Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 172: 172 | A Structural Support Beam

The possessive phrasing landed differently now. Three days ago, "my girl" from Chloe about Kumiko would have referred to friendship. Now the words carried a second layer, a territorial warmth that encompassed both affection and a quiet assertion of hierarchy. Chloe had chosen Kumiko. Chloe had given permission. And somewhere in the space between those two facts lived an arrangement that Jordan still could not fully comprehend even though he occupied its exact center.

His phone buzzed again. Different thread.

KUMIKO: DID YOU READ MY NOTE

KUMIKO: you didn’t react at all your face was STONE

KUMIKO: are you mad?? did i spell something wrong?? i wrote it really fast because dr jones was talking about aggregate something and my brain was not aggregating anything except thoughts about you

JORDAN: I read it. Your stick figure game is elite.

KUMIKO: (sparkle emoji) (sparkle emoji) (sparkle emoji) REALLY

KUMIKO: i spent like forty seconds on that which is a LOT of time for in-class art

KUMIKO: also was the compliment about your arm too forward?? chloe-chan said i should be honest about my feelings but my therapist says there’s a difference between honest and "aggressively transparent" and i’m still learning where the line is

JORDAN: It wasn’t too forward. My arm says thank you.

KUMIKO: TELL YOUR ARM I SAID YOURE WELCOME

KUMIKO: okay i’m going to try to pay attention to class now

KUMIKO: i will probably fail

KUMIKO: but i’m going to try

Jordan locked his phone and returned to the lecture. Jones had moved on to the paradox of thrift, explaining how individual saving could become collectively destructive during economic downturns. The concept was interesting enough to hold Jordan’s attention for the remaining twelve minutes of class, though his notes were sparse and his handwriting looked like a doctor’s prescription written during a minor earthquake.

When Jones dismissed them at nine forty-seven, the hall erupted into the choreography of two hundred people packing bags simultaneously. Kumiko turned to Jordan with her entire body, her eyes wide and her smile already at maximum wattage.

"Jordan-kun! That answer was amazing! You sounded like a professor! A hot professor! Like the kind they put in movies where the professor is really smart but also secretly—"

"Kumiko."

"Right! Stopping!" She clamped both hands over her own mouth, her cheeks burning pink above her fingers. Her eyes still sparkled over the barrier of her palms.

Alexis closed her laptop with a sharp click and stood, smoothing her turtleneck with one hand. She did not look at Jordan directly. Her gaze landed approximately three inches to the left of his shoulder.

"Adequate answer. You got lucky that Jones didn’t follow up with anything about the liquidity trap."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, princess."

The nickname slipped out before Jordan could catch it. Alexis’s head turned, and for one full second her composure fractured. Color flooded her cheeks from her jaw to her hairline, fast and hot, and her blue eyes went wide enough that Jordan could see the overhead fluorescent lights reflected in them. Her lips parted. No sound came out.

Then the mask rebuilt itself, panel by panel, like someone reassembling a shattered window from the inside.

"Don’t call me that in public."

She said it to his collarbone, grabbed her bag, and walked down the aisle toward the exit with her spine so straight it could have served as a structural support beam.

Kumiko watched Alexis leave with her hands still partially covering her mouth. She lowered them slowly.

"Jordan-kun."

"Yeah?"

"You just broke Alexis."

"I didn’t break anything."

"Her entire face turned red. I’ve known her for six months and I’ve never seen her face turn red. I’ve seen her get proposed to by a guy with a Lamborghini and she didn’t even blink. You called her princess and she forgot how to speak."

Jordan shouldered his bag and started walking. Kumiko fell into step beside him, her platform sneakers adding just enough height that her twin tails bounced at the level of his bicep. They merged with the flow of students heading for the exits, and the California sun hit them the moment they cleared the doors.

"Are you going to tell Chloe-chan about the princess thing?"

"Nothing happened."

"Something happened. I was sitting right there. I have eyes, Jordan-kun. Very observant eyes. My therapist says I notice too much about people I care about and not enough about people I don’t, which means my perception is highly selective but extremely potent within its target range."

"That’s a very clinical way to say you were staring."

Kumiko’s blush returned with force. "I was NOT staring! I was... monitoring the social dynamics of our immediate peer group for purposes of—"

"Staring."

"Fine! I was staring! But only because you’re my boyfriend now and I’m contractually obligated to pay attention to everything you do! That’s in the girlfriend handbook! Page forty-seven! Subsection C!"

Jordan looked down at Kumiko. She looked up at him. The sunlight hit her face and turned her brown eyes almost amber, warm and liquid and so openly, recklessly adoring that Jordan’s chest did something complicated.

He reached over and placed his palm on top of her head, between the twin tails, right where her hair parted into two dark rivers.

The effect was immediate.

Kumiko’s entire body softened like someone had pulled the tension out of her muscles with a single tug. Her shoulders dropped three inches. Her breathing slowed from hummingbird speed to something approaching normal human respiration. Her eyes went half-lidded and unfocused, and a small, involuntary sound escaped her throat that fell somewhere between a sigh and a purr.

"Nnnh..."

Students walking past them glanced over. A girl in an engineering hoodie did a double take. A guy carrying a skateboard under his arm gave Jordan a look that communicated respect, confusion, and mild jealousy in equal proportions.

Jordan kept his hand there for five seconds. The Headpat trait hummed through his palm and into Kumiko’s skull, and he could feel the exact moment the endorphin release hit her system because her whole body swayed toward him like a flower bending toward light. Her fingers found the hem of his shirt and curled into the fabric, holding on as though gravity had briefly become unreliable.

When he lifted his hand, Kumiko blinked several times in rapid succession. She looked like someone waking from a dream that had been too good, her mouth slightly open and her cheeks flushed a deep, gorgeous pink that spread all the way to the tips of her ears.

"You did the thing again," she whispered.

"Headpat."

"It’s not just a headpat, Jordan-kun. Normal headpats don’t make my brain go completely silent. My brain has NEVER been silent. Not once in eighteen years. When you do that, everything just... stops. All the noise stops. All the worrying stops. It’s like..." She trailed off, searching for words. "It’s like being held but from the inside."

Jordan removed his hand fully and shoved it into his pocket before the gesture could escalate into something that would draw even more attention on a busy campus walkway.

"We should get to math."

Kumiko shook her head like a dog coming out of water, her twin tails whipping side to side. Her expression cycled from dreamy to embarrassed to determined in the span of two seconds.

"Right! Math! Numbers! Things that make sense, unlike whatever just happened to my central nervous system!"

She grabbed Jordan’s wrist and pulled him toward the math building with surprising strength for someone who barely cleared five foot four in platform shoes. Jordan let himself be dragged, partly because resisting would require more effort than compliance and partly because the feeling of Kumiko’s small fingers wrapped around his wrist was doing something to his pulse that he did not want to examine too closely.

The sun warmed Jordan’s back. Kumiko’s grip on his wrist tightened as she navigated around a group of students blocking the path, her body unconsciously positioning itself closer to his as they moved through the campus morning together. The scent of her shampoo drifted up whenever the breeze shifted, something floral and slightly sweet that was becoming as familiar to Jordan as Chloe’s vanilla.

Two girlfriends. A forty-seven-page business plan written by a genius with crimson eyes. A boxing gym at four-thirty. A mother to meet on Saturday. A System counting down in his pocket like a bomb with a very polite user interface.

Jordan walked into the math building and found his seat.

The lecture started. He opened his notebook. He wrote the date.

And somewhere on the other side of campus, Alexis Van Der Berg sat alone in the women’s restroom of the student union building, Jordan’s henley balled up in her bag because she couldn’t bring herself to return it, and pressed her burning face against the cool tile wall while her phone screen displayed a single unread message from Harrison Van Allen the Third that she could not bring herself to open.