Author's Note: To be clear, you probably should not generally expect updates this quickly. It just happens that I have two consecutive days off of work, and this fic is presently my new obsession, so... it's pretty much consuming all my brain power, at the moment. Thanks to all who reviewed, and I hope this next chapter is as good as you've anticipated!
Chloe is shamelessly eager.
She isn't surprised that Aubrey doesn't echo her feelings, and she understands the blonde's hesitance, but Chloe can't help it; she's just excited.
Still, she has an entire day to waste before the Vampires are meant to arrive at Barden, and she doesn't quite know what to do with herself. Aubrey's too tense to share in Chloe's exuberance, and Chloe gets that – plus, Aubrey's now making every attempt to distract herself from her supposed Vampire 'Invasion' anxieties, and by the time Chloe leaves their apartment, Aubrey's already searching 'Beca' (and every possible variation of the name) through the school's database.
Chloe thinks it's sweet.
Aubrey doesn't typically fluster easily, unless it's a Bella-related concern, but something about that girl had crawled beneath her girlfriend's skin, and Chloe isn't sure that it has any intention of crawling back out. Chloe doesn't really mind, honestly; she has no doubts about Aubrey's love for her. Aubrey could probably screw anyone she wants, and as long as she comes home to snuggle Chloe afterward (and still has the energy to screw Chloe afterward, too), Chloe can't really bring herself to feel too bothered about it.
Maybe that's strange, but Chloe's been called that before, and she can't really bring herself to feel too bothered about that, either.
Not that it really matters. Aubrey would totes consider it the absolute pinnacle of disloyalty, and she would never actually do anything like that in fear of hurting Chloe, even if she did have a crush.
(Chloe maintains that she does, but she knows better than to assert her opinion too frequently when Aubrey disagrees with her. Sometimes, it just isn't worth the effort of chipping away at Aubrey's mighty walls of stubborn.)
Chloe finds herself at Stacie and Fat Amy's dorm room, which actually turns out to be perfect, because if there's anyone more excited than Chloe about the Vampires, it's Stacie.
The redhead is pretty sure that Stacie mostly just wants to gather first-hand knowledge about their sex drives, for the triumph of it, if nothing else; still, it's the excitement that Chloe's craving, and she'll take it however she can get it. Plus, Fat Amy will be there, and while Chloe isn't sure that she's excited about their guests, per se, she's still pretty positive that Amy really wants to wrestle one.
Chloe actually isn't sure how that would pan out, but she'd be happy to find out as long as Amy doesn't get hurt.
Aubrey would freak.
Stacie answers Chloe's gentle knock and swiftly pulls the redhead inside, instantly exclaiming, "I'm so glad you're here! I need you to help me pick my outfit for later," she winks overtly, and Chloe chuckles.
"Amy hasn't been helping?" She grins.
Stacie scowls at Amy, reclined between the wall and her bed, who glances lazily away from the phone in her hand and replies with a shrug and a loaded sigh, "Well, I really tried, Gingah, but Legs over here tells me that chastity belts are out of style, these days. I told her, hey, don't come crying at me when one of the Fang Gang splits your hoohopper in half," she raises her pointer finger at Stacie accusingly, then gestures it vaguely toward the area between her legs.
"Oh, honey, if some Vamp splits my Hunter in half, I can die a proud, accomplished woman," Stacie smirks, hands buried between a couple of shirts hanging in her closet as she arches her head over her shoulder to address them.
"Aw, yuck," Fat Amy scrunches her nose up. "Thank you for that image. You'll be a bloody, saturated mess – and that's if you're even still alive by the end! Chloe, you should prepare yourself for that phone call," Amy nods, both frantically and decisively. "No way I'm cleaning that up. I've got a lot of stomach, you know, but no one has the stomach for that. But, hey – I'll call her mum and pop and tell them the news; I bet I could manage to make it a bit less devastating with an artful retelling of the circumstances, yeh?"
Chloe scrunches her nose up and shakes her head bemusedly. Amy is sometimes just… too much Amy.
"Ew," is the best reply she can form, before disregarding Fat Amy's comment altogether, and shifting to face Stacie, instead.
"This has been my whole morning," Stacie deadpans unhappily.
Chloe does her very best, and only just refrains from mentioning that it's still only ten o'clock.
Stacie has tried on and discarded most every blouse in her possession, and Chloe is patient, but even she doesn't have that kind of strength.
It's only about half an hour into Chloe's visit before she starts picking up pieces of stranded clothing and trying them on for herself, in order to abate her boredom; height-wise, Stacie's a bit taller than Chloe, but their torsos are about the same length, so the shirts mostly fit perfectly.
Even if they maybe expose a bit more cleavage than Chloe's used to sharing on a casual basis.
Still, tonight could be considered a special occasion – by almost everyone, but maybe not Aubrey – and Chloe really isn't shy, so when Stacie moves on and starts tearing through her dresses, Chloe's right beside her 'ooh'ing and 'ahh'ing, and picking one out to model, too.
She's stripped down to a pair of blue panties and a bra when she realizes that she really needs to use the restroom, and she isn't terribly concerned when she steps into the hallway and makes her way there. It's a coed dorm, but this is an all girls' floor, so she isn't awfully worried about the fact that she'd failed to slip the dress over her head before leaving the room.
Not like it matters. It's basically just a bikini, and Chloe doesn't see anything wrong with that.
When she gets to the bathroom, though, Chloe swiftly forgets about her desperate urge to tinkle, because she swears to every aca-god she's ever believed in ever that an angel has descended to Earth, and is now serenading Chloe from a private shower stall.
Of course, the angel doesn't know she's serenading Chloe – at least, not yet – so, naturally, Chloe thinks that it's only fair to tell her.
"You can sing!" Chloe declares elatedly, ripping away the shower curtain that was once preventing her from viewing her angel's face.
It's actually a small, brunette-haired girl, who oddly matches Aubrey's description of Beca from earlier this morning. She has a small, cutely pointed nose and pretty, small pink lips, and Chloe thinks that even if her voice wasn't amazing, it might not actually matter; she still would be an angel.
Chloe doesn't try very hard not to look, which is how she notices that the girl blinks twice before sputtering out, "Dude! Is this, like, a thing, now? Is this something people have started doing? Invading showers? Because, like- that is not okay!" She declares ardently.
Chloe flaps her hand impatiently, and reaches forward to shut off the running water. "How high does your belt go?"
"My what? Are you- are you serious? I am nude!" She reminds Chloe, pointedly nudging her chin toward her hands, which are pretty spectacularly failing to obscure Chloe's view of large, pale breasts and other – usually private – areas further south.
"You were singing Titanium, right?"
The girl's expression shifts nearly instantly, and she smiles a little before hesitantly replying, "You know David Guetta?"
Chloe absently wonders who hasn't, and basically says as much.
"Yeah. Have I been living under a rock?" She queries bemusedly, before she shakes her head and surges onward. "That song is my jam. My lady jam," she leans in closer to disclose, grinning slightly when the brunette in front of her rolls her eyes heavenward, as if begging the god that sent her down from there to immediately beam her back up.
"That's nice," she eventually replies, and Chloe thinks it's admirable that she clearly does try to keep her eyes off of Chloe, even if she utterly fails at it.
"Yeah," Chloe nods. "Will you sing it for me?" She bites her lip.
"Your lady jam?" The brunette snaps her eyes to Chloe's for confirmation and smirks, and Chloe instantly feels heat prickle everywhere, but she's quick to save herself from whatever disaster that question could result in.
"Not for that reason. Besides," she huffs, "I'm not leaving until you sing, so…" She trails off expectantly.
When Chloe's angel doesn't immediately comply, Chloe watches as her eyes surrender their herculean effort not to ogle Chloe, and do so, anyway. Chloe had assumed that she was shy, which she guesses is a little understandable, but she was clearly wrong. The girl's eyes don't move quickly, and they shift intensely across Chloe's mostly-exposed body with sudden leisure.
Chloe plants her hands firmly on her hips (she is not posing, she swears), and the brunette chuckles darkly before she nods once, and splits her lips apart, releasing soft, strong notes of music to the world.
The redhead swallows, and has to seriously focus on not crossing her legs in abrupt discomfort – because this girl's eyes are crazy hot and super intense, still, and Chloe is a freaking sucker for her husky alto, already – before she can focus enough to chime in.
The brunette's smirks shifts into a gentle smile somewhere near the middle, and it's only once their joint voices have faded out from the chorus that the small girl picks the smirk back up and reminds Chloe playfully, "That was great. But… I still need to take a shower."
"Wait!" Chloe exclaims.
She concedes to herself that her victim, in this scenario, doesn't exactly have much of a choice. She's still naked, and Chloe's still blocking access to both her shower curtain and her exit.
"You should audition for the Bellas!" Chloe tells her excitably.
The brunette raises her brows, and Chloe finds that, curiously, she doesn't need to hear her question to know how to answer.
"You must be a freshman. Don't worry; it's an acapella group," Chloe explains quickly. "There are four of them on campus, but all the other ones are either a little terrible, or complete tools," she rolls her eyes briefly, because she hates to speak ill of them, but it's also sort of true. The Trebles are downright rude, and even Madonna can only do so much. She doesn't even feel the need to justify discrediting the High Notes. "The Bellas are the tits, and you should audition! I mean," she rambles a little and waves her hands, ignoring as best she can the piercing steel of the brunette's eyes as they match with Chloe's, "technically, auditions were a month ago, but we lost a girl – don't ask how – and now we're down one."
"No offense," her companion snorts, "but that sounds kinda lame."
"We sing all over the world!" Chloe tells her happily.
It's okay; she's used to this, and she's used to convincing people that it really isn't as silly as it sounds. Chloe's always loved to sing, and she would never judge anyone for finding a place to do it, no matter the genre or form, but she understands the gut-reaction. As much as Chloe despises it, there is a popularity chain, and some people just aren't eager to defy it.
"I've already been around the world, Red," the girl replies, with a lazy half-smile.
Chloe huffs. "Well, you should stop by practice tomorrow and try out, anyway. Aubrey will hate it, because it will mess with her schedule, but it'll be fine; I'll work it out."
The brunette barks out a laugh, and discloses on a conspiratorial whisper, "I've already pissed off an Aubrey this week. I'm not sure it's smart to try for a second."
Chloe beams and beams, and instantly latches onto the girl's wrist.
(It was doing a terrible job of shielding Chloe's view, anyway, she defends to herself.)
She absently notes a grasshopper tattoo beneath her fingers, and she wonders if her angel happens to have more of them, maybe on her back, which Chloe still hasn't seen.
Not that she needs to. Or wants to. Because- Aubrey.
Yeah.
Shit, Aubrey's going to be furious with her.
But, actually, that's exactly who she was going to talk about, so it's not so bad, right?
"I thought you looked like her description! Are you Beca? And did you happen to have your headphones broken by a very tense blonde this morning?" Chloe bounces eagerly on the balls of her feet.
The girl snorts, and replies with faux-sincerity, "Tense? No, I don't think I noticed that."
Chloe giggles and shoves at Beca's arm a little, then detaches, because she is so seriously close to flirting, right now, and Beca's eyes, and it's probably, definitely time for Chloe to leave.
Like, right now.
"Shut up. She's my girlfriend," Chloe tells her. Because that's definitely important to mention, at this point, and Chloe would never cheat on Aubrey, but she's never felt so close to wanting to as she does right in this moment. "And she's the captain of the Bellas! And she totes owes you at least a favor, if you aren't willing to let her replace your headphones, so she wouldn't even be mad about it! This is great. Stop by the auditorium on the west side of campus tomorrow around three, and you can sing for us!"
"Listen, Red, I don't know if that's – "
"Chloe," she tells her. "My name is Chloe. And I'm once again refusing to leave until you give me what I want," she grins brightly. "Please come?" She pouts.
Beca sighs, and replies with mocking, exasperated amusement, "I can make you leave, you know? Or just, like, leave on my own?"
"But you'd have to pass me, first, and if you were going to leave, you'd probably have done it already," Chloe points out. "Plus, even if you did leave, I'll totally stalk you until you give us a chance."
Stalk her? Give us a chance? Because I'm not even a little bit crumbling into a flirtatious mess, here. Not at all, Chloe huffs at herself.
Beca gazes pointedly at Chloe's barely clothed form, and answers huskily, "I don't think you want to do that, Chloe."
And, oh God, Chloe's melting, because she adores it when Aubrey says her name, but she never makes it sound like that. No one's ever made it sound like that.
Chloe's never loved her name more in her life.
"I probably really don't, because I think it'd probably be really boring – "
"What do you know about the excitement in my life?" Beca smirks defiantly.
Chloe ignores her as best she can, and tries really hard not to think about the kind of excitement Beca could probably show her.
Focus, she coaches herself firmly. Get home to Aubrey.
" – but I'm pretty confident about all this," she sweeps her hand along the length of her torso, and, oh God, she probably shouldn't have drawn attention to herself that way, because Beca's eyes follow Chloe's hands and raise back up to meet Chloe's with raised brows, obviously amused by the redhead's flustered words. "I'll follow you in my underwear if I have to, Beca, but please don't make me do that, because I really have things I need to do today."
She doesn't.
Well, that's not strictly true; she has to go home and tell Aubrey that she found her crush, and that Chloe maybe is crushing even harder, and that might not sound totally pressing, but it definitely is to Chloe.
"I'll see what I can do, Red," Beca sighs tiredly and shakes her head.
Chloe beams and pivots toward the exit, because that'll just have to be good enough; following Beca around like this all day is so not a good idea, if Chloe's honest, and Chloe doesn't actually want to have to do it. She thinks it'll test her already-fraying willpower far too much.
"See you tomorrow!" She calls over her shoulder, and hears a tremblingly low chuckle in reply.
Chloe refuses to think about how it makes her tremble, too.
Like, pretty much all over.
And Chloe also refuses to think about how she can't even stay in that damn bathroom long enough to relieve her bladder.