Infinite Cashback System

Chloe looked up.

That was all. She didn’t say anything, didn’t shift her weight on the bare mattress, didn’t put down the laptop she’d been using as a shield for the last forty minutes. She just lifted her eyes off the screen and put them on him, and Jordan felt the entire conversation happen inside the space of about four seconds without a single syllable getting spoken out loud.

She raised one eyebrow, a fraction of an inch, which meant: you’re going to tell her.

He tilted his head toward Kumiko, still holding his hand, still frowning at him with that unfamiliar crease between her brows.

Chloe’s mouth flattened, which meant: not the money part.

Jordan blinked once. Not the money part.

Her eyes went to the box fortress, then back. Not the file, either.

He gave her the smallest nod on record, a movement so slight that a security camera would’ve missed it, and Chloe closed her laptop and set it on the floor beside the mattress with the finality of a woman signing off on a merger. Two weeks ago they’d needed sentences for this. Now they had a shorthand built out of eyebrows and jaw muscles and the exact way she pressed her tongue against the inside of her cheek when she thought he was being an idiot, and if that wasn’t the single most terrifying development in his entire romantic history, it was at least tied for first with the fact that he liked it.

He was going to get read like a paperback for the rest of his life. Fine. Cool. He’d been unreadable for eighteen years and it had gotten him nothing but a Prada receipt and a parking lot.

“Kumi,” he said.

Her head came up so fast one of her twin tails smacked him in the collarbone, right on the bruise, and she felt him flinch and immediately started apologizing with her whole body, hands hovering over the spot like she could heal it by proximity.

“I’m sorry, I’m SO sorry, my hair is a weapon, I’ve been told this before by three separate people at conventions, I need to invest in a shorter ribbon length or possibly a helmet—”

“Do you trust me.”

The apologizing stopped like someone had pulled the plug.

Kumiko sat back on her heels. She was still wearing his gray henley over pink sleep shorts, the collar stretched out and slipping down one shoulder, the hem hanging almost to her knees, and the whole thing swallowed her so thoroughly that she looked less like she’d borrowed his shirt and more like she’d been issued it. Her bare legs were folded under her on the mattress. There was a strip of packing tape still stuck to her left calf, and a smear of pink marker on her thumb, and her mascara had held on through the poppyseed crisis by sheer force of expensive chemistry.

Her eyes searched his face. Not the way Chloe searched it, cataloguing tells and cross-referencing them against a database. Kumiko looked at him like she was reading the last page of a book she’d already decided she loved and was checking, just checking, that the ending held.

“Yes,” she said.

“You didn’t think about it.”

“I don’t need to think about it.” Her fingers tightened around his. “I’ve thought about it a lot already. Like, an alarming amount. I have a running document.”

“Of course you do.”

“It’s called Reasons Jordan-kun Is Different and it’s four pages and the first entry is from the night at karaoke and it says he looked at me while he was singing and I don’t think he knows he did it.” She said this at a normal volume, in a normal voice, without any apparent awareness that she’d just handed him a live grenade with the pin already out. “Anyway. Yes. I trust you. Why are you asking me like that? You’ve got the face on. The one where your eyes go somewhere else and your voice gets low and I can’t tell if you’re about to say something devastating or ask if I want boba.”

“Both are on the table.”

“Jordan-kun.”

He leaned in and kissed her.

She made a sound against his mouth, that high startled little “mmph” she always made when he moved first, like the concept of being kissed without a four-minute warning genuinely reset her operating system. Her free hand fluttered up, found his shoulder, gripped. The henley collar slipped further down her arm. He caught the back of her neck under all that black hair and held her there, and the second kiss went slower, deeper, his tongue tracing the seam of her lips until she opened with a soft wet “nnh” that he felt more than heard.

“Mmn, wait, I have marker on my hand,” she mumbled into him, and then immediately abandoned the point to kiss him harder.

Her fingers curled into his shirt. She tasted like strawberry lip balm and the iced coffee Chloe had made her drink at noon. Every time he angled her head she followed, boneless, chasing, making these small breathy sounds in the back of her throat that were absolutely going to be a problem when the walls of Unit 403 were the same thickness as the walls of Unit 404.

“Haah, Jordan-kun,” she gasped when he let her breathe, and her voice had gone about two registers down and one octave stupider. “Th-that’s not fair. You can’t kiss me during a serious conversation. My brain leaves. It goes on a trip. It’s in Kyoto right now.”

“Trust me,” he said.

She stopped moving.

He watched it land. Watched her eyes go wide and wet and then settle, watched the last of the frown dissolve out of her forehead, watched her chin come up half an inch like someone had just handed her a job she’d been waiting her whole life to be offered.

Kumiko nodded.

Not the frantic nodding she did when she agreed with something enthusiastically, the whole-body bobble that made her hair ribbons swing. One nod. Slow, deliberate, final. It was the single most serious gesture he’d ever seen out of her, and she made it while sitting cross-legged on a bare mattress with tape stuck to her leg and her boyfriend’s shirt falling off her shoulder.

From two feet away, Chloe said, “God.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She’d pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, and her voice had that flat clipped quality that meant she was feeling something and had decided against reporting it. “You two are disgusting. Keep going.”