Chapter 481 | A Maybe-Us

Chapter 481: 481 | A Maybe-Us

Kumiko noticed him looking and immediately abandoned the spring roll argument. "Is that the group chat? Did I miss something? I had my phone on silent because Chloe said no phones today but what if someone posted something important?"

"It’s not the group chat."

"Is it Alexis?" Chloe asked, her voice carefully neutral.

Jordan showed her the screen. Chloe read the message, and something complicated moved across her face before she locked it down.

"She bought silk," Chloe said. "Not the cat."

"The cat would have been better," Kumiko said mournfully. "The cat has ears."

"The cat was never going to happen. Alexis Van Der Berg doesn’t wear onesies."

"She’ll wear the cat eventually. I have a whole section about it in my notebook. Page forty-two. The heading says Operation Soft Princess."

Chloe set down her fork and looked at Jordan with an expression he couldn’t quite read. "Tomorrow’s going to be complicated."

"I know."

"She’s going to walk into this apartment expecting one thing and getting something else entirely."

"I know."

"And you’re going to have to sit across from her and pretend you didn’t spend today making me scream loud enough for Miss Valentine to hear."

"Is that what you’re worried about? Me pretending?"

Chloe’s jaw tightened. "I’m worried about a lot of things. The pretending is just the one I’m willing to say out loud."

Kumiko’s fork clattered against her container. She looked between Jordan and Chloe with her eyes getting wet, and her lower lip started to tremble.

"I don’t want tomorrow to be weird," she said, her voice small. "I want it to be like today. Everyone together. Everyone happy. Everyone eating noodles and arguing about spring rolls."

"It won’t be weird," Jordan said.

"You don’t know that. You can’t promise that. Tomorrow has too many variables, and I haven’t finished Operation Soft Princess, and what if Alexis looks at us and decides we’re all insane? What if she runs away? What if she tells everyone at school? What if she—"

Jordan reached over and put his hand on top of her head.

The Headpat engaged on contact, warmth flooding through her nervous system like a hot bath. Kumiko’s spiral cut off mid-sentence. Her shoulders dropped. Her breath came out in a long, shaky exhale, and she leaned into his palm like a cat.

"Okay," she whispered. "Okay. I’m okay. You did the thing."

"I did the thing."

"I love the thing. The thing is my favorite thing. I’m going to write about the thing on page thirty-seven."

"Thirty-seven? I thought we were on thirty-six."

"Thirty-six is full. I had to start a new page."

Chloe watched the exchange with her chin propped on her hand, and something in her expression softened. She reached out and tucked a strand of Kumiko’s wild hair behind her ear.

"She’s right," Chloe said quietly. "Tomorrow is going to be different. But different doesn’t mean bad."

"Different usually means bad in my experience," Kumiko mumbled.

"Different meant Jordan moving into Unit 404. Different meant me starting StellarNote. Different meant you coming over with pancake mix at seven in the morning wearing his henley."

"Those are good differents."

"Exactly."

The harbor light shifted as the afternoon stretched toward evening. Jordan cleared the empty containers while Kumiko and Chloe migrated to the couch, Kumiko immediately curling into Chloe’s side with her head on Chloe’s shoulder. The remote sat on the coffee table, but neither of them reached for it.

Jordan joined them on the sectional, and Kumiko immediately rearranged herself so she was draped across both their laps with her head on Jordan’s thigh and her feet in Chloe’s. She looked up at Jordan with her big brown eyes and smiled, and something in his chest did a complicated thing he didn’t have words for.

"Hey," Kumiko said. "Can I ask you something?"

"Always."

"When Alexis comes tomorrow, can you do the head thing to her too? If she needs it? Because I think she might need it. She looked so sad on the FaceTime, and her shoulders were doing the tense thing, and I’ve been thinking about it all day even though I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about things today."

Jordan looked at Chloe. Chloe looked back at him with one eyebrow raised.

"That’s up to Chloe," he said.

"I already gave permission for the shoulder thing," Chloe said slowly. "The head thing is different."

"The head thing is special," Kumiko agreed. "The head thing is for us."

"But if she needs it..."

Kumiko sat up abruptly, her eyes wide. "Wait. Wait wait wait. Are you saying Alexis might become an us? Like a real us? Like she might get head pats and notebook pages and group chat privileges?"

"I’m saying tomorrow is complicated."

"That’s not an answer!"

"It’s the only answer I have right now."

Kumiko flopped back down onto Jordan’s thigh with a dramatic sigh. Her ribbon-wrapped wrist draped across her forehead like a Victorian maiden about to swoon.

"I can’t handle this," she announced to the ceiling. "I’m too small for this many feelings. My body isn’t built for this kind of emotional throughput. I’m going to have to expand my notebook."

"You just started a new page."

"That was before Alexis became a maybe-us! A maybe-us requires at least three pages! Maybe four if she actually wears the cat onesie!"

Chloe’s phone buzzed on the coffee table. She glanced at the screen, and her expression went flat.

"What," Jordan said.

"Brooke."

"What does Brooke want?"

"She wants to know if I’ve eaten fifteen bites." Chloe showed him the screen. The message read: Nutritional compliance check. Seventeen bites minimum. Jordan is unreliable.

"Seventeen now? It was fifteen this morning."

"Brooke adjusts her projections in real-time. She says pregnancy requires a point-three caloric increase per trimester."

"Your accountant is tracking your calories by trimester?"

"My accountant is tracking everything by everything. She has a spreadsheet for my sleep patterns. She has a graph for my stress levels. She has a whole section dedicated to what she calls Jordan-Adjacent Cortisol Reduction, which I think means orgasms."

Kumiko made a choking sound. "She graphed the orgasms?"

"She implied the orgasms. Brooke never states things directly when she can imply them with footnotes."

The evening light turned the apartment gold and warm. Miss Valentine’s oven timer chimed somewhere below them, and Jordan caught the faint smell of sugar and cinnamon drifting up through the vents. Snickerdoodles, probably. The card from yesterday said FOR THE SINGER, which meant tomorrow’s card would say something else.

Jordan wondered what you called the cookies you baked for a girl who was about to have dinner with her best friend’s boyfriend’s other girlfriends. Probably something complicated with a lot of chocolate chips.

Kumiko had fallen asleep in his lap, her breathing slow and even, one hand curled against his thigh. Chloe sat on the other end of the couch with her feet tucked under her and her phone in her hand, scrolling through something with a tiny frown on her face.

"You okay?"

She looked up. "The clip from last night has two thousand retweets now."

"Is that bad?"

"It’s terrifying." She set the phone down and rubbed her eyes under her glasses. "Two thousand people listened to me sing and decided it was worth sharing. Two thousand strangers. I don’t know any of them. I can’t see their faces or read their expressions. They’re just numbers on a screen."

"They’re also people who liked your voice enough to click a button."

"I know." She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. "That’s the terrifying part."

Jordan reached over and took her hand. Her fingers were cold, and she squeezed back harder than she probably meant to.

"Tomorrow," she said quietly. "When Alexis walks through that door. I need you to remember something."

"What?"

"She’s scared too. More scared than I was about the stream. More scared than Kumiko was about the Sally costume. She’s been scared her whole life, and she’s been hiding it behind designer clothes and perfect posture, and tomorrow she’s going to walk into my kitchen and eat my food and see all of this." Chloe gestured vaguely at the apartment, at Kumiko asleep in Jordan’s lap, at the empty Thai containers on the island. "And she’s going to have to decide if she wants it."

"What if she doesn’t?"

Chloe’s grip tightened on his fingers. "Then we let her go. And we don’t chase her. And we don’t try to convince her. Because wanting something has to be a choice, not a negotiation."