Page 7 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

CHLOE

I t’s strange how you can live in one home your whole life, but one day, suddenly, it isn’t your home anymore.

After high school, my commute to college was only forty-five minutes.

I stayed in residence and then lived in hovel student apartments with too many roommates downtown, but I always came home to the suburbs.

At least once a week for the first year or two, then, as I got situated and busier, less and less.

But since starting Core Cupid, I’ve made a point to come home for Sunday dinner in the suburbs.

Except the cookie cutter house on my cookie cutter cul-de-sac doesn’t feel like home.

At some point, I started walking in the front door and noticing a smell.

Not a bad smell; just a scent . The scent of the house.

And I noticed it because it was different from my apartment, but I wondered if, for my whole life, that’s what friends smelled when they first walked in.

Laundry detergent and glass cleaner and the lingering char from last night’s dinner, since Mom only knows how to cook meat one way: well and truly done.

The couch in the living room where we sit and watch a movie after dinner no longer feels like the one I stretched out on for hours on Saturday mornings.

Even though it’s the exact same one my mom has always had.

With the same shredded fabric on the arm from multiple cats’ claws and the same burn mark hidden on the underside of the middle cushion— a relic of the time I was really into scented candles and dropped a match, my mother’s lightning quick reflexes the only thing that saved our entire house from going up in smoke.

Now I sit it on it with my feet planted firmly on the ground, my hands folded in my lap, a guest.

“Are you sure you’re okay if I go?” Mom asks, buzzing up and down the short set of stairs from our kitchen to the sunken living room. Normally, we’d eat dinner at the table, with the TV on in the background— like a civilized family— but she’s set up the TV tray tonight instead.

“I can’t believe I forgot,” she says, mostly to herself. Then she stops, cups her forehead in her palm. “I can’t believe I forgot.”

“It’s okay, Mom. Go out. Have fun.” I make a shooing motion with my hand as she readjusts my dinner plate on the tray to also fit the remote control, even though she’s already turned the TV on and found a movie for me to watch— the next movie in the Fast and Furious franchise that we’re rewatching as a family.

Except not tonight. A man— Mom has been vague about who— asked her on a date, and since she hasn’t had one of those since she and my dad divorced when I was eight, I’m not about to stand in her way.

“I would have signed you up for Core Cupid,” I say, “if I’d known you were dating again.”

Mom flushes, flapping her hands in front of her like she can’t find a hand towel. “Oh gosh, oh heavens, no. No one would want to date me.”

I arch my eyebrow at her. Clearly that is not true.

“I only mean I’m too old for your clients.”

“I have clients of all ages,” I say. Which is true, except for the woman, a few years younger than Mom, who dumped me last week.

Though I am relieved. Matching “mature” clients is always difficult.

The women are of an age— more a spirit— where they know what they want and they’re not taking any more shit.

It’s empowering, except they hate the whole “don’t google your date” thing first because they all want to know if they’re bald.

And if they are bald, they don’t want to date them.

Even if the match was a true 100 percent.

The men, though. The men are never interested in dating women in their age group. My algo could find his true match, a soul mate, but if she’s not at least twenty-five years younger than him, he’s not interested.

The “mature” queers are where it’s at. God, I love matching a couple of elder lesbians.

“Honey, did you hear me?” Mom asks.

I blink away from the dry slice of roast beef on my plate. Its only chance to achieve tenderness lies in the once frozen broccoli’s ability to ooze green-tinted water into it. “Yes,” I say. “No. What?”

“How do I look?” she asks, smoothing her hands over her dark-wash jeans and simple white button-up blouse. I set the tray aside so I can stand up and hug her.

“You look beautiful, Mom.”

We squeeze each other. Once, for a long moment, then once more, but shorter. The way we’ve hugged since I was a kid. It was born out of the anxiety we share, neither of us knowing when to end it.

“And you didn’t have to go through the trouble of making me dinner.

” Though, with her out of the house, it will be easier to hide the many leftovers.

“Do you want me to stick around until you get home?” I ask, but she waves me off.

“At least turn on Find My Friend,” I say, already taking her phone from where it sticks out of her purse.

“If he ends up being a serial killer, I need to be able to point the cops to your body.”

“He’s not a serial killer, Chloe.” But she lets me turn the app on and double check it with mine.

“Have fun,” I say as she gives me one last double squeeze, then rushes out the door. “Be safe,” I call. “Make good choices.” Then laugh to myself .

I give her fifteen minutes, enough time to know that she’s not forgotten anything and won’t be turning around out of cold feet, before I take her sharpest steak knife to the meat and cut it up into small pieces to make them easier to hide in the garbage.

I feel bad about wasting food, of course, but there’s no way that meat isn’t a choking hazard.

I pick at the rest of my food while Vin Diesel and his familia drive too fast into increasingly unrealistic scenarios.

It’s comforting, in a way, to know that no matter what’s happening in my life, the Torettos will always be there with their cars and their beers and the big family I never had.

Mom’s cat, Henry the VIII— named because he is literally the eighth of his name and not because she is a fan of the misogynist tyrant— pads across the living room, paying me no mind, and flops onto his bed at the sliding glass door to watch the birds in the backyard in the waning early evening light.

I get up and take a seat next to him, petting the one spot on top of his head that he likes and listening to his motor engine purr until two things seem to happen at once: Henry decides he is finished with affection and bites me, and my phone vibrates across the coffee table.

I hiss at him as I snatch my hand back, and he hisses at me as I stumble away from him. Enraptured by this standoff with my mom’s cat, I don’t look at the screen when I answer it. “Hello?” And then I hiss again as Henry yowls at me.

The line is silent.

“Hello? Mom?” I don’t recognize the number on the screen until I hear a frustrated sigh, and then:

“Chloe?”

“Dean? Fuck .” My hand is bleeding, drops of red blood bubbling up from two marks Henry’s little fangs left.

“Chloe,” he says, sounding frustrated this time.

“Sorry.” I jab at the screen to put the call on speaker, then stomp up the stairs to my old bathroom. “My mom’s cat bit me.”

“Your mom’s cat?”

“Henry the VIII. ”

“You’re in town?” he asks, like it’s a surprise to him that I would deign to return to our hometown despite its proximity to Toronto.

I release a different kind of hiss, this time at the sting of the hot water over the wound. “Yeah. Sorry. What’s up?”

Distantly, I’m aware that I should be nicer to him. He was not happy when he left my office the other day. Fair enough. It was stupid of me to ask him for that favor. For any favor, really.

I just really don’t want to get an infection right now.

“I wanted to talk,” he says slowly. He pauses when a box of bandages falls out of the medicine cabinet, landing next to the phone. “About…your offer.”

“Oh. Okay.” I say slowly, still processing words and how they mean things. “Like…now?”

He sighs again, a man full of un-expelled air. I can picture him, his eyes closed, his hand in his hair.

It’s strange how this house doesn’t feel like home until I’m talking to him inside it. Then, suddenly, I am both a teenager and in my thirties, nostalgic for a time that was terrible but also, somehow, wasn’t.

“I don’t know. Are you going to bleed to death after this horrific animal attack?” he asks, deadpan.

“Cats can carry pasteurella multocida bacteria in their mouths, which is highly pathogenic,” I say, doing my best to walk the line between this is serious, actually and know-it-all.

Dean is quiet again, and I strain for a sound, anything. He exhales gently and says, “I know, Chloe. I’m sorry.”

I busy myself with cleaning the bite and covering it with a bandage.

Dean says nothing. Over the phone, I can hear the sound of random keyboard clicks, the murmuring of conversation coming from somewhere near him.

Now that I’m not in emergency mode, the sound of his music, low and tinny through the cell phone speaker, but recognizably emo, is sweetly soothing.

“When did you want to talk?” I ask.

“Uh. Now? I guess?”

I wince. I’d prefer a bit more time to prepare for an in-person meeting, though perhaps this time in neutral territory. “Are you also in town?” I ask.

“Living back at home until I can get some stuff lined up,” he says, gruff.

Somehow that makes this all the stranger, all the more high school .

“My parents are traveling this summer,” he offers when I say nothing. “I’m house sitting.”

I shrug, then remember he can’t see me. “That’s cool. Gonna have a house party?” I ask as a joke.

Dean huffs. “Don’t know who I’d invite.” His voice has an edge to it, one that I feel responsible for.

“Maybe we could meet somewhere close by?” I suggest, to change the subject. “To talk?”

“The park?” he asks after a moment. He doesn’t have to say anymore. There’s only one park he could be referring to, despite there being at least three within walking distance.