Chapter Text
“God,” the door opened unceremoniously, and from the kitchen counter, Chloe heard Beca’s boots echoing on the foyer floor. She was mumbling something that the walls didn’t pick up until she entered the kitchen. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Chloe looked up from where she was chopping vegetables for dinner, spotting the tiny hurricane of a rage whirling through the room. It took most of Chloe’s self-control not to break into a grin. “Ah yes, great to see you too. My day was great, thanks for asking. I’m just making dinner for my gorgeous girlfriend. No big deal.”
Beca rolled her eyes, pulling herself onto the bar-stool before throwing a magazine down and opening up to a page where her own face was smiling giddily back up at them. Donning a striped suit with high-waisted jean shorts, photo-Beca was propped on one elbow, her hand trailing down Chloe’s figure - which was donning a bikini that, at the time, nearly convinced Beca to not leave the house at all. Their legs were intertwined on the towel, and it was a grainy photo, but you could see the wicked grin on their faces. Beneath the photo, “Hollywood’s Favorite Girl-Power Duo Enjoy a Day at the Beach”.
“It’s a cute photo,” Chloe remarked, moving to read the rest of the magazine. She was a sucker for tabloids, even after she started adorning the glossy pages with headlines like “Red-Headed Bombshell Hosts TV’s Most Talked About Dance Show”.
Beca groaned, frustrated, and pulled the magazine out of Chloe’s grasp.
“Becs, what’s the issue?”
“What’s the issue?!” Beca asked incredulously, running her hands through her hair. “‘Girl-power duo’?! Seriously? My tongue is practically down your throat.”
Chloe rolled her eyes, turning back to check on the lasagna in the oven. Grabbing the oven-mitts, she reached in and pulled out the food, placing it on the cooling rack with a satisfied smile. (She knew she’d nail this domestic thing eventually).
“Chloe!” Beca squeaked, still annoyed. “Why aren’t you bothered by this?!”
Chloe shrugged, pulling out plates. “Should I be? It’s not exactly surprising. Without any official statement by us, they just want to be safe.”
“Safe?!” Beca rolled her eyes, scoffing. “I was behind Zac Efron in traffic last week, and they called us the new ‘It’ couple.”
Trying to stifle a laugh, Chloe watched as Beca’s cheeks got redder with frustration. Tiny, irritated Beca was a Beca that always made Chloe giddy. Still, she held a hand up to Beca’s cheek, trying to calm her down. “Breathe, Mitchell. Dumb media bullshit comes with the territory.”
Admittedly, Chloe was right. Of course. They had both seen infinitely worse things written about them, and it was an accepted part of this dream wherein they could make music - or be adorable on stage - and make money. They’d sold their lives to this world a while ago, for their art ( “art” being loosely defined here).
And, on top of that accepted compromise, Beca despised most forms of PDA. The fact that she was angry about not being called out on it? It didn’t make much sense. In fact, the amount of irritation brewing in Beca over these inane and innocuous comments made next to no sense at all. Except, after years of keeping herself from gushing over Chloe Beale, she assumed that sealing the deal with a kiss meant that she wouldn’t have to hide any of that shit anymore.
“I just…” Beca pushed herself off the bar-stool, moving around the counter to put a hand on either side of Chloe’s hips. “I just kinda want to show the world how hot my girlfriend is.”
Chloe smiled, licking off the tomato sauce on her thumb before resting her arms on Beca’s shoulders.
“You know,” Chloe hummed, leaning closer to the other girl, “We could make it impossible for them to deny it.”
Beca breathed, pushing closer to Chloe so that their lips were nearly touching. “Show me what you’ve got in mind, Beale.”
–
In the weeks that followed, most of Beca’s voicemail was filled with her agent complaining about another action shot of them sneaking in and out of alleyways or peeking through the windows of their not-entirely-private bedroom, bedraggled and half-dressed.
“This is not how a respectful celebrity behaves, Mitchell,” her agent said for the umpteenth time before Beca whined an agreement and hung up. He was right, she knew. Prior to this gal-pal experiment, her private life was and forever would be her private life. Privacy was a right she guarded at all costs - even before she was announced as the next big thing.
Only, privacy was stripped from her as a result of the game Chloe concocted. The how-far-can-we-push-this game. Because Beca, who hated public…well, whatever they were doing…which, admittedly, was quite a lot…probably too much…found herself quite enjoying Chloe’s take on this game.
It was a dangerous cycle they indulged in, really. Beca would get riled up about the ridiculous headlines, and Chloe would take that anger and let it push Beca into allowing her to practically straddle the musician at a Hollywood luncheon or nip at her ear in the middle of an award show - causing Beca to throw her a glance that in itself was not safe for work. Those things would fuel a new round of ridiculous headlines, and the cycle would start again.
The danger of this game didn’t go unnoticed by their friends.
You two are so dumb, Jesse texted her, along with a picture of a tabloid from an aisle at a grocery store.
Glad to see my favorite gal pals are getting along swimmingly, Amy emailed them with a link to an article about “Best Friend Goals”.
This has really got to stop, Aubrey snapchatted Chloe a picture of them on an entertainment news channel, to which Beca responded by stealing the redhead’s phone and sending a picture of her middle finger with the caption You’re the one watching that shit anyway.
Sitting on the couch after dinner, still catching up on the day, Chloe mentioned how her agent suggested they start following the mindset of “they can’t mislabel it if you don’t give them anything to label”.
Beca pressed her head further into Chloe’s lap.
“I want to give them something to label,” she whined, as Chloe ran circles over their palms. Chloe watched the way Beca’s brows were knit in absolute frustration. She hummed.
“You’re really bothered about this, aren’t you?”
“I…really like us,” she explained, “Like, I love you, and I like this, and I’ve spent a little too long letting ‘us’ be nonexistent, yunno?”
Chloe nodded, pushing the other girl to continue. Beca always needed encouragement.
“It’s not some big pride thing,” she pressed onwards, “It’s really not. It’s just the fact that…I don’t know…if we’re only real inside of these four walls, then are we really real at all?”
Pausing her trailing finger, Chloe intertwined her hand with Beca’s. “We don’t need some magazine headline to be real, Beca,” she reminded.
“No, but it’d be nice. I want to talk about you. ‘What’s your favorite food?’ Oh, this fucking amazing zucchini pasta my girlfriend makes. ‘What’s the best gift you ever received?’ Oh, this star necklace my girlfriend gave me before we were dating. ‘Where do you see yourself in the next five years?’ Sitting right here, next to my girlfriend, arguing over what we should name our dog, because I refused to have a pug named Phinneas.”
Chloe laughed at that, tracing Beca’s hairline with her pinky. “It’s a fantastic pug name,” she argued quickly, bending down to kiss Beca’s forehead. “You see, the risk in all that is that the world will realize bad-ass singer and producer Beca Mitchell is the softest most adorable whipped romantic ever.”
Beca smiled shyly, shrugging. “I’m not even going to deny that one anymore,” she answered, and Chloe bit her lip, her chest warming up. She squeezed Beca’s hand.
“Patience, babe,” she said, “They’ll get there.”
–
Only, they didn’t exactly “get there”. And, with Beca having to go on a two-week press tour away from Chloe, she was slammed with questions that seemed to rub in the fact that hadn’t “gotten there”. Which was only part of the reason that four hours didn’t seem like enough time for the couple to fully reunite before having to be on the red-carpet for Chloe’s show’s season premiere.
Fortunately for Chloe, the show was getting the best ratings on television, but unfortunately for Beca, this meant that showing support for her girlfriend entailed walking on an outdoor carpet in a dress that was squeezed so tightly she wasn’t allowed to eat dinner, with reporters shouting her name and cameras flashing lights. And, even though they’d arrived in the same car (a truly wonderful fact, because as they left, Chloe ran a finger over Beca’s bare-shoulder and purred “God, that dress is sexy” in such a way that would’ve delayed them from the event otherwise), Chloe quickly disappeared from Beca’s side, swept away to deal with prep for the show and specific network interviews.
She was understandably starving and grumpy by the time she was corralled towards the two spray-tanned reporters she recognized from Aubrey’s snapchats. Entirely too cheery, too skinny, and too plastic, they seemed to swarm her with questions about her dress, her night,her music, and just when Beca thought she’d escape with easy, one-worded answers, they asked about Chloe.
“Are you excited about tonight’s show?” the man asked, shoving a microphone into Beca’s face. Beca shrugged.
“Yeah, I follow it closely.”
“Do you have a favorite contestant?” the woman jumped in, and Beca could almost feel her eyes light up at the prospect of talking about Chloe - Chloe who glowed on stage, Chloe who had this lovable tendency to move off script, her eyes alight with mischief.
“I actually have my eyes on the host,” Beca answered, grinning.
“Right! Chloe Beale is a close friend of yours,” the woman said, and the man chuckled, bouncing off of her comment with a bubbliness that had to be induced by drugs of some sort. “She certainly seems like a good time.”
“Mmhhhmmm,” Beca said, her grin widening to near wicked status. She fiddled with her rings, thinking about the car-ride to the red-carpet, and the fact that Chloe’s dress was a shade of blue that should be made illegal. “She’s amazing.”
“Now, tell me, Beca, while we have you here,” the man said, taking a small step closer - which, if Beca weren’t so giddy at the image of Chloe, would’ve sent her further into classic Beca-grump territory. “What do Hollywood’s favorite BFFs do for fun?”
The couple’s diluted title woke Beca up from her daydream, piercing her with the same fierceness she was starting to become accustomed to when she saw the headlines. With irritation, she thought back to the limo-ride, and the pictures released of them earlier in the week, and how, despite the caption “Beale touches best friend’s chest in a familiar way”, the touch most definitely did not feel friendly.
She smiled, then, making sure the camera caught the glimmer in her eyes. “Um, well, we bake sometimes. Online shopping, crappy reality TV…all that jazz.” The reporters were nodding, smiling as they expected almost every word. But Beca wasn’t done.
“Oh, also, we have sex. Like, a lot of sex. Classic gal pal fun-times for us!”
–
That night, when she pulled her phone out of the clutch she’d borrowed from Chloe as they pulled up to the Taco Bell drive-through, she scrolled to the top of the Bellas group chat - which had just been renamed “Acapella is NOT Wat BFFs Do For Fun”, where Amy had started what seemed to be an enthusiastic conversation with: Subtle, Bx, real subtle.