Infinite Cashback System

"I can hear the wall."

He laughed against Kumiko’s throat, which made her laugh, which broke into a sound that was neither of those things when he shifted his hand, and after that the only thing coming out of her was noise.

Water and tile and the wet slap of skin, and a high thin cry when it hit her, spine bowing off the wall, both hands locked in his hair like she meant to keep them there permanently.

She slid down the tile into a sitting position afterward and stayed there with her knees up and her mouth open and her hair plastered over one eye, breathing hard, looking up at him with an expression that had no defenses in it at all.

"I’m going to be late to a thing I don’t have," she said.

Chloe took her turn while Kumiko sat on the closed toilet lid in a towel narrating hotel amenities and pretending she was not watching, and she was watching, and both of them knew it, and Chloe had a private opinion about being watched that she expressed only in how loud she let herself be.

They got to California Adventure at eight fifty-two, which put them eleven minutes behind version eight of the spreadsheet.

"It’s fine," Kumiko said, in the voice of a person for whom it was not fine. "It’s fine, I built in a buffer, the buffer was for exactly this, the buffer was for shower-related delays, I labeled the column Contingency: Boyfriend."

"You put me in a spreadsheet as a delay factor."

"I put you in a spreadsheet as a variable."

Chloe walked between them at what she had officially designated pregnant speed and what Kumiko had unofficially designated grandma speed, one hand hooked through Jordan’s elbow, sunglasses on, sipping something iced that she had made him buy on the esplanade for nine dollars because a nine-dollar cold brew at 1.58x came back at fourteen and change, and she had explained the arbitrage to him twice already like he was slow.

Buena Vista Street looked like a movie set of a city that never existed, all red brick and gold lettering and a Red Car trolley trundling past on rails. Kumiko photographed the trolley. Kumiko photographed the trolley driver, who waved. Kumiko photographed a trash can because the font on it was, apparently, historically accurate.

Guardians of the Galaxy first, because the drop tower ate its queue in the morning and grew a hundred-minute tail by noon, and because Kumiko wanted to hear Chloe scream.

Chloe did not scream. Chloe grabbed his forearm on the first freefall and dug in hard enough to leave four crescents alongside the four crescents she had already left the night before, and when they came off the ride her hair was destroyed and her sunglasses were somewhere in her lap and she said, flatly, "Never again," and then rode it a second time forty minutes later.

Incredicoaster launched them out over the boardwalk at fifty-five miles an hour, and Kumiko screamed the entire nine hundred feet in a single sustained note with her arms straight up, and the on-ride photo came out with Jordan looking directly into the camera like he had personally arranged the physics of it, which he had not, and which he bought anyway for twenty-two dollars.

"You look so smug," Chloe said, studying the print.

"That’s my face."

"That’s a choice you’re making with your face."

Toy Story Midway Mania went badly for him. Kumiko put up two hundred and forty thousand points and did a victory dance in the exit corridor that drew applause from a family of six, and Jordan came in third behind Chloe, who had not appeared to be trying, and who then explained the ring-toss multiplier to him in the voice she used for lease paperwork.

They ate lunch in Cars Land under an umbrella at one fifteen because Chloe had located the shade in advance, and she got plain rice and a ginger ale and ate approximately nine bites of it, and Jordan noticed and did not comment, and she caught him noticing and put her hand on his knee under the table and left it there.

Kumiko got a churro at two, and a second churro at two-forty, and mounted a defense of the second churro that involved the phrase "amortized over the full day."

By three-thirty his phone had thirty-one unread messages and he had looked at none of them. Kyle had sent eleven. Leo had sent voice memos, plural, which Jordan intended to die without hearing. Brooke had sent an engagement report with a graph attached, which he did open, because the graph was genuinely beautiful and she had color-coded it, and because the last line said For clarity, I did not stay up to build this. I was already awake.

Chloe called the break at three-fifty in front of the Little Mermaid ride, which she described as the exact moment her feet stopped belonging to her.

The suite was cool and dim and the housekeeping team had made the bed with the kind of hospital-corner discipline that felt like a passive-aggressive statement about the previous night. Chloe went horizontal on top of the duvet without removing her shoes, one arm across her eyes.

"Ninety minutes," she said. "Somebody take my sneakers off. I’m not asking. It’s happening."

Kumiko took her sneakers off. Kumiko also took her socks off, and folded them, and set them on the nightstand in a small paired stack, and then sat on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap looking at nothing in a way that meant she was building up to something.

"Say it," Jordan said.

"There’s a thing on page nineteen," she said, to the carpet. "It’s just. Chloe-chan needs to rest and I don’t want to be loud and I know I’m loud, I’m aware, everyone’s aware, the wall is aware."

Chloe spoke from under her arm without moving. "You have my blessing to be loud."

"That’s the opposite of the problem I described."

He caught her wrist and pulled, and she came off the mattress edge and into his lap facing him without any resistance at all, which was the whole trouble with Kumiko, she never resisted anything she wanted, she just apologized while it happened. Her skirt bunched. Her hands landed on his shoulders and stayed.

"Oh," she said.

"Yeah."

"Oh, that’s, mmh, that’s already."

"Yeah."

He got a hand on the back of her head, thumb finding the part in her hair, and the trait went off like a struck match. Everything in her let go at once. Her shoulders dropped, her spine curved forward, and the sound she made was low and long and had nothing to do with words.

"Hnnh, that’s cheating, you always cheat, you cheat constantly."

"You keep letting me."

"I’m going to write that down."

He kissed the mark he had left on her collarbone the night before and she rolled her hips down against him, and after that she quit narrating. She went quiet in a way she never was anywhere else, forehead pressed into his neck, breath coming in these small broken hitches against his skin, and the only sounds in the room were fabric and the slick catch of movement and her going ah, ah, ah into his shoulder while she tried very hard to be considerate about it.

She failed around the four-minute mark.

"Louder," Chloe said, still flat on her back with her arm over her eyes. "You’re being polite. It’s insulting."