Page 13 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

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 all day, 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 it now , 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 at love? 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, but more somehow.

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.

“Okay?” she asks.

I unclip her belt buckle and gently guide it back toward her side of the door.

I follow the line, rubbed into the skin of her neck and shoulder by the polyester webbing, with my fingertips, then my mouth, sucking and licking those tender spots.

She tips her head back, leans farther onto her hand on my thigh to grant me greater access.

Her other hand tunnels through my hair at the back of my head, and she releases the softest sigh.

“I like being with you again, too,” I say to her skin.

Chloe pushes me back against the seat, unclipping my seat belt and pulling the lever to recline my seat as she straddles me.

I let my hands rest on her thighs, pushing her skirt up until it’s a bundle of fabric around her hips.

She peels back the knit cardigan I put back on before we got in the car and slides her hand under my white t-shirt.

Her fingers are cold, and she smiles, devilish, when I gasp at the feeling of her hands on the warm skin of my stomach.

She grips the waist of my khakis in her fist.

“How did you get more beautiful, Dean?” she asks, her voice too sweet and filled with awe to be found anywhere near a place as mundane as a municipal lot.

Even though we can’t see much in the dim light, I turn my face away. Still, always, self-conscious to be called words like beautiful or pretty.

I haven’t reached a point where I can acknowledge the compliment, but I swallow back the embarrassment, look back into her eyes, and wear her words like the compliment I knew she meant them to be. “So did you,” I say simply.

She covers one of my hands with hers and draws it closer to the warmth between her thighs. “Touch me?” she asks. And then, tentatively, “You can have my panties again. If you want?”

“I…no…” Fuck. “I’m sorry. You can have those back.”

She shakes her head and leans in closer until her lips hover above my ear. She slides our hands closer still to the satin-soft fabric of her panties. “I liked it.”

I give her what she wants. Our hands disappear under her dress, and I drag my thumb up the wet fabric of the middle of her panties.

She gasps, measured by the corresponding goose bumps against my throat.

In our tangle of limbs, all anchored between us, she finds my cock, straining against the heavy cotton.

We stop petting each other long enough for her to tug at my belt, wrench at the button and fly. I press my hips up into her hand before she’s even pulled my cock all the way out of my boxer briefs. As I fuck into her fist, the car fills with the sound of my heavy breaths and her spitting.

I’m greedy for her suddenly. Or maybe it’s not sudden. Maybe this greed has always been here, but dormant. I slip my thumb beneath her panties and groan. My dick gets harder, somehow, at her slickness against my skin, her heat. “Take them off.” I gasp as she squeezes me tightly.

“What?” she asks, her own hips stuttering where she’s been grinding against my hand.

“Can you take them off?” I ask. “Your panties.”

She answers by levering up onto her knees.

I take myself in hand, rub myself slowly while I watch her hike her skirt up around her hips and push her panties down one leg at a time.

She giggles as she tips her weight onto one knee, then the other.

Chloe doesn’t drive with music, and the silence of the car makes everything better , makes her laughter and breaths and the quiet shuffle of clothing louder.

“Here,” she says quietly, holding her panties out to me. I don’t take them right away, and she frowns. “What do you want?” she asks me after a moment.

My cheeks flush with heat and she takes my hand, moved to her thigh to steady her while she’d pulled her panties off for me, and puts it back between her legs. “What do you want?” she asks again, rubbing my thumb, my knuckles over her wet pussy. My cock leaks for her.

“Make them wet?” I can’t quite make it a command. “Make your panties wet.”

Again, she doesn’t hesitate. She replaces my hand with her panties and lets me watch her cover them in her wetness. She holds her skirt up around her hip as she rubs herself, the wet sounds obscene .

“Like this?”

“Put them on me,” I whisper, guiding her hand and her panties around my cock. The fabric is soft and slick and— “Oh fuck.”

“You like this?”

“God, yes,” I say as I return my hands to her body.

We’re awkward, arms wrapped in and around each other, moving too slow to come anytime soon; but it feels good and it’s fun, chasing her mouth when she leans in for a kiss, tonguing her nipple through the fabric of her dress, grabbing the headrest when her thumb brushes the underside of my cock in just the right place, her hand leaving a smear on the fogged window when I slip my fingers inside her.

“Do you have,” she asks between labored breaths, “a condom?”

I shake my head against the seat. “No.” I haven’t carried condoms in my wallet since my age started with a one. And I fucking regret it.

“I wish we could,” she whispers.

“I know.”

“What would you do to me? If you could fuck me right now?”

My mind wants to answer, dully, with fuck you . But I know that’s not what she’s asking for, and I want to give her what she’s asking for. I want it almost as much as I want to do the act itself.

“Tease you,” I whisper and grin when she pouts.

“ No ,” she whines softly.

“Rub myself all over you.” That feels perilous with our bare body parts already so close to each other, but it’s also exactly why I say it. Because I’d do it right now if she’d let me. “But I wouldn’t go deep inside you until you were begging.”

She grins, her eyes closed, and I hope she can see it the way I see it right now. Both the minutes teased into hours and the relief that would come once I finally sank into her. An appetizer to the orgasm to come.

“Where would you put it?” she asks, and when I don’t answer right away, it’s only because my brain fractals at all the different ways I could get to fuck Chloe, and I have to gather the pieces like my clothes from the floor .

“Wherever you want,” I finally manage to get out. A cop out, I know, even before she stops everything she’s doing— imagining us, jerking me— to stare.

She opens her mouth, and I am ready to receive whatever admonishment she’ll give me, except she is interrupted by three hard raps on the passenger-side window, a distorted flashlight beam through the foggy glass, through it, the dark figure of a hulking man.

“Okay, guys, I need you to open the window, please,” he says.

’Cause he’s a cop. He’s a fucking cop, and he’s caught us, caught me , with my literal dick out.

Again.