Chapter 447 | Stress Response Number Two

Chapter 447: 447 | Stress Response Number Two

Jordan put the phone away and decided that future Jordan could handle Thursday. Present Jordan had forty-one hours and a studio full of women who needed things from him.

Lila arrived at 5:04 in a black tank top and plaid skirt with combat boots that had seen actual combat. She didn’t knock. She walked into Unit 403 like she paid the lease, dropped into the desk chair Kumiko had vacated, and looked at the monitor with the expression of a mechanic reviewing someone else’s engine work.

"Your bitrate’s fine," she said. "Your overlay’s still four by three."

"Yuna’s fixing it," Kumiko said from the sewing table.

"Yuna’s a freelancer with three other commissions and a cat that eats her deadlines." Lila spun the chair once and stopped it with her heel. "Send me the PSD. I’ll do it tonight."

Chloe’s head came up. "You’ll do it."

"I’ll do it badly and for free, which is the only speed I have." Lila pulled a lollipop from somewhere in her skirt and unwrapped it without looking. "Don’t make it weird. I’m not being nice. I’m protecting my raid from landing on an ugly channel."

That was the most Lila thing Jordan had heard all week, and he’d heard Lila describe her own audience as "a swarm of gnats with credit cards."

They spent ninety minutes on the technical rehearsal. Lila ran the raid mechanics twice, walking Chloe through the exact window between Lila’s sign-off and Chloe’s first note, which turned out to be eleven seconds and not the thirty Kumiko had planned for.

"Thirty seconds is death," Lila said around the lollipop. "Thirty seconds and they open TikTok. You’ve got eleven. You need to be singing when they land. Not talking. Not thanking me. Singing."

"I was going to do an intro," Chloe said.

"Your intro is your voice." Lila crunched the lollipop in half, which Jordan had learned meant she was serious. "Nobody clicked through for your personality. They clicked through because I’m going to tell seventeen thousand people that my friend sings better than anything they’ve heard on Spotify this year, and then they’re going to want to find out if I’m lying."

Kumiko’s sewing machine stopped. "Lila-chan."

"Don’t."

"You called Chloe-chan your friend."

"I called her an asset."

"You said friend."

"I’m leaving."

Lila didn’t leave. She stayed until seven, argued with Kumiko about donation alert volumes, told Jordan his Instagram grid looked like a men’s cologne ad shot by someone who’d never met a man, and then took the overlay files and walked out with a comment about how the whole thing would probably fail and she’d enjoy watching.

The door closed. Kumiko clutched her hands to her chest.

"She’s going to stay up all night doing the overlay."

"Yeah," Jordan said.

"She’s going to be so mean about it tomorrow."

"Yeah."

"I love her so much."

Chloe closed her laptop. "Kumi. Go to bed."

"It’s seven."

"Go to bed at a reasonable hour for once in your life so you don’t cry through the entire stream on Friday."

Kumiko opened her mouth to argue, looked at Chloe’s face, closed her mouth, and gathered her fabric scraps. At the door she paused, one hand on the frame, her twin tails askew from nine hours of leaning over a sewing machine.

"Jordan-kun."

"Yeah?"

"Tomorrow is Thursday."

Something in the way she said it made his stomach drop half an inch. Kumiko wrote everything down. Kumiko had his class schedule memorized, his gym schedule memorized, the precise moment he’d fixed a stranger’s tiara at Disneyland written in pink gel pen on page nineteen. If Kumiko knew Thursday meant something, it was because she’d noticed him checking his phone at 4:31 in the morning and reading the same message for two minutes without responding.

"It’s Thursday," he said.

Kumiko nodded slowly. Her eyes were too bright. "Come home after."

"I always come home."

"I know." She pressed her lips together, and then she smiled, and it was the real one, the one that crinkled the corners of her eyes and made her look eight years old and eighty years old at the same time. "That’s why I said it. Because you always do, and I like getting to say it out loud."

She closed the door behind her. Jordan stood in the studio with the purple LEDs cycling slow and his chest doing something complicated.

"She knows," Chloe said.

"She doesn’t know what."

"She knows there’s a what." Chloe stood up from the desk chair, and Jordan watched her spine straighten in stages, one vertebra at a time, the way it did when she’d been sitting too long and her lower back had opinions. "Which is worse, because Kumiko fills gaps with her imagination, and her imagination is a horror writer."

She pressed her palm into the small of her own back and winced.

Jordan crossed the room.

"Don’t," Chloe said.

"Don’t what."

"Don’t do the thing where you look at me like I’m made of glass and then start doing math about my spine."

"I wasn’t doing math."

"You were doing math." She turned to face him, and her eyes narrowed. "You do a face. Your eyebrows come together like eleven percent. Kumiko has it in her notebook. It’s Stress Response Number Two, subsection ’Chloe Is In Pain And Is Lying About It.’"

Jordan put his hand flat on her lower back.

The Master Massage skill came online like a light switch in a dark house.

He felt everything. The band of tension across her lumbar spine where her posture had started shifting to accommodate weight that wasn’t visible yet. The knot below her right shoulder blade, back again, because she’d spent four hours hunched over a laptop building a promotional schedule to the minute. The tight ring of muscle at the base of her skull. The place in her left hip where she’d been compensating for the back pain without noticing she was compensating.

Chloe’s whole body locked.

"Jordan."

"Mm."

"That’s not fair."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true." Her voice had gone thin. "I have a call with Brooke at eight about the operating agree—ahh—"