Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 341: 341 | The Annexation of Jordan-kun

Six forty-one in the morning arrived the way it always did now, without an alarm, without negotiation, his eyes opening on their own like some tiny bureaucrat inside his skull had stamped the paperwork and moved on to the next file. \[Morning Person\] didn’t care that he’d slept on a raw quilted mattress with no fitted sheet and two girls stacked against his ribcage. \[Morning Person\] cared about efficiency, and Jordan had long ago stopped arguing with the parts of himself that had been installed rather than earned.

He took inventory without moving.

Kumiko had migrated in the night. She’d started in the gap between him and Chloe, tucked into a tidy little ball, and somewhere around three in the morning her body had decided that arrangement was insufficient and relocated her entire self on top of his left arm. Her leg was hooked over his thigh. Her forehead was pressed against the side of his chest, mouth slightly open, breath fanning warm over his ribs in slow intervals. His gray henley had ridden up her back in the process, and his forearm had ended up flat against the bare skin above the waistband of her pink sleep shorts, which was fine, which was completely fine, which was a totally normal place for a hand to be at dawn on a Monday.

Her hair had dried into something that could only be described as a war crime against physics. The lavender ribbons had surrendered entirely, and one of them had migrated to his collarbone and lay there like a party favor someone left behind.

Chloe was on his other side, on her back, one arm thrown over her eyes and the other still resting on his forearm from the night before. She’d fallen asleep holding on and hadn’t let go. Her hair had come loose from the ponytail and spilled across the bare mattress, the blue streak catching the first grey light off the harbor, and the henley she’d stolen from him four days ago had ridden up her hips because that garment had apparently taken a personal vow against covering anything below the waist.

Jordan lay there for a while doing the math on his own life.

Six weeks ago his mattress had a stain shaped like the state of Florida and he’d slept on top of a comforter he hadn’t washed since October. Now it was bare because the fitted sheet was still in the dryer and none of the three people living in this apartment had remembered to pull it out, which was a completely different category of failure, the kind that came with company.

The bruise on his right shoulder had matured overnight into something the color of a plum that had been left in a car. Maya’s knee had done similar work to the inside of his left thigh. His abs hurt in a way that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with Chloe deciding, at approximately three in the afternoon on Saturday, that she wanted to see what happened when she asked for something four separate times with her whole chest.

His phone sat facedown on the nightstand. He didn’t touch it.

Kumiko woke up in stages, the same as always, first the fingers, then a small unhappy sound, then a long inhale as her brain came online and began the process of cataloging her own position in space. He felt the exact instant she registered where her leg was.

Her whole body went stiff.

"Nnnh," she said into his ribs, muffled, horrified. "Ohno."

"Morning."

"Jordan-kun." Her voice had gone up two octaves and dropped to a whisper at the same time, which shouldn’t have been possible. "Jordan-kun my leg is on you."

"I noticed."

"Not just my leg." A pause while she conducted further reconnaissance without moving her head. "My whole. My entire. I have annexed you. I fell asleep in the designated middle zone with clear boundaries and I woke up as a colonial power."

"You drooled on me."

Kumiko made a sound like a kettle being removed from a burner half a second too late. Her hands came up over her face and she pressed her forehead harder into his chest, which meant she was now hiding from him by burrowing into him, a strategy with certain logical gaps.

"I did not."

"There’s a wet spot."

"That’s sweat. From the mattress. There’s no sheet, Jordan-kun, this is a thermal regulation problem, we are all sweating, this is a shared building-wide sheet crisis and you can’t pin it on me."

Chloe’s arm came off her eyes.

She didn’t sit up. She turned her head against the bare mattress, took in the situation with the flat evaluative stillness of a woman pricing a used car, and said, "You snore."

"I don’t snore."

"You made a sound at two in the morning like a very small motorcycle."

"That was the plumbing."

"It was you." Chloe closed her eyes again. "I timed it against the pipes. Different intervals."

Kumiko lifted her head, and there it was, the full unguarded face, brown eyes still soft at the edges from sleep, pillow crease down one cheek, mouth pink and slightly swollen from the way she slept with her lip caught under her teeth. No mascara. No concealer. The hickey he’d left on her neck Thursday had faded to a yellowish smudge and she hadn’t bothered hiding it in a room where both other occupants had watched it happen.

She looked at him for a second and a half. Then her eyes went wide and she made a strangled noise and dropped her face back onto his chest.

"You’re doing the face," she said.

"What face."

"The face where you look at somebody like they’re the only thing in the room and you’re not even trying, you just do it, you do it while you’re lying on a mattress with no sheet on it and your hair looks stupid and I have to be awake for it."

"My hair looks stupid."

"It looks incredible, that’s the problem, it’s six in the morning and it should look bad and instead you look like a picture from a hotel brochure and I look like a raccoon that lost a fight."

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