Chapter 436 | Good in Private

Chapter 436: 436 | Good in Private

Chloe woke up loose. That was the word for it. Loose, like someone had gone through her body overnight and unscrewed every bolt she’d been tightening since she was fourteen.

She hated how good it felt.

She sat in the passenger seat of Jordan’s Civic with her phone in her lap and the seatbelt cutting across a body that didn’t ache anywhere, and that was the problem, because Chloe Kim always ached somewhere. Her lower back from editing. Her jaw from the thing her dentist called clenching and she called Tuesday. The knot below her right shoulder blade that had lived there so long she’d stopped thinking of it as tension and started thinking of it as a part of her anatomy.

Gone. All of it. Erased by his hands in the dark while she’d made sounds she was pretending not to remember.

And then everything after his hands. Which she was also pretending not to remember, and failing, because her thighs still had the specific ache of that, the good ache, the one she wanted on repeat for the rest of her natural life.

The car smelled like the vanilla air freshener she’d made him buy and the coffee in the cupholder and him. She scrolled.

Kumiko’s content calendar filled her screen in seven different pastel colors, because Kumiko didn’t understand that spreadsheets were supposed to be legible. Chloe’s eyes found her own row anyway. She’d built enough spreadsheets to read anyone’s.

Friday, February 14th. StellarNote Debut Stream. Singing Cover Set plus Original Announcement.

Below it, because Kumiko had written the calendar out by hand on paper first and photographed it and pasted the photo into the actual document like a psychopath, there was a note in bubbly pink handwriting.

Chloe-chan’s beautiful voice deserves the world!!!

Seventeen heart emojis. Chloe counted them. She always counted things.

Her throat closed. Not metaphorically. Her actual throat, the mechanism she was apparently supposed to open in front of the entire internet in eleven days, decided to seize up in the passenger seat of a Honda Civic doing forty-two in a thirty-five.

She locked the phone.

"You okay?" Jordan didn’t look at her. He kept his eyes on the road because she’d trained him to, and both hands on the wheel because his grandmother had trained him to, and there was something obscene about how a person could be that thoughtful about lane changes and also make her forget her own middle name with a back rub.

"I’m fine."

"You went quiet. The bad kind of quiet. Not the plotting kind."

She turned her head and looked at his profile. The jaw she’d watched his sister examine like a chart. The dirty blonde catching the morning light. Six weeks ago she’d charged this man three thousand dollars to sit across from her while she wore a mask, and now he could read the difference between her quiets.

That was worse than the countdown, somehow.

"I haven’t sung in a big public space since my dad’s funeral," she said.

Jordan didn’t say anything. He was learning, finally, that she didn’t need a reaction. She needed a place to put the sentence down.

"It was thirty people," she went on. Her voice came out flat because flat was the only setting that wouldn’t crack. "In a funeral home in Koreatown with the cheap chairs and the box of tissues on every surface. Everyone there already knew me. Everyone there already loved him. I sang the song he liked, the one he used to hum while he steamed shirts, and I got through it because they wanted me to get through it. They were on my side before I opened my mouth."

She looked back at the windshield.

"Friday isn’t thirty people who loved my dad. Friday is the internet. The internet doesn’t come pre-loaded on your side. The internet is a comment section that will tell me my pitch is flat and my song is derivative and I look better with a mask, and Kumiko put a countdown on the Nova Network Twitter, so I can’t even quietly not do it."

"You don’t have to do Friday."

"There’s a countdown."

"So the countdown’s wrong." He said it the way he said things now, without the little upward tilt at the end that used to make everything he said sound like a question begging for approval. "You sing when you’re ready. Not when a Twitter graphic tells you to."

"Kumiko commissioned art." Chloe heard her own voice climbing and shoved it back down. "She paid a Korean illustrator on Twitter forty dollars for a debut card of a girl with a blue streak holding a microphone with stars behind her. She’s been posting it for three days. She made a countdown. She made a hashtag. StellarNoteDebut, she checked, it was available, she was so happy the hashtag was available."

"Chloe."

"There are eleven people already following the account who don’t know either of us. Eleven. Which is eleven more than I earned, and they’re waiting."

"Chloe."

He pulled into a spot in the north structure, third level, the one they always ended up on because their identical Civics had apparently agreed on a favorite floor. He killed the engine. The garage went quiet except for the tick of the cooling motor and somebody’s bass three rows over.

He turned in his seat to face her. Actually turned, shoulder against the door, the whole of his attention aimed at the side of her face like a lamp.

"Fuck the countdown," Jordan said.

She kept her eyes forward. Out the windshield, past the concrete pillar with a faded three painted on it, at the strip of gray morning she could see through the structure’s open side. A palm tree. Another palm tree. Southern California’s entire personality.

"Kumiko will be crushed."

"Kumiko will move the date and post a new graphic and turn the delay into a whole emotional arc with a subtitle. You know her. She’ll make it more content." His voice softened without going anywhere near pity, which was the only reason she could stand to listen to it. "She wants you to sing because she thinks it’ll make you happy. Not because there’s a graphic. If the graphic’s the thing hurting you, then the graphic loses. That’s not even a hard call."

Chloe’s fingers found the hem of her cropped sweater. She twisted it. She caught herself twisting it and made herself stop, because giving something away with her hands was a rookie mistake and she wasn’t a rookie at anything.

She’d been so good, for so long, at not wanting things out loud. Her father had died wanting things out loud. He’d stood over a steam press in a building that smelled like solvent for twelve hours a day, and he’d wanted a house they could own and a car that didn’t need a jump in December and a daughter who’d hear her own song on the radio someday, and he’d said all of it out loud, right up until the four months where the cancer took the wanting and then took him.

She’d decided somewhere in that funeral home, in the cheap chair, with the song still raw in her throat, that she would never want anything out loud again. Wanting out loud was how you got flattened. You kept the want locked in a spreadsheet where nobody could see the size of it, and you fed it in small careful amounts, and you never, ever let it stand up in front of a camera without a mask.

"What if I’m only good in private," she said.