Infinite Cashback System

Six forty-one arrived without an alarm, the way it always did now, his body running on a trait that had opinions about sunrise and had never once asked for his input.

Room service had come and gone at some point in the night. He found the evidence on the console table by the door: a stack of folded linens, a mattress protector still in its plastic sleeve, and a note in careful handwriting that read Hope you had a magical evening! with a little drawn star, which was either the most professional thing he had ever seen or a war crime, depending on how much a person knew about what had happened in that bathroom.

Chloe sat cross-legged on the couch under the window with her laptop balanced on one knee and a hotel mug going cold at her elbow. She had put on his gray henley again, the one he had stopped thinking of as his around Tuesday, and her hair had dried overnight into something wild that she clearly intended to ignore until it became somebody else’s problem. Numbers filled her screen in three columns. She had been awake for a while.

"Nine hundred and forty-two dollars yesterday," she said, not looking up. "Tickets, food, plush, ears, the suite. Rebate cleared at two thirty-one this morning. We’re up eleven hundred and forty."

"Good morning to you too."

"That was the good morning."

Kumiko had claimed the entire middle of the mattress at some point in the night and now lay diagonal across it with one arm flung off the edge, her mouth slightly open, her hair loose and everywhere because both ribbons had lost the war. She was in his shirt, the black one, which she had put on at two in the morning after announcing she needed something that smelled correct in order to achieve REM sleep. It had ridden up. He looked. He was a person of low character and had made peace with that around week three.

She made a small sound in her sleep and rolled toward the empty spot he had left behind, hand searching for it, finding nothing, and gripping a fistful of duvet instead.

"She does that," Chloe said. "You get up, she goes hunting."

"You’re doing math and surveillance at the same time."

"I contain multitudes."

He went into the bathroom that hadn’t flooded, and the shower in the Grand Californian was one of those absurd rain-head situations that turned water into a religious experience, and he had stopped being embarrassed about how much he liked it. Steam filled the glass in under a minute. He stood there with his forearms braced on the tile and let the heat work on the bruise Maya had planted across his collarbone, which had gone from purple into a color that suggested he had lost a fight with a fruit.

He heard the door open behind him at approximately the ninety-second mark.

"Um," Kumiko said, from somewhere near the sink, in the smallest voice she owned. "Hypothetically. If a person had a hypothetical hotel shower situation on page fourteen of a hypothetical itinerary."

"Get in here."

She got in there so fast she nearly took the glass door off its track, and then she stood in the spray blinking up at him like she had run out of plan the second the plan worked. Water flattened her hair against her shoulders in dark ribbons. She was five foot four with no platforms on and her forehead landed square in the middle of his chest, and when she pressed her palms flat against him she inhaled like she was checking the reading.

"You’re so warm," she breathed. "It’s not fair, it’s not a normal amount of warm, I think you have a fever, I think you have several fevers."

"Kumi."

"Nnh."

He got a hand on the back of her neck and kissed her, and the sound she made went straight down his spine and set up camp there. She rose onto her toes to chase it, both arms winding around his ribs, and her mouth tasted like hotel toothpaste and the strawberry balm she reapplied compulsively even in water. Steam rolled off both of them. His other hand slid down over the small of her back and lower, and she squeaked into his mouth, hips tilting forward on instinct.

"Mmh, wait, wait, I have to say something first."

"Say it."

"I liked yesterday more than any day of my entire life," she said in a rush, forehead against his sternum, water running off her chin, "and I’m not saying that to be dramatic, I did the ranking, I actually did the ranking at four in the morning on my phone, and yesterday came in first over my sixteenth birthday and the day I got verified, and I know that’s insane, and I don’t care."

He tipped her chin up. Her eyes were wet, which meant nothing, because her eyes were wet at parades and butter knives.

"That’s the last thing you get to say."

"Okay," she whispered.

He backed her into the tile, one hand under her thigh to hook it up over his hip, and she went ah on the impact, sharp and startled and delighted, palms slapping flat against wet stone for purchase. The water hammered down between them. Her free hand went into his hair and pulled hard enough to sting.

She was so small in his hands. Every single time it hit him fresh and did something ugly and satisfying to his brain, and he had stopped pretending otherwise sometime around the second week.

When he found her with his fingers she went boneless in a full-body drop, only his forearm keeping her upright, her voice climbing straight through the steam. "Ah, ah, Jordan-kun, that’s, mmh, that’s not fair, I had a whole speech, I had bullet points."

"Present them."

"I can’t, they’re gone, you deleted them, you always delete them, hnn."

Chloe’s voice came through the door with no urgency whatsoever. "Eight minutes until park hopper window opens, and I can hear you both through two walls, which means I can also hear the wall."

"She can’t hear the wall," Kumiko gasped.