Chapter 407 | Pregnant Speed

Chapter 407: 407 | Pregnant Speed

Jordan climbed the stairs to the fourth floor because the elevator smelled like someone had died in it and been replaced by a Yankee Candle. His body still ached from a workout he hadn’t finished and a weekend he’d finished too well.

"You smell like a locker room threw up on a Red Bull."

Chloe sat on the couch in his black shirt with her legs folded under her, laptop balanced on one knee, glasses on. The apartment smelled like eggs and rice and the lemon cleaner she used the way other people used perfume. A pan sat on the stove with two eggs already going, edges crisping the way he liked, because she’d apparently decided he was eating whether he wanted to or not.

"I told them," he said.

Her fingers stopped on the keyboard. "And?"

"Kyle wants to build me a five-year plan. Leo cried into a stack of pancakes and offered to be the godfather, which I didn’t agree to, so if a Balenciaga onesie shows up that’s why."

"Leo’s not being the godfather."

"That’s what I said."

Chloe set the laptop aside and stood, crossing to the stove with the unhurried walk she’d been using since the nausea started, the one she called pregnant speed and Kumiko called grandma speed and Jordan had learned to shut up about entirely. She flipped the eggs. The oil hissed, sssk, and she didn’t flinch at it the way she flinched at loud noises now, which meant she’d been standing at that stove long enough to stop registering it.

"So your friends know before your parents do," she said.

There it was. He’d walked in the door expecting exactly this and it still landed like a jab he’d seen coming and eaten anyway.

"My friends aren’t going to book a table at Giuliano’s and interrogate you about your uterus."

"Your mom already loves me. Your dad already apologized to me. You met my mother, my brother beat you at Tekken." She plated the eggs and slid them onto the counter with a fork laid across the rim, handle facing him. "At what point do we tell the people who actually matter that there’s a whole person coming in seven months."

"Chloe."

"I’m not pushing." She was pushing. The words arrived in a tone that said this is practical, which was how she framed every conversation she’d decided to have three hours ago while he was still in bed. "I’m asking a logistics question. My mother comes up once a month. Your parents want a follow-up dinner where we can presumably prove I’m not just some girl you knocked up between midterms. Thanksgiving’s going to be in San Francisco and I’m going to be five months pregnant by then, so the whole significant-other question gets answered whether we’re ready or not. There’s no hiding it. There’s no ’let’s wait for the right moment.’ The moment is coming."

Jordan picked up the fork. Ate a bite of egg he didn’t taste, the texture registering as food-shaped but nothing else. The mention of his sister had landed somewhere cold and specific, in the place he’d been very carefully not looking since a mystery box popped open on a nightstand three weeks ago and gave him a trait with a name that made his stomach drop every single time he thought about it.

Oedipus Simple.

Passive Attraction generation with all registered family members is significantly amplified for both platonic and romantic routes.

He hadn’t registered his family. That was the whole point. That was the entire reason he’d been dodging FaceTimes and sending short texts and finding reasons not to drive out to Irvine for the last two weeks, letting his mom think he was busy with school and his dad think he was finally taking things seriously and Cassie think whatever Cassie thought, which was probably worse than the truth because Cassie thought about everything, cataloged it, filed it under potential vulnerabilities, and waited for the perfect moment to deploy it like a lawyer presenting evidence.

The System couldn’t register someone he didn’t touch. He’d confirmed it a hundred times in his head. No physical contact, no slot, no meter, no buff activating in the background like a slow gas leak. As long as he kept his distance, the trait sat there inert, a loaded thing pointed at nobody.

"You’ve got the face," Chloe said.

"What face."

"The one where your jaw goes sideways and you stop chewing." She leaned against the counter, arms crossed, watching him with the flat evaluating look she used when she’d already decided something and was waiting for him to catch up. "You’ve been weird about your family for weeks. You dodged your mom’s call on Tuesday. You told Cassie you had a midterm when you don’t have a midterm. Every time your sister comes up you get the jaw thing."

"I don’t get a jaw thing about Cassie."

"You’re getting it right now."

He was getting it right now. He forced the muscle to unclench, which of course made it worse, the way trying to relax on command always made a body seize up like it had been asked to prove something.

"It’s complicated," he said.

"Everything with you is complicated. You have a magic app that pays you to date me. You own a hot springs resort you refuse to acknowledge. You have a trait that lets you calm Kumiko down by touching her head and another one that made a bathtub overflow." She counted them off on her fingers, then stopped, because she’d hit two and remembered they didn’t do lists in twos and neither did he. "I’ve accepted a lot. I can accept whatever this is. But I’m carrying your kid, and if there’s a reason you don’t want your family around, I’d like to know before your mother’s holding a grandchild and wondering why her son went quiet for a year."

He set the fork down.

"Oedipus Simple," he said.

Silence. A different kind than before. The kind where a smart person was running the reference to its conclusion and arriving somewhere unpleasant before you’d finished the sentence.

"Oh," Chloe said.

"Yeah."

"Oh, that’s why you won’t drive to Irvine."

"Yeah."