The name came out before she could vet it.
It hung there in the fogged-up bathroom, ridiculous, and Chloe stood absolutely still while her entire nervous system went off like a car alarm.
Chloe McKnight. Two syllables into two syllables. It fit in the mouth. It fit on a business card. It fit on a lease, on a wedding invitation, on a birth certificate under the section marked mother.
Kim Chloe had been fine. Kim Chloe had a father in it, and a dry cleaner in Koreatown, and twenty years of somebody else’s hands. She loved that name. She’d carry pieces of it forever.
Chloe McKnight had that boy in it.
Chloe pressed both hands over her face and made a sound into her palms that had no consonants in it. She had negotiated subscription tiers with men who thought they owned her. She had looked Eliza Hartwell in the eye in a campus bathroom and threatened her. She had watched her father die over four months and organized the funeral herself because her mother couldn’t hold a pen without shaking.
She could not handle a last name.
Somebody knocked on the door.
"You’ve been in there twenty-five minutes," Jordan said through the wood. "I’m required by law to check for drowning."
"I’m fine."
"Chloe."
"I did a little math."
The door opened. He’d put on grey sweatpants and nothing else, and there were four red lines down his shoulder and a bite mark on his collarbone and his hair was still a disaster. He had a glass of water in one hand.
He looked at her. The ears. The towel. The bruise on her throat.
His whole face went soft in a way that made her want to hit him.
"Don’t," she warned.
"I didn’t say anything."
"You were about to say something devastating."
"I was going to say you look good in the ears."
"That’s the same thing."
He handed her the water. She drank all of it without stopping, because she’d been screaming for two hours and her throat felt like she’d swallowed sandpaper, and when she lowered the glass he was leaning against the doorframe watching her.
"Sheets are in the washer," he said. "I flipped the mattress. There’s a towel on your side."
"Thank you."
"Also I found the tail."
"Where."
"Under the bed. It’s fine. It’s mostly fine." He scratched the back of his neck. "It’s on the counter with the stockings and we’re going to pretend the fluff situation is normal."
Chloe set the glass down. Her hands were steady, which she found insulting, given the state of everything else.
"I’m probably pregnant," she said.
Jordan didn’t move off the doorframe.
"Yeah," he said.
"That’s it? Yeah?"
"You asked me to. Four times. I counted." He shrugged one shoulder, and the bite mark shifted. "I’m not going to stand here and act surprised about the outcome of a thing we both did on purpose."
"I was wearing a magic charm suit that scrambled my brain."
"You said it after the charm wore off." He said it evenly, without pushing. "You were crying and you said it again and you weren’t wearing the bodice anymore because I’d already ruined it."
Chloe looked at the sink.
"I remember," she said.
"So do I."
"That’s the part that scares me." Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "The charm would have been a good excuse. I’ve been looking for the excuse for twenty-five minutes and it isn’t there."
Jordan came off the doorframe. He didn’t reach for her, which she appreciated, because if he’d touched her right then she would have cried and she’d already used up her allotment.
"Say the actual thing," he said.
"There’s no actual thing."
"Chloe."
"There’s a spreadsheet." She turned to face him and folded her arms over the towel. "There’s a spreadsheet in my head with four items on it and none of them work. My cycle app says the timing is a disaster. My scholarship needs a course-load conversation. StellarNote has twelve followers, which means my income is about to be twelve followers, which is not income, that’s a group chat."
"You have savings."
"Six months. Nine if I’m mean about it." She held up a finger before he could open his mouth. "And no."
"I didn’t say anything."
"You were going to offer me the onsen money."
Jordan closed his mouth.
"You were going to call it a business loan at zero percent interest because you learned that framing works on me," Chloe said. "It does work on me. That’s why it’s not allowed."
He looked at her the way he’d looked at her in Rina’s office, when he’d told her he wanted to build something himself instead of inheriting it. "I know you do that. I’ve seen the pantry."
"That’s not the point."
"That’s exactly the point. I don’t want the money for me. I’ve never wanted it for me. I want it sitting there so that when something happens, and something always happens, nobody has to make a spreadsheet in a bathroom at one in the morning."
Chloe’s jaw did the thing. She felt it happen and knew he’d clocked it, because he clocked everything now.
"I’ll think about it," she said.
"That’s not a no."
Chloe stared at him.
The worst thing about Jordan McKnight was not the magic phone. It was not the two other girlfriends, or the resort, or the trait that made tumbleweeds appear in parking lots. It was that a man who had spent four thousand five hundred dollars on a girl who wouldn’t hold his hand had somehow turned into a person who could read her like a receipt.
"I want it," she said.
The words came out flat and fast, like ripping tape.
"I know the timing is insane. I know I’m eighteen and I’ve known you six weeks and my mother is going to have an actual medical event." Her voice cracked in the middle and she kept going through it. "I know that if I told past-me, the me from January, the one who wore a mask and charged three thousand dollars for forty-five minutes of coffee, she would have slapped me. She would have said you don’t get to want things, you get to survive things."
Jordan stayed still.
"But I want it," Chloe said. "I stood in your shower and did the math four different ways and every single version was a catastrophe, and I still want it, and I don’t know what to do with that."
The apartment was quiet enough that she could hear the washer churning downstairs.
"Okay," Jordan said.
"Okay?"
"Okay."
Chloe reached up and straightened the bunny ears on her head, since one had gone crooked, and looked at him in the mirror over his shoulder instead of directly.
"Chloe McKnight," she said.
Jordan went very still.
"It has a ring to it," she added, fast. "That’s all. It’s a phonetics observation. I’m a communications major."
He didn’t say anything. His hand stayed on her neck and his thumb moved once along her jaw, and in the fogged glass she watched his face do something that had no performance in it at all.
"Yeah," he said. "It does."
"Don’t make it weird."
"I’m not making it weird."
"You’re making it weird with your face."
He kissed her forehead. Then he left and came back with a grey henley, and she pulled it on over the towel and let the towel drop, and it hung to her mid-thigh and smelled like him and she had absolutely no intention of ever returning it.
Downstairs, her phone lit up on the counter with a notification she ignored.
Chloe padded to the kitchen in bare feet, opened her spreadsheet on her laptop, and made a new tab.
She named it NOVEMBER.
Then she closed the laptop before she could put anything in it, and went back upstairs, and got into a bed with no sheets on it next to a boy who she was growing to love so much.