Your Girlfriend Calls Me Daddy

Her fingertips brushed mine.

The world tilted sideways.

I’d drained people before. Mera felt like cinnamon fire pouring through my veins. Cheon tasted like summer lightning mixed with honey. Even Aurora, that brief contact, had been bright and clean like morning air after rain.

Noel was none of those things.

She tasted like steel and ice water, sharp enough to cut glass. Her Essentia slammed into me with the force of a punch, and I realized too late that I’d underestimated how much power this tiny girl carried inside her perfectly controlled frame. The drain opened wider than I’d intended, hungry and greedy, pulling at her reserves like I was trying to drink the ocean through a straw.

"Ah—"

The sound that escaped her mouth made my brain short-circuit.

It wasn’t a gasp. It wasn’t a moan. It was something in between, high and breathy and completely involuntary. Her grey eyes flew wide, pupils dilating until they swallowed the color completely. Her lips parted on another soft noise that went straight to parts of me that had no business responding during what was supposed to be a professional demonstration.

"Mmm—"

Holy shit. She made the cutest sounds I’d ever heard in my life.

The drain pulsed between us, and I tasted more of her. Beneath the ice and steel sat something warmer, something she kept locked down tight. Determination mixed with fear. Pride wrapped around insecurity. And underneath all of it, something softer that reminded me of vanilla and frost.

"Nnh—"

Her free hand flew up to cover her mouth, but another whimper leaked through her fingers anyway. The sound was so ridiculously adorable that I had to physically stop myself from laughing. This was Noel Stark. The girl who’d spent weeks planning how to publicly humiliate me. The perfect princess with her color-coded portfolio and seventeen contingency plans.

And right now she was making noises like a character from one of those anime Mera watched late at night when she thought I was asleep.

Her thighs pressed together under the table.

I caught it because I was watching her face, seeing the exact moment her body responded to the drain’s pull. Pink spread across her pale cheeks like someone had slapped her, darker and darker until it reached the tips of her ears. Her breathing went shallow and fast, chest rising and falling in a rhythm that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with what the drain was doing to her nervous system.

"S-stop—" She jerked her hand back so hard her chair scraped against the floor.

The connection snapped shut. The taste of her lingered on my tongue, sharp and cold and unexpectedly sweet.

She stared at me with wide, horrified eyes. Then she looked down at her own hand like it had betrayed her. Then back at me. Her mouth opened and closed without sound, words failing to form.

"So," I said, keeping my voice level despite the fact that my heart was trying to punch its way out of my chest. "Now you know."

"You—" Her voice came out strangled. "What did you—"

"I told you. Drain-type."

"No, you—" She stood up so fast her portfolio went flying, papers scattering across the table and floor. "You did something! Something more than just draining!"

"Did I?"

"Don’t you dare act innocent!" Her face was still bright red, and her hands had curled into fists at her sides. "That was not normal! That was not just energy transfer!"

I leaned back in my chair, trying to look casual when I felt anything but. "The drain opens a connection. What happens during that connection depends on compatibility."

"Compatibility?" She practically shrieked the word. "What the hell does that mean?"

"It means your Essentia responded to mine." I shrugged like we were discussing the weather instead of whatever the hell just happened. "Chemistry, basically."

"I don’t have chemistry with you!"

"Your body disagrees."

"I—you—" She sputtered, her composure completely shattered. The perfect student, the controlled heir to Stark Industries, reduced to incoherent rage because I’d made her make those sounds.

I shouldn’t have found it as entertaining as I did.

"Look," I said, deciding to throw her a lifeline before she actually tried to kill me. "The drain affects people differently. Some barely feel it. Others—"

"Feel what, exactly?" Her voice dropped low and dangerous. "Because what I felt was not appropriate for a classroom setting!"

"No," I agreed. "It wasn’t."

She grabbed her portfolio from the floor, shoving papers back inside with shaking hands. "This is unacceptable. You’re unacceptable. That ability is—"

"Registered with the NEA," I finished for her. "Legally classified as adaptive-type for public records. And if you tell anyone what actually happened here, you’ll have to explain why you were testing it in the first place."

Her head snapped up. "Are you threatening me?"

"I’m stating facts." I stood, moving around the table slowly. She backed up a step, her eyes tracking me like I was a predator. Smart girl. "You wanted to know what I am. Now you know. What you do with that information is up to you."

"I could report you."

"You could." I stopped a few feet away, close enough to see the pulse hammering in her throat. "But then you’d have to admit you felt something. That the connection worked both ways. That whatever happened between us wasn’t just me doing something to you."

"Nothing happened between us!"

"You sure about that?" I glanced at her thighs, still pressed together. "Because your body seems to remember differently."

The slap came fast.

I let it land. My head snapped to the side, cheek stinging where her palm connected. When I looked back at her, she was breathing hard, eyes bright with unshed tears of frustration.

"You’re an asshole," she said, voice shaking.

"Yeah." I touched my burning cheek. "I am."

"And arrogant."

"That too."

"And I hate you."

"No, you don’t." I held her gaze. "But you wish you did. Would make things simpler."

She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. Her hands were still trembling, but whether from anger or something else, I couldn’t tell.

"Stay away from me," she finally said, gathering the last of her papers. "I mean it, D’Angelo. Whatever you are, whatever that ability does, I want nothing to do with it."

"If that’s what you want."

"It is." She turned toward the door, then paused with her hand on the knob. Without looking back, she added, "And for the record? I don’t make noises like that. Ever. So whatever you did, it was your ability manipulating my responses, not genuine reaction."

I didn’t point out that I hadn’t done anything except open the drain. That her body had responded all on its own. That the sounds she made came from her, not from any manipulation on my part.

I also didn’t point out that she was lying to herself.

"Whatever helps you sleep at night, Short Stack."

"Don’t. Call me. That." Each word came out clipped and furious.

Then she was gone, door slamming behind her hard enough to rattle the frame.

I stood alone in the conference room, surrounded by the scattered remains of her carefully organized interrogation. My cheek still burned where she’d hit me. The taste of her Essentia lingered on my tongue, ice and steel and vanilla frost.

And underneath it all, I could still hear those soft whimpers playing on loop in my head.

Fuck.

This was going to be a problem.

My phone buzzed. Mera’s name flashed on the screen.

Mera: how’d it go with the ice queen?

Rome: she slapped me

Mera: LOL did you deserve it?

Rome: probably

Mera: did you tell her about the drain?

Rome: demonstrated it actually

Mera: oooooh

Mera: how’d she take it?

I stared at my phone, trying to figure out how to answer that question. How did you explain that the girl who’d been planning your downfall for weeks had just made the most adorable sounds you’d ever heard? That she’d responded to the drain like her whole body had been waiting for it? That even now, ten minutes later, you could still feel the ghost of her Essentia cycling through your system?

Rome: not well

Mera: translation: VERY well and you’re being weird about it

Mera: she’s gonna be trouble isn’t she

Rome: yeah

Mera: good

Mera: I like her already

I shoved my phone back in my pocket and started picking up the papers Noel had dropped. Color-coded tabs marked sections about Essentia frequencies, ability classifications, and legal precedents for unregistered powers. She’d done serious research. The kind that required access to restricted databases and probably some creative rule-breaking.

One page caught my eye. A printout of energy readings from our Battle Trial, with handwritten notes in the margins. She’d circled three distinct frequency spikes and drawn arrows connecting them to different timestamps. The notes read: Gate manifestation - 2:47. Gravity activation - 5:32. Elastic manipulation - 8:15.

She’d been tracking me from the start.

I flipped through more pages. Pictures of me leaving the gym with Mera and Cheon. Screenshots of the convenience store footage, enhanced to show my eyes glowing purple. A list of every ability I’d used in public, cross-referenced with students who possessed similar powers.

Mera’s spatial manipulation. Someone’s gravity control. Rubber Body that matched no one in our class.

At the bottom of the stack, I found a page that made me stop cold.

It was a chart. Horizontal axis showed time. Vertical axis showed Essentia output levels. Three lines tracked across the graph in different colors: red for Mera, blue for someone labeled "Subject C," and purple for me.

The lines moved in patterns that shouldn’t have been possible. Where mine spiked up, theirs dipped down. Where theirs recovered, mine plateaued. The correlation was too clean to be coincidence.

She knew. Maybe not the whole truth about sleeping with people to steal their powers, but she knew I was taking something from others.