Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 223: 224 | A Girl Named Lila

Chloe heard his key in the lock at 5:06 PM, which meant Jordan McKnight was sixty-six minutes late and the spicy salmon rolls had reached the temperature of sadness.

She sat cross-legged on the sectional with her laptop open to the StellarNote Twitch analytics dashboard, which currently displayed numbers so small they would have made a first-grader feel like a math genius. Twelve followers. Four peak concurrent viewers. One VOD that she’d already scrubbed of any footage containing Jordan’s chat messages, because Kumiko had pointed out that his username literally contained his apartment number and Chloe’s paranoia had done the rest.

Kumiko occupied the other end of the couch with her legs folded beneath her, wearing the lavender cardigan from earlier and a pair of shorts so small they might as well have been a suggestion. Her twin tails were freshly retied with matching ribbons, and her phone rested face-up on the cushion beside her, its screen illuminating every three seconds with a new notification she was desperately trying not to check. The bite marks on Kumiko’s neck had been attacked with a truly heroic amount of concealer. From certain angles, you almost couldn’t tell that Jordan had tried to devour her collarbone like a medium-rare steak approximately sixteen hours ago.

Chloe had heard it all. Every single sound. Through the wall. For forty-seven minutes.

She was fine.

The lock clicked and Jordan shouldered through the door carrying his gym bag in one hand and his phone in the other, his dirty blonde hair windswept from whatever adventure had consumed his afternoon. He wore the same black tank top and basketball shorts he’d texted about earlier, his shoulders still slightly flushed from what Chloe assumed was the boxing session he’d mentioned canceling.

"Sixty-six minutes," Chloe said without looking up from her laptop.

"I know."

"The salmon is room temperature."

"I know."

"Room temperature salmon is a health code violation, Jordan."

"I’ll eat it anyway." He dropped his gym bag by the door and toed off his shoes. The motion pulled the tank top across his chest, and Chloe’s traitorous eyes tracked the fabric for exactly one second before returning to her screen. He’d gotten bigger again. The Tune Up trait or whatever he was calling the thing he refused to explain was still doing its work, and his shoulders now strained the seams of shirts that had fit him two weeks ago.

Kumiko’s head snapped up the instant Jordan crossed the threshold, her entire body orienting toward him the way a satellite dish locks onto a signal. Her face went through its usual sequence: recognition, joy, violent blush, attempted composure, failed composure, wider blush.

"Jordan-kun!"

"Hey, Kumi."

The nickname landed and Kumiko’s spine went rigid. Her blush spread from her cheeks down past the neckline of her cardigan. She opened her mouth, closed it, and pressed her palms flat against her own face.

"You can’t just... you can’t just say that with your whole voice and expect me to function."

"I said two syllables."

"Two devastating syllables."

Jordan walked to the kitchen island and picked up one of the sushi containers, popping the lid and examining the salmon with the clinical disinterest of someone who genuinely did not care about food temperature. He ate a roll standing up, chopsticks in his right hand, phone screen dark on the counter beside him.

Chloe closed her laptop.

"Where were you?"

Jordan chewed, swallowed. "Gave someone a ride."

"Someone."

"A girl whose car died in the parking structure."

The words landed in the living room with the subtlety of a brick through a window. Kumiko stopped pressing her face and looked up. Chloe felt her jaw do something it wasn’t supposed to do, some involuntary tightening that she smoothed over before it reached her expression.

"A girl," Chloe said.

"Her alternator cable was fried. I tried jumping it but the terminals were corroded. She needed a ride to her apartment off Brookhurst."

"And you just... volunteered."

"I charged her ten dollars."

This was the wrong detail to lead with, and Jordan seemed to realize it approximately three seconds after the words left his mouth. His hazel eyes moved from the sushi container to Chloe’s face, and whatever he saw there made his chewing slow considerably.

Kumiko looked between them with the expression of someone watching a nature documentary about predator-prey dynamics, her brown eyes enormous and her body very still.

"You charged her," Chloe repeated.

"Gas isn’t free."

"What’s her name?" Kumiko asked from the couch, her voice careful and quiet.

"Lila. She’s a streamer, actually. KhaosKitten on Twitch."

Something flickered behind Kumiko’s eyes. "I know that channel."

"You do?"

"She plays Stardew Valley in full goth makeup and her chat is obsessed with it. She has like fifteen thousand followers." Kumiko pulled her phone from the cushion and typed rapidly with both thumbs, her earlier tension replaced by the professional curiosity of someone who understood the creator ecosystem. "KhaosKitten, K-H-A-O-S. She does cozy gaming streams. Her whole brand is the visual irony of looking like she should be playing Resident Evil while she’s actually harvesting digital turnips."

Jordan nodded. "That’s what she said."

Chloe watched this exchange with the calm exterior of someone who had spent six months maintaining a double identity and could compartmentalize with the best of them. Internally, a familiar heat built behind her sternum. Not rage. Not jealousy exactly. More like the feeling she got when she opened her spreadsheet and discovered a number that didn’t match the formula.

A variable she hadn’t accounted for.

"Fifteen thousand followers," Chloe said.

Kumiko looked up from her phone. "Seventeen thousand two hundred, actually. She gained some this month."

Seventeen thousand. More than Kumiko’s ten. More than Chloe’s twelve.

Chloe’s mind did what it always did. It ran the numbers.

A third creator with seventeen thousand dedicated followers who played an entirely different content category would bring audience diversity, cross-promotion potential, and instant credibility to a brand that currently existed only as Brooke’s paperwork and Jordan’s ambition.

Lila Martinez would be perfect for the third woman.

Chloe hated that she understood this.