Chapter 437 | Mediocre Is Not Your Word

Chapter 437: 437 | Mediocre Is Not Your Word

It came out barely above the tick of the engine. She didn’t recognize the version of her own voice that said it. Small. Undefended. The version she’d buried in the funeral home.

"What if the thing that made Karina cry was a fluke. A trick of that studio and that piano and the fact that nobody was watching except a coach who’s paid to be encouraging. What if I get one red dot in the corner of a screen and a chat scrolling and I open my mouth and I’m just." She swallowed. The word tasted like nothing. "Mediocre."

Jordan didn’t hesitate. That was the thing about him now, the thing that still caught her off guard, the total absence of the pause where a normal boy would decide whether the truth was worth the risk.

"Then you’re mediocre and we try again."

She turned to look at him.

"But you won’t be," he said. "You’re not going to be. I’ve heard you. Karina heard you. Kumiko heard you and she has perfect pitch and a Fine Arts degree in progress and a spine made of hearts, and she still went home and paid a stranger forty dollars to draw you holding a microphone because she couldn’t hold in how much she believed in it."

"You don’t know that." Her eyes stung. She blinked it flat. "You can’t know that. Nobody can know that. That’s the whole point of doing it live. You don’t find out until you’re already inside it, and by then it’s too late to take it back, it’s on the VOD forever, it’s."

"I have a magic phone."

She stopped.

"That tracks attraction," Jordan said. "You know this. You’ve seen it. You yelled at me about the incest buff for twenty minutes. That phone told me you hit a hundred percent. Maxed out. Off the top of the chart. And you want to tell me it doesn’t know when something’s real?" He tilted his head. "I’ve spent six weeks learning that thing measures the truth even when I don’t want it to. Especially when I don’t want it to. It doesn’t lie. It doesn’t inflate. It graded me for buying you a boba and it graded me for lying to you and it graded me at a hundred percent for a girl who can strip the paint off a bathroom wall with one look."

Chloe’s mouth did something. Not a smile. The muscles that ran a smile, testing themselves.

"That’s not the same thing as being able to sing."

"No," Jordan agreed. "But it means my read on you is calibrated. And my read says the girl who sang Someone Like You in a soundproof room and made a forty-something vocal coach forget how to play piano is not going to get in front of a camera and be mediocre. She might get scared. She might crack on the bridge. She might forget the second verse and swear in Korean." A corner of his mouth went up. "But she’s not going to be mediocre. That word doesn’t have anything to do with you. It never has."

Somewhere three rows over, the bass cut off. A car door slammed. Two guys started arguing about a parking angle in the cheerful way of people who weren’t actually mad.

Chloe let out a breath she’d been holding since the calendar.

"Wednesday," she said.

Jordan waited.

"I’ll do a test stream Wednesday night. Private. Unlisted link. Nobody in the chat except you and Kumiko, and Kumiko has to promise she won’t type in all caps or send more than one emoji per message, because if I see seventeen hearts scroll by while I’m trying to hit a note I will close the laptop and quit music forever." She said it fast, the way she laid out terms, one clause locking into the next. "If I can perform through a camera. If I can open my mouth with a red dot on and not dissolve. Then Friday happens. If I hate it. If it feels like the mask coming off in the wrong way. Then we postpone, Kumiko makes her new graphic, and I owe you nothing, and you never say I told you so."

"I would never say I told you so."

"You absolutely would."

"I’d think it very loudly and say something worse."

She almost laughed. She caught it in her teeth.

"Wednesday," Jordan said. "Private. One emoji per message. I’ll write the rules into the group chat myself so it’s on record and Kumiko can’t claim she didn’t agree." He reached over and pushed the loose blue streak off her cheek, the gesture he’d learned without her ever teaching it to him. His thumb was warm. Everything about him was warm now, some System thing he’d tried to explain and she’d only half believed until his hands last night. "Deal?"

"Deal."

They got out. The morning had that flat coastal gray that would burn off by ten and pretend it had never happened. Students moved across the top of the structure toward the pedestrian bridge, backpacks and iced coffees and the particular slump of an eight-fifty.

Chloe fell into step beside him. And then, because her body had been unscrewed overnight and hadn’t fully tightened back up, because the fear had made her honest and honesty was contagious and Jordan McKnight had somehow become the one place she could set a sentence down and trust it wouldn’t be used against her, she reached over and took his hand.

In public. On campus. Where anyone from Alexis’s circle could see and it would be on someone’s story by lunch.

She laced her fingers through his and felt him go briefly still with surprise before he closed his hand around hers like he’d been waiting for it his whole life.

"If I’m bad," Chloe said, eyes forward, watching the bridge, "you have to tell me. Wednesday. To my face. You have to actually tell me and not do the thing."

"What thing."

"The supportive boyfriend thing. The thing where you look at me with your dumb warm eyes and say it was really good, babe, in the voice, and I know you’re lying, and then I can never trust another thing you say about my singing for the rest of my life." She squeezed his hand hard enough to feel his knuckles. "If it’s bad, I need it to be bad out loud. From you. Because you’re the only person whose read I actually trust, and if you protect me from the truth you break the one instrument I have."

He was quiet for four steps. She counted them.

"Deal," he said. "If you’re bad, I’ll write you a full developmental edit."

She glanced up at him.

"With citations," Jordan said. "Timestamps. A rubric. I’ll cc Brooke so it’s peer-reviewed. I’ll grade your breath support on a five-point scale and note the exact second your pitch went flat and I’ll footnote a comparison track so you know what I mean. I’ll be so brutally, clinically honest you’ll wish I’d done the voice."

Chloe looked back at the bridge.

The palm trees. The gray. The eleven strangers already waiting on an account she hadn’t earned.

Her mouth won this time. The smile got all the way to the surface before she could stop it, small and real and pointed at the concrete so he wouldn’t see her give it away.

"Okay," she said. "Good."