Chapter Text
“I’m a bad influence on you,” Chloe says, and for a moment she’s so beautiful in the moonlight that Kate doesn’t catch the sadness in her voice.
“What?” Kate says when it registers. “No, you aren’t.”
Chloe stares at her unblinkingly, cigarette raised so that her face is wreathed with smoke, and gives her a look like she’s somehow proving her point simply by existing.
“You aren’t,” Kate repeats more firmly. “What, you think nobody’s ever smoked in front of me before? I do all kinds of community service. Plenty of people have smoked in front of me.”
“Okay, but did they smoke in front of you after sneaking you out of the dorms past curfew, and did they commit petty crimes before they lit up?”
Kate rolls her eyes and shakes her head softly. “I still say you’re not a bad influence on me. I didn’t vandalize anything.”
“Mm. You did let a persona non grata delinquent into the dorms and then sneak out with her so she could tag public property, though.”
“True, but…” Kate kicks her feet gently in the air as she thinks. The metal of Chloe’s truck bed is cold and hard beneath her thighs, but right now it’s more comfortable than her own dorm bed. She hasn’t felt safe sleeping there since she woke up on the floor after the Vortex Club party she can’t remember. The gross comments that keep popping up on her whiteboard don’t exactly make it feel like home, either. “I asked you. I don’t think you’re the bad influence there.”
Chloe mock-gasps. “Kate Beverly Marsh! Are you suggesting that you were a bad influence on me??”
“Maybe,” Kate teases, and this feels better. Chloe’s moods tend to turn on a dime, and Kate’s never quite sure how to handle them. They’ve only been hanging out for a couple of weeks, and although Kate’s learned to recognize Chloe’s sorrow she hasn’t learned how to comfort her. Chloe wears that hard, tough, punk persona so proudly; offering her a hug feels like it would be a transgression. But when Chloe’s joking around, Kate feels much less out of her depth. Most people don’t expect Kate to have a sense of humor - “good little church girl” that she is - but Chloe’s proven herself to be an exception. Chloe’s an exception to a lot of things. “I did ask you to help me break the rules.”
“Because you wouldn’t know how to break them on your own, goody-two-shoes,” Chloe teases with a chuckle.
“I’ll have you know I was a rule-breaker before I met you, thank you very much!”
Chloe flicks the ash from the end of her cigarette onto the damp, sandy asphalt of the beach parking lot. “Really,” she deadpans. “Kate Marsh, rule-breaker.”
“Yes.”
“Sure we’re talking about the same Kate Marsh?” She holds a hand over Kate’s head (mercifully, it’s not the one holding her still-smoldering cigarette). “‘Bout this tall? Literal human marshmallow? Goes to church every Sunday and volunteers at the soup kitchen?”
“Yes!” Kate laughs.
“Okay.” Chloe shifts her position abruptly, reclining with her shoulders propped against the wall of the truck bed and dangling one leg off the edge of the tailgate while the toes of her other dirty boot stop just shy of touching Kate’s thigh. Kate wishes she were as comfortable anywhere as Chloe seems to make herself everywhere. “There’s obviously a story here.” She gestures melodramatically with her cigarette, luminous red embers and pale blue smoke - almost the color of her eyes - against the colorless dark of the night sky. “So spill, Katydid. Illuminate me.”
In her head, Kate scrambles frantically to find something suitably rebellious to tell Chloe. She’s sure she must have done something interesting at some point in her life, but with Chloe’s eyes on her and the way that Chloe’s biting her lip as she waits she’s having a very hard time thinking about anything else. “I… Sometimes I stay up really late. All night, even.”
Chloe looks like she’s trying not to laugh. “That’s it? Kate, that’s… That’s not even breaking any rules! You’re eighteen; you can stay up as late as you want!”
“My parents are really strict about bedtimes,” Kate says a little defensively. “Right up until I moved into the dorms, they would do room checks every night to make sure my sisters and I had our lights out and were sound asleep.” A sneaky little smile tugs at her lips and she drops her voice into a conspiratorial tone. “But there was a creaky floorboard between their room and mine, so I would listen for it and then I’d pretend to be sleeping when they’d check on me. And once they were gone, I’d stay up reading or texting my friends or watching movies.” Kate can hear how boring this sounds, so she hurries to add, “Movies my parents wouldn’t let me watch. I would sneak them. Horror movies, violent stuff. Things like that.” Not only horror movies, Kate doesn’t add because she doesn’t want to tip her hand even though she knows - she knows - that Chloe likes girls, too; she hasn’t forgotten how Chloe used to look at Rachel Amber. But she suspects that Chloe never had to sneak around her mother to watch Imagine Me and You or Saving Face or - God forbid - But I’m a Cheerleader, and she’s not sure that Chloe would understand how incredibly criminal it had felt.
“Pfft! I’ve been doing that shit since I was a kid. With my old friend Max, even, and she was almost as much of a goody-two-shoes as you. Man, after we sneak-watched Jaws she wouldn’t so much as stick a toe in the bay for the rest of the summer. Total chicken.” She grins wickedly. “Nice try, though. And I’ll definitely have to remember about the horror movies. I’ve got some that’ll knock your socks off, guaranteed. So what else you got, Cup-Kate?”
Kate chews on her lower lip for a moment before blurting, “I cursed at my mother.”
Chloe actually laughs at that. “I did that this morning. And again this afternoon. I do that literally every day.”
“I called her a…” She balks. She knows that Chloe curses all the time, but somehow she just can’t make herself repeat the word even though it felt so good to say it and watch her mother’s face turn livid. “A bad name. She grounded me for a week.” Grounded is an understatement. But Chloe doesn’t need to know about Kate getting her mouth washed out with soap at the ripe age of seventeen. She doesn’t need to know that Kate’s mother took away her phone and computer as punishment and proceeded to read her most personal texts and emails before grilling her relentlessly about them until her father came home and put a stop to it. She definitely doesn’t need to know how much Kate cried and begged for forgiveness that week.
Something in Chloe’s face makes Kate feel like she knows it all anyway. “Sounds like she probably deserved whatever you called her.” Chloe nudges Kate’s thigh gently with her boot. “And hey, if you ever want someone to go call her names so vile you’ve never even dreamed of them, much less let them soil your lips, just lemme know. I’ll do it for free.”
Kate can’t hold in a giggle at Chloe’s offer. It shouldn’t be funny, she knows. But it is. She shouldn’t think Chloe’s offer is sweet, but she does.
Chloe smiles and stubs out her cigarette, which is by then burned down to the filter. She hauls herself back up into a sitting position, the toe of her boot still pressed lightly against Kate’s thigh. “Okay, so we’ve got cursing at your mother what I’m assuming is a whopping one time in your life despite the fact that she probably deserves it way more than that, and you staying up to watch horror movies past your bedtime. Not exactly sounding like a hardened criminal, there, Kate. Sounding more like a complete and utter cinnamon bun, if I’m honest.”
“I, um. I drink wine every week?” It’s a weak stab and Kate knows it, but it’s all she’s got left unless she wants to delve into much more personal territory that she’s in no way ready to talk about.
Chloe rolls her eyes. “Doesn’t count as breaking the rules if it’s literally part of church.” She wags a scolding finger. “That’s cheating.”
Kate seizes the opportunity with both hands, a victorious grin spreading across her face. “Which is breaking the rules! Ha, got you!”
Chloe scoffs. “Uh-huh. Very clever, Marsh. Still not disproving my cinnamon bun theory, though. You’re going to have to try harder to scandalize me.” There’s a lift to Chloe’s eyebrow that feels like a dare. Or maybe it only feels like a dare because Kate really, really wants it to be one.
Both of Chloe’s eyebrows shoot much higher when Kate answers her challenge by leaning in and kissing her.
Kate wants to do this forever. She wants to press harder, dig deeper. But she’s never kissed anybody before and she suspects she’d do it terribly if it were much more than a peck, and if this isn’t something Chloe actually wants then pressing would only make it worse. So she holds her lips against Chloe’s for a couple of incredible, terrifying seconds, and then she pulls away.
Chloe blinks slowly, looking dazed. Kate isn’t sure whether that’s a good sign or a bad one. “Okay, wow, that… Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“…Does that mean I can do it again?”
Chloe lets out a laugh, fragile and amazed. “Holy shit, Kate.”
Kate wants to kiss her again, but Chloe hasn’t answered her question. Her stomach twists suddenly. “Oh my God, I’m such an idiot; I’m so sorry.” She puts her palms on her flushed cheeks. They feel impossibly hot; she can’t even imagine how red they must look. “I should have asked first. I’m so sorry.”
“It… yeah, that was definitely breaking the rules. I’ll give you credit for that one.” Chloe laughs a little shakily. “Kate Marsh, rule-breaker.”
“I shouldn’t have done it; not like that. Oh, Lord, I’m no better than those… those creeps who–” Kate can feel the warm feeling kissing Chloe gave her slipping into a cold spiral that seizes her chest and pumps ice water through her veins.
“Don’t even.”
“I didn’t even ask, or warn you, or anything; I just–”
“Dude, chill. It’s fine. I liked it.”
“You’re probably still– I shouldn’t’ve just–” Kate blinks as Chloe’s words sink in. “You liked it?”
Chloe nods. “Yeah, I mean… It took me off-guard, for sure. Asking first would’ve been better, no doubt, but it’s not like I haven’t been wanting you to kiss me for, like… a week, at least.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. It was nice.” Chloe rubs the back of her neck, frowning. Her face slips back into that space Kate hasn’t learned how to navigate, the one that shows she’s thinking too hard and feeling too much. “Uncharacteristic, though.”
Kate’s heart sinks. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means… Hell, I don’t know. It means maybe I really am a bad influence on you. It means maybe my step-dick is right and I’m just a no good delinquent dragging you down with me.”
“Chloe Price, you are not a bad influence on me!” Kate touches her shoulder. Chloe won’t turn and look at her, so Kate touches her chin and turns her head until she has to meet her eyes. The look in Chloe’s eyes makes Kate’s heart hurt. “You’re the best possible influence on me.”
Chloe laughs again, but it’s a broken sound. Kate never wants to hear her laugh like that again. “Not fucking possible,” Chloe tells her. “You’re, like… the best person I’ve ever met. And I’m…” She waves a hand to gesture at the whole of herself.
“You’re a good person,” Kate insists. “You’ve lived through bad things, and they’ve hurt you. But you’re a good person.”
“I’m a high school dropout with no job and no prospects. I smoke, I drink, I do drugs, I swear, I spit on sidewalks, I–”
“You don’t judge me. Why should I judge you?”
“I’ve sold drugs,” Chloe plows on, “I’ve hurt people, I’ve started fights just because I was angry and I wanted to hurt someone…”
“I’m not saying that you’re perfect. I don’t expect you to be perfect. But you are a good person. And you’re a good…” Kate takes a steadying breath. “You’re a good friend. You don’t treat me like I’m some fragile little flower that’s been sheltered from the world, or like someone who needs to be sheltered from it. All my life, people have tried to control me.” Kate clasps her hands in her lap, fingers wrestling with each other anxiously. “My family, my neighbors, my church, my friends… They all expect me to act a certain way, to talk and think and feel and believe exactly the same way that they do, and they don’t care what I want. They don’t care what I think or feel or believe. But when I’m with you…” Kate feels something wet slip down her cheek and wipes at it absently. “Chloe, when I’m with you, I can be who I want to be. I can be me. I can break the rules I want to break and follow the rules I want to follow and you don’t judge me either way. You make me feel alive. You make me want to be alive.”
Kate’s fully crying now, so it takes her a minute to realize that Chloe’s crying, too.
“Shit,” Chloe says, and she’s half-laughing as she cries. “Shit, shit.” She mops at her face. “You, I… Fuck, I can’t even… Shit, Kate! You’re… you’re fucking perfect. Jesus.”
Kate wants to correct her: Chloe is the one who’s perfect. She’s a perfect mess with her tangled blue hair and the dark circles beneath her eyes, her chipped nail polish and chapped lips and bony elbows and scarred forearms. Her stained clothes, her dirty boots, her bra strap slipping down her shoulder, the stink of cigarettes hanging around her in a constant fug. Her mascara running with her tears, the way she’s smiling through them and looking at Kate like she’s some kind of miracle. She’s perfect, and Kate wants to kiss her again. She wants to press the knowledge of how perfect Chloe is into her flesh with her lips so that she believes it.
But they’re both still crying, and the moment just doesn’t feel right. So instead Kate asks a question she’s been wanting to ask since they met: “May I give you a hug?”
Chloe nods rapidly, and her smile brightens. “You’d fucking better.” She opens her arms, and she welcomes Kate home.