Chapter 388 | I Do Wish I Was There

Chapter 388: 388 | I Do Wish I Was There

Jordan’s hands found her hips on reflex. She was warm, and tight, and shaking hard enough that he could feel it transferring through his palms into his forearms, and when she got all the way down she made a noise that was not a moan so much as a small collapse.

"Nnnnnnh . . ."

"Breathe," he said.

"I’m breathing. I’m breathing beautifully. I’m the best breather here." She got her hands braced on his stomach, fingers spread, and lifted about four inches and dropped back down and her eyes rolled. "AH. Hah . . . okay. Okay. I can do this. I’m doing a thing."

"You’re doing great."

"Don’t be nice to me right now, it makes my arms weak."

She started moving. It was not good technique. It was uneven and she kept losing her rhythm and about every fourth stroke she sank down too hard and yelped, and Jordan had never in his life been more thoroughly wrecked by anything, because the whole time she kept her eyes on his face like she was checking her work.

Slap. Slap. Slap.

"Ahh . . . ah . . . nnh, Jordan-kun, is it, hah, is it good, is it . . ."

"Kumi."

"I need data."

"It’s good."

"Say it in the voice."

He gave her the voice. Low, and warm, and pitched at whatever frequency the System had installed in his throat one Tuesday for the price of fifty tickets, and the word came out of him like something dragged up from deeper than his chest.

"It’s good."

Kumiko’s arms buckled.

She came down onto him with a full-body shudder, forehead thumping into his collarbone, hips still rocking on pure autopilot, and the sound out of her was long and thin and did not stop.

"Ahhhh, hah, ah, aaahn . . . that’s not fair, that’s not, hnnh, you can’t just . . ."

"Told you."

"Sh . . . shut up, shut up, I’m doing the thing, I’m still doing the thing . . ."

She was barely doing the thing. Her legs had given out around stroke twenty and now she was mostly grinding in tiny desperate circles with her face buried in his neck, and he let her, hands sliding up her back, and he could feel every vertebra under his palm and the wet at the corner of her eye against his skin.

Chloe rolled onto her stomach beside them and propped her chin on her folded arms and watched with the calm of a woman assessing a portfolio.

"Her rhythm’s off," she said.

"She’s tired."

"Help her."

Jordan got both hands under Kumiko, one on each thigh, and lifted.

"AH . . . ! Ah, wait, wait, waitwaitwait, that’s, hnnnh, that’s not, ahhh . . ."

He set the pace. She stopped trying to contribute about four seconds in and just held on, arms locked around his neck, mouth open against his jaw, and the noises came out of her in a continuous unbroken string with no shape at all.

Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap.

"Nnh, nnh, nnh, ah, AH, Jordan, Jordan, Jordan . . ."

"Louder," Chloe said.

"I can’t be louder, I’ll die."

"Then die."

She got louder.

The headboard started up again against the wall, and somewhere down the hall a door closed hard enough to register as commentary, and Jordan thought, with the specific clarity that only arrived at eleven at night in a hotel he had not paid for out of his own money in any way that mattered, that a month and a half ago the loudest sound in his apartment had been a stream on autoplay while he lay on a mattress with a stain on it shaped like Florida.

Kumiko’s back arched. "I’m, hah, I’m going to, Jordan-kun, I’m going to . . ."

"Go."

"Say my name."

"Kumi."

"My whole name."

"Kumiko."

She broke apart on him. Every muscle at once, the way she always did, no gradient, no warning, teeth in his shoulder to keep from screaming and then screaming anyway around them, and she clamped down so hard that his own vision did something unhelpful for the second time in an hour.

He held her through the aftershocks. There were a lot of them. Somewhere around the fourth one she started crying in the pure structural way she did when nothing was wrong, and Chloe reached over without a word and put a hand on the back of Kumiko’s head and left it there.

"Hnn . . . hah . . . I did the thing," Kumiko whispered.

"You did the thing."

"I did like sixteen percent of the thing."

"You did the thing."

She sagged. Completely. Dead weight across his chest, hair everywhere, one hand still fisted in nothing, and she said, muffled, "Page eleven, complete," and then she stopped talking for the first time in nine hours.

Jordan eased her off him and onto the mattress. She landed facedown and stayed there.

Chloe sat up, looked at the state of the bed, looked at the state of the two of them, and then reached for the hotel phone on the nightstand with the businesslike calm of somebody about to ruin a stranger’s night.

"Who are you calling."

"Housekeeping."

"It’s eleven forty."

"Room service closes at midnight. Housekeeping is twenty-four hours." She dialed, waited, and then her voice shifted into the register she used on brand deals and leasing agents and anybody she intended to get something from. "Hi, this is the El Capitan suite. We need a set of fresh linens, four extra towels, and one of the mattress protectors. No, no incident. Yes. Thank you so much."

She hung up.

"You just called a mattress protector into existence."

"They keep them in the housekeeping closet on eight. I asked at check-in." She set the phone down. "Kumiko snores and I am nauseous at six in the morning. Contingencies."

"You planned for this."

"I plan for everything." She stood, winced, and put a hand flat on the wall for a second, which she would deny later. "Also the sheets are destroyed and I refuse to sleep in your biohazard."

"That’s the System’s word."

"It’s an accurate word."

She went into the bathroom. There was a pause, and then a flat, exhausted, "There is standing water at the threshold," and then the shower started.

Jordan lay there for a minute with Kumiko unconscious against his side and the California Adventure skyline glowing through eight feet of glass, Incredicoaster track dark now, the whole park shut down and cooling off, and he did the thing he had been not doing since dinner.

He reached over and picked up his phone.

Four notifications. Golden, all of them, stacked and patient.

Kumiko Yamanaka: 51% to 63%. Return rate 1.26x. Status change: infatuated but guarded, to devoted. There was a note under it, and the note said, Target has stopped calculating exit scenarios. This is not a metric improvement. This is a person deciding something.

He read that four times.

The second notification was a transaction summary for the day. Total spend, one thousand four hundred sixty-one dollars and eighty-eight cents. Total rebate, two thousand two hundred nine dollars and eleven cents. Net, seven hundred forty-seven dollars and twenty-three cents in the black, for a day that had included a churro, a plush Stitch that no longer belonged to them, and a four-year-old’s tiara adjustment.

The third notification was Eliza Hartwell at fifty-eight percent, and a line underneath it that read, Target has drafted and deleted eleven messages since 6:14 PM. Quest timer: nineteen days remaining.

He did not open the fourth one right away. He knew what it was from the shape of the preview, and he sat there with his thumb over it while the shower ran and Kumiko breathed against his ribs and the last of the smoke from the fireworks drifted past the window in a thin gray line.

Then he opened it anyway, because he had never once in his life left a notification unread when it was going to be a problem.

It was not the System.

It was a text, delivered at 11:38 PM, from a contact he had saved and deleted and saved again three separate times in the last two weeks.

Alexis Van Der Berg.

I do wish I was there.