Chapter 440 | The Girl Her Father Was Sure About

Chapter 440: 440 | The Girl Her Father Was Sure About

"Chloe-chan." Kumiko’s voice came out at about three decibels. "That was. That was."

She didn’t get to the end of the sentence. She turned to the monitor instead, clicked twice, and hit play.

The recording started.

Chloe listened to herself.

That was the part she hadn’t prepared for. Her own voice out of the studio monitors, clean, unprocessed, with all the air and the crack at the top of the bridge and the place where she’d gone slightly sharp and pushed through anyway because she’d stopped caring about being correct.

It sounded like a person.

It sounded like a person who wanted something.

Something in her chest came apart along a seam she hadn’t known was there, and she pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth and held it there.

"That’s my voice," she said.

"That’s your voice," Jordan said.

"No, that’s. That’s actually mine." She was going to be normal about this in a second, she just needed a second to arrive first. Her voice had gone high and thin in a way that embarrassed her. "That’s not Calypso. That’s not the thing I do for work. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t make a single decision in that whole take, I just opened my mouth and."

"I know."

Jordan stood up from where he’d been leaning against the console. He held out his hand, palm up, fingers relaxed.

Chloe looked at it for half a second before she took it. He pulled her off the stool and into him in one smooth motion, and it wasn’t a romantic hug, it wasn’t the kind that turned into something else eleven seconds later the way most of theirs did these days. He put one arm across her shoulder blades, solid and sure, and the other hand on the back of her head, fingers threading into her hair, and he held her there like a witness. Like somebody standing at the finish line of a race they’d been told about for weeks and had shown up to watch anyway.

She pressed her face into his collarbone, directly onto Kumiko’s bite mark where the skin was still warm, and breathed in soap and cedar and the shirt she’d picked out of his closet this morning because it was softer than hers.

Her shoulders shook once. She locked them down.

Over her shoulder she heard Kumiko drag her sleeve across her face, a wet scraping sound that came with a sniffle she didn’t even try to hide.

"Friday," Kumiko whispered to herself, thick and reverent, like a woman making a vow in an empty church with her hand on a bible. "We’re doing Friday. I’m calling everyone. I’m texting the group chat. Friday’s happening."

Jordan’s phone went off against Chloe’s hip. Two short pulses, the vibration traveling through both their bodies where they were pressed together.

He didn’t move to get it. Didn’t shift his weight or loosen his grip or do anything that suggested he was aware something in his pocket wanted his attention.

She pulled back after another few seconds and wiped under both eyes with her thumbs, which did absolutely nothing except smear the damage around, and made a decision about her dignity that involved pretending she still had some. "I need the bathroom."

"Take your time."

"I’m not crying."

"You’re crying a lot."

"I’m having a physiological response to sustained diaphragmatic engagement and emotional overflow. It’s a mechanical thing. Glands and ducts."

"Sure."

She made it to the bathroom on legs that felt like they’d forgotten what bones were for and shut the door and stood at the sink with the water running cold over her wrists, because she had read somewhere, probably in one of those wellness articles Instagram kept serving her, that cooling the pulse points brought your heart rate down when you were spiraling, and she had never tested it before tonight, and tonight she needed it to be true more than she needed most things.

Her reflection in the mirror had mascara under both eyes in uneven smudges. Her mouth was still open a little, the way it got when she couldn’t catch up to whatever was happening to her.

She looked absolutely wrecked.

She looked like the girl her father had been so sure about.

Out in the studio, she could hear the recording playing again, and then again, Kumiko looping the bridge over and over at low volume, and the small sound she made every time it came back around.

Chloe put both hands flat on the cold quartz and let herself want it, out loud, in her own head, in a full sentence with no hedge on the end.

Then she turned the tap off.

When she came back out, Kumiko had already moved on to the thumbnail. She had the file open on the second monitor with a frame pulled from the take, Chloe with her eyes closed and her throat exposed and the blue streak falling across her cheekbone, and she was setting type across the bottom in a serif font she’d probably spent forty minutes selecting.

DEBUT. VALENTINE’S DAY.

Jordan was by the desk with his phone in his hand, screen dark, thumb over the edge like he’d just closed something.

He looked up when Chloe came in and put the phone in his pocket without a word, which she filed away, because she filed everything away.

"How’s my face," she said.

"Destroyed."

"Good."

Kumiko spun around in the chair with both hands pressed flat against her own cheeks. "Chloe-chan, I need to know right now, because I have to commission the overlay and the artist needs seventy-two hours minimum and it’s already Wednesday and I refuse to rush a freelancer, that’s how you get ugly art and bad karma. So. I need to know. Please. Are we."

Chloe looked at the frozen frame of her own closed eyes on the second monitor.

"Okay," she said. "I’ll do Friday."

Kumiko made a sound that the acoustic foam was not built to contain.