It isn't long before Chloe pulls away, her face averted, eyes blazing with a foreign emotion that Beca can't read, can't understand. "That was a mistake." Chloe says, voice hard and gravelly. "I – I can't do that – with you – anymore. I waited five fucking years for you, for this and – you never wanted it. I've only just – finally – pulled my life back together. You can't – you can't just come waltzing back like this and – and expect to..."

Beca grits her teeth, unable to stop the anger and hurt and disappointment and guilt from leaking into her voice, her tone. "Don't push it all on me, Chloe – we were both cowards and today I stopped being one. Have you?" She spits the last two words out.

Chloe is angry now, her blue eyes icy cold like an Arctic sky. "You have no idea, do you? How many nights I spent crying myself to sleep while you were out parading around with Jesse. How much it hurt each time you chose him over me – I'm not some goddamn consolation prize, Beca." She turns away, tears streaking down her cheeks, leaving long streaks of black eyeliner on her cheeks as they fell.

Beca's heart feels like it's being cleaved in two. Raw, throbbing, more devastated than she ever imagined she would be, Beca clenches and unclenches her fists and forces herself to breathe. She wants to grab Chloe again and kiss her, hard, and tell her – show her – that she is and always has been the single most important person in her life. But it's too late now; she'd waited too long. This wonderful, beautiful, amazing woman in front of her was lost to her forever, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Beca trembles, her knees buckling with the effort of holding everything in. Fuck, she repeats, over and over in her mind, until she feels numb and flattened, like she's lying in a hospital all drugged-up after getting rolled over by a truck. Chloe is saying something – her lips are moving – but all Beca hears is white noise and static and her own silent curse words looping like a strange, meaningless drum beat.

"Beca, I swear I thought – I thought you'd never want to be more than just friends – and I came here today because I thought that after all these months, I was ready to... be that. Friends." Chloe is rambling, white-lipped and ashen faced with guilt. "I didn't know you'd – I didn't mean to give you any wrong signals or, or –"

Broken, aching, and so, so tired, Beca turns away. "I can do that," She states, flatly. "I can do friends." She knows that it had never been – and never would be – enough; but if it's the only thing Chloe can give, maybe she'd learn to live with that the same way Chloe had.

Chloe stares at her through smudgy, blurry, tear-filled eyes. Before Beca can say anything else, John pokes his head out into the alley and yells, "Oi! Break's over! I'm paying you three hundred quid a night to mix music, not snog your bloody girlfriend."

It was so ironic, so ridiculously far from the truth, that Beca feels an almost perverse urge to laugh. Instead, she mumbles out a goodbye and takes a few steps back to the bar. Chloe catches her by the wrist. Beca pauses but does not turn around. Her expression is stony, unreadable. "I understand if you don't want to see me. Maybe not in the next few days or weeks or months. Or ever." Chloe shudders and takes a breath. "But I'd like to. I'll - I'll always be here. And when – if you're ever ready..."

"I'm alright," Beca says stubbornly, pushing her chin up even while her heart threatens to shatter into a thousand pieces. "Thursday," She says impulsively, almost impetuously, as though she were a child who refused, foolishly, to lose a bet. "Lunch." With that, she turns on her heel and heads back into the bar. Chloe watches the door swing shut behind her, wondering what the hell she'd just done.

...

Beca isn't quite sure how she manages to make it through the night, but somehow, fumbling her way through the motions, two thirty finally comes around. She grabs her bag and walks to the door without a single word to John, Blake, or the two waitresses. Blake tries to go after her, ask her what's wrong, but John stops him. "Leave her be," He says gruffly. Blake looks at his boss and realized that the grumpy, craggy man was, for some reason, guilty

Blake raises his eyebrows. "What did you do?"

"Don't look at me like that, her pissy mood has nothing to do with me." John snaps. After a while he softens. "Well, it doesn't, but I did say something that was probably – highly inappropriate, given the... situation."

Blake pats the other man on the shoulder. "She'll be alright, she's tough. That doesn't mean you shouldn't apologize though," He adds sternly, when he sees John brighten slightly.

"Don't tell me what to do," John growls. Blake gulps and took a few steps backwards, turning his palms skyward in acquiescence. John narrows his eyes at him and locks the cabinets up. "Women," He mutters to himself.

Blake hears him and laughs. "Women," he agrees.

...

Beca collapses into her bed and lies there, unable to sleep, for the next few hours. Then she simply gives up, turns on her computer and puts on her earphones. She listens to some songs, then slowly, with shaking fingers, she begins to blend a couple of tunes and beats together – tentative at first, then with a fierce, almost obsessive intensity.

It isn't the first time she'd retreated to the darkness of her room and bled her heart out into deep bass beats, haunting violin strings and steady drum beats that seemed to march on into infinity. It isn't the first time she'd amputated parts of her throbbing soul and chucked it away into music so she'd stop hurting.

There were sixty eight songs in the untitled playlist; the first song is a Titanium mash up, obviously, created during her first week in college – but it has never stopped growing since then. Each song is a reminder of every time Beca had looked into Chloe's blue eyes and felt herself falling deeper into them, every time she'd had to claw her way out, gasping for breath, every time she'd wanted to tell Chloe how much she meant to her, but stopped because she was too fucking scared.

She'd wanted to give the playlist to Chloe so many times – when she'd found out about Chloe's surgery and rushed to the hospital to be with her, when Chloe was terrified by the weakness in her voice, certain that she would never be able to sing again... when they won nationals the first time, when Chloe flunked out of Russian lit the second time, when Beca stumbled unannounced into Chloe's room in the middle of the night after a huge episode with her parents and Chloe had held her, wordlessly, while she cried herself to exhaustion. When they'd both graduated from college and spent the night getting plastered, stumbling into Beca's bed together, ending up tangled hopelessly in each other's arms until the morning sun came in and brought with it a massive headache and a miserable return to reality. A reality that they weren't together, perhaps never would be, a reality in which Beca was with Jesse and Chloe was alone because she couldn't bring herself to date anyone else.

Each time, Beca hadn't done it because she couldn't bring herself to show Chloe what she really felt, show Chloe the parts of her soul that she hid from everyone and everything except her music.

And tonight, when she finally did, it had been too late – Chloe had moved on, and Beca had no choice but to return to the darkness of her room and bury her emotions in music once again.