Chapter 412 | Load-Bearing Smug

Chapter 412: 412 | Load-Bearing Smug

Her hands landed flat on his chest, palm over the bite mark, and she pressed. The bruise Kumiko had left there answered with a dull complaint that ran down into his ribs.

"That still hurts," he said.

"Good." Her thumb dragged across the ring of teeth marks with something that wasn’t tenderness. "She was polite about it. Ninety percent of that girl is apologies and the other ten percent bites hard enough to bruise a pec. I keep thinking about it."

"You keep thinking about it."

"I said what I said." Chloe leaned in until her hair fell forward and the blue streak brushed his jaw. "Take the shirt off."

He got it over his head in one pull and she made a sound in the back of her throat, low, barely there, the involuntary kind she’d never admit to producing. Six weeks ago the sound of a girl reacting to his body would’ve short-circuited him for a week. Now he catalogued it, filed it, and immediately started plotting how to get her to do it again.

Which was, he was aware, exactly as insufferable as it sounded. He’d made peace with being insufferable somewhere around week four.

"Mmh." Her mouth found the bruise on his collarbone, the purple one Maya had installed at six-thirty that morning, and she bit down over it just hard enough to make his whole spine pull tight. "This one’s not mine."

"That one’s from a professional."

"I don’t like it." She bit again. Harder. "Nnh, hold still."

"Chloe."

"I said hold still." Her hips rolled forward and the friction went straight up through him, and she pressed her forehead into his throat and exhaled shaky. "Haah. Okay. Okay, that’s not fair either."

His hands found her waist under the shirt and the skin there was warm the way it always was after she’d been curled on the couch for two hours, hot to the touch, damp at the small of her back. He slid up her ribs. She arched into it with a small broken sound, and when his thumbs found the undersides of her breasts she made a noise that came out wrecked.

"Ahn, wait, wait." She grabbed his wrist. "Kumiko’s going to hear."

"Kumiko’s got strings on. She’s on a precision stage, she won’t hear a fire alarm."

"You know her playlist." Chloe laughed, actually laughed, one short helpless burst against his neck. "You know her playlist."

"I know a lot of things. It’s why you called me smart."

"I called you smart one time and you’re going to make it a personality." She sat back and pulled the shirt over her head, and there was nothing underneath it because there was never anything underneath it, and the harbor light coming off the factory windows painted a silver line down her sternum and along the marks he’d left on her hips two nights ago. Four small crescents. Faded to pink now.

He looked at her the way he’d been looking at her since a masked girl walked up to a table at The Ivy and took three thousand dollars off him for forty-five minutes.

"Stop that," she said.

"Stop what."

"The face. The one where you look at me like you can’t figure out how it happened." Her hands went to the waistband of his shorts. "Hnn, you did the math and it worked out, McKnight. That’s all. Don’t get spiritual about it."

"You literally called yourself an investment last week."

"Because I am one." She got him free and her fingers wrapped around him and his brain hitched, dropped a frame, came back online several steps behind where it had been. "Nn, and you keep appreciating. Fuck. You keep, ah, you keep getting bigger, that’s not a thing that’s supposed to happen."

"System’s a scam."

"The System’s a war crime." She lifted up, braced a hand on his shoulder, and lowered herself onto him in one slow slide that made her voice break clean in half. "Aah, haaah, oh, god, Jordan."

Nnh. He got both hands under her and held.

The couch made a sound underneath them, the specific creak of furniture from an affordable online retailer being asked to participate in something it was not engineered for, and Chloe braced her knees wider and started to move.

"Mmh, mmh, ah." Her forehead dropped to his. "Don’t, don’t do the voice."

"I wasn’t going to."

"You were thinking about it. Nn, I can see you thinking about it." Her hips ground down and her breath stuttered and the sound she made next didn’t have consonants in it at all. "Haaah, ahn, right, right there, don’t move."

He didn’t move. He let her set it, watched her chase it, watched her jaw go loose and her eyes lose focus and her fingers dig in above the bite mark until his skin lit up under the pressure. Six weeks ago he’d been crying into a Red Bull can with three hundred and forty-seven gigabytes of nothing on an external drive, and now the girl who ran a six-figure operation from a closet with a ring light was riding him on a couch she’d bought with money she’d never explain to her mother, making sounds she’d deny at dinner on Saturday.

He was allowed to be smug about that. He’d earned smug. Smug was load-bearing at this point.

"Ah, ah, ahn." She was speeding up, sloppy now, the careful thing in her collapsing the way it always collapsed at the end. "Jordan, Jordan, I’m, hnnh, say it, say the thing."

"You’re mine."

"Aaah." Her whole body seized around him and her voice went up two full steps before it broke apart in her throat. "Yes, yes, mmh, again, say it again."

"You’re mine, Chloe."

"Haaaah, fuck, fuck." She came like that, forehead against his, one hand clawing his shoulder and the other flat over the bite mark, and the clench of her set his own vision white at the edges. He pulled her down hard and finished inside her and the Ceaseless Discharge trait activated with the enthusiasm of a fire hydrant being opened by children, and Chloe made a strangled noise into his neck and held on through all of it.

Nine seconds.