Chapter 509 | You Are Allowed

Chapter 509: 509 | You Are Allowed

Kumiko held the pink tote on her lap like a bomb she had built herself. The Civic rolled south on Pacific Coast Highway, the ocean flat and grey outside her window. Jordan-kun drove with one hand at the top of the wheel, his other hand on the gearshift, and she had been staring at the vein on his forearm since Corona del Mar.

She made herself look at the water instead. The water did not have veins. The water was a safe place for her eyes to go.

"You’ve been quiet for eleven minutes, Kumi."

"I’m conserving energy for the hug. Dr. Nakamura says I front-load my enthusiasm and then crash. So I’m back-loading it. This is a back-loaded silence."

"Thank you for explaining your silence."

"You’re welcome, Jordan-kun. It was very loud inside my head."

Chloe-chan had refused to come. She’d pushed Kumiko out the door at 7:40 with a granola bar and instructions about keeping Alexis fed, then gone straight back to Brooke’s laptop. The typing had started before Kumiko reached the stairwell, harder and faster than usual, the way Chloe-chan typed when she was trying to solve something she couldn’t control.

The Ritz appeared on the bluff at 8:06, white and pristine against the grey morning. Kumiko had driven past it a hundred times and invented stories about the people who stayed there. She had never once considered walking through its front door.

The lobby smelled of lilies and money. In the elevator mirrors she saw six versions of herself, and every one had mismatched ribbons, lavender on the left and pink on the right. She had tied them at 2:50 in the morning in the dark, and now the whole world could see her failure from six angles.

She reached up to fix it. Jordan-kun caught her wrist.

"Leave them. They’re cute. Alexis won’t care."

"Alexis cares about everything. She once told me a font was spiritually bankrupt."

His thumb moved once across the inside of her wrist, slow and warm, and let go. Her arm stayed in the air for another second before she remembered it belonged to her.

Room 612 sat at the end of the sixth-floor hall beside a window full of ocean. Jordan-kun lifted his hand to knock. Kumiko grabbed his sleeve.

"Wait. I need to put my face on. My emotional face, Jordan-kun. I need to arrange it."

She closed her eyes and counted to four. She thought about the typo heart, which was obviously not a typo at all. When she opened her eyes, Jordan-kun was looking down at her with the soft face. Kumiko had a whole page about the soft face, and the page did not help her now.

"Okay. I’m arranged."

He knocked three times. The door opened before the third knock finished.

Alexis stood in the doorway in a white hotel robe tied tight at the waist, honey hair hanging damp past her shoulders, no makeup at all. Without the mascara her eyes looked bluer and younger and very tired. The black cuff of Jordan-kun’s henley poked out from the left sleeve of the robe. She had slept in it. Kumiko knew, because there was a crease down the cuff from a pillow.

Alexis looked at Jordan-kun first. Her chin went up a quarter inch. Then her eyes dropped to Kumiko and the cat tote, and her face did something Kumiko had never seen it do.

It crumpled. For one second it crumpled, and then it fought its way back to flat.

"You brought her," Alexis said.

"She brought herself. I was the driver."

"I brought a bag," Kumiko said. "I’m going to hug you. I’m telling you first because Chloe-chan says you need advance notice."

"You’re going to hug me in the hallway of the Ritz-Carlton."

"Inside the room is better. There are fewer witnesses. But I’ll do it in the hallway if you make me."

Alexis backed into the suite. Kumiko set the tote down by the entry console and wrapped both arms around her middle.

Alexis was five-seven in bare feet, which put Kumiko’s face level with the hollow of her throat. Hotel shampoo first, then Baccarat Rouge, the one Chloe-chan could identify from across a room, and under both, cedar from the henley. Kumiko turned her face into the terrycloth and held on.

For three seconds Alexis didn’t move. Her arms stayed at her sides like someone had nailed them there. Kumiko kept squeezing, refusing to acknowledge that she was hugging a statue.

Then something broke loose. One hand landed on the back of Kumiko’s head, heavy and graceless, all five fingers spread like she was catching something mid-fall. The other gripped her shoulder blade hard enough to wrinkle the henley.

"Your ribbons," Alexis said into the top of Kumiko’s head. "They don’t match."

"I tied them in the dark. Jordan-kun said they were cute anyway."

"Jordan-kun has questionable taste in ribbon coordination."

On the last word her voice cracked clean through the middle. Kumiko felt it in her own collarbone. She held on tighter and didn’t say anything. Sometimes the only thing you could do for someone was be solid while they came apart.

Alexis pulled back after five more seconds, eyes red-rimmed and furious about it, and dragged the henley cuff across her face in one rough swipe.

A room service cart sat by the balcony doors: a lobster shell picked clean, a dessert plate smeared with chocolate, a silver fork abandoned tines-down.

"You ate all the cake," Kumiko said.

"I told you. I ate it out of spite."

"Spite has calories, Alexis-chan. Spite counts as food."

Alexis laughed, short and surprised, a real laugh that cracked in the middle, and covered her mouth with the cuff after it escaped.

"Are those my slippers?" She was looking at the pink terrycloth in Jordan-kun’s hand.

"They’re hostages," Jordan-kun said from the window. "Ransom terms to follow."

"I paid you in mediocre cake photos."

"Those were proof of life, princess. That’s different from payment."

Alexis made a noise in her throat that was half a growl, and her cheeks went pink while she made it. Kumiko filed that away for later.

She picked up the tote and held it out with both hands, the way her mother gave gifts to neighbors at New Year’s.

"This is for you. It’s not charity. It’s a care package, which is a different legal category."

Alexis opened it the way someone opens a box that might contain a snake. The leggings came out first, then the toothbrush. The hair tie and the Pocky, which she turned over twice. Then the card.

She read it. She read it again. Kumiko watched her lips move on the second pass.

YOU ARE ALLOWED TO EAT BREAKFAST.

Alexis sat down on the edge of the bed with the card in both hands on her knees, and the robe slipped open above her thigh. She didn’t fix it. Kumiko had never seen Alexis Van Der Berg fail to fix a hem in her entire life.

"You laminated it."

"It’s binding now. That’s how lamination works."

Alexis put the card face down, pressed her palm flat on top of it, and breathed in through her nose. The cord in her neck stood out tight under her ear, the one Jordan-kun had worked loose yesterday. Kumiko looked at him. He had seen it too. His jaw shifted a quarter inch to the left, the jaw that meant he wanted to fix something. Page six, stress response four.

He kept his hands on the windowsill and his eyes on the ocean.

Kumiko’s chest went warm and tight at the same time. Chloe-chan would be so proud of him. She would never say it out loud, but she would write it on the legal pad and underline it twice.

"Alexis-chan, have you eaten breakfast?"

"I ate cake at ten last night."

"That was dinner. Dinner doesn’t roll over. It isn’t a data plan."

"I don’t have money for breakfast. You know that."

"Room service goes on the same tab," Jordan-kun said without turning. "Chloe logged it as a loan last night. There’s an interest rate. It’s written in pen."

"What’s the rate?"

"I didn’t ask. I was scared of her."

Alexis’s mouth twitched at one corner. She hid it fast, but Kumiko caught it.

"Order her the eggs," Jordan-kun said. "And the pancakes. And the fruit plate."

"I’m not eating all of that."

"Nine bites of each, and Kumi eats the rest."

"I’m very good at eating the rest," Kumiko said. "It’s my strongest skill."

She dialed zero. A man who sounded born in a tuxedo answered on the first ring. She ordered the eggs and the pancakes and the fruit plate, then added a hot chocolate because she wanted one and nobody had told her no.

"You ordered yourself a hot chocolate," Alexis said when she hung up.

"I’m part of the loan now. We’re co-borrowers. My parents met in debt together. A college credit card with a four-hundred-dollar limit, maxed out on ramen and a karaoke machine." Kumiko sat beside her on the bed. Their thighs touched through the robe and the sleep shorts. "Married twenty-four years. So debt works. Statistically."

Alexis didn’t move her leg away. Kumiko counted. Five seconds, then six, then nine.

Jordan-kun turned from the window and held out the cat slippers, the crooked embroidered eye staring at the ceiling.

"Ransom terms are fulfilled. You ordered food."

"Kumiko ordered food."

"Your name’s on the room. Good enough."

Alexis took them and looked for a long moment at the eye Kumiko had sewn wrong in October. Then she slid her bare feet into them, one and then the other, and sat up straight in a white robe and pink cat slippers on the edge of a seven-hundred-dollar bed.

She looked absurd. She looked beautiful. Kumiko had to look at the carpet for a second.

Jordan-kun tapped his phone twice and held it out.

"Chloe sent something. She said to give it to you after you ate, but I think you need it before."

Alexis didn’t reach for it. "Is this the part where you tell me what to do with my life? Every man I know does that part eventually. My father did it at eleven. Harrison did it on the second date."

"It’s not me. It’s Chloe. And she doesn’t tell people what to do. She makes them read a contract until they want to throw it at her."

Alexis took the phone. Kumiko leaned over her shoulder.

GOLDEN PARACHUTE: PHASE ONE, in Chloe-chan’s favorite font, over a table full of numbers. Kumiko saw her own name in row three next to the words emotional intake officer and decided not to ask.

Alexis’s thumb stopped at row twelve. She read it once, twice, three times.

ALEXIS VAN DER BERG: NOVA NETWORK, BRAND DIRECTOR.

Beside it sat a number, and under that a note in red with no capital letters, the way Chloe-chan typed when she was too tired to care about grammar.

probation 90 days. quota in appendix c. if you think this is charity, read appendix c again.

Alexis’s hand dropped to her lap, phone still in it. Her blue eyes went to Jordan-kun and locked there, wide and raw.

"She wants to pay me."

"She wants to work you to death," Jordan-kun said. "Payment is a side effect."