Chapter 395 | Stop Apologizing and Come

Chapter 395: 395 | Stop Apologizing and Come

Insulting was a strong word.

Kumiko filed it anyway, in the part of her brain that kept receipts, right next to you’re being polite and the exact temperature of Jordan’s neck against her forehead, which was warmer than a person should be, which she had raised as a medical concern twice now and been ignored both times.

"I’m not being polite," she said into his shoulder. "I’m being considerate. Those are different. Dr. Nakamura says considerate is a boundary and polite is a mask, and I’m—"

Jordan moved his hips up.

The rest of the sentence left her entirely. It did not trail off. It got deleted, the whole clause, the citation, the therapist, gone, and what came out of her mouth instead was loud enough that she heard it bounce off the window glass and come back.

"There it is," Chloe said from the bed.

Kumiko’s face went so hot she could feel it in her ears. She had a fully formed apology ready, three sentences, she could see the shape of it, and then Jordan’s hand slid up under her skirt and found the elastic at her hip and pulled, and the apology got deleted too.

She was going to have to start writing things down faster.

He got her out of her underwear without putting her down, which should not have been possible, and which she was going to think about later at four in the morning while pretending to sleep. Her knees came off the mattress and back onto it and then she was bare against his lap with her skirt pooled around both of them like a very small tent, and she made a sound she had never made in front of another human being.

"Okay," she whispered. "Okay okay okay."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

She reached down between them because she could not stand another second of not, and her fingers closed around him, and her whole nervous system stalled out. She had seen it. Repeatedly. She had a mental file. The file was not adequate.

"That’s not fair," she said.

"You say that a lot too."

"Because it’s a pattern."

She lifted up on her knees and lined him up, and her thighs shook, and she hated that, she wanted to be smooth about this at least once, she had watched a video, there had been guidance about hip mechanics and it had all seemed manageable at two in the morning with a notebook open.

She sank down an inch and stopped.

Every thought she had ever produced in her entire life went somewhere quiet.

"Breathe," Chloe said. She had not moved her arm off her eyes. "You hold your breath and then you panic about not breathing. Just breathe first and skip the middle part."

Kumiko breathed. It came out wrecked.

She went down another inch. Then another. It burned in a way that was not bad, it was the specific burn of something too big being accommodated by a body that had decided to accommodate it, and her hands scrabbled flat on Jordan’s chest for something to hold. She found the bite mark she had left last night. She pressed her palm over it on purpose.

Mine, said the part of her brain she was not supposed to let drive.

She dropped the last of the way and her voice broke in half.

"Kumi."

"Don’t," she gasped. "Don’t say my name in the voice, I will die, I will actually die in a hotel."

He said it in the voice.

Her back arched so hard she nearly went over backward, and his arm came around her waist and held her there, and she rocked forward into him with no rhythm at all, no plan, no version eight, just her hips moving because her hips had decided things without consulting her.

"There," Chloe said. "That’s the volume."

Kumiko turned her head. Chloe had moved her arm. She was propped on one elbow, hair a catastrophe, brown eyes without the blue over them, and she was watching with an expression that was not jealousy and was not permission either. It was closer to how she looked at a good spreadsheet.

"You’re watching," Kumiko said.

"I’m resting."

"You’re watching while resting."

"Multitasking."

Kumiko should have been mortified. She had a whole architecture built for being mortified, and it did not deploy. Instead something warm cracked open under her ribs, because Chloe Kim was lying three feet away in Jordan’s henley with her hand on her own stomach, and she was not leaving, and she was not asking Kumiko to be smaller.

Nobody had ever let her be this size before.

"Chloe-chan."

"Mm."

"I love you so much I’m going to be sick."

"Please don’t. Not on the four hundred dollar deposit."

Jordan laughed and it moved through both of them, and Kumiko laughed and it turned into a moan halfway out, and then he got both hands on her hips and took over, and after that she stopped participating in the conversation.

He lifted her almost off and brought her back down slow, and she felt every part of it, every inch, and she said things. She did not know what she said. Some of it was Japanese. Some of it was his name with the honorific and some of it was his name without, and the without felt so naked in her mouth that she used it again just to feel it.

"Jordan."

"Yeah."

"Jordan, Jordan, that’s, right there, that’s the, hnh, that’s the spot from Tuesday."

"I remember Tuesday."

"You remember—"

He hit it again, harder, and the sentence ended in a noise that would definitely reach the hallway.

Her hair was in her mouth. One ribbon had surrendered in the shower and the other was hanging on by nothing, and she felt it slide out and land somewhere behind her, nine dollars from a cart on Main Street, unrecoverable, she would allocate for it later.

Her thighs gave out at some point. She did not notice it happen. She just registered that she was no longer doing any of the work and Jordan was doing all of it and the mattress was making a sound like a complaint, and Chloe had said something about the mattress, something about a protector, and Kumiko wanted to be a person who thought about mattress protectors and she was not, she was a person clinging to a boy’s shoulders getting taken apart in a room that cost more than her rent.

"I’m close," she said. "I’m close, I’m sorry, that was fast, that was really fast, I know that was—"

"Kumi."

"Mmh?"

"Stop apologizing and come."