Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 334: 334 | That’s a Dr. Nakamura Thing

"There’s nothing to confirm because it’s too early to confirm and confirming things you can’t confirm is how you jinx them."

"That’s not scientific," Kumiko whispered, but she’d gone soft around the edges, her flapping hands slowing, coming to rest pressed flat against her own chest. Her eyes were wet. Her eyes were always ready to be wet, honestly, the girl kept them loaded like a duelist, but this was a different kind of shine. "Oh. Oh no. Oh no I’m going to cry and I just did my mascara this morning and it’s the good kind that only comes off with the special remover—"

"Breathe," Chloe said.

"I AM breathing, I’m breathing SO much—"

Jordan crossed the room. He didn’t decide to, exactly. His body had learned the pattern over the past three weeks the way it had learned to slip a jab, ahead of conscious thought, and he found himself sitting on the edge of the bare mattress between them before his brain caught up. Chloe’s shoulder pressed into his side. Kumiko folded against his other arm without a second’s hesitation, tucking herself under it like a bird finding a familiar branch, and the difference in how the two of them fit against him was a thing he never stopped noticing. Chloe slotted in like a matched piece, all confidence and warm ownership. Kumiko crashed in like she was afraid the branch might vanish, holding on with more grip than her size should’ve allowed.

The three of them sat in the wreckage of the move, boxes stacked against every wall, packing tape gun forgotten on the floor, a fortress protecting seven pages of documentation about the exact spacing of his freckles.

"If it happens," Chloe said, very quietly, not to either of them specifically, "it happens in November."

Kumiko made a small sound. Not the teakettle. Something wetter and gentler.

Jordan didn’t check his phone. It sat in the gym bag by the door, and he knew, the way he always knew now, that the System had something to say about this moment. A percentage adjusting. A milestone unlocking. A little golden notification quantifying the exact weight of three people sitting on a bare mattress surrounded by half-unpacked boxes while one of them was maybe, hypothetically, unconfirmably carrying a whole entire person.

He let it sit there and say it to nobody.

"You know what this means," Kumiko said after a while, her voice muffled against his shirt, recovering the way she always recovered, from raw to ridiculous in the span of one breath.

"What does it mean."

"It means I have to knit things." She pulled back to look at him, and her face had gone luminous, mascara holding by a thread, the crisis passed and replaced entirely by mission. "Tiny things. Tiny hats. Do you know how small the hats are, Jordan-kun? They’re the size of a plum. I have to learn to knit a plum-sized hat. I have to research yarn safety because some yarns have chemicals and a plum-sized person cannot process chemicals—"

"It’s the size of a poppyseed right now," Chloe said. "If it exists. Which we’re not confirming."

"A POPPYSEED." Kumiko’s hands flew to her cheeks. "That’s even worse. That’s so small. I have to protect a poppyseed. I have never had a purpose this important in my life."

"You’ve known about this for ninety seconds."

"And it’s already the most important ninety seconds of my LIFE, Chloe-chan, do not diminish my journey—"

Jordan tuned it out. Not because he didn’t care. Because he cared so much it was easier to let the two of them fill the air with plum hats and poppyseeds and yarn safety protocols while he sat in the middle of it and just, for one second, felt the whole ridiculous size of what his life had become.

Six weeks ago he’d been crying into a Red Bull can on a floor that smelled like failure and old pizza.

Now he had a bruise the color of spoiled plums, a girlfriend who could snap him in half at the gym and a different one who might be a knife, a poppyseed that Kumiko had already appointed herself patron saint of, and a magic phone in his gym bag that would not stop trying to hand him a hundred and fifty thousand dollars if he’d just go break the girl who broke him first.

The old Jordan would’ve spiraled about deserving any of this. Would’ve found the thread and pulled it until the whole thing unraveled, just to prove to himself that he’d known all along he wasn’t allowed to have good things.

The new Jordan reached over and stole Kumiko’s hand out of the air mid-gesture, folding it into his, and she stopped talking about yarn immediately.

"Hey," he said.

"Hi," Kumiko breathed, going pink again, the word coming out like it was the first time anyone had ever said it to her.

His phone buzzed in the gym bag.

He ignored it.

It buzzed again.

"That’s your ex-girlfriend," Chloe said. She hadn’t looked up. She was back on the laptop, cool as anything, having apparently decided the poppyseed conversation had reached its natural conclusion and business hours had resumed. "The pattern’s different. Two buzzes, gap, that’s her. Kumiko’s is a flood. Kyle’s is one and done. Your ex texts in twos because she sends the message, then panics, then sends a follow-up walking it back."

Jordan stared at her. "You know my notification patterns by contact."

"I know a lot of things about you. Most of them I keep to myself. Some of them," Chloe glanced up, and there it was, the private version of her, the one nobody else on earth got to see, the exhausted brilliant terrified girl under all the masks, "I keep to myself and use later."

"That’s terrifying."

"You keep saying that like it’s not a compliment."

Kumiko, still holding his hand, had gone quiet in the way she went quiet when she was thinking, which was rare enough that Jordan noticed it as a distinct event. Her thumb moved over his knuckles. Her eyes were on the middle distance.

"Eliza Hartwell," she said finally, and there was no venom in it, which somehow made it worse. Kumiko didn’t have venom in her. What she had was worry, and she was aiming all of it at him. "The girl who hurt you."

"Yeah."

"She’s texting you."

"She is."

"And you’re doing a thing where you don’t answer, and Chloe-chan knows about the thing, and it’s a whole strategy that I’m not fully briefed on but I can tell it’s a strategy because your jaw does the thing." Kumiko pointed at his jaw with her free hand. "The thing. Right there. It’s doing the thing."

Jordan unclenched his jaw. It didn’t help. Both of them had a map of his face now, apparently, cross-referenced and annotated, and there was no expression he could make that didn’t get read aloud back to him in real time.

"It’s complicated," he said.

"You keep saying THAT too." Kumiko frowned at him, and it was such an unusual expression on her, the sunshine girl with a genuine furrow between her brows, that it stopped him.

"You’re allowed to have complicated things. I have complicated things. Chloe-chan has an entire filing cabinet of complicated things. But you don’t have to carry them by yourself just because you got used to carrying everything by yourself. That’s a Dr. Nakamura thing. She says it to me all the time and I hate it because she’s right."

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