Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 343: 343 | Please Don’t Take It In There With You

Kumiko was sitting in the middle of the newly sheeted mattress with her knees together and her hands in her lap, and she’d taken the henley off.

She had not gotten as far as anything after that. She sat there in the pink sleep shorts with her arms hanging at her sides like she’d been told to wait, small and pale in the grey harbor light, collarbones sharp, chest rising and falling too fast, the faded yellow ghost of Thursday’s mark visible above her left breast. Her hair was still a disaster. One ribbon lay on the pillow behind her.

She looked up at him and her chin trembled and she said, "I’m shaking."

"I know."

"It’s not fear." Her hands came up, palms out, fingers visibly unsteady. "Look. Look at them. This is joy overwhelm, Dr. Nakamura calls it joy overwhelm, it happens when something I wanted for a long time actually shows up and my nervous system files it under threat because good things aren’t in the training data."

Jordan crossed the loft, went down on one knee at the edge of the mattress, and put his hand on top of her head.

\[Headpat\] engaged.

The heat traveled out from his palm and sank through her skull and did what it always did, and Kumiko’s whole spine went soft in a single continuous motion, shoulders dropping four inches, jaw unlocking, the frantic engine at the center of her going quiet all at once.

"Haaah," she breathed. Her eyes rolled closed. "Mm. Mnh."

"Better."

"Uh huh." Barely a word. Her head tipped into his hand, chasing the contact, weight settling against his palm until he was holding her up. "S’lavender. Gold edges."

He kept his hand there for four more seconds and then slid it down to the back of her neck, and Kumiko’s eyes came open half-lidded and dark, and she reached up with both hands and grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled.

She was not strong. It didn’t matter. He went where she pulled him.

Her mouth found his and missed, catching the corner, and then she corrected and got it right, and she made a small desperate noise into the kiss that went through him like a live wire. Strawberry lip balm. Chamomile she’d barely touched. Her hands moved from his shirt to his hair and dug in and tugged, and his shirt came off somewhere in the middle of it, tossed onto the floor by the nightstand, and then her palms were flat on his bare chest and she broke the kiss to look.

"Chu... nnh, you’re so warm," she whispered. Her fingers spread over his sternum, tracing down, counting. "Every time. Every single time I forget and then I touch you and my brain just."

"Just what."

"Stops." She pressed her thumb into the ridge above his hip and shivered at her own audacity. "Completely. Blue screen."

He got a hand under her thigh and turned her, and she went down onto the mattress with a squeak that echoed off the exposed beams, and the pink shorts came off with more cooperation than resistance, kicked somewhere past the foot of the bed.

"Mnnh, Jordan-ku—ah!"

He put his mouth on her throat, over the old mark, and sucked hard enough to renew it. Kumiko arched off the sheets. Her nails raked down his back, four lines from shoulder blade to ribs, and she gasped out a string of syllables that started in English and finished in Japanese and contained nothing anyone could reasonably call a word.

"Loud," he said against her skin.

"I know! I know, I’m sorry, I can’t, the walls—" She cut off with a high broken sound when his hand moved. "Ahn! Nn, nnh, oh, oh no, that’s, that’s not fair, you know exactly where—"

"Yeah."

"Youdon’thavetosaysoconfidentlyabout—AH!"

From downstairs, over the sound of a kettle clicking off, Chloe’s voice carried up through the loft railing, flat as a receipt.

"Miss Valentine baked yesterday. She’s fine."

Kumiko’s hands flew to her own mouth. She looked up at Jordan with her eyes enormous over her fingers, mortified, breathing in fast little bursts through her nose, and her hips kept moving anyway, chasing, undermining the entire cover-up operation from below.

He took her wrists and pinned them to the mattress above her head, one hand around both, because she was small enough that it worked.

"Hnnn—"

"Hands stay."

"That’s, mmh, that’s cheating, you can’t just—" Her thighs squeezed around him. "Say it again."

"Say what again."

"Anything." Her voice had gone thin and wrecked and completely honest. "Please. Use the. When you do the thing with your voice, please, I’ll be good, I’ll be so good, just—"

\[Alluring Whisper\] came out of him without much conscious authorization, dropping the register two full steps.

"You’re mine, Kumi."

Kumiko’s back left the bed. Her eyes rolled up and her mouth fell open and no sound came out for a full second, and then everything came out at once, one long unbroken cry that bounced off the factory windows and the concrete and definitely, absolutely, made it through the shared wall of Unit 402.

"Aaah! Ahn, hah, y-yours, I’m yours, I’m yours, Jordan-kun, please, please, pleasepleaseplease—"

The mattress creaked. The bed frame knocked against the wall on a slow two-count, then faster, and the sounds coming out of her climbed and cracked and dissolved into wet gasping vowels, and her legs locked around his waist hard enough that his bruise from Maya lit up along the whole thigh and he didn’t care.

"Jordan-ku— ah! Ah! There, there, don’t, nnh, don’t stop, don’t ever—"

"Not going anywhere."

"You say that— hah! —you keep saying that and I keep believing you and it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me—"

Her voice broke on the last word and she came apart under him with a sound that was ninety percent scream and ten percent sob, her whole body seizing, nails biting into his forearm where he still had her wrists pinned, and she kept saying his name in a register he’d never heard from her, small and shredded and full.

He let her wrists go.

Her arms came around his neck immediately and hauled him down, chest to chest, and she buried her face in the crook of his shoulder and shook. Not from the aftershocks. Something else.

"Don’t let her have this," Kumiko whispered.

Jordan went still.

"Thursday." Her breath was hot and uneven against his throat. "I know about the plan. I know Chloe-chan said yes and I know why and I’m not, I won’t be a problem, I promise I won’t be a problem, I’ll be so easy to keep—" Her fingers curled into his hair. "Just not this part. Whatever this part is. Please don’t take it in there with you."

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