Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 210: 211 | Chemistry: 22% → 42% [PS BONUS]

Kumiko’s cheeks went pink from her hairline to her jaw. "I mean. If. You know. If there’s a next time. Which I’m not assuming there will be because assumptions are dangerous and Dr. Nakamura says I should practice sitting with uncertainty instead of projecting desired outcomes onto—"

"There’s going to be a next time."

The fork stopped moving halfway to her mouth. A piece of cheese hung from the tines like a tiny golden flag of surrender.

"Really?"

"Really."

Kumiko put the fork down. Then she put her elbows on the counter and her face in her hands and made a sound like a tea kettle reaching boiling point, a high sustained note of pure emotion that went on long enough for Jordan to finish his coffee and pour himself a second cup.

When she resurfaced, her eyes were bloodshot and her nose was red and the raccoon mascara situation had gotten significantly worse.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Cool. Great. Amazing. I’m fine. This is fine."

"You look like you fought a raccoon."

"I feel like I fought a raccoon and the raccoon won and then the raccoon made me breakfast and told me I was beautiful." She paused. "That metaphor got away from me."

Jordan’s phone buzzed again on the counter. He could feel the golden notification pulsing at the edge of his awareness, the System reminding him of its existence with its usual corporate cheerfulness and inconvenient timing. He kept his eyes on Kumiko.

"We should shower," he said. "I have class at nine."

Kumiko’s brain visibly short-circuited. Her mouth formed the word "shower" but no sound came out. Her skin, already flushed from crying, darkened three additional shades until she resembled a human tomato. Her hands gripped the edge of the island hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

"Separately," Jordan clarified.

"RIGHT. Yes. Of course. Separately. Individual bathing. As separate people. In separate water. Obviously."

But something flickered behind her eyes. A quick drop of her gaze to his bare chest and back up, fast enough to pretend it didn’t happen but slow enough for Jordan to catch. He recognized that look because Chloe gave him the same one when she thought he wasn’t paying attention, that mix of want and strategy that women seemed to deploy with the same casual lethality as a concealed weapon.

"You go first," Jordan said. "I’ll clean the kitchen."

"I can clean! I made the mess!"

"Kumi. There’s egg yolk on the ceiling."

Both of them looked up. A single splatter of yellow marked the white surface directly above the stove, an achievement that defied basic physics and suggested Kumiko had somehow generated enough force with a spatula to launch an egg vertically at terminal velocity.

"...how?" Kumiko whispered, genuinely mystified.

"Go shower."

Kumiko slid off the stool and padded toward the bathroom. She made it four steps before stopping and turning around. She stood in the kitchen doorway with her loose hair falling over one shoulder and his henley hanging to mid-thigh and her bare legs and her bare feet and her bitten lip and those enormous dark eyes that contained more feeling than most people experienced in a calendar year.

"Jordan."

"Yeah."

"Thank you for the eggs."

She wasn’t talking about the eggs.

"Anytime, Kumi."

She disappeared into the bathroom. The door clicked shut with a soft finality. Two seconds later, the water started running, followed by what could only be described as the auditory equivalent of someone trying to express joy through clenched teeth and sheer force of will.

The muffled squealing noise that filtered through the door suggested Kumiko was screaming directly into her own hands, probably while jumping up and down, possibly while also kicking her feet in the air like an overexcited cartoon character.

Jordan stood in his kitchen and gave himself exactly three seconds to acknowledge what was happening.

Kumiko Yamanaka had slept in his bed. Worn his clothes. Cried into his breakfast. Fought his kitchen appliances for forty minutes to make him an omelet she categorically did not know how to cook. She drew stick figures of him during lectures when she thought no one was looking. She’d memorized his coffee order through pure observation, the way ornithologists studied bird migration patterns. She looked at him with the kind of raw, unfiltered devotion that made his chest feel like someone had replaced his lungs with something three sizes too large and still expanding.

Three seconds. That was the time limit. Any longer and he’d start thinking about what it meant, what it could mean, what the System was probably going to tell him it meant, and he’d already hit his quota for existential relationship panic before 10 AM.

He grabbed the sponge and attacked the egg yolk.

The kitchen restoration took twelve minutes of concentrated effort. Jordan scraped congealed egg protein off the stovetop with the edge of a spatula, wiped down the counter in systematic horizontal passes, mopped up the yolk puddle that had somehow migrated six inches from its point of origin, unplugged and replugged the toaster after extracting two jammed bread slices with a butter knife and the kind of careful precision usually reserved for bomb disposal, returned the butter to the fridge where it belonged instead of on the counter slowly liquefying, disposed of the eggshell fragments Kumiko had distributed across three separate surfaces like some kind of calcium-based treasure hunt, and finally deployed the step stool to reach the ceiling splatter with a damp paper towel.

The stool made him pause. He was six-two, and he still needed it to reach the ceiling. Kumiko was five-four on a good day, maybe five-six in those platform boots she wore to every class. Her head came up to his collarbone. When she’d hugged him this morning, her face had pressed directly against his sternum, and she’d fit there the way puzzle pieces clicked into place when you finally found the right orientation after trying seventeen wrong ones.

Jordan stepped down from the stool and folded it back up. He put the sponge in the sink. The kitchen looked normal again, like the Battle of Breakfast had never happened, like there wasn’t a Japanese girl currently showering ten feet away wearing nothing but water and the memory of his henley hanging off her shoulders.

His phone buzzed on the counter. Once. Twice.

He ignored it. The System could wait thirty seconds. He needed to finish wiping down the coffee maker, which had somehow acquired a fine mist of egg white despite being nowhere near the stove. Kumiko’s chaos had a blast radius.

His phone buzzed a third time.

Jordan dried his hands and picked it up.

The golden System interface filled his screen with its familiar warm glow.

💝 CASHBACK ∞

ACTIVE CONNECTIONS

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Chloe Kim 📍

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