Chapter 462 | I Liked Living

Chapter 462: 462 | I Liked Living

Then she kissed him, or she tried to.

She came in fast and angry, all gold hair and wet eyelashes, and Jordan caught her jaw in his palm an inch before her lips reached his. She froze there with her breath hot against his chin and her pupils blown wide, and he held her in place without pulling her closer or pushing her away.

"Hold on," he said against the tiny gap between them. "I’m not doing this without Chloe knowing first."

Alexis made a furious little noise in her throat. "Mnh, you’re joking, you are actually joking right now."

"I asked her permission to touch your shoulders over a sweater, princess, and you think I’m freelancing a kiss?"

"You’re insane, and you’re insane with really nice hands," she hissed, still frozen in his grip. "Hnngh, this is so humiliating, I cannot believe I got rejected by a man who wore Mickey ears on Instagram."

"You weren’t rejected, you got put on hold, and those are different departments."

She stared at him from one inch away for three long seconds. Then all the fight went out of her shoulders at once, and she started laughing, a helpless, shaking laugh that ended with her forehead dropping against his collarbone. Her hair poured over his arm, and her whole body trembled against his side while she laughed and cried at the same time into his navy bomber jacket.

"Put on hold," she wheezed. "My mother would literally die, she’d drop dead in her kitchen, she has never been put on hold in her entire life."

Jordan slid his hand from her jaw to the back of her head and left it there. The Headpat trait flickered under his palm and tested the connection, and he felt it trying to reach into her the way it reached into Kumiko. He pulled back on it hard, because Chloe had said shoulders, and a scalp was not a shoulder no matter how good his lawyer might be.

His phone vibrated against his hip. He fished it out with his free hand and angled the screen away from the gold curtain of hair on his chest.

The first message came from Chloe, timestamped two minutes ago. "Seven minutes left. Did she cry? She cried, didn’t she."

The second notification glowed gold at the top of the screen, and Jordan felt his left eye twitch as he read it.

"Beauty detected: Alexis Van Der Berg. Chemistry: 64%. Emotional state: vulnerable, decisive. Registration to Slot 3 available."

Sixty-four percent sat one point under the bottom of the window Chloe had drawn with a dry-erase marker on the fridge. She had written sixty-five to seventy in red and underlined it twice, and next to it she had drawn a stick figure of Jordan with a frowning face and the words "DO NOT BE STUPID."

He swiped the notification away without opening it. The old Jordan would have stared at that number for an hour and tried to buy the missing point with a Birkin bag. This version had a pregnant girlfriend who could calculate his chances of survival in her head, and he liked living.

He typed back to Chloe one-handed. "She cried and she tried to kiss me, and I stopped her. She wants in, all the way in."

The typing dots appeared, disappeared, and returned four times, which for Chloe meant her brain was rebooting.

"You stopped her?" Chloe finally wrote.

"You said shoulders, and I’m a man of my word."

"Kumiko is screaming into a pillow next to me," Chloe wrote. "She says that’s the hottest thing you’ve ever done, including the desk."

Alexis lifted her head off his chest, her face a disaster of streaked mascara and pink blotches. She tried to read his screen, and he let her, because hiding the phone would only make the whole thing worse.

"You told her," Alexis said, staring at the thread with her mouth hanging open. "You told her I tried to kiss you, while I’m still sitting on you."

"Rule five says nobody lies, and I like my rules."

"You have rules?" Alexis looked at him like he had sprouted a second head. "You people have a written document?"

"It has footnotes, and Kumiko added an appendix about emojis."

Alexis dragged both hands down her face and smeared her makeup even worse, then gave up and let her hands fall into her lap. She sat back, and the wind lifted her hair off her neck, and Jordan watched her shoulder hitch upward again on the right side. Her mouth tightened when it did.

"Your other side’s still locked up," he said. "Want me to do it before the timer runs out?"

"Obviously I want you to do it, I’m not an idiot, I’m just deeply humiliated." She swept her hair forward over her left shoulder without another word. "Do it before I reconsider my entire personality."

Jordan stood, stepped behind the bench, and set his palms on her right shoulder over the cashmere. The skill switched on with a warm surge, and it found the knot right away, a tight fist of muscle pinned under her shoulder blade from years of holding her posture perfect at dinners she hated.

He pressed his thumb into it and rolled it in a slow circle. The heat went in under the muscle, and the knot fought him like it had ambitions of its own.

"Haah, haah, oh my God, you’re doing it again, Jordan, that’s the spot, that’s literally the exact spot."

"I know where it is, princess, I’m the one touching it."

"Nnngh, don’t be smug, I will end you, I will end your whole family and their three franchises." Her hands clamped on the edge of the bench again, and her head dropped forward until her hair touched her knees. "Mmh, ahh, it’s so hot, why is it so hot, this is witchcraft, this is actual witchcraft."

The knot cracked open under his thumb with a small wet give, and she gasped so hard her whole back arched off the bench. Heat rushed into the gap, and a long, broken moan poured out of her before she could catch it.

"Ahhhn, ahh, hah, ah!"

A family with a stroller turned onto the path, took one look at the sobbing, moaning blonde on the bench and the tall guy with his hands on her, and executed a perfect U-turn. The dad covered his toddler’s ears on the way out, which Jordan considered a solid parenting decision.

He ran the heel of his hand up the side of her neck and smoothed the last band of tension out from her collarbone to her ear. Alexis shuddered from her scalp to her ankles and went limp against the backrest, her breathing ragged, her eyes half-closed.

"Hff, hff, I think you broke my spine," she mumbled. "Everything is loose, all my vertebrae are loose, I can’t feel my posture anymore."

"That’s called relaxing, and apparently it’s your first time."

"I relaxed once in Saint-Tropez, when I was twelve, and I got sunburned."

Jordan took his hands off her and checked his phone. Chloe’s timer said nine minutes and twelve seconds on her last message, which meant he had forty-eight seconds of grace before he owed someone dinner.

"Time’s up," he said, and sat back down at the far end of the bench.