Chapter 385 | A Learned Technique

Chapter 385: 385 | A Learned Technique

The phone buzzed a second time, and Jordan reached over and turned it facedown without breaking eye contact with the girl underneath him, which was the single most expensive gesture of his life if you priced it out in quest tickets, and he did not care.

"Was that it," Kumiko whispered. "The thing. That buzzes."

"Nope."

"You’re lying."

"Constantly." He got a hand under her knee and pushed it wide. "Not about this."

Chloe’s thumb moved on the inside of Kumiko’s wrist, keeping her pinned to the pillow with about as much force as a paperweight, which was the entire point. Kumiko could have pulled free at any second. She hadn’t tried. That was Chloe’s whole method, and Jordan had watched her run it on him for six weeks without once noticing she was doing it until the leash was already on.

He put his mouth on her.

"AH—! Ah, ahh, wait, wait, that’s, hnnn—"

Kumiko’s hips came up off the mattress and Jordan caught them with one forearm across her stomach and held her down, which she apparently had opinions about, because the noise she made then hit a register that belonged in a shrine bell. Her thighs shook against his ears. She tasted like heat and salt and eleven hours of wanting something she thought she wasn’t allowed to ask for.

"Chloe-chan, Chloe-chan he’s—"

"I can see."

"He’s doing the thing with his tongue where—nnnh—where it goes, hah, sideways—"

"Mm."

"That’s not, that’s not a normal thing that people do, that’s a—AH—" Her back arched. Her heels dug into the duvet. "That’s a technique, that’s a learned technique, who taught you that, I need a name and an address—"

Jordan lifted his head half an inch. "Focus."

"I AM focusing. I’m focusing so hard. I have never focused this hard on anything in my entire—hyaaa—"

Chloe’s free hand came down and covered Kumiko’s mouth, palm flat, and Kumiko’s eyes rolled back so fast Jordan actually heard her swallow the rest of the sentence.

There was a specific problem with Kumiko Yamanaka that Jordan had been dancing around for three weeks, and it wasn’t the notebook or the seven pages about his freckles or the fact that she’d built a color-coded spreadsheet about a day at a theme park. The problem was that everything she felt showed up on her face at full volume, no compression, no mixing, and so when she felt good she looked like someone experiencing a religious event, and Jordan was eighteen years old with a magic app in his pocket and a body that used to get winded on stairs. He was not built to withstand that. Nobody was.

He slid two fingers into her and Kumiko screamed into Chloe’s hand.

"Mmmf—MMF—"

"Loud," Chloe observed.

"Mmhm."

"Hotel walls are better than ours."

"MMHM."

"Not that much better."

Jordan curled his fingers and found the spot that made her whole lower body seize, and Kumiko’s hips started moving on their own, small desperate circles that had nothing to do with any plan she’d made. Wet sounds filled the space between the balcony glass and the bed. Her toes curled. One of the pink ribbons finally gave up and slid out of her hair entirely, and her twin tail came apart across the pillow in a spill of black.

"She’s close," Chloe said.

"I know."

"How."

"Her breathing changed four seconds ago." He looked up at Chloe over the ridge of Kumiko’s hip. "You taught me that."

Something moved behind Chloe’s eyes. She did not smile. She lifted her palm off Kumiko’s mouth just in time for the whole thing to come out at once.

"I’m gonna, I’m gonna, Jordan, Jordan-kun I’m—ah, ahh, AHHH—!"

She came apart with her spine off the bed and her hands clawing at the pillow above her head where Chloe still held her wrists, and the sound went on and on, cracking twice in the middle, and Jordan did not stop until the shaking stopped, and then he kept going for another four seconds out of pure spite, and Kumiko sobbed his name into the ceiling.

Then she went limp all at once, boneless, chest heaving, eyes unfocused and shining.

"Hah . . . haah . . ."

Chloe let go of her wrists. Kumiko’s hands fell without direction and landed on either side of her head, fingers loosely open.

"Kumi."

"Mm."

"You still with us."

"I don’t . . . know where my legs are."

"They’re on him."

"Oh." A pause, wet and dazed. "That’s fine. He can keep them."

Jordan sat back on his heels and dragged the back of his wrist across his mouth, and Kumiko’s eyes tracked the motion and then immediately filled up.

Here was the thing that kept catching him off guard. He’d expected Kumiko to be shy. He’d expected trembling, apologizing, checking in every ninety seconds to make sure she wasn’t a burden, and there had been some of that, sure. What he hadn’t expected was the moment right after, every single time, where she stopped hiding anything at all and just looked at him like he was the last light on in a very dark building. Six weeks ago Jordan McKnight had been crying into a Red Bull can on a floor that smelled like a crime, and now a girl who cried at plushies falling over looked at him like that, and he had zero framework for it, so he mostly made jokes and hoped nobody noticed his hands.

"Don’t cry."

"I’m not." Two tears went sideways into her hair. "It’s the ceiling. The ceiling is very high and it’s making me emotional about scale."

"Uh huh."

"There’s a whole thing about vaulted spaces and the sublime, Isabella-san would know the word—"

"Kumi," Chloe said, "if you bring up the TA while you’re naked I’m putting you in the hallway."

Kumiko covered her face with both hands and made a sound like a kettle. "That’s fair. That’s completely fair. I withdraw the reference."

Jordan reached down and hooked his thumb in the towel around his waist, and both girls looked, and he took his time about it purely because he’d earned the right after nine hours of wearing mouse ears for their entertainment.

The towel hit the carpet.

"Oh," Kumiko said.

"Yeah."

"That’s, um." Her hands came off her face. Her voice went somewhere small and stunned. "That’s very. Um. I’ve seen it before, obviously, I’ve seen it several times, I have a very good memory, but from this angle it’s, ahh . . . it’s a lot bigger from this angle, is that a real thing? Does angle do that?"

"Angle does that," Chloe said.

"Chloe-chan, it’s going to—"

"It fits."

"You don’t know that—"

"I know that," Chloe said, flat as a tabletop, and Kumiko made a strangled noise and turned her face into the duvet and did not argue, because arguing with Chloe about load-bearing calculations had never once worked for anybody.

Jordan got a hand under Kumiko’s thigh and hitched her up the bed toward him. She weighed nothing. Every time he moved her it landed the same way, this stupid animal satisfaction at how easy it was, and he had long since stopped pretending to be a better person about it.

"Turn over," he said.

Kumiko’s head came up. "What?"

He didn’t repeat it. He just put his hand on her hip and rolled her, and she went with a surprised little "hyah" and ended up on her stomach with her cheek against the pillow and her hips angled up, and Chloe shifted out of the way with the unbothered efficiency of someone rearranging office furniture.

"This is, um." Kumiko’s voice came out muffled. "This is a position. This is a specific position with implications."

"Uh huh."

"I’ve thought about this position. Hypothetically. In a research capacity."

"Page eight?"

"Page ELEVEN."

Jordan lined up and pushed in, and every single word Kumiko had been building fell out of her mouth in pieces.

"Nnnnh—hah, hahh, ahh—! Ah, oh, oh, it’s, that’s, nnnh—"