Chapter 489 | Poets and Lawyers

Chapter 489: 489 | Poets and Lawyers

Nobody in Unit 404 moved for four full seconds, a historic event in an apartment where Kumiko lived next door.

Kumiko broke first. Her chin wobbled, then her whole face crumpled upward from the bottom, and she launched herself across the cushion and wrapped both arms around Alexis’s waist. Fwump. The couch springs squeaked under the new pink slipcover.

"You said here! You said it out loud and I heard it, so now it’s real, and you can’t take it back because Chloe has it on the pad!"

"I don’t have it on the pad."

"Then put it on the pad, Chloe-chan, please, this is a page forty-four moment!"

Chloe sighed through her nose and wrote four letters and underlined them twice. Chloe Kim underlining something carried the legal weight of a blood oath in all fifty states and most of Canada.

Alexis sat frozen with a hundred pounds of crying cosplayer clinging to her ribs, her hands floating an inch above Kumiko’s back. Eighteen years of air kisses at Balboa Bay had prepared her for many things. A full-body tackle from a girl in a lavender cardigan was outside the curriculum.

"What do I do with my hands right now?"

Jordan opened his mouth, closed it, and glanced at Chloe. Rule four had been extremely clear, and he enjoyed having a spleen.

"Timer’s off. You can talk," Chloe said without looking up.

"Pat her on the head. She’ll power down."

Alexis set one palm on Kumiko’s skull like she was defusing a bomb on a game show. Two pats. Kumiko made a sound halfway between a kitten and a tea kettle and melted harder into the silk.

"Yours is good but it’s not the same," Kumiko mumbled into Alexis’s stomach. "Jordan-kun’s is lavender with gold edges, and yours is more beige, but beige is a valid color and I respect it."

"What color is Chloe?"

"Chloe-chan doesn’t headpat." Kumiko didn’t lift her face. "Chloe-chan is the person who decides who gets headpats."

"Correct," Chloe said, writing.

"I’m beige?"

"Warm beige! Like a latte! It’s a compliment, I promise, Dr. Nakamura says beige is grounding."

Alexis looked at Jordan over Kumiko’s head: is this normal? Jordan shrugged one shoulder. Five weeks ago he’d have tried to explain Kumiko. Now he understood that Kumiko simply happened to people, like weather or student loans.

Chloe clicked her pen twice. It landed in the loft like a gavel.

"Okay. You’re not going to Balboa Bay on Thursday. What are you telling your mother?"

Alexis’s posture tried to snap to attention, failed somewhere around her collarbone, and slumped again. Five minutes under Jordan’s thumbs had left her no armor, and he felt a smug little glow about that, which he chose not to examine because Chloe was watching his face.

"I hadn’t gotten that far," Alexis admitted.

"You decided to blow up a merger between two shipping families in my living room, and you have no exit strategy?"

"I have slippers."

She lifted one foot off the rug. The pink terrycloth cat stared at the ceiling through its lopsided eye.

"Those are legally binding," Kumiko added, still attached. "Page twelve. They count as an exit strategy if you click your heels, I think. I didn’t write a clause for heel clicking."

Chloe wrote three lines. Jordan leaned over the arm of the couch to read them, because her handwriting moved faster than her mouth and revealed more.

THURS 7PM: HERE. NOT BBC.

TEXT MOTHER: MON AM. NOT TONIGHT.

DO NOT SEND ANYTHING AFTER 10PM.

"Why not tonight?" Alexis asked.

"Because after ten at night, everyone writes like a poet and reads like a lawyer." Chloe capped the pen. "You’ll type something beautiful and honest, and your mother will read it at breakfast like a deposition. Send it in the morning, after coffee, in four sentences or fewer."

"Four sentences won’t cover eighteen years."

"They don’t have to cover anything. They only need to say no."

"And if she says no back?"

"She will. Women like your mother don’t take a no, they invoice it." Chloe tapped the pad. "When the invoice comes, it’ll have a number on it, and we’ll deal with the number. That’s tomorrow’s problem. Tonight’s problem is Thursday."

Alexis stared at the pad for a long time. Her throat moved. Her hand drifted up toward the cord in her neck, stopped halfway, and dropped back into her lap. That was new.

Kumiko, still attached, reached up without looking and patted the hand where it had landed, the way you’d reward a dog for not barking.

His phone vibrated for the fourth time since dinner. He had ignored the first three like a hero, and now it was pulsing in his pocket like a smoke detector with a personal grudge.

"Look at it," Chloe said.

"You said no phones."

"I said no phones at dinner. Dinner ended when Kumiko started crying into Alexis’s pajamas."

Jordan thumbed it awake. The gold glowed bright enough to sting in the harbor dark.

ALEXIS VAN DER BERG

Chemistry: 64% → 67% (+3%)

Cause: Target issued her first verbal refusal of familial expectation. Note: She was not talking to you.

Below it, a second panel slid up, its gold border pulsing slow while it waited.

REGISTER TO SLOT 3? [YES] [NO]

His thumb froze. A month ago he’d have mashed that button hard enough to crack the glass. Today it just sat there, and he became extremely aware that three women on one couch could hear him breathe.

Chloe reached across the cushion and laid two fingers on his wrist. No press, no pull. She read the screen upside down.

"I know," Jordan told her.

"I didn’t say anything."

"Your fingers said it loud."

He tapped NO himself, before she needed to. The prompt dissolved into gold dust. Chloe’s eyebrow climbed one millimeter, which Jordan had learned to read as a standing ovation and a marching band combined.

He knew roughly what YES would have bought. A bigger board, a new line on the screen, more of whatever the System liked to hand out when he did what it wanted. He also knew what it would have cost, and the person it would have cost was sitting two feet away drinking cold tea, pretending she hadn’t been ready to watch him choose.

Alexis had watched the whole exchange with her chin propped on Kumiko’s head.

"What did it say?"

"Your number moved," Jordan admitted.

"To what?"

Chloe picked up her tea, which had gone cold an hour ago, and sipped it anyway, because Chloe never wasted anything she had already paid for.

"Sixty-seven."

Alexis went still. The wrinkled silk rose and fell twice.

"So I have a voice now."

"You had a voice before you walked in here. You used it ten minutes ago at full volume, and Miss Valentine texted to ask whether someone was bleeding."

"That’s not the same voice."

"It counted," Chloe said, and that was the end of the debate.

Alexis pressed her lips together. Jordan watched her decide not to argue, which looked like a skill she had picked up sometime in the last hour.

Down the hall, Miss Valentine’s oven chimed through two brick walls. Kumiko’s head came up so fast her twin tails whipped Jordan in the chin.

"That’s the second batch! She only makes a second batch when it’s an emergency or a celebration!" Her eyes went enormous and glassy again. "Alexis, you need to change, you can’t sleep in silk that has galbi marinade on the cuff."

Alexis looked down. A small brown smear of soy and sugar marked her left sleeve, right above the frayed black edge of the henley. Her face cycled through horror and grief and landed on betrayal.

"This set is Olivia von Halle. It was eleven hundred dollars."

"And now it’s eleven hundred dollars of marinade," Chloe said. "Cold water and dish soap, tonight, or it sets by morning."

"I am not wearing the cat."