Your Girlfriend Calls Me Daddy-Chapter 57 | My Demon Girlfriend Drafts A Non-Disclosure Agreement

Marco pulled up to the building at six forty-seven, and I was already thinking about the Cheon problem before the elevator doors closed behind us.

Mera stood beside me with her academy bag over one shoulder and her tail doing that slow idle sweep it did when she was processing something. She had been quiet since the courtyard. Not the bad kind of quiet. The kind where she was running numbers and waiting until she had a figure she liked before opening her mouth.

The elevator reached my floor.

She dropped her bag, kicked off her shoes without looking where they landed, and pulled a throw pillow into her lap like she’d bought the place.

"Okay," she said. "Panda."

"I don’t want to talk about Panda."

"I know you don’t."

"She’s handled. I told her to keep quiet, she’s going to keep quiet, the situation is resolved."

Mera looked at me with those yellow eyes that saw everything and filed it under the correct category. "She called your phone at one thirty in the morning."

"People make bad decisions at one thirty in the morning."

"She interrogated me in the bathroom between second and third period."

I paused. "She did what."

"Pulled my Essentia signature out of the air in a corridor, tracked me to the girls’ bathroom in Building A, and told me she detected three distinct layers in your output. Baseline, my spatial signature, and something underneath both of those she cannot classify." Mera tilted her head. "She said her reserve dropped twenty-three percent in four minutes. She wanted to know why she didn’t get the boost back."

I sat on the other end of the couch and stared at the ceiling.

Cheon Hae-Won had a database of Essentia signatures in her head, could read output like sheet music, and had tracked the spatial signature of a girl she had probably spoken to twice through a crowded school hallway.

I had kissed her in a storage room and assumed the fun of it would buy me a week.

I was an idiot.

"She’s not going to stop," Mera said.

"She doesn’t have proof that holds up."

"She doesn’t need proof that holds up in court. She needs enough to make your life complicated, and she already has that." Mera stretched one leg out across the cushion toward me, her bare foot pressing lightly against my thigh. Not a move. Just contact. She did that when she was thinking seriously about something. "She’s the class representative. She has elevated access to the security portal. She’s already running analysis she shouldn’t technically be running, which means she’s invested enough to risk the privacy policy violation."

"Or she’s just thorough."

"She’s thorough and she’s invested. Those aren’t mutually exclusive." Her foot pressed a little harder. "Rome. She tracked me through a building because she wanted to know why she didn’t feel what I feel when you touch her."

The ceiling had nothing useful to contribute.

"Give her what she wants," Mera said.

"Absolutely not."

"Controlled answers. Contained information. On our terms, with conditions." She sat forward, pulling her foot back and folding both hands on her knee. "Right now she’s alone with bad information and a brain that will not stop working. That combination is dangerous. A smart person with incomplete data fills in the gaps with whatever they can reach, and what she can reach is the NEA guidelines for unregistered SS-rank abilities."

"She doesn’t know it’s SS-rank."

"She knows it’s unclassifiable. She knows it copies. She knows it does something to her body that she can’t explain with any documented Essentia type." Mera looked at me steadily. "She’s going to keep building her file. She’s going to keep looking. And eventually she’s going to find the right search term, or she’s going to push hard enough that her findings go somewhere outside her own head."

I rubbed my face. The ceiling remained unhelpful. "You want me to sit Cheon Hae-Won down and explain my entire power set to the girl who has been threatening to report me since yesterday morning."

"I want you to give her enough truth that she stops digging for more." Mera’s tail flicked once. "She’s not going to stop until she understands. So let her understand. Under controlled conditions. With rules."

"Rules," I repeated.

"A contract," she said, and she was already reaching for her phone. "Written. Specific. She gets answers about what you are and how the ability works. In exchange, she keeps silent, she helps maintain your cover story with the NEA, and she does not file anything with the disciplinary committee."

I thought about Cheon’s face this morning when Mera and I had walked in holding hands. The white-knuckle grip on her pen. The way she had turned to look at me over her shoulder with something cold and flat in her eyes that was performing cold and flat over the top of something considerably less controlled.

I thought about her sitting alone at one twenty-six in the morning, staring at my number in her phone, deciding to call anyway.

Mera was right. I hated that Mera was right with this specific frequency.

"If she signs something like this," I said, "she has leverage. She has a document that proves she knows about my ability, which means she can use that document if she ever decides the agreement isn’t worth honoring."

"So make her complicit." Mera said it simply, like it was obvious. "The contract goes both ways. Her signature means she knowingly agreed to suppress information about an unregistered ability. If she reports you after signing, she reports herself."

I looked at her.

She looked back with the expression of someone who had been doing cost-benefit analysis since she was old enough to open a spreadsheet.

"How did you get this good at this," I said.

"My father negotiated hero insurance contracts for three years before his leg." She shrugged. "You learn that the cleanest agreements are the ones where nobody can afford to break them."