Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 357: 357 | Devastating. My Legs Will Never Recover.

"I know."

Jordan crossed the room and sat down on the couch next to her, close enough that their knees touched. Kumiko’s breath caught at the contact, a small hiccup of surprise that she tried to cover by pressing her face deeper into the pillow. Her twin tails had gone completely lopsided now, one ribbon dangling loose and the other pulled so tight it was probably giving her a headache.

"Look at me."

Kumiko shook her head against the pillow.

"Kumiko."

A muffled sound that might have been words but came out as vowels.

"I’m not going to touch your head," Jordan said. "I’m not going to use the thing. I’m just going to talk to you, and you’re going to listen, and then you’re going to decide if you believe me or not."

The pillow lowered an inch. One brown eye appeared over the top, wet and wary.

"I want to buy you things," Jordan said. "I want to take you to Disneyland and watch you cry during the fireworks. I want to hold your hand on Space Mountain and make sure you don’t lose your ears on the roller coasters. I want to buy you a dress that makes you feel beautiful and then take you to dinner at the fancy restaurant and watch you eat something that costs more than your entire weekly grocery budget. I want to do all of that because I like doing it, not because I’m trying to get something from you."

Kumiko’s visible eye had gone glassy. Her lower lip was doing the tremble thing again, and Jordan could see the exact moment she started calculating whether this was real or whether she was about to get hurt again.

"The last guy who said something like that," she whispered, "left me at a bus station at two in the morning because his ex texted him."

"I’m not that guy."

"The one before that said I was too much and too loud and too clingy and he needed space, and then he got engaged to someone else three months later."

"Still not that guy."

"The one before that—"

"Kumiko." Jordan shifted on the couch, turning so he was facing her fully. "Come here."

She blinked at him over the pillow. "What?"

"Come here. Sit in my lap."

The eye disappeared behind the pillow again. A strangled sound emerged that was definitely not words.

"I’m not asking," Jordan said. "I’m telling. Come sit in my lap so I can hold you while we talk about this, because you’re spiraling and I can see it happening and I’m not going to watch you do that alone when I’m right here."

The pillow lowered by degrees. First her forehead appeared, then her eyebrows, then both eyes, then her nose, then finally her mouth, which was pressed into a thin line of barely contained terror and want. Kumiko’s face had gone the color of her ribbons, a deep pink flush that spread down her neck and disappeared beneath the collar of his gray henley.

"I’m heavy," she said.

"You weigh like a hundred and ten pounds."

"A hundred and fourteen. I had toast."

"Devastating. My legs will never recover."

Kumiko made a sound between a laugh and a sob, and then she was moving, scrambling across the couch cushion with all the grace of a newborn deer on ice. She deposited herself in Jordan’s lap sideways, her legs draped over his thigh and her back against the armrest, and the impact of her weight settling against him was so minimal that he barely noticed it. What he did notice was the heat of her body through the thin fabric of her shorts, the way her hip pressed into his stomach, the smell of strawberry shampoo and something underneath it that was just her.

Kumiko sat rigid in his arms, her hands folded in her lap like a schoolgirl waiting for a principal to deliver bad news. Her spine was straight, her shoulders were up around her ears, and her breathing had gone shallow and fast.

"Relax."

"I am relaxed. This is what relaxed looks like."

"You look like you’re about to take the SATs."

"I got a 1420 on the SATs. I’m very good at standardized tests. Dr. Nakamura says it’s because I externalize anxiety into performance metrics."

Jordan slid one arm around her waist, pulling her closer until her side pressed flush against his chest. Kumiko made a small "mmph" sound, and her rigid posture cracked just a little, her head tilting sideways until it rested against his shoulder. Her twin tails tickled his neck, lavender ribbon trailing down his arm.

"Better," he said.

"This is terrifying."

"I know."

"I’m sitting in your lap and Chloe is upstairs and she can probably hear us and she’s going to come down and see me being needy and weird and she’s going to think I’m trying to monopolize you and then she’ll be angry and then—"

Jordan kissed her.

The sentence died mid-word, cut off by the press of his mouth against hers. It wasn’t a deep kiss, not the kind of desperate, consuming thing they’d shared that morning when her body had been pinned beneath his on the mattress and her voice had broken on his name. This was softer, sweeter, the kind of kiss you gave someone when you wanted them to stop talking and start breathing.

"Mmmph—" Kumiko’s hands flew up, catching fistfuls of his shirt, and for a moment she went completely still against him. Then her body softened, melting into the kiss like ice under warm water, and a small sound escaped her throat that was somewhere between a sigh and a whimper.

Jordan pulled back before Kumiko could deepen it, before her hands could climb higher and her breathing could turn into something that would keep them both awake past midnight. Her mouth chased his for half a second, eyes still closed, and then she blinked up at him with the dazed confusion of someone who’d been unplugged mid-sentence.

"Why did you stop?"

"Because it’s eight-forty-two."

Kumiko’s expression collapsed. "That’s not a reason."

"It’s the exact reason. You have eighteen minutes before Chloe comes down here and takes your phone hostage, and if I keep kissing you, we both know how that ends."

"We could find out."

"We could." Jordan tucked the loose lavender ribbon back behind her ear, and Kumiko’s eyes fluttered shut at the contact. "Or you could sleep, and tomorrow you could actually enjoy the day you spent fifteen hours planning instead of hallucinating on Pirates of the Caribbean."

"I don’t hallucinate. I get emotionally dysregulated. There’s a distinction."

"There isn’t."

Kumiko slumped against him, her forehead pressing into his collarbone, and made a long noise of protest into his shirt. Her fingers stayed curled in the fabric. Jordan let her stay there, one hand flat against her back, feeling her breathing gradually slow into something less frantic.

"I hate that you’re right," she mumbled.

"I know."

"You’re going to be right about things constantly, aren’t you. For the whole relationship. Forever."

"Statistically unlikely."

"Chloe said the same thing on Tuesday and now I live with both of you."

Jordan slid his hands under her arms and stood, hauling her up with him. Kumiko squeaked and grabbed his shoulders on reflex, her legs dangling for half a second before he set her down on her feet. She was so much shorter than him standing up, the top of her head barely clearing his sternum.

"Bed," he said. "Yours. Down the hall."

"Can I sleep here?"

"No."

Her lower lip pushed out. It was devastating and she knew it.

"If you sleep here, you won’t sleep." Jordan handed her the pillow off the couch. "Six-fifteen tomorrow. Toothbrush, charger, pajamas. That’s it."

Kumiko clutched the pillow to her chest and looked up at him, and something in her face went soft and unguarded, all the anxiety draining out of it.

"Okay," she whispered.

She rose onto her toes, kissed his jaw, and fled out the door before he could say anything else.

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