Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 354: 354 | Insufferable is a Hell of an Upgrade

Chloe held his gaze for another three seconds, and Jordan watched the exact moment her business brain overrode her boyfriend-just-spent-four-thousand-dollars brain. Her eyes did the thing. That small flicker at the corner where the calculation resolved and the ledger balanced and she remembered that the four grand was not spent so much as invested.

"Two-x rate," she said. "You cleared the whole thing."

"Cleared it and then some."

"You made a rebate renting a hotel room."

"I made forty-two hundred dollars renting a hotel room." Jordan leaned back into the couch cushion, arms spread along the back like a man who had solved capitalism. "Give or take. The System doesn’t itemize tax."

Kumiko’s phone slid out of her hands and landed on the couch cushion with a soft thump. She did not appear to notice. "What rebate?"

Jordan’s mouth stopped working. Across the room, Chloe’s expression flattened into the neutral mask she wore during price negotiations, and she raised one eyebrow at him in a gesture that translated cleanly to you did that.

"Credit card thing," Jordan said.

"Which card?" Kumiko scrolled through her own notes app with the focus she normally reserved for seam allowances. "Because I have the Chase Sapphire Preferred and the transfer bonus to Hyatt is good, but Disney properties don’t participate, so unless you booked through a portal—"

"It’s a debit thing."

"Debit cards don’t have rebates, Jordan-kun." Kumiko looked up. Her brown eyes had gone very round and very sincere, which made lying to her feel like kicking a duck. "That’s the whole problem with debit cards. I did a whole spreadsheet about it."

Chloe took a slow sip of chamomile and said nothing, which was worse than helping.

"Cashback program," Jordan said. "It’s new. Regional pilot. Very boring."

"Cashback?"

Jordan stood up before she could open a browser tab and destroy him. "Anyway. Pack light."

Chloe’s eyebrow rose a precise two millimeters. "Excuse me."

"For Saturday. Both of you. Pack light."

Kumiko had recovered enough to retrieve her phone, and she was already pulling up a note titled PACKING (VERSION 1), because of course she was, because a girl who built a four-tab spreadsheet for a theme park was not going to walk into an overnight stay without a manifest. "I have a list. Sunscreen, backup sunscreen, portable charger, two portable chargers, snacks in case Chloe gets nauseous, extra socks for you because your socks are a war crime, a change of clothes, a nicer change of clothes for Napa Rose dinner, my skincare which is non-negotiable and takes up an entire bag by itself—"

"Kumi."

"—and the ears, obviously, plus a backup pair of ears in case one pair gets lost or damaged during a high-intensity ride, and—"

"Kumi." Jordan stood up off the couch, and the movement pulled Kumiko’s eyes to his bare chest, and he watched her train of thought derail directly into a ravine, her mouth still open on a word that had lost its momentum. He’d learned this over the past week, that his shirtless torso functioned as a factory reset button for Kumiko Yamanaka’s entire cognitive apparatus, and it was a little unfair how effective it was, and he was going to keep abusing it forever. "Pack light. Toothbrush, phone charger, whatever you sleep in. That’s it."

Kumiko blinked. The spreadsheet instinct fought against the direct order and lost, but not without visible casualties. "But the outfits. The dinner. The—"

"We’ll buy stuff there."

The room went quiet in a way that felt structural, like a load-bearing assumption had just been removed.

Chloe set her mug down on the counter. "You want to buy clothes at Disneyland."

"I want to buy clothes near Disneyland. There’s a whole outdoor mall thing a mile from the park. Downtown Disney’s right there, they’ve got shops, and if that doesn’t work there’s real stores fifteen minutes out." Jordan crossed to the kitchen and pulled the Brita from the fridge because his mouth had gone dry from a full day of debate and Eliza and the specific exhaustion of being looked at like a lifeline by a girl he didn’t love. "You want a dinner outfit, we’ll get you a dinner outfit when we get there. You want new sunglasses, sun hat, whatever, we buy it there. No point hauling a suitcase each for one night."

"That’s insane."

"That’s efficient. You like efficient."

Chloe’s jaw did a thing that meant he’d landed a hit she hadn’t anticipated. She did like efficient. Efficient was the language she thought in, and Jordan had just spoken it back to her with a straight face while proposing they show up to a four-thousand-dollar hotel suite with a toothbrush and a prayer, and the collision between "efficient" and "unhinged" was creating a small logical traffic jam behind her eyes.

Kumiko, meanwhile, had begun to physically vibrate. "You can’t just buy things there. Everything at Disney is a markup. A churro is like eight dollars. A t-shirt is like forty-five dollars. If we buy dinner clothes at Downtown Disney it’s going to be—" She did rapid math with her fingers, which Jordan found genuinely endearing, the way she counted on her hands like a kid tallying trading cards. "It’s going to be so much money. That’s not smart. I have clothes. I have very nice clothes. I could pack a dinner outfit in like fifteen minutes if I—"

"Kumi. I want to buy you clothes."

The words landed and Kumiko stopped mid-sentence, mouth open, hands frozen in their calculating half-curl.

"I don’t—you don’t have to—"

"I know I don’t have to." Jordan set the Brita down and looked at her, and he did the thing on purpose this time, the eye contact she couldn’t survive, because sometimes a guy had to be a little bit of a bastard about the tools available to him. "That’s not why I’m doing it. Do you get that? I’m not doing it because I have to. I’m doing it because I want to spend money on you, and you’re going to let me, because I’m not going to spend a whole day watching you flinch every time we pass a churro cart."

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