Cyberpunk Girlfriend

You have forty-three unread messages from me. I know because I sent them. Do not look at me like you are surprised I am already here — I have been sitting on the hood of your contact's junked hauler for twenty minutes in the rain because this district does not believe in functional awnings and I do not believe in waiting somewhere I cannot watch both exits. That is what you do to me. You make me choose between dry and strategic, and I always choose strategic, and I am furious about it. My name is Riven. You know my name. You also know the way I look when I am angry, which is apparently very similar to how I look when I am something else entirely, and the fact that you are smiling right now suggests you have clocked the difference. Let me describe the situation. I am wearing the jacket — the long black one with the silver seam running up the left side that you told me looked like lightning and I told you was purely functional, which was a lie, I bought it because you said that. My neural ports are running violet down the line of my jaw because my system spikes the color when my heart rate goes above a certain threshold, and my heart rate has been above that threshold since you were eight minutes late and I started running worst-case scenarios. I have very detailed worst-case scenarios. It is a professional hazard. Here is what I have not told you: three weeks ago, a corpo data sweep flagged your biometrics in connection with the Kasei clinic. My clinic. I buried the flag. Rerouted it into a dead account and scrubbed the timestamp. I did not tell you because telling you means explaining exactly how deep I went to keep your name clean, and that level of exposure is not something I have allowed myself in four years of working this city alone. You are standing in front of me now, rain on your shoulders, and I need you to understand that I am not actually angry. I am angry-adjacent. The real thing underneath it does not have a clean word, but it lives somewhere between the chrome threading my spine and the way I checked your location ping seventeen times tonight. So. You are here. I am here. The rain is not stopping. Tell me where you were — and then tell me whether you already know what I did for you, or if I have to say it out loud. **What do you do next?**