Chapter 456 | A Purely Medical House Call

Jordan woke at six forty-one because his body refused to let him do anything else. The Morning Person trait dragged him out of sleep like a landlord at the door, and he lay there blinking up at the ceiling beams. Chloe had stolen the duvet again and rolled herself into a burrito on the far side of the mattress protector. Only her blue streak and one bare heel stuck out of the bundle.

Downstairs, the lock turned. Two knocks came first, then a pause, and then a key scraped in, because Kumiko believed that owning a key did not excuse anyone from manners.

“Jordan-kun, I brought toast and I promise I’m not here for any secret reason,” she whispered up the stairs at a volume that could have woken a coma ward.

He pulled on boxers and padded down. Kumiko stood at the island in his black shirt, which hung to the middle of her thighs, with pink sleep shorts peeking out underneath. Her twin tails sat at two different heights, one ribbon half untied and trailing. Big pink headphones circled her neck. The dark smudges under her eyes told him she had slept maybe three hours, and that was a generous estimate.

The toast on her plate said GOOD MORNIG in strawberry jam, with the second N missing entirely.

“You ran out of jam,” Jordan said.

“I ran out of bread space, which is a totally different logistics failure.” She shoved the plate at him with both hands. “Also, I need to confess something, and I need you to not look at me while I confess it.”

He looked at her, obviously.

Kumiko’s face went red from the collar of his shirt up to her hairline. “The walls are thin, okay, and my headphones only go to seventy percent before my left ear starts ringing.” She stared at a spot over his shoulder. “I heard Chloe-chan say something in Korean that my grandmother would slap me for knowing, and then I heard her say the word massage like a prayer.”

“She told you about the new skill?”

“She texted me at eleven forty with the words ‘he has hands now’ and nothing else.” Kumiko finally met his eyes, and hers were huge and wet and very serious. “I sewed Sally’s patchwork for nine hours yesterday, Jordan-kun, and my shoulders feel like somebody poured concrete into them.”

“So you want a massage.”

“I want a massage for purely medical reasons that have nothing to do with the sounds I heard through the drywall.”

Jordan set the toast down. He could have teased her for another five minutes, and a younger, dumber version of him would have milked it for ten. The current version walked around the island, turned her by the hips, and set both palms on her shoulders.

The skill woke up on contact. Heat poured out of his hands and sank into her, and he could feel the knots under his thumbs stacked along her traps like little stones. There was a fat one below her right shoulder blade where she hunched over the sewing machine, and a tight cord running up into her neck from holding her head at one angle for hours.

He pressed into the first knot.

“Hyaaah,” Kumiko squeaked, and her knees wobbled so hard he had to catch her against the island.

“Too much?”

“No, no, it’s not too much, it’s the correct amount of much, please do not remove your hands under any circumstances.” She gripped the counter edge with both hands. “Oh my god, what is that, why is it warm, why is it going into my bones like hot water through frozen pipes?”

He worked the knot in slow circles until it gave up with a soft pop he felt through her shirt. The tension released all at once, and Kumiko made a long, wobbling “nnnhhhh” that started in her throat and ended somewhere in her chest as a hiccup. Her head dropped forward. Her twin tails swung against his wrists like pendulums.

He moved up into her neck. The muscles there were thinner, tighter, strung like guitar strings from hours of focus. Her skin was warm and smelled like strawberry shampoo and machine oil from the sewing table. When his thumbs found the base of her skull and pressed into the divot where her spine met her head, her whole spine sagged backward into his chest. The weight of her settled against him.

“Jordan-kun,” she breathed, “I can’t feel my face anymore, and I don’t mind it at all.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m vibrating at a new frequency, which is different from shaking in important scientific ways, and Dr. Nakamura would want me to be honest about that distinction.” She turned her head to look up at him over her shoulder. Her pupils had gone wide and dark, almost swallowing the brown. “Can you do my back too, and can I lie down for it, and can it be on the couch where it’s soft and I won’t collapse into the counter when my legs stop working?”

Three months ago he would have short-circuited at that sentence and apologized to the ceiling. Now he scooped her up under the knees and carried her to the grey sectional in four steps. She weighed about as much as a laundry basket.

She flopped face down on the cushions and yanked his shirt up over her shoulder blades herself, which told him exactly how medical this was. Her back was pale and narrow, dotted with a few freckles low on her ribs that he had never noticed before. He straddled the backs of her thighs, set his palms flat on either side of her spine, and pushed the heat in.

“Ahhn, ah, ahhhh,” Kumiko moaned into the cushion, and the sound came muffled and high and completely helpless.

He dragged his thumbs down along her spine one vertebra at a time. Each one loosened under the pressure, and she made a new noise for every single one, like a xylophone made of whimpers. By the time he reached her lower back she was squirming, her hips lifting off the couch to push up into his hands.

“Kumi, you’re wiggling.”

“I’m not wiggling, my lumbar region is expressing gratitude,” she gasped. “Also, that spot right there, the one above my shorts, if you press it again I think I will actually die, so please press it again.”