Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 376: 376 | Fort Construction is a Tactical Retreat

"No," Chloe said.

"Yes," Jordan said, at the same time.

Kumiko’s gaze bounced between them like a pinball seeking the highest-scoring target. She settled on Chloe, apparently having learned through painful experience that Chloe provided more reliable information during moments of social ambiguity.

"Your TA is attracted to your boyfriend," Chloe said, with the same clinical detachment she might use to report a stock price or weather forecast. "She’s been evaluating him all evening. The evaluation has been favorable. She just made a statement about wanting rather than obligation. Jordan responded with an accidentally flirtatious comment about saving room for something else. Isabella chose not to call him on it, which indicates either professional restraint or tactical patience. I haven’t determined which yet."

Kumiko processed this information in visible stages. Her eyes widened. Her mouth formed a small O. Her hands, still clutching a half-eaten beignet, dropped to the table with a soft thump.

"Oh," she said. "Oh no."

"It’s fine," Jordan said.

"It’s not fine." Kumiko’s voice climbed half an octave. "She’s your teacher. Teachers aren’t supposed to—I mean, the power dynamics alone—and she has a daughter, Jordan, a daughter who gave Detective Blueberry a new home, and now there’s—" She made a gesture that encompassed the entire table, the restaurant, the artificial bayou, and possibly the concept of inappropriate attraction itself. "This is very complicated."

"She’s a TA," Jordan said. "Not technically a teacher."

"That distinction," Chloe said, "will not hold up in front of an academic review board."

Jordan turned to look at his girlfriend, whose face had settled into the particular neutral expression she deployed when running cost-benefit analysis in real time. Her electric blue contacts caught the candlelight as she studied him, and for a moment he couldn’t read her at all, couldn’t tell if she was angry or intrigued or simply calculating the optimal response to a variable she hadn’t anticipated.

"You noticed too," he said.

"I noticed before you did." Chloe’s hand found his thigh again, and this time her grip carried something that wasn’t quite reassurance. "She started watching you differently around the third course. Before that it was academic interest. After that it was something else."

"And you’re... okay with that?"

Chloe’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. "I didn’t say I was okay with it. I said I noticed it. Those are different things."

"Chloe." Kumiko’s voice had dropped to a whisper, her earlier panic condensing into something more focused. "What are we doing?"

"We’re having dinner with Jordan’s sociology TA and her daughter," Chloe said. "We’re going to finish this dinner. We’re going to watch the fireworks. We’re going to go back to our hotel suite. And then we’re going to have a conversation about what just happened and what, if anything, we want to do about it."

Jordan watched Chloe’s face as she spoke, tracking the subtle shifts in her expression, and he recognized the particular mode she’d entered. This was business Chloe. Strategic Chloe. The version of her that had built a six-figure OnlyFans empire while maintaining a full academic scholarship and a convincing performance as a normal college student.

She wasn’t reacting to Isabella’s interest emotionally.

She was processing it as data.

And that, Jordan realized, was either the most reassuring thing he’d ever witnessed or the most terrifying, and he genuinely couldn’t determine which.

Kumiko’s hand found his beneath the table, her small fingers threading through his larger ones with the desperate grip of someone seeking an anchor in uncertain waters. Her palm was slightly damp, probably from the stress of the conversation or possibly from beignet residue, and Jordan held on anyway.

"I don’t want things to change," Kumiko whispered, so quiet that even Chloe had to lean in to hear. "I just got here. I just figured out how to be here. If something new happens and it breaks what we have—"

"Nothing’s breaking," Jordan said.

"You don’t know that."

"I know us." He squeezed her hand once, firmly. "I know you. I know Chloe. Whatever happens with Isabella, whatever doesn’t happen, it doesn’t change what we built. It can’t. Because what we built isn’t dependent on external factors. It’s dependent on us. On choices we make. On showing up for each other. And I’m going to keep showing up."

Kumiko’s lower lip trembled, and Jordan watched her fight the tears with visible effort, her jaw tight and her breathing controlled and her grip on his hand strong enough to leave marks.

"Promise," she said.

"Promise."

Chloe’s hand covered both of theirs, her cool palm settling over Kumiko’s knuckles with a gentleness that surprised Jordan every time he witnessed it. The three of them sat there for a moment, connected beneath the table in a way that felt more intimate than the dinner conversation had been, more honest than the loaded exchanges with Isabella.

Then Chloe’s phone buzzed with a notification, and she pulled away to check it with the reflexive efficiency of someone whose income depended on immediate response times.

"Isabella’s coming back," she said, reading something on the screen. "Sofia is requesting that Jordan help her build a fort out of bread baskets."

Jordan blinked. "How do you know that?"

Chloe held up her phone. On the screen, a text message from an unknown number displayed two sentences: Sofia wants the big boy to help with fort construction. Save me.

"She got my number from the Guest Relations form," Chloe said. "When I called in the lost child report. I gave them my contact information."

"And she kept it."

"Apparently."

Jordan watched Chloe’s face for any sign of how she felt about this development, but her expression had returned to its careful neutral default, giving away nothing. She locked her phone and set it facedown on the table, the gesture carrying the same deliberate finality as closing a Chapter in a book.

"Fort construction," she said. "That’s what we’re doing now."

"That’s what I’m doing," Jordan corrected. "You get to watch."

"I always watch." Chloe’s smile carried something Jordan couldn’t quite identify. "It’s what I’m good at."

Isabella emerged from the restaurant’s ambient darkness with Sofia on her hip, the four-year-old’s Belle dress now sporting several new water stains from aggressive hand-washing and her plastic tiara sitting at a fresh forty-five-degree angle. Sofia’s face lit up when she spotted Jordan, and she wiggled with enough force that Isabella nearly dropped her.

"Big boy!" Sofia announced, at a volume inappropriate for indoor dining. "Fort time!"

Jordan looked at Kumiko, whose tears had dried and whose expression had settled into something that approximated calm. He looked at Chloe, whose attention had shifted to Isabella with the particular focus of someone conducting real-time competitive analysis. He looked at Isabella, whose dark eyes met his over her daughter’s head with an expression that communicated things he wasn’t ready to process.

Then he stood, stepped away from the table, and held out his arms.

"Alright, princess. Let’s build a fort."

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