Page 12 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

She looks off into the crowd. “Okay. Okay,” she says, mostly to herself. She grabs a tote bag that she shoved beneath the booth, hooking it over her shoulder, and starts to walk away. Before she gets far, she stops and faces me. “Thanks.” Her voice, her face sincere. She turns to leave in earnest.

I don’t watch the way the light fabric of her dress clings to her back and her ass or the strain in her strong calf muscles as she walks away. But only just.

It takes an hour before the first pinprick of worry sets in.

We never agreed on a return time, and it’s not like I’m annoyed.

I’m glad she’s taking the time she needs.

After half an hour, I thought I’d better not see her anytime soon.

Forty-five minutes in, I was glad she took what I’d said seriously.

But after an hour, I started to wonder if maybe something had gone wrong.

Maybe she tried to find peace and quiet in her car and ended up passing out from the heat.

If we hadn’t gone to this school, I’d have guessed she’d gotten lost; the English department can spin you in circles, but she knows her way around.

She was part of student council. She was one of the girls who ran this school once upon a time, for better or for worse.

I don’t want to go wander around the school again and let memories hit me like the hockey team captain’s punches to my gut, but I will if she’s not back in another fifteen minutes.

I shut my eyes. Mostly for a moment of reprieve from the sun’s blinding rays as it sets across the field, dipping behind the tree line that students used to head toward to smoke weed in privacy.

But also to chastise myself. It’s easier, better, not to think of Chloe that way, as who she was or used to be.

The field has gotten busier, yet fewer and fewer people are stopping in to talk to me.

I’d say it was because the event organizers are setting up for the silent disco, but mostly, I think it’s because Chloe isn’t here, with her welcoming smile and a kind comment.

She has an ease I hadn’t anticipated or remembered, a read on people that I’m— if I’m perfectly honest— jealous of.

Maybe if I’d had a similar skill, what happened between us wouldn’t have happened.

“Fuck,” I mutter to myself, except it’s a bit louder than I intend, and the person walking past the booth actually skitters away. Fuck again.

I grimace and call it a smile. “Sorry.”

This is why I don’t want to talk about it. Because it will make me maudlin and mopey, and what does it really serve? It won’t change anything.

“Hey,” Chloe says, bounding up to me with a level of energy I haven’t seen from her in hours, matched by the brightness of her smile .

“Hey.”

“Going well?” she asks without looking at me. She straightens the few postcard pamphlets we have left and adjusts the retractable banner with the logo and QR code. Before I can muster up an answer— that honestly shouldn’t be this hard— she says, “So we can start taking stuff down now, they said.”

She provides no explanation of who they are.

“Oh, and here’s your food.” She pulls a takeout box that smells like pulled pork from a tote bag hanging off her wrist. “I’ll take stuff down and you eat.” She nods at the chair parked behind the booth.

“I can help,” I say, though my stomach grumbles at the same time, and Chloe ignores me anyway.

The food is good, still-warm pulled pork tacos with pickled onions, avocado, and cotija cheese. I eat in that way I’d usually reserve for when I’m alone. The same way my dad eats when he has to fend for himself for dinner: fast, messy, usually standing over the sink.

My stomach feels heavy and full when I’m done, and I’m glad Chloe let me leave my short-sleeved knit cardigan in her car. The humidity adds another level of discomfort.

I put myself to work even though she grumbles at me about it and even though I’m not much taller than her and have to stand on tippy toes to reach the lock at the top of the telescopic bar holding up the Core Cupid banner.

As I reach for it, I look at her, maybe out of self-consciousness.

Which is stupid. She knows I’m short. I’ve always been short.

But whatever I was expecting to see on her face, it’s not this.

The look in her eyes is intense, hungry, as she tracks the strip of skin exposed by my t-shirt as I reach for the top of the banner.

I’m so surprised I lose my balance, taking a step back on my flat-top sneakers, and both of us look pointedly away this time as I successfully close the rod.

The sun has fully set by the time we’ve packed everything into the trunk of her car. Movement has eased the discomfort of scarfing down food too fast, and with the evening air finally cooling off, I’m suddenly energized, even though it’s nearing ten p.m .

From the parking lot at the side of the school we can’t see the football field, but the silent disco’s MC’s voice echoes over the building toward us. Chloe stands with her hands on the closed trunk, her lip caught between her teeth, a small frown marking her brows.

“Do you think that went well?” I ask. “Like, do you think it was worth it?”

She doesn’t answer me right away, taking another moment to stare across the parking lot. “I hope so. I want to make sure you get the clients.” She shrugs.

I tap the top of the trunk, a soft metallic thud. “That’s for me to worry about,” I assure her, and I’m struck, in this moment, at how long it’s been since I spoke to my own therapist and what she might think about me entering into this arrangement with Chloe.

Well, I know what she’d think. She’d set her pen down, because she’s the type of therapist who still takes handwritten notes, and she’d sigh and say, with great effort, “Dean.”

“I never asked,” Chloe says. “Why you came back.”

I turn, resting my butt against her trunk. “Why’d I leave London, you mean?”

She nods, her hands still pressed to the trunk lid.

I sigh again, an attempt to be intentional about my breaths. “My girlfriend broke up with me,” I say simply.

“Oh.” Chloe sounds surprised, as if she hadn’t considered I had a girlfriend. I don’t know whether to be offended or chalk it up to Chloe being Chloe.

“We dated for a while. After I closed my boyfriend-for-hire services,” I joke.

She doesn’t laugh.

“She owned her own place, and I moved in. She was a veterinarian. And, eventually, she made it clear she wanted more. And I realized that I didn’t.”

Chloe turns to face me now, her hip leaned against the car. “More as in marriage? Kids?”

“Yeah, you know.” I shrug my shoulders to ease the sudden tension. “Commitment. ”

“And you don’t want that.” She nods as she says it.

“Not necessarily.” I’ve thought about it before. Marriage, or common law. The tying together of two lives in whatever way fits. “I’d get married,” I say, “have kids. I’ll be with someone for as long as we both shall live. Or, at least, I’m willing to try it.”

“Oh.” Chloe almost sounds disappointed, and I smile, studying her out of the corner of my eye.

“I just didn’t want to do those things with her.”

“ Oh. ” She winces.

“Yeah.” I broke her heart. That’s not a good guess.

She told me. You broke my heart, Dean , as I packed the last of my things into the back of the rented moving van.

I kind of broke my own heart, too. Though I didn’t tell her that.

It didn’t seem like the right time. “I wished I could have, you know? Given her forever. But…” I shrug again. A useless, empty gesture.

“But what?” she asks. “How did you know? How did you know you couldn’t give her forever?”

This time I face her, too, settling so we are almost eye to eye. I put my hand on my chest, over my heart, the heat of my palm spanning my left pectoral muscle. “I felt it. Or didn’t feel it.”

Her brow furrows, cutting deeper grooves into her skin.

“There wasn’t any one thing. It wasn’t even a list of things. It was…” I tap my fingers against the smooth cotton of my t-shirt. “When I pictured forever, it wasn’t with her.”

“Who was it with?”

“I mean, no one. I don’t know.” I smile awkwardly. “I don’t have anyone in mind.”

“Then how do you know it’s not her?” she asks, and I’m positive that Caroline— my ex— and Chloe don’t know each other, but Chloe seems to be her staunch advocate, nonetheless.

“Forever can’t be the person who only looks good on paper,” I say.

“It has to feel right. And when I thought about forever with Caro, it was…okay. It was imaginable, I guess. But it didn’t feel easy.

And I’m not saying relationships should be easy.

They aren’t. They can’t be. But the loving someone part?

The waking up every day and pu tting them first part?

Choosing them even when they piss you off or annoy you.

Even when they hurt you. That part has to be easy.

It has to be solid. And I didn’t trust myself with Caro to make that choice. ”

“But you have felt it,” Chloe says.

“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 that easy before?”

I shake my head. “Oh. No.”

Chloe makes a sound like a growl. “Then how do you know ?”

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.”