Page 14 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

CHLOE

T hat is a fucking cop.

“That is a fucking cop ,” Dean whispers. Though I don’t think there’s much point in it. He can probably hear us.

Oh god. He probably heard everything.

“Do you think he heard us?” Dean asks as he tries to pull his pants closed and I somehow manage to roll off his lap and back into the driver’s seat without impaling my ass on the gearshift.

“I can hear you,” says the disembodied voice on the other side of the glass. It sounds exasperated.

I stare at my panties. My mess of a pair of panties.

“I can’t wear these.” I don’t know why I bother to whisper, based on the information we’ve just received, but I do.

Dean stops wrestling with the seat recliner lever to put his hands over mine.

He squeezes me, then gently pulls the fabric that could destroy a CSI lab’s equipment from my hands and shoves them into his pocket.

“Is everything okay, officer?” I ask.

The shadowy person outside shifts on his feet, the flashlight bobbing with him. “You know the drill,” he says. “I need the windows down. I need to see everybody’s hands, and I need to know everyone is okay. ”

I roll my eyes at Dean like yeah right , and Dean frowns like he has no idea what I’m silently talking about.

“Uh. Okay. Officer. Sorry. We’ll be right there,” Dean says. His hair sticks to his temples and his shirt collar is pulled far to one side. In the dark of the car, the whites of his eyes are crystal clear.

“Have you never been arrested before?” I ask.

His frown deepens. “ Have you ?” he asks, at full, incredulous volume.

Instead of answering him, I reach across him for the power window switch. I could have used the main control on my side of the car, but keeping in contact with him right now is far more grounding and exactly what I need.

As the window rolls down and the officer, a white man who doesn’t look much older than us, leans into the car, his face morphs from tired and annoyed to surprised. I settle back on annoyed before the window well is even fully empty.

“You’re not kids,” he says.

Perv.

“No,” I say.

Dean shakes his head. “We’re adults, sir.”

I put my hand on his thigh, where it jitters uncontrollably. “Chill,” I say through clenched teeth. I’m still wet, and I haven’t had a chance to look at my hair, but it feels like a wild helmet around my head. This is not how I pictured car sex going.

“You know, usually kids come here to fool around. Or…” The cop flashes the light right into our eyes and we both wince. “Do drugs.”

“We weren’t doing drugs,” I say. I think that’s pretty obvious.

The cop makes a face that tells me he agrees.

“Guys.” He sighs. “Can you do all this…” He twirls his finger in our direction. “At home?”

“She lives in Toronto,” Dean says. “And I live with my parents.”

I squeeze his leg, a silent plea to shut up . Has no one ever told him about his right to remain silent?

“Are we under arrest, officer?” I ask.

“You know this is public indecency, right?” he asks .

Fuck .

“So, we are under arrest?” Dean sounds panicked. He looks at me. “I could lose my license to practice therapy.”

I look at the cop, eyebrows raised, awaiting our fate. Mostly, he looks like he wishes he was retired, which is fine with me. “Please just go…not here.” He ambles back to his cruiser, the flashlight guiding his way. He gets in but doesn’t drive away. Probably waiting for us to leave first.

A slick oil feeling of discomfort takes shape in my stomach. “Do you think he was giving us special treatment?” I ask.

Dean ignores me, flipping on the dome light and muttering about car keys.

“That felt weird. Didn’t that feel weird? Like would he have treated us differently if we weren’t adults who know our rights?”

Finally, Dean seems to realize that the car has an automatic start button. He presses it. “Honestly, probably. Yes, he was giving us special treatment, but can we please go back to my house?”

“But that’s wrong,” I say.

From a few spots down, the cruiser’s siren blips, the reds and blues illuminating the inside of the car and the strain that stress has thrown across Dean’s face.

“I agree,” he says, guiding my hands to the ten and two position on the steering wheel.

“But can we please finish this discussion at my parents’ house? Or even in their driveway? Please ?”

Dean’s chest heaves with deep, shuddering breaths, his jaw pulsing with tension.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

His chest expands on a deep inhale, his eyes closed. “I swear to god, Chloe. If you don’t start driving, I will?—”

I throw up my hands. “Okay, okay. We’re going.”

The cop follows us out of the parking lot and down the street toward Dean’s subdivision, peeling off only when I turn left.

Dean doesn’t soften, even after we lose our tail, sitting rigidly in the seat next to me like we didn’t have each other’s genitals in our hands less than fifteen minutes ago.

And I can’t think of what I should or possibly could say to make it better.

Mostly because I’m pretty sure he won’t want to talk about it anyway.

I pull into his driveway without a single direction from him. Something I should be proud of, because who remembers exactly how to get back to their high school French tutor and secret friends with benefits’ house fifteen years later? But as with most feelings tied to Dean, it’s complicated.

I turn off the engine and we sit behind a dark-colored pickup truck. The kind of utility vehicle that seems useless for most people living in the Toronto suburbs and is most likely a vanity purchase; not that I’d ever say that to Dean about what is likely his father’s car.

We sit so long, Dean staring straight ahead at the license plate— AZPY 336— that the motion sensor light pointed at us turns off. We used to wait for this moment, when we could hide behind the dark and kiss and touch. When Dean would say that French kissing is more language practice.

I want to apologize, because even though I don’t know what I did, I know it was wrong. But I’m sorry seems to be the one thing we for sure cannot say to each other. “How’d you become a boyfriend for hire?” I ask, because I’m curious and because that seems like a safe distraction.

He shakes his head before he looks at me, like he’s trying to shake away whatever loop his brain found itself in.

With his eyes on me, I am suddenly once again very aware of the fact that I am not wearing panties, that my dress is still damp in uncomfortable places.

I wonder if the cop thought, when I rolled down the window, that it smelled like sex in here, and if it still does.

“My college roommate,” he says simply.

“Like…he was your pimp?”

“Chloe.” He sighs, eyes closed and head back. “No. He liked this girl, and she wouldn’t go out with him unless he had a friend for her friend, and that was me.” His voice is rough, more from emotion than disuse. “And it turned out my date actually liked my roommate, too.”

“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 the Jurassic Park movie 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 filmed Jurassic 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, like of 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 Dean doesn’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.