Friday night ended in a manner that made Magnus question how he'd even managed to get through it at all.
He and Alex had been in their room for maybe twenty minutes, in the middle of nothing more dramatic than deciding whether it was too early to sleep, when someone knocked.
It was Jordan.
"Can I come in?" she said, already stepping past him before he'd finished opening the door. She sat down on the end of the bed like she'd been invited. Which she hadn't been, exactly, though nobody was going to say so.
"Sure," Magnus said, to no one, since she was already sitting.
Alex looked amused. "Everything okay?"
"Fine." Jordan glanced around the room like she was evaluating it. "Just didn't want to be alone with my thoughts tonight."
Before anyone could ask what that meant, there was another knock. Sofia let herself in without waiting for an answer, phone in hand, already mid-sentence about something that had happened at dinner. She paused briefly after seeing Jordan, then shrugged and sat down next to her without comment, like it was the most normal thing in the world.
A few minutes after that, Maya and Chloe arrived together. Maya barged in as soon as Magnus opened the door, carrying what appeared to be a bag of chips she'd liberated from the kitchen, while Chloe apologized for Maya with a resigned look on her face.
They paused for half a second upon seeing Jordan and Sofia already on the bed. Chloe tried — and failed — to get Maya to leave, and instead was dragged onto the bed with her.
"Girls' summit," Maya exclaimed as she settled on the bed.
"This is my room," Magnus said.
"And we're using it." Maya opened the chips. "You're welcome to join or leave. Your call."
Alex, entirely unbothered by the sudden colonization of their room, shifted to make space. "What's the summit about?"
Jordan looked around the room, pointed her finger at Alex, then slid it back and forth between her and Magnus. "This is your fault."
It took Maya approximately four minutes to decide. She pulled out a deck of Exploding Kittens, presumably the same one they'd played that morning, and announced: "Rematch? But this time, no blindfold—that's the safe version. With the people we have in this room? How about… loser of each round has to take off a piece of clothing?"
Sofia huffed a laugh. "Seriously? Strip Exploding Kittens?"
Maya shrugged. "What? We're all girls here—"
"Hey!" Magnus protested.
"—and he's already seen everyone in this room naked… and even moaning for that matter." Maya jabbed a thumb at Magnus.
Magnus opened his mouth. Closed it. Unable to actually refute it. Because Maya indeed had a point. Everyone currently in the room had been a quest target at one point or another, with the only exception being Chloe — but as Maya's girlfriend, she was also present two nights ago — and he'd still technically interacted with her during that foursome, using Telekinesis to enhance her experience that night.
Then it occurred to him there was another reason this felt weird: he technically was also close to everyone in this room in complicated ways. Alex was unambiguously his girlfriend who was navigating his very complex System life with him. Sofia and Maya shared with him an experience they'd all agreed not to tell another soul about. Jordan was his… he wasn't sure what to call Jordan at this point if he was being honest. Coach? Close friend? One night stand? Friend didn't seem to cover it, but they definitely weren't dating, nor did they have any romantic feelings toward one another. Chloe was the least complicated — he'd simply saved her life from a gunshot wound to the chest. But if that sentence was uttered under normal circumstances, it would be monumental. Which just went to prove how crazy his life had become at this point.
Jordan, who had been quiet through all of this, finally spoke.
"Well, you and Reyes certainly worked fast, Chane," she said with a shrug like the observation required no further comment.
Magnus glanced at her. Ever since the threesome with her and Alex for the monthly quest, he'd begun to suspect that Jordan treated sex with roughly the same emotional register she treated kickboxing — a way to work something out physically, occasionally with more than one other person involved, and rarely requiring extended discussion afterward. Not dismissive. Just efficient. Jordan didn't linger on things she'd already processed.
"Are we doing this or not?" Sofia asked, already shuffling the cards.
Magnus looked around the room — Alex amused, Sofia expectant, Maya smug, Chloe faintly nervous but game, Jordan cracking her knuckles — and understood, the way he'd understood many things since this whole ordeal started, that resistance was not a realistic option. So, he did what he was always going to do from the start: he sat down beside Alex with the resignation of a man accepting his fate as Sofia started dealing the cards.
The game began.
They played and talked simultaneously, the conversation drifting the way it did among people comfortable enough with each other not to need it going anywhere specific. Sofia asked Jordan about her next track season. Jordan asked Chloe about her art — Maya had apparently mentioned the watercolor hobby at some point today, probably during the time they were out swimming — and Chloe, surprised to be asked, talked for a while about a piece she was working on, growing more confident as she went.
Alex lost the first round.
"Called it," Maya said.
"You didn't call anything," Alex retorted as she removed her necklace.
"I called it internally," Maya shot back. "Also, a necklace, Alex? That's just not fair."
"Jewelry count."
Magnus lost the second round shortly after, which Maya found disproportionately satisfying given that she hadn't actually done anything to cause it.
The game continued. Jordan won three rounds in a row through what she described as "just good instincts" and Sofia described as "deeply suspicious," and by the time anyone thought to check the clock, a significant amount of time had passed and the conversation had wandered from track season to college gossip to, somehow, an extended debate about whether Tony counted as a pet.
Somehow, Magnus was not surprised the conversation wound up being about Tony again.
"He's not a pet," he said. "He'd be extremely offended." A short pause. "Actually, he was offended when Ethan said that on Monday."
"He's also not not a pet," Sofia pointed out. "He lives with you. You feed him pizza."
"He feeds himself. Mostly out of the trash. And even when I feed him, it was under his coercion. So that still counts as Tony feeding himself."
"That's not how it works."
Maya lost the next round and groaned dramatically before taking off her tank top.
"Seriously?" Alex stared at her. "You come here and suggest Strip Exploding Kittens without wearing a bra?"
Maya shrugged. "I like to live dangerously. You all should know that already."
"I'm so sorry for her!" Chloe said, blushing furiously with secondhand embarrassment.
"You know," Jordan said, watching this, "I did not expect Spring Break with my parents to turn into this in less than a week… or for it to involve this much of my life."
"Nobody expects Spring Break to involve this much of anything," Alex said. "It just happens."
"That's oddly profound for a girl who's about to lose her shirt over a card game."
"I'm not going to lose."
She lost the next round.
The game went on.
"How about we make this more interesting then?" Maya suddenly asked after a few more rounds and everyone was practically half-naked.
"Things never go well when you say that," Magnus, Alex, and Sofia said in unison.
"You're all free to say no," Maya said. "But how about… the ultimate winner gets another go at another threesome—or foursome—with Magnus and Alex?"
"Sorry!" Chloe said immediately.
Sofia blinked. "That's… not a bad reward, actually."
Jordan shrugged. "I don't have a problem with it."
"Hey!" Magnus and Alex both protested.
"What if Magnus or I win?" Alex continued.
"Seriously?" Magnus stared at his girlfriend in disbelief. "That's what you're focusing on?"
"Then you lose nothing." Maya shrugged.
"Besides," Jordan added, "neither of you are gonna win this, Reyes."
"Hey!" both of them protested again.
"Jokes aside," Sofia said, "it'll still ultimately be up to you two whether anything actually happens. So, let's just play and see where this goes."
The rounds kept coming, and the pile of discarded clothing on the floor kept growing, and the conversation somehow never stopped even as the stakes got progressively more personal. Sofia lost twice in a row and blamed the deck. Chloe, despite her nerves at the start, turned out to be quietly excellent at the game, reading the defuse timing better than anyone else in the room and lasting far longer than her early hesitance had suggested she would.
"Okay, I might've been holding back," Jordan said as she watched Chloe neatly avoid an explosion that took out Maya instead. "But she's the real dark horse here."
"She's the only horse at this point," Sofia said, gesturing at herself, stripped down to only her panties and visibly regretting several of her earlier confident bets.
Magnus, who had lost more rounds than he'd won by a significant margin, had stopped trying to strategize and had instead settled into the specific resignation of someone who understood that the universe — or at least this particular room — had already decided how tonight was going to go. He caught Alex's eye at one point, and whatever passed between them didn't need words. This was fine. This was, against every instinct he'd walked in with, actually fine.
The game reached its natural conclusion not with a dramatic final round and an actual winner, but with a gradual winding down as the novelty gave way to something quieter. Cards got set aside. Conversation slowed. At some point Chloe ended up leaning against Maya's shoulder, half-asleep, and Maya's whole demeanor softened in the specific way it always did when Chloe was involved, chaos momentarily suspended.
Jordan was the first to state the obvious. "Okay," she said, standing and gathering what clothing was still recognizably hers. "I'm going to go back to my room before this turns into something I definitely don't want to witness."
"Wise," Sofia agreed, following her lead.
"Text me if you need anything," Alex said.
"I won't," Jordan said, which from her was practically an expression of gratitude.
Maya scooped up a mostly-asleep Chloe with more gentleness than her usual chaos suggested she was capable of, murmuring something too quiet for the others to catch, and steered her toward the door with a hand at her back.
"Night," Maya said, over her shoulder, with none of her earlier bravado. Just tired and fond.
The door closed. The room went quiet in the particular way rooms did after being full of people and suddenly weren't anymore.
Magnus looked at the scattered cards, the abandoned bag of chips, the general aftermath of an evening that had started as a knock on the door and ended as something he wouldn't have predicted yet somehow wouldn't take back either.
"So," Alex said, watching him take it in. "Good night?"
He thought about it. "Yeah," he said, surprising himself slightly with how much he meant it. "Actually, yeah. Surprisingly, it was."