Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 211: 212 | I Respect Gerald

Jordan stared at the second line.

Forty-two percent.

She’d been at thirty-three last night when he checked after the aquarium date. Nine percent increase in less than twelve hours. The sex had spiked her by four, and the emotional aftermath and breakfast had added another five on top of that. Nine points in one night. With Chloe, gaining nine points had taken an entire week of dates, conversations, and intimate connection. Kumiko’s chemistry climbed like a stock during a market bubble, volatile and responsive to every micro-interaction.

The math was obvious. At this rate, Kumiko would hit fifty percent within a week, which meant break-even on spending. By the time she reached seventy-seven to match Chloe’s current level, Jordan would be pulling fifty-four cents profit on every dollar. The System loved what was happening. The System was probably running a victory lap somewhere in its golden digital void, celebrating the optimization of its metrics.

Jordan locked his phone without checking the quest log or the gacha or any of the other features designed to gamify his romantic life into a spreadsheet of returns and multipliers.

The bathroom door opened. Steam billowed out into the hallway like the world’s most humid entrance cue. Kumiko emerged wearing his henley again, her damp hair clinging to her neck and shoulders, her skin pink and warm from the hot water. She’d attempted to fix her mascara situation and achieved a partial success, the raccoon eyes downgraded to a mild panda. Her feet left wet prints on the concrete as she crossed to where Jordan stood by the kitchen island.

"Your shampoo smells like a forest," she announced. "I used approximately one-third of the bottle because I have a lot of hair and I wanted to smell like you for the rest of the day. Also your conditioner is almost empty and you should buy more. Also I found a rubber duck on the shelf in the shower and I have questions."

"That’s Chloe’s."

"Chloe-chan has a rubber duck?"

"Chloe has a rubber duck named Gerald that she claims was placed there ironically but she gets upset if you move him."

Kumiko absorbed this information with the gravity it apparently deserved, filing it away in whatever mental database she maintained on the people she loved. "Gerald," she repeated. "I respect Gerald."

Jordan walked past her toward the bathroom. When he passed close enough for their arms to brush, Kumiko’s breath caught and her whole body listed toward him like a compass needle pointing north. He stopped. Looked down at her. She looked up at him. Water droplets clung to her eyelashes.

Jordan leaned down and pressed his lips against her forehead. A simple kiss. No tongue, no heat, no agenda behind it. Just his mouth against the warm skin above her eyebrows, lingering for two full heartbeats before he pulled away.

"Hhhaah..." Kumiko made a sound that belonged in a manga panel. Her face collapsed into an expression of such pure, devastating happiness that Jordan’s chest physically ached. Her hands came up and pressed flat over the spot where his lips had been, as if she could trap the sensation there permanently, preserve it under her palms like a butterfly under glass.

"Get dressed," Jordan said. "I’ll drive you to campus after I shower."

"Mmkay." She said it dreamily, still holding her forehead, her eyes somewhere approximately sixty thousand miles away. "I’ll just... stand here. For a moment. Processing."

Jordan shook his head and went into the bathroom. The mirror was still fogged from Kumiko’s shower, and when he wiped a section clear with his palm, the face looking back at him bore a grin he couldn’t quite suppress. The bite mark on his collarbone stared back at him, purple and real and belonging to a girl who counted his eyelashes while he slept and fought frying pans for forty minutes and cried happy tears into his breakfast.

The grin stayed the whole time he showered.

When Jordan came back upstairs with a towel around his waist, Kumiko was sitting on the edge of his bed. She’d retrieved her skirt and hoodie from wherever she’d left them the previous night and reassembled herself into something approaching campus-presentable. Her hair was up in twin tails again, the pink ribbons tied in the bows Jordan recognized as her signature. The henley had vanished, replaced by her pastel pink crop hoodie zipped to her sternum. The hickeys on her neck stood out like neon signs against her skin, a constellation of possession that no turtleneck or scarf could realistically cover.

She was looking at her phone. Her thumbs moved at speeds that suggested she was either texting at championship level or experiencing a minor seizure.

"Chloe-chan says good morning," Kumiko reported without looking up. "She also says, and I’m quoting directly, ’tell Jordan if he doesn’t bring me coffee I will end him.’ With a knife emoji."

"Noted."

"She also says the walls are very thin."

Jordan’s ears went warm.

"She says, specifically, that she heard..." Kumiko squinted at the screen, her lips moving as she read. "She heard, quote, ’Kumiko screaming like she was being murdered by a ghost’ at approximately eleven forty-seven PM, and that Miss Valentine knocked on Chloe-chan’s door at midnight to ask if everyone in the building was safe, and Chloe-chan had to explain that nobody was being murdered and the sound was coming from the neighboring unit and was ’recreational in nature.’"

Jordan stared at the ceiling.

"RECREATIONAL IN NATURE," Kumiko repeated, her voice climbing four octaves into a register that could shatter crystal. "Chloe-chan told our sixty-year-old neighbor that the sounds coming through the wall were RECREATIONAL IN NATURE. I’m going to die. I’m going to walk into the hallway and Miss Valentine is going to be standing there and she’s going to KNOW and I will spontaneously combust and they’ll have to scrape me off the walls."

"Get dressed," Jordan said for the second time that morning. "We leave in ten."