"Why what?"
"Why are you okay with this? Two days ago you said you don’t share well. Your exact words."
Chloe’s jaw worked. The first crack in her composure. She looked out the passenger window at a surfboard shop sliding past on PCH, then back at him.
"I don’t. I hate it. The idea of watching another girl kiss you makes want to throw up and then set sothing on fire." She spoke plainly, without self-pity or performance. "But you told your grandfather’s will requires three. I agreed to be the first. And if it has to happen, if so other girl has to be part of your life that way, I would rather it be soone I already love than soone I have to learn to tolerate."
The red light at the Jamboree intersection caught them. Jordan stopped the car. The engine idled. A seagull landed on the dian and stared at them with the empty hostility that all California seagulls possessed as standard equipnt.
"You love Kumiko?"
"She’s my best friend. She drove forty-five minutes to help build a computer. She threatened to break your kneecaps if you hurt and then imdiately started planning our wedding. She is the only person besides you who knows about Calypso and has never once made feel ashad of it." Chloe paused. Her hand found his on the center console again.
"If I have to share you, Jordan, I want it to be with soone who will actually take care of you and not just take from you. Kumiko would take care of you."
From the backseat, a faint snore. Kumiko’s head had tilted further against the window, her twin tails pressed flat against the glass, and her mouth had opened wider. A thin line of drool traced from the corner of her lip toward her chin. Her thigh-high socks had wrinkled at the knees, and one of her platform sneakers had co untied during the drive. The Pocky stick had fallen from her fingers and now rested in the crease of the seat cushion.
She looked ridiculous. She looked adorable. She looked like soone who gave everything she had to every person she cared about and received significantly less in return.
The light turned green. Jordan drove.
His mind was doing that thing again where it tried to process too many threads at once and instead of handling them sequentially, just threw all of them into the air like a juggler who forgot he only had two hands. Thread one: Chloe was giving him permission. Not begrudgingly, not under duress, but with the calculated pragmatism of soone who had weighed every option and decided that controlling the variable was better than being blindsided by it. Thread two: Kumiko had feelings for him. Real ones. The kind that made her blush at his bare chest and stutter when their fingers touched and stare at the back of his head during class with the intensity of soone morizing the shape of his skull. Thread three: the System wanted this. The registration prompt waited in his pocket like a loaded weapon, counting down forty-seven hours to a deadline he still didn’t fully understand.
Thread four: so part of Jordan wanted this too.
He hated that thread. He wanted to delete it, quarantine it, pretend it didn’t exist. Because wanting two girls made him feel like the exact kind of person he had spent the last two weeks trying not to be. The old Jordan had thrown money at a single girl who didn’t care about him and called it love. The new Jordan was supposed to be better than that, supposed to build real connections with real people and not treat won like collectible items in a gacha system that literally treated won like collectible items in a gacha system.
But Kumiko’s face when she sang at karaoke. The way her voice blended with his during their duet. Her fingers on his wrist when she didn’t want him to leave the coffee table. The strawberry-printed underwear peeking out from under her skirt when she crawled under a desk to plug in cables. The vulnerability in her voice at the Best Buy parking lot when she asked him if he thought she was pretty, really pretty, not just cute.
Jordan breathed through his nose and kept driving.
"You don’t have to decide right now," Chloe said.
"No?"
"No. I’m just telling you where I am. Where she is." Chloe looked at her fingernails, which she had painted a matte blue that matched her hair streak earlier that week. "If you want to talk to her about it, I’ll support you. If you need more ti, that’s fine too. But the countdown is happening whether we discuss it or not."
Jordan’s blood went cold. "What countdown?"
Chloe turned to him with her lips pressed together. "Jordan. I’m not stupid. You check your phone every thirty minutes and your face does this thing where one eye twitches when a notification cos in. Sothing is tracking us. I don’t know what it is and I don’t know how it works, but there’s obviously a ti limit on sothing, and you’ve been getting more tense about it every day."
The car rolled to a stop at another red light. Jordan’s grip on the wheel was so tight that his forearms trembled.
She didn’t know about the System. She couldn’t. But she knew sothing was there, lurking at the edges of his behavior, shaping his decisions in ways that a normal eighteen-year-old’s choices shouldn’t be shaped. Chloe Kim, who maintained two entire identities and tracked her inco on color-coded spreadsheets, who had survived an abusive industry and a dead father and a family teetering on financial ruin, this girl was too perceptive and too damn smart to miss the patterns.
"It’s complicated," Jordan said. The understatent of the century. The understatent of every century.
"Everything with you is complicated." Chloe smiled. It was a small smile, tired around the edges but real. "I’m still here."
Jordan looked at her. Really looked. At the blue streak in her black hair and the faint freckles across her nose that her cara never captured and the curve of her jaw and the soft fullness of her lower lip. He thought about the first ti he saw her at The Ivy, wearing a mask and sunglasses and treating him like a client. He thought about her slamming the door in his face when he knocked with a borrowed excuse about sugar. He thought about her laughing at horror movies and burning the roof of her mouth on Korean takeout and singing in her sleep and telling his mother that her father died while maintaining the most gracious composure he had ever witnessed from any human being.
He thought about the word she whispered when she was ninety percent asleep and probably didn’t rember.
Love you.
"Okay," Jordan said.
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