Your Girlfriend Calls Me Daddy-Chapter 54 | "Short Stack" Is Not A Term Of Endearment (Yet)

Chapter 54: 54 | "Short Stack" Is Not A Term Of Endearment (Yet)

I stood in a perfect costume in a fabrication lab at Coastline Hero Academy while the echo of my father’s voice settled. The call had lasted ninety seconds. He had confirmed the suit, noted the media coverage, reminded me of the inheritance timeline, mentioned Vanguard, and hung up. Four objectives, clean execution, zero wasted words.

I genuinely could not tell if I respected him or wanted to throw my phone through the window.

Both, probably. That tracked.

I turned from the mirror.

The door to the fabrication lab opened.

Noel Stark walked in like she owned the room, which was a habit she had probably developed before she could form full sentences. Violet hair in its perfect chin-length bob, school uniform tailored to specifications that made the standard issue look like a rough draft by comparison. She carried a portfolio case in one hand, Stark Industries branding on the corner in silver, and she was already talking to Hargrave’s assistant near the entrance about her scheduled adjustment appointment.

She had not looked toward the office yet.

I stayed exactly where I was.

She looked up.

Noel Stark’s grey eyes hit me in my full costume and stopped moving.

The silence lasted maybe two seconds. It felt longer. Her expression did the thing it always did when she was recalibrating, the slight stillness that preceded whatever response she decided to deploy, the half-beat where the real reaction lived before the performance replaced it.

Then something else happened. Her eyes moved down the costume. Not quickly. Not the fast scan of someone looking for flaws. The actual, slower travel of someone taking in something they had not expected to find appealing.

She caught herself.

The recalibration completed. Her chin came up. The look she gave me after that was the Noel Stark standard-issue version, cold and unimpressed and technically correct in all its proportions, but I had already seen the two seconds before it.

I knew what I had seen.

"D’Angelo," she said.

"Short Stack."

Her jaw moved. Not quite a clench. The specific tightening of someone who refuses to give you the satisfaction of a visible reaction but is having one anyway. "You’re in my fitting slot."

"Hargrave called me in early. Costume came in ahead of schedule." I looked down at myself, then back up at her. "Someone expedited the order."

"Evidently someone values your time."

"My father values my optics. Different thing."

Something shifted in her expression at that, quick enough that I would have missed it if I had not already spent two days cataloguing Noel Stark’s tells. Recognition, maybe. The particular recognition of someone who knew exactly what corporate parenting felt like from the inside.

Hargrave emerged from behind his desk and looked between us with the expression of a man who had worked in costume fabrication for twenty years and could identify a complicated interpersonal dynamic on sight.

"Miss Stark. I’ll have your adjustments ready in the back bay. Give me five minutes." He looked at me. "Mr. D’Angelo, if you want to move through range of motion checks in the main lab space, my assistant can run those."

"I’ll manage," I said.

Hargrave took the diplomatic exit.

Noel set her portfolio case on the worktable, unclipped the fastening, and began reviewing whatever was inside without looking at me. Her hands were efficient on the pages. She wore a ring on her right hand, thin silver band, which I had not noticed before. Her nails were short, which surprised me slightly. I had expected longer.

"Your fitting took longer than five minutes," she said, still looking at the portfolio.

"I got a phone call."

"From?"

"My father."

She paused on a page. Just for a moment. "The suit looks like the Angelo production division had input."

"It did."

"It shows." She glanced up. "It’s well-made."

Coming from Noel Stark, whose family company supplied half the support gear in this building, that was approximately equivalent to receiving a standing ovation. I recognized this and said nothing about it, because making a thing of it would ruin it and I liked the moment better intact.

"Your design input was good," I said instead. "The hybrid concept worked."

She looked at me directly. "I know it worked. I designed it."

"I’m complimenting you." 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

"I don’t need your compliments."

"You do not need them," I agreed. "You have them anyway."

Noel closed her portfolio with a clean snap. She turned to face me fully, and I registered again, not for the first time, that Noel Stark was genuinely striking in the way that expensive things are striking. Everything about her was structured. Her face was all clean angles and that particular pale complexion that photographs perfectly, the violet hair catching the lab’s overhead lights and holding it. Her frame was the contradiction it had been every time I looked, that small, lean upper body and then the rest of her, the thickness of her thighs under the school skirt, the way the uniform’s fabric sat on her hips. She was, in practical terms, built like a pear-shaped weapon, and she dressed like she knew exactly what she was doing with that information.

She looked up at me. Not softly.

"Friday," she said. "Battle Trials."

"I’m aware."

"You’re fifty-ninth in rankings." Her voice was flat and specific, the voice she used when she wanted to make sure a number landed correctly. "You’ve been here two days. You have no registered ability, no documented combat record, and whatever you actually did to Titan’s villain on Tuesday is being described as either heroic or illegal depending on who you ask."

"Dramatic range."

"And I’ve watched you spend forty-eight hours being charming and making connections and acting like this is a social exercise." She took one step closer. Not close enough to be anything other than conversational, but close enough. "It is not a social exercise, D’Angelo. It is a combat assessment in front of every agency scout running early placement reviews. Whatever your actual ability is, you have been performing all week and you have not shown anyone what you can actually do."

"Maybe I’m saving it."

"Maybe you don’t have it yet." Her eyes were very steady on mine. "Maybe everything you’ve done so far is survivable and Friday is the first real thing."

I looked at her for a moment.

She held it.

"You’re nervous about Friday," I said.

Her chin moved up by two degrees. "I am never nervous."

"You’re here two days early adjusting a costume that was already built correctly the first time." I kept my voice easy. "That’s not preparation. That’s control management. You feel better when things are perfect going in."

The two degrees became three. Her eyes went a shade colder.

"I hope you’re ready," Noel said. Her voice had dropped slightly, quieter and more direct than the performing version. "Because I am going to embarrass you in front of the entire first year. Not because I dislike you." A pause. "Because you need to understand where you actually stand."