Chapter 463 | The UN Security Council of Socks

Chapter 463: 463 | The UN Security Council of Socks

Alexis stared at the gap between them on the bench. He had left two full feet of weathered teak there on purpose, and that made everything worse.

Her shoulders refused to go back up. She tried to square them, and nothing happened. Madame Fontaine had spent all of eighth grade tapping a ruler against her spine to build that posture. Jordan McKnight had taken it apart in nine minutes behind a public bench in Laguna.

The muscles hung off her bones like wet silk. Wind slid across the back of her neck, cold on skin that still burned from his palms.

"You timed it," she told the ocean. "You literally put a timer on touching me, like I’m a parking meter on Forest Avenue."

"Chloe put the timer on it. I just respect the timer."

Alexis turned her head to glare at him. It did nothing to him at all. He sat in the navy bomber with one elbow hooked over the backrest, gazing at the water while she fell apart beside him in raccoon eyeliner. The jacket pulled tight across his shoulders. His forearm lay along the wood, and a vein ran from his elbow down to a wrist she could not stop tracking.

His collar had slid sideways in the wind. A purple ring of teeth marks peeked out above the neckline, low on his chest. Kumiko had put that there. Kumiko owned a cat backpack and cried when plushies fell over, and she had bitten a grown man hard enough to leave a bruise.

Alexis pressed her thighs together under her trousers and hated herself for it.

"Stop staring at the bite." Jordan kept his eyes on the horizon. "It’s very rude, princess."

"I’m not staring at anything. I’m assessing damage to company property."

"I’m not company property yet."

"You said yet, you literally heard yourself say yet, like you’re some limited drop at Dover Street Market."

The corner of his mouth moved. He tried to hide it and failed, and a warm thing turned over under her ribs.

Her hair clip had fallen into the gravel by her boot. She bent for it and felt her spine bend in one long easy curve, no clicks, no locked joints. Everything moved. She sat up too fast and felt blood rush to her face, and the flush crawled down her throat into the neck of her sweater.

Sure, she had been touched before. Harrison had touched her plenty, his palm flat on her lower back at charity galas like he was steering a shopping cart. Two boys at Sage Hill had touched her in the back seats of their fathers’ Range Rovers. None of them had ever made her body forget how to hold itself up.

"Okay, explain it to me like I’m a normal person who didn’t just get massaged into a coma." She wiped under one eye with the cashmere cuff and watched black smear across cream. "What does on hold even mean in your little commune?"

"It means I don’t decide alone. Chloe gets a say, and Kumiko gets a say."

"Chloe has veto power over your love life." Alexis heard her own voice go flat and dead. "Like an actual veto, like the UN Security Council."

"She has veto power over most things. Last week she vetoed my socks."

"Good, because I saw your socks at karaoke, and I’ve been praying for them ever since."

He laughed out loud this time, a low rough sound. She felt it land in her stomach and stay there.

His phone vibrated against the bench slat. He picked it up, glanced at the screen, and held it out to her without a word of warning.

"She wants you on FaceTime."

Alexis stared at the green button like it was a live grenade. "Absolutely not, I look like a crime scene, I look like a Dateline episode."

"She’s seen worse. She saw me in January."

The phone kept vibrating. Alexis snatched it, flipped the camera to herself, and saw exactly what Chloe would see. Smeared liner, pink blotches on both cheeks, and hair wrecked by wind. She licked her thumb and scrubbed under each eye twice, then gave up and hit accept before she lost her nerve.

Chloe’s face filled the screen. She sat at the studio desk in Unit 403 in thin gold glasses, blue streak pinned back, purple LED light washing across one cheekbone. She looked like the mastermind in a heist movie. Her face gave Alexis nothing to hold onto.

"Hello, Alexis. You’ve been crying for at least twenty minutes."

"I have allergies, it’s February, the entire coast is pollinating."

"Your nose goes red at the tip when you cry, and you told me in October that you don’t have allergies."

A pink blur crashed into the frame from the left side. Twin tails whipped the camera. Kumiko shoved her face so close to the lens that Alexis could count her eyelashes, and her cheeks were wet and shining.

"Alexis-chan, you tried to kiss him on a cliff, and that’s so romantic that I’m going to throw up on the acoustic panels!"

"Kumiko, off my shoulder, please."

"I’m not on your shoulder, I’m adjacent to your shoulder, adjacent is legal!" Kumiko squeezed in tighter anyway, her chin hooked over Chloe’s collarbone. "Did he really stop you, did he do the jaw thing, the hand on the jaw? Chloe-chan says he does a jaw thing, and it ruins lives."

Alexis felt her whole face ignite. She had, in fact, been jaw-thinged. She could still feel the heat of his palm along her jawline, and her lips still stung from the kiss that never landed.

"I refuse to discuss the jaw thing on camera," she said, and her voice cracked in the middle.

"Oh my God, he did the jaw thing." Kumiko grabbed Chloe’s arm and shook it. "Chloe, he did it, write it down, page thirty-four!"

Chloe did not look away from the lens. She reached up and pushed Kumiko’s face three inches to the left without breaking eye contact with Alexis. Kumiko made a squeak and accepted the new position.

"I’m going to ask you one thing, Alexis. You’re going to answer without the voice you use at the yacht club."

"What voice? I don’t have a voice for the yacht club."

"You’re using it right now."

Alexis shut her mouth. She heard it then, the lilt her mother used to order white wine at Balboa Bay, a hostess smile built into every vowel. She had not noticed she was doing it. She had apparently been doing it since age nine.

Behind her, the ocean hit the rocks and pulled back. Jordan sat two feet away and said nothing. He was letting her do this herself, and she had no idea if that was cruel or kind.

"Do you want him?" Chloe tilted her head two degrees. "Or do you want a door out of March twenty-second?"