Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 313: 313 | Chloe McKnight [GT BONUS]

That was the problem. That was the actual, genuine, terrifying problem, and Chloe pressed her forehead against the wet tile and let the water pound her spine while she looked straight at it.

Nobody in her family had ever gotten to want things. Her father worked twelve-hour shifts in solvent fumes and came home smelling like a chemical plant and apologized for what he couldn’t afford. Her mother counted the containers in the fridge. Daniel wore limited-edition sneakers he thought came from a scholarship stipend. Chloe had built an entire second person out of a ring light and a face mask so that none of them would have to know how thin the margin was, and she had done it alone, in a closet, at midnight, for six months.

She’d made two hundred and eleven thousand dollars doing it. She could recite the number without checking.

And now she was standing in Jordan’s shower with his cum running down her thighs, considering, seriously, the possibility that she was done being alone about anything.

"Okay," she said to the tile. "Okay. Let’s do this properly."

She reached for the shampoo.

Item one. The pregnancy. Two weeks minimum before a test meant anything, probably three to be safe. That put it at the end of February, which was midterm season, which was fantastic timing for finding out whether her entire life had restructured itself. If it was positive, the due date landed somewhere in November. Fall semester. She’d be showing by September. She’d be enormous by Halloween.

Item two. The scholarship. Pacific Crest didn’t have a morality clause about pregnancy, she’d checked the handbook twice for entirely different reasons, but she’d need to talk to financial aid about a reduced course load, and reduced course load meant renegotiating the terms, and renegotiating meant paperwork with people who asked questions.

Item three. Streaming.

Chloe’s hands stopped in her hair.

StellarNote existed now. Twelve followers, a Micro Center receipt for thirteen hundred dollars, and a business plan written by a girl with red eyes who couldn’t order coffee without a rehearsal.

Twelve followers wasn’t income. Twelve followers was a hobby with good lighting.

She had six months of runway in savings if she was careful. Nine if she was brutal about it. A baby ate that runway alive, and she knew exactly what babies cost because she’d watched her parents do arithmetic at the kitchen table when Daniel was small.

Item four, and this was the one she’d been circling.

Jordan had nine hundred thousand dollars sitting in a business account he refused to touch.

Chloe rinsed the shampoo out and let that sit.

He’d stood in a garden in Newport Beach two days ago and told her the money felt cheap because he hadn’t built it. He’d said Nova Network had to succeed or fail on its own. He’d looked at a million-dollar onsen and treated it like something he’d been handed instead of earned, and she had watched him do it and felt her chest crack open because it was the single least Eliza thing a person could possibly do.

She would never ask him for that money. Ever. She would rather eat instant noodles four nights a week for the rest of her life, which she had done, which she was extremely good at.

But she also knew he would offer. Immediately. He would offer before she finished the sentence, and he would be annoying about it, and he would call it a business loan with zero interest because he’d learned that framing worked on her.

The water ran hot down her back.

"You’re doing it again," she said out loud.

Because she was. She was building a spreadsheet in the shower about a hypothetical baby, when the actual thing sitting under all four items was much smaller and much scarier.

She wanted it.

Not the timing. The timing was catastrophic. But the shape of it, the version of the future where she woke up next to him and he made eggs with that stupid tilting motion and there was a third person in the apartment who had his eyes and her hair. She wanted that so badly her ribs hurt.

Eighteen years old. Six weeks of knowing him. Two hundred and eleven thousand dollars in a bank account her mother couldn’t know about. And she wanted his baby.

Chloe turned the water off.

The steam had fogged everything. She wrapped herself in one of his towels, which was too big and smelled like the detergent his mother sent him, and stood there for a second with her hand on the counter.

Then she wiped the mirror with her forearm.

The girl in the glass was a mess.

Her hair hung wet and black past her shoulders, the blue streak plastered to her cheek and dark from the water. Mascara had given up hours ago and left grey smudges under both eyes that no amount of scrubbing had removed. Her lips were swollen. There was a mark on her throat, high enough that no collar would hide it, purple already, unmistakably a mouth.

Bruises on her hips. Bruises on her thighs. A crescent of teeth marks near her left breast where he’d bitten down while she screamed his name loud enough that Miss Valentine was going to bring snickerdoodles again.

She looked destroyed.

She looked absurdly, obscenely happy.

Chloe leaned closer. She’d spent six months learning her own face in a ring light, angling it, blurring it, hiding it behind medical masks and sunglasses so that one hundred and eighty thousand strangers could want a woman who didn’t exist. She knew this face better than anyone alive knew theirs.

She had never once seen it look like this.

Her hand went to her stomach again. Flat. Warm from the shower. Absolutely nothing happening in there that she could feel, and probably nothing happening at all yet, and she pressed her palm against it anyway.

"Hi," she whispered.

Then she made a strangled noise and covered her mouth, because she was talking to her own uterus in her boyfriend’s bathroom.

The bunny ears sat on the counter beside the sink. Black, slightly bent from being crushed against a headboard. She picked them up and turned them over in her hands, and the little tag inside the band caught the light. There was no tag. There’d never been a tag. Magic items didn’t come with care instructions.

She put them back on.

Just to see.

The charm didn’t do anything this time, or maybe it did and she was too wrung out to notice. The girl in the mirror looked back at her with damp hair and bunny ears and a bruise on her throat, and Chloe tilted her head, and the ears tilted with it.

"Chloe McKnight," she said.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!