Chapter 467 | Rejection Raised Her Number?

Chapter 467: 467 | Rejection Raised Her Number?

Jordan pulled into the north structure at six twelve and sat in the Civic for exactly one song. The Laguna sun was still stuck in his chest, along with the sound Alexis Van Der Berg had made on that bench. He was fairly sure the seagulls had filed a noise complaint.

His phone had three messages from Chloe and nine from Kumiko. Chloe’s said "Come home" and then "Now" and then "You’re sitting in the car again, I can see the brake lights from the window." He looked up through the windshield, and sure enough, a shape stood in the fourth floor window of 404 holding a mug.

He took the stairs two at a time. His hip complained about it, and he told his hip to grow up.

The apartment smelled of garlic and sesame oil when he opened the door. Chloe sat cross-legged on the kitchen island in his black shirt and a pair of his boxers, her gold glasses low on her nose and a yellow legal pad balanced against her knee. The blue streak hung loose against her cheek. Kumiko lay upside down on the couch with her legs over the backrest and her twin tails pooling on the floor, phone held above her face in both hands.

"He’s home, and he looks smug, Chloe, look at his face."

Kumiko flipped herself right side up so fast she slid off the cushion and landed on the rug with a soft thump. She bounced up holding the phone over her head like a trophy.

"Alexis-chan answered the group chat! She said silk obviously, and she said she’s not an animal, which means she’s thinking about it!"

"That means she’s not wearing your cat onesie, Kumi."

"It means she’s thinking about not wearing it, which is step one of wearing it. Dr. Nakamura calls it pre-contemplation."

Jordan dropped his keys in the bowl by the door. Chloe had bought the bowl. Chloe had bought most things in this apartment that had a purpose, and he had stopped pretending otherwise around week two.

Chloe did not look up from the legal pad. She held out one hand, palm up, and wiggled her fingers.

"Phone, please, and don’t make me ask twice."

He walked over and put it in her hand. She thumbed it open, because she knew his passcode, because she had watched him type it once in a Walgreens in January. The golden app glowed against her glasses. She read for a few seconds, and her mouth went flat.

"Sixty-four percent, Jordan, she’s one point under the line."

Her eyes slid to the refrigerator. A sticky note sat dead center on the freezer door in her handwriting. It said "65+ ONLY. DO NOT BE STUPID." Under the words, Kumiko had drawn a stick figure with spiky hair and a frowny face, plus a little thunderbolt over its head for reasons she had refused to explain.

"I know where the line is, babe, you wrote it in Sharpie."

"And she tried to kiss you at sixty-four."

"She tried to kiss me at sixty-three, actually. The number went up after I said no."

Kumiko made a noise like a tea kettle being stepped on. She clapped both hands over her mouth and stared at him over her fingers, her brown eyes enormous.

"Rejection raised her number? That’s so romantic and so messed up, I need to write it down right now."

She scrambled to the coffee table and grabbed her pink notebook. The pen clicked twice. Jordan watched her write "page 34, sub-point B" at the top and underline it.

His brain did a quick victory lap, because honestly, who was going to stop it. Three months ago a blonde had called him some guy from class outside a love hotel while another man groped her in a parking lot. Tonight a Van Der Berg heiress had grabbed his jacket on a cliff in Laguna and begged him to come back Tuesday with his hands. He had put her on hold like a cable company.

Character development looked amazing on him. He would allow nobody to argue otherwise.

Chloe set the phone face down on the island beside her thigh. She tapped the legal pad with her pen and finally looked at him over the gold frames.

"Sunday’s still on, and she still eats what I cook without making a face about the bowls. Tuesday she gets ten minutes, over clothes, and you text me when your hands touch her and when they stop."

"Yes, ma’am, I’ll set a stopwatch."

"You’ll use mine. Yours runs four seconds slow, and I don’t trust it."

Kumiko looked up from the notebook. Her voice came out smaller than usual, and the pen stopped moving.

"Is Alexis-chan okay, though? Like, actually okay? She cried on FaceTime, and Alexis doesn’t cry, she makes other people cry. I’ve watched her do it to a barista."

Jordan sat down on the arm of the couch. He thought about the empty Graff box Alexis had described, sitting on her mother’s vanity like a shrine.

"No, she’s not okay yet, Kumi. She said she doesn’t want to marry him, and she said it out loud to my face. That’s a start."

Kumiko nodded slowly. She wrote one more line, closed the notebook, and hugged it to her chest.

"Then we feed her Sunday, and she wears the cat."

"She’s not going to wear the cat."

"She’s going to wear the cat, Jordan-kun, I’ve seen her face when she looks at Dior."

Chloe slid off the island. Her feet hit the concrete, and Jordan saw her wince. Her hand went to her lower back for half a second before she dropped it and turned to stir the pot on the stove. Kimchi jjigae, judging by the red, and enough of it for six people.

"Lila fixed the overlay at four forty," Chloe told the pot. "It’s sixteen by nine, and the ticker clears the chat by twenty pixels. She sent it with a message that said don’t embarrass me, and then a second message that said I mean it."