Chapter 389 | The Chanel Would Have Been Better

Chapter 389: 389 | The Chanel Would Have Been Better

The phone buzzed again in his hand before he could decide what to do with the first message, and this time it kept buzzing.

Incoming call. Alexis Van Der Berg. 11:39 PM.

Jordan looked at the screen, then at the girl passed out across his ribs with her hair in his mouth, then at the bathroom door where the shower was still running and Chloe was presumably standing in two inches of water she had already priced.

The smart move was to let it ring. The smart move had been the smart move all day, and he had ignored it approximately eleven times, and here he was in a four thousand dollar suite with a mattress protector on the way.

He slid his arm out from under Kumiko one inch at a time. She made a small unhappy noise, groped for the space where he had been, found a pillow instead, and clamped onto it with both arms and one leg.

"Mmm . . . Detective . . ."

"Yeah, buddy."

"He needs a warrant . . ."

She was asleep. She was completely asleep and still building a case. He pulled the duvet up over her bare shoulder, grabbed the towel off the floor, and got the phone to his ear on the fourth buzz while walking backward toward the second bathroom on the far side of the living room, which was a sentence he would have found funny six weeks ago if he had known it was coming.

He shut the door with his hip. The tile was cold. The mirror in here was one of those ones with the lights built into the glass, and it caught him at an unflattering angle—towel around his waist, purple bruise blooming across his shoulder where Maya had planted a hook that morning in the ring, one bite mark near his collarbone that was definitely Kumiko’s and one lower that was definitely not. The lower one had teeth marks that were too shallow, too controlled. Chloe bit like she was trying not to leave evidence.

He leaned against the counter and looked at the phone screen one more time before answering. Alexis’s contact photo was a candid he had taken at the beach two weeks ago when she was yelling at someone for parking in her spot. She looked like she was about to declare war on a small nation.

He swiped to answer.

"Hey, princess."

There was a pause on the line long enough for him to hear her breathing, and then, in a voice that had been sharpened on a whetstone and then dropped in a glass of ice, "Don’t call me that."

"You called me."

"That is not relevant to the etiquette of the situation."

"It’s the only relevant thing about the situation." He turned on the faucet, ran his hand under it, and pressed his wet palm against the back of his neck. The cold water helped. "It’s eleven forty. You called me at eleven forty on a Saturday night. That’s late enough that etiquette stopped applying about two hours ago."

"Eleven thirty-nine."

"That’s worse."

"It is not worse." A rustle, fabric moving, something expensive shifting on something else expensive. "It’s earlier."

"You clarified the time so you’d have a smaller number to defend. That’s a spreadsheet move. You’ve been hanging around Chloe too long."

Silence. He counted three seconds of it and enjoyed every one.

"You sent me a photograph," Alexis said, and the ice in her voice had developed a hairline fracture, the kind you could only detect if you’d spent enough time listening to her actual speaking voice to recognize when she was performing versus when she was just talking. "At six oh nine in the evening. Of the three of you standing in front of a bronze statue. Wearing mouse ears."

"Mickey ears."

"They are mouse ears and you look like an absolute idiot in them."

"I look devastating in them. Kumiko told me so."

"Kumiko believes plush toys have feelings and emotions."

"Kumiko is correct about a lot of things and I’ve given up fighting her on the plushies." He hopped up onto the counter and sat on the edge. The marble surface was freezing cold against the backs of his thighs. He registered that fact for approximately a second and a half before deciding he didn’t care enough to move. "You didn’t respond to me for five hours after I sent it."

"I was at dinner with Harrison."

"Dinner for five hours."

"Harrison ordered the tasting menu for both of us." She delivered the name the way most people delivered the word audit or root canal. "Nine separate courses. One of those courses was literally just foam on a plate. He spent time explaining the foam to me. He explained the conceptual and culinary purpose of the foam for eleven consecutive minutes, and then he flagged down the sommelier to ask a technical question about the foam’s construction, and then after the sommelier answered him, Harrison turned back to me and explained the sommelier’s answer to me as though I had not been sitting directly across the table from the sommelier when the man said it the first time."

Jordan started laughing. He couldn’t help it. It came up out of his chest all at once and he had to press the back of his hand against his mouth to keep it from carrying through the door.

"It is not funny."

"It’s a little funny."

"It is not."

"You sat through foam."

"I sat through foam," Alexis said, and her voice broke on the last word into something that was not quite a laugh and not quite anything else, and she covered it immediately with a sound of pure disdain. "And then I got home and my mother asked how it went, and I said it went well, and she said good, and then she asked if I had worn the Chanel or the Zimmermann, and I said the Zimmermann, and she said the Chanel would have been better."

The shower shut off in the other bathroom. He heard it through two walls and half a suite.

He kept his voice level. "What are you wearing right now."