Tonight, we’d had a chance to celebrate that quick maturing of our relationship, and I’d given her a day to remember. Starting with flowers delivered in the morning, a sexy little cocktail dress delivered and waiting for her when she came back to the dorm for lunch, and then an expensive bottle of perfume, with a note to avoid the cafeteria dinner like the plague because we had plans for tonight.
She looked like a movie star coming out of the dorm, when I picked her up in the town-car, rented complete with driver, and she smelled like an angel while we rode to the restaurant. All eyes were on her as we ate, as was only fitting for the sexiest woman in the room.
However, the whole time it seemed like there was something on her mind, and it took me until the ride home to drag it out of her. Safely behind the privacy panel so the driver couldn’t hear us, I leaned in and kissed her.
“Spit it out, I can tell you’ve got something you want to say.”
“It’s… it’s just embarrassing…”
“More embarrassing than leaving your panties on my bookshelf like they were a best seller?”
Sarina blushed and slapped my arm with the back of her hand. “Shut up, you. And yes, in a way, it is.”
“Well, what is it?”
“It’s just… I haven’t managed to get a job to pay for my tuition and accommodation yet. The club got back to me and said they had a huge list of applicants with a lot more relevant experience than me. I should have spent more time looking, applying everywhere, but somebody has been keeping me busy. Not that it’s your fault,” she added hastily, “but everything I paid in advance is going to be running out soonish, so I need to get on top of this or you’ll be dating a homeless dropout.”
I shrugged. “This is no problem, just tell me what you need and I can cover it-”
“No.” She shook her head. “No… I can’t do that. I wouldn’t feel right. I know we’ve been moving pretty quickly, but that would just feel like charity and I’d hate that feeling. And don’t you dare say it would be for services already rendered.”
She waggled a warning-finger at me and I shelved the obvious joke, holding my hands up in surrender. Dropping my arms after a second, I rested one hand on her inner thigh and she clamped them together as if giving my hand a kind of hug.
“So what are you going to do?”
“Well… I did have this one idea…”
“And this is what’s been on your mind all night?”
“Yeah… um… I was thinking, you know how you said you could get some F?”
I narrowed my eyes, glanced at the privacy screen and then back to Sarina. “Yeeeaaaaahhh…”
“Well, would it be possible for me to get some to sell? I could pay you back once I sell it, and then it wouldn’t be just you paying for my whole life. You already give me too much.” She gestured at her dress.
I pressed my lips together into a thin line and turned my head to look out the window on the opposite side of the car. There wasn’t much to see there, on account of the tinting, but a blank canvas to stare at while dealing with this potential drama-bomb was probably for the best anyway.
Giovanni had been pretty specific about clamping down on the distribution of F at our last meeting, a point he would no doubt reiterate next week. As a result of that, and of meeting Sarina, I hadn’t taken any F from the lab or even visited any of my regular on-selling haunts since then. But I did still have a modest amount tucked away in my apartment.
I had no other use for it, having no particular need to take it myself. It was essentially a really inconvenient and inefficient paperweight, if it wasn’t bringing in any money or the kind of respect and lifestyle I’d grown accustomed to.
The Acardis would frown upon it, to put it mildly, if they found out, but it wouldn’t take that much F to cover her expenses for the rest of the academic year. After that, well, life was going to be pretty fucking different anyway. For “us” and the Acardis both. If there was a version of “us” that could even survive the entire truth about what I was.
The way she accepted the first part of my story, my initial reasons for going down this path before I got my taste of the kind of power I could take from the Acardis, gave me a lot of hope. The idea of having Sarina at my side when I took control instead of a string of meaningless, and ultimately inferior, lays was all kinds of seductive.
I turned back to Sarina. “OK. I can get you some. Not much, but you won’t need much. Just make sure you don’t go out on the streets selling to dangerous people. Sell on campus, small amounts to people looking to have a one-off party. Understand?”