Page 53 of Most Likely to Match
Her lashes flutter open as she comes, her cheeks flushed. The sound she makes, the most relieved agony. Then, my name; the best part ofallof this. “Dean” over and over and over until it loses all meaning.
Eventually, we hear things, like birds outside, the creaks and hums of a quiet house. Eventually, we peel ourselves away from each other, bodies sticky with sweat and come. We lie back down on our sides, face to face. My cock is soft and strangely colder than the rest of my body, but I can’t bring myself to cover up with a blanket or clothes.
She runs her fingers through my hair, her eyes closed like the gesture gives her as much comfort as it does me. “You won’t edit those photos, will you?” she asks.
Fuck. I sit up, sifting through the bedsheets for the camera. It’s lodged under a pillow, teetering on the edge near the end of the bed. The recording was somehow turned off, but miraculously, the battery isn’t completely dead.
“I won’t,” I say slowly. I’m scared to open these photos. And to tell her that not all of themarephotos.Fuck. “Um…so I did something kind of stupid in the moment.” I hand her the camera. I have to tell her. Or else all of this will have been for nothing.
She sits propped up on my pillow; she won’t look at the camera, only me.
I click the right buttons for her, so she can see on the display. “I should have asked first and…” I run my hand through my hair; it felt better when she was doing it. “I’m sorry. I’ll delete it.”
Finally, Chloe presses the playback button. From where I sit, I can’t see what I captured, and there’s no speaker for any recorded sound, so I’m left to watch her face. The confused frown between her eyebrows, the way she sucks her lower lip into her mouth, the flush that glows deeper in her skin.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. There are a million excuses I could make: It was in the moment. I wasn’t thinking. I was overwhelmed. But all that really matters is: “It won’t happen again.”
She hands the camera back to me, the video still going. I catch a glimpse of the round shape of her lips and full cheeks before I set it down. Chloe shrugs, she looks out the window. The sun is firmly in the sky, the day fully started, and we aren’t even dressed yet. “Maybe you could ask first next time?”
She pokes me with her big toe when I don’t answer right away. I grab her, running my thumb down her arch. I nod. “I can do that.”
She pulls her foot from my grasp and throws her legs over the side of the bed, reaching for the ceiling, her head thrown back, her breasts on display for every maple, elm, and birch in the ravine, as she stretches. She pads around my room, picking up pillows, finding my robe and pulling it back over her shoulders. She picks up both full mugs of coffee and takes them with her as she leaves my room. She pauses at the door and doesn’t even look at me when she says, “Ask first next time, but keep it.” Finally she catches my gaze over her shoulder. “Please.”
I fall back on the bed, my hands behind my head, a stupid smile on my face. “Sure thing.”
For the firsttime since I reconnected with Chloe a month and a half ago, I owe her something. Since we saw each other again in Moonbar, I felt like she’d owed me: An explanation. An apology. A pound of flesh. All of which she’s given freely. So it’s weird now, to move around the office with her, to meet about clients, to go back toher apartment with her once, then twice this last week, and still not give her what I know she wants.
Forgiveness.
The thing is, I have forgiven her. I believe her when she says she had nothing to do with what happened. I think part of me always believed that, at least. She has my forgiveness, but there’s a difference between giving it andtelling herabout it. The former is easy, a foregone conclusion, a sure thing. The latter? Terrifying. Because then, if she hurts me again, whose fault is that?
“You go to therapy, right?” Chloe asks me. She’s taken off her shoes, thrown her socks somewhere under her desk, and undone the button of a pair of linen pants that are so wide-legged that further loosening almost seems unnecessary— though I trust her to know her body best.
“Like therapists go to therapy?” She’s starfished on the cream carpet of her office, the couch cushions still warm from the full day interview with the GTA BJ, the unfortunate name of the Greater Toronto Area Business Journal. She’s been “on” since ten this morning while I got to mostly chill in the background. “Right?”
“Yeah.” I flop my feet out wide, then touch my toes together. Chloe wouldn’t do the floor time I gently suggested for her until I did it first. Now, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get her off it. “That’s SOP in the mental health community to avoid burnout.”
She nods, her stare locked on something I can’t see on the ceiling. “What does she think about me?” she asks, then turns her head to face me. “Sorry. That’s probably confidential.”
I lean back on my hands and take her place staring at the ceiling. “The confidentiality rule only goes one way. As a patient, I can talk about whatever I want with whoever I want.”
A nonanswer that she immediately clocks for what it is: avoidance and a gentle redirect.
Because she’s good at leading awkward conversations with clients, she leans into it. “I think it’s whomever,” she says, holding up her index finger like a point of correction.
“Is it?”
She snorts. “I don’t know.”
The truth is, I haven’t told my therapist about her. Because I don’t want her to tell me that whatever this is, is a bad idea. Which is perhaps a sign, in itself, that this is a bad idea?
“Do you see a therapist?” I ask, meeting her blue eyes. The afternoon sunlight makes the whole office glowy and warm, but nothing is quite as warm as Chloe’s eyes when she smiles at me like this.
She opens her mouth, closes it. She reaches her arm across the carpet toward my hand. We’re too far from each other to reach, but she clutches at the carpet anyway, leaving track marks, until I lie flat on my back, too, and reach for her hand, clutching each other, wrist to wrist.
“I’ve got an appointment in a couple of weeks,” she says, like she got the strength to speak the words from me. “There’s a long waitlist, but they said they had some cancellations and fit me in.”
I squeeze her, her wrist bones delicate beneath me. “That’s great.”
