Chapter 486 | Four, Seven, Ten, Off

Chapter 486: 486 | Four, Seven, Ten, Off

Dessert was hotteok from the freezer section of the Korean market, fried in butter until the brown sugar centers went molten. Kumiko burned her tongue on the first one and kept eating anyway. Alexis cut hers into four exact quarters before biting. The syrup ran out onto the chipped plate, and she did not say a single word about the chip.

"You eat like you’re being photographed," Chloe said.

"I usually am."

Alexis ate a quarter anyway. Syrup ran down her wrist toward the black cuff, and she caught it with her tongue before it got there, then looked up to see whether anyone had noticed. Everyone had.

At 8:22, Kumiko started yawning between sentences. At 8:30 she climbed into Jordan’s lap without asking and rested her cheek on his shoulder, twin tails tickling his jaw.

"I’m not sleepy. I’m resting my face on you, which is different."

"Your eyes are closed."

"My eyes are listening."

Jordan put his hand on top of her head between the ribbons. The Headpat kicked in on contact, warm and heavy, and Kumiko melted so fast he had to catch her elbow. A long happy moan started in her chest and ended as a hum against his collarbone.

"Mmmhhh, there it is, lavender with gold edges, everything’s quiet now, thank you."

Alexis was staring from across the table, chopsticks halfway to her mouth, a quarter of hotteok dripping syrup onto the placemat.

"What did you just do to her?"

"He has a headpat," Chloe said. "It turns her brain off. Kumiko has a whole Chapter about it."

"Page thirty-six," Kumiko mumbled from his neck. "Emergency Calm Button, three exclamation points."

Alexis set the chopsticks down. She rubbed the side of her neck, under her ear, right where Jordan had found the cord at Heisler Park, and her mouth tightened when her fingers pressed it. Chloe watched her do it. Jordan watched Chloe watch.

"Is that a thing he can do to anyone?"

Chloe took off her glasses and folded them beside her plate. She studied Alexis the way she studied lease paperwork, every line.

"Do you want it?"

Alexis opened her mouth and nothing came out. Pink climbed from her collarbone, and she pulled the silk sleeve down over the cuff again.

"I’m asking if it’s available. I’m not asking for it."

"That’s the yacht club voice."

"It’s my regular voice."

"Your regular voice is the one you used to say jal meokkesseumnida. Try again with that one."

The ferry horn sounded again, farther off. Kumiko had gone still in Jordan’s lap; he felt her eyelashes flutter open against his neck. She was listening with her whole body.

Alexis looked at the sticky note on the fridge. Then she looked at Jordan, straight at him, without the armor.

"I would like to know what it feels like. Please."

The please landed under Jordan’s ribs and stayed there. He knew that sound. He had made it himself in December, in a parking lot, to a girl who walked into a love hotel instead of answering.

He looked at Chloe.

Chloe looked at Alexis for a long second. Then she nodded once and picked up her water.

"Ten seconds. On the head, nothing lower. I’m counting."

Her voice was perfectly level. Under the table, where Alexis couldn’t see it, her thumb pressed a hard white line into the side of her water glass.

Jordan eased Kumiko onto the next stool. She went boneless against the table, cheek on her folded arms, both eyes wide open now and glued to the other side. He walked around behind Alexis’s chair.

She went rigid when his shadow fell across her, spine locked, nails whitening on the table edge under the French manicure. Up close she smelled like Baccarat Rouge with cedar laundry soap underneath. His soap. Jordan stopped thinking about that before it could turn into a problem.

He set his palm on top of her head.

Her hair was softer than it looked, and warm from the kitchen. The Headpat engaged the moment he touched her. Heat poured from his hand into her scalp and kept running, deeper than it ever went with Kumiko, down past her skull into the cord in her neck and the knot under her shoulder blade and eighteen years of posture lessons.

"Ahh, oh, oh no, Jordan, wait, that’s, hnnnh, what is that!"

Alexis folded forward from the waist. Her forehead dropped toward the table, and his hand followed her down because his palm refused to come off. Her fingers curled into the silk over her stomach. A sound came out of her that started high and broke in the middle, until she clapped a hand over her mouth and moaned into her palm instead.

"Mmmfff, mmmhhh, that’s so unfair, my whole, my everything is going quiet, I can’t hear my mother anymore."

"Four," Chloe counted, perfectly flat.

Kumiko was crying silently, hands over her face, fingers spread wide enough to see through.

"Seven."

Alexis’s shoulders shook. Her other hand came up blindly, found Jordan’s wrist, and held on, nails pressing crescents into his skin. She did not pull him away. She held him there.

"Ten. Off."

Jordan lifted his hand. It took a physical tug, as if her scalp had grown magnets.

Alexis stayed bent over the table for three slow breaths. When she sat up, she was flushed down to the mother-of-pearl buttons, hair over one eye, a small brown mascara smudge at the outer corner. She looked at nobody. She stared at the chipped radish bowl and pressed both hands flat to her cheeks.

"I need to sit somewhere that isn’t a dining chair."

"The couch has a new slipcover," Kumiko offered through her fingers. "It’s pink. It’s very safe now."

"Does it always do that?"

"Every time," Kumiko said into her arms. "You never get used to it. I’ve tried for months."

In Jordan’s pocket the phone buzzed twice, then a third time, long and insistent. He kept his hand away from it.

Chloe slid her glasses back on, walked around the island, took the yellow legal pad from the arm of the couch, and held it out toward the cat slippers.

"Sit down, Alexis. Then tell me what you want from Thursday."