Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 383: 383 | Detective Blueberry Needs Backup

The bathwater had dropped four inches. Most of it now lived on the marble floor, spreading toward the door in a slow tide that would probably reach the carpet in another minute, and Jordan considered doing something about that and then decided the four thousand dollars he had paid for the room covered a reasonable amount of water damage.

"There’s a towel situation," Chloe said into his shoulder. She had not moved. She was still seated in his lap with him still inside her, boneless in a way she would deny later, her breath warm and slow against his collarbone. "You flooded a hotel."

"We flooded a hotel."

"You lifted me. I was a passenger." Her hand found the mark she had bitten into his neck and pressed it, checking her work. "That’s going to be visible in class."

"You knew that when you did it."

"Obviously."

He laughed, and the movement shifted them both, which made Chloe exhale sharply and clench around him in a way that had his hips jerking upward on reflex. She made a sound low in her throat, something wounded and pleased at once, and dug her nails into his shoulder hard enough to leave four white crescents.

"Don’t," she warned, breathless. "I’m sensitive."

"That’s what I said earlier and you told me to shut up."

"And you should still shut up."

She lifted off him with the careful precision of someone dismantling a bomb, and Jordan watched her go with the specific pain of a man losing something warm. Water spilled again as she stood, running down her thighs in lines that were only partly bathwater, and she looked down at herself with an expression of clinical disgust that did absolutely nothing to hide how thoroughly she liked it.

"You’re a public health hazard," she said.

"The System agrees. It’s in writing."

Chloe stepped out onto a floor that was now a shallow lake, made a small offended noise at the temperature difference, and wrapped herself in a bath sheet that could have doubled as a bedspread. She tossed a second one at Jordan’s face without looking. He caught it. Two months ago that towel would have hit him square in the nose and he would have apologized to it.

He dried off while Chloe stood at the mirror wiping steam off a circle with her palm, examining the bite on her neck, the marks on her hips, the general wreckage of a girl who had spent eleven hours walking through a theme park and forty minutes being taken apart in a soaking tub. She turned her head to check the angle, then adjusted her hair over the bite, then moved her hair back off it.

"Leaving it," she decided.

"Kumiko’s going to lose her mind."

"That’s the point."

His phone sat on the counter beside her folded sweater, screen up, still holding the notification he had glanced at and then abandoned when Chloe called him into the bathroom. Jordan picked it up with the towel around his hips and read it properly this time.

Kumiko Yamanaka. Forty-two percent to fifty-one percent. Nine points in a single day.

He had spent six weeks watching that number crawl. Two points from a headpat. Seven from a kiss at the aquarium, which had felt enormous at the time. Four from a night that had left her unable to walk straight the next morning. Every gain expensive, every gain temporary-feeling, like she was climbing a wall with her fingernails and could slip at any second because seven people before him had taught her that the wall was greased.

Nine points. From a plush toy she gave away. From a crying kid she sat on the concrete for. From Jordan buying her an eight-dollar smoothie without checking the price and lifting a stranger’s daughter onto his shoulders and letting Kumiko put mouse ears on his head in front of forty thousand people.

The System had told him to stop trying to math his way through her. Jordan had, more or less by accident, and the number had jumped harder than any of his deliberate attempts. Which was either a profound lesson about the nature of trust or the universe personally roasting him. Probably both. The universe had a sense of humor about him lately.

"Numbers," Chloe said, not a question. She had watched his face in the mirror.

"Fifty-one."

Her hand paused halfway to her hair. "From what."

"The whole day. She gave a four-year-old a thirty-nine-dollar Stitch and didn’t blink."

Chloe turned around fully, towel tucked under her arms, and something crossed her face that Jordan had learned to recognize over six weeks of watching her run calculations she never voiced. Not jealousy. Chloe’s jealousy was hotter and stupider and showed up in her jaw. This was the other thing, the one that made her build spreadsheets titled NOVEMBER and then close them without typing anything.

"She broke even," Chloe said.

"Yeah."

"Two months. I said two months." She wet her lower lip, and her voice came out flatter than it needed to be, which meant she was covering something. "She did it in one day at Disneyland with a fake detective."

"You’re upset."

"I’m annoyed my model was wrong." She looked at the door, then back at him. "She’s asleep in her dress with her backpack still on."

The suite beyond the bathroom had gone dim, only the entry lamp burning and the park glow bleeding through the balcony glass in bands of amber and blue. Kumiko lay diagonal across the king bed exactly as she had fallen, face down, arms out, one platform sneaker still on and one kicked halfway across the carpet. Her cat backpack rode up on her shoulders. Her pink sundress had bunched around the tops of her thighs during the collapse, and the sequined Minnie ears had slid down over one eye like she had passed out mid-heist.

Jordan crossed the room, crouched, and got the second sneaker off. Then the backpack, one strap at a time, careful with the arm she had trapped under her body.

"Nnh," Kumiko said into the duvet. "Detective Blueberry needs backup."

"He’s fine. He got adopted."

Her head lifted two inches. One brown eye opened, unfocused, gluey with sleep, and tracked slowly up from his knees to his bare chest to the towel and then all the way back down again with the shameless thoroughness of a girl whose social filter was still buffering.

"You’re wet," she said.

"Bath."

"With Chloe-chan." The eye closed. Her voice went small and sludgy and devastating. "I slept through the bath."

"You walked twelve miles today."

"I planned it, though. Version seven." Her hand flopped out and found his wrist, closing around it with no strength whatsoever. "I made the itinerary and I fell asleep during the good part."

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