Chapter 488 | I’m Coming Here

Chapter 488: 488 | I’m Coming Here

Kumiko made another small noise, higher this time, and her fingers pressed harder into Alexis’s arm, leaving crescents in the silk.

Chloe picked up the legal pad and wrote. The pen scratched loud in the quiet loft. When she finished, she turned the pad around.

Jordan leaned over to look.

ALEXIS CONDITIONS (PENDING 65)

No contact below the shoulders

Timer controlled by Chloe

Kumiko present

Jordan does not speak

"I’m on the list three times," Jordan said.

"You’re the list," Chloe said. "Read the verbs."

Alexis read it twice. Pink started at the edges of her jaw and spread toward her temples.

"You want me to sit here while he touches my shoulders, and I’m not allowed to hear his voice?"

"His voice does things," Kumiko explained. "It’s on page forty-one. Chloe banned it during performances because it makes her throat go hoarse, which is bad for singing, and also Chloe makes sounds when he uses it, and the sounds are very loud, and Miss Valentine bakes extra cookies when she hears them."

"Kumiko."

"I’m providing context! Context is important for informed consent!"

Chloe rubbed the bridge of her nose under her glasses.

"His voice has an effect. You already know his hands have an effect. Both at once, before you’ve decided what you actually want, would be unfair."

"Unfair to whom?"

"To you. You’ve never said no to anyone. I’m not letting the first thing you say yes to be something you can’t take back."

"And unfair to you?"

Chloe didn’t answer that one at all. She tapped the pad once with the pen, and Kumiko looked down at the rug.

Alexis stared at the pad. Then she took the pen from Chloe’s fingers, wrote something at the bottom, and turned it back around. Perfect handwriting, even upside down.

I get to say when it stops

Chloe read it. She looked at Jordan. She looked at Kumiko, who was vibrating on the cushion with both hands over her mouth and her eyes wet again.

"Fine," Chloe said. "Five minutes. Starting now."

She set a timer on her phone and laid it face up on her knee, where all three of them could see the numbers.

Jordan moved before his brain caught up. He shifted behind Alexis, knees on either side of her hips without touching them, palms an inch above her shoulders. The black cuff peeked from under her left sleeve. Cedar soap and expensive perfume, and under both, just her.

He set his hands on her shoulders.

"Nnnh!"

Alexis jerked forward. His palms sank into the silk, and heat poured out of him before he even pushed it. Master Massage engaged warm and deep, and he could feel every knot in her trapezius.

"Oh, oh god, that’s, hnnn, that’s not fair, Jordan."

He couldn’t answer. Chloe’s rules. He pressed his thumbs into the first knot instead, at the base of her neck where the cord ran up behind her ear, and Alexis’s spine went liquid.

"Ahhhh, wait, no, that spot, I can’t, nnnngh!"

Kumiko scrambled onto her knees and pressed both hands to her cheeks, twin tails swinging.

"Her face is doing the thing! The thing Chloe does! When her eyes go unfocused and her mouth goes soft and she forgets how to breathe!"

"Kumiko, stop narrating."

"I can’t! It’s too good! Page forty-two, sub-point C, witnessing!"

Jordan worked the knot in slow circles. It fought him for three rotations, then released with a soft pop he felt through both thumbs. Alexis made a sound that climbed out of her chest and ended in a wet gasp.

"Haaaaah, oh my god, that was, hnnnn, that was in there for years, I think that knot was from my mother telling me to sit up straight at my grandmother’s funeral, I was twelve!"

The next one sat lower, between shoulder blade and spine, a hard lump that predated him by a decade. He set both thumbs against it and pushed heat through.

"Nnnnaaaah! Jordan! It hurts but it’s good! Why does it hurt but it’s good!"

Chloe checked her phone. "Two minutes."

Her pen had stopped moving on the pad. Jordan caught her eyes over Alexis’s head for one second. She held them, unreadable, and then looked down at the timer as if it owed her money.

Every instinct he had wanted to tell Alexis to breathe. He couldn’t. So he breathed for her instead, slow and audible, close behind her ear, and after a few seconds her ragged breathing found his and followed it down.

Alexis’s hands flew up and grabbed his wrists. Her nails dug in, but she didn’t pull him away. She held him against the knot while her body shook.

"Don’t stop, don’t stop, please don’t stop. I know I said I get to say when, but I’m saying don’t stop."

Jordan pushed harder. The knot held for five seconds, ten, then broke apart under his thumbs. Alexis’s back arched off the couch, her head fell back against his chest, and what came out of her was not a moan and not a scream but somewhere in between.

"NNNNAAAAAAHHHH!"

It bounced off the factory windows and the brick and the acoustic panels in the corner. Down the hall, Miss Valentine’s oven timer went off. Kumiko fell sideways onto the cushion and covered her entire face.

"That was the loudest one yet! Louder than Chloe on Friday! I’m writing it down, I’m writing everything down, page forty-three!"

Jordan bit down on a laugh so hard his jaw creaked. Line four on the pad. He was not going to be the one who broke it.

Chloe’s phone buzzed. She looked at it, then at Jordan, one eyebrow up.

"Miss Valentine wants to know if someone is injured."

Alexis was still slumped against his chest, eyes closed, hands locked on his wrists. The silk had ridden up on one side, showing the hem of his black henley wrapped around her waist like armor.

"Tell her I’m fine," Alexis whispered. "Tell her I’ve never been this fine in my entire life."

Chloe typed with one thumb. Jordan read it upside down: nobody is injured. someone is being unknotted. send no cookies. Miss Valentine answered in under thirty seconds. Sending cookies.

"Time," Chloe said. "Off."

Jordan lifted his hands against the same magnetic pull as the headpat. Her fingers slipped off his wrists and fell into her lap.

She leaned on him for three more breaths. Then she sat up slowly, like someone leaving a dream on purpose.

"Thursday," she said. "I’m not going to the Balboa Bay Club on Thursday."

It came out bigger than the coin. Not much bigger. Enough.

Chloe uncapped her pen.

"Where are you going instead?"

Alexis turned and looked at Jordan. Hair wrecked, mascara worse, silk wrinkled, posture ruined. She looked more alive than he had ever seen her.

"Here," she said. "I’m coming here."