Chapter 71: 71 | A Different Kind of Income Stream [CASTLE BONUS]

She had spent the last six months surviving by being honest with herself about money. Every dollar tracked. Every decision examined. She was not going to start lying to herself now.

If Jordan’s family had the kind of wealth she suspected, and if this relationship went somewhere real, that would mean something. For her mother’s medical bills. For Daniel’s college fund. For the spreadsheet on her iMac that she updated every Sunday morning while eating plain oatmeal and pretending it didn’t make her want to scream.

She could ask him, some small voice in her head offered.

Chloe shut that voice down so fast it left a ringing sound.

No.

Absolutely not.

She knew what Jordan’s history looked like. He had told her himself, in the parking lot of The Ivy with his new hair and his careful eyes. A girl had taken everything he offered and laughed about it at brunch with people who became Chloe’s social circle. He had spent two thousand dollars on content from Chloe herself, from Calypso, and that was before the coffee date.

He knew exactly what it felt like to be used by someone he was trying to love.

Chloe was not going to be that person.

She was not going to look at the warmth in his chest and see a solution to her spreadsheet. She refused to become Eliza. She would quit OnlyFans and eat plain oatmeal every single meal before she let herself do that to him.

Which brought her to the other thing she had been avoiding.

She pulled her skirt down again. Looked at the window.

Dating Jordan while running the Calypso account felt wrong in a way it hadn’t felt yesterday. Yesterday she was just Chloe handling her business and Calypso was a separate person in a separate closet on a separate phone. Clean lines. No overlap.

Now Jordan’s hand was warm in hers and she had a hickey on her collarbone from his mouth and the idea of sitting in her closet at midnight recording content while he slept twelve feet away through a shared wall made something in her stomach pull wrong.

She needed a different income stream.

She had actually been thinking about it before Jordan knocked on her door. Kumiko had mentioned streaming once, maybe twice. Kumiko ran a cosplay account with decent numbers and had started doing Twitch streams at the beginning of the semester, mostly just chatting and reacting to things and showing off the costumes she made. She was good at it. Warm and weird and completely herself in front of a camera, which was the only thing that actually worked on Twitch because audiences could smell performance from ten feet out.

Chloe was good at performance. But she was also good at connection.

She could stream. She had the camera setup already, minus the face blur. She had the personality. She had the follower base on Instagram to start with a non-zero audience. And Kumiko could walk her through the technical side, the channel setup and streaming software and how to run donations and subscriptions without it feeling gross.

The income would not match OnlyFans immediately. Probably not for months.

But maybe she could overlap them for a while. Transition slowly. Keep Calypso running on a reduced schedule while she built the streaming side up. Give herself a runway.

She would ask Kumiko tonight.

Jordan squeezed her hand.

Not because she had said anything or done anything. Just because they were sitting there and the GPS said eighteen minutes and he was the kind of person who squeezed your hand for no reason apparently.

Chloe looked at him.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Thinking."

"About karaoke?"

"About a lot of things."

He nodded. Looked back at the road. Did not push.

That was the thing about him that kept catching her off guard. He had this quality of just letting things be what they were. No pressure, no follow-up questions designed to make her explain herself. He asked and if she didn’t answer fully he let it go and the silence between them was easy instead of loaded.

She had not had that before. Her ex in high school had needed everything narrated. And her subscribers needed everything performed.

Jordan just held her hand.

She leaned her head back against the headrest and watched the freeway lights scroll past the window and let herself have the quiet.

Is this what a boyfriend feels like, she thought.

She hadn’t had one in over a year. She had kept herself deliberately unattached because attachment was a vulnerability she couldn’t afford. One person who knew too much could crack the whole system open.

And here was Jordan. Who already knew the most dangerous thing about her. Who had paid three thousand dollars to sit across from her in a restaurant and then moved in next door and knocked on her door because she texted him the word scared, and who had not weaponized any of it.

The GPS said seven minutes.

City lights thickened outside. Koreatown at nine PM was alive, neon signs stacked three deep on every storefront, restaurants with lines out the door, and the kind of foot traffic that made her feel both anonymous and awake.

"For the record," Chloe said, "I’m actually really looking forward to tonight."

Jordan glanced at her. "Yeah?"

"Kumiko is going to lose her mind when she sees us together."

His mouth curved. "How much do you want to bet?"

"She’s going to cry," Chloe said. "She ships us. I could tell from the way she texted me."

"Kumiko ships everyone."

"She ships us specifically." Chloe sat up straighter as they turned off the main road. "She’s been scheming since the student union. I know her face."

Jordan found a parking spot on a side street two blocks from the venue. He cut the engine. The city sounds filtered in immediately, distant music, voices, someone laughing too loud outside a restaurant across the street.

He turned to look at her.

She was already looking at him.

"You really are trying to make me skip karaoke," he said.

Chloe felt her face do something she couldn’t fully control. "Stop."

"You just look." He paused. Shook his head slowly. "Really good, Chloe."

The way he said her name landed different than it did in class. Like he meant specifically her and not the version of her she put out for other people.

"You told me that already," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt.

"I know." He got out of the car.

She got out before he could open her door. Old reflex. She was already around to the sidewalk by the time he came around the front of the car and gave her a look that said he noticed.

"I can open my own door," she said.

"I know."

He took her hand again anyway.

Chloe looked down at their fingers locked together on the Koreatown sidewalk, neon light shifting pink and gold across the back of his hand, and she thought about the spreadsheet and the Twitch plan and the hickey under her shirt collar and the way his voice had settled in her chest like something permanent.

She walked with him toward the lights.