Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 384: 384 | Don’t Hide

Jordan sat on the edge of the mattress. Behind him he heard Chloe cross the carpet on bare feet, and then the mattress dipped as she climbed on from the other side, still in her towel, hair damp and dark and streaked with blue that looked black in the low light.

"Kumi," Chloe said.

Kumiko rolled over onto her back with the coordination of a dropped puppet. The sundress rode higher. She did not fix it, and Jordan tried to be a person about that for approximately one second before giving up entirely.

"I’m sorry," Kumiko said, and her voice cracked right down the middle. "I know we had the suite and the tub fits four and I said I’d stay awake and I even had a caffeine plan and then the fireworks happened and my body just . . ."

"Kumi."

"And now I’m going to be the girlfriend who sleeps through things. That’s a category. That’s a whole category that people get put in and then they get replaced by someone who stays awake, and Isabella-san doesn’t seem like someone who falls asleep, she seems like someone who reads books at two in the morning and drinks wine and knows what a metaphor is . . ."

Chloe reached over and put two fingers against Kumiko’s mouth.

"You’re spiraling."

"Mmf."

"Say it back to me. What’s the rule."

Kumiko’s throat worked. She got her hand up and wrapped it around Chloe’s wrist, not pulling the fingers away, just holding on. "We don’t lie to each other."

"That’s rule five. Rule four."

"Anyone can leave whenever they want, no guilt, no ultimatums." Her chin trembled. "But I don’t want the rule. I hate rule four. Rule four is the worst one."

"Rule four is why the rest of them work," Chloe said, and took her fingers back. "You didn’t get put in a category. He carried a stranger’s kid on his shoulders for twenty minutes because you asked him to and then he put your napkin flag on the fort. You got exactly what you planned. You just got it with your eyes closed for the last four minutes."

Jordan watched Kumiko process that, which happened in visible stages the way everything with her did. The fear came off her face first. Then the guilt, which took longer. Then something raw underneath both of them that made her turn her head into the duvet and breathe through her nose.

"Nine points," Jordan said.

Chloe’s eyes flicked to him. Kumiko lifted her head.

"What?"

"Nothing," he said. "Come here."

He put his hand on her head, right at the part between the twin tails, where the pink ribbons had gone crooked from the pillow, and the trait went off like a struck match. Heat traveled out of his palm and down through her, and Kumiko’s whole body dropped a full inch into the mattress, spine unlocking, shoulders sliding down from around her ears. The sound she made started as a sigh and became something else in the middle, high and thin and thoroughly obscene for a girl who had just been crying about categories.

"Nnnh . . . haa . . ."

"There it is," Chloe said.

"Not fair," Kumiko slurred. Her eyelids came down to half mast. Her knees fell open a few inches, entirely without her permission. "You use it to shut me up . . ."

"It works."

"Do it more."

Jordan moved his thumb along the part in her hair, slow, and she arched her back off the bed and let out a whimper that went straight through him like a dropped wire. The sundress slid another inch up her thighs. Her hands opened and closed on the duvet.

Chloe watched with her chin tipped down and her eyes narrowed, and Jordan knew that look too. Chloe assessing. Chloe pricing something. Chloe deciding whether she wanted to sit at the table or hold the cards.

"She’s got class at nine tomorrow," Chloe said.

"It’s Sunday."

"I know what day it is." She reached over and hooked one finger in the strap of Kumiko’s sundress, pulling it off her shoulder in a single deliberate motion. Kumiko’s eyes flew open. "I’m establishing that there’s no excuse."

"Chloe-chan," Kumiko breathed.

"You’re going to overthink this for four hours if I go to bed." Chloe’s finger traced from the fallen strap along Kumiko’s collarbone, over the faded yellow ghost of a hickey Jordan had left there Thursday. "So I’m not going to bed."

Kumiko’s face went red in a wave that started at her ears and did not stop at her jaw. "You’re staying."

"I’m staying."

"On the bed."

"On the bed."

"Watching."

"Kumi."

"Sorry. Confirming." Kumiko’s hands came up to her own face and then didn’t quite cover it, both eyes visible between spread fingers, pupils enormous. "This is in the notebook. This is going in the notebook. Page eight."

Jordan pulled the sundress up and over her head and Kumiko lifted her arms to help, which involved her elbows tangling in the fabric and a squeak and Chloe reaching in to free her wrist with the weary competence of someone who had done this before with a cardigan. Underneath, Kumiko wore white cotton with strawberries on it and nothing else, and she was so small in the low light that Jordan felt the same thing he always felt looking at her, which was a protective instinct wired directly into something considerably less noble.

"You’re staring," Kumiko whispered.

"You noticed."

"I always notice." Her legs pressed together and then didn’t. "You do the thing where your jaw moves."

Jordan put his mouth on her throat. She gasped, loud, both hands going into his damp hair and pulling, and the sound bounced off the suite’s high ceiling and the balcony glass and probably reached the hallway. He worked down over her collarbone, over the old mark, and set his teeth into the same spot until it bloomed fresh, and Kumiko’s back came off the mattress in a bow that lifted her hips into his stomach.

"Ah . . . ahh, Jordan, that’s, haah, that’s the, mmm . . ."

"Words," Chloe said, from eighteen inches away, dry as sand.

"There are none. He deleted them."

Jordan slid his hand down over cotton and strawberries and found her soaked through the fabric, and the noise Kumiko produced then had no consonants in it at all. Her thighs clamped around his wrist on instinct and then forced themselves open again, trembling with the effort.

"Since when," he said.

"Since the fort." Her voice came out in pieces. "You fixed her crown and I . . . nnh . . . I had to sit down."

Chloe made a soft sound that was almost a laugh. She had propped herself on one elbow, towel slipping, her free hand resting flat on Kumiko’s sternum over her heart like she was taking a reading. "That’s the whole thing, isn’t it. Not the money. Not the suite."

"It’s the crown," Kumiko agreed, wrecked.

Jordan hooked the strawberries down her legs and off, and Kumiko covered her face for real this time, and then Chloe took both her wrists and moved them away and held them against the pillow above her head with no particular force, just a hand and a decision.

"Don’t hide," Chloe said. "He wants to see you."

Kumiko looked up at him. Nothing on her face was performed. That was the problem with her, the actual dangerous thing, the reason nine points in one day made sense in a way none of his spreadsheets ever would.

Jordan’s phone buzzed once on the nightstand.

He did not look at it.

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