Chapter Text
“So you still refuse to download Venmo?”
Beca dropped her phone onto her bed, pressing the speaker button. “I’m sorry if I don’t want my identity stolen or something,” she muttered. Hands freed, she continued her battle with the suitcase on her floor, grunting as she attempted to force the zipper closed.
“What is that noise?” Chloe’s voice was garbled and tinny, due in no small part to the poor connection at her parent’s house in the middle of nowhere. “It sounds like you’re having sex. Oh my god, did you pick up when you and Jesse were having sex?”
Beca bit her lip, slowly refolding a shirt that had stubbornly gotten caught in the zipper. “No, Chlo. I’m alone.”
“Thank god,” Chloe said. “I mean, we all made jokes about how you and Jesse probably had incredibly vanilla sex or whatever but like I never thought it would be so bad that you’d have a phone conversation in flagrante delicto.”
“Can we please stop talking about me having sex with Jesse?” It came out harsher than she’d intended, and she flopped down on the bed next to her phone. “Sorry. Also, when did you learn Latin?”
Chloe giggled. “C’mon Becs, if I couldn’t handle a little snap like that, we wouldn’t have made it through four years of friendship.” Beca stared at the ceiling, eyes tracing the pattern of the stupid glow-in-the-dark stars that she’d stuck up there when she was eight. “But anyways, you’re still going to be a dinosaur?”
“Can’t I just like mail you a check or something?”
“You’re adorable.” Beca reflexively stuck out her tongue at the phone. “You seem to have forgotten in your old age how slow the postal service is. Besides, aren’t you getting on some absurdly long flight in like…two hours?”
Beca picked up her phone, cursing as she confirmed that Chloe was in fact, correct. “How the hell do you know my schedule better than I do?”
“Please, we never would’ve gotten to any Bella performances on time if I’d left you in charge. You’re the brooding musician, I’m the high-strung choreographer who keeps everything working. It’s why we’re perfect together.” She paused. “We should really have a Broadway show or something. Though it’d probably help if we were gay men.”
Beca was avoiding processing this monologue by lying on top of her suitcase, her tiny frame accomplishing little to further her goals. Eventually, with the help of three textbooks she’d been too lazy to sell and an old Star Wars box set that Jesse had given her, she barely pulled the zipper across, falling backwards onto the floor and gasping for air.
“Beca? Did you die there?” Beca dragged herself to the edge of her bed, blindly reaching around for her phone.
She knocked the phone on to the floor before turning off the speaker and pressing it to her ear. “Sort of feels like it,” Beca replied. “Ummmmm okay. Do you really need my chunk of the gift money right now?”
“You’re forgetting the cost of the hotel. And yeah, kinda. Stace is putting part of it on her credit card but she’s got med school bills and everything to pay so I took what I could.”
Beca sighed. “All right, tell me how this Venmo thing works.”
“Bless my stars,” Chloe drawled, affecting the Southern accent that Beca had only heard after particularly heavy doses of Jiggle Juice. “I’m bringing Beca Mitchell into the 21st century.”
“Oh please. Are you forgetting that time you crashed my computer because you tried to download what you claimed was a puppy video and actually turned out to be a virus-ridden copy of Fifty Shades of Grey?”
“I stand by that decision. I wasn’t going to support a movie that misrepresents and sensationalizes certain types of sexual relationships—“ Beca snorted “—but also there’s Jamie Dornan to consider.”
“You have strong morals, and I have to respect that.” The Venmo app was downloading, the icon appearing over Chloe’s face in her background photo of them from Worlds. Beca dragged it down to the corner of the screen, pausing for a moment as those blue eyes, barely losing their luminescence in the photo, stared back up at her.
She spent the next few minutes picking a password and username and fighting to recall her Facebook password in order to connect the networks as Chloe rambled on about her younger brother and his new girlfriend. “And really, Beca, he’s fourteen. Like he’s basically a baby.”
“Didn’t you tell me you had your first boyfriend in eighth grade?”
“And aren’t you supposed to be on my side here?” Beca laughed, shaking her head as she sent Chloe a friend request. “Look at that, BMitchelLA wants to be my Venmo friend. Better send me something good in the subject line.”
With a groan, Beca turned to her emoji keyboard. “I now have another annoying form of communication you’re going to judge me by?” She paused, knowing that the symbol she needed would be the first one up on the recently used tab (because who the hell else would she ever be willing to send emojis to), but also that she needed to give Chloe at least the illusion of whining and complaining and struggling with basic human interaction. It was their dynamic, and it worked.
Chloe’s response was instantaneous when she got the message. “Aww, you’re a giant dork. I’m surprised you haven’t just replaced my name in your phone with the ladybug icon yet. But thanks, you’re a life-saver. There’s only so many times I can borrow from my dad to prevent overdraft fees until we start on the ‘seven years of college’ train.”
“Happy to help,” Beca replied, making a note in her phone to check her own balance to make sure that the inevitable identity theft had not occurred.
“Please tell me you’ve already left for the airport.”
Beca jumped up, yanking her charger out of the wall and hanging up on Chloe with a quick and desperate “bye!” before sprinting down the stairs to where the step-monster had left her car keys on the kitchen counter with a note reminding her to “drive safely and pack a coat.” She grabbed the keys, stumbling out the door with her bag in tow. As she sat in the driver’s seat, she felt her phone buzz in her pocket.
Chloe: Can’t wait to see you
She chalked the chill in her spine up to the cool Portland air before flooring the gas and heading to the airport.
Chloe had already finished packing, despite not flying out until the next morning. But after four years of living with Aubrey, she’d become nothing if not punctual, and herding the Bellas (mostly Amy and Beca) like wild cats for the next three had only increased these habits. So yeah, maybe it was a bit ironic to be early to everything when you’d taken seven years to graduate, but Chloe had had her reasons.
And it had been a productive day so far; she’d Skyped Aubrey, confirmed the set of rooms at the hotel, and continued the slow, painful process of pulling Beca Mitchell into the future. Hell, she would’ve considered it a good day just from talking to Beca alone.
The last couple of months away from her best friend had been a bit of a transition. Although Beca hadn’t started off as the most responsive friend, Chloe had become accustomed to extensive text and Snapchat conversations, but more particularly nightly intrusions into her room so Beca could complain about what in particular had annoyed her the most that day. It generally ranged from random passersby on campus to her dad (though they’d repaired their relationship to a large extent throughout Beca’s collegiate years) to Jesse.
It was the Jesse conversations that went on the longest, becoming increasingly frequent as the years went by. Beca would flop down on Chloe’s bed with a dramatic huff, spreading her arms and legs and taking up a surprising amount of space for a minute human being. Chloe would patiently turn from her desk, pull a bag of Cheetos out from a drawer and throw them at Beca’s head before attempting to control her laughter at the indignant yelp that followed (Chloe’s aim had always been solid).
The earliest complaints had been reasonable and expected from someone who had never been in a long-term relationship; growing pains like someone wanting to know where you were and what you were doing and actually wanting to hear from you all the time. Chloe herself had backed off with her texting after the first of these conversations, only to have Beca confront her a week later about whether she was mad at her for something. In Beca’s junior year, it had turned more to trivial annoyances like his stupid short-sleeved button down shirts or the fact that he always smelled like popcorn. The summer before Chloe’s final senior year had taken things to a more serious level.
Chloe and Beca were both living in the Bella house, along with Stacie, who was doing some sort of research with the Barden med school and a big-shot cancer surgeon from Johns Hopkins. Beca had come back from a particularly long shift at the radio station, entering the kitchen with her phone clutched to her ear and an expression of pure annoyance on her face. She waved halfheartedly at Chloe, disappearing up the stairs to her room for the next hour.
By the time she’d returned, Chloe had poured them both extremely full glasses of wine and opened a bag of Cheetos on the table. Beca slumped onto a stool in front of the counter, repeatedly thwacking her head lightly against the tile with a grunt. Chloe caught her head on the fifth try, tilting her face up. “Hey, we still need that pretty face for the Kennedy Center performance. Or at least the musical brain in it. I could always just move Stacie to the front.”
Beca sat up with a humph, taking a long gulp of the cheap wine before crossing her elbows on the counter edge and settling her head on her hands. “I hate men.”
“Men in general?” Chloe turned the opening of the bag to face her, Beca weakly quirking the corners of her mouth in response. “Or are we going to get specific?”
“Okay, maybe not like all parts of men,” Beca muttered over a mouthful of Cheetos. “Just their fragile-ass egos.” Chloe nodded slowly, sipping from her own glass as Beca collected her thoughts. “It’s just like—I’m sorry I didn’t go to New York with you this summer. I just wanted to save money. And we all know I couldn’t trust any of the interns alone at the station.”
“Luke trusted you.”
“Well, that’s me,” Beca said breezily. Chloe snorted, rolling her eyes as the brunette grinned at her desired response. “Okay but really. I wouldn’t have let freshman me take over the studio. I guess I just have higher standards or something?”
“You can be a bit of a perfectionist sometimes.”
Beca finished her glass, crossing to the fridge to refill. “Uh huh, and who was it that kept us up until 3 AM before Nationals last year because she wasn’t convinced that the choreography was ‘aca-awesome?’”
“I didn’t use that term exactly.” Beca waved her free hand as she poured. “Okay, but that’s what makes us so good.”
“Not gonna disagree there.” She sighed, refilling Chloe’s offered glass. “But anyways, he thinks I’ve been avoiding him.”
“Well, have you been?” Chloe was shocked to hear the words leave her own mouth. It had been an unspoken rule between them for years that Chloe would never comment on just how often Beca would blow off Jesse for odd reasons, and it had allowed them to exist in a world where they never faced the fact that Beca spent substantially more time with her best friend than her boyfriend.
Beca stared at her over the rim of her glass, waiting as if she expected Chloe to add some sort of clarifying statement. When she didn’t, Beca slowly swallowed, pulling the glass back from her lips. “Maybe by his definition.”
And this time Chloe didn’t lose control of her mouth, simply gave a sympathetic nod as Beca drummed her fingers on the edge of the counter. The only sound in the room for the next few minutes was intermittent sips and chewing as the two refused to make eye contact. Beca eventually broke the silence with a throaty cough.
“Didn’t you have some reality show you wanted to see or something?” She was watching Chloe hopefully, clearly uncomfortable with the uncharacteristic silence in the room. It was another change from the Beca of the past, but it certainly played to Chloe’s advantage as someone with an inability to keep her mouth shut.
“You’re willing to sit through the Bachelorette?” Chloe asked cautiously.
Beca dramatically rolled her eyes, grabbing the bag in one hand and the wine bottle in another. “Only because you brought Cheetos.”
She let Chloe lead the way to the couch in front of the TV, the redhead settling herself down against one arm as Beca curled up with her feet against the other, a few short inches between her shoulder and Chloe’s. “I’m really starting to question that badass reputation of yours.”
“I’m plenty badass,” Beca muttered. “Haven’t you heard about my ear monstrosities?”
“I swear, the more I get to know you, the less I believe it.” Chloe scrolled through the TV channels, one eye on the petulant face of the Cheeto-munching nerd beside her. “It’s like you’re an onion with increasingly squishy layers.”
“First of all, that is an incredibly unflattering metaphor.”
“It’s a simile, Becs.”
“Whatever. Gross.” Beca threw a Cheeto that missed Chloe by a good five feet. “Secondly, I’m pretty sure that’s not how onions work.”
“Which one of us grew up on a farm, Beca?” Chloe refilled her own glass and dodged another orange projectile.
Beca exhaled sharply through her nose before turning her eyes to the TV. “Just because you’re from Tennessee does not mean you grew up on a farm.”
One hour and two glasses of wine later, Beca had fallen into her customary position beneath Chloe’s shoulder, Chloe’s arm caught between Beca’s back and the back of the couch. The contestants were performing Shakespearean love sonnets as the Bachelorette herself admirably avoided laughing too hard when a muscle-bound blonde rhymed ‘time’ with ‘genuine.’
The brunette pressed against Chloe’s chest was not as kind. She let out that unrestrained laugh that Chloe had only ever heard while Beca was drunk, full and warm and never failing to make Chloe’s stomach jump. “She could do so much better,” Beca slurred, rolling her head back to meet Chloe’s stare. “What? She’s hot.”
“Steroid Sam there not your type?” Chloe said with a chuckle, pouring the last of the wine into her own glass before Beca could take the opportunity.
“Nah.” Beca let out a huff, breath raising the hair on the back of Chloe’s neck as Chloe’s hand went back to absentmindedly running through Beca’s hair as she faced the TV. When the show broke for commercial, promising the ‘most shocking twist in Bachelorette history,’ Chloe felt Beca’s body shift below her. And then Beca’s hand gripped her thigh. “Hey Chlo?”
She tried to answer at least three times, nothing but squeaks coming out of her mouth that she could barely hear over the pounding in her ears. On the fourth try, she got out a weak, “yeah?” as Beca’s thumb ran up and down the bare skin of her leg.
“You know what I said earlier, about Jesse?”
And the last thing that Chloe wanted to be talking about at this moment was Jesse, but she figured it was easiest to simply answer instead of saying anything out of place that would cause Beca to look up and see the flush she could feel spreading across her face. “Mmhmm?”
“I think I might be avoiding him.” It was soft and contemplative, and Chloe suddenly understood why Beca had been so abnormally quiet throughout the show rather than interjecting her customary commentary. “Even by my definition.”
The large gulp Chloe took of her wine did nothing to cool her face down, and it took all of her self-control to wait a moment and allow any remnant of sober Chloe to rise to the surface. The best she got was only slightly tipsy Chloe, but she’d have to take it. “Wha—“
“I’m not sure why I’m with him.” Beca’s interjection was barely audible, and Chloe muted the TV as she waited for her to continue. “I think I just don’t want to be alone.”
And Beca was saying the words that Chloe had thought hundreds of times but never dared to say, because Jesse had seemed to make her happy at some point and a happy Beca was all Chloe really wanted, even if Beca herself didn’t seem to be so clear on what would accomplish that. Chloe’s breath hitched slightly as she opened her mouth to answer. “Wouldn’t avoiding him leave you alone anyways? Even if you’re technically together?”
“I don’t know.” Beca tilted her head up, chewing her lip as her eyes searched Chloe’s face. “I guess it just doesn’t really feel different.”
Chloe sighed, brushing back a strand of Beca’s hair as it fell across those impossibly dark blue eyes, heavy and tired after more than enough wine, but endlessly roaming in a way that left Chloe almost unnervingly exposed. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t think he’s the one that stops me from feeling alone.”
Every atom of Chloe’s existence froze, erupted, and stilled again, jumbled and mismatched in a sloppy attempt to allow for some impersonation of human function. And Chloe, as Beca had earlier, gave her a soundless moment to retract what she’d said, to say something about the Bellas or her dad or anything. But Beca held her gaze, stars in those deep eyes that traveled to her lips and stopped.
The front door swung open with a bang. Beca sprung up from Chloe’s lap, turning to face the door as Stacie entered, exhausted and dragging her lab coat along the floor. “If I ever hear the word tumor again, I might kill someone.” She closed the door behind her, dropping to the ground with her back against it.
“Well, I wasn’t planning on saying it, if that helps.” Chloe shot a sidelong glance at Beca, who had pushed a solid two feet away from her on the couch. “Long day?”
“Ugh, you don’t even know.” Stacie peered around the couch at the TV. “I know they’re basically promising me a full ride to Johns Hopkins if I make it through this, but dear god does this ass have an ego on him. Also, why the hell do you have the Bachelorette muted?”
Chloe picked up the remote from between the couch cushions as Beca settled her back against the arm on the other side, toying with a piece of hair between her fingers. Stacie plopped down on the cushion separating the two of them, nudging Chloe’s knee aside while berating them for finishing the wine just as Chris Harrison sat down with the Bachelorette for yet another teary-eyed confessional. But Chloe wasn’t even listening, eyes wandering across the room to catch an adorably shy smile from the other side of the couch.
And while they avoided discussing the specific conversation for the rest of the summer, they didn’t avoid each other. It wasn’t really an option, and Chloe would come home from the camp where she worked more often than not and enter her room to find Beca sitting cross-legged on her bed, a bag of Twizzlers (Chloe’s personal favorite) on her pillow.
So it had sucked a bit to miss Beca for most of a year, only to find out that Jesse had known about the internship before she had; not that it was unreasonable for Beca to tell her boyfriend about something first, just different. But Beca had taken her aside after the campfire at the retreat, explained that it was just something that she hadn’t wanted to burden Chloe with, hadn’t wanted to set on her mind because she knew how she worried and finals and graduation and everything were coming up and Chloe just had to graduate this year. And yeah, Chloe knew it was time regardless, but something about the way that Beca had held her gaze (not to mention her hand) and stressed the fact that neither of them could stay at Barden had stuck with her.
Chloe had graduated with 180 credits and dual degrees in vocal performance and elementary education, busting out of that Russian Lit class with a solid 92 on the final. Everything following that had been a bit of a whirlwind, and even after Worlds, Beca had mysteriously disappeared about halfway through the after-party, only reappearing the next morning to help Emily carry a still intoxicated Amy to the airport. And the last Chloe had seen of Beca was her ushering Amy into the bathroom, waving Chloe on with an apologetic half-smile as the Australian attempted not to go all Aubrey on the old woman in line in front of her.
She did still have to get the gift money from Amy, even if the enigmatic blonde wasn’t going to fly up from Australia to Maine for the weekend. Chloe picked up her phone to find notifications for two Snapchats and an email from UCLA Admissions. Deciding that the real world could wait until later, she pulled up Facebook messenger, shooting Amy a brief reminder with about 15 emojis at the end. Amy read the message immediately but seemed to have no plans to answer.
With a sigh, Chloe opened Snapchat. The first, from AubreyP, was her Southwest boarding position; A4, a personal Posen record, Chloe noted. She responded with a frowning selfie, ‘C30’ in bold print across her nose. And the familiar tightness in her stomach returned as the second opened with a close-up of Beca, ticket pressed against her face and ‘made it thanks 2 you’ above her head. She was biting her lip while her eyes were seemingly focused on the caption hanging above her, simple and candid and all too dorky. And of course there was the mini ladybug on her nose, a tradition they’d had for as long as Chloe could remember.
A Facebook notification dropped down over Beca’s face, and Chloe sent a picture of her suitcase with a note about ‘how to be on time w/o help’ to Beca before turning to Amy’s response.
Patricia Fat Amy: Don’t worry, the kangaroos haven’t taken all my money yet. Sent it to Stacie yesterday. Not that it’ll matter when all you pitches have to send money down under once we settle the bet
Chloe Beale: That wasn’t serious, right?
Patricia Fat Amy: Serious as silk burn and Bumper’s love of capers. No backing out Red
Chloe Beale: It seems mean
Chloe Beale: Plus how would we know? She’s in on the bet and she’s not going to want to lose
Patricia Fat Amy: We all figured that one was up to you, as one half of Bloe and all. If she and that sexually confused piece of man candy haven’t ended it yet, I’m going to have to rethink my career path as a psychic
Chloe Beale: Ugh. I still don’t like it
Patricia Fat Amy: Get your knickers untwisted and relax
Patricia Fat Amy: Bi-sides, big gay weddings might bring out the best in bi-tches
Patricia Fat Amy: If you know what I mean
Chloe Beale: You need help
Patricia Fat Amy: Have fun in Maine
Patricia Fat Amy is offline.
Chloe groaned, laying her phone down on her desk. Subterfuge had never been her strong suit, and Beca was a hell of a good liar. But half a grand was on the line, and maybe Chloe could find herself motivated by that, even without any other personal reasons she may have had, to figure out when and if Beca and Jesse had broken up. Yeah, Beca Mitchell was stubborn, but she really had nothing on Chloe Beale.