Chloe reached up and tucked a loose curl of hair behind her ear. She was anxious but tried not to let it show, shaking the nerves from her stomach with a sigh. She pursed her lips into as much of a smile as she could muster and caught Aubrey, watching her reflection over her shoulder.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" she asked. Chloe nodded firmly. "We can still stay in if you'd prefer you know."
Chloe turned to face her.
"Nope. I'm going to enjoy tonight – it was my idea and I'm going to go. With you." She said firmly with another nod. The curl fell from behind her ear again. "I'm going with you, and not Beca, and that's fine."
Her voice wavered at the mention of Beca's name but she pursed her lips, fighting the prickles in the corner of her eyes.
"It is fine. She won't turn up – this is your night to enjoy." Aubrey said, reaching across and tucked the loose hair back behind Chloe's ear once again.
"It's our night to enjoy." Chloe corrected.
Aubrey scoffed, running her finger over the swollen and bruised crest of her bottom lip.
"Well, that's alright for you to say but I can hardly enjoy it looking like this, can I?" she scowled, making Chloe laugh as she turned back to the mirror to check her make up a third and final time.
"There's no way you're holding me accountable for that," she said, smiling wryly as she picked at a smudge of eyeliner with her fingertip. "You brought it all upon yourself."
Aubrey's cheeks flushed furiously and Chloe watched her reflection over her shoulder with amusement as she furiously busied herself in her purse.
"Bree, you can't stay mad at me forever."
"I'm not mad." Aubrey said, without even looking up. Chloe smirked.
"You're also a terrible liar."
Aubrey glared up at her, a fierce scowl set across her face. "Fine. I am mad – you told me to make a mistake, I made one, and now I look like I went three rounds with Fat Amy's boxing kangaroo."
"Fat Amy's got a boxing kangaroo?"
Aubrey glowered.
"I'm kidding," Chloe chuckled, turning to slide her toes into her nude suede ankle boots. She looked back up at Aubrey, who still frowned. "Alright, if you'd just told me you wanted to know what it was like I probably wouldn't have headbutted you. I'm sorry." She offered an apology as a symbol of peace, despite knowing it hadn't really been her fault anyway. It seemed to soften the sourness in Aubrey's face nevertheless.
"First, that's weird, and second – apology noted." Aubrey said flatly.
"Good." Chloe grinned back at her and shrugged her Aztec woollen poncho over her dress. She'd still opted for the pink one, Aubrey having added it was a great choice, even though she wasn't out to impress. "Now come on, we're going to be late."
Chloe had always had a strange fascination with the way the world looked through a moving car window. Especially at night. And even more so at night and in the rain. She was reminded of long summer drives as a child; cross country ventures with her dad where she would be tossed onto the back seat of the car in the early hours of the morning with her brother at her side, still tired and wrapped in blankets. She'd wake slowly, watching the world unfurl in the soupy light of the morning, pressing her forehead up against the cool glass of the window as the car sped along the highway. They would count houses, then cars, then trees and then clouds as they travelled further out of town, the hours ticking by and civilisation becoming sparser; towns turned to villages, villages to fields, and the green eventually replaced with rolling, dusty deserts.
Her brother would whine incessantly; he was too hot, tired, hungry, too cold, sweaty, uncomfortable – all along Chloe sat silently, enjoying how she felt secure in her seat, the sweaty backs of her knees sticking to the brown leather of her dads car and holding her knees in her place. She would pretend she was a bumblebee; peeling her skin from the seat like an insect stuck to gluey pollen. She watched everything through the window, the hum of the engine drowning out her brother's moans and enveloping her in her own play world. The country whirled by; greens and blues into yellows and browns, a flash of speeding red or black or purple making her jump as another car flew past in the opposite lane. Sometimes she would pass the time by racing raindrops against each other (she almost never won) and other times she would press her nose and sticky fingers right up against the window, her palms spread as flat as they would go, trying to see her reflection in the bulbous swell of the raindrops on the glass as best she could without going cross-eyed. Her brother would jab her in the ribs and she would turn and glare as fiercely as she could at his laughing face, before her dad would pull over and invite her to sit up in the front beside him. Her brother rarely got to sit in the front seats on the way out of town, and although she felt a little bad when she saw his glowering face in the sun visor mirror (his arms folded and his brow furrowed as he stared angrily out of the window) she always enjoyed the time beside her dad regardless.
The road was big and black and looming in front of her, rolling in a continuous swell in the yellow glow of the car headlamps. Just as Chloe's eyes would begin to droop, tired with a whole day of travelling, her dad would pull the car over to the side of the dusty highway, cut the engine and carry Chloe and her brother, one child scooped in either arm, across the dusty path, away from the road, and lay them down on the ground on a blanket he'd had hidden in his back pocket.
"Look," he would say, putting a hand on Chloe's and pointing it skyward. "Look at the stars."
Chloe would peer as best she could through her sleepy eyelids as her dad pointed out all the constellations he could remember. They were never right she found out in later years, but she liked them better that way.
"That one's a polar bay," he would say, tracing shapes with his finger in the dark air above them. "And that one's a lion, and a giraffe, and-" he tucked her tight into the crux of his arm "- that one, the red one, right there – that's a ladybird."
She would turn into his arm, pressing her grin into the warm leather of his coat.
"Don't be silly!"
"I'm not!" He laughed back.
"Ladybugs can't fly that high!" she would question, looking up at her dad. Her brother had long since fallen asleep, warm in the curve of her dad's arm.
Her dad nodded and squeezed her close.
"They can fly as high as you want Chlo'. You want it bad enough and it'll happen. Don't forget that."
She would sleep the entire journey back, warm under her dad's heavy brown coat, spread across the entire back seat as her brother got to curl up in the front.
A cold hand on her thigh suddenly make her jump and she cricked her neck as she turned.
"You okay?" Aubrey asked. Chloe realised she had sunk sideways in the back seat of the cab and had been staring out of the window, with her head pressed against the window as she had done so many times as a child.
She nodded and forced a smile as she noticed Aubrey's hand on her thigh. She secretly wished it was Beca's hand; warm and loving, rather than platonically reassuring as she knew Aubrey's was instead, but she was grateful of the courage her presence gave her regardless.
The cab rumbled on through the city and Chloe watched the lights and the people through the window, all slow and ethereal under the yellow streetlamp glow. They were visible one minute then gone the next as the cab turned a corner or pulled away from a junction. She wondered why there was a man sat on her own in a doorway, and then he was gone, and she wanted to know instead how long the couple at the crossing had been holding hands – and then they too were gone, and the cab was slowing, and the door was opening and the driver docked his cap as Chloe stepped out onto the pavement beside Aubrey.
She hesitated for a second, looking up to the sky as rain began to fall on her face, then Aubrey's face was sharp in her ear, her bony fingers intertwining with her own and pulling her under the canopy entrance of the hotel and into the busy foyer.
"Last chance," Aubrey said, her eyebrow raised. Chloe spotted a line of suited hotel attendants taking invitations from a busy throng of guests in the corner of the reception. A couple brushed past them and Chloe turned back to look at Aubrey who was watching her expectantly.
"We can go now, if you don't want to stay. This was yours and Bec-"
"No, come on," Chloe said, suddenly breaking from her suffocating thoughts and pulling Aubrey towards the line of people waiting to enter the hall. She fumbled in her purse for the tickets. "I got priority seating, right on the front row," she said, trying to distract herself from the weight that was creeping back up in her chest "so I think we go in somewhere else – yep, look, over here," She pointed to a separate sign at the side of the thickening throng of people. "We can go in first over there too."
Her fingers brushed the edge of a thick envelope in her purse and she tugged at it, pulling it free. She held it out to a young hotel assistant who stood at the entrance to the hall.
"Priority only, ma'am." He said, pointing to the sign. Chloe nodded.
"Chloe Beale, plus guest," she said, as he took the invite from her and thumbed through the sheets.
"Sorry ma'am." He said after a moment. "I can let Miss Beale in, but there's no ticket for your guest."
"What?" Chloe gasped, her mouth agape. "I got two – two tickets-"
The assistant held up a sheet of cream paper – the invitation letter, yes, Chloe recognised that, and then one, two invitation cards. Except there was only one.
"But – but -" Chloe stammered.
And then she suddenly knew where the spare ticket was.
"Can you not just let us in?" she heard Aubrey say.
Chloe remembered leaving the ticket on Beca's desk.
"No ma'am, I'm really sorry."
She'd taken it to surprise her.
"The letter says Chloe, plus one," Aubrey said. "So I'm the plus one. I don't really see the problem."
She'd signed it with a simple 'x' and propped it across the keyboard of Beca's laptop.
"What does this do?" she remembered asking playfully, pointing at the mixing desk. If Beca came over she'd surely see the card. It was the morning of their shopping trip and Chloe had been childishly excited as she'd skipped over to Baker Halls, the envelope tucked in the inside breast pocket of her blue pea coat. She'd hoped to hand it to Beca when she'd opened the door – practised the conversation over in her head – but then Kimmy-Jin had answered – watching her with her beady eyes and making her all uncomfortable.
As Beca rummaged in her closet and Chloe made herself at home at her desk she dropped it tentatively on the desk when neither Beca nor Kimmy-Jin had been watching, then tried to tease Beca into coming over to find it.
Instead though Beca had shut the lapto, reset the mixing dials and summoned her to leave without a second glance, moaning about personal space and invasion of privacy and – with a pang to the chest, Chloe remembered – complaining about Jesse.
"Ma'am, I'm really sorry, without that second ticket, I cannot let you in."
"It's fine, I'll go," Aubrey said, her hand on Chloe's shoulder, turning her away from the attendant.
"No," Chloe said, shrugging her hand away, finding words again in her sickly mouth. "You're not going anywhere. I know where the other ticket is. And I'm gonna go get it."