Ficorpio
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
I got my classmate’s mom pregnant.
Before you start cussing me out, I was already eighteen.
I don’t know how to explain it exactly. She wasn’t like other people’s moms. She was young. Really young. And beautiful.
The first time I met Rosa was at my classmate Kyle Bennett’s house. It was the middle of a brutal summer, and we were playing video games when his mom came over with drinks.
She was wearing a spaghetti-strap tank and denim shorts, and she had this fresh, effortless sexiness no other grown woman I’d ever seen could touch. Her thighs were pale and smooth, her waist slim enough to make my mouth go dry, and she smelled incredible.
She dropped down beside us like she didn’t have a care in the world, pulled out her smartphone, and started playing with us.
I had no idea where to look. Every few seconds, my eyes drifted back to her waist. Rosa caught me staring almost immediately. She laughed, reached over, and tapped me on the forehead with one finger.
“Watch it, kid. Don’t get fresh.”
Kyle got angry, but not at me. He snapped at her instead.
“Are you serious? My friend too? You won’t leave anyone alone?”
Rosa’s face went red. In the end, she just lowered her voice and said, “Sorry.”
That night, after I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. We’d played together, and on impulse—like I was possessed or something—I sent her a friend request.
At ten that night, she accepted it.
I invited her into a match. She said yes.
We had voice chat on, and in that lazy, low voice of hers, she said, “Aren’t you supposed to be asleep, sweetheart?”
That was the first time I realized a woman’s voice could sound that good.
“I’m not a kid,” I said. “I’m eighteen.”
She laughed softly. “Okay, big boy. You’re still a year older than my son.”
Nothing happened that night. We just played for a long time. But at one point, when I got jumped by the entire other team, she suddenly said, “Don’t panic. I’ve got you.”
It was such a simple sentence.
It still made me think way too much.
Around midnight, she finally said she had to go to work.
I remember staring at the screen, wondering what kind of job started at twelve in the morning.
Then Rosa asked, “Don’t you need to study?”
I laughed. “Study for what? I’m on the trade-school track. Guys like me end up on the factory line anyway. Who cares?”
She went quiet for a moment.
Then she said, “That just means you’ve never really given it everything you had.”
After she logged off, I sat there feeling weirdly disappointed.
I tapped on her profile picture.
It was a selfie.
I stared at it for a long, long time.
After that, I started inviting Rosa to game with me all the time. If she was online, she always accepted.
Little by little, I got used to looking for her first.
Then one day, I worked up the courage to send her a request to become my in-game girlfriend.
Chapter 2
Chapter 2
Every other invite I’d ever sent her, she’d accepted right away.
This time, she sent me a single question mark.
My whole face went hot. I hurried to explain that once your intimacy level got high enough, you could unlock a cute heart icon and a couple tag.
Once she understood, she got excited too. Rosa spent all her money on Kyle and never wasted any on herself, not even on game skins. To her, even getting one extra little heart in-game was fun.
So we became a couple in the game.
I was so happy I felt like I might float off the ground.
I stared at that tiny heart on my screen, the one linking the two of us together, and my own heart kept pounding harder and harder.
After that, Rosa started inviting me to play with her friends too. Every time I joined, the moment people saw our couple tag, the women in voice chat would start up.
“Oh wow, your man’s here.”
“Isn’t this your sweet boy?”
Her friends kept teasing her, and she’d just laugh and tell them to stop talking nonsense.
But eventually, that flirtation stopped living only online.
Rosa’s best friend, Mia Carter, loved gaming too. One time she had a promotion match and insisted we all meet up in person to help her climb.
That was how I ended up at a small bar-lounge.
That was also when I found out Rosa and Mia co-owned the place, which explained why Rosa always had to leave for work so late at night.
The whole thing felt strange to me. I was just some trade-school kid with no future to brag about, sitting there gaming with two women who owned a bar-lounge, and somehow they were still taking my calls and listening to me.
Mia played with a cigarette hanging from her lips the whole time. Rosa hated the smell of smoke, so she took me to a booth in the back.
And we sat down together to play.
To see my screen better, Rosa sat close—really close. Close enough that I could catch the faint, soft scent of her perfume.
That smell made my heart pound so hard it almost hurt.
When the match finally ended, Rosa let out an easy, satisfied stretch.
It was the first time in my life I’d seen a grown woman stretch like that up close. Her clothes pulled tight along every curve, and for a second I forgot how to breathe. Every tiny movement hit me like a punch to the chest.
That was when I understood something for the first time: laziness—real, feminine, unguarded laziness—could be deadly.
I stared too long.
Rosa noticed.
This time, instead of pretending not to, she actually blushed. She lowered her head and looked at her phone, but her fingers moved over the screen in a clumsy, distracted way. I had a feeling her mind was every bit as scrambled as mine.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3
I worked up what little courage I had and reached over to take her hand.
She flinched faintly at first, but in the end, she didn’t pull away.
We didn’t confess anything. We didn’t say a word.
I lifted my arm, wanting to try putting it around her shoulders.
But a woman like Rosa didn’t need lessons in that kind of thing. Before I could even fully wrap my arm around her, she leaned into me on her own, settling against my chest while still holding her phone.
When I lowered my head, my lips were close enough to brush her hair.
Too close to her mouth.
I wanted to kiss her.
I didn’t dare.
And yet… she didn’t avoid me, either.
So I only kissed her cheek, once, then again, each time a little closer, until I was almost touching the corner of her lips.
She closed her eyes.
Her eyelashes trembled.
Then Mia came out.
The second she saw Rosa in my arms, she froze.
A beat later she rushed over, yanked Rosa away from me, and said they had to get ready to open. While she was pulling Rosa up, I even saw her secretly pinch Rosa at the waist.
That seemed to snap Rosa back to herself. She hurried behind the bar so fast she was almost fleeing.
I acted like nothing had happened and ordered a beer. Mia checked my ID first, making sure I was old enough, and only then did she bring it over.
I was broke, so there was no way I could afford a second one. But I wanted to stay and look at Rosa a little longer, so I drank the first one as slowly as I could.
Running a place like this wasn’t easy for a woman. Rosa kept having to smile, talk, and clink glasses with customers. By the time it got late, the crowd had thinned out, and finally she came over and sat beside me.
“Aren’t you going home?” she asked.
“Tomorrow’s the weekend,” I said. “And you’ve had a lot to drink. I wanted to walk you home.”
She laughed under her breath.
“What?” I asked.
Still smiling, she said, “You don’t even have a car. How exactly are you planning to take me home? We’re just going to walk there together?”
My face burned.
That was when I really understood the gap between us.
Every guy who chased a woman like her probably had a car. Me? I was on the trade-school track, learning auto repair so I could end up on the factory line fixing cars for men like that.
I didn’t even have enough money to call her a cab.
Rosa leaned back against the booth, pleasantly tipsy, and laughed again. “Kyle brought friends back to the house tonight, so I’m not going home. I’ll sleep here.”
The second she said it, I understood.