Page 5 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

DEAN

T here aren’t many benefits to moving back in with one’s parents in your early thirties.

Scratch that.

There are almost no benefits. Mine, at least, aren’t charging me rent, and I get to work by the pool on hot summer days like this.

Sunscreen and sweat are far preferable to sitting at the tiny desk in my cramped childhood bedroom or fighting summer school undergrads and bony-elbowed senior citizens for space at the library.

Cicadas drone in the late afternoon heat.

In another backyard somewhere down the street, kids squeal and scream and an occasional dog barks.

My parents’ neighbors, Gladys and Jim, an older couple who’ve lived next to us since before I was born, sit on their deck reading, napping, listening to talk radio under the cover of their big umbrella.

Every once in a while, Gladys gets up for a “stretch” and ends up peering over our adjoining fence, asking different versions of the same questions: Am I looking forward to returning to university in the fall?

No, I graduated almost a decade ago. What am I studying?

I have a master’s degree in psychology and counseling, but again, I graduated a while ago. Am I still into photography? Yes.

I’m kind of worried about her memory .

With no sessions booked with my clients in London, I finally have a chance to edit the photos from the networking event last week.

But editing is tedious, and the heat is starting to get to me.

Plus I haven’t been able to muster the activation energy to keep going since I swiped to the photo I took of her.

I open the last few buttons of my linen t-shirt. A slip into the pool would wake me up, but the few feet it will take to stagger from the lounge chair under the umbrella to the edge feels insurmountably far in the thick Ontario humidity.

Back in the day, I hopelessly believed that this pool would be my ticket to social salvation. Like maybe the assholes I was meant to call peers would hear about my pool and want to come hang out. Then, once we were hanging out, maybe, just maybe, they’d see that I was actually kind of cool.

But that was never the case.

My friends Matty and Ricky took advantage of what the “cool kids” wouldn’t. Ages twelve to eighteen were spent practicing increasingly dangerous dives, jumps, and gainers from this pool deck.

She would come here, too. The April of grade eleven, when I started tutoring her in French, was warm. Not warm enough to open the pool but enough to lounge on the deck in our sweaters, reciting French conjugations back and forth.

Then, in the summer, she kept coming back.

Usually in the evenings or Sunday mornings when my parents were on their weekly Costco-Canadian Tire-farmers’ market trip.

The French we practiced then had less to do with the language and more to do with how far we could stick our tongues down each other’s throats.

“Sweetie,” Mom calls from the kitchen side door.

I sit up so fast the lounger almost folds itself in half with me still in it.

My heart pounds for no real reason. It’s not like I was thinking about her that way.

I’d prefer not to think of her at all. Usually, I don’t, not anymore, but I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind since I saw her last week.

Her wide eyes stare up at me from the screen, her expression not quite a smile .

“Yeah?” I pretend to be engrossed in my computer screen, dropping my round tortoiseshell sunglasses over my eyes— like that might protect me from my mother’s ability to read too deeply into whatever I’m feeling.

“Your phone has been ringing.” She holds the electronic brick above her head. “Do you want it?”

I pat my pockets, despite being able to see my phone in her hand. “Sorry. Yeah, please.”

Mom’s approach is accompanied by the soft thwup of her backyard flip-flops, the ones she’s left at the back kitchen door since I was in middle school.

She smiles, shielding her eyes from the sun as she passes me my phone.

The screen lights up, but I don’t recognize the number, other than it’s a Toronto area code.

“Who is it?” Mom asks.

I stare up at her. “I dunno.”

She nods, still standing there, watching me intently.

“Thanks?”

“You should call them back.”

“It’s probably spam,” I say, dropping the phone onto the low wicker table next to the lounger.

She shakes her head. “They left a message.”

I check my screen again. The red icon is indeed glaring at me. “Okay,” I say.

Still, she doesn’t leave.

“Mom.”

She throws up her hands. “Maybe it’s a new client,” she says defensively.

Which would be impossible, since I’ve done absolutely no networking and have made no inroads in the counseling community in the GTA. “Okay, I’ll check. Later,” I say pointedly.

She sighs but leans down to press a kiss to my sweaty crown. “I’ll bring you your hat,” she murmurs.

“Mom. I’m fine .”

She huffs again. Most of my mother’s communication happens in her exhales. “Sorry for not wanting you to get skin cancer,” she shouts as she stomps back into the house.

I peer over my shoulder, a look of apology on my face, but Gladys and Jim haven’t seemed to even notice.

It probably is a spam caller, or a wrong number, but it’s better if I quit being such a millennial and listen to the message so when she inevitably asks again, I won’t have to come up with a lie.

I punch the code into my voicemail app and wait for the message to start.

There’s silence at first. More proof of spam. Then a voice, not a word, but a hesitant, umm followed by a whispered, unselfconscious oh heavens . The sound immediately makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. That voice somehow imprinted onto the inner recesses of my brain matter.

“Hi,” the voice says. Soft, scared, sweet. “It’s Chloe.”

I shut my laptop. It’s bad enough I have to see her face staring back at me on my laptop screen. I can’t see and hear her at the same time.

That’s too much.

“I know you don’t want to talk to me.”

I wonder how she got that idea. Probably because I left immediately after Nick announced her as the winner of my headshot giveaway.

“The BIA gave me your contact info,” she says. “After you left.”

She pauses again. Chloe has always taken comfort in long silences. I can picture her face in this one, the way she’d blink at one-one thousandth shutter speed, processing thoughts, feelings, but never expressing them.

“I know you don’t want to talk to me,” she says again. “But I was hoping, maybe, we could?”

She must know how phones work, that I’ll be able to see her phone number in my call log, but she leaves her contact info anyway. Even the address of her offices, like she’s reading off a business card.

“Anyway,” she says. “It’s Chloe. I can’t remember if I said that already.” She laughs a little, a self-conscious sound. And then the message ends.

“ Ah, fuck .” I rip off my sunglasses and pinch the bridge of my nose, as if that will somehow help the headache forming beneath my frown.

“ Dean ,” Mom admonishes, and I sit up, spluttering excuses in surprise. “Don’t swear,” she says, dropping my hat on my closed laptop and stomping away again.

Everything about Core Cupid feels at odds with itself.

On paper, Chloe’s business belongs in Palo Alto.

The Toronto Business Journal— because yes, I have googled her— literally used the word “disrupt” to describe what Chloe’s algorithmic genius could do for the professional matchmaking industry.

It has all the trappings of the binary sterility I’d expect from Big Tech.

Except it also has Chloe.

Chloe’s office has the entire upper floor of a gray stone ivy-covered heritage building adapted for retail and business use.

It sits across from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Galleria Italia— one of the most recognizable buildings in Canada— and she shares her building’s first floor with none other than a photography gallery.

I stand outside, looking up at the building for too long.

I purposely dressed down for this meeting: thrifted Dickies, socks pulled high, and a t-shirt I found in my bedroom closet that was baggy on me as a seventeen-year-old and now might give a flash of belly skin and hair if I lift my arms too high.

It was designed to be a fuck you . To this meeting, to Chloe. But now I just feel like an asshole.

The stairs up to her office are narrow and cramped, each creak like a ring of her doorbell, but the opaque glass door, Core Cupid etched into it, opens to a wide open white space. Bright, sparse, austere, even.

I am wholly out of place here, in scuffed Vans, tattoos left visible, and a five panel hat that reads Your nudes are safe with me .

A door across from the entrance opens, and Chloe stands in it, backlit by floor-to-ceiling windows and bright spring sunshine.

She wears a white silk blouse, plain but well-made, and a soft heather gray skirt.

Clothing not made to be boring, but not the focal point.

“Hey,” I say, gruffer than I intended.

“Hi.” She lifts her hand in a fast aborted wave. Then steps forward, arms open like she might hug me. She quickly abandons that, too. She looks down at her eggshell carpet, an odd choice for flooring. “Come in.”

We settle into the seating area of her office.

She sits on the edge of a couch that makes awkward sounds with every slight weight adjustment.

I take the other side of the couch. She faces me.

I stare straight ahead, focusing on the condos and glass buildings of the financial district in the distance.

“Thanks for coming.”

“Yeah.” I knew that moving back home, working in Toronto, would open up the possibility of seeing Chloe again. I just didn’t think it would happen this fast. “So, I guess you want new headshots?”

The couch squeaks as Chloe leans closer. “I— actually, well.”