Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 327: 327 | A Crack in the Porcelain [CASTLE BONUS]

Eliza’s palms pressed flat against the table, fingers splayed wide, and the movement dragged the neckline of her knit sweater another centimeter south. Jordan could see the swell of her collarbone, the black bra strap bisecting her bare shoulder, and exactly one inch of cleavage compressed into a line so deliberate it belonged on a storyboard rather than a study room.

He didn’t look at it. He looked at her face.

"Section two," he repeated. "Meritocracy myth. You had three sources last week."

Eliza’s jaw worked sideways. Her fingers curled against the laminate until her nails scraped, producing a tiny sound that made Jordan’s back teeth ache. She pushed off the table and dropped into her chair, crossing her arms under her chest in a way that pushed everything upward and outward, the sweater fabric stretching taut across the tops of her breasts where the knit caught the overhead fluorescent light.

"I had four sources, actually. I found a fifth over the weekend."

"Great. Pull them up."

She stared at him for a full five seconds. Her blue eyes tracked from his face down to the black tank top stretched across his chest, the visible definition of his shoulders, the ridge of his collarbone where Chloe had left a mark that had faded to pale yellow overnight. Her gaze snagged on that mark and stayed there two beats too long before it snapped back to his face with the mechanical precision of someone who had just been caught shoplifting.

"You look different."

"I look the same as Thursday."

"No, you look..." She waved one hand in a vague circle that encompassed all of him. "You look like you’ve been sleeping well."

Jordan opened his laptop. The hinge creaked. He pulled up the debate outline draft and angled the screen toward Eliza so she could read the bullet points he’d added over the weekend, during the forty-minute window between Chloe’s third orgasm and the point where Kumiko arrived with bagels and declared war on his loft’s organizational structure.

"I reformatted section one. Your turn on two."

Eliza uncrossed her arms and pulled her laptop from her bag with a series of movements that involved bending forward at the waist while her sweater gaped open, giving Jordan a direct sightline down the front of her body. The black bra was lace. The cups were sheer enough that he could see the darker shade of her skin through the fabric. She straightened slowly, letting the angle hold for approximately four seconds longer than retrieving a thirteen-inch MacBook required.

Jordan typed a note about wage stagnation and kept typing.

The System pinged once. He didn’t check it. He already knew what it said. Eliza’s attraction level was climbing in real time because he refused to react to the most obvious seduction strategy since the invention of low-cut necklines, and some algorithmic god of romance was rewarding him for having the self-control of a man who had already been inside two separate women in the past sixteen hours and genuinely could not muster the energy to care about a third pair of breasts no matter how aggressively they were being aimed at his face.

"Okay." Eliza turned her screen. A bibliography page filled the display, dense with APA citations and highlighted passages. Her research was good. It was always good. Eliza Hartwell’s academic performance had never been the problem. "I pulled data from the Brookings Institute on intergenerational mobility, the Chetty study from Stanford on zip code correlation with lifetime earnings, and a Pew Research longitudinal survey that tracks wealth gaps across racial lines over four decades."

"What’s the fifth source."

"A podcast."

"Delgado won’t accept a podcast."

"It’s an NPR podcast featuring the lead researcher from the Chetty study. I’m using it for a direct quote about how parental income predicts child income at a rate of point five-two in the US, which is higher than any other developed nation. The quote adds color to the raw data."

Jordan leaned back in his chair. The plastic backrest groaned under his weight. He was genuinely impressed, and the feeling irritated him because he did not want to be impressed by Eliza Hartwell in any context, including the purely academic one where she had clearly spent her weekend doing actual research instead of whatever Cameron Mitchell considered a productive use of time, which probably involved protein shakes and unsolicited opinions about cryptocurrency.

"That works. Cite the original study as the primary source and use the podcast quote as supplementary. Delgado likes when you layer sourcing."

Eliza beamed. The smile hit her whole face and made her look eighteen instead of whatever curated age her Instagram filters projected. Her shoulders dropped away from her ears, and the nervous tension she’d been carrying since Jordan walked through the door released all at once, leaving her looking softer and less calculated than she had any right to look while wearing a push-up bra to a study session.

"I also have a counterargument mapped out," she said, pulling her notebook closer. Her handwriting was neat and looping, the kind of penmanship that came from private school. "If Delgado challenges us, which she will because she challenges everyone, I want to preempt the bootstraps narrative by acknowledging survivorship bias. The American Dream isn’t disproven by individual success stories. Individual success stories are the mechanism that keeps the myth alive."

Jordan closed his laptop halfway and looked at her directly.

"That’s good."

"I know."

"When did you start thinking like this."

Eliza’s smile faltered. A crack ran through the porcelain, and for half a second Jordan could see something underneath that wasn’t performance or strategy or the girl who wore lace bras to study sessions. Something tired and confused and angry at itself for being confused.

"Someone told me I needed to figure out what kind of person I was."

She held his gaze. Her right hand moved from the notebook to the iced coffee she’d bought for him, her fingers wrapping around the base and nudging it forward again. Not pushy. Tentative, like she was offering a peace treaty and expecting it to be declined.

Jordan took the coffee.

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