Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 333: 333 | Hypothetically

Chloe closed her laptop with the quiet finality of a woman who had just won something. "Dr. Nakamura also says honesty is important for growth."

"That’s DIFFERENT." Kumiko clutched the DO NOT OPEN box against her chest like a shield, or maybe like a nuclear football she wasn’t authorized to release. "That’s about honesty with yourself. Not about my best friend reading my sacred documentation of Jordan-kun’s freckle pattern out loud like it’s a grocery list."

Jordan filed that one away. "Freckle pattern."

"Left shoulder," Kumiko said immediately, then heard herself, then made a sound like a dying kettle for the third time in ninety seconds. "There are three in a triangle formation and the spacing is really aesthetically pleasing, okay? I’m an artist. I notice composition. It’s a professional interest."

"It’s a triangle of freckles."

"It’s a really good triangle."

There was no arguing with that, mostly because arguing with it would require Jordan to have a leg to stand on, and he was standing in a room he now co-owned with two girlfriends, one of whom had a seven-page dossier on his skin. His moral high ground had eroded somewhere around the second gacha pull. Probably the one that gave him a trait literally named after a Greek tragedy about wanting to sleep with your mother.

He set his gym bag down by the door and rolled his shoulder, feeling the deep ache Maya had left there settle into his muscle like a permanent tenant. His whole right side was one continuous bruise. Somewhere under his shirt was a body shot the color of spoiled plums, courtesy of a five-foot-eight woman who could kill him with her hands and had chosen instead to only mostly kill him. Progress, technically.

"How was training," Chloe said. Statement, not question. She’d shifted on the mattress frame so her back rested against the bare wall, one knee drawn up, laptop balanced on her thigh. His henley swallowed her frame, the collar slipping off one shoulder to show the strap of nothing underneath. She’d stolen it three days ago and made a face at anyone who suggested she return it, and the face worked, so nobody suggested it anymore. "You’re limping."

"I’m not limping."

"You favored your left leg walking in. Kumiko didn’t notice because Kumiko was mid-launch. I noticed."

"You notice everything."

"I do." She said it without pride. Just fact. "It’s exhausting and I’ve made peace with it."

Kumiko, having safely relocated the DO NOT OPEN box behind a fortress of other boxes where nobody could reach it without a controlled demolition, spun back around and clasped her hands under her chin. "Did Maya-san beat you up again? You have to tell me if she did. I’ll write her a strongly worded letter. I’ll use my nice paper. The kind with the little cats in the corner."

"She didn’t beat me up." Jordan lied. Kind of. Getting beaten up implied malice, and Maya didn’t have malice in her. She had precision. Getting hit by Maya felt less like a fight and more like a very rude physics demonstration. "She’s teaching me clinch work."

"What’s clinch work?"

"It’s when two people get very close and one of them keeps kneeing the other one in the thigh."

Kumiko’s brow furrowed with the intensity of a scholar encountering a difficult text. "That sounds like it has a lot of physical contact."

"Kumi."

"I’m just SAYING." She dropped onto the bare mattress next to Chloe, folding her legs beneath her, and pulled her knees to her chest in a motion that made her look about twelve. "Chloe-chan, did you know clinch work involves a lot of physical contact with a very pretty scary woman who could snap a man like a breadstick?"

"I did not know that," Chloe said, and her voice had gone somewhere new. Not cold. Cold was the door slam. This was quieter and more interested, the register she used when she found a variable she hadn’t accounted for and wanted to look at it under better light. Her eyes came off the closed laptop and landed on Jordan with the specific weight of a woman who cataloged things. "Is Maya pretty."

Jordan had walked into a lot of traps in his life. He’d walked into them enthusiastically, back when the old Jordan roamed the earth spending forty-five hundred dollars on a girl who couldn’t remember his coffee order. He’d gotten better at spotting them. This one had a floor made of tissue paper and a pit full of consequences and Chloe had built it in real time with two words.

"She’s my instructor," he said.

"That’s not what I asked."

"She’s objectively an athlete."

"Also not what I asked." Chloe set the laptop aside. The motion was slow. Everything Chloe did when she was fishing for a truth was slow, deliberate, giving him room to hang himself in the silence. She’d learned it running an OnlyFans empire, reading a hundred and eighty thousand strangers well enough to know exactly how much rope each of them needed. "I asked if she’s pretty. It’s a yes or no. You’re a terrible liar, so I’d recommend the truth."

The truth. Right. The one strategy that kept working on him precisely because he kept forgetting he was bad at everything else.

"Yeah," Jordan said. "She’s pretty. In the way a knife is pretty."

Chloe considered that. Kumiko’s head swung between them like she was watching the world’s most intense ping-pong match, her lips parted, one hand fisted in the hem of the henley she was wearing that was, Jordan realized, also his.

His entire wardrobe had become a lending library staffed by women who never returned anything.

"A knife is pretty," Chloe repeated, tasting the words. Something in her jaw eased half a millimeter. "Okay. That I can work with. Knives are pretty. Knives are also useful and I own several." She pulled the laptop back into her lap. Conversation closed. She’d gotten her data point, run it through whatever spreadsheet lived behind those dark eyes, and filed it under manageable. "Don’t get another one lodged in your ribs. We have a mattress situation and I’m not nursing you back to health while I’m nauseous."

The sentence landed and then kept landing.

Kumiko’s whole body went still. Her mouth formed a small perfect circle. Her eyes tracked from Chloe’s face down to Chloe’s stomach, hidden under the henley, and then back up, the gears behind her expression visibly seizing.

Jordan felt the floor tilt a degree or two.

"While you’re," Kumiko started, and stopped, and started again in a voice that had climbed a full octave, "Chloe-chan. Chloe. While you’re WHAT."

Chloe did not look up from her laptop. Her thumb moved across the trackpad with total composure. "Hypothetically."

"That is not a hypothetical word. That is a real word about a real situation. You said nauseous. Nauseous is a word people say when they are, when there’s a, when something is—" Kumiko’s hands were doing something now, a rapid flapping motion at wrist level like she was trying to physically fan the information out of the air before it could fully form. "JORDAN-KUN. Jordan-kun, is Chloe-chan—"

"We’re not confirming anything," Jordan said.

"We’re not confirming anything," Chloe agreed serenely.

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