Chapter 606 | Mr. Stitches is Filing a Report

Chapter 606: 606 | Mr. Stitches is Filing a Report

She hopped off the desk to get a better angle, landing on those platform Mary Janes with a heavy clack that rattled the coffee maker sitting on the counter behind her. She circled around toward my position with the phone held out in both hands, the parasol hooked over her elbow.

She had to crouch low to shoot the constructs from underneath where they were hovering near the ceiling. The pose did her figure favors she absolutely knew about and wasn’t making any attempt to downplay.

The corset bodice of her dress pushed everything up and together in a way that probably violated some workplace safety guideline that hadn’t been written yet. The puffed sleeves kept sliding lower off her pale shoulders every single time she moved or adjusted her grip on the phone.

I kept my eyes on the June pile. I focused on the task at hand. I felt proud of myself for maybe two seconds, three at the absolute most.

Then Ecchi Logic decided I’d been a good boy for long enough, and that my streak of reasonable professional behavior had lasted past its welcome.

The fourth construct was reaching past Ophelia to grab a folder that had slid off the edge of the desk during the earlier scramble.

She chose that exact moment to stand up out of her crouch, rising to her full height to get a different camera angle. She stood straight into its path without looking.

My amber fingers closed on the folder’s edge, and they also closed on the lace hem of her skirt, which had flared up when she rose. The construct pulled the folder back toward me with its usual efficient speed.

The skirt followed the folder.

It lifted in a slow, frothy wave of black and plum ruffles that caught the light streaming through the front windows.

The fabric rose up past the striped stockings that covered her legs from ankle to mid-thigh. It rose past the pale band of thigh above them that the stockings didn’t cover.

It rose high enough to show the black garter straps clipped to her stocking tops, the little metal clasps catching the light.

It rose high enough to show a flash of black lace with a tiny embroidered bat stitched right on the front, positioned exactly where an embroidered bat should not be positioned on something a receptionist was wearing to work.

Every construct I had froze in midair. So did my lungs.

Ophelia looked down at the amber hand gripping her hem. Then she looked up at me. Her face went white first, which was impressive considering where she’d started, and then it went a hot splotchy red from her collarbones up to the roots of her pink curls.

"Belmont," she said, in a very small voice.

"That was an accident, and I want that on the record."

"Put. It. Down." Each word came out louder than the last.

I dropped the skirt. The construct let go so fast that the ruffles bounced, and the folder it had been holding fell to the floor and burst open. Pages went everywhere.

She didn’t smooth her skirt. She raised one hand instead, and the air above her palm tore open into soft pink light.

A bat came out of it. It had translucent wings and glowing ears, and it was cute in a way that made my spine lock up, because I’d read her profile on the portal. I knew what it did.

The bat shot across the office and flew straight into my chest.

I braced for the despair. I’d read the reports on Despair Dive. Grown men had dropped to their knees in gutters and apologized to the pavement for existing. I waited to feel my whole life collapse into a hole, and I thought about the Commission, Sloane counting my breaths, and my parents’ photograph on the desk.

The bat went through me, came out my back, and made a small sad pop. It dissolved into pink glitter, and the glitter drifted down onto the June pile.

Ophelia stared at the glitter. Then she stared at me.

"Why didn’t that work?" Her voice climbed an octave. "That works on everybody, and it worked on Grandma’s landlord. Mr. Stitches, why didn’t it work?"

Dralun didn’t even look up from his coffee.

"He’s looking at eight months of paperwork," he said. "He’s already sad."

Ophelia processed this. I processed this. The worst part was that the dragon was probably right, because the interface chose that exact moment to unfreeze.

[INTERFACE: Heroine Ophelia Lin’s Aspect has failed to register on the Host. Reason: baseline despair already at operating capacity. Temptation Gauge: 3%. Note: Heroine’s current emotional state reads mortified and furious. Heroine’s pulse is also elevated. The interface declines to interpret.]

Three percent. The girl had just tried to emotionally annihilate me with a ghost bat, and she was at three percent.

Ophelia snatched her parasol back up and snapped it open between us like a riot shield. She stomped back to her desk, climbed up onto it, and sat cross-legged behind the lace with only her eyes and the tips of her curls showing over the top. She hugged the bear in her lap and turned it so the X-stitched eyes faced me.

"Mr. Stitches saw everything, and he’s filing a report," she said.

"Can he file two hundred of them? I’m hiring."

"Minus fifty cute points," she announced from behind the parasol. "That puts you at negative ninety-four. That’s a new record, and I hope you’re happy with yourself."

I leaned back in the chair, registering the fact that she apparently had a running ledger.

"I’m a little happy, if I’m honest."

"Ew."

She said it like I’d just admitted to a crime. The parasol snapped shut long enough for her to turn her entire body away from me before opening again, a full lace barricade. Her voice came out muffled, directed at the window instead of the room.

"Don’t talk to me for a year."

"That’s going to make the paperwork hard."

"Mr. Stitches will handle it."