Page 20 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

CHLOE

F rom a sales perspective, Core Cupid’s new onboarding process is far more efficient than it used to be.

After filling out the first survey, clients meet virtually with Dean for a complimentary thirty-minute session.

As a therapist, Dean can’t technically call himself a “dating coach,” though the profession exists outside the therapeutic context.

Something about how that’s not actually a designation, but more of a specialization that he can claim.

For those thirty minutes, Dean is not technically their therapist, which means he can share— after they’ve signed a waiver— suggestions and notes with me about their talk to help me hone the client’s details for the algorithm.

Clients come to me for our one-on-one interview with a better idea of why they’re there, and I have a better idea of what they want, too. From there, if they want to see Dean again, they’re free to become his patient, though, of course, he can no longer share information with my business.

But it’s win-win-win: for me, for him, and hopefully for the client, too.

From an interpersonal perspective, the new onboarding process doesn’t require Dean to be in the office.

Like at all. He can meet with clients virtually from his childhood bedroom.

He can send me his notes via email. And he never needs to be in the meeting with the client and me.

In fact, he’d prefer not to be there to ensure the client feels “wholly capable of expressing themselves” to me or whatever he said in his email when I asked him if he’d be around anytime soon.

He has a key. He knows the security code. He has no reason not to be here.

Except, if he considers me a reason.

“Do you still want to come for dinner on Sunday, honey?” Mom asks. From her volume, despite her proximity to me on this bench outside my favorite Spadina dumpling spot, this is not the first time she asked the question.

“Sorry.” I jerk my gaze back to her, though now she’s looking where I stared, unseeing, at a pair of pigeons investigating a hotdog bun in the gutter. “Yes. Dinner. Sunday.” I take a big bite of dumpling, juice squirting out the other end into the take-out bowl. “Bob,” I say around the meat.

She titters like a schoolgirl, tucking her hair behind her ear.

Bob wants to meet me, she said. He’s going to barbecue for us.

The way she talks about him, it sounds like things are moving fast, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

She’ll stop herself mid-story sometimes, like she’s gotten carried away with her feelings.

That or she’s avoiding telling me about spending the night, which I greatly appreciate.

“To think, my daughter runs a matchmaking company, and I met him the old-fashioned way.”

I snort. “What’s the old-fashioned way?”

“At a bar,” she says, disbelieving to her own ears. “Isn’t that something?”

“It’s something,” I echo. Really something, since I can’t remember a time my mom drank. “That reminds me.” I make a show of checking my phone. “I need to get going. Still got some things to wrap up before I head over to Moonbar this afternoon.”

“Oh, Chloe.” She sighs, taking our empty food containers. She stuffs everything back into the paper take-out bag and tucks it under her arm to toss into the trashcan at the end of the block. “I worry about you. You work too much.”

“How do you know I’m going to Moonbar for work?” I ask in a joking tone, but only half-joking.

She shoots me a look as we wait for the light to change at the crosswalk, because yes, other than a few blissful days a couple weeks ago, I probably do work too much.

“Before I forget,” she says, hustling ahead of me on the crosswalk and waiting for me only once she’s reached the other sidewalk. “Bob’s son is joining us for dinner, and he’s bringing his boyfriend. I think his name is…Amir?”

Great. I’ll be the only one without a date. “Can I bring someone, too?”

Mom laughs again, not her sweet, in-love giggle but an almost cackle, with her head tipped back, her face to the sun. “Like a date?” she asks.

I stop on the street. Two men in ankle-length suit pants and no socks swerve around me. “Yeah, like a date.”

She frowns, her nose scrunching, as if today is the first day the thought has even occurred to her.

That I might, I could, have a date. We’re not much different, my mother and I; she didn’t date after she and Dad divorced.

I never asked why. It wasn’t something I thought about as a child; I was more concerned about what their divorce meant for me because that’s what children generally concern themselves with.

But maybe she never dated for the same reasons I haven’t.

Maybe she’s felt ill-equipped all these years.

Overanalyzed the part she played in their unhappily ever after and didn’t want to be with anyone new until she understood that she’d never make the same mistakes again.

Maybe Mom, with her anxieties and nerves and routines, her specificities, was never quite able to express her feelings to me or Dad or even Bob.

Just like I, maybe, feel that way.

Maybe Mom has made a mistake, some time in her past, one I don’t know about, one that she regrets every day not only because of the effect it had on another person— a good person— but because of what that mistake said about her. About who she was, is, as a person.

“If I had someone to bring,” I say slowly as we amble up the street to my office, our pace starkly slower than everyone else out on late lunch breaks or heading to their next meetings. “Could I?”

I don’t look at her, but from the corner of my eye, Mom cocks her head to the side, a silent question. “Of course you could,” she says. I can tell from the tremor in her voice, the higher pitch, that she wants to ask questions, like who? and when did you meet? and, mostly, who?

I smile at that. “I don’t have anyone to bring, by the way,” I say.

“Don’t get your hopes up.” Because it’s not like I could bring Dean.

Could I? No. We’re supposed to be working together, and I don’t date anyway.

And the things we’ve been doing are old patterns.

Old patterns that we need to get out of our systems; that we probably have already, in fact.

“They’re not,” she says, with an overly bright smile.

“My hopes are at just the right height.” Mom stops a few steps away from my office’s lot in the shade of a tree that blooms the most lovely flowers in spring but drops the stinkiest fruit after.

She stands on the smooshed carcasses of that fruit, sticky and sickly sweet.

“I went to see a therapist a while ago, you know.”

“Oh.” Because no, I didn’t know.

“It wasn’t any one thing. It certainly wasn’t something I think I could have done if your Nana was still with us. She would have made it all about herself,” Mom whispers conspiratorially, like Nana might hear her right now.

“Did it help?” I ask. “Did you get the answers you were looking for?”

“No.” She shrugs. Laughs. “Well, not completely. But I learned that a lot of the things that I thought were my fault, weren’t. And the things that were my fault, well, I was allowed to forgive myself for them.”

Mom and I have never really talked about Dean Westlake and what happened fifteen years ago.

We never talked more than was necessary, at least. My parents knew I had a part in it because they knew the messages came from my phone.

I told them, I swore, it wasn’t me who sent those texts, and they believed me.

I think Mom and Dad were mostly relieved that they’d finally been proven right about the LKs.

Neither had liked my friend group much, and even divorced parents love to unite over a well-deserved I told you so .

But we never discussed why Dean, a boy they’d only ever known as my French tutor, would be so easily convinced to send me a photo of his genitalia.

All three of us kind of skirted around the subject; looking back, that was probably to everyone’s detriment. Including Dean’s.

She couldn’t possibly know now about Dean’s reentrance in my life. Mostly because I haven’t told her. I don’t know what I could possibly say about him to her anyway.

Hey, Mom, remember the boy who taught me French, whose life my friends ruined? Well, I think I was a little bit in love with him when I was seventeen, and now he’s back in my life and I don’t know how to make up for what I did to him— or didn’t do for him.

But her words feel specifically chosen for me, nevertheless. Maybe I’ll take them for the gift they’re meant to be.

Today I walk into a packed Moonbar, having recouped all the clients I lost since the last time I was here. And yet, I’m just as frazzled and unsteady as I was when I needed to take a moment to breathe in Jasmine’s office.

When I texted Dean to see if he was coming today, he said, “We’ll see.”

So, of course, I’m reading into that like we’re seventeen again.

Bernie and Nick are behind the bar, though Bernie does most of the bartending while Nick does what he calls community work, which mostly seems to entail chatting and predicting people’s drink orders based on “vibes.”

The bar isn’t as packed as it was for the last BIA networking event, but I still have to yell for Bernie to hear my order. “You want a what?” she asks for a third time .

“ Sex on the beach ,” I huff, exasperated. I wasn’t expecting this to be so embarrassing.

She nods, her mouth a thin, thinking line. “I’ve got to make sure we have all the ingredients.”

I stand tall at the bar while I wait, not quite looking around but making full use of my periphery, hoping to catch a glimpse of tattoos or midriff or dark hair that falls into darker eyes or pouty lips.

“Can I talk to you?” Jasmine appears next to me, her hand wrapped around my arm under the cap sleeve of my blouse.

“Um…” With her as a shield, I take a moment to do a proper survey of the bar. No Dean. “Yeah, sure. What’s up?”