I spent three years seducing my asexual billionaire husband, only to discover that every touch made him hate me more. The system says I need to stop everything now.
I was literally straddling Sterling, grinding against his lap to farm that very last point of his affection meter, when the system—offline for three years—let out an ear-piercing electronic shriek in my brain.
Error. Fatal error. This is a PG-13 clean romance. The male lead is strictly asexual. He despises physical intimacy. Ah, that red bar isn’t his affection meter, host. That’s his hatred meter. You are totally messed up.
I flinched so hard I nearly fell off the bed. All the heat drained from my face in a split second. I scrambled off his lap, tumbling onto the mattress in a panic.
“I—I can’t keep going,” I stammered, grabbing the sheets. “Let’s just sleep.”
The mature, utterly gorgeous man beneath me licked his lips. His sharp, devastating eyes sparkled with dark amusement.
“Do you think I’d ever get bored of this?” Sterling murmured, his voice a thick, whiskey-soaked growl. “We can switch to whatever position you like.”
He reached over to the nightstand, pulled out a gold-foil wrapper, and tore it open.
Horrified, I snatched it right out of his hand, shaking my head like a maniac. “No, no, no. You just got back from a business trip. You must be exhausted. You need your rest, darling. I can’t possibly drain you tonight.”
His hand froze midair.
“But every time I come back from a trip, you beg me to keep you up all night,” he said slowly. “You said you wanted to make up for the whole week I was gone.”
My heart pounded violently against my ribs. I practically spat out my excuse.
“Today is different. You’re thirty now, Sterling. I think it’s time we focus on our spiritual connection… and preserve your vitality.”
The smirk on Sterling’s face vanished.
His eyes flicked downward, briefly, toward his own body, something dark and unreadable brewing in his gaze.
“…Fine.”
He got up and walked into the master bathroom. Seconds later, the sound of the shower filled the suite.
Trembling, I grabbed the entire drawer of condoms and dumped them into the trash.
“What the hell is going on?” I screamed at the system in my head. “I vividly remember picking an 18+ hardcore novel. How did this turn into a PG-13 vanilla story?”
The system sighed heavily. “This is totally my fault. Right after I bound to your soul, I had to rush back to HQ for a report… and I accidentally dropped you into this clean romance.”
“…What?”
“Your reputation as a completely unhinged romantic has deeply traumatized the male lead,” it continued. “You are no longer fit to be the female lead of this story. If you can lower his hatred meter to zero, I’ll demote you to the ‘dark history ex-wife’ role and assign you a new target. When this is over, I’ll apply for triple the cash bonus for you.”
Being the “dark history ex-wife” sounded awful.
But triple pay…
I hesitated for less than a second.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll work my ass off.”
A while later, a deep, suppressed groan came from the bathroom. The sound of running water gradually faded.
I was too distracted by the system’s excited voice to notice how strange that groan sounded.
“It’s dropping! It’s dropping! His hatred meter just dropped to 40. See? As long as you stop forcing things, it’ll go down. Hurry—pack your stuff and move to the guest bedroom. We might be able to unbind tonight!”
His hatred had dropped.
But it felt like a needle had stabbed straight into my chest.
A dull, aching pain spread through my heart.
Keeping my head down, I bundled up my blankets and prepared to leave.
Click.
The bathroom door opened.
Sterling stood there, a white towel wrapped low around his waist, water dripping down his sculpted abs. His voice was hoarse.
“Chloe, it’s late. Where are you going?”
“I just… I think this bed is a little too crowded for two people. I’m going to sleep in the guest room.”
Before I could finish, his face darkened.
“Chloe Vance,” he said coldly, “are you telling me we’re sleeping in separate rooms?”
Before all this, I was just an excited college girl who loved reading steamy stories under my dorm covers at 2 a.m.
One night, right as I reached the most intense scene, I grabbed my water—only to spill it all over my laptop.
One massive electric shock later, I was dead.
Just like in the novels, I got bound to a system.
My reward for completing the mission? One hundred million dollars.
But as soon as the system dropped me into this world, it told me I was the passionate wife of a male lead… and then disappeared.
At first, I was ecstatic.
This was heaven.
Then I realized—I had zero memories of the original host.
I woke up in a hospital bed. On the day of my arranged marriage to Sterling Vance, I had been in a car accident and spent two months in a coma.
So naturally, I faked amnesia and moved into the Vance mansion.
My new husband was cold, distant, completely unapproachable.
Nothing like the male leads I had read about.
And his affection meter?
Always zero.
So I did what I knew best.
I tried everything.
I teased him. Touched him. Clung to him.
The couch, the bedroom, the kitchen counters, the penthouse windows…
Everywhere.
And his stats fluctuated wildly.
One second zero—after a kiss, suddenly sixty.
During more intense moments, I couldn’t even focus on the numbers.
If I tried, he would stop me.
“Chloe, you’re distracted,” he would murmur, pulling me back. “If you can still think, I’m clearly not doing enough.”
I gave up checking after that.
The only time I thought I saw it hit 100, I was so overwhelmed I passed out.
But the next morning—it was back to 70.
Still, over three years, the trend went up.
I was proud.
Just recently, I had sat on his lap in his office, sipping a strawberry milkshake, waiting for him to finish work—and his meter had spiked to 90.
I thought he loved me.
Then the system came back.
And told me the truth.
Those red numbers weren’t love.
They were how much he wanted to kill me.
My world collapsed.
But looking back… it made sense.
He was asexual.
He hated being touched.
That was his setting.
Everything I had done to him for three years—
had been torture.
If not for the massive business merger binding our families, he probably would have thrown me out long ago.
To lower his hatred, I swore to change.
I would never act that way again.
“Why do you want to sleep separately?” Sterling’s voice dragged me back.
“…Is it because I couldn’t satisfy you tonight?”
I nodded instinctively—then shook my head frantically.
“No! It’s not that. I just… it’s getting hot lately. Two people in one bed is uncomfortable. We’ll sleep better apart.”
He stared at me.
“We have central air.”
“I know, but… we need personal space.”
I backed away.
He looked at my hands, clenched tightly around the blanket, knuckles pale.
He took a slow breath, forcing his voice to soften.
“…Fine. Whatever you want.”
I practically ran to the guest room.
For a moment, it felt like he didn’t want me to leave.
That cold man had never felt so… overwhelming before.
Then the system chimed in again.
“Yes! It dropped to 20. You really traumatized him, dragging him into all that every day. Even a normal man would feel suffocated—let alone someone asexual. He’s just too polite. He probably wanted to kick you out years ago.”
“…Is that really it?”
I whispered, my chest tightening.
I had really believed he liked it.
That he wanted me.
The system kept broadcasting his hatred meter all night—fluctuating between 20 and 80.
I buried my face in the pillow, wishing it would shut up.
The next morning, I had just finished brushing my teeth when Sterling walked into the bathroom.
Before I could react, he grabbed my waist, lifted me onto the marble counter, and kissed me.
Hard.
His knee pressed between my thighs, forcing my legs apart as he deepened the kiss.
When he pulled back, his voice was low.
“You made the rules. You said we have to kiss every morning.”
I was dazed, melting against him.
His heartbeat was racing.
Does he actually like me?
Then—
“Hatred at 90! Host, what are you doing?!”
I snapped back to reality and shoved him away.
“We don’t need to do this anymore. No more morning kisses.”
He froze.
“…What did you say?”
He wanted the ritual.
But pushing him away—
might save my life.
Could I really resist the man I thought I loved?
Sterling stood perfectly still.
Water still glistened at the ends of his dark hair, one drop sliding down the side of his neck and disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt. His eyes locked onto mine with a kind of terrible calm that made my heartbeat go uneven.
“No more?” he repeated softly.
I slid off the vanity, putting as much space between us as I could in that ridiculous oversized bathroom. “Yes. I mean… no. I mean, yes, no more.”
For the first time in three years, Sterling looked genuinely at a loss.
He had always been composed. Even when I wrapped myself around him in the middle of his meetings, even when I shoved him onto the couch and climbed into his lap with absolutely no shame, he had always looked annoyingly controlled. Maybe his breathing would roughen. Maybe his hands would tighten at my waist. But his expression never truly cracked.
Now it did.
A faint line appeared between his brows.
“Did something happen?” he asked.
The question stabbed straight through me.
Because he sounded serious.
Careful.
Almost… worried.
My throat tightened. “Nothing happened.”
“Then why are you suddenly changing every rule you ever made?”
I looked anywhere but at him. At the marble floor. At the silver faucet. At my own reflection in the mirror, pale and guilty and nothing like the shameless woman I had pretended to be for three years.
“I just think we should act more like a normal married couple,” I whispered.
Sterling gave a short, humorless laugh. “You’ve never wanted to be a normal married couple.”
Exactly.
That was exactly the problem.
The system buzzed in my head like an obnoxious little mosquito. Warning. Hatred meter unstable. Current value: 62.
I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Why had it gone up again?
All I was doing was standing here breathing like an idiot.
Sterling’s gaze sharpened. “Chloe.”
I forced myself to look at him.
His jaw was tight. “If I did something wrong, say it.”
You existed, I thought wildly. You existed while being a clean-romance male lead and I apparently turned your life into a three-year psychological thriller.
But I obviously couldn’t say that.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said quickly. “You’re perfect.”
That only made his expression colder.
“Then what changed overnight?”
Everything.
My entire understanding of my marriage, my mission, my life in this world, and the man standing in front of me.
I had spent three years believing I was slowly melting a cold man’s heart.
Now I knew I had probably been trampling all over it.
“I’m just tired,” I said.
Sterling stared at me for a long moment.
Then he reached out.
Pure instinct made me flinch backward.
The second I did, something in his face went blank.
Not angry.
Not hurt.
Just empty.
His hand fell to his side.
The system screamed so loudly I almost blacked out. Hatred meter: 75! Host! What did you do this time?
My own breath caught.
I hadn’t done anything. I hadn’t touched him. I hadn’t flirted. I hadn’t kissed him. I had done exactly what the system wanted.
Then why did it keep going up?
“I see,” Sterling said.
His voice was polite.
That was somehow worse than if he had shouted.
He turned, picked up his watch from the counter, and fastened it around his wrist with slow, precise movements. “I have an early meeting. I’ll have breakfast sent up.”
And just like that, he walked out.
The moment the door clicked shut behind him, my legs gave out.
I slid to the floor and buried my face in my hands.
The system made a confused whirring sound. “That… wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“You think?” I hissed. “You told me if I stopped touching him, his hatred would go down.”
“It did go down!”
“It also shot back up every five seconds!”
The system went quiet for two full beats. “Maybe the male lead is emotionally unstable.”
I lifted my head. “He’s a billionaire CEO, not a malfunctioning blender.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
I would have laughed if my chest didn’t hurt so much.
After a while, I dragged myself to the guest room, changed into something less dangerous than my silk nightdress, and headed downstairs. If I was going to survive this marriage long enough to become the dark-history ex-wife and collect triple pay, I needed a plan.
Step one: stop all physical contact.
Step two: reduce unnecessary interaction.
Step three: become so bland and non-threatening that Sterling’s hatred meter would eventually crawl to zero.
Easy.
Probably.
Maybe.
When I reached the dining room, Sterling was already there.
Of course he was.
He sat at the far end of the long table in a charcoal suit, reading financial reports while sipping black coffee. Morning light poured across his shoulders, outlining him in gold. He looked so unfairly beautiful that I almost forgot he allegedly wanted me dead.
Almost.
I stopped three seats away from him and sat down as quietly as possible.
He did not look up.
A maid placed breakfast in front of me. Fruit, toast, eggs, yogurt, coffee.
Normally I would have marched straight over, climbed into Sterling’s lap, stolen a bite off his plate, and demanded he feed me strawberries while he worked.
Now I sat with my back ramrod straight and stared into my yogurt like it contained the secrets of the universe.
Silence stretched.
Then Sterling folded his newspaper.
“Why are you sitting over there?”
I nearly dropped my spoon.
“Because…” I scrambled for an excuse. “Because sunlight is good for digestion.”
Sterling slowly turned his head and looked at the curtains behind him, then at the floor-to-ceiling windows behind me.
The side I was sitting on was in shadow.
“…Right,” he said.
The system whispered, “Hatred meter: 48.”
I blinked.
It had gone down.
So distance was good.
Distance was safe.
Distance—
Sterling pushed his chair back and stood.
My hand clenched around the spoon.
He walked around the table.
My pulse started sprinting.
Then he pulled out the chair directly beside mine and sat down.
Hatred meter: 67.
“What are you doing?” I asked weakly.
“Having breakfast with my wife.”
His tone was perfectly calm, but there was something dangerous simmering underneath it.
I inched my plate half an inch away from him.
His eyes dropped to the movement.
“Chloe,” he said, “look at me.”
I obeyed before my brain could stop me.
He leaned back slightly, studying my face like he was looking at a puzzle with missing pieces.
“You’ve been avoiding me since last night.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“You moved to the guest room.”
“That was for sleep quality.”
“You canceled the morning kiss.”
“That was for oral hygiene.”
He stared at me.
I stared back with all the dignity of a raccoon caught knocking over trash cans at midnight.
Sterling’s lips pressed into a thin line. “And now you’re acting like I have some kind of contagious disease.”
The spoon slipped from my fingers and clattered against the plate.
“No!” I said too loudly. “You’re very healthy.”
Hatred meter: 39.
I froze.
Wait.
That answer had lowered it?
The system sounded just as shocked as I was. “Host… I think he liked that.”
How? Why? In what universe?
Sterling’s gaze flicked over my face. Some of the tension in his shoulders eased, barely noticeable unless you’d spent three years obsessively studying every breath he took.
“Then explain it,” he said quietly.
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
Because there was no explanation I could give him.
Sorry, darling, it turns out I’m not your devoted wife but a transmigrated idiot with a broken mission system, and I recently learned I may have been tormenting you for three years.
Probably not the move.
So I did what any emotionally repressed fraud would do.
I lied.
“I had a dream,” I said.
Sterling’s expression did not change. “A dream.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of dream?”
I lowered my eyes. “A bad one.”
Silence.
Then, to my utter horror, Sterling reached out and touched my cheek.
Just the back of his fingers. Barely there.
Still, it felt like my entire nervous system went up in flames.
“About me?” he asked.
Hatred meter: 15.
I stopped breathing.
The system stopped breathing.
Even the maid pouring coffee in the distance seemed to stop breathing.
Sterling was still looking at me with that same unreadable expression, his fingertips cool against my skin.
Why was it dropping?
Why would him touching me make it drop?
He was supposed to hate physical intimacy.
That was his setting.
That was the whole premise.
Wasn’t it?
I swallowed hard. “A little.”
His hand stilled.
“Did I hurt you in it?”
The question cracked something inside my chest.
Because he sounded careful again.
Not sarcastic. Not mocking. Not cold.
Careful.
I had been so sure every rough kiss, every lowered voice, every possessive touch over the past three years was just him enduring me. Just him gritting his teeth and suffering through my insanity because of the merger between our families.
But what if—
No.
No, absolutely not.
The system had confirmed it. The red numbers were hatred.
The system might be incompetent, annoying, absent for years, and the direct cause of most of my trauma, but it was still a system. It should know what a meter meant.
Shouldn’t it?
I forced myself to smile.
“In the dream, you left me,” I said softly.
Sterling went very still.
And then the hatred meter dropped all the way to 5.
The system made a sound like a dying kettle. “This is scientifically impossible.”
Sterling lowered his hand.
For a moment, he just looked at me.
Then he said, very evenly, “I’m not leaving you.”
My heart gave a horrible, desperate thud.
He stood up before I could respond, buttoned his jacket, and reached for his briefcase.
“I’ll be home early tonight,” he said. “We’ll talk then.”
And just like that, he left me sitting there with my untouched breakfast and a hatred meter that had somehow nearly hit zero because I told him I dreamed he abandoned me.
The front doors shut.
I turned to the system.
The system turned to me.
“…Explain,” I said.
“I can’t,” it said.
“That’s not good enough.”
“It literally makes no sense! Unless—”
“Unless what?”
The system fell silent.
I narrowed my eyes. “Unless what?”
A full five seconds passed before it answered, in a tiny, horrified voice.
“Unless the meter was never hatred either.”
I stood up so fast my chair scraped violently across the floor.
“What?”
“I mean, technically, the system interface is old,” it babbled. “And there were some updates while I was away. And there was that one cross-genre patch. And also some color-coding changes. And maybe a bug in the emotional-spectrum labeling module—”
I grabbed the edge of the table. “Tell me right now what you’re saying.”
The system sounded like it wanted to die.
“I’m saying there is a small chance,” it squeaked, “that the red meter might not have been hatred.”
A roaring filled my ears.
I thought of Sterling’s face last night when I tried to leave the bed.
This morning when I pushed him away.
The way the number had risen when I flinched from his touch.
The way it dropped when I said he left me.
The way he said, I’m not leaving you.
My knees nearly buckled.
“What… what else could it be?”
The system did not answer immediately.
When it finally did, its voice was barely audible.
“In intense-romance modules, bright red usually means… obsession.”
I stared straight ahead.
Then I smiled.
Then I laughed.
Then, because life was a cruel and vicious joke, I started laughing so hard I nearly cried.
“Obsession?” I repeated. “You’re telling me I spent all night sobbing because my husband might not want to murder me—he might just be catastrophically in love with me?”
“Host,” the system said weakly, “I really need you not to phrase it like that.”
I pressed both hands over my face and let out a muffled scream.
Three years.
Three whole years.
Three years of believing I was seducing a difficult male lead.
Then twelve hours of believing I had been tormenting a deeply repressed man into plotting my death.
And now—
Now I apparently had a billionaire husband with a terrifyingly high obsession index.
I inhaled sharply and dropped my hands.
“Wait,” I said. “If the meter is obsession… then why did it rise every time I touched him?”
The system made a small embarrassed beep. “Because he liked it.”
I went still.
“Liked it?”
“Yes.”
“But you said he was strictly asexual.”
A pause.
Then: “…The source material said he was cold, abstinent, and not close to anyone.”
I stared at the empty seat Sterling had left behind.
“That is not the same thing.”
“I realize that now.”
I pointed a shaking finger at the ceiling. “You ruined my life.”
“In my defense,” the system muttered, “you were already making very bold choices before I returned.”
I couldn’t even argue with that.
I sank back into my chair and covered my eyes.
This was bad.
No, this was worse than bad.
Because if Sterling truly hated me, then all I had to do was back off and let time fix it.
But if Sterling was obsessed with me—
Then last night, when I ran to the guest room…
This morning, when I canceled the kiss…
Every step I had taken to “save my life” might have looked to him like rejection.
I slowly lowered my hands.
“System.”
“Yes, host?”
“What does an obsession meter at ninety mean?”
The system hesitated. “It means… the male lead is in a mentally fragile state and may respond unpredictably to signs of abandonment.”
I stood up again.
“What does ‘unpredictably’ mean?”
“It means,” the system said carefully, “you should probably not sleep in the guest room tonight.”
A chill ran down my spine.
As if summoned by sheer narrative malice, my phone buzzed on the table.
A message from Sterling.
I opened it with numb fingers.
Tonight. Wear the white dress I bought you.
My throat went dry.
A second message appeared.
We’re going on a date.
A third followed almost immediately.
And Chloe?
I stared at the screen.
If you try to run to the guest room again, I will come carry you back myself.
I looked up slowly.
The system made a tiny electronic whimper.
“Host,” it said, “I think the male lead knows something is wrong.”
I swallowed.
Because suddenly, for the first time since the system returned, I was absolutely certain of one thing.
Sterling Vance had never hated me at all.
And that realization—
terrified me far more.