Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 308: 308 | I’m Going to Be Very, Very Careful

He came down over her. Her legs hooked around his hips. The sheer fabric of the tights was the only thing between them now and it felt like almost nothing, like a formality, and when he pressed against her she made a sound that arched her whole spine off the bed.

"Aaah, okay, that’s, that’s the charm thing, everything’s, haah, Jordan, I can feel you through the tights and it’s-" Her nails raked down his back. "It’s too much, it’s not enough, I don’t know which, both, it’s both-"

"Which one do you want me to fix first."

"Both. Now. I don’t-nngh-I don’t care about the order!"

He caught the waistband of the tights and she lifted her hips to help, and the ridiculous fragile fabric slid down her legs, and she kicked it off somewhere near the foot of the bed, and now it was just the bodice and the collar and the ears and nothing else, and Jordan took a second to look at her because he was, at his absolute core, a man who appreciated a view.

"Stop staring," she breathed, but her thighs pressed together and her flush deepened and she did not mean it even slightly.

"You put on the outfit."

"I put on the outfit so you’d touch me, not so you’d file a report-"

He touched her.

The sound she made cut off in the middle, spiked up into a register that definitely carried through the wall into 403, and her hand flew up to grab his shoulder, nails biting in. The charm effect had done exactly what the System’s clinical little description promised, forcefully elevated physiological arousal, and Chloe was gone, absolutely gone, her hips chasing his hand, her head thrown back against the sheets.

"There, oh my god, there, don’t, don’t move, don’t you-ah!"

"You said both. Now you want me to hold still."

"I changed my, haah, I changed the terms of the-mmh-of the agreement, shut up, shut up and-"

"Renegotiating mid-deal. That’s bad faith, Kim."

"I will end you."

She got a hand in his hair and yanked, and it should have been a punishment, except the noise she made when she did it undercut the whole gesture. Her whole body wound tighter.

He could feel it building in her, the shake in her thighs, the way her breath went ragged and uneven, the way her sounds climbed and climbed with nowhere left to go, and the old Jordan, the one who’d never touched a girl, would’ve panicked at how fast it was happening.

New Jordan just watched her come apart and thought, with the specific arrogance he’d stopped apologizing for, that he was extremely good at this now and that the credit was at least partly his own.

"Jordan-" His name broke into pieces. "I’m, I’m gonna, the suit, it’s, everything’s so-"

"I know."

"Don’t stop!"

"Not planning on it."

She shattered.

The sound she made wasn’t loud so much as total, this long broken cry that folded in on itself, her back arching clean off the mattress, her thighs clamping around his hand, and her whole body seizing for a stretch of seconds that went on long enough for him to genuinely worry about the noise complaint. The bunny ears had gone completely sideways. Her nails had left marks on his shoulder he’d feel tomorrow. Her mouth hung open around a shape that never quite became a word.

Then she collapsed back into the sheets, gasping, boneless, one arm flung over her eyes, and Jordan looked down at her and felt the smugness bloom in his chest like a slow warm bruise.

"That was fast," he said.

"Shut up."

Chloe moved her arm and looked up at him, and her eyes were wet at the corners, still glassy, and the expression on her face wasn’t the sharp one or the cocky one or the Calypso one. It was the other one. The rare one. The one that made his chest do the thing that had nothing to do with the outfit.

"You said no to the cage," she whispered.

"Yeah."

"Even though it would’ve been safer. For you." Her fingers traced his jaw, slow, the callus on her index finger rough against his skin. "You could’ve locked me at eighty-five percent forever and never had to worry about me leaving, and you said no."

"I already told you why."

"Tell me again."

The old joke sat right there, ready. Something deflecting about return rates or optimization. He could feel the shape of it in his mouth, the easy exit, and it would’ve been so simple to take it, to keep the thing behind his ribs safely behind his ribs where it couldn’t be used against him later.

He didn’t take it.

"Because if I have to trap you to keep you, then I didn’t keep anything." His voice came out rougher than he wanted. "I kept a puppet. And I already know what it feels like to buy something that looks like love and isn’t. I did it for four months. I’m not doing it again, not even when the version I could buy is you. Especially not when it’s you."

Chloe stared at him.

Then she surged up and kissed him, both hands framing his face, and it wasn’t the desperate suit-charm kiss from before, it was slower, and it tasted like salt, and he realized she was crying a little and doing an excellent job of pretending she wasn’t.

"You’re not allowed to say things like that," she mumbled against his mouth.

"You told me to."

"I revoke it. New rule. No devastating honesty during sex."

"That’s a terrible rule. Kumiko would never agree to that."

"Do not," Chloe pulled back, pointing a finger at him with as much authority as a woman in sideways bunny ears could muster, "bring up your other girlfriend while I’m wearing the pregnancy suit."

She grabbed his shoulders and rolled, and he let her, ending up on his back with Chloe straddling his hips, the bunny ears finally slipping off entirely to land on the pillow beside his head. She looked down at him, flushed and wrecked and smiling that crooked smile. "Which means you have a very specific problem. Because the charm effect isn’t done with me. And I’m not done with you. And we can’t do the one thing that would actually finish this."

"There are other things."

"There are so many other things." She rocked her hips against him, slow, and his brain browned out again. "But you have to be careful, Jordan baby. Because if you slip up, if you get too eager, the suit does its little ovulation optimization thing and then we’re explaining to my mother why I dropped out to have a baby with the boy she met four hours ago."

"Your mother knows people in Koreatown."

"My mother knows people in Koreatown."

"So this is a high-stakes situation."

"Extremely high stakes." She leaned down until her mouth brushed his ear, and her voice dropped into the low register, the Calypso one, the one she only aimed at him now. "So what are you gonna do about it, baby? Hm?"

And there it was again. Those exact words, the ones that had dropped him in the kitchen, deployed a second time with full knowledge of their effect, because Chloe Kim never used a weapon once when she could use it twice.

Jordan’s hands found her hips. He held her still, felt her shake against him, felt the charm running through her like current with nowhere to ground out, and he looked up at the girl who’d started as a transaction and become the only real thing in his ridiculous new life, and he decided that the System, the quests, the tickets, the tumbleweeds, the whole absurd golden apparatus that had rebuilt him from a crying wreck on Christmas into whatever this was, none of it mattered.

The girl mattered.

The girl in his bed, wrecked and laughing and crying and threatening him, one hundred percent and freely given, mattered more than any number the app could invent.

"I’m going to be very, very careful," he said.

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