Page 6 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

I came here to get it over with. The first meeting. The postmortem. I wanted to show her that, fifteen years later, I have barely thought about her at all. Except by putting this much thought into the whole thing, I’ve proven myself wrong.

My hurt is still here, a gut-deep betrayal. But the performance of that hurt, anger, carelessness, none of it actually helps. It’s exhausting. The problem is, I’ve committed to it now.

“So you don’t want photos?” I face her, scowling. Then make a show of looking around, like the people we went to high school with are camouflaged against the walls, ready to pop out and take my photo at a moment’s notice. “Trying to get me in another compromising position?”

“Dean, no.” She shakes her head emphatically. “I’m sorry. I’m so— ”

I hold up my hand. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, despite being the one to bring it up.

She presses her lips together, looking down again. Part of me wants to demand her gaze, the full weight of her attention. Part of me feels like that’s the least I deserve. To be looked in the eye when she speaks to me.

The rest of me knows that Chloe’s attention isn’t limited to eye contact and that her attention is earned anyway. I sigh. Make a fist with one hand, then the other, watching the ink across my knuckles stretch and flex.

“You got tattoos,” she says, the worst icebreaker ever.

“Yeah.”

“George V and Edward VII had tattoos.”

I look at her, but she’s still examining the ink on my hands, following it up my arm, where I’ve collected doodles, dates, and names over the years. “ Okay .” I don’t really know what to say to that.

Her gaze trips on the semi-colon tattooed along my forearm. She blinks up at me. “Dean. I am so so —”

I hold my hand up again to cut her off. “I’m serious.

I don’t want to talk about it,” I say. “Like, at all.” The sudden knowledge that she was about to apologize fills my gut with a churning discomfort, one I’m not willing to interrogate right now, other than to know that I don’t think I can hear another word of this without bolting.

Chloe examines me. Her face is emotionless and blank, except for her lips, turned down in the faintest frown.

“Either I’m here to talk about business or nothing.”

It takes another long moment of quiet contemplation from Chloe before she takes a deep breath, nods a short bob of her chin, and says, “I need you to be my boyfriend,” she says. And before I can respond with what the fucking fuck? , she adds, “I’ll pay you, of course.”

“Chloe, what the fucking fuck?” I stand, the couch voicing its displeasure.

She continues to look at me as if everything she’s just said makes complete and total sense. “I’m losing clients…actually, I’m bleeding cl ients. I’m not sure how much longer I can continue to go on like this.”

“You realize that none of this explains why you think you should or even can hire me as your boyfriend?”

She sighs, clasping her hands tightly in her lap.

“I have recently started to lose clients because, apparently, I can’t match people if I don’t have my own perfect match ,” she says, air quoting the words.

“And I plan to approach this problem with a solid business strategy. But…until then, I think the best way to put a stop to it would be if I at least gave the appearance of having a partner.”

I pace. Rip my hat off so I scratch my head with the bill and jam it back on again. I sit back down in the chair across from the couch so I can face her head-on when I say, “Once again, Chloe. What the fucking fuck are you talking about?”

“Don’t yell at me,” she says quietly.

Which frustrates me enough to make me actually raise my voice when I say, “I’m not yelling.”

We sit quietly as my echoes reverberate around the room. “I haven’t talked to you in fifteen years. And the first time we do talk after you ruined my life , you ask me to pretend to be your perfect algorithmic match to save your business? Have I got this right?”

She has the decency, at least, to look sheepish. “Okay.” She wipes her hands down the front of her pants, then clasps them again on her lap. “In my defense, I had a different speech prepared, but then you showed up to a business meeting—”

“This is a business meeting ?” This time I am definitely yelling, but I can’t help it. I am incredulous.

“In this slutty little crop top—”

“ Hey .” I tug at the t-shirt, which, okay, could probably be considered an indecent length if this was a business meeting.

“Then you said you didn’t want to talk about…” She waves her hand in the air, as if that one movement can encompass the history between us. “So I had to revise my speech on the fly, and yes, I may have left some things out.”

I need to leave. I should get up and walk out of here. Who cares if she complains to the BIA about the photographs. I can refer her to another photographer. Hell, I’ll even pay for it.

She fidgets, the index finger of one hand picking at a hangnail on the other.

Another thing about her that hasn’t changed in fifteen years.

Chloe used to pick and bite her nails and skin, especially when she was nervous, or stressed, or sad.

Or angry. Essentially, whenever she was experiencing emotion.

When we were younger, I used to take her hands in mine, covering them until I felt the fidget cease.

I won’t do that now, not today, not with everything between us.

Maybe I’m a sucker— still a sucker— when it comes to her.

Maybe I need a backbone or some balls. I won’t take her hands and comfort her the way I used to, but I won’t leave either.

I keep my ass in this chair and say, “Start again.”

While I’ve never been a huge day drinker, I am grateful that Moonbar has been experimenting with late afternoon opens. There are a couple full tables on the small sidewalk patio, but I’m the only person at the bar. Nick flaps a Moosehead coaster onto the wood between us.

“You okay?” he asks, with the tone of someone who already knows the answer to that question.

“Did you tell Jasmine I was a sex worker?” I ask.

Nick closes his eyes, removing his glasses to rub at the marks on the bridge of his nose. “Okay, so technically, yes…”

“Dude, what the fuck?” I say, more exasperated than actually mad.

“I told her I thought it was a genius business idea for a first year university student.”

I nod my agreement. It really was. “Well, she told Chloe, and Chloe is not only the winner of the BIA raffle, but also a girl I went to high school with.”

He winces .

“She and her friends kinda ruined my life for a minute there.”

His wince deepens. Jasmine hired me a few months ago to take photos of the bar and the staff, to launch their new website, and Nick and I got along immediately.

It was nice to finally make a new friend.

A friend who wasn’t Matty or Ricky, who never really stopped being my friends, even though we all scattered across Ontario to go to university.

From there, it was easy to tell Nick stories.

He’s self-effacing and self-deprecating.

He invited me places, to a Leafs’ game that neither of us were very interested in, but that his dad had given him tickets for.

Moonbar enveloped me into their little family, inviting me for dinner at Rocco and Ed’s.

Probably because they could tell I felt like a tourist in the place where I’d grown up.

“I’m not mad,” I say. “I guess I’m just trying to figure out how Chloe knew to ask me to be her fake boyfriend to save her failing business.”

Nick is surprisingly unfazed by this sentence, which is a feat.

I feel pretty fucking fazed saying it. Instead, he nods, mouth flat, and begins to pull bottles off the bar rail and shelves.

After he sets the vodka and triple sec down, he pulls cranberry and fresh-squeezed lime juice from the mini fridge beneath the bar.

He scoops ice into a cocktail shaker and does that thing that bartenders do, performing cocktail mixing like it is both Olympic sport and classical art, no measuring needed, all of it intuited by feel alone.

When he’s done, he hands me a frosted cocktail glass filled with pink liquid and delicately taps his own glass to the edge of mine. “Slàinte mhath.”

“What’s that?” I ask, taking a small sip. The drink is tart and sweet, with only the slightest taste of alcohol. The kind of drink that you could have way too many of and way too fast and fall off your stool after. “Those words.”

“Good health,” he says.

“Slan-ge vah,” I say back, and he shrugs, good enough.

“I’ll never tell you what to do,” Nick says. He leans across the bar, like he’s about to share state secrets. “But under no circumstances,” he says, taking a gulp of his drink, “should you enter into any sort of ‘fake dating’ arrangement.”

I shake my head. “With Chloe? No.” I shake my head again to emphasize the absurdity of the idea. “No. I wasn’t going to.”

He arches an eyebrow.

“I wasn’t.”

Both eyebrows raise now. He nods slowly, patronizingly.

“That would display a shocking lack of intelligence,” I say, sipping my drink. “She broke my heart. I would never put her in the position to do that again.”

“ Ahh .”

It takes a moment, one I’ll blame on alcohol consumption before four p.m., to hear the words I just said. “Not that she could be in that position again. Because I don’t have feelings for her. Not anymore.”

This fucking bastard says nothing. Instead, he starts making more drinks.

“Nick. I’m serious. I don’t.”

He sighs as he refills my glass. “You feel something , bud.”

Fuck .

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I slap my hat down on the bar, drag my hands through my hair. “It took a long time for me to process all of it, and by the time I did, it was like I didn’t want to talk to her about it anymore. I didn’t want to sit there through her apology because I knew if I did, I’d forgive her.”

Nick drains his cocktail. His cheeks are flushed and his glasses askew in a way I don’t think he notices. “Isn’t that good?” he asks. “To forgive someone?”

“I don’t have proof, but I think Chloe was a part of it, you know?

All the shit that went down with her friends?

I think she took part somehow. Like how did they get her phone without her knowing?

And if she was a part of it, it means she wasn’t the person I thought she was.

Or at least, not the person I wished she could be.

And then I’d have to admit that I wasn’t the judge of character I thought I was.

But if she apologizes— even now— I’m scared I’ll forgive her.

And if I forgive her for that, I mean, what’s the point?

I’m a fucking doormat, you know? Again.”

I finish off my drink. “What is this? It’s good.”

Nick nods, topping me up again with this frosty pink elixir. “Cosmo,” he says.

“Right.” Cosmo. I know those. “I’m a Samantha,” I say.

His eyes go wide. “No shit. Me, too.” We drink to that.

“Okay. Okay,” he says, staring intently into my eyes but leaning heavily on his elbows. “I can’t tell you what to do, man. Only you know that. It’s complicated.”

“Nuanced,” I say.

“It’s fucking nuanced ,” Nick agrees. “Forgive her. Don’t. I don’t care. I support you, man. I love you,” he says, like a revelation.

I laugh. I’m realizing, just now, I love Nick, too.

“I love you, too, man.” We tap glasses. Drink.

“Except I will tell you to not be her fake boyfriend. Faking it, that’s bad. Fake anything. Except boobs.” He points a finger gun at me, and I nod. “Fake boobs are great .”

“So great.” I nod and then stop. Nodding is actually making me kind of dizzy.

“But it sounds like she needs help. And it sounds like you’re not totally against helping her? Maybe?”

I shrug, ’cause yeah, maybe. “Who am I to deny assistance to a beautiful woman?” I ask.

“Famous last words,” Nick says with a resigned sigh.

Some of the cosmo sloshes over the rim of my glass and onto my hand. I suck it off, to which Nick nods approvingly.

“Maybe you can find a way to help each other,” he suggests. “Maybe that’s what you can do instead of all those I’m sorry s.” He makes a very boo-hoo face. “And I forgive you s. I don’t know, man. I don’t know. I’m just a bartender, you know? What do I know?”

“Hey.” I reach across the bar to pat his shoulder but miss and fall halfway over the wood. We both dissolve into giggles. Eventually, he helps me back into my stool .

“All I’m saying is, you keep punishing Chloe for something that happened over a decade ago, right?”

“Yeah.” It’s weird, ’cause I know it’s true, but hearing Nick say it, suddenly it’s like, true true. Really true.

He squints at me through his glasses even though we’re in a basement and it’s not very bright down here. “Mostly you’re just punishing yourself, though.”

Whoa.

“Whoa.”

He nods sagely.

“What the hell are you chucklebutts doing?” Jasmine stands in the doorway to the back hall, a pen sticking out of the back of her red hair, her lips pursed.

Nick’s eyes grow wide. “Baby, we were just talking.”

“We’re having cosmos.” I hold up my empty glass.

“We’re Samanthas,” he tells her.

Her nostrils flare delicately while she stomps behind the bar, taking our glasses from our shockingly weak grips. “Neither of you are Samanthas,” she says, like we are, in fact, just chucklebutts. Always only chucklebutts. “Samantha would eat you for breakfast.”

Nick looks at me, a grin on his face that makes me laugh before he’s even said a word. “You must be a Samantha, then.”

“I…” She raises her chin imperiously. “Am a Charlotte.”

“But you ate my ass for breakfast this morning.”

“ Nicholas .”

If I had any cosmo left in my mouth, I’d spit it all over this bar.