Page 16 of Most Likely to Match
“He’s not a serial killer, Chloe.” But she lets me turn the app on and double check it with mine.
“Have fun,” I say as she gives me one last double squeeze, then rushes out the door. “Be safe,” I call. “Make good choices.” Then laugh to myself.
I give her fifteen minutes, enough time to know that she’s not forgotten anything and won’t be turning around out of cold feet, before I take her sharpest steak knife to the meat and cut it up into small pieces to make them easier to hide in the garbage.
I feel bad about wasting food, of course, but there’s no way that meat isn’t a choking hazard. I pick at the rest of my food while Vin Diesel and his familia drive too fast into increasingly unrealistic scenarios. It’s comforting, in a way, to know that no matter what’s happening in my life, the Torettos will always be there with their cars and their beers and the big family I never had.
Mom’s cat, Henry the VIII— named because he is literally the eighth of his name and not because she is a fan of the misogynist tyrant— pads across the living room, paying me no mind, and flops onto his bed at the sliding glass door to watch the birds in the backyard in the waning early evening light. I get up and take a seat next to him, petting the one spot on top of his head that he likes and listening to his motor engine purr until two things seem to happen at once: Henry decides he is finished with affection and bites me, and my phone vibrates across the coffee table.
I hiss at him as I snatch my hand back, and he hisses at me as I stumble away from him. Enraptured by this standoff with my mom’s cat, I don’t look at the screen when I answer it. “Hello?” And then I hiss again as Henry yowls at me.
The line is silent.
“Hello? Mom?” I don’t recognize the number on the screen until I hear a frustrated sigh, and then:
“Chloe?”
“Dean?Fuck.” My hand is bleeding, drops of red blood bubbling up from two marks Henry’s little fangs left.
“Chloe,” he says, sounding frustrated this time.
“Sorry.” I jab at the screen to put the call on speaker, then stomp up the stairs to my old bathroom. “My mom’s cat bit me.”
“Your mom’s cat?”
“Henry the VIII.”
“You’re in town?” he asks, like it’s a surprise to him that I would deign to return to our hometown despite its proximity to Toronto.
I release a different kind of hiss, this time at the sting of the hot water over the wound. “Yeah. Sorry. What’s up?”
Distantly, I’m aware that I should be nicer to him. He wasnothappy when he left my office the other day. Fair enough. It was stupid of me to ask him for that favor. For any favor, really.
I just really don’t want to get an infection right now.
“I wanted to talk,” he says slowly. He pauses when a box of bandages falls out of the medicine cabinet, landing next to the phone. “About…your offer.”
“Oh. Okay.” I say slowly, still processing words and how they mean things. “Like…now?”
He sighs again, a man full of un-expelled air. I can picture him, his eyes closed, his hand in his hair.
It’s strange how this house doesn’t feel like home until I’m talking to him inside it. Then, suddenly, I am both a teenager and in my thirties, nostalgic for a time that was terrible but also, somehow, wasn’t.
“I don’t know. Are you going to bleed to death after this horrific animal attack?” he asks, deadpan.
“Cats can carry pasteurella multocida bacteria in their mouths, which is highly pathogenic,” I say, doing my best to walk the line betweenthis is serious, actuallyand know-it-all.
Dean is quiet again, and I strain for a sound, anything. He exhales gently and says, “I know, Chloe. I’m sorry.”
I busy myself with cleaning the bite and covering it with a bandage. Dean says nothing. Over the phone, I can hear the sound of random keyboard clicks, the murmuring of conversation coming from somewhere near him. Now that I’m not in emergency mode, the sound of his music, low and tinny through the cell phone speaker, but recognizably emo, is sweetly soothing.
“When did you want to talk?” I ask.
“Uh. Now? I guess?”
I wince. I’d prefer a bit more time to prepare for an in-personmeeting, though perhaps this time in neutral territory. “Are you also in town?” I ask.
“Living back at home until I can get some stuff lined up,” he says, gruff.
