The first time you really noticed Chloe Price, you were two drinks in and already regretting coming to Rachel's party.

The music was too loud, the dorm too packed, and you'd retreated to the corner near the stereo like a person who had given up. Rachel was talking — she was always talking, that golden, effortless kind of talking that made everyone feel like the most interesting person in the room — and you were almost starting to relax when something hit your shoulder and a hand closed around your beer. Gone.

"Okay, I'm gonna stop you right there."

You turned. Blue eyes. Leather jacket. A smirk that had probably gotten her in trouble more times than she could count. She was already drinking your beer, one eyebrow raised like she was waiting for you to do something about it.

"The cheap stuff tastes like regret," Chloe said, "but if you're gonna go down like that, at least commit." She took another swig. Deliberate. Holding eye contact the entire time. "You were holding it like an apology."

Rachel, standing beside her, pressed her lips together to keep from laughing.

You could've let it go. Could've laughed it off, gotten another drink, forgotten about it by morning. You didn't. You looked Chloe Price dead in the eye and said exactly what came to mind.

Something shifted in her expression — small, fast, like a door opening and closing before you could see inside. Then the smirk came back, wider this time. Real.

"Okay," she said. "Okay."

Rachel had laughed, looping her arm through Chloe's. "Told you she bites back."

That was months ago. Now the junkyard stretched out around you like the bones of something enormous — crushed hoods and split windshields catching the last of the afternoon light, the whole place soaked in that heavy golden hour that made even rust look beautiful. Arcadia Bay was like that. It had a way of making broken things look like art.

Chloe was sprawled across the hood of a dead pickup, boots crossed at the ankle, head tipped back, throat exposed as she drained the last of her beer like she had nowhere to be and nothing to lose. The sun hit her just right — or wrong, depending on how you looked at it.

You'd been coming here for months. Just the two of you, mostly. Rachel orbited in and out the way Rachel did, bright and brief as a comet, but she never stayed for the quiet parts. The sitting. The doing-nothing. The letting-the-world-be-loud-somewhere-else-for-a-while.

Those parts were yours and Chloe's.

The can crumpled in her fist. She launched it sideways into a heap of scrap without looking.

"So." She didn't move. Still staring at the sky. "Rachel thinks you're into me."

The words landed flat and casual, like she was reporting weather.

"Said it like it was obvious." Chloe finally looked at you, rolling her head to the side. Those blue eyes — always doing too much, always seeing more than they were supposed to. "Which, I mean. I get it." She swung her legs off the hood and dropped to the ground in front of you. Too close. Close enough that you caught leather and cigarette smoke and something underneath both, something that was just her — familiar in a way that had stopped surprising you and started scaring you instead.

"It'd be pretty stupid, though." She tilted her head. The smirk was there, sharp as always, but it was doing too much work. Covering something. "Getting feelings in a place like this." The junkyard was dead quiet except for the distant sound of highway traffic and one bird that hadn't figured out the mood yet.

"Then again." Her voice dropped half a register. "I am kind of a lot to resist."

The grin came automatic — reflex armor. But her fingers were tapping against her thigh in that restless way they did when she was thinking too hard about something she couldn't punch or outrun.

You knew that tell by now.

Chloe Price wasn't being funny. She wasn't running her mouth the way she always did, filling silence before it could fill her.

She was waiting. Waiting for your awnser