Infinite Cashback System

Kumiko pressed her face into Jordan’s arm and made a noise like a kettle that had learned humility.

Here was the thing, and Jordan knew it was ugly the second the thought formed, which was the difference between the guy sitting on this mattress and the guy who’d cried into a Red Bull can six weeks ago. The old Jordan wouldn’t have noticed the ugliness. He’d have run the whole play, called it love, and never once turned it over to check the underside.

Kumiko was at forty-two percent.

He’d been carrying that number around all afternoon the way you carry a rock in your shoe. Forty-two meant a return rate of zero point eight four, which meant every dollar he spent on the girl currently trying to fuse with his bicep cost him sixteen cents. She’d been registered for over a week. She’d slept in his bed, screamed his name loud enough that Miss Valentine had brought over baked goods as a diplomatic gesture, cried on his kitchen floor over an omelet, and drawn him as a shirtless knight fighting a dragon that was metaphorically her mother.

Forty-two percent.

Meanwhile Chloe had walked from seventy-nine to one hundred in the span of one honest conversation and six rounds of a bunny suit, and the System had thrown confetti and offered him a magic cage.

It wasn’t a measure of desire; he knew that much. He saw it in the way she held on too tight, in the notebook full of his freckles, in the quiet assumption that every good day was just a prelude to a goodbye.

It was a measure of trust, and with Kumiko, trust wasn’t a spike. It was a slow, painful climb.

So he was going to raise it. Yes, partly for the money, and he wasn’t going to lie to himself and pretend otherwise, because eighteen hundred a month at a loss was the kind of number that made Chloe’s eye twitch and made her start using words like customer acquisition cost, and because a guy who’d spent forty-five hundred dollars on a girl who couldn’t remember his coffee order had earned the right to be a little mercenary about romance.

Mostly he was going to raise it because she’d nodded like that.

“Okay,” he said, and sat up, and rolled his shoulder to unstick the bruise. “New plan. Both of you clear your Saturday.”

Chloe’s head came around. “I have a stream Saturday.”

“Move it.”

“Jordan.”

“You’ve got twelve followers. Reschedule the twelve.”

“That’s the most disrespectful thing anyone has ever said about StellarNote and I’m going to remember it forever.” She’d already pulled her phone out and opened her calendar, though, which meant she was in. “What’s Saturday.”

“All three of us. Whole day. Dawn to whenever Kumiko passes out from crying about a parade.”

Kumiko lifted her head off his arm. Her expression had gone very carefully blank, the kind of blankness she deployed when she was forcing herself not to hope, and he could see the exact second the wall came up. She was trying not to let herself want whatever it was she thought he might offer, which meant she was already imagining something specific, something good enough to hurt if it fell through.

“What kind of day,” she said. Her voice had gone quieter. Smaller.

“Disneyland.”

The sound that came out of her didn’t fit into any alphabet he knew. It started low, somewhere in the range where you feel bass through your ribcage, and climbed up through what had to be six full octaves before fracturing into something that wasn’t quite a scream and wasn’t quite a sob. Then she was scrambling up onto her knees on the mattress, both hands slapped over her mouth like she was trying to keep the rest of the sound from escaping, and tears were already falling, actual tears, streaming down both cheeks in real time.

One of the boxes next to the bed tipped over. The one labeled PLUSHIES: RANKED in purple marker, and suddenly there was an avalanche of soft creatures pouring out onto the hardwood floor. A parade of fabric animals tumbled across the room in total silence while Kumiko vibrated in place and cried into her palms.

“MOCHI,” she said through her fingers, which made no sense until he remembered the koi.

“The fish isn’t invited.”

“Not the FISH, the CHURROS, they have the ones with the strawberry filling and they’re seasonal and they might be gone and we have to go EARLY, we have to go so early, Jordan-kun, the rope drop is at eight but you have to be in the parking structure at six-fifteen or the tram line eats your entire morning, I have a spreadsheet, I have an ACTUAL spreadsheet, it’s color-coded by wait time volatility—”

“Of course you have a spreadsheet,” Chloe said.

“Everyone in this apartment has a spreadsheet, Chloe-chan, that’s WHY WE WORK—”

“Breathe.”

“I have BEEN breathing, I’ve been breathing since noon, I’m SO good at breathing now—” She was crying properly, mascara finally giving up its long war, black tracking down one cheek. She scrubbed at it with the sleeve of his henley, which just spread it around. “You want to spend a whole day with me. Both of you. Together. Not like, taking turns, not like scheduled, just, a whole entire day with all three—”

“That’s what I said.”

“Say it again.”

“No.”

“SAY IT AGAIN.”

“A whole day,” he said. “You, me, Chloe. Saturday.”

She launched herself at him. He’d been braced for it since the word Disneyland left his mouth, and even braced, her momentum knocked him flat on the bare mattress with her sprawled across his chest, forehead pressed into his sternum, hands fisted in his shirt, sobbing in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with sadness and everything to do with a nervous system that had never learned how to metabolize good news.

“Hnn, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’m getting your shirt wet, I’m ruining your shirt—”

“It’s your shirt now.”