Saturday.

I woke up late. The damn fundraiser had taken more out of me than I thought. I also woke up to a text message from an unknown number...which I’d called last night. Must be Max.

Thank you, Eli, Chloe’s home safe. I understand she had a little bit of a run in with you and Diamond. Please accept my apology for her behavior.

You have nothing to apologize for. She does, but it’s not a big deal, kids will be kids.

I am not a kid!

I almost laughed. I hadn’t known Chloe had stolen her dad’s phone. I was honestly impressed she woke up before I did, given how wasted she’d been. Must be that teenager constitution.

Well, or she could have stolen it after her father sent the original message.

This is definitely how you convince people of that. Listen, like I said, you owe Diamond an apology.

But not you? Guess you’re fine with getting to grope me, so no apology needed? Probably the closest you’ll ever get to a real woman!

I did laugh at that.

I’ve got a copy of the surveillance, if you’d like to see it. I didn’t grope you. But you don’t owe me an apology because your words don’t have any effect on me and you didn’t attempt to **** me, unlike Diamond.

I didn’t **** anyone!

No, you tried, but fortunately she’s a lot stronger than you and stopped you before you could. Now, I’m afraid I have no more time to spend on you.

I added that last bit because her entire reaction seemed to suggest that the more I pulled away, the more she’d chase.

Yeah, well, I’ve got your number now so, get used to hearing from me, dickhead.

Eh, I’ll just block you. Have a good one, kiddo.

I saw the little dots that indicated typing and knew she was typing something about not being a kid, when I actually blocked her.

The obvious way forward was to get another phone, which she did, but I just blocked her again. If she wanted to do this, she’d need to find a way to approach me, or Diamond, in person and she only knew Diamond’s address. I had a very nice breakfast, which I made for myself, trying to focus on something besides work, which wasn’t really working as I was deciding whether I should ride along on Jewelz’s date, when I got an announcement. +5 SP (Chloe: +32).

I was confused, until I realized she must have apologized to Diamond, like I ordered. Already? Damn this girl was thirsty. I didn’t think Diamond would give out my address without telling me, but I checked and confirmed the door was locked, just in case and checked the time.

Kat’s date wouldn’t be starting until the evening. I dropped into her head for a moment, but as she was going through an extremely boring lecture of how to use the recording device from Rapetoy, I decided to check in later. Despite myself, I couldn’t help thinking about other things I could be doing. Chasing down Alina, investigating Kali, preparing for Peyton’s release…

Finally, I decided to do that, running over to Jenna’s gym and dropping off the stuff Peyton would need to have picked up and I took advantage of her invitation and worked out hard. I didn’t need to, given my enhancements, but it still felt right and tired me out enough to distract me from my brain’s endless running. I felt...like I had during that period after Asa had left, but before I managed to pull myself up, when I’d been playing endless video games, because there was always one more task to check off on the list of endless quests and it felt good to accomplish something, even if it was just getting that check mark.

This was more productive than that, but it was a similar sort of strange flow state that had once eaten an entire week of my life.

Doing normal things helped ground me a bit. You know, probably. Not like there was a handbook for this. When I was heading home, I got a text from Diamond, inviting me to lunch at her place, as there was someone who wanted to talk to me. She played with it, but did convey the needed information, that Chloe had apologized and that I should come over for lunch. That explained the SP I’d gotten, but I was surprised she was still there. It had been a couple of hours...though she could have left and come back, or even apologized on the phone and arranged this time. It wasn’t actually likely that she’d gone over in person and Diamond had spent the last three hours fucking her until she thought Chloe was good enough for me.

For one thing, it would take a lot more than three hours. Also, my life wasn’t actually a porno. Just...close. Which was what doing normal stuff was supposed to remind me of. It didn’t seem to be doing a great job of that, to be honest. I texted I’d be there, but I still had some time, so I drove around, looking for Bridgette, like an idiot.