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When a door closes, another opens.
And sometimes, standing behind that metaphorical door, happens to be your literally half-naked childhood best friend.
Literally half-naked childhood best friend is also coming around the corner of the girls’ locker room, complaining about the cold from underneath one of the stiff school towels.
She shivers and says, once she drops a second over Chloe’s head, “If I freeze to death, consider yourself responsible.”
Chloe laughs once she gets a look at Max’s (only semi) serious glare, secretly grateful for the barrier between her eyes and her stupidly heated face.
“Well,” She shrugs, shaking out her hair. “I think I’ll be able to keep you plenty warm.”
Max whacks her in the shoulder. “By shaking all over me like a wet dog?”
Chloe grins and finds herself unable to help but take note of how the water rolls like glass beads down the swoop of her stomach, spine, how they slide down the side of her jaw, the angle of it, down the hair that clings to the bend. How they’re on her hands, tiny, blue, thin bone running through, and how she still hasn’t put on a shirt.
Chloe’s eyes zero in on where it sits immediately, lying in a little pile with her sneakers. So, just in time for Max to miss it, she kicks it up with her foot and into her hand.
Max turns and her shoulders fall knowingly once she sees Chloe’s hands tucked behind her. “Give it back.”
Chloe tilts her weight onto one foot and tries very hard to look innocent, shrugging. “Give what back?”
“Chloe.” Max says.
“Max.” Chloe says.
With a look, Max extends her hand, and makes a very serious grabby motion. “Give.”
Chloe, subsequently, does not give. Instead, she starts to dangle her shirt over the edge of the pool and puts on a face, like she’s thinking really hard. “I don’t know... I’m kind of digging your look right now, actually.”
And it isn’t a lie. She’s standing there, helpless, half-dressed, water spots on the skinniest skinny jeans that Chloe has probably ever seen in her life.
“Chloe,” Max tries to sound serious, but it’s watered down by a laugh as Chloe smacks her hand away. “Come on.”
“You’re gonna have to come and get it.” She steps further back. “And you know… you could think of this as a favor. You’re too pretty for this cheap shit.”
“If you’re not gonna give it back, I guess I’ll just have to-“
“Have to what? ” Her eyes widen.
“Do…” She hesitates. “Something.”
“Something,” Chloe repeats. “You weigh ninety-pounds soaking wet. Literally.”
“Ninety-pounds of soaking wet rage, if you’re not careful.”
So Chloe decides to be careful. She isn’t exactly down to get ripped a new one tonight. But still, she smiles smugly to herself as she heads for the lockers while Max lags behind to kill the lights in the office, asking, “So. Still cold?”
She doesn’t get the answer she’s expecting- instead, she’s just about knocked off her feet when Max grabs her by the hands, shoving her into one of the corner walls by the exit.
“Okay,” She says flatly. “What’s happening?”
If the smack in the arm she gets says anything, Max just isn’t having it. Rather than giving an answer, she just grabs her tighter and tucks the two of them closer so that they’re able to lean more into the wedge of wall near the last row of lockers, dicks of all shapes and sizes immortalized, sitting scratched into the metal.
And then they’re smushed together into a corner for a good 20 seconds. For no real reason. Not that Chloe exactly minds- but she is kind of curious as to what for- though, right before she’s about to ask, she feels Max’s nose brush against her neck.
And she stills. And she realizes exactly how compromising of a situation this is. For her, at least, because she’s just close enough to be able to do something really stupid if she really wants to, and she really wants to, because Max is…
really warm.
And really close.
And there’s a flashlight sweeping back and forth across the floor.
Chloe freezes and Max’s hands ball up into fists, the both of them squeaking when the light just barely grazes their shoes. It’s so hard for Chloe to not burst out into nervous laughter then, especially when Max presses her face further into the muscle between her neck and shoulder, head shaking from side to side. She’s almost certain that Max can hear, feel her heart beating through her chest, how fast it’s started to race- they’re so pushed up against each other that she might as well be able to hear her pupils dilating.
But then there’s footsteps, a door slamming. Quiet. Max’s body heat and heartbeat.
“Okay,” Chloe says to the top of her head, hands sliding down to her forearms to keep her steady. “I think they’re gone.”
“Good,” Max’s head bows in relief, Chloe’s chin touching her crown more fully. “That was close.”
“Yeah.”
No kidding.
Chloe’s about to say grab for her hand and book it before she pauses, notices a line of red as it makes its way down the fragile curve of her cupid’s bow. “Shit, Max.”
Her eyes go wide. “What?”
“Nothing, it’s just-” She points- “your nose-”
“Oh,” Max touches it to the back of her hand. “Shoot, sorry.”
“No, don’t be. I’m the one who kept getting caught with her ass hanging out. Um,” She pulls out a bandana from her back pocket, reaching for her hand so she can lead her into the light. “Here.”
When she reaches up to grab for it, Chloe lightly bats her hand away and murmurs, “I got it.”
She can’t help but feel a little bit guilty, wincing as she turns her head to the side for a better look. That guilt starts to dissipate, though, when she meets her eye. It’s only for a second, but when it happens, she feels a strange tension beginning to gather at the backs of her knees. Pressure building, building, building something to chase after.
“So,” Chloe drags the first, and dumbest, words she can think of over the lump in her throat. “Otters win?”
Max just smiles. “You know it.”
Chloe swallows.
Yeah.
She’s definitely winning.
Chloe has to eyeball the parking lot from behind a corner before they’re able to make their escape. But they get there, just barely missing a run-in with Groucho and his gun, piling into the truck as quick as they can.
And as quiet as her old junker can be, she pulls into the driveway ten minutes later, killing the engine. She leans back against the seat, and then there’s Max, clueless and glowing as she sits next to her under the stern light of the streetlamp, glowing as the mouth of the moon opens wide. The last of the summer’s whining cicadas are clicking in the darkness around them, and Chloe finds herself stuck in this thick, sticky October headspace, like Max still lives two houses down and they just got back from one of their middle-of-the-night drugstore raids.
It’s the most simple, sweet thing that she’s felt in a long while.
She stays quiet for longer than she really means to. For longer than is probably normal. And she only snaps out of it when she hears the sound of denim skidding across leather, when she feels the small weight of a small hand landing on top of her own.
“Hey,” Max’s voice ripples through the cab. “You good?”
Chloe feels another second go by, another part of her making its way out of the grip of Arcadia’s smoking soil as Max’s own tightens. It doesn’t seem like everything’s wound so harshly around her anymore. Something kind has allowed this odd, lovely thing inside of her to be unfurled, found a way to smooth out her bent wings.
But she just squeezes all of that down into a plain, “I’m good.”
And it’s true.
She feels... really good.
Like she finally has some breathing room.
They manage to make it upstairs with minimal floor-squeakage. Max runs a hand over the crack in the railing that she made when she was twelve, and over her shoulder, Chloe smiles- when she took the heat for it, she wasn’t allowed to stay over at Max’s place for a whole weekend because of her clumsiness. Not that she didn’t sneak out. But still.
Chloe scrolls through her phone while Max is in the shower, greeted with said-girl’s smiling face from where it sits at the very top of her profile. When she sifts through, she finds dozens upon dozens of messages of congratulations and thanks pouring onto her page from slews of Blackwell students, members of Kate’s family and the like. No wonder her phone was going off all night.
She’s only been back in Arcadia for a month and she’s already made her way onto the front page of the news. She’s saved Kate’s life. She’s saved Chloe’s... a handful of times. And she’s shaken the dirt off her psyche to boot.
That’s at least worthy of lockscreen-status. And besides… it’s a cute picture.
All of Max’s pictures are cute pictures.
She rolls her eyes at herself because she feels like a middle-schooler again. She didn’t even know she could feel like that anymore. She didn’t even know she could feel anymore, at all. At least, until Max came back.
She had stopped expecting it but had never stopped wanting it. She knew, in a heartbeat, that she’d take her back, but didn’t realize exactly how true that was until she actually got the chance. She’d never felt so much relief in her life, finally able to hold onto the lifeline that had been dangled, cruelly, just out of reach, in front of her face for five years.
To anyone else, Max might seem like your typical plain Jane vanilla girl-next-door type. But she did the impossible- she saved her. She filled in the five year-old girl-shaped hole in her chest in seconds.
Not to mention that she kept her from getting shot at.
Twice.
And spared her of a stabbing.
The world has a hell of a sense of humor. And a hell of a sense of timing.
Chloe has always seen the world through a dirtier lens than Max. Grass was just grass, the sky was just the sky- she never really understood why Max would look at an apple core or at a broken down car and fasten some sort of deep, romantic meaning onto it.
Could a dirty, used-up piece of shit like that really be worth saving?
But she’d listen to her wax poetic about heaps of garbage for hours if it meant she’d stay. To think that she was just about to run her over two days ago. To think that seconds later she was sitting in Chloe’s passenger seat, with the still-pretty smile and the polaroid camera and the sorry eyes that she couldn’t ever bring herself to be mad at even if she tried.
Chloe wants to laugh as she hears Max making her way back from the shower. Five years and Chloe still remembers the rhythm of her footsteps.
She pretends to be very interested in her hangnail when she comes back into the room, once again wet-haired, wearing one of Chloe’s t-shirts. It’s two sizes too big, something she’d taken from the top drawer of her dresser. She didn’t even have to ask which one to look in- she remembered where they were, just like that. Like she never left.
And it’s nothing special. Just some ratty old green thing that she got at a thrift store a few months ago. But goddamn if she doesn’t look good.
And Chloe wants to say something about how proud she is of her, about how glad she is to have her here. Something goopy.
But instead she just sticks with, “You’re badass, Max.”
She pauses in the middle of folding her jeans. “For taking a shower?”
“For what you did today,” Chloe remains uncharacteristically serious. “With Kate. And... with me. You’re awesome.”
She stays still for a few more seconds, eyes shifting around the room the way they do when she gets nervous. Eventually, she lets out, a little quiet, “Thanks to you.”
Obviously, we’re connected.
The heel of Max’s palm reaches up to swipe a wet tangle of hair from her cheek.
Obviously.
Chloe rests her weight on her elbow once Max’s phone starts to vibrate, six little dings ringing out in succession from where it sits on the bed.
“Somebody’s popular.”
Max just makes some vague mumble as she sits, legs criss-crossed on her side of the mattress. She only gives it a brief glance before silencing it, setting it face-down on the floor. “Just Warren.”
“Oh.” Chloe tries not to let her smile stale too quickly.
There’s a little lilt of humor in her tone as she speaks again, more genuinely inquisitive than it is mocking. “What?”
“Nothing, you’re just-” She shakes her head, trying to come up with something, quick. “-gonna leave the poor guy hanging?”
Max doesn’t answer that. Instead, she just makes a face that translates to a very likely maybe.
Chloe wants to laugh as much as she wants to roll her eyes. Mostly, though, she’s exhausted just thinking about it, from playing this mental game of compare and contrast, so she flops her back onto the bed. “Christ, Caulfield.”
“What did I do?”
“It’s not what you’re doing,” She starts. “It’s what you’re not doing. If you don’t tell him to back off, I’m gonna have to waste all that money we took on a straitjacket-fitting.”
“I don’t wanna be mean!”
“It’s honest,” Her eyebrows raise for emphasis. “Honesty is the best policy, remember?”
“Yes,” She sighs, exaggerated. “I remember.”
“Good.”
She can feel Max’s knee overlapping her own. The knuckle of her index finger is barely grazing she knob of Chloe’s ankle, touching but not really touching. She smells like fabric softener and her skin is still carrying onto a few drops of water on the thighs.
There’s a little pause, and then Chloe’s looking at her face again. Always, looking at her. Always, bark and no bite.
“And I mean,” Chloe starts again, almost whispered, already regretting the words before they’re even fully out. “If you aren’t being honest about what you want, then…” She scratches lightly at the blanket. “What’s the point, you know?”
If her calculations are correct, Max is looking at her. Really hard. And she suddenly feels a soft spike, an upwards spiral in her chest, causing her to come to the conclusion that she really wants to scream. Or maybe vomit. Whichever comes first.
Max looks like she’s about to say something, but Chloe doesn’t give her the chance for it, hurriedly blinking the delusion out of her eyes as she looks away.
“Whatever,” She turns on her side, starting the search for her lighter. Quickly, she shifts her tone into something that she hopes sounds less serious. “I guess if you’re not gonna do it, I’ll just have to keep you all for myself. Maybe then he’ll catch on.”
“Very funny, Chloe.” Max unfolds her legs and rolls onto her stomach, chin propped up on her arms as one hand grabs onto a small lump in the blankets. “But I don’t know if I’d ever be able to plan us a wedding.”
“What about Vegas?”
Max groans.
“No?” She grins. “Vegas weddings are sick.”
“Vegas weddings are for people who don’t want to remember it.”
“You just don't get romance.”
The lighter takes a few tries to spark up but it eventually blooms, allowing her to wave the end of her joint through it, waiting for it to cherry.
“Like the hair, by the way.” She hears Max say, the fingers of her free hand reaching to feather through the ends. “Might need a touch-up, though.”
“Was gonna do it yesterday,” Chloe smiles and gives her a dull slap in the arm. “Thanks for tanking my plans.”
Max laughs, quiet, and retracts, her hand curled up near the corner of the pillow. She gets that look on her face she usually does when she’s contemplating something, psyching herself up to speak, teeth tacked onto her bottom lip.
“I could help you with it,” She finally speaks up. Her voice is quiet, hesitant, like she’s skirting on the edge of something dangerous. “If you wanted.”
She’s all clean vowels and careful cadence, tongue. For a second, the memory of the two of them sneaking a bottle of dye into Mom’s shopping cart comes to mind.
When Chloe meets her eyes again, she seems to shrink. Her mouth opens up like she’s about to take back the offer altogether, but before she can, Chloe just nods, slow.
“Yeah,” She says, earnest. “Okay.”
She’s never felt more allowed to exist in the world than she does now. She’s finally gotten the answer to a long-asked question, sitting in the silence afterward as if it’s something sacred. And while there’s no certain answer as to whether or not she’s going to actually live up to her promises, Chloe trusts her. She trusts her.
“It’s freezing, dude,” Max murmurs, maybe five minutes of stillness later. “Close the window.”
“You’re closer.”
She squints. “I’m colder.”
“Come here, then,” Chloe laughs. “God.”
Max comes there, then, tiny and tired where she sits, wrapped under Chloe’s right arm. She’s quiet, and it’s comfortable, and there’s this unspoken confirmation that something has changed. Chloe remembers an hour ago, a different dark but same sort of feeling, like a pre-teen playing kissing games in someone’s closet.
Or maybe she’s just imagining it.
She finds herself combing Max’s fawny, half-dry hair behind the shell of her ear with her knuckles, over and over, like it’s the most interesting thing in the world. And it very well may be. Max leans into it, nose touching her neck like before.
Chloe hums. “Hair’s soft.”
Either this stash is shitloads stronger than she remembered, or Max just seems to have that effect on people. Probably the latter. Everything around her feels so much more vivid, sensory overload in the most pleasant, colorful, welcome way.
Max is glow-in-the-dark with two big, blue light-catchers for eyes. She reaches up and lightly lands her hand in Chloe’s own, the surface of her palm open and warm and welcoming, like an anchor, like she’s grounding her to a girl made out of an earthy, unending gentleness. Or something equally as cheesy.
Chloe can’t do anything other than just smoke and stare at her hand, other than wonder how such a small thing can cause such a big rift to split in space and time, how it can all the while mend the one she made years ago in a second, in a simple touch.
“Hey.”
Max moves her head under Chloe’s chin, just a little to let her know that she’s heard her. “Mm?”
Her eyes wander over to the angry scribbles on the wall. “I’m really glad you came back.”
She doesn’t expect it to be so easy to say. She’s not used to sounding like that, all vulnerable, all the way open, words pliable between palate and tongue. It’s alarmingly warm, stripping her soft and naked of her thickly-thorned skin.
“Me, too.” Some cog is turning in her brain when she says it, making the corners of her mouth lift upwards.
It’s hard for Chloe to think of something to say after that that isn’t I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you, or It would be pretty fucked up if I kissed you right now, wouldn’t it, haha. Because Max really isn’t leaving her with much choice, here.
In a way, she feels selfish. For living in some fucking dream world where Max loves her back and where she isn’t some shitty, asshole dropout. But more than that, even, Chloe’s tired of staring at the timer, of waiting for the bomb to go off.
So she lets herself just have it.
Whatever it is.
She looks down when she feels a faint petting at her collar, a nail running over the place that falls thin and black and worn against warm bone. There’s a pair of always-curious eyes following along with the back-and-forth of her own motions. She looks further and her feet are touching her own, poking out from underneath the blanket, just two thin, tiny, pinkish pale things that carried her so far away, so long ago.
Sleepy, and stunned, Chloe reaches up to hold the roaming hand in her own again. Gently. Not to stop her, but rather to feel, the way her muscle moves as she curls her finger under the thread of her necklace, how she frees it from its place where it sits, coldly on her chest. How she cradles the bullets in her palm, stroking her thumb back and forth across the length of the gold, thoughtful.
“H-hey,” Chloe says. “Max?”
Max doesn’t answer.
She just blinks, once, to meet Chloe’s gaze. Looking at her in that way that could make even Chloe believe that she’s special.
“Oh.”
She’s so beautiful.
It’s so terrifying.
Max just keeps looking. Chloe just keeps looking back. At her, at the sight of the slight of Chloe’s shirt on the bending bone of her hip, the pearled freckles on heathered skin that follow. The four that form in the shape of a diamond on her right wrist, a strange reminder. It’s so weird that it’s still there, like clocks that still tick when no one is watching, like the writing they made on an empty school desk- they were there when they first met and they were there on that last day, peeking out of the dark sleeve of a funeral dress.
It’s funny, because she’s staring up at her right now, close enough again for her to be able to do something really stupid, and all she can think about is her arm.
Max is wearing her clothes again. She’s making wrinkles in her sheets again. And for the first time in what feels like forever, Chloe doesn’t feel homesick sitting in her own bed.
In fact, she’s stopped feeling like she’s stuck in a place run by blue-blooded teenage boys with guns, and instead, it’s just the dinky little fishing town where she grew up. It’s just home. It’s as if the five year-old itch in her heels has stopped. As if they’ve found solid ground.
In her time on her own, Chloe had learned how to sift things into two strict categories: blood and not-blood. But now that just doesn’t seem needed. Now it just seems like it never was.
Now she wants to kiss her more than she is scared. Thought is eclipsing any logical sentiment that crosses her mind.
She’d spent all this time clutching and crushing hard things in her fists, trying to force something kind out of something cruel- trying to bring in a wave that would only in the end go out. But this, this wonderful thing in front of her, is ripe and ready for the tender taking, leaking something sweet into her palms.
She’s had this idea in her head a hundred times at a hundred sleepovers with zero idea of the weight of it or what it meant before.
But Max beats her to the punch.
Max kisses her. Which is a phrase worth repeating- Max kisses her and it doesn’t feel like a favor. She’s clumsy, but it’s so endearing that Chloe doesn’t even care, learning lips kissing lines that all lead to the same place.
Max doesn’t back down. This feeling is oddly deep and warmly dark and right now, Chloe knows nothing about herself other than that she’s been reduced entirely to a being of longing. It’s like the feeling is wrapping, taut around the circumference of the universe that turns gently right across from her and then some. It’s like torture.
So she loosens that longing from its sling.
The joint falls into her ashtray without looking, and she kisses her back without doubting. She can’t afford to. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t have to.
And for just a split second after they pull apart, she expects Max’s other hand to raise, for her to wipe the moment away- but she doesn’t. She doesn’t recoil. She doesn’t change her mind or immediately drop her as her best friend or tell her she’s gross or do any of the other things she imagined she might’ve done when they were kids.
Instead she just looks at her that way again- the way that makes her think that she’s worth something- the way that makes her think she’s loved. She just makes Chloe wordless again, makes her feel like she’s never been hurt, encouraging her to make her way over the most gorgeous of tipping points, a mirror image looking back up at her from the bottom.
She’s about to say something until Max whispers against her lips, “Beat ya.”
And then they’re just two kids laughing into each other’s mouths. For a second she thinks she might have to pinch herself to see if this is a dream. But the flutter in her chest is enough to tell her that, thank God, this is real.
Chloe pretends to pout and looks at her in question. “Was this a competition?”
“Don’t be a sore loser. And yes,” Max pushes a lock of hair behind Chloe’s ear, finger dragging down to run across the lobe. “That I won. And I’m expecting my award.”
“What’s that?”
Max kisses her again and she looks so happy.
“You never stop surprising, do you?” Chloe asks, words muffled in between Max’s movements, letting her just do as she pleases.
She grins, just wide enough to let her dimples show, to crease the little crinkle in her freckled nose. “Guess not.”
Chloe rolls onto her back again and wonders how she does it, how she makes something so pure and placid out of something so large and tragic, kissing the flat spot beneath her ear.
“So,” Her tone takes a turn for the devious. “Portland?”
“...Tomorrow?”
“Uh, hell yeah?” She affirms. “Why, does the schoolgirl have a test in the morning?”
Max stays quiet for a second. And then-
“No,” She winces. “I have two.”
“You are such a square.” Chloe rolls her eyes, though lovingly. “Fine. Friday. I’m picking you up. Matching tattoos and no backing out.”
And then she tilts her chin up to kiss her again, just because she can. Because there’s no taste of embellishment or a trigger-happy tongue in her mouth. She keeps at it until they’re too sleepy to even keep their eyes open anymore, tired from swimming and second-guessing, bodies braiding together in the sheets.
Now she’s allowed to stay asleep while the world turns gently. While the outside starts to glow like yellow and her insides start to glow like yellow, the morning slipping, slick, into the autumn fog where it breathes through her window.
Chloe wakes up early the next morning. Which really attests to the power of Max’s presence. And the first thing she sees is her best friend’s head, her hair a soft mess of sweet-smelling brown, bangs dried down all crooked. The blankets have been kicked around their ankles during the night, but they’ve managed to keep their fingers laced together throughout it all.
And then she gets an idea.
She has to channel Max, digging through the places that she probably shouldn’t be, but not caring- and it takes some sleuthing, but she finds it
Sorry, Ape-boy. She starts, attaching a picture of Max’s sleeping form, their hands in frame. To be honest, she’s kind of surprised that she isn’t springing out of unconsciousness just to get on her about the angle or the lighting being too concentrated in this area or that.
But even without her seal of approval, she sends it, tacking two last words onto the end:
I win