Infinite Cashback: My Wealth Rebate System

Before he could start, there was the small matter of making the sink functional.

He turned on the faucet, adjusted the water until it ran warm, and reached for the dish soap.

He squeezed a generous amount onto the sponge, paused, then added a little more for reasons he couldn’t quite justify.

Sarah stood nearby, watching, arms crossed, close enough that he could smell whatever she’d used on her hair earlier, something faintly like vanilla, which was an unhelpful thing to notice while holding a dirty plate.

It wasn’t even that dirty. A crust of something along the rim that used to be sauce, maybe, in a previous life.

He just needed a second to process that this was happening, that he was standing in his own kitchen being supervised through the act of washing a dish, like a parolee doing court-ordered community service.

Then he turned his head and met Sarah’s eyes. She was standing there with the unmistakable expression of someone waiting to see whether he actually knew what he was doing.

"You want me to start with this one, boss. Or is there a preferred ceremonial order I’m supposed to follow? Should I say a few words first?"

"Just wash the plate, Jason."

He ran it under the water, and the crust didn’t move. He scrubbed harder. It still didn’t move, and for a humiliating three seconds he genuinely fought the plate, sponge squeaking, water splashing up onto his sleeve which he had, of course, rolled up specifically to avoid this exact outcome.

Sarah watched the whole thing without saying a word, which was somehow worse than if she’d laughed.

"It’s fighting back," he said.

"It’s just a plate."

"It’s a plate with opinions."

She reached past him, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm and grabbed the scrub brush sitting untouched at the back of the sink, and held it out without comment.

There’s a brush and I’ve been using a sponge like an animal.

He took the brush, and this time the crust surrendered in about two seconds. He didn’t say anything. Neither did she. But he caught, out of the corner of his eye, the exact shape of her trying not to smile, and losing.

The second plate went faster. So did the third. He found a rhythm now, scrub, rinse, rack and somewhere in the middle of it he stopped performing reluctance and just did the thing, sleeves damp and water gone lukewarm.

Sarah was close enough at his elbow that when he reached for the towel their hands nearly collided over it.

Neither of them moved back first.

"You’re better at this than I expected," she said.

"Low bar."

"Extremely low bar."

He dried his hands anyway and when he looked up she was still standing there, closer than the conversation strictly required, watching him with an expression that had drifted somewhere past supervision.

Then she blinked, stepped back, and put her hands on her hips, the universal stance of someone about to say something he wasn’t going to enjoy.

Sarah started moving along the counter, and this time she wasn’t just looking. She was touching things, picking them up one at a time like she was cataloguing evidence.

A phone charger, coiled and abandoned near the toaster, nowhere close to an outlet. A single shoe, for reasons Jason genuinely could not reconstruct. Something flat and swollen with old water damage that might once have been a paperback.

She held the shoe up between two fingers like it had personally wronged her. "Why is there a shoe in the kitchen."

"I don’t know."

"You don’t know."

"I want to be honest with you. I have no theory."

"That’s concerning."

She set it down and kept moving down the counter, and Jason found himself watching her hands more than the objects in them, which was its own small problem he decided not to examine right now.

Then she reached the notebook.

It was wedged between a stack of unopened mail and a coaster he didn’t own a matching set for, spine cracked from being shoved into that gap more than once.

"That definitely doesn’t belong in the kitchen," she said, already turning it over.

"I was using it." He said it too fast, and heard himself say it too fast, and reached for it a half-second after he should have.

Sarah didn’t hand it over. She held it slightly out of easy range and looked at him instead of the notebook. "For what?"

"Writing."

"Writing what?"

He should’ve had an answer ready. Instead the kitchen got very quiet, water still dripping off one hand onto the floor, and he became aware of exactly how close they were standing.

Close enough that stepping forward to take the notebook back would put him somewhere neither of them had agreed to yet.

"Nothing important," he said, and reached again but slower this time, deliberate, and his fingers closed over the edge of it at the same moment hers did.

Neither of them let go immediately.

Sarah looked up at him. Not teasing this time, actually reading him, the way she’d read the plate, except he was considerably less washable. "You’re a bad liar."

"I’m a great liar. You’re just annoyingly observant."

"Those aren’t mutually exclusive."

He almost laughed, the echo of his own line from the shop, thrown back at him and in the half-second his guard dropped for that, she could’ve taken the notebook clean out of his hand.

She didn’t. She let go first, stepped back and held both hands up like she was releasing a suspect for lack of evidence.

"Fine," she said. "Keep your mystery notebook."

"Thank you."

"I’m going to find out eventually."

"I don’t doubt it."

She turned back to the counter, already reaching for the next object to interrogate.

Jason tucked the notebook under his arm and didn’t move for a second. Didn’t say anything either. He just stood there, in his own kitchen, holding the one thing in the apartment he actually didn’t want her to find and found himself oddly unbothered by how close she’d just come to finding it.

That was new.

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