Lust Meter System: Conquering Beauties-Chapter 129: Don’t Look Down

The discharge process took longer than it had any right to.

That was the thing nobody told you about hospitals — getting in was fast, frantic, all motion and urgency.

Getting out was paperwork and waiting and someone always needing to verify something with someone else who was currently unavailable.

Liam sat on the edge of the bed for forty minutes while various people came in and out of his room with forms and instructions and small plastic bags containing his belongings.

Someone went over wound care with him in careful, unhurried detail.

Someone else explained what he should and shouldn’t eat for the next few days.

Dr. Reyes came back, checked his levels one more time, signed off on the discharge with the kind of quiet efficiency that told him she’d done this a thousand times.

He listened. He nodded at the right moments. His ribs complained every time he shifted his weight.

He was about to cover the bill at the cashier’s desk when the woman at the discharge desk looked at her screen and said, simply, "Your bill’s already been settled, Mr. Carter."

He looked at her. "By who?"

"An Elena Ashford."

’Of course she did,’ he thought.

He didn’t say anything after that. Just took his copies of the discharge forms, folded them once, and slid them into the plastic bag with the rest of his things.

---

The passenger seat of Tasha’s car was lower than he remembered seats being.

Getting in was its own ordeal — the bending and knowing exactly how far he could twist before his side reminded him he had three inches of stitches holding him together.

He made it. He was in.

The seatbelt sat at a careful angle across his chest, avoiding most of the bruising.

The city moved past the window. He watched without really seeing it.

Buildings, shops, a woman walking a dog too big for the sidewalk, a food cart on the corner surrounded by a small crowd. Normal things.

The kind that kept happening regardless of whether you’d nearly bled out the night before.

Every bump registered in his side. Not the sharp, blinding kind — the medication was still handling that — but a low, persistent throb that spiked whenever the car hit a seam in the road.

Tasha had been driving slower than usual, choosing lanes more carefully. He’d noticed.

He glanced over at her. She had both hands on the wheel, eyes forward, jaw set in the way she got when she was focused. She’d changed out of the grey hoodie — fitted white tank top now, tucked into light-wash jeans that sat snug on her hips and thighs.

"Hey," Liam said.

She glanced over briefly, then back at the road. "What?"

"Thank you. For coming to pick me up."

She was quiet for a moment. Watched the road. Shifted lanes smoothly before she answered. "Don’t mention it."

She said it the way you said something that was simply true. Not brushing him off — just stating a fact.

She’d come because the situation required it, and she’d done it the same way she did most things: without needing recognition for it.

He turned back to the window.

A traffic light ahead cycled from green to yellow. Tasha eased off the gas without being rushed about it.

His phone buzzed.

**Grace:** Hey. I was just notified that you were discharged. How are you doing?

He read it, then typed back.

**Liam:** Discharged about an hour ago. I’m in the car now. Sore, but okay.

The three dots appeared immediately.

**Grace:** I’m really glad to hear that. I was genuinely worried. When I found out you were in the hospital I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to come, but I had to deal with something and I hated that I couldn’t just leave.

That tracked. He knew her job didn’t stop because her night had gone sideways.

**Liam:** You don’t have to explain yourself. You had something that needed handling. I understand that.

**Grace:** Still. I kept checking my phone the whole time. Are you sure you’re okay?

**Liam:** Stitches. Some bruising. Nothing that won’t heal.

A short pause.

**Grace:** Okay. Good. I’m really relieved.

He could feel the exhale behind that message — the kind that came after hours of sitting with something you couldn’t do anything about.

**Grace:** I don’t know if this is the right time to bring it up, but you said something before everything happened. At my place. You said you wanted to tell me something.

He looked at that for a moment.

He’d almost forgotten — the conversation that had been cut short before it started. He thought about how to say what he needed to say without making it sound heavier than it was, or lighter.

He typed carefully.

**Liam:** I want to be honest with you — this doesn’t end after one session. What we’ve started needs time to take hold completely. That’s just how it works. Eventually it stops being treatment and becomes something else entirely. And if it comes back, if you start feeling the pain again, you call me. I’ll come.

He sent it. Put the phone on his thigh and looked out the window. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

The dots appeared.

They stayed there for a long time. A full minute, maybe more. He watched the city pass by the glass.

The dots disappeared.

He waited.

They didn’t come back.

He exhaled slowly through his nose and set the phone face-down on his thigh.

’Alright.’

"Who was that?"

Tasha’s voice. Easy, not particularly invested.

Liam turned the phone over once in his hand before setting it down again. "A friend. She’s a cop."

Tasha glanced at him briefly. "Didn’t know you knew any cops."

"I do now,"

"Mm." Her eyes went back to the road. "Is she the one who helped you last night?"

"Yeah."

Tasha nodded once, like that answered something she’d been quietly wondering about. She didn’t push further.

His phone buzzed.

He picked it up.

**Grace:** Okay.

One word. But she’d spent over a minute composing it, which said everything the word itself didn’t.

He looked at it for a moment. Then he put the phone in his pocket.

---

There was no ceremony about getting back to the apartment.

Tasha got him to the building. She opened his apartment door without making a thing of it, just stepped aside so he could use her shoulder without having to ask. He did.

She got him to the couch.

He dropped into it — not a choice so much as a negotiation his legs won — and sat for a moment with his eyes closed, letting his side settle.

The apartment smelled different.

Garlic, butter, something warm and savory he couldn’t quite name.

He looked toward the kitchen — pot on the stove, steam curling from under the lid, cutting board with vegetable scraps pushed to one side.

She’d actually cooked.

"Food’s ready, so go shower," Tasha said. "You smell like a waiting room."

She was already a few steps away, moving toward the kitchen. She’d set her jacket down somewhere between the door and here, and the white tank top sat clean and fitted across her shoulders.

He opened his eyes and looked at her.

She’d been staying at his place for weeks, but she’d never cooked for him before. And now the words had come out like they were the most natural thing in the world. Like she’d been saying them for years.

He wasn’t sure what to do with that.

"Give me a few minutes," he said.

"Take your time."

He pushed himself up from the couch slowly and moved toward the bathroom.

He got the shirt as far as his left arm before the problem made itself known.

The movement — arm back and up, shoulder rotating — pulled directly across the stitches.

Not enough to tear anything, but enough to make it a non-option. He stood in the middle of the bathroom with the shirt bunched around his forearm, his other hand flat on the counter, and looked at himself in the mirror.

A blue screen flickered across his vision.

A slightly wide grin crossed his face.

---

"Tasha."

"What?" Her voice came through the door.

"Can you come here?"

A pause. "Why?"

"Just come in."

Footsteps. The door opened and she stepped just inside, one hand on the frame.

She’d changed into one of his shirts — grey, oversized, sleeves swallowing her hands. Completely unbothered about helping herself to his wardrobe.

She took in the situation immediately. The shirt bunched around his arm. The way he was standing with one shoulder dropped.

"Can you help me?"

"How did you even get it on in the first place?" It wasn’t sarcastic — it was a genuine question, the kind you asked when something didn’t add up.

"The nurses helped me before I left," he said.

She looked at him for a moment. Then she crossed the bathroom and reached for the fabric without any further comment.

"Hold still," she said.

She worked carefully.

He could feel the concentration in it — the way she moved the fabric in small, deliberate increments, reading where the resistance was before she pulled. He felt every slight shift across the stitches.

Kept his breathing steady.

Kept his hand on the counter and didn’t make a sound, though twice his grip tightened without meaning to.

She eased the shirt off his left arm, then his right. Stepped back.

She had the shirt in her hands and for just a moment her eyes moved across his chest — not lingering, not deliberate, just the automatic thing eyes did when a new view opened up.

He wasn’t built like someone who made the gym his second home, but the years in the field had left something. Lean, defined, the kind of build that had function behind it.

Her expression didn’t change. She set the shirt on the counter and shook her head once at nothing in particular, already turning.

"Okay—"

"I need help with the pants too."

She stopped.

Turned back. Looked at him with the particular flatness of someone recalibrating their expectations for the next sixty seconds.

"Why can’t you manage that yourself?" she asked.

"Same reason I couldn’t manage the shirt. Bending forward pulls on the stitches."

She looked ready to push back on that — he could see it in the set of her jaw — but then something shifted.

Her eyes moved briefly to the bandaging at his side, to the bruising spreading out from under it, and whatever argument she’d been forming quietly dissolved.

She exhaled once through her nose. Said nothing. And lowered herself.

She hooked her fingers into the waistband of his sweats and pulled them down slowly, working carefully around the bandaging, keeping the movement controlled and even. He braced against the counter.

The waistband cleared his hips, slid down his thighs.

She stopped when they reached his knees.

And stayed there.

Because at that level, at that distance, there was no graceful way to not see what was directly in front of her.

The white cotton of his boxers. And the outline beneath them — heavy, unmistakable. She’d have to be blind to miss it, and Tasha wasn’t blind.

She went still.

Not the kind of still that came from concentration. The kind that happened when something caught you off guard and your body processed it before your brain caught up.

A full second passed. Maybe two. The bathroom hummed.

Then she looked up.

The expression on her face sat somewhere between outrage and the look of someone who had just realized, too late, that they had walked straight into something they absolutely should have seen coming.

The system flickered at the edge of his vision, cool and completely indifferent.

[+20 Lust Points]

[70/100]

[Option 1: "That would do, thank you." | +0 Lust Points]

[Option 2: "Now drop the boxers." | +20 Lust Points]

"What?" she said.