Your Girlfriend Calls Me Daddy-Chapter 51 | 23% Of My Essentia Is Missing And I Think I Liked It
The thing about Cheon Hae-Won was that she did not spiral. She was not the kind of girl who spiraled. She was the kind of girl who made lists, assigned priorities, and executed.
So what she was doing at her desk at seven forty-three in the morning, still in yesterday’s uniform, surrounded by printouts of Essentia signature data and a cold cup of tea she had never touched, was not spiraling.
It was investigation.
Hae-Won pressed her fingertips together and stared at the readouts.
Rome’s Essentia signature had changed again overnight. She could feel it the moment he walked into homeroom. Three distinct layers where there had been one yesterday morning. The baseline, which still read as low-output nothing, the kind of flat signal that produced Passive Null results on a standard scan. Then the spatial signature she had already identified as Mera’s, sitting on top of it like a borrowed coat. And underneath both of them, something else. Something older and deeper and completely unclassifiable. A fourth-dimensional resonance that her ability could detect but could not name.
She had spent the last two hours pulling every database comparison she had access to through the class representative portal. Nothing matched it. Not any documented Catalyst subtype. Not any Flux variant. Not any Root modification.
Whatever Rome D’Angelo carried in his body had never been formally catalogued.
Hae-Won’s pen tapped against the desk in that rhythm she did when she was thinking. Four beats. Pause. Four beats. Pause.
She needed more data.
She pulled up the academy’s internal security portal on her laptop. As class representative, she had elevated access for administrative purposes. Monitoring common areas for safety incidents. Verifying attendance through camera timestamps. Filing conduct reports.
She had never used it for anything personal.
She opened the camera archive for Building C, second floor, corridor seven.
The storage room.
She typed in yesterday’s date and set the timestamp range for the afternoon. The footage loaded. Grainy. Standard security quality. But clear enough.
She watched herself follow Rome around the corner. Watched him open the storage room door and pull her inside in one motion. The timestamp read 14:23.
Hae-Won’s stomach dropped.
She pulled up her own Essentia monitoring log. She kept meticulous records, had since her ability manifested, tracking her output and reserve levels throughout every day.
At 14:23, there was a spike.
Not a small one. Not the kind of fluctuation that came from using her ability to scan someone. A massive, sharp-edged spike in her Essentia output followed immediately by a drop in her reserve levels that should have taken twenty minutes of sustained ability use to produce. Instead it happened in approximately four minutes.
Her ability had not done that. She had not consciously used her ability in that storage room.
Something had pulled it out of her.
Rome had pulled it out of her. Through his mouth. Through his hands. Through contact that her body had welcomed while her Essentia bled out through every point of connection between them.
Hae-Won’s pen went still.
She looked at the camera footage again. The timestamp running in the corner. The door closed at 14:27. She came out first, walking fast. Then Rome, three seconds later, looking thoroughly unbothered. Hair slightly disheveled. Jacket straightened. The smirk visible even in the grainy image.
She had been in that room for four minutes.
Four minutes and Rome D’Angelo had taken something from her.
Hae-Won closed the security portal. Sat very still for a moment, hands flat on the desk.
Then she opened a new document and started writing.
Subject: D’Angelo, Rome. Transfer student, Class 1-A. Registered status: Passive Null, pending retest.
Observed: Three distinct Essentia signatures on intake Day 1. Signatures not consistent with Passive Null classification. Signature 1 baseline, unclassifiable. Signature 2 matches Cross, Marilyn spatial pattern. Signature 3 unknown energy type, possible absorption or drain subtype.
Incident log: Subject entered storage room with class representative at 14:23 on Day 1. Duration: 4 minutes. Class representative Essentia reserve dropped 23% during incident. No conscious ability use recorded.
Cross-reference: Cross, Marilyn Essentia reserve spiked 15% on Day 2 morning. Output stronger than baseline. Pattern consistent with external amplification. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂
Conclusion—
Hae-Won stopped typing.
She looked at the word conclusion on her screen and the blinking cursor waiting after it.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
The conclusion was obvious. Rome had drained her Essentia in that storage room the same way he had drained Mera’s. The same contact. The same mechanism. But Mera’s output had increased afterward, which meant the transfer was bidirectional under certain conditions. Mera gave something to Rome. Rome gave something back.
Hae-Won’s reserve had dropped 23% and had not received anything in return.
Which meant.
Which meant either the effect was incomplete. Or Hae-Won had not given Rome enough for the exchange to trigger. Or the return transfer required something more than four minutes in a storage room.
The text messages from last night surfaced in her memory uninvited.
You liked losing control.
You liked what I made you feel.
And that scares you more than anything I actually did.
Hae-Won deleted the document. She was not keeping a file on this. Files created paper trails. Paper trails required explanations.
She closed the laptop, pressed both hands over her face, and held them there.
She was not doing this. She was not building a case file on Rome D’Angelo because she wanted justification for the things she was feeling. She was not investigating him to get closer to him. She was the class representative. She had responsibilities. Standards.
A career trajectory that did not include getting mixed up with a misdiagnosed drain-type with three illegal ability signatures and a girlfriend who answered his phone at one thirty in the morning.
A girlfriend.
Hae-Won stood up abruptly, straightened her uniform, and pulled her hair tight. She grabbed her academy tablet, her color-coded planner, and her bag.
She was going to class.
She was going to sit in her seat in the front row with perfect posture. She was going to take notes. She was going to be exactly who she had always been.
She was absolutely not going to spend another second thinking about Rome D’Angelo.
