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.”