Chapter 70: 70 | A Weather Forecast [CASTLE BONUS]

The knock came at seven forty-four.

Chloe knew it was Jordan before she opened the door. She knew because she had been standing six feet away from it for the last three minutes, checking her reflection in the dark screen of her burner phone and second-guessing the outfit she had changed into twice already.

She opened the door.

Jordan stood in the hallway in dark jeans and a fitted black henley with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, his hair sitting perfect without looking like he tried, and his hazel eyes did this thing where they went from her face to her body and back again so fast she almost missed it.

Almost.

"Hey," he said.

That was it. Just hey. But his voice had this weight to it now, this low resonance that settled somewhere behind her sternum and stayed there.

Chloe had dressed in a white babydoll top that sat off her shoulders and a black pleated mini skirt that ended four inches above her knee, with black thigh-high socks and white platform sneakers. Her hair was down. The blue streak caught the hallway light. She had done her makeup soft, just a little liner and gloss, the kind that made her look like she woke up this way.

She knew she looked good.

She still had to actively stop herself from reaching for the doorframe.

"You clean up well," she said.

Jordan’s mouth pulled at the corner. "You’re trying to make me skip karaoke."

"I’m really not." She grabbed her bag from the hook beside the door. "I’m actually really good at karaoke."

"Yeah?"

"Like, embarrassingly good." She stepped into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind her. "Don’t be surprised if Kumiko cries."

Jordan laughed. It was a real one, the kind that started in his chest and didn’t perform for anybody. Chloe noticed. She noticed more things about him than she should have.

They took the elevator down. Jordan reached over and took her hand in the lobby without asking, just slid his fingers between hers like it was something they had always done, and Chloe’s stomach did something embarrassing. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

She stared at their hands.

His were bigger than hers. Warm. He had nice hands, which was its own problem because she kept thinking about what those hands had done to her hours ago and that was not a productive line of thinking for someone trying to survive a public outing.

The parking garage was quiet. Their footsteps echoed against the concrete as they walked to his Civic. He opened the passenger door for her without making it a big deal, just opened it and waited, and Chloe slid in and pulled her skirt down and told herself to get it together.

He got in on his side. Started the engine. The GPS said thirty-two minutes to Brass Monkey in Koreatown.

"Nervous?" he asked.

"About karaoke?" She turned to look at him. "No."

"You keep pulling your skirt down."

Her face went warm. "That’s because it’s short."

"I know." He said it completely neutrally. Eyes on the road. One hand on the wheel. The other still holding hers across the center console.

Chloe turned back to the window.

Okay.

So.

She was maybe a little nervous. But not about karaoke. Karaoke she had. Kumiko had dragged her to private rooms in Koreatown twice already this semester and Chloe had discovered, with some genuine surprise, that she was the kind of person who became a completely different human the second a microphone was in her hand.

Less Calypso, less Chloe Kim the careful social climber. Just her. The version that used to practice harmonies into her phone camera at midnight in her childhood bedroom while her parents slept down the hall.

She was nervous about the thing she had been trying not to think about for the last four minutes.

Chloe was not a person who got embarrassed easily. She had built an entire career on manufacturing comfort with her own body. She had filmed herself in lingerie sets in her closet-studio at two in the morning with forty-seven subscribers watching and felt nothing except strategic. She was professional. Controlled. Calypso did not blush.

Chloe Kim apparently did.

Because Jordan was not her subscriber. Jordan was the person who had been inside her twice in the last twenty-four hours, and both times she had lost entire sections of her brain function, and both times he had finished in a way that was. Not. Normal.

She understood anatomy. She understood variation. She had done enough research for content purposes to know that the range of human biology was wide.

But Jordan was something else entirely.

Big was already its own complication. Her body had needed a full minute to adjust both times, which she had never experienced before, and she was not exactly inexperienced. But the volume. The thickness of it. The way he had gripped her hips and said things that had no business being said out loud and she had responded to every single word of it like her brain had been wiped.

He talks about breeding me like it’s a weather forecast, she thought, and her face went nuclear.

She stared at their held hands.

He is holding my hand, she thought. Like a normal person. Like none of the last twenty-four hours happened.

She liked that about him.

She hated that she liked it.

Jordan said nothing. Just drove. His thumb moved in a slow circle against the back of her hand and the GPS counted down thirty-one minutes and the city lights started multiplying outside the window as they got closer to the freeway.

Chloe pulled her brain back to something practical.

He had spent three thousand dollars on a coffee date with Calypso.

Before that, months of subscriptions and tips and custom content that she had recorded in her closet at midnight.

He had that kind of money lying around. Spare. Not saved-up money, just available money, the kind she had never once had access to in her entire life.

And the inheritance thing.

Twenty million dollars.

She did not believe the story. Not entirely. It was too specific and too convenient and she had watched Jordan’s face when he said it, the way his eyes did this micro-adjustment that she recognized from her own mirror when she was working around a truth instead of saying it. But something about the explanation had landed. Some version of it was real, even if the details were manufactured.

He was going to be rich. Or he already was. His family paid his rent and his tuition and his car without blinking, and that was just the allowance. That was the baseline.

Chloe knew what her family’s baseline looked like. She had grown up watching her father work twelve-hour shifts at the dry cleaners and come home smelling like solvents and still apologize for what he couldn’t afford. She knew exactly what it felt like to do the math on a dinner menu before ordering.

She looked at Jordan’s profile in the dark of the car.

She liked him. She liked him for real, in the inconvenient way, the way that made her nervous about karaoke because she wanted him to see her actually be good at something for the first time.

But she could not pretend the financial reality didn’t exist.