Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“It’s just annoying, is all,” Beca grumbled, picking at a loose string of her jeans. 

The silence crackled over the phone in a way that Beca still wasn’t used to. In the years leading up to graduation, there was a softness in the quiet that stretched between them, and they would spend hours floating within that silence, working inches apart on homework and mixes with only occasional breaks to ask for a new pencil or sigh exasperatedly. Now, though, Beca felt an electricity in their silence, and she chalked it up to the distance that was spread between them like butter on toast. 

She was getting used to it - to the weekly Skype dates and the nightly phonecalls - but there was something to Chloe Beale that could only be appreciated in person, and she hated the way she missed it. 

Chloe hummed on the other end, and Beca knew she was considering something. She could hear the way Chloe bit the inside of her cheek, and almost felt whatever ridiculous idea she was going to say before she said it. 

“What if we indulge them?” Chloe said, her voice tinted with mischief. She had originally called to make sure Beca was packed for the wedding, an added reminder to print out the boarding pass to Maine before actually getting to the airport. And while Chloe was excited - beyond excited, really - to see the girls who kept her paying college tuition for three extra years, Beca seemed hesitant. 

“How do you propose we do that?” 

“Wellll,” Chloe started, “They always joke about how we’re a thing, so let’s prove them right.” 

“What are you even…I…um,” Beca shook her head furiously, not calming at the sound of Chloe’s laugh on the other end of the line. 

“Chill, Becs,” Chloe said, “I’m not saying we need to be honest. I’m saying we placed bets in this whole thing too. And I need money for the class hamster I’m thinking about getting, so if we happened to show up to CR’s wedding hand in hand…who would that hurt, exactly?” 

“You’re telling me that you want to pretend we’re dating to make a hundred bucks,” Beca deadpanned, but she already heard Chloe’s excited chirp of confirmation, and despite herself, she felt the corners of her mouth lift up. It was unavoidable, really, because once Chloe got excited about something, Beca fell right in line behind her, secretly relishing in the way Chloe looked at her like she was making all of her dreams come true at one. 

“Come onnnn,” Chloe sang, “We’re both going solo anyway. It’ll be fun.” 

“Fun,” Beca repeated, biting her lip. “Fun’s one word for it.” 

“Becs, we’re already, like, married,” Chloe argued, “So what if we add a few public kisses to our act?” 

“No, no kisses,” Beca said quickly, holding her hand up although Chloe couldn’t see it. On the other end of the line, there was a squeal. 

“That means you agree!” Chloe said excitedly. 

“No, that wasn–”

“Nope! You said it. You said you agreed. Okay hold on.” 

“Chloe wai–” Before Beca could properly disagree to the whole situation, Chloe was calling her from her computer, the Skype icon ringing annoyingly in lieu of the co-worker Beca was in the middle of mindlessly creeping on on Facebook. “Why are you skyping me?” 

“Because,” Chloe said, frustrated, “If we tell Aubrey now, word will spread by tomorrow morning, and that’ll eliminate this whole announcement thing.” 

“Chloe, I’m not–”

“Beca,” Chloe said, her voice turning suddenly stern. “Pick up the Skype call.” 

So Beca did. Because Chloe had even further mastered her “angry teacher” voice since starting at the private elementary school she was teaching at, and it was enough to bring back terrifying memories of near-detentions for young and rebellious Beca. Within seconds, Chloe’s face, albeit a bit blurred, popped up on the screen. 

Her hair was tied back in an easy bun, longer than Beca was used to seeing it, and maybe a shade more blonde, though Beca couldn’t tell with the poor office lighting of the other woman’s apartment. She sat so that her knee rested against the edge of the desk, revealing sweatpants even though she was still wearing the sundress she’d probably worn to work that day. On her knee was a balanced frozen dinner, which just looked like gray slop. It took all of three minutes to process Chloe’s image - it always took that long - before Beca saw herself in the tiny box on the screen and groaned. Quickly, she raised the computer up from her lap to maintain a semi-better angle, though she’d already showered and now leftover eyeliner was smeared over the bags under her eyes. Her hair, for all intents and purposes, should’ve matched Chloe’s. It was, after all, thrown into a bun of equal haphazardness. Yet, somehow, it was more chaotic - a ridiculous bird’s nest of knots she didn’t really want to face yet. She winced into the screen, and Chloe laughed. 

“You’re cute, Babes,” Chloe said, wrinkling her nose. When Beca gaped at her, she waved her hand. “I’m only practicing. Relax.” 

Beca silently mimicked the other girl, resulting in Chloe’s easy laugh again, which, Beca hadn’t realized she missed until that very moment. 

“I’m gonna call Bree no–”

“I’m really excited to see you,” Beca blurted before Chloe could finish. She blushed, then, hoping the light of her loft was poor enough that Chloe couldn’t see her, though she was giving her a confused look. “I mean…sorry…just, like, unrelated from all this. I just, uh, miss you. I wanted to tell you.” 

Chloe stopped, closing her mouth and smiling in a way that almost broke Beca’s computer. She tried to bite it down, but that only made the action more adorable. “I am too,” she said softly, nodding. Then, “But save the adorbs for Bree’s eyes, please. We have to be convincing.” 

Chapter Text

She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until she slammed into Chloe, drowning in a swirl of red hair and squeals. It was in that instant that she became able to breathe again, like the wind was being knocked back into her, and the result was giggling non-stop so that more than a few of the older women on the plane (apparently Maine was a hotspot for LA senior citizens to have 40 years belated bachelorette parties?) glared at them when they walked past. 

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been hugging her, but she felt a hesitant hand on her shoulder, which was enough to pull Chloe away with equal amounts of giggles leaving her breath. When Beca turned around, she saw Emily, standing a few feet away with a cautious look on her face. 

“Sorry,” the younger girl said quickly, holding up her hands. “Like, super sorry. I know this is your, um, like, reunion and everything. I just…We have to pick Aubrey up from terminal B in five minutes so…” Her eyes grew wide, and she was still flailing her hands nervously. “Like, do not let me interrupt. I can…I can go get her but…”

“Em,” Chloe said, effectively quieting the other girl. “S’fine.” 

“Okay,” Emily breathed, grinning at the two of them before clapping her hands and jumping once. “You’re just so adorable…I…gah….I’m, like, totally fangirling right now.” 

“What?” Beca asked. The question earned a slight jab to her ribcage, followed by a glare from Chloe that tugged at the edges of her lips. All of the signals were passed in a series of short seconds, enough so that Emily hadn’t even noticed, and were finished by Chloe easily sliding a hand into Beca’s. 

“She’s still not used to people knowing,” Chloe said to Emily, pulling Beca in closer. “Babe, do you need help with your bags?” 

It had been a long flight. A long series of flights, actually, which included more than a few delays and too much time spent cramped in the flimsy seats of airport gates with a computer balanced on her knees. So, what seemed like a ridiculous dream from the night before completely slipped Beca’s mind, because sure when they video called Aubrey, Chloe did all the talking, and Aubrey did all the eye-rolling, but the whole speech the blonde gave about “hurting her best friend” just…it didn’t seem real. It seemed like one big, elaborate prank set up by her sleeping subconscious so that when she saw Chloe today, she’d feel all weird and tingly, like she’d violated the redhead in her dreams or something. 

Only now, clad in her traveling gear of leggings and an oversized top which she, conveniently, stole from Chloe (who’d stolen it from Tom) her junior year, and hair that went unwashed thanks to the limitations of time caused by getting to gates and security on time, it was real. Painfully, painfully real. While Beca busied herself with mentally banging her head against every tile of flooring that her bag gluck glucked on, Chloe occupied herself with intertwining her fingers with Beca’s and pulling her as close as she could. Which, normally, wouldn’t mean much. Chloe had been away for a long time, and was really overwhelmingly affectionate when she’d seen someone everyday, let alone when absence was involved. Now, though, Beca was worried about the fact that she knew she smelled like plane - stale and like the coughs and farts of the people stuffed in around her - and yesterday’s Lean Cuisine, mixed with a touch of the burnt coffee that was still fuzzy in her mouth. She was worried about the way Chloe’s lips seemed like they were closer to her cheek than ever  before, and she was worried about the way Emily kept throwing side glances behind at them, grinning all the while. 

The whole thing, now that it was enacted, made her queasy, and she wished that Chloe would relinquish her hand because it was beginning to get increasingly and embarrassingly sweaty.

“Breathe, Becs,” Chloe whispered, dangerously close to Beca’s ear. She nuzzled the girl’s cheek with her nose, and Beca was assaulted by the scent of Chloe’s shampoo. “You’re doing great.” 

“I feel dumb,” Beca grumbled, hoping Emily was out of earshot. “And disgusting.” 

“You look great,” Chloe said placatingly, pushing a strand of Beca’s hair behind her ear. “Fantastic.” 

“That’s a lie,” Beca huffed. She was aware of how their voices had risen enough for Emily to hear, and she wondered whether this was purposeful on Chloe’s part - wondered whether that meant Chloe was being honest or not. And then she wondered why she suddenly cared so much. 

“Mmmm,” Chloe hummed, halting her walk where Emily had, right in front of Aubrey’s gate. “You could be wearing a trash bag, and I would be happy to be seeing you, Becs.” 

Beca, tired and maybe a touch loopy, smiled despite herself, leaning her head to rest against the one that Chloe had perched on her shoulder. “You flatter me,” she said, and Chloe chuckled lightly. She looked down at their hands, flexing hers so that Chloe’s hand stretched out and she could see the bright green nailpolish applied meticulously during their skype session the night before. “But I missed you.” 

It seemed almost private. Personal. Like, sure, they were in the middle of the airport terminal, with a very youthful and over-excited Bella watching their every move, but Beca knew that she was a terrible actress, particularly when it involved physical contact. She did genuinely miss Chloe, and in that moment, wrapped up in a scent she’d almost forgotten and curled into hands that were just as warm as she’d remembered, she wasn’t inclined to deny herself the opportunity to say it or be embarrassed by the sincerity with which she delivered the line. 

She thought, briefly, that Chloe recognized it too. The sincerity, that is. Because she curled tighter into Beca and sighed, saying, “I missed you too. So much.” 

It was enough for Beca to know, bet or no bet, act or no act, that Chloe would’ve said that no matter what. She would’ve meant it no matter what. The redhead was her best friend, and she liked to consider herself one of Chloe’s many “besties”, and with a presence as strong as Chloe’s, it was only natural that Beca would be assaulted with the realization that she was missing something essential the minute she saw the redhead again. 

“Ew,” they heard from behind, “Beca remove your claws from my best friend, please, I need a hug from her.” 

“Breee!” Chloe squealed, turning around instantly and dropping Beca’s hand in favor of throwing her arms out for Aubrey to run into. The blonde had three bags, matching in pink - though all different hues, of course - and she was crossing her arms until Chloe realized she was there. The meeting promptly broke her facade, cracking her face into the widest grin Beca had seen, which was enough to remind the smaller girl of the person that Aubrey grew to become in her final year as a Bella and of the few late nights they’d spent brainstorming for the finale set. 

It was enough, at least, to send Beca crashing into Aubrey after Chloe, squirming in between the two girls to pop up and squeeze the blonde enthusiastically. 

“Okay, okay, love birds,” Aubrey said, pulling back. She threw a quick wave at Emily, who was standing uncomfortably away from them, but loving the interaction nonetheless. “I’ve made a few rules.” 

“You’ve been here less than a minute,” Beca argued, but Aubrey threw her hand up. 

“And from what I’ve seen, it’s already necessary for these rules to be enacted, Beca,” she shot back. Beca saw the way her hand was already stretched out, getting ready to count out what laws she wanted to put in place. “So. No public sex.”

“Aubr–”

“Beca, I was Chloe’s roommate for three and a half years,” Aubrey said, “So no public sex.I’ve already had my room moved so that I’m not next to you guys. Sorry, Em.” 

The other girl shrugged, looking visibly uneasy about the set of rules already. 

“Second, no ridiculous pet names. At least, not while I’m in hearing range.” 

“Aubrey, that’s not fair, Beca is my schnook’ems,” Chloe said, her voice high and squeaky. Beca immediately stepped back, slapping Chloe on the arm. 

“That is…No,” Beca pointed a finger at all the girl’s present, “Just for the record, she doesn’t do that.” 

“Regardless,” Aubrey hummed, “I can’t handle the ridiculousness that is Chloe Beale in the honeymoon phase, especially when it’s with you, so…no pet names around me. And no displays of affection that you wouldn’t want your grandma to see.” 

“My grandma’s dead,” Beca deadpanned, this time earning a slap from Chloe. 

“Mine moved to a nudist colony when my mom was twenty two,” Chloe said, resulting in three confused stares her way. She shrugged, nonplussed. “Just, like, saying. She probably doesn’t care.” 

“How many more rules are there?” Beca asked, steamrolling over the strange confession. Aubrey looked up, tallying something in her head, before looking back at them. 

“One,” she said. “Don’t break her heart.” 

“Yeah,” Beca grumbled, “You told me.” 

“No,” Aubrey cautioned again, her gaze steely. Beca was brought back to her freshman year, watching the way the girl’s finger pointed right into her chest, her eyes like laser beams on concentration and determination. If she wasn’t scared half to death, she would be shocked by how far she’d progressed with this woman. Only, her heart was beating too fast for that. Aubrey had that power. “Don’t. Break. Her. Heart.” 

For a second, all four girls were silent. Then, Emily clapped quickly, letting out an uneasy “Oooookay” to break up the tension. It worked, apparently, because Aubrey snapped out of her gaze immediately, glancing over at Emily and smiling kindly at the girl. 

“Em, how’re the Bellas doing?” Aubrey asked, linking arms with the very scared sophomore, and heading out of the airport. With wide eyes, Beca looked at Chloe, who was biting back laughter. 

“This is not funny, dude,” Beca said, her voice cracking. “That woman is going to kill me when she finds out this is fake.” 

“Relax,” Chloe cooed, linking arms with Beca in the same way Aubrey had just done with Emily. “She’d have to get through me first. And I fight dirty.” 

“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” Beca quipped, taking an unsteady breath and trying to calm down after the adrenaline boost of Aubrey’s threat. “Public sex?” 

Chloe shrugged again, only this time turning it into a way of leaning her head against Beca’s shoulders. “So I’m a bit of an exhibitionist. With the whole grandma thing, it kinda runs in the family.” 

Chapter Text

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When Chloe stepped out of the shower, she walked through a trail of steam that was weaving through the room, and without anything but a towel she reached over to the minibar to inspect their rations. 

Beca, who was perched on the bed, fought the urge to look up, while simultaneously realizing that she was also fighting the urge to speak up. Her instinct would be to ask Chloe what the hell she was doing, because mini bars were notoriously expensive, and they were both working on paychecks that were meager, to say the least. What stopped her, though, was the song that continued even after the shower-head had turned off. Some nonsense Jason Derulo song was made into a much sweeter melody when radiating off of a newly clean Chloe with water droplets creating a puddle around her feet. Beca had experienced more than a few times that stunning realization of “My best friend is beautiful”. She was even learning how to say it out loud, whether to co-workers creeping over her shoulder at old college Facebook photos (which was always just in the form of Beca agreeing to someone else having said it) or to Chloe herself, when she was worrying about the hem of her graduation dress or the outfit she wore to her job interview. This, though, was something more than that realization. Something heavier. Because it had the ability to knock the wind out of Beca completely so that instead of feeling uncomfortable, she just felt in awe of the person that Chloe was - someone who could make Jason Derulo sound beautiful without a touch of makeup or awareness of outside gazes. 

When Chloe stood back up, one hand on her towel and the other on a travel-sized bottle of vodka, she bit her lip. “What’re we thinkin’, cap’n?” 

“I’m not captain anymore,” Beca said, putting away her laptop. She slung her legs over the side of the bed and walked up to Chloe, taking a steadying breath before plucking the bottle from Chloe’s hand. “And neither are you.” 

The bottle opened with a snap, and without fully considering her actions, Beca threw her head back, pouring what seemed to be only a few drops of alcohol down her throat. 

“Wow, okay then,” Chloe said. She took the bottle back from Beca, shaking it back and forth to see if there was any left over. “You officially owe me a drink.” 

“That hardly constitutes a drink,” Beca argued as Chloe moved to her suitcase and started moving through it. Despite all her prepping Beca for the trip, it was clear from the bag that there was little to no preparation or packing on Chloe’s part. Clothes were strewn here and there, not even remotely resembling being folded, and Beca swore she saw a Halloween costume tucked away in there. She would’ve asked, too, if Chloe hadn’t plucked out what she wanted with a determined “Aha!”. It was, decidedly, not sleep wear. “And those hardly constitute pajamas,” Beca continued. Chloe glanced up at her, a mischievous look in her eye.

“That’s because we’re not going to sleep, silly.” 

“Uh, yeah, we are.” Beca gestured to her outfit, which she’d changed into while Chloe was in the shower. Her hair was already thrown up into a bun, and she was sporting the boxers she’d stolen from Jesse along with a theatre camp shirt from what seemed to be eons ago. When Chloe first saw her wearing it, she thought she’d never hear the end of it. “Or, at least, I am.” 

“Shut up,” Chloe said easily, slipping her underwear up under her towel. “If I go out, you go out, girlfriend.” 

“Isn’t there that stereotype about lesbians and staying inside?” Beca tried, planting herself back on the bed. “Going to bed early, or something?” 

“Okay, first, you don’t even sleep so that wouldn’t even work,” Chloe argued. She was clasping her bra around her towel before slipping the fleece out and positioning her chest the way she wanted. Then, with hands on her hips - her bare hips - she focused her gaze on Beca. “Second, we’re not lesbians. Or, at least, I’m not.” 

“You’re dating me,” Beca said quickly, then cleared her throat. She had her eyes focused solely on Chloe’s, so as to avoid letting them wander anywhere else. Chloe, it seemed, knew this, and enjoyed the struggle she’d put Beca in. “Or, like, fake dating me. Or whatever. Doesn’t that make you a fake lesbian?” 

“Hardly,” Chloe scoffed, reaching for her shirt. “It makes me a lady that fake-likes other ladies. Or real-likes. Either way. Not gay.” 

Beca was quiet for a moment as Chloe buttoned up the sheer shirt she’d picked out for the night. The words clunked around in her head, and she tried to pick out what exactly about them made them stick. Then, “Real-likes?” 

“Yeah,” Chloe breathed easily. “Who knows. I like pretty people, and I like when pretty people like me, so that means I real-like ladies, probably. Amongst others.” 

“Right,” Beca said quickly. She was finding it hard to swallow, and for some reason, she was shaking her head, which she knew made her look not unlike a puppet or something equally as shell-shocked and ridiculous, so she fought every urge her body had to react and tried to aim for something somewhat casual. “Yeah, like, obviously. That’s a cool thing. Thanks for telling me?” 

“What?” Chloe spun around, her top half satisfying whatever look she was going for. She was still, yunno, relatively nude from the waist down. Which was a thing Beca was not thinking about at all. Not at all. “Oh, Becs, I’m not coming out to you.” 

“You’re not?” 

“No,” Chloe said, waving her hand. “Because I was never, like, in, you know? You just never asked.” 

“But I thought tha–”

“Whatever,” Chloe said quickly. She hopped to get into her pants, then snapped at Beca with her hands. “Put real clothes on, please, I want to be the hottest couple at the hotel bar.” 

“The hotel bar,” Beca repeated, playing with the hemline of her shirt. “You do know the only people at hotel bars are lonely business motherfuckers, twenty-something’s trying to get away from their way over-grown family vacation, and drunk moms on field trips.” 

“Yeah,” Choe threw her a top from her own suitcase, one with a swoop neckline that Beca would never own. Chloe had a tendency to accidentally buy clothes for Beca without realizing it - well, for everyone, really, because when she liked something she saw, she’d buy it before noticing that she’d only liked it on the body of someone else, but more recently the clothes had mostly been purchased with Beca in mind. “So you’ve obviously got some competition.” 

“Those drunk moms are something,” Beca joked, throwing the top on and reaching for the bra she’d discarded on the floor. Chloe grabbed her hand, though, and winked. 

“You don’t need it tonight,” she said simply enough, eyes jumping down to Beca’s top. “They look great.” 

“Mmmm, I don’t think so, Chlo,” Beca said, blushing from her chest all the way up to her cheeks, “I think I’ll just go for a little bit more suppo–”

“Beca,” Chloe said, nearly stomping her foot. The sharpness made Beca blink, standing up from where she was reaching. “Really. Don’t.” She then clicked her tongue, pulling an “okay” sign with her hands while winking. “Trust me, Babe.” 

There were a lot of things Beca wanted to say. Something, of course, about Chloe’s use of one of the most gross terms of endearment in the English language, and something about how weird she felt just…running free. All that tacked onto something about how she bet Chloe bought that shirt just for the purpose, and then a quick question of what the hell she wore on her bottom half. Only, she was having troubling finding any of those words in that exact moment. Sure, they were all in her head, but the process of getting them from there to her throat, which was currently constricting nervously, seemed more than impossible. So she settled for grunting, a sound which really came out to be more of a squeak, and Chloe chuckled, watching her put on the jeans she’d kept in the front pocket of her carry-on. 

With a dab of extra eyeliner on Beca’s part (and a touch of borrowed lipstick because Chloe argued that she always looked better with some color on her lips) and a half hour spent drying hair on Chloe’s part, they were ready to head out. Or, rather, down, seeing as the bar was standing ready for them the moment they stepped out of the elevator. 

“You didn’t tell me the other Bellas would be here,” Beca whispered quickly when she spotted Stacie sitting at the end of the bar, leaning over it to talk to the bartender and giving two business men to her right an eye-full. Emily was stationed next to her, hands in her lap, looking around nervously and trying to keep her eyes settled on the late-night news pouring over the old television screen perched on the wall next to them. Amy was walking out of the bathroom, tugging at her shirt to put everything in it’s place. 

Chloe glanced at Beca, shrugging. “Didn’t know they would be,” she said, then reached for Beca’s hand. “It’s not like I was planning on breaking the facade anyway, though.” 

Beca felt her breath against her neck as she whispered, and she tried her best not to stutter in response to it. “Of course you weren’t,” she tried for her best perturbed tone of voice, and Chloe chuckled at the attempt. The flush from earlier was still climbing up from her chest, and all she wanted was to cover it up, but she settled instead for focusing her stare on the bar. Because if anything was going to stop the weird twist in her stomach, alcohol would. Right? 

“I’m gonna need more than that baby bottle from upstairs.” 

Snaking a hand around her waist, Chloe started the walk towards the bar with Beca in tow. Beca still had to get use to the feeling of another person’s weight balanced against hers. “Good thing you owe me a drink too,” the redhead said. The minute they slipped onto the seat, Emily breathed out in relief and jumped over to them, drawing the attention of a mostly uninterested Stacie. 

“Didn’t think we’d see you two Tasmanian devils down here tonight,” Amy said, winking, “Thought you’d make use of the room.” 

Beca pointedly ignored the comment, and the subsequent heat it sent to her cheeks, trying her best to forget about the hand that wasn’t usually on her knee that was now, very surely…well…on her knee. She settled for ordering her drink instead of responding, the cold neglect of Amy’s comment being enough to draw Stacie’s attention. 

She was always like a hawk, but since Chloe and Beca’s little announcement, it seemed worse. Like every one of Beca’s moves was under appraisal by Stacie, which was more than unfortunate because the queen of public displays (both of affection and of things that weren’t quite affection) was a hard person to convince of whatever lie they were trying to pass off. She reached over the counter, popping into the conversation. 

“They just heard we were down here,” Stacie started, “And realized that when you get more than two Bellas together with alcohol, a mean game of truth or dare gets played.”

“Who wants to miss out on that, am I right?” Emily said with false excitement, her anxiety over the setting seeping into every one of her words and making them sound insincere. Beca winced, but Chloe just squeezed her knee. 

“Beca and I are determined to get drunk, actually,” Chloe said, her voice certain. Beca spun around to stare at Chloe, whose lips were set in determination. She just barely glanced at Beca out of the corner of her eye, but it was enough.

“And what’s the occasion, gay baes?” Amy asked, slapping the redhead on the back. Chloe shrugged. 

“Being together,” she said easily, clanking her glass with Beca’s. “Being in love.” 

Beca smiled, hoping it was less uneasy than she actually felt, and held her glass up in toast. She thought the best tactic, at this point, was steam-rolling Chloe’s statement and the subsequent way Emily was clutching her chest in a “how sweet are they” gesture. Better to not acknowledge it at all, she figured. So she just sighed, staring at the cup just placed into her hands. “Also, being tired as fuck and forced to go out,” Beca mumbled after taking a sip. 

“Mmmhhmm,” the bartender chimed in. He was wiping the edge of the bar, and looked up with a grin at the two women, winking. “Takes some kind of true love to be convinced of that.” 

Chloe giggled, throwing back her glass even though she had at least three fourths of it still full. Within a few seconds, she finished it, giggling and looking at Beca with eyes that were already partially glazed over. “Oh, you bet,” she said, raising her hand up from Beca’s waist to her shoulder. She flicked Beca’s chin, and Beca tried to swat it away with no avail. “I’ve this one wrapped around my finger.” 

“You can say that again,” Stacie muttered into her glass to the sound of the other girls’ agreements. The bartender just laughed, and Beca copied Chloe’s actions, finishing off her glass quickly. 

“Whatever,” she grumbled, not wanting to think about what it meant that even this stranger could agree with Stacie’s conjecture. She shifted in her seat uncomfortably, accidentally pulling Chloe closer to her in the process. Judging by the amount of dead weight Chloe was already managing to maintain, Beca guessed that drink went to her head pretty quickly, and that it was about to be a long night. She thought she’d catch up as soon as she could. (Re: alcohol made it easier. Yeah?)

 “Just get me a shot, yeah?” 

Chapter Text

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She woke up with dry mouth and a headache that somehow worked its way to her neck, throbbing. It wasn’t the worst hangover she’d ever had but…she’d never really woken up with a heavy weight spread over her chest. 

A heavy weight that was, as it turns out, someone else’s arm, dotted in familiar freckles and short red hairs. Beca groaned, turning and finding Chloe’s body impossibly close to hers, her nose touching the other girl’s chest. At the contact, Chloe let out a contented sigh, her leg tangling with Beca’s before she could slip away from the grip. 

She was, as she expected, without any kind of blankets - all of them were heaped onto Chloe’s side of the bed, so that she had a mountain rising up past her shoulders. Apparently, though, she didn’t need much in the way of blankets, because Chloe really was more than just aesthetically hot…she was physically, too. Beca realized with whatever horror her foggy brain could muster that she’d taken off most of her protective clothing over the course of the night, clearly too affected by Chloe’s body heat to have endured the safe confines of a sleep sweatshirt and pants. 

The result was Beca, hungover and sweating beneath Chloe whilst donning only old Mickey Mouse underwear and a tank top that had lost its proper position over the course of the night. 

“Chloe,” she whispered, her hand moving automatically to run up and down the arm that was splayed over her chest. She watched goosebumps rise, but Chloe didn’t stir. “Chloe,” she whispered louder. The redhead hummed, burrowing more into Beca’s body. 

Her lips were pursed just slightly in her sleep, and her face, normally clouded by excitement or playfulness or, in moments of crisis, pain, was now just filled with a soft, subtle kind of bliss. Her cheeks were red from the blankets, and her skin was clear save for the makeup that was leftover from the night before. Beca wasn’t thinking when she moved her arm from Chloe’s to the corner of the redhead’s lip, tracing the line there and moving down to her chin - pulling her bottom lip for a second before running her knuckles up the other girl’s jawline. 

It was strange. And not really something she thought actively about doing. She felt like this was an art museum, the work displayed with a sign that said “Do Not Touch” which always, without fail, made Beca all the more tempted to reach out. She never really considered the movement of her hand until she made contact, and by that point it was too late. 

The knock on their door was sudden and jolting, so Beca jumped like she’d just been caught…well…weirdly caressing her best friend’s face? (Wow, what’re the chances that that just so happened to be exactly what she was doing. Which…okay, so even she could admit that that was a weird thing to do.) 

“Go away,” she grumbled then, attempting the hide the way her heart rate jumped when she heard the noise. She looked over at Chloe, scared, and saw that the girl still had her eyes closed, but a very aware smile was playing on her lips. 

The lips that Beca just touched. 

The lips that Beca, last night, had….

Yeah. Shit. That happened. 

…As part of the game, of course. Another scene in their weekend-long act and nothing more. Beca was grateful that alcohol had the power to dilute thoughts while enhancing heat, because all she was really aware about now that the kiss was in the past-tense was the way that it burned. Which was just vague enough to write off as basic lust, felt upon getting the chance to kiss a pretty person after months of…like, not kissing pretty people. 

Besides, how cliche would it be for her to fall for her best friend because they’d pretended to date for the weekend? 

You see this bullet? It was successfully dodged. 

The knocking continued, and it took Beca almost a minute to realize that, lost in her own thoughts, the sound had not stopped. She only noticed because Chloe squinched her nose, pressing it into Beca’s shoulder and grunting. “Stop them,” she said, pained. Beca smiled, taking a deep breath. She tugged at Chloe’s arm, which was raised reluctantly, and slipped out of the bed. 

The light outside the door was blinding, as their room was pitch black save for a touch of light streaming in through the curtains. What was even worse, though, was the smile that greeted her on the other side - Emily, as bright and chipper as ever despite her nighttime festivities, holding a tray of coffees with Jessica and Ashley behind her. They all had their mouths open in some strange expression of excitement? Joy? Beca wasn’t terribly good at reading emotions, even her own, and she was too hungover to really think to much about it; it was Emily, Jessica, and Ashley, so excitement would always be a safe guess. 

“What?” Beca spat out, not at all regretting the sharpness that she assaulted them with. They’d known her, collectively, for nine years, and should by now know that morning wake-up calls were not something she appreciated. Especially when drinking was involved the night before. 

Emily flinched slightly at the curtness before launching into her apology. “So sorry, we figured you were up, it’s already noon and–” she paused, eying Beca slowly. 

The girl was standing in the doorway with bedhead not even she could imagine, in nothing but underwear and a tank top that still didn’t know what it was supposed to be covering, and when Emily looked into the room, Beca followed her gaze to Chloe - who had now taken up the whole bed, letting the covers spread out to reveal a bare back. 

Beca blinked. 

A bare…back? 

She was pretty sure she would’ve remembered the…bareness. 

Emily’s eyes widened at the same time Beca’s did, and she stepped back immediately. “I amso sorry,” she said quickly, shoving the coffee into Beca’s hands. “You guys, like, take your time or…err…” 

“Enjoy?” Jessica added, with Ashley tacking on a giggle. Beca, even this early (it wasn’t “early” apparently, but it felt like it), was quickly learning she was capable of blushing before she was fully conscious of being awake. 

“Thanks,” she said, glaring. Emily pulled a face, and Beca softened, only slightly, her hand playing with the door and counting down the seconds until she could close it. “We’ll be down in a sec. Sorry for…um…this.” 

Emily nodded, or made the move to nod, before Beca closed the door quickly, her hand running up her forehead and pulling her hair back. When she looked over at the bed, the room now feeling way too dark, Chloe was sitting up with a grin on her face. She was holding the blankets close to her chest. 

“Did you…were you…I feel like I would remember…” 

Chloe chuckled, “I slipped out of my shirt when you opened the door,” she explained, “It helps the whole effect.” 

“I didn’t think we were going for sex fiends,” Beca said, her throat dry. She bent down, beginning to pick up the outfits they’d scattered on the ground last night, stopping when Chloe didn’t have a response. She looked up, her eyebrows raised at Chloe’s wide grin. “What?” 

“I like that tank top,” Chloe said, her smiling widening as Beca held the clothes closer to her chest for protection. “Very….open.” 

Beca scoffed, throwing Chloe’s shirt at her before opening the blinds. She had to fight the urge to hiss at the sunlight that streamed in then, bright white and sending jolts of pain straight through her temples. “If I had known you were such a horny chick, I wouldn’t have agreed to be your girlfriend, you know,” Beca said jokingly. She tugged at her tank top, pulling it down over her bottom, because here facing the window she felt like Chloe was staring her down. Sure enough, the redhead chuckled. 

“You love me not in spite of my libido but because of it,” Chloe said in return. She shuffled out of bed, having put her shirt back on, and took Beca’s hand, spinning her around once. “I haven’t slept that well in ages.” 

Beca squeaked at the sudden movement, but went with it, because there was something about Chloe Beale that made friendly waltzing in the morning…appropriate? She thought that soon she’d be singing to the birds. 

“Oh yeah?” Beca asked, an eyebrow cocked. “Must’ve done a number on you then.” 

Chloe stopped dancing, her eyes faking seriousness before her face cracked and she waved away the comment. “Or we drank so much my body had to literally turn off to recover.” 

Beca shrugged. “That too.” 

“You were okay with…like, the kiss and stuff, right?” 

Beca rarely heard Chloe be hesitant about anything, but her voice was hedging uncertainty. Beca felt nervous all of the sudden, this jingling anxiety tickling her gut, so she took the time to walk into the bathroom, letting the sound of the fan drown out the silence between them. She looked just as much of a mess as she thought she did, which would be embarrassing if Chloe hadn’t seen in her much worse conditions over the years. She wondered, briefly, why she even cared what Chloe thought about the way she looked. 

Then she kind of just assumed it was because Chloe, apparently hungover and fresh from sleep, looked not unlike Aurora post-thousand-year-slumber. Which is to say, absolutely untouched and princess-esque. 

“Yeah,” Beca managed, spreading toothpaste on her toothbrush. She leaned against the doorframe, meeting Chloe’s worried eyes and trying to quell them with a smile. “Totes.” 

“Perfect,” Chloe said. She seemed a little like she was allowing herself to be convinced by Beca’s weak approval - like she needed to not break the fragility of the “Yeah, totes” for both of their sakes. 

Which was true, and something Beca found herself being grateful for. She slipped behind the brunette, turning on the shower and grabbing a towel from the rack. “We have ten minutes before we meet the girls for set up. Or, lunch. Or whatever Stacie has planned.” 

“Then?” Beca asked with a mouthful of spit. Chloe was feeling the water, waiting for it to get warm, and Beca hoped to God their conversation would end without Chloe undressing herself. She had a tendency to do just that, and Beca realized it wasn’t something she was really prepared to handle today. The blushing and the winking and the breathlessness was for a time that…wasn’t now. 

She then hated the fact that she also really wanted Chloe to start undressing before the conversation ended, which, naturally, made her feel like the worst friend in the world. 

“Then, there’s rehearsal dinner. Stacie’s got this diluted Bachelorette party plan.” 

“And tomorrow, we go live,” Beca said, wiping her mouth. Chloe looked at her, smiling. 

“We went live a long time ago,” Chloe said, winking. Beca mimed looking around, and Chloe cocked her head, curious. 

“Oh,” Beca said, “I’m just looking for the cameras. Or the people. ‘Cuz, see, you’re doing an awful lot of flirting behind closed doors for a fake girlfriend.” 

“And you’re doing an awful lot of blushing in return,” Chloe answered, having stood up and walked over to Beca to brush a finger over her pink cheek. 

“It’s burning hot in here,” Beca muttered, “Of course my face is red.” 

Chloe rolled her eyes, tutting and backing away. “Whatever,” she said, “You never asked, but, Beca Mitchell, I’m a bit of a method actress.” She shrugged sarcastically before slipping her underwear off, the t-shirt she was wearing just barely covering everything it needed to. When she turned to turn the temperature knob, she bent down slightly, and Beca reddened again. 

This was just…not okay. 

“You can’t blame me if I’m dedicated to my craft,” she finished. She stepped into the shower, then, slipping her shirt off in such a way that all Beca saw was the bare back she’d seen that morning before the redhead disappeared behind the curtain. 

She didn’t realize until she left the steaming room that she was so unbelievably fevered. 

And a little out of breath. 

And a little…scattered. 

Or a lot. A lot. Of all of the above. 

Jesus Christ. 

Chapter Text

“So,” Emily clapped, looking at the girls expectantly. They’d gotten downstairs four minutes later than they promised, which sent Aubrey into a tailspin about the value of adhering to schedules despite “sexual relations”, and the rush down the steps - the elevator was out of order - made them breathless and rosy cheeked enough for Amy to cough out some crude comment that Beca preferred not to hear. 

She’d been dating Jesse for three years, and not once did anyone even so much as inquire about their sex life. In fact, the topic of those things was almost taboo for everyone except for Stacie, who’s favorite dinner activity was making CR say “Mmmhmmm” a little too knowingly, and Chloe, who actually tapered out of those conversations a lot more towards the end of her Bella career. She was surprised, then, that this seemed to be such a source of interest for the other girls. Every single wink, every flash of a smile, or lingering fingers, brought on a series of hoots and hollers that made Beca even more aware of how she acted around Chloe. 

Which, in turn, made her aware of the fact that she wasn’t actually acting any differently. I mean, not really. Sure, there were a few “babe”s thrown out by Chloe and received with nothing more than an embarrassed scowl on Beca’s part, but, for the most part, Beca treated Chloe with the same kind of strange friendliness that she always paid the redhead. Only now, she seemed to have an audience. 

She shook her head at Amy, thinking about how she could’ve literally had sex with Jesse on the middle of the Barden stage without a Bella so much as looking in her direction. The natural path of thought, then, was how the Bellas would react if anything remotely close to that happened with Chloe. And the natural path of reaction to that, then, was a blush rising entirely too quickly on her cheeks, claiming to reveal whatever Amy said to have been true and drawing more than a few giggles from the rest of the crew. 

Chloe, apparently, loved the attention. Or the way Beca’s cheeks were heating up. To be fair, it had been proven over the past day that Chloe had quite the penchant for making Beca’s cheeks heat up, so that was probably the source behind her snicker and the squeeze of her hand against Beca’s, but the brunette decided to attribute some of it to the way Emily was, once again, nearly holding her hands to her mouth to keep from exploding. 

“Dude,” Beca said, addressing Emily, “Can you, like, stop being our personal shipper?” 

“Sorry,” Emily said. She stepped back, shaking her head. “You’re just like…well…you two are so…”

“Gay for eachother?” Amy added, earning a slap from Aubrey. 

“Yeah!” Emily said before catching herself. “I mean, no. I mean, however you identify is cool or whatever.” 

“Okay,” Aubrey clapped. She stood at the center of the group of girls, hands on her hips, and Beca couldn’t help but think that she looked genuinely happy there. She assumed that the temporary nature of this position of leadership was enough to keep her relatively at ease amidst all this planning, so that Aubrey could actually enjoy being at the forefront of this group once more. In fact, she was almost glowing. 

The blonde handed out instructions promptly to each appointed “team”, who all proceeded to split up - running everywhere from the store for emergency wedding details to the dining room for centerpiece set-up. She pointedly separated Beca and Chloe, much to Beca’s chagrin, claiming that had she put the two in a tag-team, they wouldn’t have gotten anything productive done. Chloe cracked a joke about the subjectivity of the definition of productivity, which, even Beca had to admit was clever, while Aubrey groaned, grabbing Beca by the hand and carting her off to where they both would be working. 

Because, logically, Aubrey must have believed firmly in the idea of keeping friends close and enemies closer. There was no other reason she would’ve opted to have Beca by her side overliterally any other one of the Bellas. 

“Don’t be flattered,” Aubrey huffed, reading Beca’s mind. She was walking at a pace quicker than Beca was used to keeping up with, even after having lived for months in LA. “I picked you because I trust you the least.” 

“I thought this whole acapella hatchet was buried, like, eons ago,” Beca said. She was slightly out of breath when she ran into Aubrey’s back after the blonde stopped abruptly in front of the parking garage entrance. 

“It was,” Aubrey said. “I can like you without trusting you.” 

“Okay,” Beca said slowly. Aubrey’s car was parked directly in the front of the garage and without one inch of dirt, which Beca expected, though when she got inside she was surprised to find the floor covered in fast food wrappers. “And this shit…”

“Is shit,” Aubrey said simply enough. “But I don’t exactly have time to eat anything better most nights.” 

“Right,” Beca muttered, holding up a McDonalds bag. Aubrey tore it out of her hands, starting the car without comment. It took Beca more than a little self-control to hide her grin and not take a photo that would be attached to the group text. Later, she thought. That can be for later. “What exactly is it that you don’t trust me with?” 

She hardly wanted to venture into the conversation, but Aubrey’s coldness was a little hurtful to Beca, who, as much as she hated to admit it, softened over her four years to the point where she…wanted Aubrey to be her friend? No, that wasn’t right. Maybe, she just expected it. Or thought, at the very least, that they already jumped that hurdle into “polite acquaintances”. If the whole distrust stemmed from a general disbelief that Beca would be able to conduct a proper wedding task without mistake, well, then, Beca would understand. But there seemed to be something else underlying the frozen edges of the car seat next to her, and maybe she’d been hanging out with Chloe too much, but she found herself particularly invested in thawing that. 

“Oh, everything,” Aubrey chirped. She turned on the radio as they headed out of the garage, and Beca winced at the show tunes that were coming out of the stereo. Not so much because she disliked them, but because she knew every word. Show tunes had the power to take the listener back to those awkward years of over-sized band camp shirts and braces - the approximate age every anyone was when they dreamt about the stage. The approximate age Beca was when she went through the theatre phase she refused to tell anyone about. 

She reached out, turning down the stereo slightly and enduring Aubrey’s glare through the red light because it was worth the slight break she got from the music. “But mostly Chloe,” Beca said with a breath. She was blunt, always prided herself on maintaining a frankness that made others flinch, but confrontation was a different story. Especially when it centered around a false premise. 

Err, semi-false. Maybe. 

“She’s good,” Aubrey said. Beca nodded, sighing. 

“Too good for me, you’re saying.” 

“You said it,” Aubrey answered. Her turn signal dug holes into Beca’s temples. She still was unbearably hungover from the night before, and the stark confession on Aubrey’s part didn’t do much to make her feel less nauseous. After a few seconds of silence, Aubrey turned, her actions like a bird. Not one of prey, as per usual, but one of curiosity. “When did it happen? Between you two, I mean.” 

“What?” 

“You and Chloe,” Aubrey clarified, annoyed that Beca didn’t understand. They pulled up to a bright red barn, the parking lot being an open field of grass that Aubrey’s car openly rejected. “When were you two…an item?” 

“An item?” Beca scoffed, but Aubrey just rolled her eyes. When Beca sobered up, she took a deep breath. 

It turns out, in all those years at theatre camp, improv was never really her thing. So she closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, trying her best to center herself within a story that was close enough to the truth that it could be delivered with a semblance of believability. She wasn’t really sure what she settled on until the words started falling out of her mouth. 

“It’s been a long few months,” she said truthfully. “And I think a big part of that was being away from the girls. The Bellas. Chloe, mostly.” 

Aubrey hummed in agreement, and Beca realized that she understood more than anyone else. While the Bellas weren’t her life in the same way that super senior Chloe had felt, they carried her enough for her to be in a place on top by the end of it all. And then, she just left. She just had to leave, abandoned with the knowledge that everyone else was still staying back, still living in that bubble, without her. 

“I missed her, like, more than….” Beca paused, sighing. “L.A. is a beautiful place. And…I hate it. Because, there’s too much sun, you know? The amount of times I felt like I was doing something wrong because I was in the sun and Chloe wasn’t was….It happened a lot. Me thinking about her happened a lot. I would be walking down the street or listening to a track at work and….” 

She paused, looking up at Aubrey, who’s hands were still on the steering wheel despite being parked. She was looking at Beca with an ounce of understanding. Sympathy, maybe. Recognition. 

Like she knew where this was going. 

Like, maybe, she’d been there too. 

Which was remarkable, and enough to make Beca shake her head, because not even Becaknew where this was going and….

“Yeah, whatever,” she said, choking out an uncomfortable laugh and waving her hand. “She was always more than one of the girls. She was Chloe. Is Chloe. I guess…” she swallowed. There was something heavy in the air, and she thought about how different this felt from lying. While she felt sick, still, there wasn’t a clamminess to her hands. There wasn’t a stutter in her words. There was just…an acute sense of letting something go. Of breathing again. Which was weird because Beca wasn’t sure she was ever holding her breath in the first place. “I guess that I always knew. And having her not around just made it more obvious.” 

“And you told her?” 

“Yeah,” Beca said quickly, grateful for the guidance. She wasn’t sure where that story was headed, or what was even pushing it, and Aubrey’s voice was enough to put her back on track. “I sent a letter. With this….with this old mixed CD. My first, actually.” 

Aubrey smiled, then. Beca was sure she hadn’t seen this particular brand of Posen smile in her life. 

“It’s shit,” Beca admitted, letting out a laugh that Aubrey joined in on. “Like, proper shit. But…that was kinda the point. Chloe makes my shit feel not like shit. Which is, like, so totally romantic, I know.” 

Aubrey laughed, which made Beca stop in her tracks, her mouth falling open without her permission. Aubrey cocked an eyebrow at her, tilting her head. “What?” 

“I’m sorry, did I just make Aubrey Posen laugh?” Beca’s mouth was open in shock, probably wide enough for a fly to fly in, but she didn’t much care, because Aubrey was shaking her head and shoving Beca playfully and the brunette couldn’t shake how normal it felt to be hanging out with Aubrey. 

“You also,” Aubrey started, pointing at the clock, “Made Aubrey Posen late. Congratulations.” 

Beca unbuckled her seatbelt, the grin never leaving her face. “For making you late, or for winning you over with my movie moment of love confession?” 

Aubrey rolled her eyes. She got out of the car and glanced over at Beca through the window. “Both,” she admitted. “You look at her in this way….” she started, averting her eyes. She looked at the barn for a second, then back at Beca. “Like she’s the entire world, and you’re just grateful to be rotating around her. It’s like the way the moon probably looks at the Earth.” Beca blinked, surprised by the sudden poetry. Aubrey, clearly uncomfortable, shook her head and chuckled to herself. “You really love her.” 

Beca bit her lip. 

Love was a word she was accustomed to running away from. As cliche as the act of fight or flight was, accompanying any Daddy issues she might have and blended with the perfect ounce of sexual questioning (because, okay, not even she could really deny the sexual questioning occurring as of late - no matter how hard she tried), she realized that she was painfully close to being every single manic pixie dream girl summoned up by the movie-gods Jesse used to make her watch. Still, “love” was and would never be her thing. 

And while she would never deny the fact that she loved Chloe - she was even starting to get used to saying it after Skype dates and phone calls - this felt different. More…permanent. Heavier, in that way that it seemed to imply a totality to it. A finality. You love her, it said, so you are in love with nobody else. 

It should have, would have, scared her. It should have thrown her for a loop, ruined the act altogether, and made the rest of the afternoon with Aubrey extremely tense. 

But it didn’t. 

It’s not that it stirred up some sentimental mumbo-jumbo about feeling right and full and complete and glowing. No. It just made her feel not scared. 

Which, in Beca terms, was no small feat. 

She took a shaky breath, though the silence that spread between them in that moment was enough to communicate it all. Aubrey was already halfway out of the window frame, having felt like she’d received enough of an answer already. Or, at least, somewhere near that. 

Still, Beca felt the need to answer. The desire to answer, because the words were already on her lips and all she needed was to breath to set them free. 

“Yeah,” she said, almost so quietly that there was no way Aubrey could hear. “I really think I do.” 

She was undoubtedly and completely not scared about this sentiment. 

And it was precisely that not fear that scared her the most. 

Chapter Text

“You survived!” 

Chloe was situated at the headboard of the bed, Beca’s laptop perched on her knees. She had her own - of course, who didn’t? - but she liked exploiting the fact that she knew Beca’s password. There was something exciting about having access to the one thing that Beca trusted no one with, even if she used it to watch cheesy dramas about doctors or reality television shows about love. 

She also took some enjoyment from filling Beca’s internet history with those things, if only because she knew that, in the middle of the night, Beca would notice and feel a second-hand embarrassment from it all. 

Beca slumped into the room, falling face first into the bed a few inches from Chloe’s feet. The redhead laughed, putting the computer away and crouching forward, knees tucked into her chest, to put her head consolingly on Beca’s back. Beca shifted her head so that she could see Chloe, and the other girl responded with a smile. “It wasn’t that bad?” she tried, her words being met with a scowl from Beca. 

“You,” Beca started, her words muffled by the comforter. “Are a saint for being best friends with that woman.” 

“She’s not that terrible, Becs,” Chloe argued. Her hand was moving in lazy circles over Beca’s back, drawing out shapes and figures after a while that calmed Beca down slightly. 

“Also, I have learned that I am allergic to hay.”

Chloe chuckled, her nose nuzzling into Beca’s shoulder blade. “You are truly a warrior.” 

Beca made a noise of disgruntlement, with followed with Chloe hitting her lightly on the back three times. Before she could fully respond to what was happening, Chloe swung one leg over her, effectively pinning her to the bed. Beca grunted at the pressure. 

“This is not happening,” she muttered, but Chloe just hummed contentedly. 

“You know, Becs,” Chloe said, “I think the problem is this gosh-darn bed. It’s so…lumpy…” The redhead bounced twice, her actions resulting in Beca’s double-groan. “And noisy.” 

“Chloe, we are adu–”

“And ticklish?” Chloe leaned forward, pressing her nail into the space between Beca’s neck and her shoulder. The girl beneath her squealed, reaching quickly to grab the offending hand and throwing Chloe’s center of balance off enough to send her colliding on her side onto the mattress. With her fingers wrapped around Chloe’s wrist, Beca sat up triumphantly, holding Chloe’s wriggling hand right above her face. Chloe tried all the while to break free, fighting Beca’s force enough to draw her hand closer, yet again, to Beca’s shoulders. “Ooh, is that a smile I see, Ms. Mitchell?” Chloe tried. She was on her back now, so she kicked her legs out, using them as leverage. Sitting up, she was able to use her other hand to try to get at Beca, causing the other girl to squirm in an attempt to get out of her reach. With one quick snap - one that was entirely too coordinated for a girl like Beca - the brunette was able to grab Chloe’s other hand, moving to pin them against the bed. 

“Not a chance in hell,” Beca breathed, though she was laughing. Chloe, too, was giggling, the laughter rising up with the breathlessness so that when Beca softened her grip, Chloe’s hands moved to her torso, holding her there for balance while she guffawed. Slowly, as their heart rates returned back to normal and their laughter died out, Chloe was able to sigh once, deeply, and while she hoped Beca didn’t notice, her eyes scanned the other girl’s position. She tried to focus them on Beca’s eyes, which were stationed just above her, but they keep veering, moving down to where the other girl’s lips were quirked. Beca’s smile almost hinted that she knew exactly what Chloe was thinking, and was more than aware of their current proximity or the way their chests were still heaving with breath. Almost, but not quite. 

“What?” she asked, noticing that Beca was staring as much as Chloe was, still leaning over her, and not at all fighting the hands that were situated comfortably on her hips. 

“Nothing,” Beca said, backing up suddenly with a shake of her head. The absence of her against Chloe made the redhead shoot up, suddenly cold and suddenly scared. There was something in her gut, something turning and twisting and squeezing, and she could recognize how different it was from just a few moments ago where - if she was still enough to recognize it - she felt it burning, warm instead. 

“Hey,” Chloe put her hand out to Beca’s shoulder, wincing when the other girl slipped out from under her grasp. “What’s going on?” 

Beca watched the seams of the bedspread, biting her thumbnail. Scooting forward so that her shins were touching Beca’s side, Chloe tried again, reaching out to take Beca’s thumb out from between her teeth, ignoring the way blood had blossomed there. Beca looked up at her, the haziness distance suddenly disappearing from her eyes like smoke being waved away until she took a deep breath and it was gone altogether, replaced by a smile wider than Chloe had seen as of late. “I just missed you,” Beca said, shrugging. “You’re…you…This afternoon would’ve been more fun with you around.” 

Beca’s hand was still in Chloe’s, so the redhead brought it up to her cheek, leaning her face against it. “You’re so totally the best girlfriend ever,” she said, grinning. When Beca rolled her eyes, backing away, Chloe wondered if it was the right thing to say. 

If there was a right thing to say. 

Beca was sincere. If there was one thing you could say about her, it was that one the rare occasions she veered away from her sarcasm, she was completely and utterly genuine in her words. Chloe always thought that that’s what made it so hard for her to go beyond jokes most of the time - the fact that talking seriously always meant more for her than it did for most people. So she wasn’t really sure how to approach the way that Beca was looking at her in the moment, or the tone that Beca’s words had been said with - something wondering, or wandering, uncertain but completely solid, somehow words that were ellipses in and of themselves because they implied that there was something more to be said. But she knew - could tell, at least - that it was uncomfortable for Beca to admit. Or, maybe, she realized after she’d said anything in response, it was uncomfortable for Chloe to hear. Because while Beca’s sincerity made it harder for Beca to talk, it also made it harder for Chloe to listen to without getting her hopes up or, at the very least, echoing in her mind at three in the morning when she was trying to sleep. So, she brushed it off with a joke, because it was safe. It was the clean route to go, and she took it. 

She was Chloe Beale, and she liked to push boundaries. But when it came to this - wheneverit came to this - she rode the brakes. Always. 

In a move so sudden that it made Beca jumped, Chloe hopped up, standing on the bed before jumping off quickly. She landed without a thud or a falter or a trip, and headed towards her suitcase. “The day’s not over, you know,” she said, throwing open the top of the bag and started to dig through her clothes. 

“Rehearsal dinner, I know,” Beca answered. “Aubrey drilled the schedule into my skull on the ride back in hopes she could somehow force me to be on time.” 

“Well, you better get started now then if you want to make all her dreams come true,” Chloe said. 

“Yes, that’s all I’ve ever really wanted…”

“Shut up and take your clothes off, Mitchell,” Chloe said, smiling wickedly. Beca threw a pillow at her, leaning back on the bed in order to look at the ceiling. Her sight, though, was quickly obstructed by a sparkling dress hitting her right in the head. “I’m serious, you know,” she heard Chloe say, “We’ve got a half hour.” 

–

“Alright, alright,” Cynthia Rose held her hands up in an attempt to placate the small crowd that was gathered around the center aisle. While Aubrey was ridiculous about properly rehearsing the entire ceremony, the girls were all able to maintain a certain level of enthusiasm the entire way through. It was easier than what they were used to, and at least these rehearsals didn’t involve vocal exercises and “cardio”. 

They had met the other bride only a few hours ago, in the lobby of the hotel before both sides of the wedding party caravaned to the barn, and, sure, Chloe was quick to approve of most people she met, but judging by the way she saw Beca almost immediately accept the other woman, the bride, Hannah, was a keeper. 

She was, apparently, the head of the LGBTQIA+ organization at Barden, graduating with a degree in Women’s and Gender Studies (Stacie was in almost every class with her, and actually set the two brides up originally, which didn’t fail to spark a quick and temporary flame of anger in Chloe, who was slightly offended none of this had been discussed earlier). So, her side of the wedding party was a blend of men, women, and non-binary identifying people, all assigned to various Bellas according to height - a fact which made Beca first in line behind Flo, and which started yet another discussion about height order wherein Beca yet againfought her natural, God-given 5 foot 2 inches to the arguments of every other person in the party. 

They had, for the better half of five minutes, been begging Cynthia Rose to give a speech of some sort, some kind of closing commentary before the party separated and headed to “diluted” Bachelorette parties. (Chloe was entirely sure how “diluted” translated to Stacie, who had planned the whole thing, but she was always along for the ride). Which was why, as soon as CR spoke up to quell the chants of “speech, speech”, Chloe let out a victorious whoop that resulted in Beca shoving her lightly, and a hand being thrown over the other girl’s shoulder. Beca rolled her eyes, but didn’t back away from the redhead’s embrace, leaning comfortably into it instead. 

“So, I know y’all know that love is weird,” CR started, clasping her hands together. “And hard, and not always there when you need it to be. Or want it to be. Unless you’re Stacie.” 

The crowd laughed as Stacie bowed slightly, throwing a wink out to one member of Hannah’s side of the wedding party, one with tattooes and swoop of pink hair swiping over their face. 

“But, uh, when you find it, or get it, or earn it, or whatever, you kinda forget that it was ever a pain in the ass. People forget pain, and I think they also forget loneliness, once they’re not lonely. I think, at the core, that’s what love is.” 

Chloe felt - or, rather, was acutely aware in the way she might be if she knew a bee was slowly descended on her shoulder - Beca’s hand slide around her waist. She wondered, glancing down at Beca quickly and praying that the girl didn’t freak out and back away, if Beca even noticed that she did that. If she did, she gave no indication, her gaze not focused on Cynthia Rose, but on the empty space just to the left of CR, intent and thoughtful. 

“It’s being comfortable,” CR continued, “And feeling safe. Scared as shit, but also safe. It’s throwing away all the hard stuff that love tends to bring out, and realizing that, at the core of it, seeing this person waking up in the morning or dancing when she thinks no one’s watching or laughing to the point of snorting and realizing that as happy as they feel, you’re happier precisely because you know their happy. It’s trying your damnedest to keep the feeling going, not for your sake, but for theirs, because you care. So, so much.” 

Beca smelled like Chloe’s shampoo - she, of course, forgot her own. It was confusing for a moment, when Chloe leaned her head against the other girl’s, but somewhere beneath that smell was the inherent one she’d gotten used to. The smell of cracked leather and a touch of peppermint. Beca was wearing the dress she graduated in, grey but feminine, with a touch of navy and an ounce of softness that was perfect for her. 

“When you look at me like that,” Beca muttered under her breath, her gaze not breaking from the spot she was looking at intently moments ago. She seemed far away, considering something, but maybe Chloe looked the same way. Lost in a tunnel of thoughts she shouldn’t be having. “It gives me the creeps.” 

“Shut up,” Chloe whispered back, watching Beca’s lip turn up in a curved grin. She squeezed her shoulder lightly one more time. 

“I got that,” CR said, looking over at Hannah. “So good luck to y’all, ‘cuz it’s not easy.” 

Some of the crowd chuckled, while others clapped, and Stacie jumped up to give Cynthia Rose a hug, moving to Hannah immediately after. Beca pulled away from Chloe, then, as if she’d suddenly become aware of how closely they were positioned. A feat, really, because if Beca was aware of anything, it was her proximity to people around her and the subsequent contact caused. She looked almost flustered when she turned to face Chloe. Embarrassed. 

“Wait in the car?” she asked, her thumb pointing out to the makeshift parking lot of grass outside the barn doors. Chloe nodded simply, breaking away from Beca. 

“Yeah, sure,” she said, “I’ll come with.” 

Chapter Text

Beca was a person who fled. Not only was it her nature, it was the only thing she’d really learned how to do, and she tended to blame that particular part of herself on her crappy genetics - her parents did have a stunning ability to run away when they were scared too. 

Only, in her time with the Bellas, she worked actively on not fleeing. Like stretching out a crick in her neck or slowly working her way to touching her toes, it was a gradual, working tug that stung until she became numb to it. So when that need to flee sparked up again, and she was now aware of the fact that she didn’t fight it. It itched at her, making her feel guilty. 

She obsessively bit her lip on the ride to whatever “undisclosed” location Stacie had picked out for the party, feeling Chloe pressed against her side. They had fit five people in the backseat of the car, which meant that the windows were fogging up too much for Beca to see out of them, and Chloe’s arm had nowhere to go but around her shoulder. When her lip started to bleed, she sucked it in, tasting the rust and trying to focus on just that as a way to force out that feeling that was niggling in her gut. 

They were small instances of fleeing, admittedly. Small, but stark in their suddenness, and if Beca wanted to play the game of denial, she’d claim she had no idea why they seemed so massive to her. Twice that day, she slipped away from Chloe’s contact, quickly and harshly creating actual distance between them so that she could breathe. 

If she wanted to play that game, she’d say it was because she wasn’t used to someone touching her like that. Friendly and familiar and loving. 

If she wanted to play that game, she’d say it was because they were getting wrapped up in things they shouldn’t - there was strict schedule, and tickle-fights or moments leaning into each other were not penciled in. 

And she wanted to play that game, actually. Wanted to play it very much. It would rid her of the sweat that was lying like a thin cover on her hands, and the way her heart was fluttering - not beating, but fluttering….like moths and not butterflies had invaded her chest. 

She just found that, while she could physically and temporarily flee from Chloe’s touch in those moments of acute intensity, she couldn’t, for whatever reason, flee from the implications behind those moments. She was trapped between the foggy window of the car and Chloe’s breath, and she was forced to sit, staring that monument of fear in the face. No matter how good she’d gotten at fighting the urge to flee, it was never so tempting as it was now. And, yet, never so impossible. 

Chloe was warm. Hot, really - temperature wise - where Beca was cold hands and gruff grunts. She smelled like citrus, so that when Beca used her shampoo that morning she was enveloped in nothing but steam and that scent, carrying her back to another shower at another time in what felt like another universe. 

She was sweet, too, Beca had learned on the trip. As sugary as she seemed, metaphorically speaking, her lips were more so. Beca almost had the urge to tease her about it when they were sitting on opposite sides of the bed before they’d fallen asleep the night before. Like she lined her lips in brown sugar, and, really, Beca wouldn’t be too surprised. 

Chloe was a lot of things, Beca’s best friend being one of them. Fake girlfriend being another. 

Beca just hadn’t realized just how many things Chloe was until now. While she couldn’t assign a name to that yet, nor could she tell how she felt about the realization of this unnamed this, she knew with the kind of premonition that comes with standing right outside the doors to a party or resisting the urge to read forward a few sentences in books that when she would be able to name that - to react to it - it would be one of those paradigm-shifting moments in her life. 

She could feel it like she could feel the hot air blowing against her from the inside of the car. Like she could feel the pressure of the music pouring from the speakers and Chloe’s hips as she tried in the small space to dance along. 

When they pulled up to a gated entrance, Stacie put the car in park. 

“This is it?” Jessica asked, moving to look out the dashboard window. Stacie smiled suspiciously and nodded. 

“Explanation soon to come,” she said, unbuckling her seatbelt. “Ashley, grab the booze. Jess, grab the bride. I’ll go get the keys.” 

The rest of the car burst into motion at the commands, shuffling out of their confined space as Stacie walked around to the gates and jumped, slinking one leg over the top before following with the other. She hopped down easily, wiping her hands over the back of her dress, and walked out of sight just as the headlights of the car turned off. Beca moved to unbuckle her seatbelt, aware that Chloe was the only other person in the car. 

“What?” Beca asked, looking up at her and pulling a face. Chloe’s gaze was only enhanced unabashedly, and it was clear she was making no apologies for inspecting Beca before she spoke up.

“Something’s up…” she finally said. Her arms were crossed, and Beca felt her skin prickling under the weight of her stare. 

“Nope,” Beca answered under her breath. She had her hand on the door handle, ready to pull the latch and open it, but Chloe’s hand stopped her. In the action of reaching over, her face had gotten closer to Beca’s, brushing over her nose and refusing to back away. Eyes flickering side to side to watch Beca’s, Chloe didn’t give up. 

“Beca,” she said. Her eyebrows were furrowed in concern. “You sat the entire carride chewing your lip off.” 

“I did no–” Beca stopped her response when Chloe pointed to her own lip, right where Beca had broken skin on hers. “I’m fine.” 

“You’re not,” Chloe answered just as quickly, and much more certainly, than BEca. 

“You can’t hold me hostage here,” Beca said. Chloe visibly winced, pulling back and sitting down in her seat again. The way that she surrendered - so quickly and easily - was enough to pluck a pang of guilt in the back of Beca’s throat. She ran her hands over the door handle while her other hand searched out Chloe’s. “Sorry. No…uh…I’m just, like, tired. Thinkin’ about…like LA. And stuff. About having to leave you guys again.” 

Chloe nodded knowingly. It wasn’t a lie. Not necessarily. Because Beca was terrified of the plane ride home again, “home” being an optional term considering she hadn’t felt this comfortable in months. They had two more days before the separation would spread this gaggle of girls all over the country again, and Beca was thinking about that. Constantly, it seemed. A sense of temporariness lay underneath every single activity they all participated in. 

So it didn’t cause the cut on her lip, or the fidget of her hands. It did, at least, contribute to it, and that was enough to warrant it as a small truth. Enough to rid Beca of guilt. 

Because her actual answer, the one that was “I think I’m feeling something but I can’t tell if I am or what that thing I’m feeling even is, just that it’s scary and it involves you…I think” wasn’t really one that A) she was going to say out loud and B) was satisfactory for anyone’sstandards. 

“Before the ceremony tomorrow,” Chloe said easily, “I’ll book my ticket to visit you. It’ll be something to look forward to. Yeah?” 

Beca smiled, not sure why her eyes were pinpricked with a touch of tears. She swallowed them down easily, nodding. “Yeah,” she said. The hand that had slipped into Chloe’s reached up, carrying Chloe’s hand with it, and shifted so that their fingers were intertwined. Chloe smiled at that, grinning up at Beca before they both jumped at the sound of knocking outside the car door. 

“Stop trying to make babies in my rental car,” Amy said through the foggy window, “Biology doesn’t work like that.” 

Chloe shook her head, letting go of Beca’s hand in favor of the other door handle. 

It was cold outside, fall having come early to Maine, it seemed, but Beca couldn’t dwell much on her bare knees because as soon as she stepped out of the car, Stacie was pushing the gates open and flourishing to what looked to be a closed waterpark. 

“Ladies and lesbians,” she said, “Drink and dive - but not in that order.” 

“Stacie,” Beca said cautiously, walking forward with her eyes centered on the girl who was still grinning mischievously. “Are you trying to tell me that you opted out of a strip club?”

Non-committally, Stacie shrugged. “A request by the bride-to-be that we don’t go to one of those establishments,” she said, “So, instead, I thought we’d be the ones to strip.” 

“What?” 

“I don’t see you wearing a bathing suit, Mitchell,” she said, her grin getting wider when Chloe snickered. “Or any of us for that matter.” 

“Is this why you had Aubrey send out that email about making sure we all wear underwear tonight?” Emily had stepped forward, her face turned in slight disgust. 

“Well I don’t know what your formal outfits may or may not have entailed,” Stacie said, throwing her hands up. “But I know more than a few of you are a bit…prudish. So I opted for the forewarning, just in case you didn’t want to skinny dip in a public waterpark after hours.” 

“Sweet,” CR finally piped up, nodding at the other girls excitedly. “I’m here for this.” 

Aubrey held up her hand, joining Stacie at the helm of the group with her other hand on her hips. “You’ve got two lifeguards here,” she explained, pointing to herself and Stacie. “But don’t make us have to brush up on our skills.” 

“Which means that if you’re not a strong swimmer, stick to the shallow ends,” Stacie finished, eyes on CR. The bride tutted, waving her hand at their cautious remarks before unbuttoning her shirt. 

“I can survive a waterslide,” she said, slipping quickly out of her pants. “Or two.” 

With that, the other girls stopped their words of question or caution and caught up in excitement, as an enthusiastic shiver ran through the collection of women, landing finally on Beca, who was biting at the same part of her lip that she’d been earlier. 

Chloe glanced up at her with her hand positioned on the zipper in the back of her dress, realizing the look on Beca’s face and recognizing it immediately. 

“Becs,” she said, abandoning the zipper though she’d already pulled it an inch or two down. The result was straps falling from her shoulders and an extra looseness to her top half that fought with gravity. And lost, incidentally. “This is breaking and entering, thrill rides, and alcohol. It literally has your name on it.” 

Beca rolled her eyes, because it was an easy means of communication her annoyance. And not at all because it acted as a way for her to relocate her stare, which had been aimed on the way Chloe’s dress was currently sitting on her chest by pure chance. Chloe walked forward, putting her hands on Beca’s wrists and pulling them where they’d already crossed themselves. She held the hands up by her face, limp and shaking. 

“It’s a bachelorette party by Stacie,” Chloe reasoned, “It could’ve been worse. Besides, it’s not like it’s anything I haven’t already seen.”

Beca’s eyes widened at that, and, instinctively, she tried to tug her hands away from Chloe’s fingers, finding that the redhead’s ironclad grip was unfaltering. When she huffed, giving in, Chloe still didn’t let go. 

“Unzip me?” she said, putting the hands on her bare shoulders and turning around. Beca didn’t have to say yes - didn’t have to say anything really, aside from pulling Chloe’s hair from around her neck to get a better view of the zipper. When she fingers traced over the back of Chloe’s neck, the redhead shivered slightly. 

It was, almost, imperceptible. Almost. 

Her hands were shaking when they made their way to the zipper, so much so that the small zipper slipped out of them twice. She tugged, pulling the zipper down until she was met with the light pink lace of Chloe’s bra. 

It was then that she decided she should try to breathe, even if it would only further the assault on her senses, so she sighed and she thought she could hear Chloe chuckle. Maybe. 

She kept tugging, feeling the way Chloe’s back curved in slightly before rounding out around the hips. The skin left there was pale, almost as white as Beca’s arms, and lined in occasional freckles, the birthmark right above the curve of Chloe’s back pushing Beca’s finger to press down. Chloe squirmed at that, shifting out of Beca’s touch in a second and giggling. She held the dress to her chest still, as if unsure of what to greet Beca with. Beca was, in the moment, very grateful for the act of discretion. She tapped the brunette shoulder, gesturing for her to spin around, and Beca did so, her breath still occasionally zoning out. 

She hadn’t realized how cold it was until the heat of Chloe’s fingers over her neck sent goosebumps jumping out all over her arms. “This dress is one of my favorites, Becs,” Chloe said quietly. Her voice was in Beca’s ear, and Beca had to fight the need to make a sound. 

“If you dare say ‘but I’d rather see it off of you’…”

“God no,” Chloe laughed, pulling the zipper down until it reached Beca’s mid-torso. When she turned back around, one hand on her chest still, Chloe was smiling. “When you look like this, pick-up lines and come-ons are not really in your repertoire.”  

“Makes s–” Chloe, without fanfare, let her dress fall to her ankles, so that she was standing in front of Beca in the bra and underwear combination that she’d become familiar with when they were living together. This was….different though. For one, it felt more wrong, to have Chloe standing in front of her naked instead of toddling around the Bellas house in little clothing. For two, it was Beca. She tended to be slow to realize things like “you’re pretty” and “you might be the most beautiful thing in the world.” And now, unfortunately, the realization came crashing into her. “-Ense,” she finished with a croak, and Chloe laughed. 

Beca slowly lowered her dress down to her hips before hopping out of it, grinning when she saw the way Chloe was staring at her too. 

Like they might be the only people in the world. 

She tried her best to let herself not be uncomfortable about it, which, surprisingly, wasn’t hard when she had the body she’d seen so long ago standing in front of her again. 

“Lazy river flip cup!” Amy said, sailing by the water next to them in an intertube and sipping margaritas, “Let’s gooooo, ladies.” 

Beca shook her head, reaching out for Chloe’s hand again. 

She was beautiful. Even her flaws were flawless, and Beca wondered how the hell she did that. She wanted to touch every stretch mark and forgotten scar, like you want to touch every figurine in an antique shop - just to say you did, or just to get that kind of mystique and beauty and soak it in for yourself. 

She wanted to reach out to the chest that was spilling out of pink lace, and she wanted to tell Chloe that the space between her navel and the light blue underwear she was wearing was the same bright white as the moon. 

She was leering. She was certain of it. 

And that should have been weird. Best friends don’t leer at the half-nude bodies of best friends. 

But it wasn’t. Because Beca felt herself wanting all of those things, and it wasn’t ridden with fear or guilt, because that would imply that it had room to contain anything more than itself. 

Which, for the record, it did not. 

So instead of reaching out, and instead of saying anything, she squeezed the hand that Chloe so eagerly took, and she counted to three, cannonballing into the water in front of them without letting go. 

It was then that she decided she probably very much definitely needed to get drunk tonight. 

Chapter Text

It took a lot for Chloe to be destabilized. As much as she liked to float and jump and skip, at the core of it, she was solid. Always steady. If this all were a song, she would be the beat, because it was constant - because unlike the melodies and harmonies, it stayed in one place and refused to be knocked by outside intrusions. 

She had realized a long time ago that the beat was exactly what Beca used to merge her songs, like a paint brush covering the sketchy edges of mismatched pitches so that it all appeared smooth. She always thought that that was what she was - not the tape that held together the entire piece (that had always been Beca), but rather the thing that blended the edges so that the place where the tape began and the place where it ended was completely indecipherable. Beca kept it intact. She kept it seamless. 

But, sitting at the top of the tallest slide in the park with a Solo cup in hand, she realized that she was shaking. The cup was shivering, and the stilts that held the entire slide structure up was swaying side to side with the wind. Beca was at the base of the slide, dunking Emily under the water by applying the weight of her entire body onto the taller girl’s shoulders, and Chloe watched the way she hopped out of the pool time and time again, water falling down from her hair and onto her shoulders to amplify the effect of the moonlight on the pale white of her skin. And Chloe realized, with a sense of fearsome certainty, that she was shaking. Knocked off her solid foundation and sent tumbling down. 

When Beca looked up to see Chloe sitting at the top of the slide, her hand already moving to sip out of her own cup, she raised an eyebrow and quirked her lips. Chloe laughed, then, in a way that was sharp and tinkling so that it could bounce off the metal of the slide and reach back to her. 

More than the press of Beca’s lips against her own, Chloe could feel the press of her hand against her waist, and the ringing of Cynthia Rose’s words echoing in her ears over and over and over again. 

It was interesting how safe love made you feel, when the act of feeling it at all was so very dangerous. When the act of understanding any of it at all had the potential to knock you down completely from where you stood so sure and certain only moments ago. 

“Creepin’ over here, Ms. Beale?” Stacie took the last step up to the slide, slipping onto the landing and taking the cup immediately from Chloe’s hands. 

“You know, no one ever called Rapunzel a creep for staying up in her tower and watching the people, I don’t know why I have to adhere to that title,” Chloe said. She leaned back, resting on her elbows and stretching her legs down the curve that started the slide’s current. 

“Because Rapunzel was locked up in that tower,” Stacie said, “And because she didn’t spend all that time checking her Prince Charming out. She spent it brushing her hair. Or…whatever.” 

Chloe laughed politely, her gaze coming to fall on Beca again. She felt then not unlike the way a moth must feel when it sees a light - knowing it’s dangerous and dumb and burning, but being unable to resist the urge anyway. Like it was instinct and not logic taking control. 

She wondered if anyone had ever told Beca that she was beautiful. There was a type of person, a type of beautiful person, who walked around as if they’d never heard that truth, and Beca, in all her hunched shoulders and skittish hands, was one of those people.Though Chloe was sure Jesse had to have said it to her at some point. 

She made the mental note to try to tell her and realized, briefly, that it was strange that she never had. Because Beca in this light, with this kind of freedom that accompanied alcohol and an abandoned waterpark at midnight, was a statue and poem moving together to create some sort of masterpiece that Chloe couldn’t quite find the words for. She had the smoothness of a statue - that same marble white perfection of Rodin’s work, with every ounce of her body flowing into the other parts, so that when they moved you could see what interacted with what and how the dance all came together to make the woman kicking her legs out at the edge of the water. And she had the openness of a poem - that same fluidity and ease of existence - enabled by the people she was around so that she didn’t have to covertly cover up those hidden parts of her body like she did when Chloe first saw it all that night in the showers. 

“Seriously,” Stacie snapped in front of Chloe’s eyes, making her blink and turn her attention away towards the girl that was sitting next to her. “Tone down the stalker-vibe, please, it’s not like you don’t get to see that every day.” 

“What?”

Chloe had forgotten the game for a fraction of a second, and Stacie watched with suspicion the curve of confusion forming on the redhead’s eyebrows. Only after her glance was met with Stacie’s own confusion and suspicion did Chloe realize her mistake, jumping on it immediately to wipe it away. “Oh, yeah, well…doesn’t mean it gets old.” 

Deciding to let the momentary lapse in acting go, Stacie leaned back herself, taking another sip of Chloe’s drink. “Yeah, I get that,” she said, “Can’t blame you. Who knew she was packing that kind of heat under all those flannels, eh?” 

“I did,” Chloe said with confidence. Her eyes had moved back to Beca’s form again, and she chose not to fight the magnetism anymore. “I knew.” 

“Yeah? You get some sort of sneak peek?”

“Kind of,” Chloe answered, brushing off Stacie’s scandalized gasp, because that wasn’t the story she wanted to tell - now or ever. It was funny, sure, and creepy, maybe, but the story was mostly just special. Private. For her mind only. And while that should’ve stood out as strange a long time ago - that she hadn’t told any of the girls, and neither did Beca - it mostly just felt right that no one should know but them. “But, I mean, that doesn’t really matter. Because you could tell. With the way she walks. And the way she smiles…she’s….the body is kind of just the beginning with her, isn’t it?” 

“Dear God,” Stacie said. “I came up here to gossip, and you want to write a sonnet about your girlfriend’s beauty? No thank you.” 

“Sorry, sorry,” Chloe held out her hand, waving it around her head. 

“Existential when drunk,” Stacie commented, “That’s new.” 

“Yeah, I guess it is. I’ve kind of…got things on my mind.” 

“Seems like it,” Stacie said. “Realizing you’re in love with your best friend can do that.” 

Chloe’s eyes broke from Beca and zeroed in on Stacie, mouth agape. “Stacie, wh–”

“I know you two aren’t a thing,” she said, hopping back to a squat. “Beca’s got the look of Supremely UnFucked as of lately, and my guess is that based on your very visible leeringyou’re feeling the same. So it’s no secret that you two aren’t together. I just have a feeling you guys don’t know that.” 

“Stace, don’t tell the other Bellas,” Chloe said. She was too tired to fight Stacie’s arguments, because, really, they weren’t wrong, and arguing them would probably end in her inadvertently supporting the entire conjecture, revealing that, yeah, “Supremely UnFucked” wasn’t at all far from accurate at the current moment. 

“Oh, I won’t,” the girl said, standing up. “That’d be dumb. Cutting short this charade you two have going would end all the fun. Obvs.”

“Right, obvs,” Chloe nodded, a nervousness settling in her stomach. As Stacie started to tiptoe off the top of the slide, Chloe turned towards her. “What did you mean? About how Beca and I don’t know we’re not together?”

In that second, Beca made her way to the top step, breathless from running up the flights of stairs, with eyes flashing between the two women. “What’s up?” she asked when she noticed the somber feeling radiating from them, and Stacie grinned, her stare passing from Beca to Chloe and back to Beca again. 

“You know,” she said simply, “You just don’t want to know that you know.” 

With that, she tapped Beca on the shoulder once, humming contentedly and starting to skip down the steps without making much sound on the metal. Beca furrowed her eyebrows, watching the girl as she disappeared before turning her attention to Chloe, leaning down at the mouth of the waterslide and flicking water on Chloe’s thigh. 

“You’re not having fun?” she asked. Her hair hung around her face in wet tendrils, already curling, and there was a curve to her smile that was clearly derived from too much alcohol. Chloe smiled sweetly, taking a deep breath. 

“Tons of, actually.” 

“Yeah? Well, you’re shit at showing it.” Beca scooted down into the small pool of water next to Chloe, forcing the redhead to move slightly. There wasn’t enough room in the water, so they were pressed together, bare leg against bare leg, and though Chloe wanted to itch at the spark stretching in the line between them, she resisted. Beca nudged Chloe’s shoulder once with her nose, resting her chin on Chloe’s shoulder. “Come on, Babe,” she said, exaggerating the pet name obnoxiously, “What’s your deal?” 

“You’re really pretty,” Chloe blurted, deciding that one breath was the best way to tell her. “Beautiful, actually.” She sighed when she was done, watching Beca sit back, surprised. 

“I’m really n–”

“Yeah, you kind of are. Or, definitely are. I just…” Chloe poked at the freckle on Beca’s knee. “I feel like no one tells you that. Or like you don’t believe it. Or something. I don’t know. I just think that you need to know how beautiful you are. Because it’s kind of totally insane.” 

Beca looked away, then, and Chloe watched her swallow her words. The hazy drunkenness of her eyes had disappeared in a flash of a second and was replaced with something much sharper. Fear, almost. Or concern. Or hurt. And Chloe thought in that moment that she’d done something wrong. Said something that she shouldn’t have. She ran over her words one more time, deciding that the only issue existing there was, maybe, bluntness, though that never really bothered Beca before. 

She reached out cautiously, putting a hand on Beca’s bare shoulder and feeling the muscles there inherently constrict. “Earth to Becs?” 

The brunette turned her head, meeting Chloe’s eyes, and Chloe noticed she was biting her lip again. She used the hand on her shoulder to touch the spot being gnawed at, forcing Beca to release it with a sigh. 

“Thanks,” was all Beca said in return. She didn’t tell Chloe to move her hand when it lingered on her lip, and she didn’t try to look away when Chloe stared carefully into her eyes, looking for some kind of answer to the sudden change in Beca’s reactions. She just sat there, breathing steadily, until she closed her mouth, turned her head, and threw out the same easy, drunken smile as before. 

Only this time, it didn’t really reach her eyes. 

“Let’s give this old guy a go,” Beca said suddenly, her voice higher than usual when she slapped the edge of the slide. Chloe met her smile with the same kind of uncertainty, taking her shoulders and standing up to rearrange herself. “What’re you…”

“If we’re going on this death-trap,” Chloe explained, her voice as thick and unusual as Beca’s, but trying hard to force that away, “Then we’re going together.” Because as much as it stung to have her arms around Beca’s bare waist, and as much as it burned to press up against her back, forcing her to lean back so that most of the weight was on Chloe, the redhead liked it. More than liked it. Loved it, despite hating how much she loved it. 

With Beca situated between her legs, she felt something searing in her gut, reaching up to her head and telling her that it was wrong while reaching out to every pinpricked inch of her skin to scream that it was right. She could tell, by the way Beca hitched her breath, that the feeling, somewhere down that line of pleasure and pain, was mutual. 

“On the count of three,” she said, her breath running over Beca’s neck and towards her ear. “One.” 

“Two,” Beca whispered, her hands bracing themselves on each of Chloe’s thighs. 

On three, they both pushed off, using the current to propel them out and down, screaming and giggling with the sense that it wasn’t, really, ever going to end. 

And Chloe thought that it was more than being destabilized. It was crumbling altogether. 

Chapter Text

There were few nights when Beca felt more drunk than she actually was. Sure, she’d had more than a few sips of alcohol over the course of the party, but there was an acute awareness that came with her giddiness, the kind that wasn’t frequently boosted by stale beer and cheap wine. 

It was the kind of intoxication that made her want to skip, and let her dance along to the music that was playing over the loudspeakers. It was the kind of intoxication that created phone backgrounds with tongues sticking out and wet footprints against the cement. 

She wondered if this was what Chloe felt like every single day of her life - bright and bubbling with something that was beyond herself. Like she’d just had one gulp too many of the fizzy lifting drink, and she was currently floating way too close to the ceiling. 

It didn’t fade when they all piled into the car, with a painfully sober Aubrey manning the wheel and a dripping wet Chloe sitting on her lap. She looked up at the redhead, tugging at the one strand that Chloe seemed to have missed in putting her bun up. 

“Hey you,” she said, her words sounding gargled. High and airy and not belonging to herself at all. Chloe beamed down at her, the smile doing nothing to help her float safely back to the ground. She put a hand on Beca’s cheek, rubbing her thumb along the jawline and grinning all the while. 

“Hey you.” 

The rest of the car was silent, most having fallen asleep in the minutes between the water park and the hotel. In the rust of the street lights passing outside, Chloe was coated in a thin sheen of bronze, and with the rain that was starting to fall outside, the shadows of the drops left spots on her skin. Beca wanted to reach out and touch them. 

She was just enough in control to resist that urge, but she was surprised - almost to the point of crashing back to reality - when she realized just how hard that urge was to resist. 

“You’re like a puppy,” Chloe hummed. Her words were more slurred than before. “You, like, lean in when I pet you.” 

Beca squinched her nose, turning her face quickly to catch the hand latched onto her cheek between her two teeth. She let out a cartoony “Grr” that sent Chloe squealing. The rest of the car shuffled at that, a few sending annoyed glances their way, and Chloe’s surprised squeals made way to a stream of giggles that spread to Beca. She tried to press them down, because each one was sending her higher and higher and she wasn’t sure if that was really a safe place to go anymore, but the act of suppressing them led to her covering her face with Chloe’s bare shoulder, which was shaking with her own laughter. 

She smelled like pink wine and chlorine and Chloe, and suddenly whatever they were doing didn’t seem so funny. 

It didn’t really seem funny at all, in fact. 

Beca kept her head there, resting, with Chloe’s hand having migrated to the back of her head where it brushed soft circles in her hair. She sighed into her, and could almost feel the way her breath was sent through Chloe’s pores. Could feel how it seemed to bolster the other woman there, so that the natural sway of her drunken balance steadied slightly. 

The other girls filed out of the car quickly when they made their way to the hotel parking lot - some latched onto others for an easier guide back to their rooms. Just like at the beginning of the night, Beca stayed back, her hand tracing circles on Chloe’s knee as they watched the figures recede in the parking garage. 

“We have to move, Beca,” Chloe whispered into Beca’s hair, and the brunette hummed. Chloe giggled, then, tugging at Beca’s head. “Come on, smalls.” 

“I dun’ wanna,” Beca grumbled. When she pulled away from Chloe’s shoulder, she was met with the same shining eyes. 

She could see in them the glee that Chloe held - that sense of reckless abandon that came with a night like this. It wasn’t there earlier, when they sat at the top of the waterslide. Then, her eyes were still. Sparkling, but still. Clear. 

Her words rang in Beca’s ears again, bouncing between the temples that were already starting to pulse. 

It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought she was beautiful. If caught at the right angle, or with the right assistance, she knew that she could look good. She’d had boyfriends tell her that, too. In the back seat of cars or at the corner of pep rallies, they’d lay or sit or lunge with a roaming hand, and between quieted breaths they would use some variation of that word. Beautiful. 

It always felt like a key, though. Like a password, if they typed in the right letters, then the entire process would be easier. While it never really was ingenuine, it was always one means to an end, said with a purpose. 

Jesse was different, of course, and in those first few months he would tell her she was beautiful when she was mixing or trying on a costume for the new Bella set, and it was with such unabashed sincerity that it made Beca blush. It was in those moments that she felt like she didn’t really deserve the word, or the awe that was accompanied with it. With him, it wasn’t a password, but it was a prayer, and Beca couldn’t help but shake the feeling that it wasn’t being said to the right person. A prayer to a saint, and not to a god. 

She didn’t fancy herself to be a god, but, still, she could recognize the different between the two intercessions enough to know that the right kind - the kind of whispered “beautiful” that she wanted - was the kind that actually directed to her and not at her. 

When Chloe had called her beautiful, Beca was sitting next to her, tipsy and soaking wet with water that was probably rife with the public’s bacteria - amongst other things. Her makeup had smeared off, and her clothes were discarded somewhere near the entrance, and it hadn’t escaped her that there was a small mountain of hors d’oeuvres piling at the bottom of her stomach. She didn’t notice any of those things, though, when she was sitting next to Chloe and hearing that word. In a moment where every single part of her acted as evidence to argue what Chloe said, all Beca could think - all she could feel - was that she trusted that Chloe was telling the truth. Both because of the unimaginable, indescribably sincerity behind the sentiment, and because of the way Chloe said it like it was a secret. A prayer for only behind closed doors, whispered directly to the source. 

So when Chloe tugged at her to get her to go back to the room, Beca wasn’t drunk enough to resist the offer simply on the grounds that she was too lazy to walk to the elevators (she was, for the record, entirely too lazy to walk to the elevators). It was also because she was afraid of watching Chloe open the door, one lip bitten, and she was afraid of seeing Chloe throw her things on the bed. She was afraid of the shirt that would be discarded in place of something more comfortable. She was afraid of the singing that would come from the shower, or the hand that would sneak it’s way across the mattress to pull Beca closer because “Beca, goddamnit, I’m going to cuddle tonight”. 

She couldn’t promise that those things wouldn’t lead to her making a mistake - or a series of mistakes - and it was that that she was the most afraid of. 

Still, “You can’t just sleep in the car.” 

It was a valid argument. Beca groaned, scooting Chloe off of her lightly to the sound of the redhead’s pleased chuckles. 

In the elevator, Chloe slipped her hand into Beca’s. She wouldn’t let go until they made it to the room, and even then, she had tried to open the door without breaking the contact. The result was an uncomfortable shuffling of bodies that ended in awkward laughter and a definitive separation of hands that let Beca steady herself if only a moment before they walked into what she was beginning to consider The Danger Zone. 

She had enough thought to know that it had never really been like this with Chloe before. Heavy, like the air was humid with something unspoken between them. They had had several sleep overs over the course of four years, and they were always the ones to share a room when singing competitions came along. 

She was also just high enough off the ground to allow herself to fully know why this was such a struggle. 

She was just far enough away from herself to admit that the curve of Chloe’s neck was pulling her closer without her realizing it, and when Chloe bit her lip while she opened the door, she was just outside of it all to know, without a doubt, what the action did to her. The sweeping feeling somewhere deep in her stomach wasn’t something she could ignore anymore. It wasn’t something she wanted to ignore anymore. 

When they walked in, Chloe, sure enough, threw her keycard and her phone on the bed, stretching up so that the dress she had put back on - haphazardly so it was more of an oversized shirt than a proper dress - was riding up the back of her thighs. Beca reached out, somehow moving in slow-motion and fast-forward all at once in precisely the right speed to be unable to stop herself, and put her hands squarely on the other girl’s hips from behind. 

The hitch in Chloe’s breath broke every once of heavy air in the room, sending it all crashing in shattered glass of breaths between them. 

“You’re kinda beautiful too,” Beca said quietly. Her chin was rested on Chloe’s shoulder. “Or, like, definitely.” 

Chloe batted at Beca mindlessly, though her head cheek leaned on her head. “Mmm, you’re wrong.” 

“What?” Beca let go, then, the world spinning back to it’s normal speed and leaving Beca stuttering to keep up. Chloe spun around, eyebrows furrowed. 

“You’re wrong,” she said again, simply. Now, turned face to face, Chloe put her arms on Beca’s shoulders, pulling her in by the neck. The move was deliberate, and any interpretation of their current position other than exactly what it was would be considered wildly inaccurate. 

“I,” Beca said carefully, feeling her breath puff out as she pressed her forehead to Chloe’s, “Am never wrong.” 

She put her hands back on Chloe’s hips, letting them guide the other woman closer to her so that they were pressed together everywhere but the heart-shaped gap left from their chests to their eyebrows. She felt, rather than saw, Chloe smirk. 

“I’m not going to argue with you when we’re dancing so nicely,” Chloe said. Her hands were clasped behind Beca’s neck, but she chose that moment to press them down, fingers running up and doing the hills of Beca’s spine. When Beca shivered, she sent out a silent prayer that the other girl didn’t notice. 

They’d had many sleepovers. They shared many rooms. 

This, most certainly, never happened on those nights. 

“There is zero music, Nerd,” Beca answered. Standing this close, she could taste Chloe. Not in the way that she was itching to, but something still as sweet. Like feeling the wind without being able to touch it. The redhead shrugged. 

“We can make it,” she said. Beca knew, then, that there was something more to come. She had gotten used to the way Chloe’s words hung in the air when she was ready to torture the other girl - almost like they wiggled, waiting for the punctuation that would send Beca’s eyes rolling. “With our mouths.” 

Only this time, Beca’s eyes didn’t roll. Instead, she just smiled, ear to ear, feeling Chloe do the same. The giggle that was rising up in her chest was threatening to break their contact, though, so she stifled it into an exhale, shaking her head slightly. “Smooth.” 

“I don’t need to be smooth, we’re already dating,” Chloe answered. They had been moving the entire time, swaying their hips back and forth, and Beca thought that if anyone walked in, they would look crazy. Connected at every possible juncture, with dresses that got too tight the second time around and hair that was still dripping, dancing while no music played. 

There was one move that they both were waiting for. Beca could feel Chloe thinking about it in the stretches of silence between them - a moment of quiet that lasted too long. She worked on action. Almost always. Permission was for the apology that came after. 

Only right now, she had Chloe Beale’s hips between her hands and her breath on the space right above her lips. 

And she really didn’t want there to be an apology to follow.

So she moved her head up, breaking the seal that had spread from one forehead to another, so that she could meet Chloe’s eyes. For one fraction of a second, she let her gaze flicker down, forcing them back up and taking a deep breath. 

“I want to kiss you right now.” 

Chapter Text

She wasn’t expecting the words to echo in the chasm between their lips quite the way that they did. She watched the way they passed from Beca’s eyes in a flash of sudden understanding down to Beca’s lips, said in a desperate breath that vibrated on Chloe’s lips. 

“Beca,” was all she said in return. 

It was like a spell. A magical chant of some sort - not an offering, and not an apology, but something said with the intention of altering the elements of the universe. Something said with the knowledge that what came next would cause a chain reaction. 

It was hesitant. 

It was scared. 

And it was hopeful. 

So Chloe tightened her grip on Beca’s neck, her mind stirring that pot of possible concoctions while Beca stared worriedly at her and bit her lip through the silence. When Chloe closed her eyes, aiming for just a moment’s respite from the voices of resistance passing through her head, there was a burst of cold air between them. Beca’s hands left her hips and in it’s place was a sudden emptiness that left Chloe gasping. 

“It’s fine,” Beca said hurriedly. She was shaking her head, and her eyes were forced on the rumpled bed sheet drifting over the floor. “It’s just…nevermind. The whole thing. Let’s just pretend I didn’t say that, and we’ll be, like, totally and completely cool.” 

“Beca,” Chloe said again. Her hand was on the inside of Beca’s arm, thumb connecting with ring and pinky finger so that the other two could feel the slamming of Beca’s pulse in her veins. A hammer was knocking out a steady beat against the back of her skin, but it helped to bring Chloe back to…some sort of steady head space.

She wasn’t one to deny herself the opportunity to float slightly above the rest of the world - in fact, one of the reasons she was so capable of staying up when everyone else was down was her refusal to surrender the chance to be swept up inside a moment. So, she had spent the better half of the night sinking into that feeling of floating, and she hadn’t realized that she ended up waist-deep in a cloud until Beca’s words crashed her back down to reality, cutting that fog into shattered pieces and jagged edges.

She wanted what Beca said she wanted. That much was clear. 

She just wanted to make sure that those jagged edges weren’t going to cut either of them by the end of it all. She wanted to permanently and effectively prevent the situation wherein one of them ended up left on the floor, bleeding. 

Even in the silence that stretched between them with her hand on the inside of Beca’s arm, she felt like it was starting. Like if she applied any pressure at all, the blood would blossom out the paper cut that was already forming. 

Beca was her steady. Her strong. Her sure. She saw over the course of the few days they had been together. The way in which Beca was beginning to tilt to the side, between stutters and blushing cheeks was enough to give Chloe this kind of blind hope that maybe - somewhere down the road - there would be one drunken night, during one terrible reunion, that ended up in her tracing the tattoos lining Beca’s ribcage. 

That’s all it was, though. A blind hope. A “hey, wouldn’t it be nice” type of situation. A dream, really - the kind that you wake up from and feel guilty for later, pushing it to the recesses of your mind and avoiding discussion of it at all costs. 

Now, with Beca standing next to her and the sound of the heater busting up in the room, she realized it was less of a dream and more of a precursor to a nightmare. Not because she didn’t want it - because if anything was clear, it was that - but because she didn’t want what came after it. The sober apologies, said over shared Advils and orange juice cleanses. The uncomfortable fall-out and the inevitable texting conversation had weeks later where there was a confession of “something feels different”. 

She realized then, like she’d realized a thousand times in the past year, that she was scared. Constantly, permanently scared. For years, she prided herself on the idea that she was the brave one. The one who reached out when others didn’t, who opened doors she shouldn’t, who walked up the creaking steps or turned on the haunted shower even when the audience yells for her not to do it. Then, she discovered that it didn’t take bravery to turn your back and pretend like there wasn’t a monster following you up the stairs or a murderer behind the curtain. It didn’t take bravery to avoid the thing that was threatening the comfortable stagnancy of your life. It took bravery to fight it.

It took bravery to wear a cap and gown. It took bravery to give Emily the keys to the Bellas house and back up out of the driveway to start her long drive back to the home where she’d lived her entire life. And it took bravery, now, to look into the eyes of the scariest thing Chloe could imagine: Beca Mitchell, sad and injured and refusing to break her glance away from Chloe’s lips. 

Particularly because all she wanted was to reassure Beca, to tell her it was okay and that if she wanted to kiss her, then, goddamnit, she should. Fighting the battle against that instinct so that she might consider all the possible consequences was proving to be one of the biggest challenges Chloe had faced thus far in her long string of Trying-To-Be-Brave moments. 

“Beca,” she said one more time, her voice so soft she worried Beca wouldn’t be able to hear it. The brunette jerked away from her grasp, holding her arm closer to herself. It was funny how each time she said the four letters, they resonated differently. Shaking, but gaining steadiness - a means of communicating to Beca that she was still holding on, even if it looked like she was backing away. They had different tones, different pitches, and yet they also, somehow, sounded exactly the same. Echoes of eachother. 

“Stop saying my name like that,” Beca grumbled. Chloe noticed how fragile her voice was, like it was just holding onto the edge long enough to get through the most basic words and sayings. 

“Like what?” 

“Like you’re trying to find a way to turn me down without hurting me. Like I’m that kind in high school you have to mercifully say no to,” Beca snapped. She held her hands to her face, exhaling loudly into them before moving them up to tug at her hairline. “It’s fine. I get it. No harm done.” 

“Beca, can you just, like, stop assuming that the entire world doesn’t want you for one second, maybe?” Chloe spat out. Beca’s eyes shot to Chloe quickly, wide but furrowed, too, in confusion. Chloe threw herself onto the bed, letting herself bounce twice before settling into the mattress with a hand on her forehead and her gaze on the ceiling. “I need to think.” 

“No, you don’t,” Beca said. “I told you you don’t. I have my answer, and it’s cool. It was just a….statement. Or whatever. Actually, it was more like a joke. Ha ha, I want to kiss you, that’s so funny.” 

Chloe sat up on her elbows, glaring at the girl who had a weak smile on her face. Chloe hated that smile - the one that never really reached Beca’s eyes, sitting limply on her face - and she hated that she had to be the receiver of such a smile now. She hated that Beca felt the immediate instinct to hide herself the second Chloe paused to examine things. It reminded her of the night in the showers and how Beca couldn’t focus on anything but trying to keep herself completely covered. She’d failed - oh boy, how she failed - but she was still determined. Why let people see you like a baby deer when you could convince them you’re a lioness? 

“I’m going to shut up now,” Beca said finally when she noticed the annoyance behind Chloe’s eyes. “Or, shower, actually. Because I don’t know if I can shut up. So…Yes. Shower. Okay. I’ll see you when I come out. Of the shower. Like when my shower’s over. Because I’m not, like, coming out. You know….” 

With a laugh that matched Beca’s smile - weak and not fully reaching the rest of her demeanor - Chloe waved off the girl, who looked visibly relieved to get the chance to leave the anxiety of Chloe’s silence. 

It took approximately two short breaths for Chloe to miss the feeling of Beca’s breath against her lips and the pressure of her forehead on her own. Two short breaths and enough longing to erase that moment of hesitation and fear and the act of trying to be smart or mature or whatever you called this terrible feeling of saying no to the things you actually wanted more than anything. 

This time, when she said Beca’s name, it carried something so fundamentally different that it almost sounded like a different series of letters altogether. There was no apology in it, no fear. Just desperation. Just the feeling of calling for the train and hoping it hadn’t left before you could hop on. 

“Beca.” 

The zipper on Beca’s dress was pushed an inch down as the other girl started walking towards the bathroom, and this was what Chloe decided to focus on when she took the two more short breaths between lying on the bed and standing in between the girl and the door. She couldn’t tell, then, if her heart was hammering because of the way she hopped over to Beca - hurried and racing - or because of the way Beca was staring at her now, with eyes that were filled to the brim with absolutely nothing but hope and a small touch of curiosity. 

Possibly, a bit of shock or surprise, as Chloe had suddenly hopped into her field of vision, which was already pretty scattered given the recent heart-stopping thoughts and actions Beca’s body was engaging in, and Beca promptly responded on instinct with a jump and a holding out of hands for protection. 

Chloe let that part of the reaction subside, watching it be replaced with a question - a purse of Beca’s lips and a tilt of her head - and feeling like that was exactly the set-up she needed to put her hands on either side of Beca’s face. They ran up the length of Beca’s cheek bones, tracing intently, and Chloe watched when the other girl closed her eyes in response. 

Beca hated to sleep in the same room as other people. She hated the feeling when someone wanted to surprise her, they covered her eyes with their hands before saying hello. She hated the act of shutting herself off in that way, because it opened up the opportunity for unprotected examination. So here, now, in the seconds before Chloe pressed her lips to Beca’s, she recognized the tiny tidbit of Beca that was being given to her. She acknowledged the small way in which Beca was offering something silently. 

And then she wiped that away, because if she did any more thinking at all then this entire thing might be ruined again. Instead, she acted. She ran. Not away from the monsters this time, but towards them, like the brave girl everyone believed her to be. 

Kissing Beca wasn’t a thing that should have felt new to Chloe. She’d done it several times over the course of the weekend, at the request of others or for the pleasure of making the other girl blush profusely. This, though, with her hands reaching back to Beca’s neck where they sat before they separated earlier, and Beca’s on the small of her back, pushing her closer, was very different from those moments. 

Those moments were a performance. This was a conversation. A conglomeration of all the words that they couldn’t actually say - a symphony of “your beautiful”s and an orchestra of “I want to kiss you”s. It was, Chloe thought as Beca tilted her head to side, breath ghosting over her jaw before reaching her neck, everything that Chloe needed to tell Beca. She just hoped that Beca heard it all too. 

Caught between the wall behind her and Beca’s body in front, they moved to a natural rhythm until there seemed to be a mutual understanding that they needed to breathe. Beca pulled away first, nipping at Chloe’s bottom lip and letting go with a smile that spread smoothly onto Chloe. She moved so that she was pressed against the wall too, eyes closed and head tilted up, catching her breath. 

Chloe remembered once again how much it took for Beca to let herself be seen with her eyes closed. It was enough for her to lean over, pressing a feather light kiss to the neck that was exposed, until Beca reached for her chin with her hands, bringing her face up to nuzzle her own. 

“You keep fucking thinking that people don’t want to do that to you every second of every day,” Chloe whispered quietly, and Beca, who was still holding Chloe’s head between her hands, just looked up again, grinning. 

“You’ve never sworn around me,” was all she said in response. 

“Keep this up,” Chloe snorted, peeling away from Beca, “And you’ll be hearing me swear a lot more.” 

With that, she spun around, throwing a wink behind her to add to the effect. Here she was again, back in that place of floating along with the opportunities given to her, only this time the colors around her felt brighter. It was her favorite part about kissing someone new for the first time, and with Beca the colors weren’t just bright - they were vibrant. 

Beca stood, leaning up against the wall still, with her mouth wide open, gaping. “Okay, new rule,” she shouted behind Chloe as the redhead stepped into the bathroom to get ready for bed, “You can’t do shit like that and then leave me hanging!” 

“Mmmhmm,” Chloe hummed. “Whatever you say, Babe.” 

Chapter Text

When Chloe walked into the bathroom, she closed the door behind her, leaving Beca standing with her back to the wall. She thought about every after-school special she’d ever seen, and how at the end of a perfect date, the girl would stand behind the front door with the back of her head pressed against it, smiling to herself until some father figure would walk by and ask her how it went. 

It had always seemed like a waste of thirty seconds - both for the film-makers and for Beca, who had to sit there watching the woman swoon and bite her lip excitedly. 

So there was a touch of self-loathing applied when Beca performed that exact same action, closing her eyes slightly and holding her hands to her stomach. She could feel Chloe, though, and that’s what wiped away any ounce of self-consciousness. She smelled like coconut and citrus, and in the absence of the redhead was an invisible figure made entirely of electric currents, pressing and tugging at the places that Chloe was touching only seconds ago. 

She felt like everything was disjointed. Like the sound wasn’t matching up to the video. Like the ride was hurtling forward in lurches. It bit at the edges of her temple so that she couldn’t fully place herself in her surroundings. All she knew was the heaviness of her breathing and the way her stomach felt like it was practicing gymnastics, and, as she slipped from the wall to the bed in one fell plop, she could register just barely that this might be what a panic attack feels like. 

Because suddenly what was real and what was fake were not decipherable, and in its place was just the heartbeat she was feeling in her ears. Chloe was humming in the other room, and if Beca focused enough on the buzz of her voice she could sneak away from the impossible speed that her mind was working at. So, she counted her breaths and centered all that she knew on the sound of Chloe’s humming until, with the harmony of the faucet joining Chloe’s song, Beca could sit up straight, wipe the corners of her eyes, and slip out of her dress with shaky hands. 

When Chloe came out of the bathroom, a grin tugging at the edges of lips that were still lined with uncertainty, Beca took a deep breath. “Hey,” she said, watching Chloe slink under the comforter. The redhead smiled sweetly. 

“Hey.” 

Beca slipped in after her, crawling up the bed until she was under one layer of blankets so that the thin sheet was still separating them. She felt her hair fan around her head as she lay looking up at the ceiling, her hands clasped over her chest. From the dip in the bed, she could feel Chloe shifting, and the burning that her stare pressed into Beca told the brunette that Chloe was facing her now. When she dared to turn from the spiky paint chips of the ceiling to Chloe’s face, she found the redhead resting her head on her hand, looking down at Beca with a worried glance. 

“Can we,” Beca started, reaching up towards a strand of hair that was hanging out of Chloe’s ponytail. She tugged it lightly, watching Chloe grin at the movement. “Can we just not talk about it tonight?” 

Chloe’s eyes were the problem, Beca thought. They said everything, and they said nothing, and Beca couldn’t help but compare them to a campfire or to the crashing of waves against land. Because they were impossible to look away from. You jumped into them before you realized that you had, and it pulled you, sucked at you, until you noticed that they took time away too. 

So Beca watched them flicker between her own two eyes, seeing how the crashing of these particular waves were rapid tonight, concerned and warily and scared, and Beca hated when Chloe looked like that. Now that she knew just what it was like kissing Chloe Beale, the desire to reach up and press her lips to Chloe’s eyelids, forcing them closed and calm and quiet. 

Instead, she just moved her hand from the strand of Chloe’s hair to the line of her jaw, running her thumb there twice. “I’m fine,” she said, letting out a weak smile. She was proud of the way her voice didn’t crack. It was sure. Solid. 

It made sense, though, because Beca was fine. At the core of it, apart from the way the world was still spinning, Beca was fine. Better than fine, really, because she couldn’t shake the feeling that her life until now was some kind of spiral all turning into this pinprick of a moment. She’d turned the windshield wipers on, and the result was finally being able to see clearly in front of her. She thought that maybe she was having such trouble breathing because until now, she wasn’t letting herself do it the right way. Her body was just trying to catch up to all the things it had been missing. 

“Totally fine,” she said again, because she liked the way it sounded on her lips, and because when she heard it she believed it more fully. This time, when she smiled, it was strong enough to pass onto Chloe, who breathed a small sigh of relief. “Just tired. And tipsy.” 

“Tomorrow,” Chloe said. Beca noticed - she was noticing so much, now - how much she loved the way Chloe sounded before bed. How she lowered her voice like other people could hear her and were trying to sleep, like she was always in a sleepover, or like when the sun set, everything became a secret. Beca nodded, letting her hand fall to Chloe’s shoulder and then down her arm. She a path of goosebumps leading from every area her hand touched, and it sent her stomach twisting again. 

“Tomorrow,” she said. Chloe’s hand, the one that her head was resting on, fell, and she turned towards the lamp to turn it off, but Beca was over her now, biting her lip. With a quick breath, she closed her eyes, “I love you, by the way.” 

When she opened them again, Chloe was smiling up at her. “I love you too, nerd. Now, spoon.” 

With the roll of Beca’s eyes, she settled back down into the bed, tucking her chin into Chloe’s neck and resting a hand on the space between the hem of Chloe’s boxer shorts and her tank top. Grunting slightly, Chloe shifted so that she was facing Beca, and she put a hand on the other girl’s hip. Her head was pillowed by Beca’s chest, and when she sighed, Beca smiled, allowing herself a small kiss to the other girl’s forehead. 

For a brief second of near-sleep, she let her anxieties swirl into fears which swirled into more anxieties, all centered around “tomorrow” and the idea of whatever conversation they were going to have to have. Beca wasn’t even really sure what she wanted to say - or needed to say, really. 

Beca fell asleep strangely quickly, and she was used to blaming that on the alcohol, or the swimming, or the near-constant socializing she’d been subjected to thus far this weekend. What it was, though, was the ease with which Chloe was able to slip all the pieces back to where they were supposed to be. That disjointed feeling from minutes ago had been erased the minute Chloe walked back out, and even the feel of her pressed against the other girl was familiar. Comfortable, even though it burned with something new. She was holding Beca to this reality, and Beca wasn’t just grateful - she was indebted. Amazed. 

It all felt more right when Chloe was with her. Like every ounce of concern and worry and fear and racing thought was slowed and swallowed until all that was left in it’s wake was a weighted cloud of rightness. 

They woke up to a phone call this time rather than a hesitant knock on the door, and Beca groaned when she heard the first few notes of “The Sign” pouring out from Chloe’s phone because in her sleep-filled brain it was something straight out of the traumatic past of her worst nightmares. 

Chloe had gotten impossibly close over the course of the night, wrapping her legs around Beca’s, but not close enough that Beca couldn’t watch her wrinkled her nose in discontent when her conscious mind recognized the ring tone. 

“I’m not answering that,” Beca whispered lightly, and Chloe squeaked in response, pressing her head closer to Beca’s neck before releasing her to turn towards the phone on the nightstand. 

Aubrey’s voice was loud enough for them both to hear it. Until Beca realized why it was so clear.

“You overslept. Again.” 

“You’re standing outside our door, and you decided to call me?” Chloe asked. In the hallway, Aubrey scoffed. 

“Well excuse me for not wanting to….walk in on anything,” she said. 

“That’s not…we’re not….” 

“I’ve seen you sleep nude enough times to know what to expect. As it is, I’m still not sure if I need to get the rental car’s interior cleaned from whatever you two were doing last night.” 

Beca held the comforter up to her mouth to cover her bemused smile, but when she heard that, she rolled her eyes and tapped at Chloe’s shoulder. Her hands were cold, but Chloe was warm, and it was almost enough for her to try to convince the redhead to stay in bed the rest of the day. She gestured to the phone when Chloe looked at her, and, surprised, Chloe handed it over to her. 

“Bree?” she said, her morning voice cracking. From the hall, Aubrey sighed. “Unless you want to relive the ear-plug days of your junior year, I suggest you go somewhere that’s not right outside our room.” 

Chloe gasped, slapping Beca on the shoulder. It did nothing but help Beca’s lie, apparently, because she could almost see the disgusted face Aubrey was wearing and the sound of her heels were echoing off the walls. 

“You have twelve minutes. We have brunch at the hairdressers, and then an hour for dresses and final touches.” 

“Twelve minutes?” Beca said. Chloe’s mouth was pursed in a frustrated, determined look, but that only acted as more encouragement for Beca, and she took that stare and raised it a wink. “That’ll be plenty of time.” 

“I’m hanging up now,” Aubrey finished just as the elevator dinged. Beca hung up with a laugh and a pillow hitting her in the face. 

“I don’t know what the fuck this thing is,” Beca said, gesturing between the two of them and grinning, “But if I can get rid of Aubrey that easily from now on, I’m not inclined to stop.” 

“You’re the worst,” Chloe said. Her voice was still raspy, dry and crackling, and if Beca closed her eyes she thought that she might fall right into it. 

Strange, she thought, how it felt like she was wide-awake and unwilling to get up all at the same time. 

There was never a moment where Beca had a sudden burst of remembrance about the night before. Instead, it was like dipping her feet into a pool and realizing that she was already in the deep-end. The memory snuck up on her, covering her before she knew it, and that feeling of having everything be familiar and locked in it’s place had not waned since the night before. With Chloe sitting up next to her and stretching in the line of light from the crack in the curtains, it still felt….normal. 

Exciting and scary and promising and scary and hopeful and scary and miraculous. 

But also…normal. 

Right. 

She reached out to poke Chloe’s ribcage, laughing when the result was the sound of Chloe squealing and squirming away from her hand. “Morning,” she quipped, knowing that the smile on her face was sweeter and lighter than she’d let most people see - especially at this time of the day. Chloe hummed, bringing her face closer to Beca as if, for a split second, she might kiss her, and then pulling back. Beca breathed into the motion, blinking when it didn’t end in anything. Chloe responded with a laugh of her own. 

“’Mornin’ to you too,” she said sweetly. She reached over, slapping Beca’s ass once. “Now, up up up. A Bella’s about to get hitched!” 

Chapter Text

Chloe never really learned not to stare. That was, maybe, her mother’s biggest mistake in raising a perfect lady - the concept of looking at someone until they turned around wasn’t something that she ever thought to be rude. 

She believed fully in the art of soaking something in until it wasn’t there anymore. It was why she ate four bowls of pasta on the nights Stacie cooked dinner, and why she took showers until the hot water tank gave out. People in the past, observers of her life and examiners of her mind, concluded that it was the result of parents taking away her plate too early at dinner. She had inherently concocted this idea that if something was in front of her now, it wouldn’t be - couldn’t be - in front of her later, so she better take it, all of it, in while it was there. 

This was the reason she was staring at Beca when they rode the elevator. Staring so shamelessly, in fact, that the brunette turned around, throwing an eyebrow up and pursing her lips. “Like what you see, Beale?” 

Chloe blinked, her smile spreading. “Yeah, in fact, I do. Wanna talk about that, Mitchell?” 

Beca had woken up in a good mood, which was a sentiment Chloe never thought she would ever utter. She assumed that it was the festivities - weddings never failed to bring out the spirit in everyone - so when she had hopped out of bed and into the bathroom, she slipped her iPod into the hotel’s speakers and they sang while they got changed. Not toothbrush-as-microphone singing, but rather the mindless wording along with the lyrics in a way that was as natural to Chloe as breathing. Hearing herself accompanied by Beca made it better, too. Because Beca’s voice always fit into the holes that Chloe couldn’t reach - she snuck in, wiggling through the melodies and molding to the harmonies, somehow managing to make Chloe sound better in the process. 

There was a lightness there, to the whole morning (all twelve minutes of it), that Chloe didn’t want to touch. It was easy like it hadn’t been in a long time, and every ounce of Chloe begged to keep it that way. She felt the feeling of not wanting to get out of bed, not wanting to ruin the magic that comes with keeping your eyes closed, but knowing that without a doubt you have to. 

Sure enough, the minute she said those words, Beca’s face fell - not into anything resembling discomfort or uncertainty, but rather just dropped, weighted by the tension that was suddenly pushing everything in the elevator down. Chloe had to fight to stand up straight under the pressure. 

The kiss was…

Chloe couldn’t think about it. Not really. Not if she couldn’t talk about it properly. Because every time she thought about it, like when she was brushing her teeth and when she was curling into Beca and when she woke up to realize that the smell of lilac and cracked leather was still engulfing her, she could feelit all over again. She could feel it all over again. From the pinpricks in her toes to the red tips of her ears, she felt like all of her senses were on alert. The sensation was accompanied by an undeniable absence that her mind couldn’t describe but her body had, somehow, memorized. It was like the feeling of hugging air, because while she held her arms out, nothing stood between them, and her skin was tingling for contact stronger and more electric than that of the fabric of her clothes. 

She had grown up waking up early for Christmas morning, and even at this age she would sneak into her parents room and sit on the edge of their bed, waiting for them to wake up. Because as much as Chloe played the card of permanently excited jumping bean, she was impatient when it came to anticipation. She wanted the ending before the middle came, and she wanted presents before the sun rose. 

Waiting, it seemed, was almost never an option. 

While she wanted more than anything to give Beca the necessary space to sort out whatever was making the brunette stare off in inopportune times, she acted on instinct and habit and inherent Chloe Beale qualities that made it impossible to let Beca push off the conversation. 

She could try, of course. She could fight the temptation. But when Beca looked at her like she was watching a machine working right for the first time - amazed at every click of every cog and every gear - and told her that she loved her like she’d said one million and one times already, Chloe thought that the effort would be shortened greatly. The effort had to be shortened greatly. There was no way in hell she was going to be able to wait. 

Beca stood in front of her, face weighted by the pressure of the question that Chloe left hanging in the air, until the elevator opened to a lobby full of girls dressed in variations of sweats and pajamas. They squealed when the doors opened, as if they hadn’t just seen both of them, and while Chloe loved her girls - she did love them, she really really did - this was, perhaps, the worst time for squealing squadrons of excitement. She found herself actively needing to pull up her smile and the gleeful excitement on her face, a thing that was only necessary twice or three times before in her Bella career. 

Which was why before they left the elevator, she reached down for Beca’s hand, squeezing it tightly and smiling when Beca looked up at her in surprise. “Later,” she promised, and Beca nodded determinedly, holding their hands up slightly. 

“Right.” 

“Thank God,” Aubrey said from the middle of the circle full of bridesmaids, fanning out the army of people with her hands. “They’re here, and we’re off, come on, Bellas.” 

Snapping her fingers, she started walking towards the doors, and like chicks in a line the rest of the girls followed, Chloe and Beca taking up the caboose in silence. 

The hair salon wasn’t far away, and Beca, whose stomach was grumbling throughout the cramped car-ride, rushed into it at the promise of doughnuts being inside. The girls filed in, until it was just Chloe and Aubrey standing in front of the clear glass windows, watching the girls as they scattered around the coffee. CR was pushed to a seat in front of the mirrors, and Amy was already holding up extensions that CR was trying to swipe away. Stacie was trying to pump up CR’s hair already, and Beca was sitting in the corner, spinning the hair salon chair around while looking at her knees. 

“You okay?” Aubrey’s hand was familiar on Chloe’s shoulder, and the redhead nearly cracked at the feeling. There was something about Aubrey’s touch that was just enough. Just strong enough. Just steady enough. Just hard enough. Just soft enough. 

It was, Chloe thought, simultaneously holding Chloe together and helping her to topple over. “She’s getting married!” Chloe said, and while she meant it to come out as excited, it really was filled with a sorrier tone. She frowned at it, not knowing what her own voice meant. Aubrey’s hand squeezed her shoulder once, and it sent a sigh out of Chloe. “One of us is getting married!” 

“You’ll get there, you know,” Aubrey said, pulling Chloe closer. “We’ll all get there.” 

Chloe shrugged, but the action only pushed her closer to Aubrey, and she found herself not fighting it. “I don’t know, Aubs. These girls….they have lives. You have a life. You guys have somehow built something for yourself, and…I…I don’t know how you did it. Or when, for that matter. It’s like I blinked, and all the sudden that teen angst shit was over for you. You all just…knew who you were. Who you are. And…I don’t know…” She stood up straight, pulling away from Aubrey and shaking her head. Quietly and quickly, she sent a prayer of thanks for Aubrey’s planning, because she wasn’t wearing a touch of makeup pre-hair-appointment, and if she had, it would be dripping. A thing she didn’t want to have to explain to the other girls. “I don’t know what I’m saying. Weddings, man…” she said weakly, throwing out a broken chuckle. When she looked at Aubrey, the blonde was pouting, looking at Chloe like she was a little girl who’d fallen on the sidewalk. 

She thought, briefly, that she really had gotten a lot more like Beca. Because it was something that almost bothered her. “Don’t do that,” she said, sniffling and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “Don’t look at me like I’m some sad case that needs your expertise. Because I’m fine,” she smiled at Aubrey, her bottom lip wavering. “Totes.” 

“Chloe,” Aubrey started, but Chloe shook her head. Her hand was already on the door. 

“Fine,” she repeated, “It’ll all work out and stuff.” 

The bell that rang when the door opened was enough to break up Aubrey’s words so she had enough of an excuse to ignore it, and despite keeping her head down and heading straight for the fruit salad in the center of the room, she felt a feather light touch to her shoulder that she recognized instantly. When she looked at the hand, the nails were painted black, and the cuticles were preposterously treated. She shrank under the touch instead of turning like she would normally, and that only made the hand clamp down harder. 

“Chloe,” Beca said worriedly. She used her hand to turn Chloe slightly, and with a finger she lifted the redhead’s chin. Chloe thought that seeing Beca might just be enough to make her lose it again, and it was silly, really. Because she wasn’t feeling anything at all like this at the beginning of the day, or even at the beginning of this whole trip. There was the sound of Stacie laughing at something Emily had said, though, and Amy trying to figure out what Lilly was requesting of the hair dresser, and it was all enough to make her feel like they’d travel just far back enough in time to be safe from all of those unknowns that had attacked her when they graduated. 

It was just enough, too, to remind her that it was temporary. That it was the past. 

Beca put her hands on Chloe’s shoulders, pressing her forehead against the other girl’s. “Are you okay, Chlo?” 

Chloe nodded, a squeak coming out, but Beca didn’t move. 

“We can talk now? If that’s the problem, Chloe, we can talk now…I had no idea I w–I di—”

“No, no,” Chloe said quickly. She took a deep breath, separating herself from Beca. It almost hurt, like tearing glue off. “That’s not it. Just…wedding emotions…”

“Oh, Chloe, you don’t th–”

“It’s silly,” Chloe said shortly. Her voice was high, filled with something empty and deep at the same time, and it was enough to make Beca furrow her eyebrows. 

She wasn’t sure if Beca had realized it yet or not, but she knew, she hadknown, that if there was one person who was better at hiding from things than Beca in all her ear spikes and eye makeup, it was Chloe. That’s why she knew how to tear down Beca’s walls. And sure, her walls were easily sung melodies and high strings of laughter, which differed from anything Beca had put on to disappear, but it worked well enough. 

So she laughed now, too, because it was always the path she took in these situations, and because even in the far corners of her mind she was aware that Beca was slated to get her hair done now and if they messed with Aubrey’s schedule any more the blonde might cut off her head. 

Only, Beca didn’t relent. She didn’t join in the laughter or walk away. 

It was a strange feeling, almost, and she knew that Beca felt that awkwardness too. She knew that it was against Beca’s nature to remain after a problem had been even superficially dismissed. Beca didn’t like conflict - despised it, really - and Chloe had given her the out that even those capable of comforting normally took. But instead, she just eyed Chloe, her gaze flickering between Chloe’s eyes until finally she let out a sigh that seemed to carry so many words. 

Chloe squeaked when Beca pulled her into a hug, largely out of surprise, and it made Beca hesitate for a fraction of a second, as if she was afraid of hurting the redhead somehow. Then, she squeezed, and Chloe could feel the effort it took to engage in such a close moment. 

She thought: Beca’s a good hugger. She doesn’t even know it, but she is. She was capable of holding tight without it seeming too tight, and it was able to convey whatever comfort that girl was trying to communicate.

“It’s okay if you’re not okay, you know,” Beca whispered into her ear, squeezing her again to punctuate her sentence. When she pulled back, their hair clung together for a moment, and Chloe, who hadn’t realized she’d been crying, laughing despite herself. Beca joined in, a soft, sort chuckle. “You just can’t lie about it, okay?” 

“Right,” Chloe said, mirroring Beca’s earlier words with the same curt nod of her head. For some, it might not be enough. It might have seemed like a meager response, and one that was flimsy enough to evade later. But it was a solemn promise for them, considering they had a tendency to write contracts with just a stare. 

Which seemed to be exactly what they were doing now, or, maybe, they were talking…Chloe couldn’t quite tell, as her eyes were too hazed to see properly. All she knew was that she must have misheard whatever Beca’s eyes were saying, because when Beca leaned in again, this time much more directly aimed at her lips, she found herself caught off-guard for the second time in less than five minutes. 

And, suddenly, Beca’s lips were on her own, pressing softly with hands that were creeping up her neck to find handle in her hair and pull her closer. Chloe sighed, and her hands found Beca’s hips, more to steady herself than anything else. 

She only broke away when she heard Amy hooting at them, slowly enough that Beca’s face was frozen in her closed-eye lip-purse for more than a few seconds. Chloe liked watching the smile spread slowly over her face, starting with a touch of awareness in her closed eyes and reaching out to pull at the sides of her lips until there was a grin there that push her eyes open and staring at Chloe. 

“Thank you,” Chloe said, and Beca chuckled, pulling her hair back with her hand and taking a breath. 

Catching her breath, Chloe thought quickly with a touch of pride. 

“It’s so good you’re thanking me?” Beca said with an eyebrow raised. 

Chloe scoffed and hit Beca on the shoulder, taking the moment of contact to run her hand to her other shoulder and pull her close to her side. “Shut up, you know verbal gratitude is all I can give you.” 

“Oh,” Beca answered, grinning. They were both very aware of the sets of eyes staring at them from the room full of mirrors, “I don’t know if that’s true.” 

Chapter Text

Beca didn’t know what caused Chloe’s breakdown, and, of course, the instantaneous fear was that she was somehow a major player in the tears that had formed in the redhead’s eyes. 

Chloe had made it clear, though, that it wasn’t her, and while she was inclined to persist in worrying well after she was told it was unnecessary, there was something in the way Chloe looked almost grateful for Beca’s presence that placated her. 

It was still scary, though. Chloe wasn’t one to crumble - Beca recognized this early on, and she always made a point to keep an eye on the redhead during those stressful times of the year, because Chloe was a mastermind at evading the gaze of concerned stares. It was something Beca was always almost jealous of. She’d spent her entire life painting herself as someone who didn’t need a second glance, and the result was enough eyeliner and piercings to only get second glances. Chloe on the other hand covered herself in songs and laughter, bright colors and even brighter smiles. It was all a means of pushing people out, though, which was why when Beca saw her crying, she was more than scared. 

She was actually, physically pained. 

It was why she didn’t leave when Chloe made it clear she was allowed to, and it was why she pulled Chloe into a hug when she knew that was beyond her job description. Because if Chloe felt safe enough to crumble in front of her, then she deserved Beca’s attention, care, and concern. She deserved Beca’s love. 

Beca couldn’t really explain what drew her to kiss Chloe, though, because she was doing so well with the whole comforting thing. She, who dealt with tears by handing an awkward tissue to the culprit and running away, was currently passing the test. It was just that when she pulled away from Chloe’s hug, the redhead’s eyes were the shade of blue they turned when she cried - overwhelmingly, impossibly blue, and pulling, pulling, pulling Beca in. 

She wasn’t thinking. At all, really. She was operating on an instinct basis, because that hadn’t screwed her up thus far, and because if she thought she would realize how close they were and how dangerous the entire situation was - the two of them, entwined in each other’s arms with Chloe crying about some unidentified issue….

And after the kiss, she fought the inching thoughts that were entering her mind. The ones that told her she didn’t even realize how much she was hurting, too, until she got the chance to let it out in that one fraction of a second. The ones that whispered how kissing Chloe felt like breathing, but also like suffocating, because though she was completely consumed she also couldn’t fight to get enough. 

Instead, she threw a wink at Chloe. Took a deep breath. Smiled. And caught Chloe’s smile, because that was all she knew how to do before Aubrey pulled her elbow and tugged her until she was sitting soundly in the salon chair, a bright purple haired stylist flitting over her head like a fairy godmother of sorts. 

“That your girlfriend?” the woman asked halfway through the styling. The conversation had consisted of nothing but compliments towards Beca’s hair ( “so thick”, “such curls”, “I would killfor this hair”) that Beca assumed were given to every client, accompanied by one or two attempts at small talk. Beca wasn’t one to make strong conversation with strangers, let alone strangers she was trusting with her hair, and on occasion she would catch Chloe’s eyes in the mirror while the redhead was mid-story, her hair up in curlers, only to see the girl grin knowingly at her determined silence. 

The stylist was looking over at Chloe, eyebrows raised, and Beca felt protective, for some reason. “Yeah, actually, she is,” she said, with a touch more bite than she intended. The stylist’s stare snapped back to Beca’s in the mirror, and she seemed to shrink a few inches until the glare. 

“She’s cute,” the woman said, earning a slight squint from Beca. Then, she squeaked out a meek, “You two are cute” to relieve the tension a touch. 

It was silly, really, and Beca would’ve been embarrassed were she not already out of her comfort zone and quickly realizing how short her temper was during this process of “dolling up”. Just, with every stolen glance towards Chloe, the stylist eyed her up and down, and it was filled with a certain predatory nature that drew a small pinch from Beca’s gut. She had to bite her tongue to keep from saying anything, and then she had to bite back her thoughts to remind herself that Chloe was still very much not her girlfriend. She was not her property, even if she was dating her. 

Chloe was Chloe, and she drew the eyes of almost everyone in the room every time she walked into it. This was something that Beca had grown used to. It hurt sometimes, but was saturated with the kind of pride that came from knowing your best friend was beautiful. Chloedeserved those looks, and Beca knew it. 

Only now, she was warm. Genuinely bothered by it. For Christsake, they were making out in the middle of the salon, did this lady not see that? Did she not know what the hell that meant? 

So when the woman finished, tapping Beca on the shoulder lightly, the brunette smiled weakly, examined her hair, and tried her best to pull the most genuine thank you out from her face. 

She snuck up behind Chloe, then, making sure that the stylist had her eyes still trained on the two of them, and she put her hands on the redhead’s shoulders. Her hair wasn’t done yet, pulled up in curlers, and she was using the down time to paint her nails, but there were other Bellas waiting for their hair to be done too, gathering around in the surrounding seats. 

“Hey,” she said quietly into Chloe’s ears, surprising the girl a little. It was becoming their word. Beca liked it. There was a simplicity to the greeting that felt right, but it had a certain heaviness when said with the right tone of voice, and Beca couldn’t help but think that it felt strangely relevant to how she felt around Chloe as of late. Like she kept food in the microwave for a touch too long, and now all she could feel was steam. 

“Hey,” Chloe said back. Her eyes met Beca’s in the mirror, her lips pursed, and Beca grinned into it. There was a sleepiness to Chloe now, like she might have been on the verge of slipping into a nap a few seconds ago, though her eyes were still that shade of blue from the earlier tears. 

A reminder for Beca, who was still running her hands up and down Chloe’s arms. “You doing okay?” 

“A-Okay, now,” Chloe said with a wink, and Beca snorted, nuzzling her nose into Chloe’s neck. “You’re being friendly.” 

“Yeah, well,” Beca started, pulling away from Chloe to walk towards the front of her. She wasn’t sure why there was a certainty to her walk that hadn’t been present…well, at all…except for the knowledge that her stylist was still watching them as she was putting away her tools. It was enough to fuel her actions past her thoughts, in order for consideration to come only after each step, and not before it. “I missed you,” she finished, putting her hands on either side of the seat. Chloe raised an eyebrow, tilting her head, but Beca couldn’t help but notice the way her neck was turning a bright shade of red. 

That’s what she loved. The ability to make Chloe blush, despite it all. Chloe was the head-turner, sure, but she didn’t turn her head for just anyone. Beca prided herself from day one in garnering the attention of Chloe, and it was only recently (try, the last twenty four hours) that Beca started to rethink those moments of attention and why, exactly, Chloe was drawn to her since the very beginning. Either way, the fact that anyone could make Chloe Beale blush was really an amazing discovery. The fact that it was Beca was…really….

Beca didn’t actually have a word for that. Other than scary. And exciting. And overwhelming. A miracle, she thought halfheartedly, because while it defied the laws of everyday, it was also still terrifying in it’s ability to make you question everything. 

“You missed me,” Chloe repeated, her eyes locking on Beca’s lips for a short breath before she looked up again. “And this isn’t about Renee checking me out?” 

“Who the fuck is Renee?” Beca asked, backing up quickly even though Chloe was chuckling at her surprise. 

“Your stylist, Becs, God. Did you talk to her at all?” 

“How could I, when she spent all her time ogling you?” Beca asked, and Chloe laughed louder now. There were wrinkles around her eyes when she laughed, because she tended to laugh with her whole face, and Beca didn’t know when she started to notice these little things about Chloe, but she knew that they instill her with a new surprised feeling every few seconds when she discovered something different. 

“I knew you were getting jealous,” Chloe said, pulling Beca closer until the brunette stumbled into her lap. Wrapping her arms around Beca, she squeezed tightly. 

“I am not jealous,” Beca said, tugging at Chloe’s arms to get a chance at breathing. Chloe, though, was a master at all things cardio, and that included lifting. She she was not about to be escaping from Chloe’s grip any time soon. 

“Sure, babe,” Chloe said, nuzzling into Beca’s neck. “I’ll believe that when I see it.” 

“Hey, lady-lovers,” Amy said from behind the snack counter. “Can you retain your lovey-dovey, cuz I think CR might start questioning her decisions.” 

“Yeah, sheesh, who’s getting married here?” CR commented from her seat. She was finished a long time ago - there wasn’t much hair to work with - and had been talking to Stacie for most of the morning or gushing with the other girls about her wife-to-be’s dress (which she wasn’tsupposed to see, but accidents happen, right?). 

“It’s true,” the woman sweeping up the salon said, resting her head on the broom. “You two are glowing.” 

Beca smiled, looking down at Chloe, who had poked her side in response to all the commentary. 

It was so natural. That’s what struck Beca in that moment. Sure, it had been freakily natural all weekend - she was beginning to question how people defined “dating” because this all felt a lot like how she’d been acting with Chloe all along. Only now, it was….

Well, it didn’t feel like anything other than just right. There was a fear originally. A kind of awkwardness that accompanied every coupley thing that they did. Now, as they eased into it enough - and they really eased into it, it seemed - Beca was stunned by how simple it all was. It was her, and it was Chloe, and sure, there was bit more touching, but at it’s base it just felt like right where she needed to be and exactly what she needed to be doing. 

It felt right. 

Her hand weaved into Chloe’s and she lifted it to press it into the back of the chair as she pressed her nose to Chloe’s, grinning all the while. “This is fun,” she said, quiet enough for only Chloe to hear. 

“I’m glad you think so,” Chloe said back. Her breath smelled like maple syrup and coffee, and Beca’s stomach grumbled in response. She groaned, leaning back before hopping off of Chloe’s lap. 

“Hey,” Chloe said loudly, her heel kicking out to hit Beca lightly on her ass, “We gonna talk about how fun it is?” 

“Yes, ma’am,” Beca grumbled, throwing a salute out. “But let me eat first, woman. One cannot discuss such things on an empty stomach.” 

“Excuses, excuses,” Chloe sang. Beca turned around, throwing a finger up before walking back to her, leaning over the chair. 

“I promise,” she said, her eyes suddenly serious. “I’m just scared.” 

“Me too,” Chloe admitted. 

The honestly felt good. Simple and easy like everything else, and Beca started to wonder why she expected anything other than that anymore with Chloe. It was starting to become a chant of hers. 

“But it will be good,” Chloe said, reassuring herself more than Beca. They both nodded, uncertain, standing in the uncomfortable silence for a second before Beca started to walk backwards towards the snack table. “And even if it’s not,” Chloe shouted as she kept walking, “It’s necessary!”

It was, Beca thought as she threw up a thumb to agree with Chloe silently, her heels clacking across the floor. And that was what scared the hell out of her.

Chapter Text

Chloe understood Beca. After four years, she learned the intricacies of every single look Beca sent - every twitch of her fingers, every sniffle of her nose. Their senior year, she used to know when Beca would get sick before Beca did, hounding her with cups of tea that went untouched because she could hear the slight change in Beca’s voice that came with having a cough. She’d learned early on how to attach meaning to the silence in Beca’s conversations, and it was easy enough now to make sense of whatever storm tended to brew in her eyes. 

It was funny how even in these past few days, Chloe knew - or thought she knew - exactly what Beca was doing when she acted a certain way. Instinct or history would’ve told Chloe that Beca would steal away to the corner to brood over the course of whatever strange thought metamorphosis she was currently experiencing. That tended to be her mode of operation: to hide, to think, to freak out silently by herself, and then to emerge having garnered everything she thought would be the answer. 

This time, though, she responded with opposite fervor. She didn’t hide, she jumped. She didn’t think, she acted. She stood almost every moment she could next to Chloe, and she battled the thoughts she was having through winks and hand holding. While Chloe was, at first, confused by the ease with which Beca was seeming to approach everything, she realized pretty quickly what Beca was doing. 

And she realized, too, that it didn’t bother her as much as it should. 

Because Beca knew that if she acted like something was going on in her head, then Chloe would push her to talk about it. She knew that if she thought instead of acted, Chloe would force conversation between the two paths of response. Like a child  trying to stay up past her bedtime, she acted like there was nothing different about the current situation. And Chloe loved it, breathed it, fell for it, because she liked how easy it was. 

She even considered, for a fraction of a second, that they never talk about it. They could continue in this strange purgatory of relationship and avoid the discussion forever with tiny pecks on the cheek and flirty conversation. It was easy and simply and required nothing but base instinct, so on the surface there seemed to be no issue. 

But Chloe had lived a lot of her life knowing the consequences of avoiding discussion. She was a pro at evading confrontation. Her parents lived under the guise that they didn’t need to talk about anything at all - not the late nights at the office, not the missed dinners or the absence at recitals - and the result was a blow up or series of blow-ups that hit her household and made the foundations of it crumble when she was twelve, fifteen, twenty-three…

And they always pushed those nights spent arguing aside, burying it with sweet glances later like nothing had happened, so that when the bomb went off again it would be just as surprising and just as expected as the one before. 

It was how Chloe operated too. Stay in the same place, do the same thing, and maybe no one will notice the struggle that is lurking underneath. Avoid the things that scare you precisely because they scare you, because the status quo is better than the unknown that can come with facing that thing that you don’t want to face. 

There was no point in it. No benefit to it, unless you considered paralysis to be pleasant, and Chloe learned long ago that not being to move past a place was less than enjoyable despite how attractive it seemed. So she kept pushing Beca, ending those sweet moments with a reminder, because while the conversation was going to be hard, the possibilities that existed after it had the potential to be bright and shining in a way this purgatory never could be. 

She considered this as the bumps in the road they were driving down continued to tap her forehead against the window. Aubrey had taken half of the girls back to the hotel to get ready and then came back for the other group, shouting that they all only had about five minutes before the final car was leaving, because they were already running late. 

She didn’t know that CR had factored in an extra hour for the occasion that they would all be inevitably behind Aubrey’s packed schedule, and Chloe held in her laugh when Stacie put a hand on Aubrey’s shoulder to tell her to “calm the fuck down”. 

It was funny and strange and scary that while on the short ride back to the hotel, Chloe found herself missing Beca. There was a space in the car for where Beca normally jammed herself in, right on Chloe’s lap next to Flo, and the redhead tucked her knees into her chest to fill up the spot. 

With this kind of reliance, a conversation was definitely necessary. 

They were getting ready in the suite that CR had rented out for that night, and when Chloe walked in behind Stacie, Emily was sitting on the edge of the bed getting her dress pinned by a very stressed Ashley. She’d have to talk to that girl about eating habits during the stressful part of the acapella season, if not even that size fit her properly, but a nutritional talk wasn’t really part of the itinerary for the day. 

Beca’s mixes, some of the older ones that the entire team had grown accustomed to, were playing on the hotel’s clock radio, and from the bathroom, Chloe heard Beca swearing while she tried to put her dress on. Too preoccupied with the task of finding her own dress in the pile that Aubrey had plopped onto the master bed, she didn’t realize when Beca walked out until she saw a hand reaching for a dress in the middle of the pile. “That one’s yours,” Beca said behind Chloe, her breath trickling over Chloe’s neck, “I’ve checked.”

Chloe was someone who, naturally, always fell for the storyline of the girl who took off her glasses and became magically beautiful. It was one of her favorite tropes, and almost every time it happened, she was just as pleased as the first time she’d seen it in a movie. 

Only, the reason she fell for it every time was because she always loved to see the poorly hidden beauty of the actress being exposed properly. She loved the collective gasp of the audience, because she always thought it was kind of funny how people didn’t recognize how pretty the character was before the makeover. 

So when she turned around to see Beca, she wasn’t surprised. Because it wasn’t really a secret that Beca had something inherent about her that was beautiful. That didn’t stop her from losing her ability to breathe, though, because Beca was wearing a dress that - under normal circumstances - she would never wear. Sleeveless, with a heart-shaped neckline that dipped just low enough for Chloe’s favorite patch of faint freckles to be seen. It was simple, sure, the gold stitching on the bodice just enough to brighten the navy blue, and it looked similar enough to Chloe’s bridesmaid dress, but it was stunning when Beca wore it, because it hugged her curves almost better than her own skin, and it provided the kind of contrast that made her look cream white. 

She’d done her makeup, too, and Chloe was reminded of the girl she met at the activities fair, with the pounds and pounds of blacks and greys. It was as if that morphed somehow with time, so that the piles of mask was reduced simply to a smoky eye, like clouds to the storm of Beca’s navy blue eyes. She smiled, and her face changed somehow. Light and airy, and thiswas the Beca that Chloe loved most. The one who cared. The one who loved. The one who did it all with an ease she didn’t even know she had. 

Chloe found herself laughing, a breathy, chuckle of a laugh, and Beca furrowed her eyebrows. 

“That’s not the response a girl’s lookin’ for, you know,” Beca said, and Chloe shook her head, holding her hand out. 

“It’s not…that’s not…” she stopped, standing up straight. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at me.” 

“Okay….”

“I just…um…I think I’m drooling,” she said, and Beca looked down, starting to blush. Chloe used her finger to lift Beca’s head, finally meeting her eyes and realizing that without the dress or the makeup or the hair, this - this stare, these eyes, aimed solely at her - was really all Beca needed to be that beautiful basis for a movie transformation. “I think I’m blinded every day by how beautiful you don’t know that you are,” she said, her words just a breath into the air around them. Beca smiled fleetingly, then started to shake her head with a kind of knowing sadness that only came with years of disbelief. 

“Stop,” she said, “I don’t….I don’t know what to say when you talk like that.” 

“Thank you works,” Chloe answered, “Though I wouldn’t be opposed to an ‘I know’, either.” 

“Chloe, I—”

“Beale!” Aubrey walked between the two of them, her finger already stabbing into Chloe’s face. “You’re not walking down the aisle in sweatpants.” 

“Right,” Chloe said, her eyes still trained on Beca. The girl had something of value in her eyes before she started talking. A preparation of some sort, like she was going to say something. Something more than the nothing they’d been passing between them as of late. And when Aubrey stormed in, there was a mixed gaze of disappointment and relief that sent a surge of curiosity through Chloe. She wanted nothing more in that moment than to push Aubrey aside, grab Beca’s hand, and ask for five minutes - just five minutes - to talk. To figure this shit out, because it was necessary, and it was scary, but it was - it would be - good. She was on a time crunch, though, and had never been good at facing Aubrey, even at the end of the blonde’s reign. So she sighed, broke her stare with Beca, and looked straight at Aubrey with a nod. “Right, no, I’m changing now. Beca, zip me up?” 

Beca reached for the dress, but Aubrey bumped her to the side with her hip. “Nuh-uh, I’m not dumb,” she said, looking between the two of them. “If you disappear with Beca, you’re not coming out until five minutes after the reception. No. I’ll zip you up.” Aubrey beckoned Chloe into the bathroom with her hands, and Beca’s smirk was hardly covered up as she left. “Come on, she’ll be here when you’re done. Let’s go. Chop chop.” 

“Just….” Chloe held her hand up, glancing back at Beca one more time to see her laughing her herself at Aubrey’s comments. “Let me get my shoes, okay?” 

The blonde nodded hesitantly, watching Chloe for a second before passing into the bathroom. Instead of reaching under the bed, where the shoes had been thrown, she put her hands on Beca’s hips, surprising her. “Were you going to say something?” she said into the shell of Beca’s ear. The brunette smiled widely, pressing back into Chloe and sighing. 

“Yes,” she said lightly. “No. Kinda.” 

“Give me two minutes,” Chloe said, pressing her lips to Beca’s shoulder so softly that she wasn’t sure if the other girl even noticed. This, she thought, was probably not allowed. Without many Bellas focused on them, it was overstepping the bounds. It fell under things that Chloewanted to do, and not things that Chloe had to do to continue the game they were playing.

But she wasn’t going to know if it was okay until after they finally talked, if they would ever talk, and so she let herself give into her wants. Because Beca’s shoulder was bare for the first time since Chloe could remember, and it seemed like it was actually calling her to tempt it with her lips. 

“Chloe,” Beca said, her voice hinting on the edge of urgent. The redhead pulled back, thinking she was finally being told that she’d gone too far. Beca, however, had turned to face her, and didn’t look angry. Just…nervous. “Aubrey’s waiting.” 

“Right,” she said, searching for whatever illegible thing Beca was holding behind her eyes. “Okay. But…hold your thought, yeah?” 

“Yeah,” Beca said, nodding slowly. “I don’t think I’m about to forget it.” 

And Chloe knew Beca. Knew every in and out of what the girl said versus what she meant infallibly. 

But she didn’t know what, exactly, that last comment - said so that Chloe might not hear it - meant. Didn’t have any idea, actually. 

Chapter Text

For all the build up that the activities of the weekend had provided, the actual preparation time was entirely too short. It almost reminded Beca of being back on the Bellas, with girl after girl sneaking into the bathroom to check lipstick smears or mascara runs. There were squeals, and there were photo ops, and Beca swore she saw it all in a swirling mass of colors circling her. 

She had gotten ready early - it never took her very long - which meant that the rest of the half hour they all had left before they made their way to the ceremony was spent watching the nonsense around her. She realized, then, how it must feel to be the sun. Around her, planets orbited, following their own crooked path to and from the nearby mirrors, and she just stood there, still and silent and wondering for a brief and terrible moment if it was always as isolating as it felt in this moment. 

Then, there was a hand on her arm, and the elliptical orbit of Chloe Beale intercepted her existence, tugging on her until she broke her position and danced along to whatever tune was playing over the stereo. 

She thought it was perfect - the outsider and the insider, blending their paths together so as to draw in the gravity of the rest of the group. 

She thought, too, that was how it was and how it was supposed to be. 

And, sure, there were words meant to be said between the two of them. Sure, when Chloe looked at her before putting her dress on, she almost started to talk. Sure, she didn’t know what she wanted to say. 

But for this brief moment, everything stood still, and she got that same feeling she’d had the night before - that feeling that told her everything was about to change. 

The drive to the ceremony was short, this much Beca was already aware thanks to her pre-planning and preparation with Aubrey. There was frost on the ground from the night before, but the red barn doors were open wide enough for the space heaters to welcome them in. 

Emily squealed when she walked in. Jessica and Ashley held onto each other, eyes watching the lines and lines of christmas lights that had been put up. Stacie nodded, content and unimpressed as per usual, while Aubrey herded CR into the back. 

Chloe held Beca’s hand. 

And Beca wondered how many times the elliptical orbit of Chloe Beale intercepted hers, and how many frozen states of paralysis she pulled her out of. All this, while the redhead dragged her into the corner, where there were stairs that led up to an attic balcony of sorts. Carefully, they both sat down, their feet dangling over the edge. 

There was glitter on the back of Chloe’s palm. Her nails, which were painted bright green earlier that weekend, were now painted a soft pink. It was different shade, though, from the rose that was blooming over her palm, inside all the pads of fingertips.

“Reading my palm?” Chloe asked, and Beca clasped her hand onto Chloe’s, halting the observation. “What do you see?” 

“Fuck if I know,” Beca grumbled, looking down at where her feet were dangling. Aubrey was watching them curiously, with a hint of suspicion and an ounce of caution. They didn’t have much time. “I think that….I don’t know what to think.” 

Chloe nodded slowly, sighing. “Maybe if you try to use your words, we could figure it out together?” 

“Yeah,” Beca said quickly. “Um. So. Chloe Beale, best friend.” 

“That’s me,” Chloe said, raising her hand as if taking attendance. 

“Chloe Beale, fake girlfriend,” Beca continued. 

“That’s me again.” 

“See, you’ve been a lot of things for me,” Beca said. “Captain. Co-captian. Creepy shower girl.” 

“Sexy shower girl,” Chloe said, and Beca shook her head immediately. 

“Let’s stay away from the word sexy right now,” she said sheepishly. “Like, sorry, I just…”

“That’s my fault,” Chloe said. “I’ll let you keep going.” 

“Right. Okay. Um. So, yeah, I’ve seen you in a lot of different lights. But, like, you’ve always been…Chloe. You’ve always been this familiar, comfortable thing in my life…The thing about you is that I never really had to think about you.” 

“And now you are,” Chloe said. Beca closed her mouth, nodding. Looking out from the balcony, Stacie was straightening CR’s jacket. Beca sighed. “So now that you’re thinking about me…what do you think you’re thinking?” 

“I’m thinking that I never really knew….” Beca stopped, scratching her head. “I never really knew just how much I love you. God…I never really make it this far in my thought process, you know.” 

“Keep going,” Chloe urged. “You’re doing great.” 

“Thanks,” Beca said, chuckling lightly. “Okay. So. You know how there are people who are beautiful…”

“We’re not going back to this,” Chloe started, but Beca held her hands up. 

“No, no, I think I have a point,” Beca said quickly. “What I’m saying is….there are people who are beautiful. And that’s, like, generally. They’ve got good skin, or good eyes, or good hair. And then there are people who are your beautiful. Your particular brand. Like you can look at a house and say, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful’. And then you can look at your home and say, ‘Wow, that’s my beautiful’. There’s a difference there, because your home is cracked and splintered or, like, a really ugly shade of yellow, but you’ve grown up in it. You own the beauty that it has, because you’ve learned to own it. You’ve learned to love it. You’ve….” she stopped, taking a breath. “When I see you, I can’t stop thinking about how you are my beautiful. Not because I own you or anything, that’d be weird,” Chloe paused to chuckle, and Beca shook her head, “But because your particular brand of beauty, at least to me, is all of the things that I need. The things that have pulled me in. The things that have kept me in. The things that I’ve grown with, the things that I’ve trusted. All in your face, and your forehead scar and the little brown freckle in your crazy blue eyes.” 

Chloe reached out to grab Beca’s hand, clapping her palm over it a few times lightly. 

“I guess I never really thought about love as anything more than something you fall into. It’s trip. It’s, like, sudden and quick and drops the world out from under you,” Beca continued. “Only now, I think I see that it can be like walking downhill. At first, you don’t realize you’re doing it. Actually, it takes forever for you to realize. And then….you’re running to keep up with the down slope. You’re running to keep your footing. And then, maybe, you just…fall. ‘Cuz you’ve realized how far downhill you’ve already gone, and how fast you’re going down, and…”

“Beca,” Chloe said, interrupting the world that Beca had travelled to. 

Beca was not a speaker. She didn’t like to talk, and normally, even the people who knew her well knew that a curt few words was enough to communicate what Beca needed. Speeches were most definitely not her thing. 

So while Chloe thought she had seen every version of Beca, she was just now seeing a new one. A Beca who spoke for so long she got lost in her own words, who forgot to take steadying breaths and stuttering sentences, because she was so entranced in her thoughts. 

This was a Beca who was letting her mind out and naked and running openly in front of Chloe, and it was so much more than enough for Chloe to see just how stunning it could be. 

“Sorry,” Beca said weakly. Now, she was blushing. Now, she was caught up with her own words, and now, she could understand what, exactly, she had been saying. “Shit, I’m really sorry. That wasn’t…I think…I just….um…” 

“Beca,” Chloe said again, her hand falling on Beca’s cheek. “You’ve done really well.” 

“Thanks for the grade,” Beca muttered weakly, but Chloe just laughed quietly. 

“Can you say it, now?” Chloe asked, watching Beca carefully. There was something in her eyes, a kind of hope or expectation, and Beca felt both like she knew the answer and also like she was overwhelmingly afraid that she didn’t. That if she guessed this guess and it was wrong, she could really and royally fuck things up. “One last thought. A summary. For me.” 

“A ‘too long; didn’t read’?” 

Chloe laughed, looking down, and Beca felt that surge again. That ridiculous urge to say something. To say anything. To keep Chloe their. 

She thought again about the difference between a beautiful house and a beautiful home, and realized that Chloe laughing is every bit of a beautiful home that she could ever get. 

“Something like that,” Chloe said. “Then I’ll go. Then, it’ll be my turn. I promise. Just….say it. Because, I think you need to.” 

“Right,” Beca said. She closed her eyes, smiled a bit. Because this felt almost like practicing a line or taking medicine. Chloe was right, she needed to do it. And she needed Chloe’s supervision to make sure it happened. “Okay. I think that you are….that I….” 

“Don’t think,” Chloe said. Her voice floated outside of Beca, whispering over the curve of her neck, where she knew Chloe was hovering. The weight of Chloe’s chin on her shoulder kept her down. “You’ve done that already. Say what you know. Not what you think you think.” 

“Chloe, I love you,” Beca said, her eyes still closed. Chloe shuffled, her weight being lifted from Beca to the sound of a deep inhalation. “I’m….” she paused, opening her eyes. Chloe was there. Smiling. Her face was illegible, but Beca was inexplicably unafraid of what she was going to say next, and she blamed everything that was Chloe Beale for her fearlessness. “I’m in love with you. I think.” 

“You know, you were really close to saying that without the ‘I think’,” Chloe said with a grin that caused Beca, despite it all, to roll her eyes. “We’ll get there, though.” 

“Will we?” Beca asked, her question holding more weight that even she expected. Chloe, suddenly serious again, nodded soberly. 

“We will. Now,” she took a deep breath. “My turn.” 

Chapter Text

Chloe had seen Beca naked very early on in their friendship. 

Of course, she knew somewhere in the back of her mind that this wasn’t supposed to be the memory she was pulling from in the seconds after Beca had semi-confessed her love for her. 

It was just interesting  how small that seemed now - how much of a nonentity that moment was, and how insignificant those expanses of white skin and nervous smiles were. She was stunned by the sudden realization that what she had just witnessed was so much more intimate. And she recognized the absolute privilege that was being able to watch Beca Mitchell sort out the scale of her brain, adding weight to one side before considering and taking weight to the other. 

While she didn’t place the human form high on the list of things to consider private - to her, bodies were just beautiful, and present, and inherently….shared - she could recognize the feeling of being hit by such astonishing, private, and personal beauty simply by watching Beca talk. Her cheeks had gotten red while she stretched onwards in her thoughts, not because she was embarrassed but because she was so enraptured, and when she used her hands Chloe saw all the intent that came with mixing being swirled through the air. 

As Beca slowed to a stop, pushing the car of her thoughts up a hill she wasn’t entirely sure she was ready to climb, Chloe’s chin rested on Beca’s shoulder. She thought then that if it was possible to see every ounce of the machine in someone’s head, she was watching it. If it was possible hear the whirring of thought, she was listening to it. Close enough to count the three freckles on the edge of Beca’s jaw, she thought that it was impossible to get any more naked than that moment. 

And, just like any time she was introduced to someone’s body in a new light, she found it to be undeniably beautiful. 

She could never stand to walk through museums and not touch the things that caught her attention, pulling her so close that her nose was touching the canvas. It was maddening, and she was kicked out of three field trips for being too curious. So she didn’t even try to stop herself when she reached up, brushing the tips of her knuckles over the edge of Beca’s jawline. Beca caught the touch, turning towards it so that, sleepily, she could watch Chloe. 

As previously pointed out, Chloe knew every inch of Beca. Both physically, thanks to that shower incident, and mentally, because over the course of four and a half years she learned what every facial cue would be even before Beca did. 

Now, she was surprised to find that she was seeing something new. Something unexpected, as if finally seeing Beca naked in this way led her to find a constellation of scars and freckles and stretch marks that she never dreamed of finding. Because when Beca looked at her, there wasn’t the panic that Chloe would’ve expected. There wasn’t an inch of concern that what Chloe was going to say would not reciprocate the exact sentiments that Beca worked so hard on getting out. This worry, of course, was what Chloe expected of Beca. She was greeted instead with utter calmness, a kind of contentment that made it seem like the entire ordeal was over - not because Beca didn’t care for what Chloe was going to say, but because she needed to say what she said so badly that the instant relief washed over any normal Mitchell concerns. 

“You know what’s funny?” Chloe finally said, breaking the spell of slow silence between them so that Beca blinked a few times, fighting the urge to pull away. “What was one of the first things I said to you?” 

“It’s all with our mouths?” Beca said, squinting. Chloe laughed, nuzzling her nose in the crook of Beca’s shoulder. 

“No, goof,” she said, “When I was trying to get you to join…” 

“Right. ‘Help us turn our dreams into a reality’,” Beca recited, “I remember it because it was weird as fuck.” 

“Shut up, we can all be as eloquent as you,” Chloe joked. When Beca blushed, she regretted the tease, and pulled Beca closer to apologize. “The point is, you followed through with that. So, if this is my turn to say things, I want to say thank you, first.” 

“Chloe…”

“My turn,” Chloe held up her hand, halting Beca’s speech immediately. “I didn’t know why - I still really don’t know why - but the prospect of seeing the Bellas get a voice…like, a realvoice, was my dream. And then you came along, and you just….did your weird magic thing and–” Chloe snapped her fingers, “Dream come true. Standing on stage year after year having done something completely different, having come together, having grown this….thingout of nothing….” 

“You’re a cheeseball, you know,” Beca interrupted, and Chloe scoffed. 

“I didn’t make fun of you when it was your turn,” Chloe argued, and Beca laughed, zipping her lips with her fingers. “I guess, when you don’t really know who you are, it’s easy to identify with a group. I think that’s why we were all drawn to the Bellas…because even though everyone else thought they knew who we were, we never really did. That’s why seeing us get that….power was an actual dream come true.  Because it wasn’t just finding a sound, it was finding our sound. I didn’t realize it at the time that I came up with that dream, but that’s why it was all so important to me. Slowly, the Bellas showed me who I am, just like it showed you who you are, and we were all able to do it together, hand in hand, and…..” Chloe took a breath. “That’s obviously why I didn’t leave for so long. I still hadn’t figured any of it out. Hell, I still haven’t figured it all out. Any of it. Not like you or Aubrey or even, God, even Emily…”

“But you ha–” Beca started, and Chloe intercepted her interruption again. “Sorry.” 

“The Bellas have meant the world to me even when I didn’t know what the ‘world’ or the ‘me’ was, and you played such an integral part of that that I don’t even really know how to properly thank you,” Chloe said quickly, her breath coming in short strokes. “I don’t know when, but somewhere along the line, Becs, it turned from the Bellas to you. To Beca. The dream and the world and the reason I stayed and the way I could figure things out or at least the reason towant to figure things out…it was you.” She paused, blinking out the tears that had sneaked into her eyes. Letting out a soft, embarrassed chuckle, she shook her head. “Sorry, I…crying isn’t how I wanted to do this.”

“It’s kind of inevitable when it’s you, Beale,” Beca dead-panned, though there was a thickness in her voice too. Chloe smiled when she heard it. 

“Beca, I don’t want to scare you, and I don’t want to freak you out, and I don’t want to hurt you in any way, but I need you to know that I’ve been in love with you for a really, really long time,” she said. Her hands were sweaty now, intertwined in Beca’s, and the brunette squeezed them tightly to stop them from shaking. “You became that dream before I realized it, and when I realized it…I got so scared. So….ugh,” she shook her head again, “The nights I would spend, Beca….the nights I would spend….” 

Beca reached up, pushing a strand of Chloe’s hair back behind her ear. She smiled, then, sweetly and calmly and in such an un-Beca-like way that Chloe lost her train of thought all over again. 

She had had this planned. She had had this worked out. She had tried time and time again to go over these words in her head for the occasion wherein this would occur. And yet, she felt like she was losing strings on all ends of the carefully sewn script. 

“You saying that you’re in love with me too. Or, that you think you are,” she allowed, garnering a laugh from Beca, “That’s you taking a dream I never admitted to having, and turning it into a reality I never thought could exist.” 

There was a tear dropping down slowly from Beca’s cheek, and when Chloe reached up to catch it with her thumb, Beca chuckled. “You are such a cheeseball,” Beca reiterated despite the sob in her throat. She laughed, and with it came a tongue sticking out between her teeth, and Chloe couldn’t help it. She laughed too, in a mixture of tears and giggles that made her feel like she might very well be losing her mind. 

“So thank you,” she said when the silence slowly landed on them again. “For being the reason for so long, and for making me want to fight to find myself, and for not slapping me too hard when I avoided that fight by distracting myself via flirting with you–”

“I knew you were flirting!” Beca said, and Chloe slapped her lightly on the shoulder, telling her in no uncertain terms to shush. 

“I’m in the middle of my love soliloquy, woman,” she said, “Let me finish.” 

“Fine,” Beca whined. She put her head on Chloe’s forehead, sighing. “But hurry up. I want to kiss you before my snotty crying starts.” 

“Hmmm, so sexy,” Chloe hummed, and Beca chuckled. There were goosebumps on Chloe’s arms, a shake to her hands, and, now, a burning kind of cold heat in her chest. “Sorry, do I still have to refrain from using that word?” 

“You’re safe for now,” Beca allowed. 

“Good. Because all I wanted to say was that if you’re not ready for any of this, that’s okay. That’s good. That’s….important. But I am, and I’ve been ready, and…”

“Now you have to say it,” Beca whispered into Chloe’s ear, and Chloe closed her eyes, letting her smile spread like butter. “I know you can,” Beca said in a mocking tone, pulling a laugh out of the redhead. 

“I’ve fallen in love with you,” Chloe said, “No gosh darned ‘I think’ about it.” 

Beca giggled then, a slow, soft, humming sort of giggle that pulled Chloe up to straight sitting position again, so that she was looking right into Beca’s eyes. She thought she’d seen every kind of smile Beca had - she thought she’d memorized it by now. 

This was very clearly a brand new smile, and Chloe thought that it might be her absolute favorite one. 

“Thank God for that,” Beca grumbled, her eyes trained on Chloe’s lips unabashedly. Chloe followed her eyes down towards Beca’s own, and they leaned in, this time in a way that was clear and purposeful and infinitely easier than it had been before. 

But Benji, who had been hired to play the cello for CR as she walked down the aisle, was tuning his instrument, and Aubrey was lining up the girls, clapping at Chloe and Beca to get “their aca-asses down here” - how long she’d been doing that, that girls weren’t sure, but they realized then that they must’ve blocked the noise out for long enough to turn Aubrey’s face red. 

“She’s always a mood killer,” Beca commented, pulling away to stand up and wipe the hay off of her legs. Chloe held her hand up, being pulled by Beca to standing position. She reached forward, slapping Beca’s ass to get the excess hay there off too. 

“Sorry,” she said when Beca jumped and shot a surprised look over to Chloe. “You had a lil something.” 

Beca held her hand up to slap Chloe lightly on the shoulder, but the redhead caught it easily, using it as leverage as she stepped forward, the grin on her face growing despite Aubrey’s annoyed whistling. She put a hand on Beca’s waist, running her thumb over the hip bone she felt beneath the fabric, and she carefully placed the hand she was holding on her shoulder. 

“Some kind of talk,” Beca muttered, her breath ghosting over Chloe’s lips. The redhead smiled wider, face impossibly close, and nudged Beca’s nose with her own. 

“It’s about fucking time we actually talked,” she said, taking the final centimeter away from them to connect her lips to Beca’s, hand instinctively snaking around to the small of Beca’s back and press her even closer. 

When they pulled away, Beca shook her head, poking Chloe’s collarbone sharply. “Youcannot say fuck,” she said. “I told you that.” 

Aubrey whistled again, and both girls jumped. The hand that was on Beca’s back shifted slightly so that they were both able to walk, arm in arm, and Chloe put her head on Beca’s shoulder, playfully humming. “This is going to be an issue,” she said, “I told you that.” 

And Beca blushed then, her lips pulled into a smile that said every thought she was too embarrassed to say. Chloe wiped it away with another peck on the lips before skipping down the steps in twos, apologizing to Aubrey all the way down. 

The words from both of them echoed around the room, even if everyone entering the barn was deaf to sound. In fact, Chloe could feel them all vibrating under her skin, like the space between bone and flesh was carbonated. 

There were ways, of course, of remedying that. Ways that she was halfway certain judging by that earlier blush, Beca would be a-okay engaging in. Only, she was in a barn, in front of people, and one of her sisters was about to get married. 

So she stood in line, arm in arm with Beca, and she looked behind her to see Cynthia Rose standing confidently, reading to process in. And in her eyes, she saw all the confidence, excitement, and contentment that she felt burrowing into her chest. 

This was it, and this was right, and once she had Cynthia Rose alone - maybe in the limo they’d rented or between photo-taking - she would ask her if this was how she knew, too. Though she was pretty sure she already knew the answer. 

Chapter Text

In movies, there’s this magic moment when you feel a chill roll through the room. There is silence perfectly placed so that you can feel movement without explicitly seeing it, and you shift in your seat, swallowing some lump in your throat, because you feel as though you’re on a precipice. In moments, the story will crash, fall, and tumble down to it’s end, with smiles and epilogues and music that is too cheery to fit the story you’re still trying to comprehend. 

This is why Chloe loved movies. It’s why she sat through the good, the bad, and the ugly. For that flash of a moment where she felt the energy being stuffed into her chest - the space between her temples full with something more than her life, and her plot, and her characters. 

It’s also why Beca loved music. Because in every song there was that same moment that made her want to hold her breath, leaning over the edge to see what was at the bottom. 

As they were standing in the doorway to the barn, arms linked and bouquets ready, both of them thought that this must be what it was like to experience that moment in real time. 

Beca could’ve laughed, really, because the music was swelling as she realized this, and it was really so perfect so was almost bothered by it. She looked over to Benji, who was perched in the corner of the barn with his cello, and she nodded lightly. In front of her, Ashley and Jessica began their walk, just as practiced. One-two. One-two-three. One-two. Aubrey was on the side, arm on whoever was next until she gave the go ahead to set them free. 

Chloe nudged her slightly with her hip. That’s when it happened. 

Beca didn’t think much about weddings when she was little. In fact, it was something that always bothered her mom, if she was being honest with herself. Every little girl had some sort of plan, no matter how insane. Her cousin was set and ready to get married on the moon, and her aunt always talked about how she wanted tulips in the flower arrangements. Beca would always give a close-lipped smile and nod quietly. There was no plan for her. There wasn’t even a hazy image of how she wanted that day to be, let alone a dream that was so detailed she knew the flower arrangements. 

Even with Chloe, she knew that there was an idea of what the redhead wanted. She and Aubrey had apparently made journals for the special occasion their freshman year on a weekend night they vetoed the all-campus party. Chloe had shown her once, very clearly embarrassed, and Beca didn’t cease taunting her about it for at least a week. 

There was once - once - when Beca dreamt she was getting married, and she remembered distinctly waking up from the dream feeling not unlike she had just had a nightmare. Not because Beca was afraid of marriage (she was), but because in the dream, Beca was happy.  Completely, unequivocally happy, and standing in a white dress in the center of a crowded room without any insecurities, anxieties, or concern. She surmised later when she told that dream to Jesse that she must’ve thought it was a nightmare because clearly a Beca that calm on her wedding day was being drugged after an intricate kidnapping. 

All this to say, in short, that there was always a disconnect when it came to Beca and marriage. Well, when it came to Beca and the future in general - the house, the husband, the kids….all of it. But as she stood at the foot of the aisle, arm in arm with Chloe, who was nudging her hip, it was like a sudden flash of bright light. The dream came back, in all it’s confusing comfort, and this time in the span of a half a second, Beca saw her wedding day with more clarity than she ever had before. 

Not because she wanted to marry Chloe. To be clear, that wasn’t it. She hadn’t even….

Whatever. It wasn’t because she wanted to marry Chloe. 

But in the past five minutes, there had been a turn, and Beca felt like the safe she’d been fiddling with for her entire life just clicked, waiting to be opened. She saw the walk she would make however many years from now, and she felt no fear around it, and she couldn’t help but think that this was because she had struggled for so long to see the person standing at the other end. And now, it seemed as though she had an entirely new piece of considerations for who that person might be - considerations that made the image less suffocating and more….hopeful. Promising, at least. 

She couldn’t help but feel like maybe the struggle all along was that she was seeing it wrong. Or, maybe, not seeing it all the way. When you’re too zoomed in on a picture, you end up missing the scene. 

“You alright?” Chloe asked, breath tickling over Beca’s ear, and the brunette jumped. 

“Yeah,” she breathed, nodding. “Yeah, no. I am.” Aubrey tapped her lightly on the inside of her elbow, nodding as if to tell them to start, and Beca took another deep breath, standing taller. 

What Chloe said next, then, was almost humorous in its perfection. “You’ll be fine. Just one step at a time.” 

And it was like each step brought another piece of the puzzle for that image she’d battled with for so long. The song, and the dress, and the walking, all mixing together to make a scene she could fit herself in without butterflies. 

It wasn’t a nightmare. It wasn’t even close. 

“You’re crying,” Chloe whispered through nearly closed lips, leaning in so that no one else would hear her as they made their way down the aisle. 

“What?” Beca said a little too loudly and a little too obviously. Composing herself, she smiled politely at the people sitting in the row she was about to pass, but her words were geared at the woman walking next to her. “I am not.” 

“You are too,” Chloe answered. Beca quickly reached up, swatting away the tear that was making its escape down her cheek. 

“Whatever, you saw nothing,” Beca hissed back, and Chloe chuckled. Light, breathless, like the sound of the music that was trailing behind them. Slipping to the side of the makeshift altar, Chloe’s link arm straightened out, grabbing Beca’s hand and pulling her close without the rest of the crowd seeing. They were stationed to stand beside Jessica and Ashley, who were just slightly in front of Emily and Stacie (damn height order), like a battalion behind Cynthia Rose, who stood, swaying slightly, at the center of the piece. 

Chloe reached out, squeezing CR on the shoulder and rocking her a little before finding Beca’s hand again. Beca looked down the line at the Bellas, stationed in a perfect row, and leaned against Chloe’s hand. 

They were here. They were together. Plucked out of the headlong dash that was the future, they got to remain for a second in the past, and Beca had spent so much of the weekend racing around the things happening in her head that she missed just how tired she was of having to stand on her own. She missed these girls. Not their chatter or their games or their songs….

She missed the way it felt to stand with someone. She missed the way it felt to be close without having to think about how close she was, and she missed the ease of it all. The feeling of the air when she knew she wasn’t alone. 

The vows weren’t long - no one expected them to be, considering that Cynth was always someone who liked things short and sweet. And while Beca wanted more than anything to focus on what her friend was saying to solidify her relationship in the eyes of the nation, the more she focused on concentrating, the less she was able to pick up. Chloe’s hand had sneaked from Beca’s to Beca’s waist, drawing lazy circles over Beca’s hip in a way that was classically Chloe and therefore, classically innocent. Mindless. 

For the redhead, anyway. 

When they reached the end, Chloe squealed, throwing her hands up, and the rest of the Bellas followed in celebration, letting out hoots and hollers as Cynthia Rose “sealed the deal” (these words were apparently how she told the minister to deal with the “you may kiss the bride” situation). And Beca felt like she was being tickled, almost. Maybe by Chloe’s breath as she whooped, or by the pull of the dress, Beca couldn’t tell. She just knew there was a pinch and twist in her gut that made her shout out too, wiggling her hips slightly and giggling. 

Chloe slipped out right before they started to take pictures, something about “powdering my nose” that Beca never really understood, and in the interim, she let herself watch the Bellas, who had broken out in a harmony of 500 Miles that could put any of her mixes to shame. They were dancing, too, and it was silly how drunk they looked, all motioning with come-hither hands to Beca to join in. 

“Some things never change,” Jesse said from beside her, reaching to unbutton his suit-coat. 

“I’ve got a feeling they’ll be doing this when they’re fifty,” Beca agreed. Without thinking, she reached out, pulling Jesse into a hug. “You been hiding all weekend?” 

“Wanted to save all my good lookin’ for the special occasion,” he said, brushing his hair back jokingly. “Didn’t wanna tempt anyone.” 

“At a gay wedding,” Beca quipped, and Jesse shrugged. He was nodding, always nodding. Beca had called him a bobblehead when they were dating, because he tended to ease his way into conversations that way. 

“Nah, I had work,” he said, “Couldn’t escape until this morning. They wanted a rough cut of this scene and I–”

“I promised Chloe no shop talk,” Beca said, holding up her hand. He grinned widely. 

“The wife, I see.” 

“Were you…You were at the wedding, right? You do know who got married….” 

“Well sure,” he said, “And it was at this very same wedding where Chloe had her arm wrapped around you. Which…I mean, if that wasn’t you two being you two then I’m really going to have to slap some sense in you.” 

Beca scratched the edge of her forehead. “Was that a thing I was supposed to warn you about? Because there wasn’t much time…Like, I mean, I wasn–”

“Becawww,” he said, his tone almost serious. He put a hand on Beca’s shoulder, letting the palm weigh there. “I’m no scorned lover, despite my leading man appearance.” 

Beca nodded, offering up a weak smile. 

“You two were dating when we were dating anyway. Not–” he paused when he saw Beca’s face, “I mean that you might as well have been dating. How long has it been happening, anyway?” 

“Um, two hours, roughly,” Beca said, grimacing. “This is weird…”

She spun around to go, but Jesse’s hand on her shoulder held her in place, turning her back to face him. “I’m gonna want the deets, you know,” he said, tilting his head down so that he was looking up at her, “But that can wait, because your lady has arrived.” Finishing with a taunting whisper, he leaned in with a side smile, “You know what I said about my looks tempting people…I wouldn’t want anyone to be jealous…”

“Shut up,” Beca grumbled, grinning up at him. “You’re a nerd.” 

“I’m your nerd,” he said. At that moment, Chloe’s hands wrapped around Beca’s waist in a hug. She rested her chin on Beca’s shoulder. 

“What, you keeping a farm of us, Becs?” she said, pecking Beca’s temple lightly. “I could’vesworn she told me I was her nerd a little bit ago.” 

“She’s building an army, actually,” Jesse joked, and Chloe giggled, the sound tickling over Beca’s bare shoulder. 

“I’m going to go now,” she said, “Because I’m uncomfortable.” 

“Don’t be,” Chloe hummed, squeezing Beca tighter to keep her from moving. 

“She’s right,” Jesse said, pulling out his phone and shooting off a quick text. As he was walking away to where Benji was standing with Emily, he threw out a small wave. “Use protection, kids!” 

“Shut up!” Beca said quickly in response, Chloe’s gasp adding more to the humiliation. “That was so…I’m…I don’t even know.” 

“You’re flustered,” Chloe said, finally turning Beca around so that the back hug became a front hold. Her hands found Beca’s neck, resting there on her shoulders. “It’s cute.” 

“Are you drunk?” 

“I’m happy,” Chloe clarified. Sure enough, there was gleam in her eyes. “Because now I think I can do this–” she tugged at Beca’s neck, pulling them closer until their foreheads were touching, “Without it being a weird.” 

Beca closed the difference in a kiss, hand finding Chloe’s jaw and running her thumb over it. She breathed into the kiss, inhaling and finding that everything smelled like Chloe. 

She thought that if she had that all the time, it wouldn’t be such a struggle to wake up in the morning, because this….

…This was something electric, always, and she wondered if one day that feeling might dullen. When Chloe’s hands moved to the small of her back, pulling her in so that Beca’s spine was arched, the sound that came out of the redhead was enough to tell her that no, it wasn’t going to get old. 

Like so many other things this weekend, it was impervious to time and to frequency and to the effects of the turning of the universe. At least, that’s what Beca thought. She didn’t have much issue testing that, though, and trying this little thing out whenever she wanted. 

Just to…see if it could get old. 

That’s all. 

Chloe pulled away, tongue poking out from between her teeth, and she laughed. She laughed, that same laugh from before, so Beca joined in, feeling now more than ever like she was being tickled from the inside out. 

Then, just like when she was standing at the end of the aisle, she saw a flash. White and blinding. 

This one, though, was accompanied by Emily shouting, “Say cheese!” and only when they broke apart completely, did either Beca or Chloe realize the camera that was almost shoved in their faces. 

The photo was of that instant after Chloe pulled back, foreheads still touching, with Beca’s eyes closed but her mouth open just slightly, an impossible smile ghosting at the edges. Chloe’s face was squished, nose wrinkled, tongue peeking out of her teeth as she giggled, and Beca thought for the thousandth time that she was beautiful. Really, unconsciously, impossibly beautiful. 

Only, with Chloe’s finger brushing over the side of the screen with Beca’s face, the brunette felt like she was beautiful too. Not beautiful because Chloe thought so, or because standing next to the redhead made anyone beautiful just like a contact high. 

But because she looked happier than she was used to seeing. Lighter, and brighter, and when Stacie stole the phone to add a filter, Beca reached up, hopping, to steal it right back. Because she didn’t want what was meant to be in color to be put into black and white. 

Chapter Text

They finally got to settling the bet, which meant that the pool of money between all the Bellas was split between Stacie, Beca, and Chloe - the only three people who guessed, somewhat drunkenly, that “bhloe” would come together before the wedding. 

Cyn guessed that it would happen two weeks after graduation. Em was still unconvinced that it hadn’t happened already, and Amy held out, claiming, “If they’re not together now then they’ll never see the light.” 

So, after professional photos were taken in all sorts of ridiculous poses around the barn and dinner was started to be prepared in the corner - with Aubrey supervising, of course - Stacie clapped to garner everyone’s attention and gather her lump sum. 

“This is money I’m glad to give up,” Cynthia Rose said, throwing away her twenty dollar bill, “If it means y’all finally came to your goddamned senses.” 

“True,” Amy sang, “I don’t have any green toilet paper as of now, but I do have a pair of edible underwear in my luggage. No? Not appealing?” 

Beca watched as Amy looked between her and Chloe, waiting for any form of interest in her offer. 

“That’s not…necessary,” Beca choked out, scratching the back of her neck. Chloe’s hand found it’s way to the small of Beca’s back, pulling her in tighter. Beca found that what should’ve been a nerve-wracking move - the timing, the proximity, the hand placement - really only helped her to breathe easier, blush falling from her cheeks as quickly as it came. 

“Paypal us, Ames,” Chloe said with a wink. “And talk to Stace about edible lingerie as proper payment.” 

As Stacie walked slowly up to Amy to discuss things in quieter tones, Chloe turned to Beca, a grin inching up her face. 

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Beca said, moving to step back from Chloe. As it was, they were standing so that Beca’s hands were on Chloe’s shoulders - the hand on her back staying in position despite the fact that they were now facing each other. 

“Like what?” 

“Like you know a million secrets about me,” Beca said. She let go of Chloe’s shoulders, heading over to where drinks were already being served. “It’s freaking me out.” 

“Sorry,” Chloe coughed. She sped up to keep Beca’s pace, leaning on the beverage table and eying Beca. 

“What?!” Beca said, eyebrows furrowed at Chloe’s permanent smile. 

“Nothing!” Chloe said, backing up. 

“You’re being weird,” Beca grumbled. She reached over the drinks to where the cake was sitting, dotting her pinky in a touch of frosting. Chloe squealed at that, earning a surprised look from Beca.

“That is a wedding sin,” Chloe said, grabbing Beca’s hand. “You can’t steal from the cake!” 

“It’s not stealing,” Beca muttered behind a mouth full of frosting, “It’s taste-testing.” 

There was a drop left on Beca’s cheek, and Chloe reached out, plucking it off with a swipe of her finger. 

“And now you’re officially as guilty as me,” Beca said, though Chloe responded with a slight roll of her eyes. 

“It’s secondhand theft,” Chloe said simply. “Doesn’t count.” 

“Whatever,” Beca said, crossing her arms and sighing. “Pour me a drink, girlfriend.” 

It should be noted that this was the first time Beca employed the use of that title - whichimmediately sent a shiver of absolute and instinctual panic down her spine, but she’d work on that - to get Chloe Beale to do something. 

It should also be noted that in an effort to not go into an existential identity crisis every time she said the word “girlfriend”, Beca used the power of that label several times throughout the night. The more she used it, according to her logic, the more she could get used to it. It took time. It took practice. 

Her use of the word, though, had nothing to do with the fact that when she used it, Chloe giggled and skipped off to grab whatever thing she requested (drinks), which meant after an hour - and before dinner was even served - Beca was drunk enough to feel sleepy, and Chloe, sober, was loving it. 

“You were looking at me weird,” Beca said, head resting on her hand as she sat at one of the fold-out tables set out to convert the aisle into a dining area. “I swear you were. Are.” 

“I’m looking at you like I always look at you,” Chloe giggled, hand reaching out to twist into Beca’s. 

“You’re looking at me like I’m naked,” Beca said, and Chloe cackled, then. 

“I’m looking at you,” Chloe said, leaning in to just speak into Beca’s ear, “Like you’re the most beautiful girl in the room.” 

“That’s not how you always look at me,” Beca argued, taking another sloppy sip from her drink. Chloe stole the glass from her, leaning on her chair to put it at the other table and securely away from Beca’s grasp. 

“Oh, but it is,” Chloe said, “You just never noticed.” 

“Well, it’s weird,” Beca said, unintentionally swaying closer to Chloe until her forehead resting on the redhead’s. “Makes me feel funny.” 

“Becs,” Chloe hummed, voice steady and sure. She put a hand on Beca’s shoulder, solidifying her. “You tired?” 

Beca nodded, eyes squinting under the weight of the alcohol she had. 

“You want a nap?” 

“You,” Beca said, already resting her head on Chloe’s shoulder, “Are a saint.” 

Laughing lightly, Chloe stood up carefully, bringing Beca with her and walking slowly until they made it out to Aubrey’s car. Beca went in the back seat first, followed by Chloe, who hit her head slightly on the roof. 

It had stung, and were Chloe alone she might’ve had the gall to swear, but with Beca there, the tired laughter drained out the pain, and she slipped in between the backseat cushion and Beca’s body, which immediately formed to fit Chloe’s. 

Beca hummed. Here, in the slow stagnancy of the car, the alcohol stopped buzzing, and there was something that replaced it. 

It wasn’t drunkenness so much as it was contentedness. Fullness. A feeling no different from a post-holiday meal, scrunched up on the couch, where all the festivities of the day slip away in favor of the drone of seasonal television. 

She was working on a stomach filled only with Luna bars that Jessica and Ashley stashed away in their bags and one or two gummy bears from the bottom of Chloe’s phone case-like purse, but the last thing she felt was hollow. And any tiredness she was feeling was the sensation of blood being weighed down by some kind of honey, slow-pumping and rushing at the same time. 

She breathed in Chloe’s scent, sighing. “You always know when I need a break.” 

“Your face is easy to read,” Chloe said mindlessly, eyes already closed. 

It was at this point that Beca realized something new, and she thought maybe this was why she had been so exhausted in the first place - because she was realizing something new and paradigm shifting every couple of moments, it seemed, and there was only so much a body could take. Either way, it was now that she realized there was only ever one person who could be present and still make Beca feel like she was escaping. 

She lived her entire life in solitude - not in a way that you should pity her for, but just in the way that a quiet girl with shy tendencies has a habit of doing. She developed, then, a certain Beca that existed around other people, and a Beca that existed alone. A private and public self, ne’er the two shall meet. 

She’d always thought with Jesse that that was the struggle - in order for her to stay sane, she needed to see that private self. And in order to see that private self, she needed to be alone. Without him. Sufficiently, this cut off most of her quality time with him, and she assumed that this would be an issue in most relationships. How do you become the most vulnerable, most pure version of yourself when you have to do it in front of someone else? 

Here, now, with Chloe, it struck her like a beam of golden light - or, something decidedly less religiously toned. With Chloe, she was that self. She was every self. There was no escape, because there was no need to hide. Chloe wasn’t a presence to transform her from one private Beca to a thousand public ones. 

Chloe was the escape in and of itself. The only person Beca felt like she was her true self around, and, okay, that was cliched, but she had had five glasses of champagne, eight hours of socializing, and two and a half minutes of cuddling, so she felt that “cliched” was allowed for the time being. 

The biggest thing that stood in Beca’s way throughout so much of her life was the wall she built up between the person that she was behind closed doors and the person she presented herself as. It’s what kept her from joining the Bellas at first, and, frankly, though the wall had gotten thinner, it caused problems well throughout her career at Barden. It’s what spurned the internship secret of senior year, and it’s what caused her to leave after graduation without making any formal goodbyes. 

It was, in Beca’s eyes, something that would never be eradicated. A tumor of sorts, lining every vital organ and keeping them from pumping at 100% productivity, 100% of the time. She could work, and people could fight it, but at the end of the day, after three years of dating the same man or four years of sleeping in the same house with the same women, it wasn’t going to go away. 

It was, instead, something Beca just had to live with. The curse of introversion or shyness or whatever the principal of her junior high had called it. 

And it didn’t slip Beca’s mind that this would inevitably keep her from being able to be happy and in love. To be happy was okay. To be in love was okay. To have both, wasn’t possible, because to have one was to deny the self that was allowed or capable of fostering the other. 

Only now, there was Chloe. 

There had always been Chloe, who, even in the silence, was able to make Beca feel notalone and distinctly alone at the same time. In her, Beca felt herself merging into the one person she both wanted to be and inherently was, combined, of course, with the angel that Chloe believed her to be. 

The invisibility with Chloe shattered. It had been shattered since that very first day at the activities fair. And left behind was a Beca that was unprotected but also very clearly unafraid. 

So here, escaping from the party for a few minutes of solitude should’ve been something that only Beca did. A second, she thought, to catch her breath, both from the socializing and from the whole idea of Chloe Beale and “girlfriend” and “I think I’m in love with you”. 

She should’ve been alone. 

But Chloe was breathing next to her, sleeping with a grin on her face and an arm wrapped around her waist, and Beca didn’t feel like she was suffocating or waiting for the real escape later. 

No. 

She felt like she was safe and secure - the feelings that always accompanied being surrounded by people, while also feeling like she had enough room to breathe. 

And Chloe was the only person she had ever known who could merge those two pieces together to make being alone not feel lonely. 

She nuzzled into Chloe’s chest, sighing quietly and feeling the redhead pull her tighter. 

She wasn’t sure what this was. 

She wasn’t sure how comfortable she was with “girlfriend” when it wasn’t being applied in the pretend way that they’d maintained all weekend. 

She wasn’t sure what it meant, or if she handle the questions that would swoop in the minute they left this perfect bubble of openness and understanding - what her boss would say at the Christmas party later that year, or what her dad would say when she asked if Chloe could come to her stepsisters baptism. 

She wasn’t sure about any of it, and she wasn’t sure about herself. 

But she was sure that she was tired of thinking for one night - for one weekend that was impossibly long. She was sure that the sound of the Bellas singing in harmony to the song the DJ had started playing was the most beautiful sound she heard aside from the small puffs of breath being released by Chloe next to her. She was sure that the hand on her waist was solid and warm and right, and she was sure, above all, of Chloe Beale. 

Which seemed like enough for know. Enough for ever, maybe, but she didn’t want to think about that. 

She just wanted to sleep, ringing in the end of three days of universe shifting in this rental car that she sat in hours ago on the lap of her best friend with sores on the inside of her cheek from biting too hard. Because she felt, very certainly, that when she woke up she would be as confused as she was when she fell asleep. 

But she’d been waking up to Chloe, who would be angry they missed the actual cake, and she thought that if life was a pile of want, the desire to stretch after a nap and realize Chloe was still there was a mountain. 

So she closed her eyes, reaching down to wrap her hand around Chloe’s, and she nudged her slightly. 

“Chlo?” 

The redhead hummed, awake, but on the fringe. 

“I want to place a new bet,” Chloe said suddenly, making Beca’s eyes flash open for a second. She furrowed her eyebrows, confused, and waiting for the redhead to continue. “Since I had good luck with the last one.” 

“Okay,” Beca breathed, nodding slightly. 

“I bet that you love me,” Chloe said, “That you are, undoubtedly, in love with me.” 

“Can I bet that you’re right?” Beca said, “Because I have fifty bucks to my name now, and I wanna put some money on that.” 

Chloe smiled sleepily, eyes still closed, and stretched her legs like a kitten mid-nap. “I’m not going to money, Beca Mitchell,” she muttered. “But I want to hear it. If you can. That’s my payment.” 

Beca sighed, nuzzling closer and closing her own eyes too. 

“No pretending though! We cheated one bet,” Chloe said, “I’m not testing Lady Luck by cheating another.” 

Beca, despite herself, laughed. 

She laughed. 

When she should have been terrified, she closed her eyes, started to fall asleep, andlaughed. 

So if she need a sign that this was good, and real, and right, all of these things were enough. 

“I’m in love with you,” Beca said, “No goshdarn ‘I think’ about it. So you win.” 

“Our first date,” Chloe hummed with a tired smile wider than her entire face, “Is on you, then.” 

Chapter Text

Beca slipped out of the shower in a cloud of steam, letting it fall over the mirror in tiny droplets before taking a deep breath and brushing out her hair. She preferred it this way - hidden behind the haze of the fog, she couldn’t see her face or the way the makeup from the night before was smeared on her face. 

Scattered over her neck were a few purple marks, and when Beca ran her hands over them in the shower she let herself play a game of connect the dots - neck to shoulders to hip bones and back again, feeling the effect that it had on that permanent shiver down her spine and turning the temperature of the water just a tad bit cooler in the process. 

She was leaving today. Headed back to the apartment that was a touch too grey after spending a weekend pretending like that place didn’t exist at all. 

It’s not that she hated the city - it was actually pretty nice, and everyone at the studio was kind enough to her. It was just that it was…lonely. 

Solitary, more like, and while Beca was at one time used to this, she’d grown to be accustomed to a certain level of invading privacies, inappropriate song performances, and giggle-squeals keeping her up at night. 

Not to mention, LA didn’t have Chloe. They skyped, obviously - that’s how this whole mess started - but Chloe was back home with her parents looking somewhat desperately for a job there, and texting wasn’t ever equivalent to the way she curled her lip with she was surprised or offended, or the way she raised her eyebrow when she had something particularly suggestive to say. 

She was leaving today. Definitely and without argument, she was leaving today. 

Both Chloe and her skipped their flights, paying for the room for another night under the excuse that all the Bellas needed a proper ride to the airport, and they really didn’t mind the extra time spent together. 

The first half of that was a lie. The second half of that was the truth. 

They woke up a few hours into the reception, after the cake but before the final song, stumbling into the barn again with bedhead and sleepy eyes that had Aubrey convinced she needed to take the rental car to a cleaner before turning it back in. 

There were bright sides, of course, to missing the first dance and the garter toss. 

Such as being sober and being wide awake for hours into the night, and while there was a bit of discomfort surrounding the process of sliding the key into the door on their way back - tension and uncertainty painting everyone of their moves and weighing down the air until Chloe put her purse on the cabinet with the tv and turned to Beca with cheeks redder than her hair. 

“I want to do something,” she said “With you, and I want to make sure I’m allowed to.” 

“If you order pizza, I’m not paying for it,” Beca said jokingly, though she was entirely too sober to be walking towards Chloe with the kind of confident, mocking hip-sway that she was managing. 

She never expected Chloe to be coy, but she recognized in the redhead that the uncertainty based around her questions was centralized in a need to be sure that Beca was totally and completely comfortable with what she wanted to do. 

It was appreciated, too, because it gave Beca the chance to feel completely and one hundred percent….capable. She knew, logistically, that she didn’t have the upper hand - so to speak - but with the shy game that Chloe played, she allowed Beca to make the moves, stepping forward slowly until her hand was on Chloe’s collar bone, drawing lines over the bone. It let Beca move slow, and then move fast, and it let Beca pause to think about what she was going to do and where she was going to do it, and, most importantly, it let because stop thinkingwhen she needed to, pressing her lips against Chloe’s neck slowly, softly, until she found her way to Chloe’s lips and her hands found their way to Chloe’s hips. 

It was strange. 

She thought that the next morning, when she was lying in bed next to Chloe, feeling hands trailing up and down her bare arm. 

Being with a girl, sure. She wasn’t nearly drunk enough to call any of what happened a “blame” situation, or to even really want to turn it into something that someone would put fault on. No, she was sober, and she was fumbling, and, when there was just enough of a sound coming from Chloe to make her brain fire up - both overthinking and not thinking at all - she was overwhelmingly afraid. But she wasn’t uncertain, and with Chloe sitting back on the bed carefully, looking up at Beca for the next move, she felt…almost…confident. Or, at the very least, confident in the fact that what she was doing was something she wanted to do. 

More than she ever expected to want to do it. 

Because with  Chloe looked up at her, flushed, with her dress half unzipped and her lips red, Beca forgot about all the claims towards the redhead’s beauty from earlier that day and settled for a clean-cut final solution. 

Chloe was hot. Very definitively hot, and while Beca didn’t like using that word, none other came to mind. Chloe was a person capable of enlisting an entire army to fight her battle - not for love, but for lust - and when she scooted back on the mattress, the dress was pulled down just enough for Beca to see the top of her bra, which was naturally bright red, and…yes. 

Hot. 

Because Beca never really felt the kind of on-fire feeling that she’d heard everyone talking about - hands so burning cold that they were shaking until they found something solid in the curve of Chloe’s hips, needing to touch everything and understanding nothing all at once. She never really understood the kind of electric jolt that could shoot so actively up and down her spine, and when people mentioned the way the space under her skin could turn inside out, she always felt like it was some sort of exaggeration. 

Until now, with Chloe. With the pads of her fingers skitting across zippers and the feel of Chloe’s lips moving from hers to the bare skin on her shoulder. Until now, with the sounds that Chloe was making whenever she did something right and the faces she made whenever Beca touched just the right spot. 

Until now, when Chloe did the same, and she managed to both feel it so deeply it made herbrain flip and not feel it at all, almost floating from some place above and beyond her body. 

It had clicked. In that moment and the series of moments that came spiraling out like a loose thread under Chloe’s touch, it had clicked that this was what people talked about. This was why it was “such a big deal”. 

The danger that surround love and lust and everything in between was all hitched on this moment, and the centuries of poems or innuendos she was forced to read in lit classes that never matched up to hasty make-out sessions in cars or nights with candles where Jesse triedoh so hard to make it…right. 

Time, and time, and time again over the course of her weekend with Chloe - and even before that in their four years - Beca was overwhelmed with the realization that everything felt right when for so long she couldn’t help but feel like it was wrong. Time, and time, and time again over the course of her weekend with Chloe it. had. clicked. 

That night, it clicked again. So clearly and so perfectly that Beca found herself laughing by the end of it - nearly scaring Chloe half to death - because how could she not have known sooner, and why did it take her so long, with so much fear, and so much trouble, to know. 

“I’m not,” Beca said, breathing to catch whatever oxygen she could, “Laughing at you.” 

“Really? Cuz this isn’t the response I wanted to elicit in you,” Chloe said, hand trailing from where it sat just above her belly button to the side of her hip where, if she kept making the figure eight she was working on, it tickled so much Beca’s insides flipped. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head, “I’m sorry. No. It’s not you. It’s…this.” 

“Sex,” Chloe said simply, pausing her figure eight to really examine Beca’s face. 

“Yeah. No. I dunno. Us, actually. And how…dumb I am.” 

“You’re not dumb,” Chloe said. She leaned her head down, hair falling in ringlets over Beca’s chest so that the brunette let out a shaky breath, pulling her focus in enough to continue the conversation. “You’re actually very,” Chloe started, scooting up slightly to press brush her lips over Beca’s chin, “Good.” 

Beca shook her head, trying to fend Chloe off for a half a second so she could finish her though. “No, uh,” she breathed again, smelling only Chloe, and she felt the need to move her hands. To fiddle with them, or twist them, or…something, so she settled on running them up and down Chloe’s back. “I just don’t know what took me so long. To…realize.” 

“Life doesn’t tell you what it knows until it thinks you’re ready for it,” Chloe said simply, thumb pressing down on the freckle on Beca’s shoulder. 

“Yeah,” Beca said. Her hands moved from Chloe’s back to her mid-stomach. “Yeah. I’m just…I’m glad it did.” 

Standing in the bathroom, towel falling just short enough for the bruises to peak over on both sides, she brushing at the condensation on the mirror just enough to see her hair falling limply over her shoulders. 

She was, for the record, very glad that it did. 

“Beca?” Chloe shouted from behind the bathroom door. There was a coffee left on the sink with Beca’s name on it, complete with a sharpie heart that Beca, rolling her eyes, imagined Chloe asking the barista for with a wink and her very unbrushed hair. On the corner of the mirror just above the cup was an arrow drawn by fingertips and the words, “For you. -C.” 

“Yeah?” Beca called out, holding tighter onto her towel. 

“When do you fly out tomorrow?” 

Beca fumbled through her makeup case to find deodorant, trying her best to picture the boarding pass she’d been emailed earlier that morning. “Before noon.” 

“Delta?” 

“Uh,” Beca said. She paused, tapping her fingers against the edge of the sink before turning the doorknob. “Yeah, I think so. Why?” 

Stationed on the edge of the bed with her laptop, Chloe clicked once, with a dramatic flourish, and looked at Beca, the grin growing wider on her face. “No reason.” 

“What,” Beca said, holding tight to her towel but pressing her knee on the mattress to crawl up on the bed and nudge Chloe’s shoulder with one finger, “Do you have up your sleeve?” 

Chloe giggled, turning the computer screen to face Beca so she could read the confirmation email. 

“I’m going home,” she said, “Finally. And I’m dragging you with me.” 

“This,” Beca started. She crawled forward more, pressing her forehead to Chloe’s shoulder now and taking a deep, steady breath. “This is something I’m so grateful for.”

“I know,” Chloe said, closing the computer screen. She reached down, grabbing Beca by the chin and pulling her up into a kiss. “You’re welcome.” 

“I love you,” Beca said, this time letting it carry every ounce of weight that she’d been so afraid to unload only hours ago. 

“You can’t stop saying it now,” Chloe giggled. Her words were slurred with the laughter, her eyes half-closed, and Beca couldn’t help but feel like they were both a little drunk. 

At the very least, not existing on this plane. 

Beca shrugged, moving to stand behind Chloe on her knees, hands on Chloe’s shoulders. “I don’t want to stop,” Beca said, letting Chloe’s head fall back onto her chest. 

“Good,” Chloe hummed, looking up at Beca and reaching a hand out to run over her chin. “I never want you to.”