Chapter 386 | Then Finish in Me

Chapter 386: 386 | Then Finish in Me

She was tight enough that his vision did something unhelpful at the edges. He went slow. He had learned to go slow with her the first time, when she’d gone completely rigid and then completely liquid inside the space of about four seconds and then cried about it afterward for reasons that had nothing to do with pain. Halfway in he stopped and let her adjust, and Kumiko’s hands scrabbled across the duvet and found Chloe’s ankle and held on.

"Chloe-chan—"

"Breathe."

"I can’t—"

"You can. In through the nose."

Kumiko took a shuddering breath, and Jordan felt her open around him, and he slid the rest of the way home.

The sound she made then wasn’t loud. It was worse than loud. It was a thin broken thing right at the back of her throat, and it went through Jordan’s chest like a nail.

"Full," she whispered. "It’s, ah, I’m so full, Jordan-kun, I’m—"

"Yeah."

"Don’t move yet. Please don’t move yet. If you move I’m going to say something insane."

"Say it."

"No."

"Kumi." He leaned down over her back, mouth at her ear, and dropped his voice into that other register, the one the System had installed in his throat and the one Chloe had made him promise not to weaponize in public, and this was not public. "Say it."

Kumiko’s entire body shivered from the shoulders down.

"Nnnh . . . that’s not fair . . . that’s the voice . . ."

"Say it."

"I want you to keep me." The words came out in a rush, wrecked, half into the pillow. "That’s the insane thing. Not tonight, not the trip, I want you to keep me, I want to be the one you keep, I know that’s not how it works, I know rule four exists, I read rule four, I have rule four written on the inside of my notebook where I can see it, but I—hah—I want you to keep me anyway, I want to be so easy to keep that leaving me would be inconvenient—"

Jordan pulled back and drove into her, and the rest of it turned into vowels.

"AH—! Ah, ahh, ah, ah, AH—"

He set a rhythm and did not let up. The bed frame in the El Capitan suite cost more than his Civic and it still knocked against the wall on every third stroke. Kumiko’s fingers went white around Chloe’s ankle. The wet slap of it filled the room, obscene, echoing off eight hundred dollars a night of floor-to-ceiling glass with California Adventure glowing on the other side.

"Kumi," Chloe said.

"Mmm—hah—"

"Look at me."

Kumiko turned her head. Chloe was down on one elbow at eye level with her, towel long gone, hair a damp black mess with that streak of blue running through it, brown eyes without the contacts, softer and smaller and infinitely more dangerous.

"Nobody’s leaving," Chloe said.

Kumiko’s face broke.

"You don’t get to decide that—"

"I decided it Tuesday." Chloe brushed the hair off Kumiko’s cheek with two fingers. "You were asleep on the mattress with no sheet and you snored like a scooter and I decided it then. He comes home to both of us."

"Chloe-chan—"

"Say it back."

"He comes home to—ahh—to both of us—"

"Again."

"To both of us, to both of us, nnnh, Jordan, Jordan I can’t, I’m going to—"

Jordan got a fist in her hair, gathered what was left of the twin tail, and pulled her head back off the pillow.

Kumiko came so hard her arms gave out.

She clamped down on him in waves, screaming with no shape to it at all, and he rode it out with his teeth set and his hand still in her hair, and somewhere in the middle of it she said his name four times in a row, each one smaller than the last.

Then she collapsed forward, face down, twitching.

"Hah . . . haaah . . . I can’t feel my . . . hnn . . ."

"Legs," Chloe supplied.

"Anything."

Jordan hadn’t finished. He was somewhere in the vicinity of nowhere near finished, and the reason for that was a bronze-tier line item in his inventory with the worst name in recorded history, and he’d stopped resenting it about two weeks into this arrangement.

He eased out. Kumiko whimpered at the loss. Chloe watched him with her chin propped on her hand and her eyebrows doing something arithmetical.

"You’re not done."

"Nope."

"She’s done."

"Yep."

Chloe considered the ceiling for a moment, the way she did before she reorganized somebody’s entire financial life, and then she sat up and swung a leg over Kumiko’s boneless body and settled onto her hands and knees on the mattress facing him.

"Then finish in me," she said, "and hold her while you do it."

Jordan looked at her.

"That’s not a request," Chloe said.

Which was how he ended up with Kumiko curled against his chest, cheek on his sternum, one hand fisted loose in his shirt that he wasn’t wearing, while he knelt behind Chloe and pushed into her still slick and swollen from the tub, and Chloe’s forehead went down onto her forearms with a groan that came out of her chest like she’d been holding it since the fireworks.

"Ffff—Jordan—"

"Loud," he said.

"Shut up."

Kumiko lifted her head just enough to watch. Her eyes were glassy. Her mouth hung open. She reached out with the hand that still worked and put it flat on Chloe’s lower back, just resting there, and Chloe made a sound at the contact that was not about Jordan at all.

The two of them together short-circuited something in him that no percentage on a golden screen was ever going to be able to measure, and he knew that with total clarity, and he also knew that the thing on the nightstand was going to try to measure it anyway.

"Harder," Chloe said.

He gave it to her harder. The headboard hit the wall. Kumiko’s fingers spread wider on Chloe’s back and she whispered something in Japanese that Jordan didn’t catch and Chloe apparently did, because her whole spine shuddered.

"Say it in English," Chloe gasped.

"You’re beautiful," Kumiko breathed. "Both of you. You’re so beautiful I want to die."

"Don’t say that."

"Sorry—hah—sorry, I meant it nicely—"

Jordan felt it building at the base of his spine, that long fuse the System had rewired to burn twice as slow and twice as hot, and he wrapped one arm around Kumiko’s ribs and pulled her in tight against his chest while he drove into Chloe with the other hand locked on her hip.

"Chloe."

"I know. Do it."

"Chloe—"

"Inside," she said, "obviously," and Jordan lost the last of it.

He came so hard the room went white at the corners, and the trait kicked in the way it always did, wave after wave with no sign of stopping, and Chloe’s voice broke on a wail as she felt it flood her, and her arms folded and she went down flat with him still buried.

"Oh my god—oh my god—it’s still—Jordan, it’s still—"

"Yeah."

"How is that—hnnnh—"

Kumiko, pressed between them, small and shaking and wrecked, made a soft awed sound into his collarbone and said, "It’s a lot. It’s always a lot."