The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 558

Chapter 558: 558 | This Is What Love Looks Like

The truth was sitting on a bench in an empty courtyard, wearing a black hoodie and waiting for his girlfriend to pick him up. The truth was an eighteen-year-old with a System in his head that handed out abilities like candy and demanded payment in the form of romantic entanglements with powerful women.

The truth was so much stranger than anything the internet could imagine.

Headlights appeared at the end of the access road.

I watched the car approach, a sleek black sedan that screamed money in the understated way only really expensive things could. Diane’s taste. Sloane preferred something with more personality, but Diane had probably insisted on taking her car for reasons that made sense in the particular logic of Fitzgerald family dynamics.

The sedan pulled up to the curb and stopped.

The passenger door opened first. Sloane stepped out before the engine had fully shut off, her pink hair catching the last of the afternoon light and turning it into something that hurt to look at in ways that had nothing to do with brightness. She was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt and the same black choker she’d worn since she was fourteen, and the look on her face when she turned toward the bench was the kind of thing you could feel from ten feet away.

The driver’s door opened a moment later. Diane emerged with considerably more composure, smoothing her blouse and surveying the empty courtyard with the expression of someone cataloging potential threats out of habit rather than necessity. Her gaze swept the perimeter once, found nothing worth addressing, and settled on me with the particular precision of a woman who could read a room from outside it.

Sloane didn’t wait for introductions or confirmation or whatever protocol a normal pickup would follow.

She crossed the distance between us in maybe four seconds. Her stride ate up the ground with the particular urgency of someone who had been stuck in a car for two hours doing nothing while the person she wanted to hold was somewhere else, and there was no hesitation in the way she closed the gap.

No question in her approach.

No performance.

I stood up just in time to catch her.

Her arms went around my neck. Her face pressed into my shoulder. Her entire body fit against mine like we’d been designed for this exact configuration of contact, which, given the System’s involvement in our relationship, wasn’t entirely out of the question.

The impact was solid enough that I took a half-step back to brace myself. She was strong in the way explosive Aspects made people strong, her muscles carrying the density of someone who spent half her life charging kinetic energy through them, and she wasn’t trying to be gentle.

Through the bond I felt everything she’d been holding back during the drive. The relief and the fear and the anger and the love all tangled together into something that didn’t have a name but didn’t need one.

She pulled back just far enough to look at me.

"You look terrible."

"Thanks. I’ve been practicing."

"Your room is a disaster."

Diane approached at a more reasonable pace, her heels clicking against the courtyard pavers with the rhythm of someone who never rushed because rushing implied a lack of control. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"The room is fine," she said. "It looks like every teenage boy’s room I’ve ever seen. Slightly better, actually. I expected more laundry on the floor."

"I have a system."

"You have a pile."

"The pile is the system."

Sloane was still pressed against my chest, her fingers tracing patterns on my back that she probably wasn’t aware she was making. Through the bond I felt her checking, cataloging, confirming that everything was still where it was supposed to be.

I was still here.

I was still breathing.

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