Page 27 of Most Likely to Match
“Felt what?”
She huffs and waves her fingers in the space between us. “Everything you were talking about. The easy stuff. You’ve felt something thateasybefore?”
I shake my head. “Oh. No.”
Chloe makes a sound like a growl. “Then how do youknow?”
My hand, still on my chest, contracts. My heart, beneath, pounds. That little skip feeling that’s not really a skip at all but a double beat. The same beat I’ve gotten since I was a teen, nervous, sad, shy. Hurt.
“I just…know.” I press my fingertips harder into my chest, grounding myself. “I might not have felt it before with Caro,” I say. The words don’t taste bitter, like a lie, but they are certainly uncertain. “But I know that what I felt with Caro wasn’t it.”
Chloe hums, so softly it might not be a sound she meant to make. Slowly, she lifts her own hand, presses her fingers to the top of my hand. “Okay,” she says finally, my explanation deemed good enough. We stare at the pinpoints of contact between us, her three fingers pressing into my skin.
“Dean?” she asks, another question on her lips. I wonder if she’ll ask me if I want to go to the disco, if we could dance together now like we never could before. And I know I’ll say yes.
I can talk to my therapist about my decisions later.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice rough.
“Do you want a ride home?”
Before she starts the car,Chloe says, “Thanks for coming.”
“Of course.” I press my head against the headrest and close my eyes. I am still hot and sticky from standing in the sun and heat allday, but the one thing that was surprisingly comfortable about the whole event was Chloe.
It’s funny the things I can get comfy with when I decide to lock them in a mental box and never think of them again.
I fish my phone out of my pocket. I should definitely make an appointment with my therapist.
We’re only driving for a few minutes before Chloe flips on the turn signal for the briefest moment and turns off the quiet suburban road nowhere close to my parents’ house into a parking lot. It takes me a moment to recognize where we are. The community center where I had swimming lessons and attended summer camps and where I lifted weights in the gym when I first met Chloe and wanted to impress her when she took my shirt off.
“What are we doing here?”
She parks at the far end of the lot. Far from the building and farther from the streetlights spreading harsh yellow halos over the pavement. The suburbs are never truly dark. Light pollution makes pitch-black impossible. But this spot, next to this empty soccer field, surrounded on three sides by ravine and green space, is probably as close to darkness as you can get.
“I know you said you didn’t want to talk about what happened,” she says. “And I said I didn’t want to talk about the other thing that happened.”
The quiet tick of the engine is the only sound in the answering silence. I’m not sure if she’s waiting for me to say something, to give her permission to talk about itnow, to tell her to stop, but my heart beats in my throat, and that’s the only thing I can really focus on.
That and Nick’s cosmo-fueled advice, how continuing to punish her for something that happened over a decade ago is mostly just punishing myself.
“And I don’t want to rehash that,” she says. “Any of it. We’re working together now.” She turns in the driver’s seat to face me. I can almost feel the soft brush of her gaze on the side of my face. “And that feels really important,” she says. “I think the work I do— that we can do together— is really important. Giving people a chance atlove? At that forever feeling you talked about? It feels special, you know?”
In the moonlight, her skin is silvery smooth, her eyes more gray than blue. It’s easier somehow to see the woman she is today than the girl she was in this light. Still earnest but guarded, brave but self-conscious. She’s still all the things I admired about her then, butmoresomehow. Like every trait has had time to take root and grow. Like despite growing taller, filling out her frame, each quality has become more concentrated.
“I don’t want any of that to change. I want to keep working together, but…” She winces, as if whatever she’s about to say is too embarrassing to think, let alone say. “I really like being with you again,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “It feels really…”
I study her face, the honesty there, the openness. The fear, too.
“Easy,” she says, the word simple, a machine’s cog fitting perfectly into the right spot.
When I reach for her, she hesitates, but only for a second. Her skin is as soft as it looks as I rub my thumb along her cheekbone, then brush my lips across the same spot. I open her mouth with my thumb against her chin, and she answers by kissing me, tentatively, with her tongue.
We kiss almost awkwardly, like the teenagers we once were, trying to figure it out for the first time all over again, licking, tasting, accidental nibbles, and on-purpose, gentle bites. We knock teeth, and she laughs, smiles into my mouth, and that only makes it better.
I would happily kiss this woman’s teeth or even risk the sharp edge of an incisor for the taste of her laughter in my mouth.
The thought catches me off guard enough that I pull back. I put space between us so I can breathe, I can pause. Her hand is on my inner thigh, the other gripping the center console to pull herself closer to me. Her seat belt cuts a sharp line across her neck and collarbone.
