Page 67 of Most Likely to Match
“Shit,” Lauren whispers. “Hold on.” She starts toward the sound booth, which is a fancy name for a laptop hooked up to speakers and a lot of extra wiring next to the stage.
“Hi.” Chloe’s voice, instead of music, filters through the crackling speakers. Her face appears on the screen on the stage. “I was having trouble coming up with what I should confess to you all.”
Well, fuck. This doesn’t seem like it’s supposed to be happening. Lauren stands frozen in the middle of the dance floor, staring up at the screen like everyone else.
Chloe’s laugh rings out softly across the caf. She looks stunning in the video booth. She doesn’t need that lighting to look like that, though. The lighting is lucky it has this canvas to work with.
“And…um…this is probably so awkward.” She laughs again. “I’m assuming, though, that anyone who’s watching this is watching it, like, two weeks after this reunion, so I don’t really care.” She shrugs, looking down into her lap. I don’t need the camera to have panning capabilities to know she’s picking at her fingernails. I make fists, empty of her hands. “I guess my confession is…”
Fuck. She took the confessional booth seriously. Because of course she did.
She looks back into the camera, eyes the kind of blue I only see on my luckiest of golden hours. “My confession is I loved Dean Westlake in high school.”
My heart does that little skip that’s a non-skip; a double beat. Myfingers go numb, the room too cold despite the people and their dancing.
The same skip-beat I’ve gotten since I was a teen, since she asked me to be her tutor. Since the first time she kissed me, the first time she looked at me and saw someone nobody else saw.
The same little non-skip I got when I saw her for the first time again, through my camera lens. When she was trying to impress my friends at the baseball game. The silver of her skin in the moonlight on my pool deck. The same beat I’ve gotten when Ifeel, a lot, maybe too much.
The screen version of Chloe puts her face in her hands. Her shoulders shake. The sound cuts out for a moment, music again, then it’s gone. She pulls her hands away, but she wasn’t crying. She’s smiling, she was laughing. “I’m not supposed to say this either,” she says, her smile so big it could crack her cheeks in half. “But fuck it. I’m probably not going to see most of you again anyway. And you know what? I don’t really care anymore. Like, I mean this in thenicestway, but I don’t care what you think. What any of you think. But I love Dean Westlake now.”
Lauren squeals, running for the sound booth. A few people turn to look at me. Others hoot and holler; someone does an obnoxious finger whistle. I can’t really move. Embarrassed for her because she thinks all of this is going into the ether until we get the link to watch it weeks from now. Also so fucking in love with her in return that I can’t look away. I want to hear every word. I want to bathe in them, float away on the buoyancy each syllable fills me with, sneaking between tendon and bone.
It’s not the part where she said she loves me. I already knew that, even if she hasn’t quite said it aloud yet. It’s the part where she said it— even if by accident— in front of everyone else.
I thought staying a secret for a little longer would be good. It would stop me from having to explain myself to people, when in truth, I don’t really care what they thought to begin with. But Chloe has done the thing, the one thing, I’ve always only ever wanted.
She’s called me hers. She’s made herself mine. I matter to her. The most.Le plus.
Suddenly, I can move again. I move toward her. Lauren is still stabbing at laptop keys, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve heard everything I need to hear. Someone slaps me on the shoulder as I pass them. I open the door to more hollers. A guy tells me to go get my girl.
The video booth door has a surprisingly strong latch, but after two short tugs, it opens from the inside. Chloe is there, her face happy, bright, her attention mine.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hi.”
I crowd her backward into the small space. There’s not much room for us.
“Is that still recording?” I ask. She looks down at the screen, then back to me, frowning. “I think…why?”
I cup the back of her head and tunnel my fingers into her loose hair. Her hip fits into my palm, better than perfect; just right. “You know what?” I say the words against her lips. Her arms come around my back. She grabs on to the fabric of my shirt. I am her tether, her anchor. “It doesn’t matter. Let ’em see this.”
I kiss Chloe. Her lips soft and smiling against mine. I eat the sounds she makes, get full first on her laugh, then her sighs. I drag my thumb across her jaw, open her to me like I’ll be open to her. The truth is on her tongue, against the back of her teeth; it’s in every snapshot of her memorized against the back of my eyelids.
We aren’t a secret, and there are no secrets between us.
Chloe blinks, eyelashes fluttering, as I pull away. Her lips shine, and that’s from me. Her eyes do, too. “Hey.” I run my thumb along the delicate skin under her eye. “What’s wrong?”
She shakes her head. Closes her eyes. Turns her mouth toward my palm, pressing a gentle kiss there. “I just love you,” she says.
“Baby,” I whisper. Kiss a path from her lips, her chin, to her ear. “I love you the most.”
15
CHLOE
1 MONTH LATER
