"Because yours has the loft and the double windows." Chloe set the candle down and did the thing where she stopped moving entirely, which meant something was assembling behind her eyes. "We’re paying forty-three hundred dollars a month for two apartments, twelve feet apart, and we sleep in one bed."
Jordan opened the washer and started shoving sheets in, because he already knew where this was going and he wanted to be doing something with his hands when it arrived.
"You want to move in," he said.
"I want to stop lighting money on fire."
"That’s the same sentence with worse marketing."
"I’m a communications major." She hopped up onto her own counter, feet dangling, and pulled her knees up. In his volleyball tee, with her hair up and her legs bare and a bruise the exact shape of his thumb on her thigh, she looked eighteen in a way she almost never let herself look. "Think about it structurally. Your unit has the loft, so the bedroom’s separated from the main floor. Mine’s the same footprint but I’ve already got the acoustic foam on the north wall, the LED bars, the desk built out, and Kumiko spent four hours cable-managing that setup with actual zip ties and a label maker."
"So your place becomes the studio."
"My place becomes the studio," Chloe said. "Yours becomes the apartment. We sleep at yours, we shoot at mine. No boyfriend walking through frame in a towel. No koi fish noises. No Kumiko screaming in the background while I’m live."
"Kumiko screams in the background regardless of geography."
"Kumiko screams in the background of my dreams." She waved that off. "The point is Nova Network gets a real space for free instead of leasing a studio in Costa Mesa for three grand a month, and I stop paying rent on a bedroom I use twice a week."
He shut the washer. The lid gave that cheap plastic thunk and the water started with a hiss, and he leaned back against it and looked at her.
She was right. That was the annoying part. He’d been sitting on twelve thousand dollars of accumulated rebate money and a business account with nine hundred thousand in it and it had never once occurred to him to solve a problem with a lease.
"There’s a version where it’s better," Jordan said.
"Say it."
"I pay your rent."
Chloe’s eyebrows went up about a millimeter.
"Not as a gift," he said, before she could get her mouth open, because he’d learned that lesson at Micro Center with a shopping cart and a two thousand dollar receipt. "As a transaction. Nineteen hundred a month, my card, straight to the leasing office. At your rate that comes back as three thousand and change."
"My rate."
"One point five eight."
She went very still on the counter, and then her whole face changed, and it was not the reaction he’d braced for. There was no offense in it. There was arithmetic.
"One point five eight," Chloe repeated. "So nineteen hundred out, three thousand and two dollars back."
"Eleven hundred profit. Monthly. Recurring."
"On rent." Her voice had dropped into a register he’d only heard twice, and both times had involved a spreadsheet. "Jordan. That’s thirteen thousand two hundred dollars a year of pure spread on a bill I was going to pay anyway."
"It’s more than that if the number holds."
"You’re at a hundred percent with me. It holds." She hopped down off the counter and started pacing her own kitchen, barefoot, one hand at her mouth. "God. Okay. Okay, that’s not romance, that’s a yield strategy. Why haven’t you been doing this the whole time."
"I’ve been buying you boba."
"You’ve been buying me boba." She turned on him. "You have a machine that converts affection into liquid capital and you have been running it through a fourteen dollar drink."
"I bought a computer once."
"You bought a computer once and cleared five hundred dollars and then went back to boba." Chloe pressed both palms against her eyes. "This is like watching somebody use a nuclear reactor to charge a vape."
Jordan laughed. He couldn’t help it, and she was too worked up to enjoy it, which made it better.
"You know what this is," she said, dropping her hands. "This is generational wealth. Not the resort. The resort’s a lump. This is compounding. Rent, groceries, gas, tuition, insurance, the stuff you’re already obligated to pay. Every fixed cost in your life becomes revenue instead of an expense." She stopped. "It would be actively stupid not to do this. It would be immoral. There are families in this country who would kill for a one point five eight on their utility bill."
"That’s a weird sentence."
"It’s a true sentence."
He watched her walk it out. She was doing the thing where her jaw worked slightly to one side and her fingers tapped against her hip, and he knew she was building the tab in her head, categories, projections, best case and worst.
"So we do it," Jordan said.
"We do it, and we do it wrong."
"Meaning?"
Chloe turned around and leaned back against her fridge, and there was something small and mean and delighted at the corner of her mouth.
"Meaning you shouldn’t be paying my rent," she said. "You should be paying Kumiko’s."
Jordan blinked.
"Think about it." She held up a finger. "I’m capped. One hundred percent, one point five eight, that’s the ceiling, that’s as good as it gets and it can’t go up. Kumiko’s at forty-two."
"Forty-two is a loss."
"Forty-two is zero point eight four, which means every dollar you spend on Kumiko you lose sixteen cents, and you’ve been eating that loss on jellyfish tickets and Pocky like a man with no plan." Chloe’s eyes had gone bright in a way that made him a little nervous. "But she’s volatile. You told me. She jumped nine points in one night. She jumped seven off a single kiss at the aquarium. Her number moves like a meme stock."
"So?"
"So you put her rent on your card and you don’t do it for the return, you do it because she’ll cry. And when Kumiko Yamanaka cries, that number goes up eleven points." Chloe spread her hands. "You spend eighteen hundred at a loss for two months, she hits break-even, and then you’ve got two recurring rent payments printing money instead of one. That’s not spending. That’s acquisition cost."
Jordan stared at her.
"You just built a customer acquisition funnel out of my girlfriends."
"I built a portfolio," Chloe said. "You built a funnel when you registered us."