My Scumbag System-Chapter 408: My First, If Not My Only

Natalia closed the door behind them.

The click was quiet. Deliberate. Not a dramatic sound, just a door shutting, but her chest did something embarrassing when it did.

She turned around.

Satori was already sitting on the edge of her bed, elbows on his knees, head slightly bowed. The hallway conversation had cost him something. She could see it in the set of his shoulders. Not weakness, exactly. More like a man who had been performing for cameras and crowds and four different women all evening and had finally run out of performance.

She knew that feeling.

She was intimately familiar with it.

"Lie down," she said.

"I’m fine."

"You have three cracked ribs and second-degree burn scarring on both forearms and you’ve been awake for nineteen hours."

"I said I’m fine, Natalia."

"And I said lie down."

He looked up at her. His eyes, God, his eyes were doing that thing where they went quiet. Not cold. Not calculating. Just tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

He lay down.

She pulled the blanket back and he shifted onto his side automatically, making room. Like they had done this a hundred times. Which they had, more or less.

Natalia climbed in after him.

She didn’t reach for him immediately. She settled with her back against the headboard, one knee tucked up, and just let herself look at him for a moment while he wasn’t watching her look.

The burns on his arms had mostly healed. The skin still had that pink-tight quality, new and tender-looking. She had seen them when they were raw. She had watched the medical staff wrap them and she had stood outside that door with her hands balled up because there was nothing to hit and the feeling in her chest had been enormous and shapeless and awful.

She reached out and traced her fingertips very lightly along his forearm. Not the scar tissue. The inside of his wrist, where the skin was still normal.

He exhaled.

"Your pulse is fast," she said.

"Observant."

"It shouldn’t be. You’re supposed to be resting."

"Hard to rest with you staring at me."

"I’m not staring."

"Natalia."

"I’m looking at you thoughtfully."

He laughed. A short, real one. The kind that had nothing in it except amusement. She loved those the most. The ones she couldn’t have predicted and hadn’t been earned through strategy. The ones that just happened.

She slid down from the headboard until she was level with him, facing him. He was watching her now with those dark eyes that she had once found unreadable and now found terrifyingly legible.

"The interview was good," she said. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

"You’re going to tell me what you actually thought."

"I said it was good."

"Natalia."

She sighed. Pressed her lips together. Looked at the space between his collar bones.

"Sterling asked you about living for someone and you looked at her."

She kept her voice even. She was very good at keeping her voice even.

"I looked at the camera," Satori said.

"You looked at Cel first and then the camera."

Silence.

"I’m not going to pretend I don’t see it," she said. "That’s not who I am."

"No," he agreed. "It’s not."

She appreciated that he didn’t lie to her. He had never been particularly interested in lying to her, which was one of the stranger comforts of whatever this was between them. He lied to everyone else with a fluency that was almost artistic. With her, he just, didn’t bother.

"She’s from a different world," Natalia said. "Cel. She doesn’t know what you are yet."

"She knows more than you’d think."

"That’s the problem." She met his eyes. "She’s smart. And she’s decent. And she held your hand in a dying dimension and you came back with that look you get."

"What look."

"The one where something has changed and you’re trying to decide if you care that it changed."

He was quiet. Which meant she was right.

She pressed her palm flat against his chest. His heartbeat was steady under her hand.

"I’m not going to make you choose," she said. "You know that. That’s not, it was never about that."

"Then what is it about?"

She thought about the answer for a long time.

"I need to know where I end," she finally said. "Not in a, I’m not asking you to promise me I’m the only one. I stopped wanting that a long time ago. I’m asking. Am I still the first?"

He lifted his hand and covered hers where it sat on his chest.

"Yes," he said.

Simple. No performance in it. No strategy. Just the word.

She let out a breath she hadn’t noticed she was holding.

"Emi," she said. "I can understand Emi. She’s warm and she’s good and she looks at you like you’re the answer to something. And you’re," she paused, "you’re gentle with her in a way I didn’t think you were capable of. That’s not an insult."

"I know."

"Skylar." Her mouth curved slightly, against her will. "Skylar at least bites back. She’ll keep you honest. She’ll probably also stab you eventually."

"Probably."

"I find that reassuring somehow."

"Me too."

She looked at him.

"Cel is different," she said.

He didn’t answer.

"Cel looks at you like you’re a problem she’s trying to solve," Natalia said. "And you look at her like she’s something you hadn’t accounted for. And that’s," she pressed her lips together. The Cryo-Lich Ring pulsed cold against her finger, matching her heartbeat. "That specific combination is dangerous. For you and for her and for me."

"Do you trust me?"

The question sat in the dark between them.

She thought about the Gate run. The Necropolis. His hands on her in a VHC archive room. The first morning she had woken up in his arms and looked at the ceiling and understood that something irreversible had happened and chose not to run from it.

"Yes," she said. "Which is frankly the most inconvenient thing that has ever happened to me."

He smiled. A real one, the tired kind, the one that softened his whole face into something that bore very little resemblance to the predator who had systematically dismantled her.

"Come here," he said.

She moved closer.

He tucked her against his chest with one arm, carefully, avoiding pressure on the worst of the healing ribs. She felt him exhale slowly as she settled there. His chin rested on top of her head.

"I can’t promise it won’t get more complicated," he said into her hair.

"I know."

"I can promise that this doesn’t change."

She understood what this meant. Not a gesture or a category but the specific gravity of what existed between them. The thing that had started as conquest and become something the System apparently saw fit to make permanent.

"It better not," she said.