Page 35 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

“Yeah.” I don’t know what else to say about it.

I can’t tell her that we’re not “just friends,” that we’re so much more.

It’s not right to tell Lauren things about Dean.

Any information she gets has to come from him.

I didn’t do anything to protect him when we were kids, and even if she’s not a threat any longer, I won’t fail at that now.

“I, um…” She loops her arm around mine again, her other hand resting gently on her belly. “I don’t know how to say I’m sorry for what I did to him.” From the corner of my eye, she glances at me, but I don’t turn. “And to you.”

I stop and she stops with me. “Me?”

Lauren’s face is heat-exhaustion levels of pink. “I stole your phone, Chloe. I betrayed your trust. On top of what I did to Dean.”

“It was pretty fucked up,” I say.

“I know,” she says quietly. “When I saw you guys at the diner, I honestly didn’t even realize it was him.” She shakes her head. “So that made things worse.”

“Are you asking me for advice?” Part of me wants to tell her not to bother.

Don’t corner him emotionally and require forgiveness of him.

But that’s my own need to protect Dean. He deserves an apology and to decide whether to accept it or not.

“Because I don’t know either. He didn’t let me apologize at first.” But in the end, maybe that was for the best. “Maybe that’s because sometimes apologies aren’t enough?

It made me have to be different. He made me different. ”

Lauren and I walk in silence, the tour guide telling our group about how high winds during a thunderstorm caused a tree to come through the windows of this hallway about five years ago.

It happened on a weekend, so no one was injured, but this entire block of classes was closed for months after.

A mural of trees surrounds the windows now, thunder, lightning, and rain on one side, sun and clear blue skies on the other, painted by the kids.

“What,” Lauren asks slowly, “did you have to apologize for?”

I let our group pull away from us again.

With Lauren’s arm through mine, walking these halls, it feels like we’re sixteen again.

Except without all the baggage that comes with complicated teenage girl relationships, the intense sense of love and belonging, the toxicity and competition.

With her now, I can forgive her for the person she was, even for who she’s grown to be, but mostly, I can forgive myself for the person I was, and I can choose to do better.

“For not being brave enough to love him the way he deserved the first time.” I’m saying too much, but not because I think Lauren deserves this truth. Because Dean does, and I do.

“But you do now?” she asks. “Love him?”

The unnecessary tour spits us out of a dark stairwell back into the foyer, bustling with overflow from the dance floor-cafeteria-auditorium.

“Yeah,” I say proudly. “I do.”

Slowly, she extricates her arm from mine.

“Have you made your confession yet?” Lauren nods toward the metal box.

It’s about the size of a photo booth, except instead of a flimsy curtain, it has a latched door.

A couple come tumbling out, red-faced and laughing, tangled in each other’s arms. The only reason I’m not scared to find bodily fluids in that booth as I approach it is because I know that the videos are being live-streamed into the auditorium, if not the sound.

Lauren waves at me as I close the door.

This pill box of a room is barely tall enough for me to stand in without phantom feelings of knocking my head off the ceiling. The lighting is a social media influencer’s dream and entirely too bright to be conducive to thinking clearly.

There’s a bench set into one wall. Across from it, a screen with a green button set below it, with Hit record printed below it in red bubble letters.

I sit on the bench, adjust the ruffle sleeves of my dress, and use my reflection in the screen to tuck my hair behind my ears and check for any smudged mascara. There’s so much I want to confess.

I’m not the girl they all knew, of course. But then, that’s not something I can confess to them. Only something I can show them.

I’m not as successful as I hoped I’d be, but also, probably a lot more successful than I give myself credit for.

And speaking of credit, Dean deserves some.

I want them to know how strong he is. That we— all of us— put him through something that could have turned him into a sour, spiteful version of himself.

And yet, somehow, instead, he’s this. A man with the gentlest hands, with a shy smile, with a capacity for perseverance and forgiveness that could fill every locker in this school and still overflow onto the tile floors.

I want them to know that, actually, I no longer need them to know how successful I am. I know it enough for myself. And even if I wasn’t, I don’t need to prove anything to them, to anyone, other than the people that matter. My mom, Dad, Jasmine, and Nick. Dean.

But I also want— maybe more than I want anyone to know any of these things; with the kind of desire that feels painted on my skin in permanent ink— to reach for him, touch him.

Here, alone, in public, in the office, in bed, at Sunday dinner, in front of his parents.

The need I once had, to prove myself to everyone else, pales in comparison to the weight of his hand at the small of my back, to the sound of my name when he laughs.

Whatever I felt for him as a teenager— infatuation, obsession— it’s grown along with me, settled with time, and changed into this: the quiet thrum of his heart against my ear, the smell of him in my nose long after he’s left my bed.

I’ve changed from a person who thought I was incapable or undeserving of love into this, into loving him.

But I can’t say all of that, and I imagine there’s a time limit on these videos to begin with. I take a deep breath, lean forward, and press record.