Page 9 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

Fuck. “Fine.” I stomp over to him and let him pose me how he wants.

He takes a few test shots first, him behind me, his arms hanging limply around my waist. The timer counting down what feels interminably longer than ten simple seconds.

He’s stiff, avoiding physical contact wherever possible, which only serves to make the soft brush of his exhales against the back of my neck all the more weighted, heavy.

Even if he was able to pull off something that looked good, given this frankly abysmal setting, there’s no way it’d look believable.

“Stop,” I say as the ten-second timer finishes its countdown and the camera captures us in this stiff-spined version of a prom portrait.

His arms come around me, not like a hug or even a hold. More like he’s a basketball net and I’m the ball. “Hold still,” he hisses, as if he somehow cares about how our photo turns out.

I turn in the circle of his arms, and suddenly all that contact he was avoiding is decidedly unavoidable.

My breasts brush up against his chest with every heaving, angry breath.

“Forget I asked,” I hiss. I wish we weren’t at the library, if only so I could yell at him.

“I don’t get why you even wanted to work together to begin with, since you so obviously hate me. ”

His hands cup my elbows, a ledge for me to rest them on, making it easier to point confronting fingertips at him. “I don’t hate you,” he says, seeming genuinely affronted.

“Well, you don’t seem to particularly like me.”

At some point, my index finger stopped working and my hand now rests, curled into a fist, against his chest. His heart beats on the other side of his rib cage, his answering yell in our hushed fight. He’s the one to break first, taking a step away, his back against the opposite shelf.

“I don’t know how I feel about you,” he finally says, looking past me.

“I said I was sorry.” But even that is petulant and childish to my own ears. “I…I am sorry.”

He closes his eyes, a look of pain crossing his face. “I don’t want to talk about that.” He takes a deep breath, his chest expanding almost to its limit.

I find myself hoping that maybe he’ll expand enough to touch me again, even the lightest brush of his body against mine or that I might be downwind enough to catch the stirring of his sigh against my collarbone. He meets my eyes. “Do you want photos or not?”

“Not,” I say hotly. Then, quieter, “At least not like this. ”

“Not like what? Fake?” he asks. His thick eyebrows are furrowed low over his dark brown eyes and somehow even thicker black lashes. He squints at me.

He’s always had squinty eyes, ones that lent him an air of skepticism. I used to think it was a defensive posture; if he was skeptical of our classmates, then it wouldn’t be as fun for them to mess with him.

“What did you think boyfriend-for-hire services entailed, Chloe? It’s all fake.”

Despite the space he took, we’re still strangely close to each other. If a librarian needed to reshelve some books, there’s a good chance we’d be asked to leave. I don’t think the Toronto Reference Library can afford the luxury of a lenient hookup tolerance policy.

“I guess I thought you’d at least be good at pretending .”

He laughs, corrosive and bitter. “Sorry I can’t fake it as good as you.” He says the words under his breath, but we’re close enough and it’s quiet enough that nothing is really a whisper.

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about that,” I snarl. And I immediately regret it.

He rears back like I slapped him. “You know what? Fuck this. I’m done.”

He steps past me without another word, a cloud of cinnamon gum and spicy vanilla and disgust. I should let him leave. I almost do.

“Wait,” I whisper-yell. I grab his camera off the shelf. “Your camera.”

He stops a few feet away from the end of the stacks, his back still turned and his shoulders at his ears.

I hold the camera out to him. “I am sorry. I know you don’t have to accept my apology, but I want to say it anyway.

I wish there was…” I shrug, shake my head out of sheer frustration.

“I wish I could go back and do things differently. I wish there was something I could do to make it up to you.”

Finally, he faces me. “You could get caught mid-clamgram,” he says, matter of fact.

“Excuse me, what? That is the most horrific word I’ve ever heard. What ?”

For the first time since we saw each other at Moonbar, Dean’s mouth curves into what I might actually call an authentic smile. “You don’t like clamgram?”

I cover my ears. “Please stop saying that. I’ll literally do anything to get you to stop.”

He laughs. I’m annoyed, but fine. If my visceral reaction to that horrible term is what he needs right now, he can have it.

“Anything, huh?” He grins again, his hair falling into his eyes.

I pause. “I mean, no. Not anything . I’m not going to take a picture of my privates in public, if that’s what you’re implying. I could get arrested.”

He lifts a skeptical eyebrow, because, ugh, in the aftermath of what my friends did to him, he was threatened with a legal investigation for “distribution of child sexual assault material” by our vice principal, even though he wasn’t legally a child and was clearly the victim in the situation.

“Choose something else, Dean.” I cross my arms over my chest, hoping a power pose will end this discussion. I can’t believe I’m entertaining anything remotely like this in the first place. He looks me up and down.

Actually, no; it’s not a look. It’s not a casual perusal or even an assessing eye.

He catalogs me, his gaze growing warmer, hotter, with every blink.

Suddenly, I can feel my pulse at my throat.

I’m sure that’s what he sees when his eyes linger there.

The summer dress I’m wearing is purposefully modest, but the fabric buttons along the front of it are an insubstantial barrier to him, those brown eyes, and long lashes.

I take a step back, and part of me almost wishes I could convincingly say it’s because I want to put space between us. But that’s a lie. I take this step, then another, because I want him to follow me. I want us to move deeper into the camouflage of these stacks and their surrounding quiet.

And he does. Slowly, carefully, like he’s afraid one wrong step might land him in a trap, Dean follows me.

“What…” I clear my throat. “What are you choosing instead?”

He reaches for me. His palm spanning the curve of my waist. He moves closer still. Until his chest brushes mine. Until, with enough mutual friction, these buttons could be nothing but a pile on the floor.

For a moment, embarrassingly, I think— I hope — he might kiss me.

He looks at my lips, licks his own. He leans in, but he drags his cheek across mine instead, his stubble the gentlest abrasion, sending shivers over my skin and down my spine, into my darkest corners.

I moan, loudly, embarrassingly so; mortified that his gentlest touch still has the power to melt me in his hands, rather than ashamed of the risk that we could get caught.

Well, mostly.

He stops, his lips, always so pouty and plump, brushing the lobe of my ear. For a terrible moment, I imagine what it would be like if he tugged at my diamond earring with his teeth, to hear the clink of metal in his mouth. I could almost come. Just like this.

Until he says, “Give me your panties.”

I freeze. Replay the words once, twice, hoping my brain of ones and zeros will somehow compute what obviously must be a completely new binary language.

I try to pull back, to see his face, look him in the eye, but I can’t. He squeezes my waist, a gentle encouragement.

“You…you want my panties?” I can’t even remember why anymore. What are we doing here? What is this for?

“You said you wished there was something you could do to make up for what happened. For what your friends did.” He says friends like he’s not sure that’s totally true. “And you won’t take a cl—”

I hiss, pressing my cheek to his.

His teasing laugh rumbles against me. “That’s what you can do,” he says simply. “You can give me,” he says, each word invisibly punctuated, “your panties.”

This time I cannot hide my shiver. There are a million reasons I cannot give him my panties.

Like, I can’t take the TTC home without panties on.

And what if there’s a strong breeze that lifts my skirt?

Also, I can’t give a man my panties. Period. Exclamation point .

Except I slip my hand underneath my dress. I hook the soft cotton pointelle fabric with my index finger and shimmy it down my legs.

Dean is a human privacy screen, though there’s been no foot traffic so far, and as I pull the elastic fabric over my shoes, I grab his forearm for balance, tan skin over taut muscle.

He sucks in a breath as I hand him my panties rolled into a ball, and by the look on his face, maybe he wasn’t expecting me to go through with it.

“There,” I say, beaming with pride, my smile too shit-eating for my own good. “Even?”

Dean’s forearms flex as he makes a fist around my panties, but the surprise on his face has morphed into what looks like…anger.

His knuckles are white from his tight grip. Slowly, he looks down, opens his hand. He lifts my cotton panties like he might smell them, and that is too far. I should be scandalized.

There’s no room for scandal, though. Not when I can feel my wetness paint the inside of my upper thighs, when every subtle shift feels like the whisper of his fingertips, or— oh god— his tongue.

Dean stops himself before he does anything with the panties that might make me want to rub myself all over his leg. “You,” he says, husky, like he can’t catch his breath, “are wet?”

I flush, embarrassed and confused. “You…you’re angry about that?”

Dean crowds me against the shelves, his hand sliding up the back of my thigh. “No, I’m not mad,” he says, a barely contained growl. He squeezes me. “I’m gonna do something about it.”

But he doesn’t do anything. He waits with his hand on my thigh.

My heart pounds in my throat. I listen for muted footsteps on the carpeted floor, the hushed voices of librarians or students or a freaking janitor.

There’s nothing, no one. Yet still he waits, holding me by his fingertips off the edge of a cliff when I wish he’d let me fall. Except, maybe that’s why he waits.

He needs me to jump.

“Well?” I ask, barely recognizing the sound of my own voice. “Do something.”