Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 349: 349 | Break-Even Achieved

The sarcasm landed harder than Jordan intended. Eliza flinched, and the flinch made her look young, younger than eighteen, younger than the girl who’d posed with Cameron’s BMW in Instagram photos and tagged him in location posts at expensive restaurants.

"I deserve that."

"You deserve worse than that. You deserve exactly what you picked."

"I know."

"Then why are you still with him?"

Eliza opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "Because if I leave him, I’m the girl who downgraded. I’m the girl who couldn’t keep Cameron Mitchell. My mother would call me and ask what I did wrong and tell me to fix it, and every girl in our social circle would know I failed at the one thing I was supposed to be good at."

Jordan set his empty smoothie cup on the table and leaned back in his chair with both hands behind his head, a posture that stretched his white t-shirt across his chest in ways that Chloe had anticipated when she’d selected the garment from his closet that morning.

The fabric pulled taut over shoulders that had finally started to show definition from three weeks of consistent gym sessions, and Jordan watched Eliza’s eyes drop for one-point-three seconds before returning to his face with a faint pink tinge spreading across her cheekbones.

He cataloged the glance without reacting, without smirking, without any of the desperate validation-seeking behavior that would have consumed Old Jordan for the next six hours.

"That’s the dumbest reason I’ve ever heard."

Eliza laughed. The sound came out ugly and honest and nothing like the practiced giggles she’d deployed during their twelve dinners together, the ones she’d used when Cameron said something that wasn’t funny but needed to be treated as funny because he was Cameron Mitchell and social currency demanded it.

This laugh came from her stomach and shook her shoulders and made her cover her mouth with her hand as if trying to stuff the honesty back inside, and when she removed her hand her mascara had smudged at the outer corner of her left eye in a way that made her look less like the polished Instagram version of herself and more like the girl who’d sat next to him in Statistics and borrowed his notes because she’d been too hungover to take her own.

"You’re mean now," she said. "You used to be so nice."

"I used to be a pushover. Nice and pushover aren’t the same thing."

"No. They’re not." She wiped her eye with the back of her wrist. "You’re really not going to look at my outfit, are you."

"I noticed the outfit. The push-up is new since Tuesday. The skirt is shorter. The waves took longer than usual. You wore the vanilla perfume instead of the floral because I mentioned once during dinner in November that I liked vanilla, which you apparently remembered even though you forgot everything else about me."

Eliza’s mouth opened. Stayed open. Her cheeks went from white to pink in under a second.

"You noticed all of that."

"I notice everything now. I just don’t react to it."

"Why."

"Because you’re not the girl I come home to, Eliza."

The sentence landed in the smoothie shop like a stone dropped into still water. The two girls in the corner had given up pretending not to watch and were openly staring. The pop music cycled to a new track with a synthetic beat that sounded aggressively cheerful against the weight of what Jordan had just said.

Eliza stared at him for six full seconds. Her eyes moved across his face the way Chloe’s did when she was looking for the lie, except Chloe could find the lie in two seconds and Eliza needed all six because she was still learning that Jordan no longer produced lies worth searching for.

"Chloe Kim."

"Yeah."

"You love her."

The word hung in the fluorescent light of JuicedUp surrounded by fourteen-dollar smoothie cups and inspirational wall decals about nourishing your body and your soul. Jordan considered the question with the seriousness it deserved, which was more seriousness than he’d expected to deploy in a smoothie shop on a Thursday afternoon while his boxing coach’s bruise throbbed in his shoulder and his girlfriend waited at home on a mattress they’d ruined.

"Yeah," he said. "I do."

Eliza pressed both palms against the table. Her acai bowl sat untouched, the granola slowly absorbing moisture and becoming soft. Her credit card receipt curled at the edge of the table where condensation from Jordan’s cup had dampened it. She exhaled through her nose, long and controlled, and when she lifted her head her eyes were dry and her jaw was set and she looked like someone who’d just received news they’d been expecting for weeks but hadn’t been ready to hear.

"Okay." Eliza stood. She picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder with a motion that was more mechanical than graceful. "Thank you for the debate. We’re going to win."

"Probably."

"Email me about the final review session."

"Thursday works."

Eliza turned toward the door. Stopped. Turned back. Her hand gripped the strap of her bag at the shoulder, knuckles blanched, and her face held an expression Jordan recognized from the mirror, from the bathroom floor of his apartment on January tenth, from the parking lot of the Sunset Love Hotel on Christmas Day. The expression of someone standing at the edge of something they built and realizing it was built on nothing.

"Jordan."

"Yeah."

"Thank you for not lying to me."

She walked out. The door chimed. Afternoon light swallowed her silhouette as she crossed the street toward the parking structure, her tennis skirt catching the breeze and her blonde waves catching the sun and her heels clicking against the pavement with the same confident percussion she’d used walking in, except now the confidence sounded manufactured and the girl producing it sounded tired.

Jordan sat alone at the table with his empty smoothie and her untouched acai and his phone buzzing against his thigh.

He pulled it out.

The notification glowed gold.

Eliza Hartwell: Attraction 47% → 52%

Break-even achieved. All future spending is now profitable.

Target initiated emotional confession without user reciprocation. Target acknowledged user’s romantic commitment to another. Target departed without securing follow-up.

Recommendation: Continue current approach. Target is approaching critical threshold.

Jordan locked the phone, dropped it in his bag, and left a five on the table for the busser who would have to clean up Eliza’s abandoned bowl.

His thumbs typed as he walked.

52. She cried. Didn’t touch her. Didn’t sit on her side. Drank the large slow.

Chloe responded in four seconds flat.

Good boy. Come home.

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