Method and Opportunity

The sound of Sweeney’s sobs fades into the distance, merging with the sound of her feet running down a flight of stairs. You and Callie stand in the empty apartment, frozen in shock.

You recover first.

“WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT!” you yell.

“I, I, I, I was just teasing her!” Callie sputters. “I do it all the time! She likes it! It’s not like I was bullying her! I’m not a bully!”

You look at her incredulously. “You made her cry,” you point out. Her face falls.

“I’m not a bully,” Callie repeats in a very small voice.

“Christ,” you say as you pinch the bridge of your nose. “I have no idea if this is fixable.”

“Oh,” Callie says, barely audible. “Are you… are you gonna be okay?”

“Well, if you define ‘okay’ as ‘living on Vandermeer Avenue in Gillistown’, maybe not!” you snap.

She flinches, and you sigh. “To be fair,” you remind her, “I did say I wanted to look at some other apartments before I made my decision. And… my sister said I can stay with her for as long as I need, so it’s not like I’m homeless,” you admit.

Callie sniffles. “That’s nice of her,” she says. “I–”

“Callie, what was the point of that?” you ask. “I mean, what was your goal? What were you expecting would happen? It obviously wasn’t this.”

She squirms a little. “A thr–”

“ Aside from a threesome,” you say, a little impatiently. Part of you is stunned that you’re being so dismissive of the concept of a threesome with Callie and Sweeney. “You were all over me from the second we met,” you say. “I was a total stranger. You didn’t even let go of my hand!”

Callie glances at her own hand. “I –” she tries to say, but you’re still talking.

“And then you basically tried to get me into an orgy! And I’d like to think I’m so unbelievably handsome that gorgeous girls will just walk right up to me and be all, hi, nice to meet you, please fuck me in the ass while I eat my landlord’s pussy!, but I know I’m not.”

Callie’s eyes are wide, and she looks maybe a little scared of you. Your phone buzzes in your pocket.

You realize that you’re cutting her off – you’re practically steamrolling her – just like your uncle Roger does. And you’re nine inches taller than her.

(Also, you don’t know that she takes it up the ass.)

(Although she probably would if that’s what you wanted.)

(Your cock twitches.)

“I’m… I’m sorry,” you offer, and your phone buzzes again. “I don’t mean to be rude to you, it’s just… the past few days have been really, really weird and stressful, with the fire and everything,” which is true, “and this is a real… what the fucking fuck situation, y’know? Please. It’ll help me feel better if I understand why you did that.”

She takes a deep breath.

“I was trying to make Sweeney jealous,” she says glumly.

Suddenly a lot of things make sense.

“So you two are… uh…”

You trail off, uncertain how to finish that sentence.

“‘Dating’?” Callie suggests. “‘Involved’? ‘Fucking’?”

You half-shrug. “Okay, sure.”

Callie has a very thin, pinched-lip expression for a moment.

“No,” she says. “And no, and also no.”

Suddenly those things don’t make sense any more.

You blink. “But – then –”

Callie looks up at the ceiling.

“Sweeney is adorable,” she says. “I really, really like her. She’s super nice, and she’s fun to be around. And… I mean, you saw how pretty she is! And…”

Callie trails off for a moment, then sighs. “Okay, fuck it,” she says. “I trust you. I… I… god, it should not be this hard to tell you this!” She takes another deep breath, and you realize that although she’s black, she’s light-skinned enough that you can see that she’s blushing. “I have a crush on Sweeney,” she says rapidly. “Ever since we moved in here, I’ve been trying everything I can think of to get into her panties. I flirt, and I tease, and I flirt, and I tease, and… nothing.”

She glances at you a little nervously. “You don’t mind that I’m bi, do you? Some guys don’t like that.”

You’re pretty sure that the Your Kinks are Their Kinks attribute means that all your Top Prospects will be sexually interested in other women, even if they weren’t before. “You are who you are,” you tell her.

Tautologies like that would usually bother you, but it seems to reassure Callie.

“Anyway,” she continues, “I heard you guys talking, and I thought I’d come watch, and maybe flirt with her a little bit, and then she said that stuff about riding the washing machines, and I realized… holy shit, she’s gotta be super horny if she’s telling you that, and… then I thought, what if I make her think I’m more interested in you than in her?”

“Maybe she’s not into girls?” you offer.

Callie makes a dismissive gesture. “A few months after we moved in here, she caught me and my mom making out, and watched us for like five minutes.” She stiffens, clearly having realized what she just admitted to you. “I – I mean, I –”

Oh thank god, now you won’t have to keep pretending you don’t know Callie and her mom are fucking.

You make a dismissive gesture of your own. “I pretty much knew once you said she’d told you about my dick,” you half-lie.

“Oh,” Callie says. “Um. Okay. So anyway, I expected you’d… wanna know about me, and you completely flipped things on me by asking about Sweeney, and that’s when I realized, oh my god, I can’t hurt her feelings!” She pauses. “It really is a shame you can’t smell things,” she adds. “Lilac Paradise is so good.”

“I can smell fine,” you tell her. She looks startled. “It was easier to say that than to argue about whether you were creeping Sweeney out.”

Callie grimaces. “You think I was creeping her out?”

She screamed and ran away, you don’t say, because Callie clearly feels bad enough already. “How would you have felt if I got right up close to you and started sniffing you?” you ask instead.

You didn’t notice exactly when Callie’s nipples went soft – probably when Sweeney screamed and ran away – but they must have, because now they immediately poke out through her sleep shirt again.

“If you did it?”

You roll your eyes. “If any random guy you’d just met did that.”

“We’ve been here for like three years,” Callie mutters. She clears her throat. “Anyway, then you and me talked for like an hour, that was amazing, and then I realized you were the guy my mom saw yesterday, and… and I like you a lot, you’re smart, and you’re interesting, and maybe you’re not model-handsome but you really are cute, and I was just getting so horny, and then you started talking about leaving, and I was going to offer to suck your cock, maybe ask if you wanted to come back to my apartment and fuck –”

– and you have an erection again –

“– but if I did that, then Sweeney would have left, so I just… do you know what Oppositional Defiance Disorder is?”

Oh no. She’s not going to say what you think she is, is she?

“Yes…”

“I’m not saying Sweeney has that,” Callie emphasizes. “She’s such a sweetheart. She goes out of her way to keep people from getting upset. But sometimes, if you tell her she can’t do something, she gets totally fixated on proving you wrong.”

Oh fuck. She did.

“… you tried to reverse-psychology her into sucking my cock?”

Callie holds up her hands. “I guess?” She gives you a weak smile. “Almost worked?”

“I don’t want someone to suck my cock if she’s only doing it to prove a point! I want her to enjoy doing it!”

You’re confident that all your Top Prospects will enjoy sucking your cock, although you’re not sure if that’d be a result of the kink-sharing attribute, or a necessary precondition to being a Top Prospect.

(Being absolutely honest, you’re also not sure if you’d have been so principled about this a week ago, but you’re confident that Eleanor and Sigrid and Penelope will all enjoy sucking your cock as much as Tammy and Molly did. Not to mention Sonia. Or Maggie, or Belinda, or –)

“I’d enjoy it,” Callie says quietly, and squeezes her tits through her top. You decide not to acknowledge that, although your cock disagrees. She wanders over to look out the window.

“Do you think I ever had a chance with Sweeney?” she asks, her voice distant.

“I don’t really know,” you admit. Something’s bothering you about what Callie said, and you’re not sure what it was.

“My mom told me that if I wanted a romance, instead of just sex, I’d probably have better luck with someone closer to my age. Angela’s cute too, I’ve had some fantasies about her, and about her and Sweeney together, but she’s not… she’s not soft the way Sweeney is. Sweeney isn’t… pushy. Uh, Angela is Sweeney’s daughter.”

“Yeah, I talked to her on the phone,” you say.

“Jenna says there’s someone out there for us,” Callie says. “And you’re amazing, and I thought, maybe if it’s not Sweeney, then maybe it’s you, and then I thought, why can’t it be both?” She glances at you. “Jenna’s my sister,” she explains.

You nod.

Again, a deep breath, and Callie adds “I’m fucking her too.”

You almost say “yeah, I know”, but manage to just say ‘oh’ instead. Something occurs to you. “Wait, if you’ve only been here three years, how do you know Sweeney hasn’t been fucked in ten years?”

Callie blinks. “I dunno, I just… I was making it up. It sounded good. I didn’t think about it. Angela says the last time Sweeney had a boyfriend was back when she was a kid. When Angela was a kid, I mean. She’s around my age, so that’s about ten years?”

The pattern-matching part of your brain says that’s not what the weird part is, but you’re not finished with following this line of thought. “So I guess she doesn’t flirt with every guy who’s looking to rent?”

Callie shrugs. “I dunno, I don’t watch every time she’s showing an apartment, but… honestly, probably not. Plus, if someone took the apartment just because she was being flirty, and then she stopped, they’d probably be mad and leave.” She purses her lips. “She’s kinda flirty with Travis?”

“Travis who’s eighty-five and blind.”

“He’s only eighty,” Callie mutters. She sighs. “Are you gonna be late for your friend?”

Oh shit, _that’s_what was weird.

“Incidentally,” you say, “what was that about us talking for an hour?”

Callie blinks again. “Earlier! We talked about walkability scores, and public amenities in Gillistown, and the sculpture garden and the bike paths! Do you not remember?!”

“That wasn’t an hour.”

Her brow furrows. “Forty-five minutes, then. Why – ”

“That was barely five minutes.”

“What? No, it –”

“Callie, what time do you think it is right now?”

She looks perplexed. “Must be nearly one? Maybe a little past?”

You pull out your phone and check, then show it to her.

It’s 11:39.

She squints at it, and then checks her own phone, clearly baffled.

“What – how –”

You’ll be very surprised if this isn’t the work of the Multiplier. You shrug, which isn’t a lie.

“Anyway,” you say, “you’re right, I should get going. Because I really am meeting someone for lunch, for real.”

Callie looks sad, but nods.

“Are you gonna be okay?” you ask. “Apartmentwise?”

She shrugs. “If Sweeney was the sort of person who’d evict us just because I tried to seduce her, we’d have been out of here a long time ago. What should I tell my mom?”

“About me?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you didn’t tell her I was here at all, did you? You were just planning to?”

“… no.”

“Then just don’t mention me.”

Part of your brain is freaking out that you’re passing up an opportunity to fuck a mother and two daughters, but you point out to it that you can always come back later.

Callie looks very disappointed. She sighs. “Yeah, okay.”

“Also,” you say, “we probably shouldn’t be in here alone.”

“Oh!” she says, startled. “Right. Yes.” She hastily strides out of the vacant apartment; you follow her, and lock the door behind you.

She reaches for her own doorknob, then hesitates. “Hey, Jacob?”

“...yeah?”

“In all seriousness… would you maybe wanna go for a walk down by the canal and see the sculpture garden? At some point in the future, I mean? Maybe talk about heat islands, traffic flow, light pollution, that sort of thing?”

“… maybe.”

She holds up her hands. “Best I can ask for. … Hug?”

She opens her arms uncertainly. “Okay, yeah,” you say, and hug her back.

The two of you stand in the hallway, holding each other, for almost a full minute. She smells nice, and she really is very pretty, and her nipples are poking at you, you know she’s not wearing a bra, and she’s got a blissed-out smile on her face, and you have an erection, and she’s starting to rub against you, and you remember that she’s almost certainly not wearing panties.

You realize that if this hug goes on much longer, you are going to kiss Callie on the mouth, and then follow her into her apartment, and strip her nude, and fuck her, and cum in her, and keep fucking her until Jenna and Shondra get home, and then fuck them and cum in them also.

You let go and step back.

“It was nice meeting you, Callie,” you say, and shake her hand. “Bye.”

“Bye,” she says, and opens the door to her apartment as you open the door to the stairwell.

Something occurs to you.

“Wait,” you say.

Callie pauses halfway across the threshold.

“Hm?”

“It’ll bug me if I don’t say this…”

“Okay?”

“I realize you were just making it up, but… if Sweeney really is horny all the time because she hasn’t been laid in ten years or however long it’s been… doesn’t that make her more likely to suck my cock?”

Callie’s eyes widen.

“For fuck’s sake,” she says, then shakes her head. “Bye, Jacob. Have fun with your friend. I hope she’s pretty.”

She goes into her apartment and closes the door behind her.

You go into the stairwell, wait until you can be confident of not having an erection in public, and head downstairs. As you pass the second floor, you briefly consider knocking on Sweeney’s door, but decide that would probably not be a good idea. You’ve learned the hard way that sometimes trying to apologize just makes things worse.

On the way through the lobby, you hold the door for a couple of old ladies who’re coming back from somewhere. “Thank you!” they say, but you just smile and nod and give them a thumb’s-up. If you don’t have a conversation with them, the Multiplier won’t start tracking them, and you don’t really want to know what are your odds of a successful romantic and sexual relationship with them.

You make your way along the street until you reach the bus stop. Perfect timing: the bus shows up thirty seconds later.

You get on, wave your passcard over the sensor, and take a seat.

Now is probably a good time to check the Multiplier.