the dangerous part. Easy talk made promises feel cheap.
“Well, unfortunately for you,” I said once we had both settled, “I don’t know any speeches to motivate you.”
She waited, watching me like she already knew I wasn’t going to leave it there.
“But what I do know is that you’re very… persuasive. Maybe that’s a start.”
“You think?”
“Mhm.”
“Persuasive enough to have you take me out on a date?”
There it was. The question I had been dodging since the mall, since her father, since Tom’s too-pleased face at dinner.
I couldn’t shut her down cold. Not after the talk. Not after she had driven me here and sat through nurses and a doctor who wanted me naked for no reason.
“As long as you don’t mind.”
I hadn’t just walked into her trap. I had helped build it, then held the door open for her to walk through it.
“Great. I’m free tomorrow.”
A black car rolled into the hospital lot before I could take the words back. A man in a bodyguard suit got out and opened her door. Another woman in the same uniform was already inside, eyes forward, expression dead.
So that was the feeling. Eyes on me for a while now. Not lust. Security. The kind of attention that meant somebody important thought I was worth watching.
“See you, Tyler.”
She waved, beaming. I waved back because there was nothing else to do. The bodyguards didn’t flicker. Protect and nothing else. Fair enough.
Now I had to deal with the fallout.
“Absolutely not!”
Sara’s voice hit the house like a thrown plate. We were in her room. I hoped it was soundproof. I did not believe it for a second.
“Do you know how wrong it is?”
Lower now, but still mad. Her arms were folded. Her eyes were wet at the edges in that way that wasn’t crying yet, just pressure.
One could argue a date with her friend was not as wrong as sleeping with her cousin. I also knew that if I said that out loud, I would not be leaving the room on my own feet.
So I spent a good hour talking her down. It was dinner. Nothing else. No hotel. No “one more drink.” No hands under a tablecloth. I said Carol’s father was circling me and that saying no too hard would look like I had something to hide. Sara hated that answer, but she understood leverage. She made me promise anyway. The fact that she allowed the date at all counted as progress.
When she finally cooled, I moved in. Lust was still sitting too high in my body. The system’s warning about a berserk state had not left my head since the restaurant. I didn’t want to find out what that word meant the hard way.
She stepped back.
“Nu-uh.”
“What?”
I sounded offended. I had no right to. Not after last night. Not after this morning. Not after promising her a clean dinner and then reaching for her the second she stopped yelling.
“No. Not tonight.”
She walked out still upset, shoulders tight, chin up, the walk of someone who wanted to slam a door and decided not to give me the satisfaction.
At dinner she made passing remarks about me and Carol. Little knives dropped into normal conversation. Aunt Elise congratulated me, genuinely happy, like this was the healthy young-man story she wanted to believe in. Tom looked like a man whose plan had worked. Mira gave nothing, as usual. Sasha teased with no real bite, which somehow made Sara’s silence louder.
Only Sara stayed sour. The others chalked it up to her best friend dating her cousin. The real reason sat under that, heavier and sharper. She had tasted me that morning and then watched me walk toward someone else with a smile I didn’t even mean.
With no other choice, I went to my room to take care of the daily quest and bleed off some of the heat. My own hands. No pleasure worth remembering. Just maintenance so the system wouldn’t punish me for being surrounded by people I couldn’t touch.
Then a knock.
Hope lifted fast. Sara, I thought. She had changed her mind. She had come to finish what she started or at least to glare at me until I felt worse.
I opened the door and found Mira.
The hope died on the spot.
I was about to ask what she needed when she said it herself.
“I need a favor.”
“Sure.”
I opened the door wider. She came in like she owned the place, crossed the room, and sat on my bed. I took the chair. Distance felt safer. With Mira, it always did.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah.”
Silence stretched. Long enough for me to start wondering if she had connected the mall, the teacher, Sara’s mood, and the way Aunt Elise had stopped caring about Tom’s lunch. Mira was too sharp for comfort. If anyone in this house could ruin me with a single correct guess, it was her.
Then she said, “I need your help.”
“For what?”
I barely kept my voice even.
“You remember me telling you about me being bi?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I need something regarding that.”
No details. No story. Just the next line, dropped like a lock clicking shut.
“You can’t ask questions, and you have to come with me to my study session tomorrow.”
What did a study session have to do with her being bi?
I asked myself that all night, staring at the ceiling, listening to the house settle, wondering whether tomorrow was going to be simple or another kind of disaster.
The next morning, I got the answer.
~~
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