Page 12 of Most Likely to Match
My hurt is still here, a gut-deep betrayal. But the performance of that hurt, anger, carelessness, none of it actually helps. It’s exhausting. The problem is, I’ve committed to it now.
“So you don’t want photos?” I face her, scowling. Then make a show of looking around, like the people we went to high school with are camouflaged against the walls, ready to pop out and take my photo at a moment’s notice. “Trying to get me in another compromising position?”
“Dean, no.” She shakes her head emphatically. “I’m sorry. I’m so—”
I hold up my hand. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, despite being the one to bring it up.
She presses her lips together, looking down again. Part of me wants to demand her gaze, the full weight of her attention. Part of me feels like that’s the least I deserve. To be looked in the eye when she speaks to me.
The rest of me knows that Chloe’s attention isn’t limited to eye contact and that her attention is earned anyway. I sigh. Make a fist with one hand, then the other, watching the ink across my knuckles stretch and flex.
“You got tattoos,” she says, the worst icebreaker ever.
“Yeah.”
“George V and Edward VII had tattoos.”
I look at her, but she’s still examining the ink on my hands, following it up my arm, where I’ve collected doodles, dates, and names over the years. “Okay.” I don’t really know what to say to that.
Her gaze trips on the semi-colon tattooed along my forearm. She blinks up at me. “Dean. I am soso—”
I hold my hand up again to cut her off. “I’m serious. I don’t want to talk about it,” I say. “Like, at all.” The sudden knowledge that she was about to apologize fills my gut with a churning discomfort, one I’m not willing to interrogate right now, other than to know that I don’t think I can hear another word of this without bolting.
Chloe examines me. Her face is emotionless and blank, except for her lips, turned down in the faintest frown.
“Either I’m here to talk about business or nothing.”
It takes another long moment of quiet contemplation from Chloe before she takes a deep breath, nods a short bob of her chin, and says, “I need you to be my boyfriend,” she says. And before I can respond withwhat the fucking fuck?, she adds, “I’ll pay you, of course.”
“Chloe, what the fucking fuck?” I stand, the couch voicing its displeasure.
She continues to look at me as if everything she’s just said makes complete and total sense. “I’m losing clients…actually, I’m bleeding clients. I’m not sure how much longer I can continue to go on like this.”
“You realize thatnoneof this explains why you think you should or even canhireme as your boyfriend?”
She sighs, clasping her hands tightly in her lap. “I have recently started to lose clients because, apparently, I can’t match people if I don’t have my ownperfect match,” she says, air quoting the words. “And I plan to approach this problem with a solid business strategy. But…until then, I think the best way to put a stop to it would be if I at least gave the appearance of having a partner.”
I pace. Rip my hat off so I scratch my head with the bill and jam it back on again. I sit back down in the chair across from the couch so I can face her head-on when I say, “Once again, Chloe. What the fucking fuck are you talking about?”
“Don’t yell at me,” she says quietly.
Which frustrates me enough to make me actually raise my voice when I say, “I’m not yelling.”
We sit quietly as my echoes reverberate around the room. “I haven’t talked to you in fifteen years. And the first time we do talk after youruined my life, you ask me to pretend to be your perfect algorithmic match to save your business? Have I got this right?”
She has the decency, at least, to look sheepish. “Okay.” She wipes her hands down the front of her pants, then clasps them again on her lap. “In my defense, I had a different speech prepared, but then you showed up to a business meeting—”
“This is abusiness meeting?” This time I am definitely yelling, but I can’t help it. I am incredulous.
“In this slutty little crop top—”
“Hey.” I tug at the t-shirt, which, okay, could probably be considered an indecent lengthifthis was a business meeting.
“Then you said you didn’t want to talk about…” She waves her hand in the air, as if that one movement can encompass the history between us. “So I had to revise my speech on the fly, and yes, I may have left some things out.”
I need to leave. I should get up and walk out of here. Who cares ifshe complains to the BIA about the photographs. I can refer her to another photographer. Hell, I’ll even pay for it.
She fidgets, the index finger of one hand picking at a hangnail on the other. Another thing about her that hasn’t changed in fifteen years. Chloe used to pick and bite her nails and skin, especially when she was nervous, or stressed, or sad. Or angry. Essentially, whenever she was experiencing emotion.
