Chapter 505 | The Interest Rate Is Written in Pen

Chapter 505: 505 | The Interest Rate Is Written in Pen

The elevator doors slid shut on the sixth floor, and Jordan let his head drop back against the brass panel for the forty-seven-second ride to the lobby. His hands were shaking, which felt deeply unfair. Those hands had seated a graphics card on the first try and broken a knot in Alexis Van Der Berg’s shoulder hard enough to scatter pigeons. Now they trembled over a girl he had refused to touch.

Four crescents sat in a row across his wrist where her nails had dug in, white at the edges, pink in the middle.

Two months ago, a blonde girl had looked at him across a love hotel parking lot and called him some guy from class. Tonight a different blonde had stood barefoot in a room with eight pillows and asked him to stay, and he had walked out anyway. Either the most emotionally evolved man in Orange County or a certified idiot with a debit card.

His phone went bzzt against his thigh before he could decide which.

The gold spilled across his palm.

?? CHEMISTRY UPDATE ??

Alexis Van Der Berg: 67% → 69% (+2%)

Cause: User declined escalation during target’s vulnerable state.

Status: Target is furious. Target respects it. These are currently the same feeling.

(Note: You will regret this decision for approximately forty minutes. Then you will stop.)

A second panel slid in underneath, smaller and smug.

HIDDEN QUEST: Golden Parachute

Night One Housing: SECURED

$749.00 logged as LOAN. Loans count toward independence. Charity does not. Keep the paperwork.

Jordan read the status line twice. These are currently the same feeling. He knew that apartment. He had lived in it for most of January.

"Forty minutes," Jordan told the empty elevator. "That’s adorable. I’m going to regret it all the way up the 73."

The doors opened on marble and chandeliers and a concierge who nodded at him like they shared a secret. Jordan nodded back, because apparently he got nodded at in the Ritz now, and walked out into ocean wind that smelled like salt and money.

The valet brought the Civic around. Jordan reached for the gear shift and stopped.

Two pink cat slippers sat side by side on the passenger mat, one embroidered eye crooked where Kumiko’s needle had slipped back in October. They stared up at him from the footwell like a pair of tiny disappointed parents.

He thought about going back upstairs for one long breath. Then he picked up his phone.

Jordan: Your slippers are in my car. This is now a hostage situation.

Read in under four seconds. She had been staring at the thread.

Alexis: Return them immediately.

Jordan: Ransom is dinner. Real dinner. No foam.

Three dots appeared, vanished, and appeared again for so long that he’d reached the first stop sign before the reply landed.

Alexis: I have thirty-three dollars and a boba card, you absolute degenerate.

Jordan: The boba card is in my cupholder. You have thirty-three dollars.

Alexis: I hate you so much.

Alexis: what counts as real dinner

Jordan: Anything that arrives on a plate with a lid on it.

He called the front desk from the stop sign, put room service for 612 on his card, and told the woman to send up whatever the lady ordered plus a slice of chocolate cake she would pretend she didn’t want. "Of course, Mr. McKnight," the woman said, so warmly that Jordan briefly wondered whether you could leave reviews for hotel employees.

One last text.

Jordan: Order the lobster. It’s a loan. Chloe’s writing the interest rate in pen.

No reply. He pulled onto Pacific Coast Highway, the black ocean sliding by on his left. The cat slippers rode shotgun.

At the next light he reached over and buckled them in, because it felt rude not to.

Somewhere past Laguna he did the arithmetic the System had skipped. One night at the Ritz was a rounding error on a Van Der Berg statement and a real dent in his. Six months of her was a number he didn’t have. What he had was a girlfriend who did math for fun, a girl next door who sewed slippers, and a boba card with three stamps in his cupholder. It would have to be a start.

At the Crystal Cove light, his phone rang through the speakers. Chloe always called the moment he stopped expecting her to. He had stopped pretending it was coincidence weeks ago.

"You left her at the Ritz," Chloe said, in the voice she used on lease addendums.

"I left her at the Ritz."

"Seven forty-nine before tax and the resort fee. Brooke is going to make the face where she blinks twice."

"It’s a loan. The app said loans count."

"I know what the app said. I’m the one who taught you what a loan is." A short, loaded pause. Her voice dropped half a register. "Did she ask you to stay?"

The light turned green. Jordan kept his foot on the brake one extra second.

"She grabbed my wrist hard enough to leave marks. She asked where I was going in a voice I’m going to hear at two in the morning for the next month."

"And you said no."

"I said ask me when she can walk out the door if she doesn’t like the answer."

On the other end he could hear her breathing, and the particular hum of a kitchen at night, and he understood that she had been standing at the island with her phone in her hand for a lot longer than eleven seconds.

The silence went on so long that the car behind him honked. Jordan rolled forward. On Chloe’s end, a small voice broke in at a pitch normally reserved for dog whistles.

"He said WHAT? Chloe-chan, put me on, put me on, I need to hear it in his voice, this is a page forty-nine moment, I already labeled the page—"

"Kumiko, sit down before you knock over the tea."

"I am sitting! I am sitting so hard right now! Jordan-kun, is she okay? Did she eat? Does a gas station hot dog count as dinner, because legally I don’t think it should."