Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 318: 318 | The Kumiko Problem [GT BONUS]

The hesitation question deserved about two seconds of honest thought, and Jordan gave it exactly that.

Chloe cooked actual food. Not impressive food, not Instagram food, actual Korean home cooking that tasted like something a real person made for another real person they wanted to feed. The eggs she burned every time she tried were the only exception, and Jordan had already fixed that problem. She cleaned on Sundays with the focused aggression of someone running a military operation against entropy. She stole his henleys but she also did his laundry without mentioning it, which was either domestically convenient or slightly terrifying, and he had landed somewhere between both and stopped caring. She was going to be the mother of his child in approximately seven months if the magical pregnancy suit had done what magical pregnancy suits were apparently designed to do, which meant the structural argument for maintaining separate addresses had collapsed entirely.

Also her couch was better.

"The Kumiko problem," he said.

Chloe climbed off his lap with the careful dignity of a woman whose legs had recently failed her, landing on the floor and gripping the counter edge. Her hair was fully destroyed. The bruise on her throat had gone purple overnight. She looked like she had just survived something and enjoyed it, which was accurate.

"Kumiko comes over three times a week already," she said.

"Right."

"She cried in my bathroom once because you texted her a headpat emoji."

"She what."

"She did not say it was a headpat emoji. She said it was a metaphor for the physical act of being perceived." Chloe reached up and pulled the elastic out of her hair, letting the black waves and the blue streak fall loose around her shoulders. "She needs a place to come when she’s with you. Not the hallway. Not the strip of carpet between your door and mine."

Jordan thought about it the way he thought about problems that were actually solvable if he stopped treating them like they weren’t. Two apartments, twelve feet of shared wall, one girl who had built a production studio in her unit and one girl who had built the same setup in his building but smaller. The math was obvious. The math had been obvious since Kumiko showed up at seven in the morning with a spatula and her entire heart in both hands.

"We give her your bedroom," he said.

Chloe went very still.

"Hear me out." Jordan dropped off the washer. The kitchen floor was cold through his socks. "Your studio is here. Nova Network needs the studio, which means Kumiko needs the studio, which means Kumiko is here constantly anyway. She converts your unit into her bedroom slash shared workspace, she pays whatever rent she was already paying on her place to us instead, and your address stays on her lease so her parents don’t have questions."

"We’re charging Kumiko rent."

"We’re giving Kumiko a room in exchange for existing in our building as a content creator for the company we all work for."

"Jordan."

"Forty-two percent," he said. "Zero point eight four. Rising fast."

Chloe stared at him for a moment, and then something shifted in her face and she laughed, once, flat and real, and shook her head at the ceiling like she was appealing to God about the quality of man she had ended up with.

"You’re going to tell her it’s a business arrangement," she said.

"I’m going to tell her she gets to live near her two favorite people and her koi fish is a twenty-five minute drive away."

Chloe pulled open the washer door and started transferring the wet sheets to the dryer, which was genuinely from 2011 and sounded like a cement mixer on its third career. She was quiet for a moment in the way that meant she was building something in her head, not the spreadsheet version, the other kind, the version where she was trying to figure out if something was allowed to feel good before she decided to let it.

"She’s going to cry," Chloe said.

"Obviously."

"Happy crying."

"I assumed."

Chloe closed the dryer door and hit the button and the thing kicked on with a sound like a small disaster, and she turned and leaned against it and looked at Jordan with her hip against the machine and her arms crossed and the blue streak falling across her left eye. She looked exactly like a girl who had spent six months figuring out how to survive alone and was currently experiencing the extremely uncomfortable sensation of not having to anymore.

"Tell her today," Chloe said.

"We haven’t even moved anything."

"Tell her anyway. She’s been awake since five, she’s sent me fourteen texts, and the last one was a picture of her toast that just said I miss you both."

Jordan pulled out his phone.

The System notification was still sitting at the top of the queue, a golden banner he’d been ignoring for twenty minutes, congratulating him on maximum chemistry and offering a Platinum Gacha and various other rewards he was categorically not dealing with on a Sunday before noon. He closed it. Opened his messages.

Kumiko’s last text was a photograph of her breakfast toast with strawberry jam. The jam had been spread into two figures standing close together. Under it she had typed I miss you both and then a sequence of seventeen small heart emojis in descending size order.

Jordan typed: Come over.

The response was immediate. A scream emoji, six rabbit emojis, a running girl, and then: should i bring anything.

He typed: Yourself. And maybe the pink notebook.

She sent back: !!!! and then a forty-five second delay that he suspected involved outfit selection and then: omw!!!!! with three exclamation points and what appeared to be a drawing of a sun with his hair done in Jordan’s signature style, spiky on top with the darker fade, rendered entirely in emoji and somehow accurate.

He put the phone in his pocket. Chloe was watching him from the dryer with an expression that looked like it might be getting away from her, the kind of look she only had when she was tired enough that she’d stopped managing it.

"What," he said.

"Nothing." She uncrossed her arms. "Help me fold the dry stuff."

Kumiko arrived nine minutes later in a lavender hoodie and black leggings with her twin tails in pink ribbons and her ita-bag over one shoulder covered in keychains and the pink notebook stuffed in the side pocket. She knocked twice and then knocked again before Jordan got the door, and when he opened it she looked up at him with enormous brown eyes and said "hi Jordan-kun" in the voice she used when she was trying not to immediately throw herself at him, the voice that had a structural load limit of about four seconds.

He stepped aside to let her in.

She walked three steps into the apartment, clocked Chloe in the kitchen folding towels, and made a sound from somewhere in her sternum that was not quite a word. It was more like a vowel that had been emotionally compromised, somewhere between mm and oh and something that had no English spelling. She dropped the ita-bag on the couch and crossed the kitchen in five steps and wrapped both arms around Chloe from behind, face between her shoulder blades, squeezing.

"Hi," Chloe said, without stopping folding.

"Hmm." Kumiko pressed her face harder into Chloe’s back. "You smell like him."

"We live together now."

Jordan watched the pause stretch out and then collapse.

Kumiko turned around from Chloe’s back with her eyes already wet, looking at Jordan with the expression of someone who had just received information their body did not know how to process at normal human speed. Her lip wobbled once. She bit it.

"You’re moving in together," she said.

"We already were," Jordan told her. "This makes it official."

"And I get," she started, and stopped.

"Unit 403," Chloe said. "Your room. Your studio. Your cosplay closet. You pay rent to us instead of your building and we funnel it straight into the Nova Network operating account so Brooke can sleep at night."

Kumiko stared at Chloe and then at Jordan and then at the kitchen counter and then back at Jordan, and then her face did the thing it did sometimes where all the architecture holding it together let go at once. She put her hands over her mouth. Her eyes went glassy with the genuine article, the wet kind, not the kind she used when she was being dramatic.

"Hey." Jordan crossed the kitchen.

"Hmm, nn, I’m fine," Kumiko managed from behind both hands, which was not the most convincing thing anyone had ever said. Her shoulders were shaking.

Jordan put his hand on top of her head between the twin tails. His palm settled between the ribbons into the warm silk of her hair, the weight of it spreading through his fingers down to the heel of his hand. The Headpat trait engaged the way it always did, a low current moving up through his arm into his chest, and Kumiko’s hands came down from her face and her shoulders stopped shaking and her eyes went half-lidded and her body just kind of exhaled. The whole mechanism of her, the constant motion, the talking, the thinking at three times normal speed, went offline. She swayed forward a degree.

"Ohh," she breathed.

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