Page 31 of Most Likely to Match
“So you broke them up?” I turn in my seat to face him. “That is diabolical, Dean.”
He lays a gentle hand on my bare knee. “No, Chloe.”
“Oh,” I say, my mouth holding the shape of the word. “Sorry.” I pretend to zip myself shut.
“My roommate and the other girl didn’t really work out, but this girl didn’t know how to talk to him, and he saw her as just a friend.” He shrugs. “So I offered to help. We went to some parties together, I held her hand, we danced. I talked her up to my roommate and mentioned all the things that were already true, you know? That she was cool, funny. Really smart. They were both weirdly obsessed with theJurassic Parkmovie franchise and…” He shrugs again, like this is the most uninteresting story he’s ever had to tell. “They eloped a couple of years ago. In Oahu, Hawaii. That’s where they filmedJurassic Park,” he explains.
“And how did she pay you?” I ask slowly, because I’m not sure if it’s rude to ask.
He rolls his eyes but smiles. “She paid for my alcohol when we went to parties or bought my popcorn when we watched a Mustangs hockey game.”
“Hockey or men’s hockey?” I ask.
He grins, turns his head to face me again. “Hockey,” he says, likeof course.
We keep our smiles as silence descends once again. A car passes behind us on the street, and as the nighttime cools, as the sweat on my body cools, goose bumps appear along my bare arms and legs. He rubs his hand along my forearm, but it does nothing to help the chill.
At least not visibly.
The distraction worked. His body is no longer a stiff board in the seat. He leans one shoulder against it so he can face me fully. His face trends more toward a smile than the rigor of a frown. His legs are still now that we’re not being— arguably— gently interrogated, and I think I see now what I didn’t before, when I was too focused on doing my civic duty of giving cops a hard time.
“The cop,” I say. “Was that…” Traumatic? Triggering? “Did you…” I don’t know how to say it.
Actually, I don’t want to. I don’t want to admit out loud that Deandoesn’t trust me and that he has a right not to. But I can’t ignore the panic he was so clearly feeling, and I can’t forget the angry way he accused me at our second first meeting in my office of trying to embarrass him again. One of those accusations that’s so absurd it was meant to sound like a joke.
Except it wasn’t.
“Did you think I did that on purpose?” I ask. “Somehow?” I tack on to the end, mostly for myself.
His smile slowly fades, and internally, I kick myself for ending it. “I know you didn’t,” he says quietly.
Relief melts into my muscles like a ten-milligram shot of melatonin straight to my brain.
“I know, rationally, you didn’t.”
Never mind.
“But…?” I swallow the sudden lump in my throat.
“But, in the nicest way possible,” he says with a regretful mouth, “it’s not even really about you, Chloe. Something happened to me fifteen years ago, and it was traumatizing. And it doesn’t matter that I’m an adult now. Or that we were in a car and not on a stage or all the other reasons why this time was different from that time. My body doesn’t know that, and it doesn’t care. The primordial part of my brain just wants to protect me.”
I bite my lower lip to keep from blurting out, well, anything. It hurts to be told it’s not about me, even though it isn’t. It really, really isn’t. And it hurts to know that Dean still doesn’t trust me, even though he doesn’t really have a reason why he should.
But that’s my own ego. And that’s not what Dean needs from me right now, not my apologies or my defense, my reasons or explanations. Not all those things I was trying to force on him fifteen years ago.
I take his hands, curled into loose fists on his lap, and hold them, tattooed knuckles first, to my mouth. I kiss them, each letter. He’s cold, too, but still warms me. “Thank you,” I say against the ink. “It means a lot to me that you would tell me that.”
He draws his hands away but doesn’t let me let go, reeling me intohim until we’re a bridge over the center console. He presses my hands to his chest. He cups my face, his thumb tracing one side of my mouth, the dip of my chin, my cheekbone, gently drawing across the thin skin under my eye.
“This is reckless,” he says. A fact, a threat, an omen. An invitation.
“Yeah,” I breathe the word.
“I shouldn’t want this,” he says. “With you. But I do.”
I slide my hands up his chest, over the sharp edges of his collarbone, settling on the tender point of his pulse, beneath his jaw. “Would it help?” I ask, then kiss him, a slow drag of my lips on his, “if I made you come?” Two attempts now, and Dean has been left hanging during both, even if one was his own fault.
He kisses me, a tease of his tongue. “I guess we should try, at the very least.” He nods, serious.
