Page 25 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

DEAN

I stretch out across the bed, arms reaching for soft, warm skin, but coming up empty.

The top-down blinds my parents installed after I moved out have only been drawn down about twelve inches, but combined with early morning sunlight streaming from the hallway through my open bedroom door, I have to squint at the sudden brightness when I open my eyes.

As if summoned by every teenage nocturnal emission ever released in this bed, Chloe chooses this moment to pad into my bedroom, holding two steaming cups of what I can only assume is coffee and wearing my old blue and green tartan bathrobe. And absolutely nothing else.

Suddenly, Chloe could be the human embodiment of the sun, and I still wouldn’t— couldn’t— look away.

The robe hangs from her shoulders, sloping gently over her breasts, her nipples barely covered by flannel.

The curve of her tummy and the flare of her hips command my attention.

I follow the lines of her body with my eyes, my hands and mouth aching to join, until I land at the inevitable terminus between her thighs.

When we were younger, I never spent much time looking at her.

Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t know I could.

I didn’t understand the simple joy of looking at her— at any woman’s— body.

Noticing the golden tint to the hair between her legs, the shadows thrown across her body by breasts, hips, and limbs.

At most, back then, I got momentary glimpses of skin that looked impossibly soft.

Now I wonder about her scars, how they got there and how she feels about them.

I find freckles and consider the best names to give them so that I can use them in the future to map out her body the way astronomers use stars to map the night sky.

“Good morning,” she says, placing the mug on the bedside table when I don’t take it from her offered hand.

“Sorry.” I clear my throat, sheepish at being caught staring, though not regretful. I sit up against the wall and hold the mug in my hands, letting the warmth seep in.

Chloe doesn’t take back her spot next to me, though.

She wanders the cramped horseshoe of floor space left around my bed, investigating the accumulation of stuff on my dresser and walls.

She stops at the bookshelf on the other side of my bed and exchanges the coffee in her hands for the Nikon D700 DSLR.

“Does this still have film in it?” she asks, frowning down at the viewfinder.

“No.” I smile. “It’s digital.”

“Oh, duh.” She blushes. She turns her back to me, bending over the camera.

I mentally thumb through what photos I could possibly have on that memory card, but when she turns back to me, half her face is shielded by the camera, the lens pointed directly at me, and I flinch, tugging the sheet up my body and turning away.

It’s only a moment before I stop myself and face her, though a sticky, shameful fear in me can’t let the sheet go. She catches it all from behind the viewfinder. She lowers the camera, her expression turning guarded.

“What’s wrong?” she asks after a moment of heavy silence.

I shrug. “Just wasn’t expecting it,” I lie.

She glances down at the camera, back at me. She sucks her lower lip into her mouth. Thinking pose, one that hasn’t changed in fifteen years. “You don’t trust me.” It’s not a question .

To buy myself time, I take a drink from my mug. Then another. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think I’d trust anyone to take a photo of me while I was naked.”

Her frown deepens. So it probably doesn’t make her feel better.

A flicker of resentment, or something that looks a lot like it, crosses her face, but it’s gone so quickly I probably imagined it.

Chloe’s shoulders expand on a deep sigh, then she crosses back to my side of the bed.

She sits at the edge of the mattress, the robe slipping off her shoulder to reveal more of her breast, her nipple, rosy pink and pebbled.

She holds the camera out to me, viewfinder first. “Take my picture?”

I take the camera from her, almost instinctually.

The weight of it, the cold of the plastic base, all of it, is as familiar to me as my own body.

I think I could recognize my cameras if I were blindfolded, based on touch alone.

“You want new headshots already?” I ask, checking the exposure and shutter settings absently.

She reaches for me again, directing the camera lens more firmly at her and the viewfinder at my face.

“Take my picture,” she says again. “I trust you.” Her voice is soft, tender, questioning. Whatever her level of trust is, her tone belies the statement. I want her to trust me, though. And more, I want to trust her.

My finger hovers over the shutter button, then the click seems to echo through my bedroom as I take the first photo.

Her eyes flutter open, her back straightening, like she’s surprised but also, maybe, a little pleased.

I don’t bother looking at the display to see the photo before I set up for the next one.

I sight her through the viewfinder this time, backlit by the sun, bracketed by shadow.

I sit up straighter, flip through settings with my thumb until I find monochrome mode.

Light like this deserves to be prioritized.

“Can you turn…” I reach for her, guiding her chin to the left, the right, tip her face up an inch, looking for the right placement. “Like that,” I murmur.

Click.

“Do you wanna see it?” I ask, still staring at the camera version of Chloe, somehow captured on LCD. This old tech doesn’t seem capable of holding all of her in, even if I can see the reality of her in front of me.

“No,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “Does it look…nice?”

I smirk at her, turn the screen for her to see.

“Oh,” she says, surprised.

Nice isn’t the word I’d use. Nice is for annual family photographs, where everyone is dressed in a different version of the same outfit. Nice is mass-produced photography prints from discount home furnishing stores.

Chloe is art.

“Can I take another?” I ask.

“You can take as many as you need,” she says simply. As if fifteen years of distrust and ill-processed trauma can be solved in one photo shoot.

I must believe it can be, though, because I lift the camera again.

“Can you…” I gesture to my shoulder, and after a moment of hesitation, she hooks her fingers in the fabric of the robe, pulling it down.

“Like this?” she asks.

I nod and she lets the robe drop from her shoulders, flannel pooling around her naked waist. I extricate myself from the sheets, doing my best not to disturb the fabric around her, crawling to the other side of the bed, her back to me.

“What are you—” she asks, turning to face me.

“Go back,” I say, a polite command— the kind I use with clients.

She listens, facing the other direction.

“Wait. Turn back, right…there.” I stop her in profile.

“Look there?” I point at the wall above the bed.

I gather her hair in my hand, place it over one shoulder, then the other, let it hang down her back before setting it back over her shoulder. “Like that,” I say. “Perfect.”

She is. A perfect model. The lines of her face, her body, the way her skin soaks up light, the mysteries in the shadows cast across her. I could spend hours doing this, capturing whole photographs and small pieces of her .

Click.

“Wanna see?” I offer again.

She nods. Her eyes are more eager this time. I crawl behind her, my legs bracketing her hips. She leans into me; my cock half hard between us. I hold the camera up for her, my arms around hers, my chin on her shoulder, as I click through the images.

“Do you like them?” I ask after a heavy silence. I want her to like them. I do.

“Yeah,” she says; the but is silent.

“You want me to delete them?” I ask, my thumb already hovering over the dial, even if that’s the last thing I want to do.

“No,” she says quickly. “I want…” She leans to the side, like she’s trying to meet my eye even if she won’t look at me. “Can you make them more…explicit?”

I have to sit with her words before I can respond. They’re already pretty explicit. But also, my brain can’t answer her with words, in the English language, and process all the potential poses I’m now imagining her in, at the same time.

“Yes,” I say, because that is the only acceptable answer to that question. “How? Like, full frontal?”

She shrugs, her hair tickling my inner arms. “That, and more sexual?” She leans into my hips again, hers canting to make her point.

I put the camera down, and Chloe turns to face me. Her palm on my upper thigh is both warm and a shock.

“Like us? Together? Photos of us having sex?”

“You don’t have to be in them.” She brushes her lips across the stubble on my chin, like she’s soothing me.

My heart pounds, but I don’t think it needs soothing.

I catch her chin, her lips, press my thumb over her mouth.

“You make me feel beautiful,” she says against my skin.

“Sexy. These photos are sexy. I want more.”

More.

More sounds dangerous, feels risky. More sounds like famous last words. But who am I to deny her? Even if they’ll probably end up my famous last words, not hers .

“I can give you more,” I say, suddenly haggard-sounding.

She kisses me, forceful, tender, like she’s grateful.

I pull away before the kiss steals all my focus. With all my control and as much gentleness as I can muster, I say, “Get on your knees.”

She kneels on the bed, the robe thrown to the floor, her hair falling down her back. She spreads her thighs just enough that if I wanted to, I could fit my hand between them, her palms up, an offering.