Work Text:
The first time Max sees it, she isn’t even trying to (she swears).
It’s exactly a week after the Storm didn’t come, and Max lets Chloe drag her to someone’s house party, because it’s either Chloe gets hammered there or she’s getting hammered alone in her room when Max’s at Blackwell and out of reach. Max’s powers have been slowly fading over the past few days and Chloe’s only gotten worse and Max is scared shitless of something happening when she’s not there to prevent it—or when she’s there and can’t prevent it anyway. Max would let the entire world burn if it made Chloe Elizabeth Price feel less cold for half a second, but she’s only human and as aching as it is to realize, Chloe’s a handful that Max doesn’t quite know how to handle when she’s sad.
Sometimes when Max spends the night and Chloe drives her to Blackwell in the morning, her gaze’ll linger over to the ditch for a second and Max will convince herself if she wasn’t in the car with her Chloe would turn the wheel without thinking. Then she’ll force Chloe to text her when she gets home and will feel sick to her stomach until Chloe does. When Chloe gets too high, Max is scared of how bad she will feel when she sobers up and when Chloe gets drunk, Max is scared she’ll drink herself to death. It’s probably unhealthy enough to drive a therapist to madness but Max forces herself to believe that it’ll pass.
Max drinks a glass and a half of rum and gets tipsy enough to like the feeling a lot, so she makes herself dunk a few glasses of water and she finds Chloe where she’s drunkenly dancing to aggressive EDM to make her drink water too. It’s relieving when Chloe complies easily enough. It’s less relieving when Chloe drops her forehead against Max’s and Max can feel herself stare at her best friend’s lips for ten seconds too long before she thinks of the smell of the junkyard and the feeling of dirt under her nails and she pulls away to pathetically ask Chloe if they can go home now.
Chloe folds once more and Max drives Chloe’s safety hazard of a truck even though she’s pretty sure she isn’t back to fully sober yet. She manages to get them home still and then Chloe spends fifteen minutes throwing up on the sidewalk in front of her house before she lets Max wrap one of her arms around her shoulders and half-carry her inside and all the way upstairs to her room.
They probably both need a shower and some food but Max is too tired to even change, so she gets under the covers on Chloe’s bed and watches as Chloe pulls her vomit-stained jumper over her head, and—and that’s when she sees it.
Chloe pulls her jumper off and the jumper tugs at the shirt underneath and for a second there’s a thin line of Chloe’s skin showing. Max’s gaze mechanically catches the belly button piercing she knows is there and she even gets to see the V that Chloe’s hipbones are tracing because she’s wearing low-waisted jeans with no belt and—and for a second she swears to fucking God there’s ink there. And then Chloe’s throwing her jumper to the side and her shirt sits on her frame again and Max blinks and feels like she’s hallucinated. She’s pretty convinced Chloe does not have more tattoos than the sleeve of her arm—she’s seen her in only a bra and a bikini bottom last Tuesday, and even though she was mostly avoiding staring at Chloe’s body like a creep, she would know, right? Right. At least she’s pretty sure. She’s probably just tipsier than she thought, and she shouldn’t even care this much about Chloe’s tattoos anyway. Why would she.
“What,” Chloe mumbles more than asks when she catches Max’s eyes on her, her own half-lidded. She still looks white as a sheet. It’s making the bags under her eyes stand out even worse. Max’s mouth is dry when she swallows, and she doesn’t know what to make of the painful tug at her heartstrings when it’s paired up with the swoop of her stomach.
“Nothing,” Max says, and she doesn’t check Chloe’s hip for ink when Chloe falls asleep with her sweat-soaked forehead pushed into her neck.
•.•
The second time Max sees it it’s under way lighter circumstances and because she cannot help but ask.
She isn’t going to lie to herself and pretend like she hasn’t been thinking about it ever since that night. She feels like a perv whenever she spends the night and tries to get a glimpse of Chloe’s hip without being obvious when she’s changing in the room—even though Chloe has no concept of that same privacy and will start taking her clothes off without even warning Max first, or will tell Max to ‘just get changed’ and then keep the conversation going keeping eye contact like Max isn’t stripping in front of her. Admittedly, it’s almost offensive that Chloe never looks the tiniest bit flustered in front of Max while Max can’t even bring herself to look at her hip for too long without tearing her eyes off like it burns to watch, but Chloe is beautiful and slender and tall and she has pale skin that looks smooth to the touch, and Max is just Max, so she guesses it’s understandable.
Chloe is smoking—and it’s a cigarette not a joint which, hey, silver linings—and Max is sitting at Chloe’s desk attempting to get done with chemistry homework. She’s texted Warren for the answers twice and he’s only replied with vague hints and ‘you can do it, Max Headrooms’, which isn’t helpful. She doesn’t know if Chloe’s as good at this shit as she used to be, but she asks her to come explain it to her anyway. Chloe snorts like she’s going to make fun of her but she pulls the chair from her dressing table next to Max’s and she takes a look at her worksheet instead.
“‘s just a trick question, dude, that’s actually pretty easy.”
Max swears to everything that’s holy that she listens to Chloe’s explanations the first few seconds. She gets distracted halfway through because Chloe isn’t wearing a beanie and her hair dye is starting to wear off and her roots are going back blonde, and Max tries not to think of a wheelchair and of dead whales on the sand. Instead, she thinks of the way fourteen-year-old Chloe would look like when she rode her skateboard and her long blonde hair would catch the wind and she feels her stomach churn a bit anyway.
When Chloe’s done talking she stares at Max for a bit, and Max stares back and looks at the smudged eyeliner at the corners of Chloe’s eyes, and Chloe’s chair is a little lower than hers so she has to look down and it feels weird but not bad. Chloe smells like tobacco but also like saltwater and the thought comes to Max unbidden that this is exactly what she’s missed for five years in Seattle that made her heart feel like there was a hole in the middle of it.
She looks at Chloe’s lips and the day is too peaceful and the sun is too high in the sky so she doesn’t think of Rachel Amber. She thinks I love you, and then again I love you. Except it’s louder the second time and her breath catches a bit in her throat because she knows if she said the first I love you they could laugh it off but if she said the second one the world would shift on its axis and she would lose her mind. So instead, she says:
“I have not listened to a single word that came out of your mouth.”
“…nice,” Chloe sighs, and grabs Max’s pencil and completes the worksheet for her and Max lets her. Chloe lights up a new cigarette then and opens the window, and uses her desk as a ladder to get to the roof before she tells Max to do the same, and Max complies.
Chloe sits on the edge and Max next to her, and it’s quiet for a while. Max remembers doing this a lot as kids, and she remembers she’d never sit too close to the edge and Chloe would taunt her for it, and she’d sit closer and closer to said edge like she wanted to prove her point to her but all it did was drive Max insane and make her hold on to the back of Chloe’s shirt just in case.
She watches as Chloe shows her cool tricks she can do with the cigarette smoke and she wonders who taught her all that and decides not to ask just in case it was Rachel. She stares at Chloe’s profile and at the way her jawline works when she blows the smoke out, and then at her neck where her tattoo starts and the question kind of tumbles out of her mouth on its own.
“You don’t have any more tattoos than this one, do you?”
“Who do you take me for, of course I do,” Chloe says without missing a beat, grinning around her cigarette, and Max’s mouth gets dry all over again.
“Where,” she asks without thinking, and before she knows it Chloe’s rolling her eyes half-heartedly, and caching the hem of her shirt in her mouth so she can hold it up as she pulls the waistband of her jeans and boxers down to show Max. Max has no idea why her hands feel so clammy all of a sudden.
Along Chloe’s hipbone, there're two tiny stars, that could so easily be missed it’s maddening, that are drawn so purposefully messily to still look beautiful, and they fit Chloe so well Max gets a bit short of breath. Max wants to take a picture of the whole thing, of the red fabric between Chloe’s teeth and the look she has in her eyes like she knows what Max is thinking and the way the black ink looks on her skin.
“What does it mean?” she asks, and immediately wishes she hadn’t because that makes Chloe let go of her shirt and adjust herself and just like that the moment’s over and Max takes her eyes off Chloe just as fast because God, she was staring, wasn’t she?
“Doesn’t mean shit, Caulfield, it makes me look hot is all,” she replies as she takes another drag. Max can’t fight the urge to nod.
“Yeah,” she says, and Chloe smirks again.
•.•
The third time it happens it’s because Max Caulfield is undressing Chloe Price.
She thinks about that tattoo for days on end, and about how greedy it makes her feel, so much that she ends up having dreams about it. It’s extremely disorienting, because Max has never had actual wet dreams before. She’s had vaguely sensual dreams which she woke up from before anything even happened—she’s never had wet dreams. Like, erotic, sexual, whatever—wet dreams. But now she’s having recurring dreams about her best friend and her stupid fucking tattoo, and it’s driving her absolutely insane.
She’s around Chloe as often as usual, and making eye contact has never been harder than now that she’s basically fantasizing about her on a daily basis. She gets better at it after a few days, but she can’t get rid of the feeling inside her chest whenever it happens, that feels like fear and giddiness all at once. She feels like a middle-schooler with a stupid crush. It’s unbearable. She already knew Chloe had gotten hot over the years—she’s not blind, she saw it as soon as she got back. And Chloe’s a reckless flirt and Max isn’t dumb enough to deny how attracted to her she already was before, but it feels like torture now.
They’re on Chloe’s bed and Chloe’s smoking—a proper joint this time. Max accepted to take a hit, but she’s pretty sure she didn’t inhale, so it should be fine. She choked on the smoke anyway, but that’s to be expected considering she’s never even hit an e-cig before, and the stuff Frank sells is pretty aggressive. She doesn’t know how they got to this, but Chloe’s rambling about the guys she hooked up with as a teenager before she had her epiphany and realized she didn’t even want to touch a guy if she could help it. The entirety of Max’s strength she’s using to avoid imagining Chloe naked and the tattoos and piercings on her body.
“What about Rachel?” she asks at some point because maybe the weed did work on her, she isn’t sure. She’d know it if it had, wouldn’t she?
“Uh, what about Rachel?” Chloe echoes back to her, tilting her head to meet Max’s gaze. Max doesn’t answer for a while because she’s too busy staring.
“I mean, you guys were a thing, right?” she says at last. “She was your…” she trails off, like she wants Chloe to complete the sentence for her so she’s sure she’s not saying something stupid. Chloe doesn’t. Max commits to it. “…your girlfriend?”
It makes Chloe laugh, for some reason, even though it sounds bitter.
“Oh, she’d have hated that.”
“Being your girlfriend?”
“Being anyone’s girlfriend,” Chloe clarifies, staring at the ceiling. “She didn’t want labels. Said it’d make her feel trapped. She wanted, like, freedom, in every aspect of her life. That, too. So, yeah. We were a thing, but it was complicated.”
“So you weren’t dating?”
“We were a thing,” Chloe repeats with a shrug.
She doesn’t look like she’s done with Max’s stupid questions, so Max risks her luck and keeps going.
“But you wanted more, right?”
“Listen, I was really into her. I’d have taken anything. I was happy being whatever she wanted us to be if it was something.”
Max looks at Chloe and thinks that at least makes sense to her.
“That’s kind of unfair to you.”
“No, it’s not,” Chloe shakes her head with a sharp, short laugh. “She wasn’t using me, Max, we agreed on this shit. Maybe I agreed because I wanted her so bad I’d have taken whatever, but still, that was my shit to sort out. It’s on me not on her. I knew from day one she didn’t want a relationship. I was bullshitting about my feelings, it wasn’t her problem to figure out. And I get that it sounds weird from your perspective, but that’s how things were, seriously.”
“No, I get it,” Max shrugs. She really, really doesn’t. “It’s just I can’t imagine having so much of you and not wanting you whole.”
There’s a silence after that, and now Max is positive the pot got to her. She doesn’t dare look back at Chloe, but she can’t bother feeling nervous either. She means every word. She thinks Chloe, with all her flaws and imperfections, is probably the most grounding person she’s ever known. She’s the only one in the world making Max feel like she belongs. Max thinks of Rachel having this Chloe, but younger and eager and most likely the most willing she’s ever been in her life, and she wonders how she managed not to fold.
Max would have folded within a second. Max would fold right now.
“You’re—” Chloe finally starts talking, just to stop herself right away. She looks at Max. Max meets her gaze. Chloe’s staring, and Max is thinking of Chloe’s tattoos and of Chloe’s eyes and of Chloe’s blonde hair and of the way Chloe’s laugh sounded back in ‘08. Chloe opens her mouth and closes it, and before Max knows it, they’re kissing, and she isn’t even sure who started it, but she grabs at the back of Chloe’s neck without thinking and pulls her even closer.
“You’re fucking insane,” Chloe mumbles against Max’s lips when they part and then she’s kissing her again and Max’s brain keeps short-circuiting. “You come back, and you’re all over me, and you say those things… you’re fucking insane.”
Max’s insides are melting.
“Good insane or bad insane?”
“Take a wild fucking guess.”
Max laughs and is cut short by Chloe’s mouth crashing against hers again. It’s only when Chloe starts kissing her neck that Max allows herself to act on instinct and tug at Chloe’s shirt so she takes it off. Chloe takes it off, and Max pulls her closer by the waistband of her jeans, trying to pull it down subtly, to get a glimpse at the ink on Chloe’s hip again. Chloe slots a thigh between Max’s legs, and Max makes a sharp sound into Chloe’s hair, and then Chloe looks up at her with a smirk and a knowing glint in her eyes.
“That what you wanna see?” she mumbles, undoing her belt to let her pants slide down a bit, and Max can’t help but nod—especially when Chloe couples the words with a light bite to her earlobe. “I fucking knew it,” she says in Max’s ear, and her laugh sounds genuinely amused. “I knew it when I showed it to you. You’re into that shit. Weirdo.”
“Fuck you,” Max mutters sheepishly, as she tightens her grip on Chloe.
“I’m getting to it. Jesus,” Chloe snorts, and slips her hands under Max’s shirt.
•.•