Chapter 397 | I Don’t Have Insurance For That

Chapter 397: 397 | I Don’t Have Insurance For That

The drive back down the 5 took eighty-one minutes because Chloe made him stop at a gas station in Santa Ana so Kumiko could pee, and then again in Irvine so Kumiko could pee, and the second time Jordan sat in the driver’s seat with both hands on the wheel and thought about how his body felt like a rental car that had been returned with the tank empty and the seats reclined all the way back.

Kumiko slept from Irvine to the Cooper Garment Lofts with her cheek mashed against the seatbelt and one hand still curled around her phone, and Chloe rode shotgun with her bare feet on the dash and her sneakers in the footwell, scrolling a spreadsheet that had somehow acquired three new tabs since Saturday morning.

"You cleared eleven hundred and forty," she said around the 55 interchange. "Before the merch. With merch it’s fourteen hundred and change."

"Cool."

"That’s it. Cool."

"I’m running on fumes, babe. You want commentary, you gotta plug me in first."

She looked at him for a while. He kept his eyes on the road because looking at Chloe when she was doing that thing with her mouth was a good way to end up in a guardrail.

He got them upstairs at 9:14. He carried Kumiko’s cat backpack and Kumiko carried Kumiko, mostly, though she took the last four stairs at a diagonal and had to be steered by the shoulders. She kissed his jaw in the hallway and said something about version nine and then went into 403 and shut the door and Jordan stood there for a second listening to her drop face-first onto her own bed through two inches of drywall.

Chloe was already in his kitchen filling the Brita.

He got out of his clothes in stages. Shirt at the couch. Jeans on the stairs. There was a moment on the loft landing where he genuinely considered sleeping right there on the hardwood, and the only thing that stopped him was knowing Chloe would document it.

"You look destroyed," she said from the mattress.

"I walked twenty-two miles and got ridden like a rented mule for two days. I’m allowed."

"You loved it."

"Never said I didn’t." He fell onto the bed on his stomach and the whole frame complained about it. "Just saying there’s a difference between loving something and surviving it."

She got her hand into his hair and started scratching at his scalp, which was a dirty move and she knew it, and he made a noise into the sheets that was not dignified.

"Mmh. Do that for eight hours."

"Four."

"Deal."

The Morning Person trait woke him at 6:41 like it always did, except this time it woke him the way a car alarm wakes a neighborhood, all volume and no actual usefulness. His eyes opened. Nothing else did.

He lay there taking inventory.

Shoulder: still purple where Maya had put a body hook through it. Ribs: four small crescents that were Chloe’s and had gone from red to pink. Left pec: Kumiko’s teeth, a full print, deep enough that it had bruised in a ring. Hips: sore in a way that had nothing to do with boxing and everything to do with a girl who weighed a hundred and five pounds and had spent Sunday afternoon insisting she wanted to do the work.

Lower back: gone. Not sore. Simply absent from the roster.

Chloe was diagonal across the bed with the entire duvet, which was a pattern he had stopped fighting somewhere around week two, and her hair had dried in a shape that suggested violence. Without the contacts her lashes looked longer. He watched her breathe for a while, which was the kind of thing he would have called insane about somebody else, and then his phone lit up on the nightstand and ruined it.

DAILY QUEST: Path to Becoming Adonis

Physical: 0/90 minutes

Hygiene Level 1: Incomplete

Social: 0/3

(System Note: User’s stamina reserves are at 34%. The System has reviewed the weekend’s activity log and would like to formally state that it did not know that was possible. Please hydrate.)

"Thirty-four percent," Jordan said out loud.

He’d take it. Thirty-four percent of this body still cleared a hundred percent of the guy who’d been crying into a can on a filthy floor in January, and that guy hadn’t even been walking to the mailbox.

He sat up. His abs filed a formal complaint. He stood, and something in his hip made a sound like a door in an old house, and he decided that if this was the price of the last forty-eight hours then he’d pay it in installments for the rest of his life and still come out ahead.

Kyle’s text was already sitting there from 6:02.

KYLE: gym. 730. and youre explaining the mickey ears

KYLE: leo sent me nine voice memos about it. NINE. i listened to one and its just screaming

KYLE: also IS THAT A BITE MARK

He typed yes and put the phone in his pocket.

The rec center smelled like rubber and Axe and other people’s ambition, and Kyle was already at the bench when Jordan came through the turnstile with a Powerade and the general bearing of a man returning from a war he had personally started.

Kyle looked up. Then looked longer.

"Oh, that’s bad."

"Morning."

"No, man, you look like you got run over by something with a warranty." Kyle stood and circled him once, actually circled him, like a mechanic. "Your shoulder’s purple. Your neck’s purple. Is your neck purple in two places."

"Three, if you count the one under the collar."

"I’m not counting anything under the collar. I don’t have insurance for that." Kyle sat back down and slapped the bench. "Warmup set. Bar only. I want to see if you can even find the groove."

Jordan lay down and pressed the empty bar, and the empty bar was work. Forty-five pounds. His arms shook on rep six like a freshman’s, and Kyle watched with his hands on the rack and his mouth doing something he was clearly trying to hold in.

"How many miles."

"Twenty-two. Twelve Saturday, ten Sunday."

"And."

"And what."

"And the other cardio, Jordan." Kyle helped him rack it. "You’ve got the look. My cousin got that look after his honeymoon. He was walking like he had a hip replacement and he was twenty-six."

"I’m not confirming anything."

"You’re limping."

"I’m ambulating with character."

Kyle laughed hard enough that the girl on the adjacent bench looked over, and Jordan caught himself grinning at the ceiling, and it occurred to him with the clarity that only shows up when a man is too tired to lie to himself that six weeks ago he had not had a single person on the planet who would have noticed him limping.

They worked light. Kyle put him on machines and called it recovery volume and mostly just talked at him, which was the actual point of the session. Halfway through the lat pulldown stack Kyle brought it up.

"Leo’s convinced Maya saw the post."

"She didn’t see the post."

"She has an Instagram, dude."

"She has an Instagram with four pictures on it and three of them are the gym’s schedule." Jordan pulled the bar down and let it up slow. "She doesn’t care what I look like in a towel."

"She grabbed your throat last Thursday."

"That was technique."

"That was technique," Kyle repeated, to nobody.