"Whaddya say, Goldilocks?"
"Goldilocks?" Chloe says around the electric toothbrush presently shoved in her mouth.
Beca's in the doorway behind her, and they look at each other via the mirror. "Your room's too cold. The rest of the house is too hot. Mine should be just right."
Chloe smiles and they both laugh at the toothpaste froth that drips from her lip as a result, and the laughing only makes it worse until she has to stop brushing and wipe off her face and start over.
"Tone down the sex appeal, Chlo. We'll never make it out of the bathroom."
Chloe shoos her away with her hand. "Get out!"
The door closes in Beca's face, and she can still hear laughter on the other side, accompanied by the buzz of Chloe's toothbrush. She returns to her bedroom where she'd just changed into shorts and a tank top.
And maybe her cutest pair of underwear.
She's not trying to be presumptuous - she's not - but at the very least, she's sure Chloe will be in her bed tonight as she is most nights, and she'd most certainly like to visit second base. Maybe third.
She's not opposed to a home run.
Not that she's being presumptuous.
She spares a thought toward wishing she had decided to shave her legs that morning. But it's too late for that now. And it's not like Chloe's never witnessed her in worse states of care.
She's filled with the urge to clean her room, but there's not time for that because she hears the toilet flushing, so she settles for scooping up the three days' worth of clothes from the floor and tossing them toward her closet. So they're in a different place on the floor. Consolidated.
"Be there in a sec!" drifts in from the hallway and she sees the light in Chloe's room turn on, followed by a comment about how chilly it is. Drawers open and close and Chloe's closet door screeches, and Beca realizes she's just standing in the middle of her room staring at the doorway.
Which is not at all awkward.
So she turns on her reading lamp and turns off the overhead light and crawls into bed, telling the part of her brain responsible for anxiety, whatever it's called, to calm the fuck down and that this is a night like any other night.
Right.
"Hey, sorry." Chloe shows up in a teal camisole and teal and gray plaid shorts that may or may not have been matched intentionally (Beca thinks they probably were). She wonders how many different pieces of clothing Chloe owns that are a shade of blue, because her supply seems endless. Every single one brings out her already stunning eyes in a way Beca is sure must be illegal in at least fourteen states. "Ooh, yeah, your room is way better," Chloe says with a shimmy of her shoulders.
And just like that, the anxiety shuts up and the warm glowy returns, and Beca scoots over in an invitation that Chloe accepts. She slides under Beca's sheet and settles on her side to face Beca, like she does every night, for their pre-sleep chat.
"Did you really get a speeding ticket today?" Chloe asks.
Beca groans. "I did. I can't believe it."
"On the way there or back?"
"On my way home."
"Why were you speeding?" She sees Chloe start to smile.
Beca gives a nonchalant shake of her head. "No reason." She can see Chloe's hand moving in her periphery until it disappears into the sheets, but Beca keeps her eyes trained on Chloe's face.
The hand shows up a few seconds later resting along the bare skin of her thigh, just below the hem of her shorts, and she swallows thickly.
"No reason?" Chloe repeats, clearly not fooled.
"Nope."
The resting hand starts to move, just slightly, not much more than shifting from a palm flat against her to individual fingers drawing small circles.
"Maybe you were excited to get home?"
Beca scrunches her nose, making a face. "Why would I be excited to get home?"
Chloe hums thoughtfully and swirling fingertips drift lower, to the back of Beca's knee, and she has to fight to not jerk herself away from the tickling sensation. Thankfully it passes quickly and instead it feels nice. Really nice.
"Maybe because," Chloe pauses to wet her lips, and Beca can't tear her eyes away them after that. "You couldn't wait to kiss me again."
She tries and fails pretty spectacularly to meet Chloe's eyes. "Conspiracy theorist." She also fails to stop her hips from pulling her closer to Chloe when the swirling fingers work their way higher, until they're dancing along the waistband of her shorts and slipping under the edge of her tank.
"Maybe," Chloe says thoughtfully, and Beca still can't get her eyes off her mouth. "But it's so...satisfying when I'm right."
Beca is starting to lose the will to keep up the banter. She needs those lips on hers again. Pronto dente. "Hiit the light?" she manages to ask. It's always Chloe's job to turn off the lamp.
"Room still just right, Goldilocks?"
Beca runs her fingers through distinctly non-golden locks and feels the tickling patterns against her stomach pause. She can't see Chloe, not her face, anyway, because she's using Beca's chest as a pillow. What she can see are the messy but somehow still perfect waves of red that create a striking contrast where it rests against both their bodies. She can see Chloe's perfectly smooth back and the way the muscles rest and move with her quiet breaths, and her eyes follow the line of her spine down until it starts to curve, where it disappears under the sheet they're sharing. If she lifts her head a little, she can see the hand that's idly caressing her. But it's more fun to not know where its journey will lead next. It's taken her to some pretty spectacular places recently.
She can feel the side of Chloe's face that's pressed against her ribs move, and she knows she's smiling.
"Oh. Yes. It's perfect. Thanks for having me."
Beca smiles at the formality of the statement. It's not untrue, however; Beca had very much had Chloe tonight. More than once, in fact. "My pleasure."
Chloe lifts her head at that and scoots back enough to be able to look at Beca. "Oh, the pleasure was all mine," she says with a waggle of eyebrows.
"I beg to differ." Beca bites her lip as soon as the words are out, because she knows she lobbed that to Chloe. Slow pitch. Underhand.
"Well, you certainly know how to beg." And she knocks it out of the park. Home run.
Beca jostles her with the arm that's still around her shoulders. "You. Shut up."
"Shutting up? Now that's something you're no good at. In certain situations."
"Oh my God," Beca says, laughing and feeling her face warm a bit. "As if you were so quiet."
Chloe grins down at her, and Beca's confident she never wants to take off her X-Ray/Technicolor vision glasses. "It wasn't a criticism. I'm taking a great deal of pride in it."
Beca feels herself blush harder and she rolls to her right, into Chloe, until her face is hiding in her shoulder and their legs are tangled (again). "Shh."
Chloe laughs and reels her in closer, rocking back and forth playfully.
And Beca wonders how it's possible for something like this to feel so natural, so right. It was unlike everything she knew about herself to be able to strip of her barriers, figurative and otherwise, without any hesitation. She hadn't even thought about it. They ate their pizza. They washed up for bed. They changed into pajamas. Chloe came to Beca's room like basically every night prior. They talked and Chloe turned off the lamp and they said, 'goodnight.'
But instead of turning to face the wall to sleep like usual, Beca moved to settle over Chloe and bring their lips back together, picking up exactly where they had left off on the couch.
It was like any other step of their routine. Not that there was anything routine about it. But that's how natural and easy it felt.
It just was.
In a perfect metaphor for this recap of events, one second Chloe is snuggling Beca and rocking her, and the next Beca finds herself pinned on her back, staring up at brilliant blue eyes that seem to be hinting that it's still not quite bedtime, even though her last glance at the clock told her it was well past two o'clock in the morning and Chloe has class at nine o'clock.
"Insatiable," Beca teases. She'd have liked to accompany the comment with a tickle to Chloe's stomach or something akin, but her arms are very much incapacitated, pressed into the bed on either side of her head and held down with a fair amount of pressure. She hears herself squeak when lips connect with her neck, and she feels like maybe she should be embarrassed about it, but she can't redirect the necessary energy to do it. And she has no desire to try.
"You do realize," rumbles against her neck, "I've been waiting for this for years."
Beca pushes her shoulders back and gives a jerk of her chin, preening best she can in her current position. "Oh really? Years?"
She feels her wrists set free and warm hands drag down her arms as Chloe slips lower. "One or two," Chloe says between the wet kisses she's pressing down Beca's chest. "Or four."
"You flatter me." She drops her freed hands to Chloe's back, arching her fingers so her nails drag up her back as she moves backward.
"Don't act like you haven't felt the same way," tickles her stomach.
Beca sucks in her tummy, away from the tickles that keep coming from breath and lips and that gorgeous red hair, and she has a flash of a memory of their interruption earlier in the night. That she was very much intending to tell Chloe something before the doorbell rang. She catches Chloe under her arms before she's out of reach and gives a tug to get her to return.
"But…" Chloe says as she crawls up, pouting a little.
"I wanna tell you something."
"Oh!" Chloe smiles brilliantly at first, but it quickly fades to a soft, gentle smile. "Okay."
Beca looks up at her, words on the tip of her tongue. She thinks back through the previous times she's said it. It was always a grand to-do, with worry about whether or not they'll say it back, or she's been the one trying to decide if she can say it back. It's always been nervous and shaky and worrisome. But it's not now.
Something about this time is special. She knows it. Feels it. She reaches up and brushes the curtain of hair away from the right side of Chloe's face so she can see her better, hovering above. She holds it there, fingers combed in, thumb brushing back and forth against Chloe's cheek.
"I love you."
What's interesting about this particular instance, she notes, is that she's told Chloe she loves her innumerable times. Over text. In passing as they come and go from the house. Before leaving for winter or summer breaks. After winning competitions.
It's different now. It's the same, but different. They're different. They're on their new path, the one they've never taken. The language is different along this one.
Chloe's eyes slip closed and she turns her head to press her lips to the soft skin of Beca's forearm. She holds her lips there, and Beca can see the fluttering of her eyelashes and the way the corner of her eye crinkles a little. When she turns back and opens her eyes, Beca can see that they're wet, shining with unshed tears.
"I've been waiting so long to hear you say that," she says, and Beca can hear a tremble in Chloe's voice. A teardrop finally makes its way past her long eyelashes and Beca catches it with her thumb to brush it away from her face. She knows Chloe knows it's different now, too. She's heard Beca say it a thousand times. But never like this.
Beca trails her free hand down Chloe's arm. "Sorry it took me awhile. Better late than never, right?"
Chloe sniffles and laughs, and nods furiously as she drops down to kiss Beca. They simply kiss, nothing more. The image of an envelope with a lipstick imprint zips through Beca's mind, and she smiles internally. Chloe pulls back but stays close. She nudges Beca's nose with her own to get Beca to open her eyes, and when she does, Beca sees that the tears are gone.
"I love you, too."
Sealed with a kiss indeed.