Chapter 461 | My Girlfriend Says It’s My Best Quality

Chapter 461: 461 | My Girlfriend Says It’s My Best Quality

Jordan kept his hands on his knees and his mouth shut, which went against every instinct he had built over eighteen years of saying the wrong thing at the worst possible time. Chloe’s text sat in his head in her flat little font, telling him to listen more than he talked and not to fix anything, and the annoying part was how right she usually turned out to be.

"So say it again, princess, but slower this time," he said. "You drove twenty minutes to a cliff to say it, and I want the full version."

Alexis glared at him through her smeared mascara. "I literally just said it, Jordan, you heard me, and you’re making me repeat it because you’re a sadist."

"I’m making you repeat it because you said it to the ocean the first time."

Her mouth opened and stayed open while the wind pulled her hair sideways across her face. She shoved it back with one hand, and the frayed grey cuff of his henley slid out from under her cashmere sleeve again, which she noticed and did nothing about.

"I don’t want to marry Harrison Van Allen the Third," she said to his face, each word landing hard enough to leave a dent. "I don’t want his yacht, and I don’t want to learn which Rolex he bought in which year, and I don’t want to sit at the Balboa Bay Club on March twenty-second while my mother opens a Graff box in front of forty people."

Jordan nodded once and waited, because the version of him from November would have jumped in right there with a speech. That guy would have promised to beat Harrison up, or buy her a plane ticket, or do something romantic and expensive that nobody asked for. That guy had spent forty-five hundred dollars learning that fixing a girl’s problem and knowing a girl were two different jobs.

"Okay," he said, keeping it low. "What do you want instead?"

The question hit her harder than the massage had. She pulled back against the bench slats and stared at him like he had asked her to name every element on the periodic table in Mandarin.

"Nobody asks me that," she said, and her voice went thin at the edges. "My father asks what I’m planning, and my mother asks what I’m wearing, and Harrison asks nothing at all because he already knows the answer is him."

"I’m asking, though, and I’m a very patient boy."

"You’re an extremely irritating boy, which is different."

"Both can be true at once, and my girlfriend says it’s my best quality."

That got a snort out of her, a real one, ugly and nasal and completely off-brand for someone with forty-three thousand Instagram followers. She covered her nose with the back of her hand and looked scandalized by her own face.

Jordan’s inner monologue did a small victory lap, because making Alexis Van Der Berg snort on a public bench ranked somewhere near benching two twenty-five on his list of lifetime achievements. Then he told the monologue to sit down, since the girl beside him had tears drying on her cheeks and his ego could celebrate on its own time.

"I want to finish my degree without it being a line on a wedding announcement," Alexis said after a long silence, picking at a thread on her sleeve. "I want to do something where people know my name because I did the work, not because my great-grandfather bought half of Newport in 1952."

"That’s a good want."

"It’s a stupid want, because I have no idea how to do anything." She laughed at herself, bitter and fast. "I’m literally good at three things, Jordan, and they’re dressing well, ruining people’s weeks, and knowing exactly which girl in a room is lying about her bag."

"Those skills pay money in my line of work, just so you know."

Her head snapped around. "Your line of work is a talent agency run out of a converted garment factory by a pregnant scholarship student and a girl who sews her own anime costumes."

"It’s a talent agency with a Delaware LLC and an accountant who reads protein folding papers for fun," Jordan said. "Chloe runs the brand side, and she’s always saying she needs someone who reads a room faster than a spreadsheet can."

Alexis went silent. The wind dropped for a second, and the waves below slapped the rocks with a wet crash that sounded louder in the pause. She was doing math behind her eyes now, and he could practically watch her running the numbers on forty-three thousand followers, a face every camera loved, and a brand-new reason to be somewhere other than her mother’s dining room.

"Are you offering me a job right now?" she asked, suspicious to the bone.

"I’m telling you there’s a chair at the table, and you’d have to argue with Chloe about the pay, which I wouldn’t recommend."

"Chloe would eat me alive in a contract negotiation."

"She’d eat you alive and then make you a very fair offer, because Brooke would kill her if she didn’t."

Alexis looked down at her hands in her lap and turned the frayed cuff around her wrist with one finger. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped out of its usual sharp register into something younger and scratchier.

"That’s the business chair," she said. "I’m asking about the other one."

Jordan’s stomach did a slow flip that had nothing to do with the cliff. He had seen this coming since karaoke, since she described her dream man down to his exact height and hair color in front of five witnesses and a bowl of fried chicken. Seeing something coming and having it land on a bench in Laguna were very different experiences, and his body was reporting the second one with enthusiasm.

"Say what you mean, princess, since we’re doing honest today."

"I told you to stop calling me that." She turned sideways on the bench and pulled one knee up, and the tailored trousers stretched tight over her thigh. "Fine, then, here’s honest. I’ve slept in your shirt for three weeks, and I sat on a bathroom floor at a three-star restaurant staring at a picture of you in mouse ears, and I made a noise on the phone that I’ll be thinking about on my deathbed."

"That noise was very memorable."

"Shut up, or I’ll push you off this cliff." Her cheeks went blotchy red again, and she leaned toward him until he could smell her perfume, something expensive with amber and cedar in it that fought the salt air and won. "I know about Chloe, and I know about Kumiko, and I know I’m walking into something insane and possibly illegal in several states."

"It’s legal in all fifty, I checked."

"Of course you checked, you absolute freak." She was close now, her blue eyes locked on his mouth, and her hand landed flat on his chest right over the bite mark Kumiko had left. "I’m asking whether there’s room for me, Jordan, and not in the payroll."