The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 365

Chapter 365: 365 | Vanilla, Sin, and Cinnamon

The shower in my dorm was exactly hot enough to strip away the smell of Felicity’s perfume and not nearly hot enough to strip away the memory of her mouth.

Water ran down my back in sheets. Steam fogged the mirror I couldn’t see from here anyway. I braced one hand against the tile and let my head drop forward, breathing, trying to organize the last three hours into something that made sense inside my skull.

It didn’t make sense. That was the whole point.

I’d gone to class this morning as a candidate. Come out a representative. Delivered an impromptu speech that apparently hit harder than I’d intended. Got kidnapped by a blonde with territorial seating habits and zero respect for my Combat Theory attendance record. Made out in a movie theater like a horny teenager, which, technically accurate, but still. Almost got caught by campus security while Felicity generated a discussion about cinematography using my exact voice.

And now I had a date with my actual girlfriend in forty-seven minutes and I smelled like vanilla and sin.

The System chose that moment to remind me it existed.

[TEMPTATION GAUGE UPDATE]

Felicity Hardy

Previous: 14%

Current: 38%

Stage: Curious → Attached

+24% in single encounter

Note: Host has achieved the fastest single-session Gauge advancement recorded for a non-primary heroine. The System is... impressed? Concerned? Both seem applicable.

I stared at the notification through the steam, water plastering my hair to my forehead.

Twenty-four percent. In one afternoon. From a girl I hadn’t even slept with yet.

The yet sat in my mind like a promise I hadn’t technically made but absolutely intended to keep.

[Additional Context]

Felicity Hardy has crossed the Attached threshold. Her thoughts will now drift to the Host in contexts unrelated to immediate interaction. She will begin engineering reasons for proximity. Protective instincts may emerge. Physical boundaries have softened significantly.

Current emotional state: Satisfied. Vulnerable. Terrified. Hopeful.

The combination is noted as volatile.

Volatile. The System’s word for it, not mine, but accurate in the way most of its observations were when they weren’t being deliberately obtuse.

Felicity Hardy had walked into that theater as the girl who called herself my best friend first lady with a grin that never quite reached her eyes, the one who performed warmth so convincingly that most people never questioned whether it was real. She’d walked out as someone different. Someone who’d asked me twice if she was too much, who’d needed to hear the answer both times, who’d believed me when I said no in a way that suggested not many people had ever made her believe it before.

That was the part that sat heavy in my chest now, water dripping down my spine in the cooling air. Not the physical stuff. The physical stuff was spectacular, I wasn’t pretending otherwise, I could still feel the phantom pressure of her throat around me and the way her nails had bitten into my stomach through my shirt, but that wasn’t why the Gauge had jumped twenty-four points in a single session.

She’d believed me when I said she wasn’t too much. When I’d called her perfect exactly as she was. When I’d told her the messy parts were the parts worth keeping.

The loneliest girl in Class 1-B, the one who’d learned to be charming because the alternative was being alone, who’d spent years suppressing the hungry parts of herself to stay acceptable, had looked at me in a dark theater and decided I was safe. Decided that the real Felicity, the one without the performance, could exist in my presence without being judged or abandoned or treated like a thing.

That was worth more than any amount of physical contact. The System knew it too, the cynical little algorithm, and it had adjusted her Gauge accordingly.

still coming right

yes

good

wear the blue thing

which blue thing

the one felicity picked

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