Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 315: 315 | The Going Rate For A Lifestyle [GT BONUS]

Sunday arrived at 6:41 in the morning, which was the exact minute the Morning Person trait had decided was reasonable for a functioning adult, and Jordan lay there for a while with his eyes open and a girl using his sternum as a pillow, doing the kind of math nobody does out loud.

"Don’t move," Chloe said into his chest, without opening her eyes.

"I wasn’t."

"You were about to. You do a thing with your shoulder first."

"That’s slander."

"It’s data." Her hand slid flat across his stomach and stayed there, warm and possessive. Her hair was everywhere. The blue streak had wound up plastered across his collarbone sometime in the night, and there was still one bunny ear on the nightstand, bent at a forty-degree angle, looking like it had personally witnessed something.

He got about four more minutes before her actual alarm went off, and then Chloe Kim came online the way she always did, which was all at once and with an agenda.

"It’s Sunday," she said, sitting up. The henley slid off one shoulder and she didn’t fix it. "Sunday is cleaning day."

"Sunday is a rest day."

"Sunday is meal prep and laundry and vacuuming, and your apartment currently qualifies as a biohazard for entirely new reasons." She swung her legs off the bed, winced, and then sat back down with an expression Jordan would be thinking about for the rest of the week. "Oh. Ow."

"You good?"

"I’m walking like a cowboy and it’s your fault."

"That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me."

She threw the bunny ear at him. It hit his face with a soft plastic tap and fell into the wreckage of the bed, and Jordan lay there holding a magical fertility accessory while his girlfriend limped to the bathroom with her spine straight and her dignity theoretically intact, and he thought about the fact that on January tenth he had cried into a Red Bull can.

Growth. Some people meditate.

They started with the mattress.

Chloe supervised. That was the word she used. What it meant in practice was that Jordan dragged the thing off the frame, propped it against the factory windows in a rectangle of grey morning light, and then stood there while she pointed at it with a bottle of enzyme cleaner and delivered a verdict.

"That’s not coming out."

"Baking soda worked last time."

"Last time was sweat." Chloe crouched, tipped her head, and made a small sound of professional disappointment. "This is a different category of problem, Jordan. This is an insurance claim."

"Then we get a new mattress."

"We’re not buying a mattress because you can’t control yourself."

"You told me to."

"I told you a lot of things." She stood up and pushed her hair back with her wrist, which left a streak of cleaner across her temple, and she didn’t notice. "None of them were structural advice."

He got the enzyme cleaner anyway, and he did the scrubbing, on his knees on the hardwood while the washer chewed through the first load of sheets downstairs and Chloe attacked the bathroom with the focus of somebody defusing something. She sang while she cleaned. Not full voice, not the thing Karina had dragged out of her at the piano, just fragments under her breath in Korean and English, drifting through the open door with the smell of bleach.

Which was, objectively, insane. He’d paid three thousand dollars to sit across from a masked stranger at The Ivy. Now she was in his bathroom humming a Girls’ Generation deep cut while she scrubbed his sink, wearing his shirt, with his bruises on her hips.

Jordan pressed harder into the mattress and thought about the fact that the System had offered to lock her in place and he’d said no.

Best decision he’d ever made. Also the dumbest, financially. Both things stayed true at the same time, which he was slowly learning was how most real decisions worked.

Around nine they hit the laundry problem.

His washer had one load in it, his dryer had nothing, and the pile on the floor of the loft had grown into a topographical feature. Sheets, towels, four henleys that had been stolen and returned and stolen again, one destroyed magic bodice that neither of them had figured out how to dispose of, and the stockings Chloe had hand-washed in the sink out of spite and then draped over the shower rod like a flag.

"My washer is bigger," Chloe said. She was leaning in the doorway with her arms crossed, hair up now, the henley traded for one of his old volleyball tees that she had claimed with zero negotiation. "We should do the big stuff at my place."

"Fine."

"And your dryer takes ninety minutes because it’s from the year two thousand and eleven."

"It’s vintage."

"It’s a hair dryer with delusions."

They ended up hauling everything four doors down the hall, and that was when the whole thing started, because they got into her unit and Chloe stopped in her own entryway and looked around her apartment with a strange, flat expression.

Jordan set the laundry basket down. "What."

"I won’t be able to live here anymore."

"You live here."

"I’ll sleep at your place." She walked in, slow, past the grey sectional with its perfectly fluffed pillows and the fake fiddle-leaf fig she’d never once watered on purpose. "There’s gonna be dust on the coffee table. My coffee table."

"So you’ll been busy."

"I’ve be getting railed," she said, pleasant as a weather report, and then she picked up the candle and turned it over. "I pay eighteen hundred dollars a month for a room I use as a closet and a Twitch studio."

"Eighteen?"

"Nineteen with parking."

He whistled. She shot him a look.

"That’s the going rate for a converted factory with exposed brick and a leasing agent who says ’lifestyle’ four times a tour."

"I pay twenty-four," Jordan said. "Dad handles it."

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