Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 342: 342 | Go Upstairs, Jordan

Chloe rolled onto her side and stopped.

Jordan felt her go still through the mattress before he heard anything, and then she was up and moving, out of the bed, down the stairs on bare feet with one hand pressed flat against her mouth, and the bathroom door slammed hard enough to rattle the frame.

Kumiko sat up fast. "Chloe-chan?"

The sound came through the wall.

Kumiko’s hands hovered in the air between them, fingers spread, and she looked at Jordan and Jordan looked back and neither of them said the word out loud. There was a protocol. Chloe had established the protocol on Saturday night in the bathroom with her palm on her stomach, and the protocol was that you did not confirm unconfirmed things, because confirming unconfirmed things invited whatever bad luck was circling overhead to come in and take its shoes off.

"Water," Kumiko said, and she was already off the mattress, ribbons forgotten, henley sliding off one shoulder as she went. "Cold water and the lemon ones, the drops, she keeps them in the third drawer, I organized the third drawer, I know where the drops are."

She was down the stairs before he could get his legs under him.

Jordan sat on the edge of the bare mattress and pushed both hands through his hair and listened to two girls handle a situation on the floor below him, one of them apologizing to a toilet with the crisp diction of a woman who considered vomiting a personal failure of will, the other one narrating a full inventory of every ginger-adjacent product in the apartment while running the tap.

He’d spent eleven days in January not speaking to a single human being.

Not a proud stretch. Not a story he’d tell. He’d eaten cold pizza off the box lid and watched other people play video games at four in the morning and let his body dissolve into the couch, and if you’d told that version of him that six weeks later he’d be sitting on a naked mattress in Newport Beach listening to his pregnant girlfriend get handed lemon drops by his other girlfriend, he would have said something bitter about it and then gone back to the screen.

The old Jordan would have spiraled about whether he deserved it.

The new one went downstairs to pull the fitted sheet out of the dryer.

Chloe emerged from the bathroom at seven-fifteen with her hair scraped back, her teeth brushed twice, and an expression that dared anyone in a two-mile radius to comment on the last twenty minutes. She took the glass of water Kumiko handed her, drank half of it standing at the island, and set it down.

"I’m fine."

"You’re pale," Kumiko said.

"I’m Korean and it’s February."

"Chloe-chan."

"Kumiko." Chloe pointed one finger at the couch without looking. "Sit."

Kumiko sat.

Jordan finished wrestling the fitted sheet onto the mattress, which took longer than it should have because whoever designed fitted sheets had done so out of spite, and then he came back down and leaned against the fridge and watched Chloe run the kettle. She moved through the kitchen with the total command of someone who had colonized it in nine days flat, hip-checking the drawer shut, pulling the chamomile from the cabinet above the stove, knowing without looking that the second mug from the left had a chip in the handle.

She poured two cups. Handed one to Kumiko. Took her own to the couch, sat down at the far end, tucked her feet under her, and pulled a blanket over her lap.

Then she looked at Jordan.

"I’m not up for it," she said.

"Okay."

"Which is not the same as me leaving the room."

Kumiko’s mug stopped halfway to her mouth.

Chloe took a sip of tea, set the cup on the coffee table beside her laptop, and settled back into the cushions with her arms folded loose over the blanket. Every part of her body language said she was a woman relaxing on a Monday morning. Every part of her face said otherwise.

"Kumi," she said.

"Y-yes."

"Put the tea down."

The mug hit the coffee table with a small ceramic clack and a slosh that went over the rim. Kumiko didn’t wipe it up. Her hands went into her lap and gripped each other and her shoulders climbed toward her ears and she looked at Chloe with her whole face open, waiting for the sentence to land.

"Go get on the bed."

Kumiko didn’t move.

"Chloe-chan, I don’t. Is this. Are you." Her voice fractured into component pieces. "Are you sure, because you’re sick and I don’t want you to think I’m, that I would ever, if you’re not okay then I’ll go to my room, I have a room now, I can be in the room, I’ll organize the plushies again, they’re ranked but the subcategories need work—"

"Kumiko."

"—and it’s not that I don’t want to, I obviously want to, I have a document about wanting to, it’s four pages, the fourth page is mostly just the word please written in different fonts—"

"Kumiko."

Kumiko’s mouth shut.

Chloe leaned forward and picked up her laptop, opened it, and set it on her knees without turning it on. She rested one hand flat on the closed screen.

"I’m going to sit right here," she said. "I’m going to drink my tea. And I’m going to watch, so that when your brain starts telling you that you got in the middle of something and ruined it, you’ll have a memory of me sitting on this couch handing you permission with my mouth."

Kumiko made a sound.

It came out of her like something puncturing. Her eyes went glassy immediately, and she pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth, and Jordan watched her nod four separate times, fast and small, as if the motion itself were load-bearing.

Then she was up off the couch and past him and up the stairs, and he heard her trip on the second step and catch herself on the railing and keep going.

Chloe picked her tea back up.

"Six hours," she said.

"I did six."

"I know. I checked your phone at nine-oh-six." She blew across the surface of the cup. "The sentence was good. No question mark."

"You went through my phone."

"I read a notification on a nightstand from eighteen inches away." Chloe’s eyes came up over the rim. "Go upstairs, Jordan."

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