Chapter 485 | He’s Very Bad at Saying No to Sad Girls

Chapter 485: 485 | He’s Very Bad at Saying No to Sad Girls

It came out clipped and careful, each syllable handled like borrowed crystal. Kumiko made a sound like a deflating balloon and pressed both fists to her mouth. Chloe’s face did not move except for one corner of her lips.

"Your vowels are wrong, but your posture is perfect. Eat."

They ate. Jordan dropped the first piece of galbi into Alexis’s bowl before she could decide whether she was allowed to take one. She stared at it the way she had stared at the slippers.

"Nobody serves me. People pull my chair out, or they tell me what to order, but nobody puts food in my bowl."

"Welcome to Unit 404. Chloe puts food in everyone’s bowl and then counts how much they eat."

"I count your bites because you lie about them."

"I counted Chloe-chan’s bites at lunch and she had nineteen, which is a personal record, and Brooke said she’d make a graph."

Kumiko reached across and set a piece of sweet potato in Alexis’s bowl, next to the galbi. Chloe, without looking up, added spinach. Within ten seconds Alexis had more food in front of her than anyone at the table, and she sat looking at the pile like it had been delivered to the wrong address.

Alexis picked up the galbi. Textbook chopstick grip, the kind somebody beats into a kid at cotillion. She bit into it and stopped chewing. Her eyes went to Chloe and stayed there while she finished the bite and swallowed.

"That’s very good."

"I know it’s good. Have another."

Jordan watched Chloe watch her reach for the second piece. Whatever she had been undecided about at seven this morning, the marinade had decided it for her.

A second piece, then a third, then sweet potato she had to chase around the bowl because the honey kept sliding off. Somewhere around the fourth piece of galbi, her shoulders came down from her ears by a full inch.

Jordan tracked it the way he tracked Maya’s guard. His body ran that habit without permission now; he might as well use it on something besides getting punched.

His phone buzzed once against his thigh. He left it there. Whatever the System wanted could wait until he didn’t have three women watching him eat and pretending they weren’t grading every choice he made.

Chloe noticed. Her eyes flicked to his pocket and back, so fast he’d have missed it if he hadn’t been watching her profile. He gave her the smallest shake of his head. She went back to her rice, chopsticks in that efficient rhythm that meant she was counting something.

Kumiko vibrated in her seat, visibly holding three questions in at once. Alexis had stopped analyzing every bite and was just eating now, which Jordan decided to count as progress whether or not the System confirmed it.

The fridge got her around 7:40.

Alexis had stood to refill her water, waving off Kumiko’s offer like someone used to being served and tired of fighting about it. She stopped in front of the freezer door with the Brita pitcher in her hand. Jordan saw the sticky note at the same time she did, and every drop of blood in his body left for a better neighborhood.

65+ ONLY. DO NOT BE STUPID.

Under it, Kumiko’s stick figure: spiky hair, frowny face, thunderbolt over its head.

Alexis read the note. She tilted her head and read it again. The pitcher stayed perfectly level.

"Is that me?"

Kumiko made a noise like a kettle at the end of its life. Chloe set her chopsticks down with a tiny click.

"Yes, that’s you."

Jordan wanted to crawl under the island and live there with the rice cooker. He had a magic phone that rebuilt his skeleton and handed him a hot springs resort, and it still couldn’t spawn a trapdoor when he needed one.

"Sixty-five what?"

Chloe folded her hands on the table. Her voice stayed level and dry, a weather report about a hurricane.

"He has a number for you, and you’re at sixty-four. I don’t let him make decisions about people under sixty-five, because under sixty-five they don’t know what they want yet, and he’s very bad at saying no to sad girls."

"I’m excellent at saying no to sad girls. I said no to Alexis on a cliff."

"You said no to her with your hand on her jaw, Jordan, which Kumiko has described to me in detail on four separate occasions."

"Five," Kumiko whispered.

Alexis set the pitcher on the counter very gently and turned to look at each of them in turn. Jordan braced for the yacht club voice, the ice-pick one that cleared rooms at brunch.

Instead she laughed. It started small in her chest and climbed until she had to grab the counter, hair falling forward over the champagne silk. She laughed until a tear ran down to her jaw, and she wiped it on the henley cuff without thinking.

"You put me on the refrigerator. My mother keeps an empty Graff box on the kitchen island so the staff understand the tone of the household, and you put me on a sticky note with a cartoon."

"It’s a really good cartoon," Kumiko offered, wobbling.

"It’s a terrible cartoon. He doesn’t look anything like that."

"His hair does that when he wakes up," Chloe said, then caught herself and took a sip of water.

Alexis stopped laughing. She looked at Chloe for a long time, then at the note, and her shoulders came down another inch without her noticing.

"What happens at sixty-five?"

"Nothing happens. You get a voice. Right now you have a chair and slippers and a seat on the left side, and you’re welcome to all of it. But you don’t have a voice yet."

"And who decides when I have one?"

"You do. The number just tells him when to believe you."

"What if I lie?"

"Then it doesn’t move, and you still have a chair and slippers." Chloe picked her chopsticks back up. "Which, for the record, is more than I gave anyone in October."

A ferry horn sounded over the harbor, long and low, and Kumiko’s sniffle filled the gap after it.

Alexis walked back to her seat in the cat slippers and sat down. She picked up her chopsticks, and her hand shook just enough that they clicked together twice.

Jordan put another piece of galbi in her bowl. She didn’t say anything about it, and she didn’t move it to the side, either.

Sixty-four. One point, and a cartoon on a fridge.