January 1, 2016

She said yes.

Technically, it was January 1st when she wrote it. It was four in the morning and they'd just stumbled up the spiral staircase together (which really was a bitch when you're tired and still a little tipsy), and she stole a moment while Beca was in the bathroom to jot it in her journal which took up residence under the edge of their mattress.

The four hours prior to that were a spinning blur of the good kind.

Beca crashing into her with a kiss before she responded to the question.

Chloe laughing and asking if that meant 'yes.'

Beca laughing and nodding and then covering her mouth and freezing as if she just realized what had happened.

And then there were tears and more laughing as Chloe grabbed her hips and lifted her enough to spin them around playfully.

"Put me down!" Beca had demanded, batting at Chloe's arms.

"I'm practicing," Chloe said when she set her down carefully.

"For what?"

"That whole threshold thing."

And then they were laughing again, and Chloe remembers throwing her hands in the air and squealing, "We're getting married!" And while the music was too loud for her to be heard by everyone, the dozen or so people around them heard it and gave a cheer.

The party went off the rails after that. It turned into an impromptu concert festival, singer after singer jumping on the stage with the DJ to sing - sometimes horribly depending on their level of inebriation - over their studio recording in the DJ's library. A few were lucky enough to get instrumentals. Ed Sheeran found a guitar somewhere and finally gave them a proper slow dance.

After their moment, they got swept back up in the party. The DJ unleashed his best after midnight, and though they quit drinking after The Question, Chloe felt increasingly drunk, but on adrenaline and endorphins and one particularly frenzied groping session that took place in a bathroom stall.

As Chloe sat on the bed after scribbling in her journal, pants off and shirt unbuttoned as she waited to use the bathroom, she felt...off. Not a bad off. Kind of out of body, like she was watching herself from above, like a dream.

But Beca exited the bathroom wearing the oversized tee she'd left on the floor after waking up that morning, with her face scrubbed of the glamour and her hair tied up in its messy bun, and her face tired but her eyes bright, Beca was...just Beca again.

But that was it, Chloe thought as Beca smiled at her and gave her a go-ahead to the restroom, that it was never just Beca. It was and it wasn't, and Chloe promised herself when she was thirteen and saw a terrible Lifetime movie about a woman who let a man be her everything and then who left her ruined that she would never let someone be that, to be her everything.

And Beca wasn't her everything.

But she was as close to it as Chloe would let her be.

Beca was still awake when Chloe returned, arms crossed behind her head to prop it up a little. She didn't say anything, but she recognized when Beca was wired, bubbling over with whatever it was, and as Chloe slid under the covers next to her, intent on curling up next to her, Beca was quicker, pushing Chloe onto her back and climbing over to straddle her hips and lean down to bring their faces close. Chloe laughed, lifting her eyebrows in inquiry.

"Who are you?"

Chloe tilted her head. "Huh?"

Beca shifted her weight to lift her left arm and tap Chloe's chest in time with her words. "Who. Are. You?"

"Um...I'm Chloe?"

"Nope," Beca said, popping the 'p' with smacked lips.

"It's like four in the morning. You're gonna have to spell it out for me, Bec."

Beca grinned and shifted her hand to lay against Chloe's neck, thumb idly stroking the column of her throat. "You..." She paused and lowered herself enough to place a soft kiss to Chloe's lips. "Are..." And another. "My fiancée."

Chloe drew a quick breath through her nose. The term lit something inside - an immense level of pride, perhaps. Beca's tongue slipping past her lips interrupted her analysis and she sighed into it, bringing her hands up to Beca's waist and simply hold her.

Beca pulled back after a moment, smiling. More like grinning like the cat that got the canary.

"Oh my gosh," Chloe said, laughing at the look she was getting. "What is it now?"

"I'm going to make it official." Beca clambered off Chloe and shuffled on her knees to her side of the bed.

Chloe watched as she bent over, stretching to pull open the drawer to her nightstand and reaching in for whatever. She heard the tap-tap-tap as she felt around and then she was on her way back, smiling with her hand hidden behind her. "Whatcha got there?" Chloe asked, letting out a little oomph when Beca sat over her again.

"Close your eyes."

Chloe hesitated and then closed her eyes. She was nervous, but nervous-excited, and she felt Beca shift a little and heard a tiny squeak of what sounded like a hinge followed by the soft thud of something hard hitting the carpeted floor. She wanted to peek, but whatever it was, Beca was taking her time and drawing out the anticipation for a reason and she kept her eyes closed. She felt hands on her, beginning at her stomach and making her shiver, moving higher to graze but not linger over her breasts, and up to her shoulders. She expected those hands to continue their parallel journey down both arms, they detoured and both trailed down her left, a warm palm underneath and fingernails tickling down her bicep and inner elbow and underside of her forearm until they were on her hand, playing with her fingers one at a time, and she started smiling.

"Bec..."

Beca wiggled her thumb, and then her index finger, and then her middle finger. "Hmm?"

And then she felt it, the chill of metal slipping over her ring finger, catching at her knuckle and then moving past to settle into place. She swallowed the lump in her throat and let Beca keep playing with her fingers until she tugged on them playfully.

"Open."

She counted to five and aimed blindly to land her gaze on Beca, who was smiling down at her, biting her lip, and Chloe could tell Beca was fighting back tears, which didn't make it an ounce easier for her to do it.

She didn't look, not yet. But she could see it in her periphery, the way it caught the low light given off from the bedside lamp to make it sparkle.

"Beca."

"You -" Beca's voice was thick and she stopped to clear her throat. "You beat me to it. So. I figured I should give you this." She tapped the sparkle and sat back.

Chloe finally let herself look at the silver band wrapped around her left ring finger, crystal clear jewel perched atop it proudly. She felt a tear slip out, rolling warm down her temple to disappear into her hair and she didn't bother to wipe it away, but she blinked a few times to try to keep the rest of them reined in. She fanned her fingers out, trying to imagine what it would look and feel like to have a ring on that finger every day for, hopefully if everything worked out, forever.

"It's beautiful," she breathed. The ring was perfect with its silver - maybe platinum? - band and a princess cut diamond and...and smaller ones inlaid in the band that she noticed once she drew her hand closer, and it was literally the exact ring from her secret wish list. She snapped her eyes up to Beca, who was biting her lip again.

"Oh...my gosh. I can't believe you!"

Beca shrugged with one shoulder, feigning a little bit of guilt. "A bitchy little bird told me?"

Chloe scoffed and swatted Beca's thigh. "You're the one that's been making Aubrey harass me about marriage all this time!"

"I can neither confirm nor deny that."

"Beca!" Chloe was laughing, and trying really hard to not feel like a complete moron for being blind (yet again) to what she now felt should have been pretty damn obvious. "Baby, I'm sorry, I can't marry you after all."

Beca flinched, jumping back an inch. "What?!"

"I can't let you be married to a felon. Because I'm going to murder my best friend."

"Oh my God, Chloe!" It was Beca's turn to swat, connecting a couple times with Chloe's arms. "It's too soon to joke about that."

"About killing Aubrey?"

"Saying you changed your mind!"

Chloe softened immediately, dropping her exaggerated anger. Beca was serious. "I asked you, remember? I'm not going to change my mind."

Beca shrugged, eyes downcast, maybe a little sheepish. "I knew you were kidding but, wow," she paused, laughing nervously, "it kind of suckerpunched me right in the gut."

"Aw aw awww," Chloe teased with a wiggle of her hips to get Beca to look at her again. "Somebody really loves meeeeee!"

"Shut up."

"Yes you doooo! You got scared when I said I didn't -" she paused, gasping as a lightbulb turned on. "That's why you were having Aubrey do it! You were scared for me to say I didn't want to marry you."

"Well...yeah. Basically."

Chloe crunched her abs to sit up and better look eye to eye with Beca and loop her arms around her waist. "I get it. But I don't want you to feel like you can't talk to me about stuff."

"This wasn't, like, not knowing how to tell you I hate how you squeeze the toothpaste."

"It doesn't matter how I squeeze it -"

"You waste it when you don't start at the bottom! No, that's not what we're talking about right now. Never mind that."

Chloe chuckled and let her hands roam a little over Beca's back, enjoying the warmth. "So it wasn't like toothpaste."

"No!" Beca huffed and slouched a little, rapping her fingers against her thighs. "I...I didn't want to scare you off. Or hear what I didn't want to hear. And...I knew that Aubrey would buffer it."

Chloe smiled a little at that. "I can't decide if I'm more amused that you went to Aubrey, and imagining how that first conversation went, or that you thought you could do anything that would scare me off."

Beca groaned, rolling her neck. "Please don't tease me right now."

"Sorry," Chloe said quickly. "I'm sorry. I don't mean it that way. I just...it's going to take a lot more than you asking me to spend the rest of my life with you to chase me away. I hope you know that."

Beca nodded, lifting her eyes from where they kept slipping down in bashfulness.

She pressed her hands to Beca's back and moved to lay back and bring Beca down with her. "Come here."

Beca followed easily. She slid down a bit to tuck her head under Chloe's chin. Chloe found Beca's left hand and matched it up with her right, measuring their fingers against each other for a moment before continuing, looking at Beca's bare finger. "You need a ring, too."

She felt Beca shrug against her. "It's okay."

"I almost bought one, you know."

"A ring?"

"Mhmm. For you for Christmas."

"What happened?"

"I chickened out and got you earrings instead."

"You chickened out?! Chlo!"

"What? I was scared I was misreading your two thousand signals and I'd freak you out."

"So you're telling me you were afraid to just ask me, lest you scare me off?"

Chloe nodded.

"I'm having a major case of déjà vu right now." Beca's tone was teasing, and Chloe poked her in the ribs with her free hand.

Beca laughed and tilted her chin to press a kiss to Chloe's collarbone.

"You know what I wanna know?" Chloe continued.

"Hmm?"

"At the party. You told me to ask you. Honestly I have no idea if that's even what you were talking about."

She felt more than heard Beca's quiet chuckle. "It was."

"But how did you know?"

"You forget that literally everything you think is super obvious on your face."

Chloe blushed at that. "But that's kind of...a complex thought to display...facially with such...clarity."

She felt Beca take a quick breath, and then she paused, as though considering. Maybe remembering. "You...you were looking at me like I was the only person in the room. And...you look at me like that a lot. But...not like that."

Chloe sighed and ran her hand down Beca's back.

"And I didn't actually know. It was more a...Hail Mary? With a hope that I was right and that you wouldn't ask me if I wanted another shrimp cocktail instead."

Chloe laughed. "Good use of a football term, babe."

Beca groaned at that. "Thanks for that reminder."

"Oh, no no, shh. No thinking about that right now." Chloe could have kicked herself, reminding Beca of the incident at Thanksgiving.

"It's fine. Maybe they'll come around to the idea if you make an honest woman out of me."

Chloe felt another kiss pressed to her chest and brought her hand up to rest on the back of Beca's neck, scratching lightly how she knew Beca liked it. "So we're really doing this?"

"Seems that way."

"Maybe we can go shopping together? Somehow the ring you like didn't make it to my inbox and I don't want to go in blindly."

Beca laughed and flipped her head to face the other way, toward their clasped hands. She flexed her fingers with Chloe's, playing with them and running her thumb over her knuckles. "You could give me your Barden ring. Like we're going steady in the 1950s."

"That," Chloe said, detangling their fingers to pull her class ring off her right hand, "is an excellent idea." Beca held her hand up, fingers splayed, parallel to the bed to wait as Chloe slipped the band over her fourth finger. It wasn't a diamond, or even a real jewel. It was a faux emerald and had music notes inlaid on one side of the wide band and 2015 on the other with Barden University engraved around the stone's setting. It wasn't something she ever thought she would give Beca, certainly not for this particular tradition, but in a way, it made sense. It was at Barden that they met, through the music they both lived for, with the year the wall between them finally came crashing down. Chloe was acutely aware of the action, of the physical motion of sliding a ring onto Beca's finger, onto that finger, and she took a shaky breath to keep calm. "There."

She saw Beca looking at her hand for a moment and then the hand turned and worked its way under Chloe's neck, as though seeking warmth. They were silent a long moment, long enough that Chloe wanted to sleep, but she knew Beca was still awake, her breaths still shallow and even, the occasional sniff or wiggle confirming her assumption. Chloe's eyelids were getting heavy, the emotion and energy of the night piling up quickly.

"Baby?"

Beca shifted. "Hmm?"

"I'm sleepy."

"You can sleep."

"You aren't tired?"

"Just thinking."

Chloe hesitated a second, and then wriggled carefully out from under Beca so they could lie face to face. "About?"

Beca smiled and tugged Chloe's hand out from where she'd tucked both under her pillow, left hand and left hand, and she interlocked their fingers, rocking their hands back and forth as though pointing out their new accessories. "We're getting married."

Chloe felt the swarm of butterflies that hibernated periodically in her stomach wake up, and again, it wasn't that she forgot - she was just given an engagement ring for Pete's sake - but hearing it, hearing Beca say it, made it a thousand percent more real. "Yeah," she said with an exhale. "We are."

Beca's smile grew, and then she was scooting forward until she was close enough to kiss Chloe. "I love you."

Chloe smiled back. "I love you, too."

"God, why are you still awake?" Beca laughed, turning over and backing into Chloe like she did every night (until it got too warm to tolerate, anyway).

Chloe scoffed and tugged Beca close with an arm around her waist. "Screw you."

She felt Beca shake with silent laughter, obviously fighting to keep it under control. "Maybe tomorrow."

When Chloe woke up, it was well past noon. There was no hangover to be seen, thank goodness, but her head felt fuzzy. She was on her stomach, hands under her pillow, and she dragged them out to roll over and stretch, momentarily startled by the bauble that now lived on her ring finger.

It was definitely going to take some getting used to.

A smile crept over her face as she looked at it, a constant reminder that Beca had planned to propose, that Beca really did want to be with Chloe the way she wanted to be with Beca, that it wasn't all some kind of ruse.

"Morning."

She looked to the left to see Beca sitting up in bed, laptop propped on her thighs, headphones on but the right side pushed back so she could hear. "How long have you been up?"

Beca tapped the spacebar and pushed her headphones back completely to hang around her neck. "An hour maybe?"

Chloe stretched again, this time tensing her legs beneath the covers and rolling her ankles. "You could have got me up."

"It's nice, being with you when you're sleeping."

Chloe smiled. "What do you mean?"

Beca shrugged. "You're always moving. When you're asleep, you're...not, obviously. And I can just enjoy you? That sounds weird and creepy and like I don't enjoy you otherwise I promise I don't mean it like that." Beca rushed her explanation, and it made Chloe giggle.

"It's okay, I get it." She pushed herself up against the headboard next to Beca, glancing at her screen. "Whatcha doin'?" The fact that Beca pressed Command+Tab to toggle another window to hide what she was mixing didn't go unnoticed.

"Nothing. Just checking Facebook."

Chloe let her white lie slide; there was surely much more fun to be had about her explanation than the real thing. "And what's happening in the world of Facebook?"

"Apparently there's Bellas drama. Why is there drama over break? Emily is posting vague and passive-aggressive status updates, followed by inspirational quote hipster graphics."

"We could give them something else to discuss." The night had been such a whirlwind, the excitement that came with actually telling people she popped the question was just catching up to her. She grabbed her iPhone off the nightstand, disconnecting the charging cable, and started playing with different angles to photograph her new piece of jewelry.

"You and that artsy shit. You're going to put three filters on it and make it look like a photo from a century ago."

"I am not!" Chloe answered, flipping through filters and settling on one (just one!) that brightened up the white background of the duvet and accentuated the rumpled bedding and the peaks that were their hidden feet so it was super obvious they were in bed. "Now...how to break this news..." She reflected and considered, ignoring Beca's suggestions, until she had to laugh at the most predictable one:

"She liked it so she put a ring on it."

"But I'm the one that asked you, Bec."

"Yeah but it's a picture of your ring."

"You're right. Come on, hold out your hand." Chloe splayed her fingers out again in what she decided was the prettiest angle and leaned over to get Beca's in the frame, too. And then repeated the filtering process to push the photo first through to Instagram and her Facebook, and then immediately into the Bellas Facebook group.

Chloe Beale We liked it.

"Okay, go comment on it."

Beca rolled her eyes but refreshed her browser anyway, and Chloe could see a hint of a smile touching her lips.

Beca Mitchell So we put a ring on it. On them. On each other. Whatever you get the point. We're getting hitched. Huzzah.

The response was immediate, Chloe's phone chiming at every comment on her post.

Emily Junk O-M-Aca-G YOU GUYS!

Stacie Conrad Hottest couple ever! Congrats!

Fat "Amy" Patricia All you bitches owe me $20. Oh and that's awesome!

Cynthia-Rose Adams Aw hell yeah, welcome to the club, ladies!

Chloe Beale Thanks, guys! Super excited!

Jesse Swanson Good luck. And I don't mean that in a bitter, snarky way.

Fat "Amy" Patricia Sure you don't, loverboy. btw who added him? This group is Bellas only. Or does boning a Bella get you in? Emily Junk can you add Bumper?

Stacie Conrad Is one of you going to share the deets or do we get to hypothesize for another four years?

Beca Mitchell AMY! Emily Junk don't add him.

Beca Mitchell Stacie Conrad she asked me last night at midnight.

Jessica & Ashley Awww! Congratulations!

Emily Junk Beca Mitchell OK boss!

Emily Junk O M G THAT IS SO CUTE

Stacie Conrad That is so cliche, of course you did, Chloe Beale.

Chloe Beale IT WAS NOT CLICHE. Not really. It's not like I planned it. I didn't even have a ring to give her.

Stacie Conrad Those are your scary super long fingers with that rock. You mean to tell me Mitchell was more romantically prepared than you?

Beca Mitchell HA!

Chloe Beale Stacie Conrad she was. I will concede that point. Guess I beat her to the punch.

Lilly Onakuramara I'm an ordained minister.

Florencia Fuentes ¡Felicidades!

Katherine Junk I'm so happy for you ladies! Congratulations on this new phase of your lives together. Emily Junk don't forget your dentist appointment at 2:00pm.

Emily Junk Katherine Junk THANKS MOM. AS ALWAYS, THIS IS NOT THE PLACE TO HAVE MOM CONVOS.

Aubrey Posen Well, it's about time. I'm calling you now.

"That's right, she better call me," Chloe said, thumb hovering over the screen of her phone to wait for it to illuminate with an incoming call.

"These girls are ridiculous."

Chloe saw the Facebook window disappear and the blackness that was Beca's favorite mixing program re-appear, but Beca turned the computer away before she got a good look at whatever it was she was working on. She didn't have time to think about it, because her phone lit up.

"Aubrey. Posen. You little sneak!"