Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 337: 337 | Plum-Sized People

"It’s my SHIRT NOW," she wailed, which somehow made it worse.

Chloe watched all of it from her spot at the end of the mattress with her arms still around her knees. She’d gone quiet in a specific way. Jordan knew that particular quiet. It was the one she wore when she was doing arithmetic she didn’t like the answer to.

He met her eyes over the top of Kumiko’s head.

Chloe’s gaze dropped, just briefly, to the pocket where his phone usually lived, then came back up. She didn’t say the word numbers. She didn’t have to. She’d been the one who’d stood in her own kitchen twenty-four hours ago and explained the funnel to him in her spreadsheet voice, Kumiko’s rate is volatile and responsive to emotional stimuli, and now here he was proposing a fourteen-hour emotional stimulus with mouse ears on it.

He didn’t flinch. He’d stopped doing that.

Yeah, he thought at her, and let her read it off his face. Both things are true.

Something in Chloe’s shoulders came down. She reached over and put her hand on Kumiko’s back, between the shoulder blades, and rubbed a slow circle there while Kumiko continued to fall apart on his ribcage.

"I want the Grand Californian," Chloe said.

"That’s four hundred a night."

"I want the Grand Californian, and I want the private entrance to California Adventure, and I want a dinner reservation at Carthay Circle at eight so I can sit down for ninety minutes in the middle of the day and not be walking." She had her calendar open again, and her thumbs were moving. "I’m nauseous, my feet are going to swell, and if you make me do fourteen hours on concrete without a room to go horizontal in, I will end you in that park in front of children."

"Noted."

"Also I’m not going on the spinny ones."

"Which are the spinny ones."

"You know which ones are the spinny ones, Jordan."

Kumiko’s head came up off his chest, wrecked and shining. "The teacups."

"The teacups," Chloe agreed.

"But the teacups are—"

"I’m going to be very sick, Kumiko, and I’m going to be very sick on you specifically because you’ll be sitting closest."

"That’s fair." Kumiko wiped her face with both hands, spreading the mascara into something that looked genuinely tragic, and then beamed through it in a way that made Jordan’s chest do something complicated and unauthorized. "Okay. Okay. Revised itinerary. No teacups. But we HAVE to do Rise of the Resistance, we have to virtual queue at seven exactly, and Jordan-kun has to be the one on the phone because his reflexes are inhuman now and I need someone with inhuman reflexes on the boarding group—"

"I’m on the phone. Got it."

"And you have to wear the ears."

"No."

"You HAVE to wear the ears."

"I’m six foot two."

"Which is EXACTLY why it will be funny and also devastating and also I need a picture of it for reasons that are entirely mine." She’d already gotten her own phone out, thumbs flying, adding items to something. "I’m buying you ears. I’m buying all three of us ears. Chloe-chan, do you want the sequin ones or the ones with the little veil—"

"Whatever’s least likely to end up in a photo my mother sees."

"That eliminates the veil ones, the veil ones are BRIDAL, that’s a whole statement—" Kumiko stopped. Looked at the phone. Looked at Chloe. Looked back at the phone. "...I’m not going to say the thing I was going to say."

"Say the thing," Chloe said.

"No, it’s too early and you said we don’t confirm things we can’t confirm and I RESPECT the protocol—"

"Kumiko."

"They have the baby ones," Kumiko whispered. "The tiny ones. For the plum-sized people."

Chloe put her face in her hands.

Jordan lay on the bare mattress in a room full of boxes with one girl crying happily on his chest and the other one hiding behind her palms, and he thought, with the detachment of a man watching his own life from a lawn chair a hundred yards away, that he was probably going to spend nine hundred dollars on Saturday, and that at Chloe’s rate he’d clear about fourteen hundred back on whatever portion touched her, and that every dollar spent on Kumiko would come back eighty-four cents and he genuinely did not care.

Which was new. The old version of him had cared about the exchange rate on affection more than he’d cared about the affection, and it had made him the punchline of a story Alexis Van Der Berg told at brunch.

His phone buzzed in the gym bag by the door.

Two buzzes. Gap.

Chloe’s hands came down off her face. She didn’t look at the bag. She looked at him, and her expression had gone absolutely still, the way it did right before she started using words like closed loop and vertical integration.

Kumiko noticed the silence about a beat and a half later, the way she always did, and lifted her head off his chest with her ruined mascara and her hair everywhere and her hand still fisted in his shirt.

"Is that her," she said.

Nobody answered.

"Jordan-kun."

He reached up and put his hand on top of her head, right between the ribbons, and the trait engaged with that low hum he never got used to, and Kumiko’s eyelids went heavy and her spine went soft and the question dissolved out of her mouth halfway to being asked.

"Nnn," she managed, and melted, forehead sliding back down against his sternum. "Mm. That’s cheating. You’re cheating. I had a follow-up question and you deleted it."

"I did."

"That’s so unfair. Do it again."

Chloe stood up off the mattress, crossed the loft, and picked the gym bag up off the floor by the strap.

She didn’t open it. She held it, weighing it in one hand like she was pricing it, and the two buzzes had already stopped, and outside the factory windows the Newport sky had gone the color of a bruise about four days old.

"Six hours," she said.

"Six hours."

"You said six hours at three-oh-four." Chloe set the bag down on top of the box marked DO NOT OPEN, which felt like a message. "That’s nine-oh-four. It’s five-fifty-one."

"I can count."

"I know you can count. I’m asking whether you’re going to."

Kumiko, face still pressed into his chest, hummed something dreamy and incoherent that had the word churro in it somewhere.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!