Chapter 317 | I Want To Live With You [GT BONUS]

Chapter 317: 317 | I Want To Live With You [GT BONUS]

That landed harder than she probably meant it to, and Jordan let it sit, because she was allowed one free shot after the last twelve hours and she’d earned it honestly.

She noticed. Her shoulders came down half an inch.

"That was mean."

"It was accurate."

"Both." Chloe pushed off the fridge and came over, and she put her hands flat on his chest, right over the four fading lines her own nails had left. "I’m not mad about it. I’m just going to say true things at you occasionally forever."

"Terms accepted."

"Also," she said, and the mean little smile came back, "if we’re being efficient, we’re both wrong. The optimal play is Alexis."

Jordan groaned.

"No, listen." Chloe was fully into it now, one hand still on his chest, the other gesturing. "Alexis Van Der Berg spends four hundred dollars on a facial. She has a standing appointment at a salon in Newport that charges more for a blowout than my mother charges to dry clean a suit. She flew to Aspen in January for four days and posted eleven times about it. Her Sephora order alone could fund a small nonprofit."

"She has money."

"She has her father’s money, which is worse, because it comes with Harrison Van Allen the Third attached." Chloe tipped her head. "You’d be paying her Amex bill for a girl who is already sleeping in your henley, which means the spread would be astronomical, and she’d be so offended by the implication that she needed help that she’d blush for four hours and then let you do it anyway."

"You’ve thought about this a concerning amount."

"I’ve thought about it since Micro Center." She patted his sternum twice, flat, like she was closing a folder. "She’s high maintenance. High maintenance is high volume. High volume at a good multiplier is the whole game. Do you want the ugly math or do you want to keep buying me fourteen dollar drinks."

Jordan looked down at her. Her hair was coming out of the tie. There was still a streak of enzyme cleaner at her temple and a bruise on her throat too high for any collar, and she was standing in her own kitchen explaining how to arbitrage his romantic life with the calm of a woman who had built a two hundred and eleven thousand dollar business out of a ring light and a closet.

"You’re terrifying," he said.

"I’m useful."

"Those aren’t different for you."

The washer thunked into its spin cycle behind him and the whole thing started to vibrate, and Chloe’s hands slid up his chest to his shoulders, and the tab she’d been building in her head closed with an audible click.

"Sit on it," she said. "The washer."

"That’s not how laundry works."

"Jordan."

He got up onto the machine. She climbed after him, one knee then the other, straddling his lap on top of a shaking Whirlpool with her volleyball tee already riding up her thighs, and the vibration went straight through both of them at once.

"Hah, oh," she breathed, and her hips rocked forward before she’d even decided to. "Okay. Okay, that’s, mm, that’s a lot."

"You planned this."

"I noticed it once in December and I’ve thought about it every Sunday since." Her mouth found his jaw, then his throat, then the bite mark she’d left on his collarbone, and she pressed her teeth into it again, softer. "Shhk, don’t talk. Don’t do the voice."

"I haven’t done anything."

"You’re about to." Chloe rolled her hips again, and the whirr of the drum climbing into its high spin made her whole body shudder against him. "Mmnh, oh my god."

His hands went under the tee and found nothing under it, which he should have expected and didn’t, and the sound she made when his palms closed on her bare hips was high and cracked and not remotely careful.

"Aah, wait, hah, the walls," she gasped.

"Miss Valentine already knows."

"Miss Valentine brought me snickerdoodles."

"Then she’s not mad."

Chloe laughed into his neck, and the laugh broke apart into a moan halfway through as she ground down against him. The washer hit its peak cycle. The whole machine bucked under them with a rattling thump-thump-thump and she keened, forehead against his shoulder, fingers digging into his back hard enough to hurt.

"Nnh, Jordan, hah, hah, that’s not fair, I can’t, I can’t think when it does that."

"Then don’t."

"Ohh, aah, wait, wait." Her voice pitched up. "It’s, hnn, it’s going to stop, the cycle’s going to stop, we have four minutes."

"Four’s plenty."

"That’s the most arrogant thing you’ve ever, aahn, oh, oh god, right there, don’t move, don’t you dare move."

He didn’t. The drum roared, the sheets sloshed and slapped inside it with wet thwaps, and Chloe Kim came apart on top of a washing machine in her own kitchen with her mouth open against his throat, her thighs locked around his hips, her whole body seizing in tight little jerks while she made a sound that had absolutely nothing controlled in it. It went on for a while. The machine kept shaking. She kept shaking with it.

Then the cycle wound down with a descending whine and clicked off, and the apartment went dead quiet except for two people breathing.

"Four minutes," Jordan said.

"Two and a half," Chloe rasped. "You don’t get to round up."

She stayed where she was, boneless, forehead on his shoulder, and he ran his hand up her spine under the shirt and counted the vertebrae the way he did when he wasn’t thinking about it.

"We should switch loads," she mumbled.

"Sure."

"I can’t feel my legs."

"Second time this weekend."

"Don’t." She lifted her head. Her eyes were wrecked and glassy and her lips were swollen and she looked at him from four inches away with something that was not remotely about laundry. "The apartment thing. I meant it. Not the funnel, not the rent, the actual thing. I want to live with you."

The washer ticked as it cooled.

Jordan had a joke ready. It was a good one, it involved the mattress, and it died somewhere between his brain and his mouth.

"Yeah," he said.

"That’s it?"

"You wanted a speech?"

"I wanted to know if you’d hesitate." Chloe’s thumb moved along his jaw. "You didn’t."