Chapter 474 | Conducting Research

Chapter 474: 474 | Conducting Research

Jordan woke at 6:41 because his body had decided weeks ago that sleeping past dawn was a personality flaw. The Morning Person trait pulled him to the surface like a hand on his collar, and the first thing he registered was the smell of lemon cleaner, sesame oil residue from last night’s jjigae, and Chloe’s vanilla shampoo baked into the pillow she’d stolen from his side of the bed sometime around three.

The second thing he registered was that Chloe had migrated in her sleep again. She lay diagonal across the mattress with one leg hooked over his hip and her arm flung across his chest, her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt like she was holding a receipt she refused to lose. The blue streak in her hair had dried into a wild comma against her cheek. Without the brown contacts, her lashes looked longer, softer, casting tiny shadows on skin still flushed from what they’d done after the stream.

The third thing he registered was that his phone sat on the floor of Unit 403 where it had fallen out of her jeans, and he could not check it without performing a tactical extraction from a woman who weighed a hundred and twenty pounds but slept like a bear trap.

Jordan lay still and let the morning happen.

Through the wall, Kumiko’s sewing machine had gone silent sometime around four. Before that he’d heard her singing fragments of the Korean ballad Chloe had performed, looping the bridge over and over, each repetition slightly different as though she was trying to memorize something that couldn’t be memorized, only felt. Kumiko had texted the group chat at 3:47 AM with a single photograph of her Sally costume hanging from the mannequin, the painted seams still wet, and the caption "she did it she did it she did it" with no punctuation and forty-one heart emojis descending into a row of crying faces. Chloe had responded from bed with one word: sleep. Kumiko had replied "no" and then nothing else, which meant she’d fallen asleep mid-defiance with her phone on her chest and her ribbons still in.

Jordan loved that girl in a way that hurt his ribs if he thought about it too long.

Chloe shifted. Her hand moved from his shirt to his stomach, fingers spreading across his abs, and she made a low noise against his shoulder that carried no meaning beyond the biological fact that she was warm and comfortable and did not intend to leave this position for any reason short of a building fire. Her thumb traced the lowest ridge of muscle above his waistband, back and forth, the world’s laziest seismograph measuring the fault line of his self-control.

"Stop it," Jordan said to the ceiling.

"Mmn. Stop what." Her voice came out wrecked and husky, still coated in last night’s performance. Karina would have winced.

"You’re petting my abs in your sleep."

"Not sleeping. Conducting research."

"Your research is going to start a problem I don’t have time to finish."

Chloe opened one eye. The natural dark brown caught the harbor light and turned the color of black coffee held up to a window. She studied his jaw with the focus of someone pricing real estate.

"You look smug," she said.

"I am smug. My girlfriend got two thousand followers last night."

"Nineteen twelve."

"I’m rounding up because I’m an optimist."

"You’re rounding up because you failed math in high school and never recovered."

"I got a B minus."

"B minus is the participation trophy of letter grades." She closed her eye and pressed her face back into his shoulder. Her thumb kept moving. "What time is it."

"Six forty-three."

"Then we have seventeen minutes before my alarm, and you have seventeen minutes to not ruin the best morning I’ve had in six months by checking your phone."

"My phone is on the floor in your apartment."

"Good. It can stay there. If it glows, I’ll step on it."

"That phone is worth eight hundred dollars."

"And your girlfriend is worth more, so pick your wars." She bit the tendon where his neck met his shoulder, not hard, just enough pressure to make his spine light up. Then she released and settled back into the pillow with a small, satisfied hum, her leg still hooked over his hip, her hand still on his stomach.

Jordan closed his eyes and let seventeen minutes feel like something worth keeping.

The alarm went off at seven on the dot, not the K-pop explosion Chloe usually deployed but something softer, a piano loop that drifted up from the nightstand like smoke. Chloe had changed it overnight. The realization landed in Jordan’s chest with the quiet force of someone leaving a door unlocked because they trusted the person on the other side.

Chloe sat up and stretched. The black shirt, his black shirt, rode up to her ribs and showed the fading crescent marks he’d left on her hips Wednesday. Her hair looked like something a bird would build a nest in. She yawned so wide he saw her back molars.

"Eggs," she announced.

"I’ll make eggs."

"Obviously you’ll make eggs. I’m telling you what I want, not asking for volunteers." She swung her legs off the bed and stood, wobbling once before catching herself on the nightstand. Her hand went to her lower back for half a second, dropped, and she pretended the wobble never happened. She’d been doing that more often this week. Jordan noticed and didn’t say anything because Chloe had a rule about being noticed that she hadn’t written down but enforced with extreme prejudice.

She padded downstairs barefoot, and Jordan heard the coffee machine start before his feet hit the hardwood.

By the time he reached the kitchen, Chloe sat cross-legged on the island with her laptop open and a mug already in her hand, steam curling past her gold glasses. She looked like a very pretty gargoyle that had learned to use spreadsheets.

"Nineteen twelve became two thousand forty-one overnight," she said without looking up.

Jordan cracked three eggs into a bowl. "How."

"VOD. People watched the replay after we ended. Lila’s community shared clips. One of her moderators posted a thirty-second cut of the bridge on Twitter at eleven fourteen, and it has eight hundred retweets."

The egg Jordan was cracking missed the bowl. Shell fragments hit the counter, and yolk slid toward the edge like a suicide attempt.

"Eight hundred," he said.

"Don’t make it weird. It’s just a clip."

"Eight hundred retweets in seven hours is not just a clip, Chloe."

"It’s a clip that happens to be attached to a voice that made a girl in Lila’s chat type ’oh’ and nothing else for six seconds." Chloe scrolled, her blue streak falling across the glasses lens. "The conversion rate from Lila’s raid was fourteen point three percent, which is almost five times the platform average. Brooke sent me a graph at five AM that I’m choosing not to discuss because if I look at it too long I will throw up, and that has nothing to do with morning sickness."