Chapter 391 | Heh.

Chapter 391: 391 | Heh.

"Or what."

There was nothing on the other end for about a second and a half, and then the line went dead with a small plastic click, and the screen swapped over to CALL ENDED, 4:17, with her contact photo sitting there staring at him. She’d never sent him a photo. His phone had scraped it off her socials on its own, some professionally lit shot of her at a yacht club in white linen with her hair doing that honey-blonde thing it did, looking directly into the camera like she was daring the photographer to charge her for it.

Jordan set the phone face down on the marble and grinned at himself in the mirror.

Heh. She was so much fun to mess with.

That was maybe the ugliest true thing about him at the moment, and he’d stopped pretending otherwise about three weeks ago. There was a girl in a gated estate in Newport with a father catching a six AM to Singapore and a mother who audited her dress choices at midnight, and she’d called him because she’d sat on a bathroom floor looking at a photo of him in foam mouse ears, and he’d made her make a noise she’d deny under oath, and then she’d hung up on him rather than admit anything out loud, and he had enjoyed every single second of it. He wasn’t going to dress that up as something noble. He liked winning. He liked that she’d called him first.

She’d come to him eventually. Chloe had said it in a kitchen with wet hair and no expression, and Chloe had never been wrong about a person yet.

He picked the phone back up, because leaving a phone alone was a skill he did not have and had never had, and the old version of him had refreshed a girl’s story forty times in one night, so at least the current version was doing it with better posture.

Instagram loaded slow on hotel wifi.

Her story ring was up. Eliza Hartwell, posted eleven minutes ago, which put it at 11:52 on a Saturday, which meant a house.

He tapped it.

Red cups on a granite island. Somebody’s off-campus place with the lights all the way up and the music loud enough that the audio clipped into static. Cameron sat on a barstool at the center of the frame with a Patagonia vest on over nothing, because of course, and he was mid-laugh with his head tipped back at something happening off camera to his left. His arm hung around Eliza’s waist without any particular attachment to it, the arm of a guy holding a jacket he wasn’t wearing yet.

And Eliza was smiling. The Instagram one. He knew that smile because he’d paid four thousand five hundred dollars over two months to receive it approximately twice a week. Full teeth, no eyes, the corners set at an angle she’d probably practiced in a mirror at fifteen. Her cream sweater was the one from the debate, and her hair had gone slightly flat in the back where she’d been leaning against something, and her eyes weren’t on the camera at all. They were doing the sweep. Scanning the room the way she always did, checking the exits and the hierarchy and who was watching whom.

There was another blonde half in frame with her hand on Cameron’s knee.

Jordan let the story run out and drop into the next one and then backed out of it without watching.

Fifty-eight percent, the app had told him at some point tonight, along with a note about eleven messages drafted and deleted since dinner. Eleven. Which meant she’d been standing in that kitchen with a plastic cup of warm vodka in her hand, typing something into her phone and erasing it, then typing it again, then erasing it, while the guy she’d traded him for explained something loudly to a girl whose name he’d forget by Tuesday.

Three months ago that would have gutted him. He’d have laid down on the tile and let it happen. He’d have written her a paragraph.

Instead there was just this low flat nothing, and under the nothing, a thing he didn’t especially want to name, which was that some part of him thought she was going to spend the next four years of her life in rooms exactly like that one, smiling with no eyes, while somebody’s arm hung on her like a coat.

Not his problem. He’d told her the truth in a smoothie shop with a straw in his mouth and she’d thanked him for not lying and then gone right back to the guy who couldn’t remember her name after nine PM.

Can’t save them all.

The joke didn’t land the way he wanted it to. It sat there in his chest with weight on it, which was annoying, because he’d been under the impression he was over this.

The shower had already shut off in the other bathroom. Through the suite he could hear Chloe moving around, the specific pattern of her walking on tile in bare feet, and further off, the low unbothered sound of Kumiko breathing on the bed with her whole body committed to it.

Jordan looked back at his own reflection.

Purple across the collarbone where Maya had put a body hook that morning, already going yellow at the edges. Kumiko’s bite on his shoulder, high and angry and not even a little bit apologetic. Chloe’s marks lower, four small crescents along his ribs, spaced out and thorough. A white towel hanging off his hips at an angle that was frankly doing some heavy lifting on his behalf. Six weeks of Iron Coast and clean protein and whatever the app had installed in him on that first bronze pull, stacked into a body he still occasionally didn’t recognize in glass.

And there, folded next to the guest towels on the counter, black felt and cheap foam and a hundred and eighteen dollars of theme park markup:

Mickey ears.

The idea arrived fully assembled, the way the good ones always did, right after the bad ones.

He put them on.

They didn’t sit right at first, and he adjusted the headband until the tension was even, and then he took a step back and looked at what he’d made. Six foot two of him in a white towel with a bruise, a bite mark, wet hair, and a pair of mouse ears adding four inches to the total height. The mirror lighting in the Grand Californian was absurdly good. Somebody had been paid a lot of money to make sure guests looked like the best version of themselves at midnight, and Jordan intended to abuse that for free.

He raised the phone, angled it so the towel line survived, and let his other hand fall loose at his side instead of flexing, because flexing was a tell.

The shutter went off with a soft artificial snap.

He looked at it.

It was obnoxious. It was completely, indefensibly obnoxious. His abs caught the light in a way that had nothing to do with anything he’d earned in a gym and everything to do with a gacha pull he’d gotten in a Target parking lot while crying about a girl. The bite mark was visible. So was the bruise. So were the ears, sitting on his head at a jaunty and profoundly stupid angle, which was the entire point, because a shirtless mirror selfie on its own was a cry for help and a shirtless mirror selfie in Mickey Mouse ears was a joke, and jokes let you get away with anything.

He typed the caption in under four seconds.

happiest place on earth