Chapter 156: 156 | The Unboxing and Assembly of My Romantic Downfall [PS BONUS]

The words came out on autopilot, pulled from the section of her brain that had memorized streaming theory the way other people memorized sports statistics. Kumiko was grateful for autopilot. Manual control had been offline since the gas station.

Chloe was already on her feet, pulling the LED strip lights from one of the Micro Center bags. "These go behind the monitor, right?"

"Above, actually. You peel the adhesive backing and press them along the top edge of the desk, angled toward the wall so the light bounces instead of hitting the camera directly." Kumiko stood up. Her legs felt hollow, like someone had replaced her bones with those pool noodles children hit each other with. She walked toward the pile of equipment and crouched beside it, her pleated skirt fanning out across the concrete floor. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Jordan tore open the acoustic foam panels and held up a square of charcoal grey material. "Where do these go?"

"Behind where she’ll be sitting. Two rows of four on the wall. They reduce echo and make the audio cleaner, and they look good on camera because they add texture to the background."

Kumiko pulled the microphone arm from its box and began assembling the clamp mechanism. Her hands shook. She dropped the first screw. It pinged off the concrete and rolled under the sectional. She closed her eyes, took a breath that filled approximately forty percent of her lung capacity, and retrieved the screw on her hands and knees.

When she emerged from under the couch, Jordan was standing directly in front of her, holding a strip of LED lights in one hand and the acoustic foam panels under his opposite arm. He looked down at her with a half-smile that did absolutely catastrophic things to her cardiovascular system.

"You good?"

"Super good. So good. The goodest. I’m fine."

"You dropped this." He held out a small bag of mounting screws that must have fallen from her foam panel box.

Their fingers touched when she took the bag.

One point seven seconds this time. She counted.

Jordan turned away and walked toward the wall behind Chloe’s desk, where he began peeling adhesive strips from the back of foam panels and pressing them into place with flat palms. His arms reached high enough that his shirt rode up two inches from his waistband. Kumiko saw the top of his hip bone. She saw the shadowed groove where his oblique muscle met his waist. She saw the faintest trail of hair below his navel, so light it was almost invisible.

She dropped the screw again.

Chloe caught it midair before it hit the floor, plucking it from the space between them with two fingers like she was picking a flower. She placed it in Kumiko’s open palm, closed Kumiko’s fingers around it, and held her hand there for a beat.

"Focus," Chloe murmured.

"I’m focused."

"You’ve been staring at his hip for thirty seconds."

"I was looking at the foam panel alignment."

"The foam panels are on the wall. His hip is on his body. Those are different locations."

Kumiko felt her face catch fire from her hairline to her chin. She pulled her hand from Chloe’s grip and returned to the microphone arm with renewed commitment to not looking at anyone’s exposed skin for the remainder of the setup process. This commitment lasted approximately ninety seconds, at which point Jordan reached up to position a foam panel on the top row and the motion pulled his shirt high enough to reveal the full lower third of his abdominal muscles, carved and shadowed in the golden afternoon light from Chloe’s factory windows.

Kumiko attached the microphone arm to the desk clamp backwards.

She noticed five minutes later when the arm pointed toward the wall instead of the chair.

Nobody mentioned it. Chloe simply reached over, loosened the bolt, rotated the arm one hundred eighty degrees, and tightened it again while Kumiko pressed her palms against her burning cheeks and asked herself how she had managed to build three complete gaming PCs from scratch but could not operate a single desk clamp in the presence of a boy she liked.

The answer, Kumiko knew, was that PCs did not have abs. PCs did not smell like cedar. PCs did not call her "Kumi" in a voice that made her internal organs rearrange themselves into a more pleasing configuration.

Jordan stepped back from the wall to evaluate his work. Eight acoustic foam panels sat in two neat rows, charcoal grey against the white wall, covering the space that would appear behind Chloe during streams. The alignment was almost perfect, with only a slight tilt on the upper left panel that gave the arrangement a handmade quality rather than a factory finish.

"How’s that look?"

Kumiko forced herself to evaluate the panels as objects rather than as things touched by Jordan’s hands. "Good. Great. Maybe shift the top left one a centimeter to the right."

Jordan adjusted it. "Better?"

Kumiko nodded. Her voice had vacated her body and left a forwarding address at the bottom of her stomach.

Chloe plugged the LED strip into the surge protector and the wall behind the desk erupted in soft purple light that bled across the foam panels, the monitor stand, and the potted plant Chloe had positioned in the corner earlier that week. The effect was immediate and professional, the kind of ambient glow that said "I stream regularly and take my content seriously" without shouting "I spent four hours in a Micro Center on a Sunday."

"Oh," Kumiko breathed. The color washed over her face. "Oh, Chloe-chan, that’s beautiful."

Chloe adjusted the brightness on her phone app until the purple deepened to a shade between violet and navy. The light caught the blue streak in her hair and turned it electric. She smiled, small and private, at the screen, and for a second she looked exactly like the girl Kumiko had met during orientation, the one who had laughed too loud at Kumiko’s terrible joke about Wi-Fi passwords and made Kumiko feel like maybe college would not be so lonely after all.

Jordan positioned the monitor on its riser and connected the power cable. The screen flickered to life, and the PC’s RGB fans threw red and blue reflections across the acoustic foam. The streaming corner of Chloe’s apartment was taking shape. It looked real. It looked like the beginning of something.

Kumiko held the microphone arm steady while Chloe threaded the cable through the boom and connected it to the audio interface. Their heads were close together, Kumiko’s twin tails brushing Chloe’s shoulder. Chloe smelled like vanilla and chamomile and the faintly metallic scent of new electronics.

"You’re shaking," Chloe said, quiet enough that Jordan, who was untangling a power strip on the other side of the room, could not hear.

"I know."

"It’s going to be okay."

"You don’t know that."

"Yeah, Kumi. I do."