Chapter 392 | IS THAT A BITE MARK

Chapter 392: 392 | IS THAT A BITE MARK

No location tag. No tagging anybody. No emoji. Just the photo and four words and a post time of 12:03 AM on a Sunday night, which was objectively the single worst hour to post anything if you gave even half a damn about the algorithm, and Brooke was going to send him a paragraph about that within the hour because Brooke tracked engagement windows the way other people tracked their horoscopes.

He posted it.

Then he leaned back against the counter, folded his arms across his chest, and waited for the carnage to start rolling in with the bunny ears still perched on his head. He could have taken them off. He didn’t. Commitment to the bit, or maybe just the fact that his hands were occupied holding his phone like it was a live grenade with the pin already pulled.

It took nine seconds.

Kyle’s name lit up the notification banner first with a message that contained no actual words, just a chaotic string of capital letters that looked like he’d hammered the keyboard with his forehead in a fit of religious ecstasy, followed immediately by BROTHER in a font size that shouldn’t have been possible in a text message, followed by WHERE ARE YOU, followed by a pause Jordan could physically feel through the screen like Kyle had set the phone down to collect himself before the final nail dropped into the group chat coffin: IS THAT A BITE MARK.

Leo went next with four crying emojis in a row, then a voice memo Jordan flat-out refused to touch at midnight, then the words THE CHARACTER ARC IS REAL in what might have been sincere support or mockery or both because Leo contained multitudes, then thirty seconds later with no prompting whatsoever: MAYA IS GOING TO SEE THIS.

Brooke’s message arrived exactly when he’d predicted it would and somehow still caught him off guard with its precision. Posting at 12:03 AM Pacific places you in the lowest engagement window of the seven-day cycle. Your projected reach will be reduced by approximately 34%, though I acknowledge this may have been an intentional choice on your part to avoid saturation. That said, the composition is strong and the framing choice is effective. I do not know why I am saying that. Please disregard the last sentence. I am going to sleep now.

Ava sent a screenshot of the post with no caption attached, then eleven minutes later sent a full paragraph apologizing for sending the screenshot without asking permission first and clarifying that she hadn’t meant anything weird by it and that she thought the photo was nice and that she hoped he was having a good night and that she was sorry again.

Kumiko liked it from the bed with her face buried in the pillow and one hand somewhere under the blankets where her phone definitely was not, which meant she’d done it psychically or Jordan had broken her Instagram app or she was awake just enough to double-tap on muscle memory before passing back out.

And then the like count did something he had not expected at all.

It hit sixty-one. It hit sixty-two. It sat at sixty-two for about forty seconds and then dropped back to sixty-one, which meant somebody had tapped it and then untapped it, which meant somebody had been holding their phone in a loud kitchen full of red cups with their thumb hovering over a photo of him in a towel while the guy with his arm around her waist laughed at something across the room.

The golden notification came in under it, soft and warm, the way it always did right when he’d rather it didn’t.

Eliza Hartwell: 58% → 63%

Cause: Target viewed content 11 consecutive times in 4 minutes. Target has left the party. Target is currently in a bathroom.

He stared at that for a while.

The bathroom door opened behind him.

Chloe stood in the frame with a white towel wrapped and tucked under her arms, her hair dark and heavy with water and dripping onto the tile, the blue streak gone nearly black. She’d taken the contacts out hours ago, and her eyes without them were brown and smaller and softer and did not match the rest of her at all. There was a mark on her throat she’d decided to leave visible and a second one just above her collarbone she almost certainly hadn’t noticed yet.

She looked at him for three seconds without moving.

"You posted."

"How could you possibly know that."

"Your face."

She crossed to the counter, took his phone out of his hand without asking, and scrolled with her thumb while water ran down her shoulder blade and dripped onto the tile in uneven little taps. The screen lit up her face from below in the dim bathroom, blue-white and clinical.

"Twelve oh three. Terrible timing."

"Brooke already covered that."

"Brooke’s right."

Her thumb stopped. Her eyebrows didn’t move. Nothing in her expression moved, which was how he knew he’d done something interesting. She read something on the screen he couldn’t see from this angle. Her mouth stayed neutral.

"Two hundred and six likes in eleven minutes with terrible timing."

"Is that good."

"It’s obscene."

She handed the phone back and reached up and straightened the ears on his head with both hands, two fingertips on each side of the headband, adjusting them until they sat level. Her thumbs brushed his temples on the way down, warm and damp. She smelled like his shampoo and her conditioner and something else underneath that was just skin.

"Tag Nova Network next time."

"I’m not tagging my girlfriend’s talent agency in a thirst trap."

"You are, actually, because a thirst trap converts at four times the rate of a logo, and you’re the only asset we have that costs nothing."

She stepped in closer. Damp heat came off her in a wave. The towel was doing significantly less work than his was, and he could see the edge of the mark he’d left above her collarbone peeking out over the white terry cloth. She tilted her head up and met his eyes.

"And it’s our agency."

"Sure."

"Say it."

"Our agency."

"Better."