Chapter Text
Chloe ate her toast two ways; she usually took a slice of bread, and she would toast it just enough to where there were hints of gold streaking across the plain and spongy bread, and then she would smear a glob of peanut butter over it, and then she’d top it with a generous drizzle of honey; the other way she’d prepared her toast was the same start, toasting until golden (but still spongy), but instead of peanut butter she’d put cream cheese, and avocado, with sesame seeds and poppy seeds — then she’d cut the toast on the diagonal, and make a triangle sandwich out of it. Today, however, she didn’t have her toast, either way, instead, she woke up twenty minutes after her alarm, leaving her only twenty minutes to get ready, and get to work — meaning no coffee, and no savory, or sweet, toast.
Instead, all she got was a tension headache and a sour growling stomach. Her interrupted routine had become so essential that her entire day was thrown off completely, so badly that her supervisor left her on paperwork instead of patient check-in and workup due to her tardiness. It was only an hour past noon, and her spirit was begging to go home so she could redo today. She wanted to redo more than today. “Chloe? Chloe?” She looked up and saw one of her peers waving her hand in front of her face.
“Yeah, yeah, yes?” She rushed out, totally embarrassed. She looked down at the open file in front of her, and she found that she’d finished the task already, and she’d been staring at it for the past five minutes.
“It’s lunch,”
“I can’t, Mave, Dr. Howard needs me to get this paperwork all sorted out,” Chloe explained, with an exasperated sigh. She closed the file, and moved on to the next, scanning the text hurriedly with a black pen (despite her inability to absorb words at the moment). Before she could stop her, Mave pulled the documents away from her sight, and gave her a stern look.
“Go, I got this, you gotta eat sometime, you know,” Chloe pressed her lips together, and finally breathed heavily.
“Okay, okay,” she relented, “Thank you,” she said earnestly.
A quick drive to the nearest Starbucks was what she decided on, where she could get coffee and whatever sandwich sounded good since she didn’t get to have either earlier in the morning. She drummed her hands on the steering wheel, and made a smooth turn into the parking lot, where she turned off the radio so she could see better (yes, it’s weird, no she will not elaborate) and squinted her eyes to scavenge for a parking space. Finally she found one, and she stepped out of her car, and she rushed inside without locking it behind her. Luckily, the line was moving quickly, and she was able to order, “And here is your change, we’ll have that up for you,”
“Thanks,” she took the bills, and change, and she haphazardly shoved it into the pant pocket of her scrubs, and she scurried to the side. She waited near one of the mug shelves, and she rocked on the heels of her feet. She glanced around seeing several people studying, or speaking with friends, with dates. Chloe exhaled, and stared wistfully at a couple, when suddenly her eyes settled on the most intense, navy-blue eyes she’d ever seen. She ducked behind the mug shelf, and she watched as Beca Mitchell walked to the end of the line with Elliot towering over her. She watched as they murmured to each other, as they crept closer, and closer to the front of the line. Chloe watched Beca give a subtle and wry smile from the side of her lips, and give a short lived laugh. It was as if they were back at Barden, before…
“Chloe: iced caramel macchiato, and a maple wood bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich,” She straightened her posture immediately, and she sped-walked to the counter to snatch the order from the barista’s hands, and disappeared out the door, and she swore that she could feel eyes on her as she left.
It’s not that she didn’t want to see Beca, it wasn’t like that at all. She really wanted to see Beca, on multiple occasions, she wanted to hear her rant about the way Ed Sheeran was going to peak after he led more male artists to tap into the same emotional vulnerability and lose his “originality” at a rapid decline, and how much her coworkers bothered her, she wanted to make fun of her for reading Les Misérables again — Chloe wanted to see her — but she wasn’t so sure that Beca wanted to see her too.
The summer months put between them felt like years, and it took a lot to not think about it constantly. It was like someone took the stars and left behind the darkened sky so that she could feel the emptiness without them. Without Beca, she was out of place, and the only comfort she had was the knowledge that she still existed somewhere away from her. The only time Chloe ever saw her was through posts from across the country, in North Carolina, where she was recovering. She made it a strict rule to not seek her out, to let Beca come to her, and she hadn’t. In the time that they’d been apart (not including the time she spent staying out of her way), she hadn’t spoken to her, and yes, Chloe was to blame — she didn’t hold up her end of the bargain — but it was the disappointment that hurt the most. It was the disappointment that no matter how much time passed, Beca would never remember her, and that made each day feel like punishment.
She gripped her steering wheel hard, her sandwich had been discarded in her cup holder (along with her long forgotten coffee). It was unreal that Beca was there, in San Francisco. There were hundreds of coffee places in the city, but she- they had to walk into the one Chloe frequented the most? She was already trying to figure out the closest place that served coffee, but the only one she could think of was a McDonald’s and their coffee always upset her stomach. She sighed frustratedly as she raised her iced coffee to her mouth to take a sip, only for it to dribble down her wrist. Chloe shook her head, and she glanced in the rear view mirror at herself, deciding that she just wouldn’t be buying coffee anymore. She’d been meaning to stop drinking so much caffeine anyway.
The water was lukewarm, and Chloe could feel the undissolved bath salts sitting underneath her body. It dug into her skin uncomfortably, and she looked around her bathroom to find that only one of her candles was still burning. It was the candle that Beca had gotten her for finals, it smelled like chamomile tea — her favorite. She smiled sadly at the flame, and remembered how much better Beca was at drawing baths — how good she is at drawing baths. Chloe quietly scolded herself, she made a bad habit of speaking of Beca as if she were dead. She wasn’t dead, she just didn’t remember.
Chloe turned her head back to the faucet to watch it drip, and she looked down at her toe nails. The navy blue nail polish from spring break was chipped, and on its last legs. She recalled the way she had to explain to Aubrey what had happened to Beca. A fit of sobbing and shouting, her knees buckling and then falling to the ground, and there Aubrey was unable to soothe her pain. Chloe took a shaky breath in, and leaned forward, and she yanked the chain to drain the tub.
Clad in a white towel with pink polka dots, she clicked through the TV, and when she landed on some late-night soap opera she stopped. The main character’s new bride just woke up from a coma with no recollection of who he was. Chloe chewed her lip as she watched their conversation play out. The groom sobbed, he begged her to remember, and Chloe could feel herself about to cry. It wasn’t until he kissed her that she remembered, and she stuttered his name in a whisper. Chloe changed the channel again, and she arrived at a rerun of The Nanny , she’d seen this episode before. She quietly laughed with the laugh track after a good punchline, and laid down in her unmade bed.
She thought to herself, maybe she should’ve kissed Beca before like in the soap opera. Maybe she would’ve remembered then.
Chloe wiped her sweaty forehead with her elbow, and she continued to scrub her bathroom floor. She always did love lemon scented cleaning products, her entire apartment probably smelled like lemon by now. She cleaned her entire bedroom (closet included), she dusted the living room, and she washed and put away all of her dishes. This was the last chore that needed to be done. She considered going grocery shopping, or going to the car wash, anything to ignore the DM from Beca left in her inbox. Chloe hadn’t read it yet, but when she woke up, and she unlocked her phone there it was from the account she tried very hard not to stalk.
Finally, after mopping up the leftover suds, she leaned against the door frame to catch her breath. In her urgency to not read her message, Chloe had forgotten to leave the bathroom window open to let the cleaning product fumes out. Her lungs felt heavy, and shallow, as if she’d just been swimming. After she slipped off her big, green cleaning gloves, and discarded them in the kitchen sink, she plucked her phone off the sofa, and stood outside on her small balcony. She opened every app except for Instagram , and she stared at the little red notification on the app icon for far too long. She turned off the screen, and looked down at the street below, but as her phone began to ring she felt sudden dread at the thought that it might be Beca. She closed her eyes, hoping that it hadn’t been Beca calling to confront her about running away the day before. She opened her eyes to see that it was only Emily. “Hello?”
“Hey!”
“Hi, Em, how are you?” Chloe said excitedly.
“I’m good, I’m good, I just held auditions!” Emily squealed, and Chloe winced at the shrillness of it, “I think we have some pretty good picks this year,”
“That’s great! What song did you pick for them?”
“ All Time Low ,”
“That’s such a good one!”
“I know!” Emily replied proudly, “It had enough vocals, and a lot of backtrack to see if anyone who auditioned knew how to find pitch, stay on tempo, and fill in the instrumental with sounds,”
“Sounds like the perfect storm,” Emily chuckled, and quietly agreed.
“Well, I gotta get to planning initiation, but I just wanted to call and tell you the news,”
“Okay, Em, sounds great,”
“Okay, bye! I miss you!”
“I miss you too,” Emily hung up, and Chloe rolled her shoulders as she turned back around to see her already clean apartment. She sighed heavily, and trudged back in. Someone had to disinfect every single door knob in the apartment.
Chloe bopped her head to a random early 2000s song that played through the speakers, as she pushed her cart through the grocery store. She leaned heavily on the handle bar while she browsed the Pedialyte . She grabbed the orange one, and continued meandering through the store. She browsed the produce section, feeling the damp chill against her body as she passed by. She wished she’d gone to wash her car instead, she had no real need to be at the store. Her fridge and pantry were both stocked, she didn’t need any other essentials, there was no reason to be there other than because she was avoiding something. Still, she walked the aisles, shopping according to her growling stomach. Potato chips, bean dip, a pint of rocky road ice cream, all things junk because she had the day off.
She looked at the shelves, and she noticed a bag of Starbursts . They were Beca’s favorite. For almost every movie night, Beca would grab Starbursts to eat them by the handful, but she would give all the yellow ones to Chloe because Chloe only liked the yellow ones. Sometimes she would warp the sides to turn them into stars before she gave them to Chloe. Without thinking she grabbed a bag, and she made her way to self check-out.
Sometimes Chloe would imagine that she and Beca were dating, and that Beca worked at a small label, and she was busy making someone’s EP, and she had her own home studio in Chloe’s spare room. As she swiped the barcode on her potato chips, she thought to herself that Beca would probably be swamped with work so when Chloe got home she wouldn’t see her right away because she was holed up in the spare room. The heartache the illusion caused didn’t matter if for a second Chloe could experience what would've been if things had worked themselves out.
After she put all her bags in the backseat, she sat in the driver’s seat and leaned her head back against the headrest. It was cool out, the breeze stirred the air around gently. Just as she’d begun to relax, her phone began to ring, the sound cut through the air hard and sudden. She looked down to see that it was Emily again. She sighed, and answered, she put the phone up to her ear, “Hello?” She said tiredly.
“Hey, Chloe,” Emily greeted, “How’s it going?”
“It’s going kind of slow, you?”
“It’s good! I finished planning, what are you up to?”
“Just got out of the grocery store,”
“Nice, nice,” she hummed, “So, funny story, um, Beca texted me,” Chloe gulped at the name.
“Oh?”
“Yeah… Yeah, she said that she saw you the other day?” Chloe sighed, and she rubbed her eye roughly.
“Yeah, Emily, I did see her,” Chloe pressed her lips together, and she allowed her fingers to jingle the keychains hanging from her key fob, “I didn’t know she lived here,”
“She said the same thing about you too, actually,” she could hear Emily smack her lips, “She told me she messaged you,”
“What, are you guys best friends now?” Chloe said bitterly before she could stop herself. All she received was silence from her other end, she could imagine the grimace on her face, and already she felt guilty. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,”
“It’s okay,” Emily said quietly, “I get it,” Chloe paused, and she closed her eyes.
“I haven’t looked at her message yet,”
“Are you going to?” she asked curiously.
“I don’t know yet,”
“That’s okay,” Chloe breathed slowly, “Well, I’ll let you go now, talk soon?”
“Yeah, talk soon,”
“You know I love you, right?” Chloe smiled, and started her car.
“Yeah, I love you too,” the call ended and Chloe drove home.
As she entered her apartment, she noted how empty it felt, how lifeless it was without the commotion of the Bellas running amuck. The door to her spare room was open, and the lights were off, just as she always left it before. The illusion wore off, as she came to terms with the fact that Beca wasn’t here. Suddenly, she wasn’t hungry anymore.