Chapter 8: The First Rival

Brutal Midwest winter howled against the windows, driving needles of snow across the glass while the house stayed a cocoon of heat and sin. January 2019. I sat in the office chair, laptop open to the portfolio dashboard, green numbers climbing in steady waves. Sophie rode me slow and deliberate, her tiny waist twisting with each downward grind, slick walls hugging me like warm velvet. Her perky tits pressed against my chest, nipples dragging with every roll of her hips. The room smelled of her arousal and the faint trace of pine from the Christmas tree we still hadn’t taken down. Outside, the world froze. Inside, everything burned.

My hands gripped her ass, guiding her rhythm while my eyes stayed locked on the screen. The dropshipping site had expanded into three new categories—winter tech accessories timed to the exact post-holiday slump I remembered from my first life. Revenue held steady. Bitcoin, though ... that was the test coming. A minor dip loomed in the next few weeks, the kind that would panic most holders but hand me an exit I could time to the minute thanks to memories that stretched to 2026.

Sophie’s breath hitched against my neck. “You’re thinking about money while you’re inside me,” she teased, clenching deliberately. “Should I be jealous of the numbers?”

I thrust up once, hard enough to make her gasp. “Never. You’re part of the numbers now.” She came with a soft shudder, milking me, but I held back. There was tension in the air tonight—something sharper than the usual hunger.

It arrived the next morning in the form of Derek.

The local bully from my old high-school days had reinvented himself as a wannabe entrepreneur. Somehow he’d scraped together the same dropshipping niche—exact products, same ad copy, prices slashed just low enough to bleed my margins. He’d even lifted my landing-page layout down to the font choices. My phone buzzed with alerts from the forum accounts I monitored: Derek bragging in private groups about “stealing the playbook from some kid who got lucky.” He had no idea I’d mapped every 2019 market move eight years ago.

I felt the old rage flicker, then cool into something colder. Smug certainty. I knew exactly how this played out. Derek’s supplier was flaky, his ad budget thin, his personal life a mess. I spent the next two weeks moving in silence—buying up the best ad real estate on the platforms he used, undercutting his bids with surgical precision, even quietly reaching out to his supplier with better terms. The empire flexed without fanfare. While he scrambled, I layered in fresh Bitcoin positions, selling high at the exact peak I remembered before the coming dip.