Page 38 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

T hunder rolls through the sky outside my office window, the sound so low and distant it’s easy to confuse the acoustic shockwave with the sound of one of my matchmakers rolling their chairs across the floor.

But when neither Ayesha nor Leif pop their heads into my open doorway a few seconds later to interrupt my phone call, the origins are clear.

The storm that has been pounding the city for the last eight hours is finally moving on.

Luckily, Zoltan agrees. “It did.” His smile beams brighter than any post-rain sunshine ever could. “We’re meeting up again on Thursday,” he says.

As I finish up the call and close the laptop, Lief does lean into my doorway. “Hey, boss. You all done for today?” They’re white, freckled, and fair, with bottle green hair and a look of eternal impish-ness, but today, their smile seems extra cheeky .

“Just about,” I say.

“Cool. Ayesha and I have some client meetings we scheduled off-site so—”

“Be caref —”

“So we’re going to be careful,” Ayesha says, joining Lief in the doorway. Her lilac hijab complements her brown skin and toothy smile.

They’re both freshly graduated from university. Lief with a degree in gender studies and Ayesha in business. I can’t help but feel protective of them. They whisper and giggle to each other as they leave the office.

“Check in with me after,” I call, which only makes them laugh inexplicably harder.

Once I hear the door click shut behind them and their feet stomp down the stairway, I turn to my phone. As I expected, it’s a text from Dean:

Lover: hey

hi xo

I’ve been too busy to check in all day.

Good sessions today?

Lover: I think so

Lover: can I ask you something?

Anything.

Lover: for a favor

Yes. Anything. What?

He types and then stops, again and again, the text bubble disappearing enough times that my screen turns dark while I wait for his response.

Lover: send me a picture.

I roll my eyes. Dean has countless photos of me.

He has a folder on his phone for black and whites, for color, for candids and selfies.

He has another locked folder with other kinds of photos that are just for us.

He hoards photos like currency, a miser for my likeness.

But unlike the finance bros who insist on “high quality women,” I am happy to simply print him more money.

I set the phone in its stand and open the camera. I pose, my chin in my hand, and smile, take a few photos, and send all of them to him.

Lover: not that kind of photo

I’ve long lost the impulse to check my photos first. Dean says photography isn’t about capturing a beautiful thing. It’s about finding a real thing. “Real is beautiful,” he says. “That’s a successful photo.”

I double check the ones I sent anyway, in case a real booger was hanging out of my nose in one of them or something, but they’re all normal. They’re fine. Real.

What kind of photo?

I wish there was a way to inflect suspicion in my text messages, because before he’s even started his response, I’m suspicious of what he’s about to say to me.

I’m not sending you a CLAMGRAM

Lover: I want a clamgram

I laugh as he sends a series of lol s across my screen.

Lover: maybe I should take the pic instead, though. Can you meet me somewhere?

I glance at the time on my phone.

Aren’t we meeting for dinner soon?

I type with suspicious intonation. Instead of dignifying me with a response, he sends me an address: 789 Yonge Street.

I stare at it for a moment, because the address isn’t immediately recognizable, but I have this persistent sense that I’ve been there before.

Finally, I give up and type it into my search bar.

YOU WANT TO GO BACK TO THE TORONTO REFERENCE LIbrARY?

The library is still open when I arrive but is supposed to close in thirty minutes.

I loiter for a minute or two outside, the pavement already drying from dark to light gray, the heat from the sun burning away any residual cool storm air.

Eventually, when he doesn’t join me out here, I go inside to wait in the air-conditioned lobby.

He never said where he’d be, and he’s not answering any clarifying texts, but after a ten-minute wait, I start to wander.

It’s part nostalgia, part rationality that takes me up to the fifth floor.

That spot in the stacks is the only place that has any significant meaning to either of us, so I might as well check there.

Dean stands at the back of the stacks, leaning against the wall, looking down at his camera when I turn the corner. He smiles at me when I step into the stack with him. “Hey.”

“Whatever you have planned for me here,” I say, crossing my arms in mock authority, “just do it to me when we get home. I don’t think the librarians want their books exposed to whatever depraved activities you have stashed away in your mind. ”

He huffs a laugh as he lifts the camera to his face and focuses the lens on me. “I’m not the one with an exhibitionism kink.”

I grin but don’t argue. He’s not right. But he’s not wrong, either. I think we just bring out the best in each other.

He steps closer and closer, snapping photos as he moves. He stops a few feet away and sets the camera on a span of empty shelf. “I thought maybe,” he says, a tremor in his voice, “we could take a photo together?”

“Here?” I ask. I look down at my short-sleeve button-up white blouse and the mid-calf flowy navy blue skirt.

My hair is probably a humid, puffy mess, and I didn’t bother putting makeup on for work this morning because it feels like it will melt off my face the moment I step out into the summer heat.

“Don’t you want to take advantage of golden hour or whatever? ” I ask.

He raises an eyebrow. “What? You want to go do photos in the park again?”

I shrug. “I at least would like a little warning. What are these pics supposed to be for? Headshots?” Because if that’s the case, I definitely need to find some lip gloss and a hairbrush.

Dean shakes his head, tugging the strap of my bag off my shoulder and setting it gently on the floor. “Chloe, they’re couple photos,” he says slowly. “They’re just for us.”

“I thought you were taking me out for dinner, though.” I’m hungry and I was promised falafel and tabouleh.

“Chloe.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and takes a deep breath.

I copy him. We watched a video once of a woman who came every time her Dom kissed her on her forehead.

I think Dean might have trained me to do the same thing but for calming breaths.

“They’re just a few photos. Then we’ll eat. I promise.”

“Sorry,” I say quietly. I tug at the hem of his short-sleeve button-up shirt, left untucked from his blue slacks. We’ve accidentally dressed alike. Though he has a hat— likely with some pithy joke embroidered across it— tucked into the back pocket of his pants.

“I fucked up the last ones,” he says, his voice equally quiet, as he moves my body into the position he wants in front of the camera. He plays with my hair, putting it over one shoulder, the other, then deciding it was best behind my ears and down my back like I had it.

“You didn’t fuck them up,” I insist. “Fucked me up, maybe.”

He laughs. Stops fiddling with something in his pocket to look at me. He takes my chin between his fingers and kisses me. “Hey,” he says again. “I haven’t gotten to do that all day.”

“Yeah.” I kiss him back, a quick brush of our lips that lasts a little longer the next time I do it. “You left too early.”

He’s slowly and unofficially moved into my condo.

After he rented a small office space for in-person therapy sessions, it just made more sense for him to live downtown, anyway.

And while I don’t necessarily have extra room in my postage-stamp sized condo, I could make some for him.

Turns out having a boyfriend is endlessly fun.

Even the boring parts of relationships, when you stop punishing yourself, let yourself have one.

Dean takes his spot behind me, and we face the camera, his arms around my waist, his chin hovering over my shoulder.

“Shouldn’t you set the timer?” I whisper.

An announcement comes over the library PA, “The library will be closing in five minutes.”

“Right.” He presses a button on the camera, but all that happens is the flash snaps out of its dock. Dean turns back to me. “You know, I think, if it’s okay, I might make one small change to your wardrobe.”

I look down at myself. It’s a pretty dull outfit. “Again, if I was told beforehand, I could have packed something,” I say.

He waves the words away with his hand. “No. It’s nothing big.” He takes my hand, A-P-E-R closing around my fingers. “Do you trust me?”

I frown, a seed of worry that he even has to ask. “Of course.”

He nods, looks at the camera, shoves his hand in his back pocket. For a second, I practice my explanation of why I don’t want to wear his ball cap in these pictures. But he doesn’t present me with the hat stuffed into his back pocket.

Instead, he holds a ring between his thumb and forefinger .

I frown at it, blink at the thin gold band and the single stone glimmering in the overhead lights.

“Chloe,” he says, the trembling returning to his voice. I meet his eyes when he’s quiet for too long. He smiles crookedly. “I had a whole speech,” he says. “But I’ve forgotten it.”

“Okay,” I say. I think I’m supposed to feel something. Happy, anxious, scared. Different. Whatever I’m supposed to feel, though, is dulled by the heavy glug of my blood through my veins. “Just say…” I say, “whatever feels best.”

He smiles, lifting my hand to his mouth to press a kiss there. “Okay. Well. I love you, Chloe.”

I nod. “I love you, too.”

His eyes shine as his smile widens, and suddenly, whatever it was I’m supposed to feel? I feel it. Happy. Anxious. Scared. Different.

Loved. I feel loved.

“Le plus,” I say.

These words seem to steady him. The tremor is gone. “So, uh…” He holds the ring up to my ring finger. “Do you want to get married?” he asks.

There have been so many times in my life when I have failed him. But even more when I have failed myself. When I was too stuck, too frozen to say the things that needed to be said, the things he deserved to hear, that I deserved to say.

This is not one of those times. “Yes,” I say. “I want to get married.”

I want to stand in front of everyone who loves us and claim him. And I will.

Now, I will.

I don’t know if Dean actually puts the ring on my finger.

I’m too busy kissing him. My mouth filled with the taste of his cinnamon gum and his laughter.

I cup his hip beneath his clothes, pull him against me.

We bump into something; another something thuds mutedly to the carpeted floor.

Distantly, I hope it’s not his camera, but I am too preoccupied with huffing the spicy vanilla scent he wears like the newest party drug to check.

Dean hooks my leg around his waist, pressing himself against me. His hand holds me steadily, his palm spread wide across my ass, the other hand gripping the bookshelf above my head.

Forget my moral panic about sex in the library. So help me, I will write the librarians a letter of apology tomorrow if it means this man can fuck me against their books right now.

“Ahem.” A voice breaks through the horny siren blaring in my mind.

Dean covers as much of me as he can with his body as he looks over his shoulder at the source of the throat clearing.

“The library is closing now,” a woman says.

“Right,” we say in unison. Dean slowly peels away from me. Luckily, all of our clothes, including my panties, are still on. I just have to adjust the twisted waist of my skirt. Dean keeps his back to the librarian, an Asian woman whose black hair is streaked through with gray at her temples.

“Sorry,” I say. “We just got engaged.”

“Congratulations,” she says with the flattest possible affect. I don’t think she means that.

She watches us gather our stuff and escorts us to the front doors. We definitely can never return here. This can never be my home branch. But with his hand in mine, his laughter in my ear, I can’t bring myself to care.

He kisses me the second we step outside as the librarian locks the doors behind us. “I know,” he says against my lips. “I said I’d feed…” We can’t stop kissing long enough to finish sentences. “You. But can we stop at…” Our kisses have dissolved into teeth and lips mostly. “Moonbar first?”

Finally, I pull my mouth away from his. “But isn’t there a BIA event tonight?”

He grins.

Moonbar looks closed. Like it’s not just a quiet night or a symptom of a poorly advertised BIA event. The business is closed . There are no lights, no music pumping from behind the door. No laughter. Even Chuck, the bouncer, has deserted his station. “Maybe the BIA event got canceled?” I suggest.

But Dean pushes the door open anyway. He tugs my hand as we descend into the bar, the air thicker, a bit stuffier down here. “Don’t worry about it,” he says as the stairwell empties us out into the dark bar.

A moment later, the lights turn on, the music blares, and a cacophony of people yell at me. It takes a moment of silent blinking to fully process: Congratulations!

The first faces I recognize are Nick’s and Jasmine’s.

Then my mom’s, my dad and his fiancé, who are supposed to be living in Japan right now.

Lief and Ayesha. Dean’s mom and dad. Jade, Jasmine’s little sister, Rick and Matt, Mrs. Rivkin.

It takes another longer moment to realize that I recognize every face here. These are all our friends, our family.

The bar is decked out in white streamers and balloons, and the lyrics to an early aughts emo song play on the screen above the karaoke stage.

And pinned across the back of the bar, hiding the old, foggy mirror and many random license plates, a banner with the words, in bright silver letters:

DEAN & CHLOE: MOST LIKELY TO MARRY

THE END