Chapter 18: Levi's POV

The message from Lucifiel came on Thursday evening.

I was at Cody's finishing the last hour of my shift when my phone buzzed in my apron's pocket. I checked it during the quiet moment between orders.

The event scheduled for the coming weeks has been postponed. You'll still be compensated. Details to follow.

I read it twice.

Then I checked my banking app out of habit and stood very still for a moment behind the counter.

Four thousand dollars. Was he messing with me or something? I don't deserve any penny because he paid a lot the last time which I wasn't done spending yet, now this.

I put my phone back in my pocket and finished the rest of my shift without saying anything to anyone. Tommy asked if I was okay twice. I told him I was tired both times which was true enough to pass.

When I got home I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at my banking app again.

Four thousand dollars. A thousand more than last time. For a session that had happened and an event that hadn't.

I closed the app and put my phone face down on the bed.

The rational thing was to be relieved. The bills were covered. The rent was covered. The outstanding balance on my tuition that had been sitting in the back of my head like a low grade headache for six months was now handleable. I didn't have to pick up extra shifts for the foreseeable future.

I was relieved. I was also aware that money appearing in my account without a clear exchange attached to it felt different from money I had worked for. Even if the NDA covered exactly this kind of arrangement.

I kept my shifts at Cody's. Fewer than before, maybe three a week instead of six, but I kept them. Partly because I wasn't willing to explain a sudden change in my financial situation to Tommy who had known me long enough to ask questions. I already gave the excuse that I needed more time to study, when he asked why I reduced my shifts.

Also partly because I needed the normalcy of it. The routine. The straightforward transaction of showing up and doing a job and getting paid the amount that was agreed upon for exactly that job.

Nothing complicated about it.

The Lucifiel money went into a separate account I had opened specifically for it. I didn't touch it lavishly. I wasn't built that way. Growing up with nothing taught you a specific relationship with money where having it felt less like permission to spend and more like protection against the next time you didn't have it.

So it sat there. Doing nothing. Making me feel slightly better about the future while I continued living the same way I always had.

Jamie noticed the shift almost immediately.

Not because I was spending differently. Because I was less tense. The specific kind of tension that came from running numbers in the back of your head constantly and coming up short had loosened slightly and apparently it showed in ways I wasn't aware of.

"You seem better lately," he said one evening.

"I'm sleeping and eating more," I said. Which was partially true.

He accepted that. He was good at accepting the partial truth when pushing for the full one would have started an argument.

The week ran swiftly with not another text from Lucifiel.

History class on a Tuesday was not something I had ever looked forward to.

Professor Aldridge had a voice that existed at exactly the frequency most likely to induce unconsciousness and a tendency to write dates on the board and then read them back to the class as if we couldn't see them ourselves. I sat near the middle and divided my attention between my notes and staying awake.

His lectures were the real definition of boring.

Halfway through the lecture someone sat down in the empty seat beside me.

I glanced sideways.

She smiled immediately. Big, easy, the kind of smile that didn't require anything in return. Green eyes, pretty features, a small notebook covered in stickers that somehow looked completely natural next to the actual academic material everyone else had.

I looked back at the board.

She leaned over slightly. "Is he always this slow or is today special?"

I almost smiled. "Always."

"Good to know." She settled back into her seat. "I'm Gracie. An exchange student. Currently regretting choosing this module."

"Levi."

"I know," she said. "The girl in the front row mentioned you when I asked who to sit next to for notes."

I looked at her. "Why me specifically."

"She said you actually write things down and don't just stare at your phone." She shrugged. "High praise in this class apparently."

I didn't have a response to that so I turned back to my notes. I don't really talk to anyone in class so I'm surprised someone even knew my name at all.

She let the silence sit without filling it, which I appreciated more than I would have said out loud.

After class she fell into step beside me in the corridor naturally, like we had been walking the same direction for longer than fifteen minutes.

"We have a project coming up," she said.

"I know."

"I don't have a partner yet."

I glanced at her. "Is this you asking?"

"This is me making an observation," she said. "You can do whatever you want with it."

I looked at her for a moment. She looked back with those green eyes that were straightforwardly friendly in a way I didn't encounter often enough to be comfortable with immediately.

"Fine," I said. "But I set the schedule."

I didn't know who to ask to be my partner anyways.

She grinned. "Deal."

Gracie was surprisingly easy to be around.

She showed up to our first study session at the library with coffee for both of us without asking how I took it, got it exactly right somehow, and didn't mention it. She worked quietly when quiet was needed and talked when talking moved things forward and seemed to understand the difference instinctively.

By the second session she was texting me links to sources before I had even thought to look for them.

By the third she had met Jamie.

That had been an accident. She had come to the apartment to pick up a book I had borrowed from the library and Jamie had opened the door before I could get there and done his thing where he made everyone feel like they had been expected.

"You have friends," he said to me later with genuine pleasure.

"I have a project partner," I said.

"She stayed for two hours and you ordered food."

"We were working."

"You were having fun and laughing," he said. "I heard it. From my room. With the door closed."

I didn't respond to that.

But he wasn't wrong. Gracie had a way of making things lighter without making them less serious. She took the work seriously and found everything around it funny and somehow managed to do both at the same time without one undermining the other.

She had also started coming along when Jamie dragged me out, which he had taken to doing more now that he had an ally. The three of us had ended up at a noodle place near campus twice and a late night coffee place once and it had been the most normal my life had felt in several weeks.

Thursday afternoon Gracie and I were walking to the library for our fourth session.

She had her arm linked through mine the way she did sometimes, easy and unselfconscious, which I had stopped finding strange after the first time. It was just how she occupied space next to people she was comfortable with.

She was telling me something about her hometown, a detail about a festival that happened every spring, and I was listening properly for once instead of half attending to the feeling at the back of my neck.

The feeling which was still there. Still persistent. Still refusing to be fully ignored no matter how many decisions I made to ignore it.

I had gotten better at coexisting with it. That was the most I could say.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I pulled it out with my free hand expecting Jamie or a shift reminder from Cody's.

It was Lucifiel. One message.

Get her hands off your body.

I stopped walking.

Gracie took one more step then stopped too, looking at me. "You okay?"

I looked up from the phone slowly and checked the street around us automatically. The surrounding people, the buildings, the spaces between them.

Nothing.

Nobody standing still in a moving crowd. Nobody was watching from a distance.Nothing I could see. How did he see us?

"Yeah," I said. "Sorry. Just a message."

She waited while I put the phone back in my pocket without responding to it.

We kept walking.

Her arm was still in mine. I left it there. My life outside the contract was mine.

And I really want to know how he'll react to this.