Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 225: 226 | Rules for a Relationship with Footnotes

Chloe pressed her fingers against her own temples. The sushi sat heavy in her stomach, the laptop glowed softly on the couch cushion where she’d left it, and the purple LED strips Kumiko had installed cast everything in the room with a violet hue that made the moment feel like it belonged in a dream sequence rather than real life.

Twelve followers. That’s what Chloe had. Twelve people in the entire world who had clicked "follow" on StellarNote during a debut stream where she’d accidentally called Jordan her boyfriend and then panicked about it for forty minutes. Kumiko had ten thousand across platforms. This Lila person had seventeen thousand.

And Jordan was standing in her kitchen with protein powder on his shorts and an expression that said he’d already started building something bigger than any of them could see.

Chloe hated how much she trusted him. She hated how his voice made her pulse shift gears when he said her name. She hated that he’d registered her in some golden phone application that tracked their relationship like a stock portfolio and that she still didn’t fully understand what that meant or what it was doing to either of them. She hated that he was probably right about the girl with the purple streak and the dead car.

Mostly, Chloe hated that she couldn’t hate any of it enough to walk away.

"Rules meeting," she said firmly. "Now. Before anyone DMs anyone else or picks up any more strangers in parking garages."

"I already sent the DM," Kumiko said in a very small voice.

"We’ll address that."

Jordan grabbed the sushi containers and moved them to the coffee table while Chloe retrieved her laptop and opened a fresh document. Kumiko settled back onto the couch and pulled a pink notebook from her bag, the same one covered in doodled hearts and anime characters that she brought to every class. Jordan sat between them, which Chloe noted was becoming his default position in their shared geography. The center of a triangle he hadn’t designed but couldn’t escape.

Chloe typed RULES at the top of the document in all caps, font size twenty-four.

"Okay," she said. "Ground rules for whatever this is."

"A relationship," Jordan offered.

"A relationship with footnotes and a business plan attached. Rule one."

She typed as she spoke, her fingers moving with the speed of someone who had managed six months of subscriber communications and content schedules on a daily basis.

"Nobody posts about our relationship on any public platform without all three of us agreeing first. That includes Instagram stories, Twitch chat messages, Twitter, TikTok, carrier pigeon, and smoke signals."

"That’s fair," Jordan said.

Kumiko raised her hand like she was in class. "What about vague posts? Like if I post a sunset picture and caption it ’thinking about someone special’ with a heart emoji?"

"Define ’someone special.’"

"Jordan."

"Then no."

"What if I say ’special someones’ plural and use two heart emojis?"

"Absolutely not."

Kumiko’s hand lowered and she wrote something in her pink notebook that Chloe suspected was either a complaint or a strategy for circumventing the rule later.

"Rule two," Chloe continued. "Sleeping arrangements."

The room got very quiet. Jordan’s jaw did the tightening thing. Kumiko’s pen stopped moving.

"Jordan sleeps at his apartment or mine. We don’t rotate on a schedule because that’s weird and corporate." Chloe typed while she spoke, not looking at either of them. "If Kumiko wants to stay over at Jordan’s place, she texts me first. Not asks permission. Texts me so I know where everyone is and I don’t bang on the wall at midnight because I heard screaming and thought someone was being murdered."

Kumiko covered her face with both hands.

"I wasn’t that loud."

"Miss Valentine knocked on my door."

"Oh god."

"She brought cookies."

"Were the cookies good?" Jordan asked.

"They were snickerdoodles and they were excellent, which is beside the point." Chloe’s fingers paused on the keyboard. "Rule three. Business and personal stay separate."

She looked up from the screen and found Jordan watching her. His hazel eyes carried that particular warmth she’d first noticed during their Ivy coffee date, back when he was just a subscriber named Ricky and she was just a girl in a mask pretending that three thousand dollars could fix whatever was broken in both of them.

"Nova Network is Nova Network," Chloe said. "Whatever we are outside of it doesn’t change the business decisions inside of it. If Brooke says a content strategy is wrong, it’s wrong regardless of who suggested it. If a sponsorship deal is bad for one of us, we all walk. Money doesn’t get mixed with feelings."

"Agreed," Jordan said immediately.

"Absolutely agreed," Kumiko added, her pen scratching rapidly in her notebook.

"Rule four." Chloe swallowed. This one was harder. "If any of us wants out, for any reason, at any time, they say so. No guilt trips. No ultimatums. No dramatic confessions at airports or train stations."

"I don’t take trains," Kumiko said.

"It’s a metaphor."

"I know. I just wanted to clarify my transportation preferences."

Chloe looked at Jordan. He looked back.

She’d spent her entire adult life making rules. Rules for Calypso. Rules for Chloe Kim. Rules for when to post and what to wear and how much skin was too much skin and which version of herself belonged to which audience. She’d built a fortress of protocols and spreadsheets and burner phones to keep every piece of her life in its designated compartment.

Jordan McKnight had walked through every wall she’d ever built. He’d knocked on her door with a sugar excuse. He’d sat on her couch and watched horror movies. He’d told her a stupid lie about an inheritance and she’d believed him because the alternative was admitting that something about the lie was true even if the details were wrong.

"Rule five," Chloe said quietly. "We don’t lie to each other."

The purple light from the LED strips shifted across Jordan’s face. His expression didn’t change, but Chloe watched his Adam’s apple bob once.

"No more lies," she said, and typed it.

"No more lies," he said.

Kumiko set down her pen and placed her small hand on top of Jordan’s where it rested on his knee. Chloe reached over from the other side and covered both their hands with her own.

Three people on a grey sectional in a converted factory loft with purple lighting, room-temperature sushi, and a document titled RULES in twenty-four-point font.

Chloe saved the file.