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Clarke returns to the ballroom on quiet feet, then stands just inside the doorway, letting her eyes adjust to the dark. The space is lit only by the low, flickering candles on the tables, the fairy lights framing the windows. Guests like fancy-dress ghosts gather in pairs and groups, talking, drinks in hand, while others take to the dance floor in the center of the room.
A few minutes outside on the balcony, in the cold, clear autumn night, has done her good. She felt the sharp chill of the season on her skin, tilted her head back to take in the cloudless sky and the few bright points of light that are the reflections of stars. She wondered at the threat of early snow in the air. The indoors was becoming too stuffy, too close. Outside she felt like she could breathe again and now, back here, the warmth of so many people gathered all at once sends a pleasant feeling up her bare arms and her neck.
Now she watches as the band breaks at the end of their first set, as the people on the dance floor scatter and disperse. Miller slumping down into the nearest chair, struggling to pull loose the knot of his tie. Roma and Brie leaning on each other as they pull off their heels, throwing them out of sight beneath the overhang of a tablecloth. Jasper and Monty heading over toward the cake, already sliced and arranged on small china plates at the far end of the room. Whatever quiet threatened as the band set their instruments aside has fallen away again, replaced by the loud pop beats from the stereo. Clarke catches sight of the newlyweds still on the dance floor, twirling in a circle, smiling, laughing, and feels a warm affection rising in her chest.
Maybe if she could, she would stay here on the outskirts for the rest of the night, simply observing, not out of shyness but out of a sense that these moments are not meant for her. She's wearing a new dress, and she's not used to the way it clings along the curves of her body, not used to the sway of the skirt around her legs. What did she think would happen? What did she think she would feel in this moment? What was she expecting from a new outfit and a late night and a fancy hotel, the sparkling of tiny lights, a faint view of the skyline through windows that, after dark, serve only to reflect the festivities themselves in faint, blurred images?
Romantic fantasies feel not even like indulgence, but like silly distractions, the mistakes of the past or of a younger self.
She slips her way around the tables, excusing herself past people's feet, until she reaches the edge of the dance floor. She intends to find her table again and sit down, but before she can, she sees him, and stops short.
Bellamy.
He's standing at the corner of the wedding party table, one hand in his pocket, the other wrapped around his half-empty glass of champagne, talking to a couple of people that Clarke doesn't know. He's ditched his suit jacket and tie, the sleeves of his shirt pushed up to his elbows. The top buttons of his shirt are undone. And whatever magic his sister worked on his unruly curls in the morning has worn off, and they're a mess again, such a perfect mess that Clarke wonders if he stole away and mussed them up again himself. Now that she's looking at him, she cannot stop looking at him. She stays right where she is, wondering when he will notice her.
She has no doubt that he will.
One of the other guests makes a joke, and Bellamy laughs, brings his glass up to his lips to drink and in that moment, that moment at last, he happens to glance at her. And everything else stops.
The other two are still laughing. They do not notice that his smile has turned soft. How he tries to hide it, for a moment, behind a sip of champagne. How he is not paying attention to them anymore. How his gaze has locked on her.
She feels like she's holding a great secret, thumping in her chest along with the beating of her heart: this secret of the way he looks at her, and the heat that rises, a pink blush across her skin. The heat of the room, stuffy and thick. The dim-lit background of the room like blurs and shadows, and the surround-sound of the upbeat melody of the music, so loud it could almost drown out the thrum of the secret, of her heart, of her lungs. The way he meets her eye, messages sent without words.
Hey there. I see you. I'm having fun, but not as much as I'd be having with you.
They always have more fun when they're together.
She's smiling back at him, warm, fond, wondering how she can feel the magnetic pull of him and yet still be standing here, immobile and waiting—waiting not for him but for the right tenor of resolve to form within herself.
He says something to the other guests, sets his empty glass down on the edge of the table, and starts walking over to her.
*
The dress is forest green and fits perfectly. Clarke twists her hips from side to side, watching the way the full, knee-length skirt curls and flows, then bounces up and down on her toes, testing the low v-neck. It feels sturdy enough, what it reveals more suggestive than scandalous. Her reflection stares back at her, tripled in the dressing room mirrors: her hair starting to fall free from its loose, messy bun, her cheeks slightly flushed, her expression tired and critical, not quite a scowl.
"Don't worry, Clarke," Raven says, from behind her. Clarke can see her in the mirror, sitting at the very edge of the bench, leaning forward with her arms crossed on her knees and trying to catch Clarke's eye in the glass. "You're not going to fall out of that dress." She hooks her finger around the strap of one of the reject dresses, this one the color of sea foam, vaguely sparkly, and with a low rectangular neck that cannot possibly be intended for someone of Clarke's body type, and lifts it up out of the messy pile of fabric next to her. "This one, you would have popped right out of. That one," she nods again toward the current dress, her expression equal parts serious and appreciative, "that one is the one."
Clarke glances over her shoulder, meets Raven's gaze straight on. "This is the one?" she repeats.
Three hours of dress shopping has made her weary and uncertain. Every dress is too big at the top and too narrow at the hips, or vice versa, or a horrible color, or too sparkly, or too formal, or not formal enough. Two hours in, she suggested they abandon the mall and go home; she’d solve the dress issue later. But Raven had taken her by the shoulders, turned her smartly around and away from the exit, and insisted, "Clarke Griffin isn't a quitter."
"This one," Raven says, now, with a single, authoritative nod.
Clarke turns back to her reflection, smooths down the front of the dress and considers. "After this, we'll find something for you," she says, which isn't an admission that Raven is right. More like an attempt to buy some further thinking time.
Raven snorts. "No, I already told you." She leans back against the dressing room wall, so all Clarke can see in the mirrors is her legs, one crossed over the other, her foot kicking absently. "I know what I'm wearing. That—"
"Dress from the back of my closet that I wear to all fancy events," Clarke finishes with her. She rises up onto her toes, briefly, imagining herself in heels. Except there will be dancing, so—better stick to flats. "You know, I have dresses in the back of my closet, too."
"Yeah. But you need a new one."
Raven says this as if she were stating a well-known truth, so easily and so simply that for a moment, Clarke's brain completely stalls. She just stares at herself, picturing herself not in the bland, brightly lit, white dressing room, but in the hotel, in the ballroom, in the crowd.
"And why do I need a new dress?" she asks. She tries to sound like she finds this concept of needing funny, but her tone falls flat.
Raven sighs, and pulls herself to her feet. "Because," she answers. She steps up behind Clarke and takes down her hair, rearranging it in waves over her shoulders. "You're going with Bellamy. And I am not a fool."
Clarke meets her eye in the mirror. She could ask what Raven means, but that would be a waste of time. She knows. They both know. Maybe, Clarke thinks, everyone knows, everyone except Bellamy himself—which would be funny, and a little sad, since he's been her best friend for ten years, and he knows everything about her, and she has never been able, never wanted, to hide anything else from him before.
"I'm not really going with him," she says, instead. Her voice is quiet, and must sound, even, a little sad, because Raven puts her hands on Clarke's arms and rests her chin comfortingly on her shoulder. "I mean—he's in the wedding party. So I probably won't even get to talk to him until an hour into the reception. At least."
"Yeah," Raven says. "But he still asked you." She gives Clarke's arms a squeeze. "To a wedding. Which is romantic. If you show up wearing this, with your hair down like this... The first time he sees you, his jaw is going to drop."
Clarke lets her eyes close briefly, Raven's voice a low tone, almost a whisper, in her ear, something tempting and fantastic and irrational, probably, floating to the surface of her mind: the image of Bellamy, on the other side of the ballroom, catching sight of her through the crowd, finding her stunning, finding her breathtaking—would every almost moment between them click into place, then? Would he see her differently than he did in college? Would the romantic setting and romantic clothes and romantic music make confession safe?
"I didn't know," she says, flicking her eyelids open again, "that you cared so much about Bellamy's jaw."
Raven laughs, and wraps her arms around Clarke in a hug. "I don't," she says. "But if you do, you'll stop overthinking this and just get the dress. Seriously, Griffin. You’re hot. And he knows it. Just—” She looks at them in the mirror, smiling, and Clarke starts to smile tentatively, too. “Just remind him.”
*
All at once: a taut anticipation, a tightrope feeling as he walks toward her, as if, in their new clothes and in the candlelight, they are different people, and every secret she's held down within herself is flickering to life—and yet at the same time, a deep exhale of relief. Her best friend, approaching her in a crowded room. She slipped inside again unseen, but now she does not feel unseen, illuminated instead by the relaxed and charming way that he is smiling at her.
"Clarke—" He says her name a little too loud, to be heard over the music, stands a little too close and even then leans in. "Hey. I lost track of you there for a minute."
"Yeah, I was just outside." She crosses her arms against her chest, then lets them fall down to her sides again, can't stop picturing herself just grabbing him by the front of his shirt and pulling him close. Not ardently. Casually. She almost could: they have long been easy with each other that way. "Just to get some air. It's nice out." She nods her head back toward the far side of the room, the balcony, then flicks her gaze over Bellamy's shoulder, to where Octavia is twirling gracefully around in her heels. "I bet Octavia is really happy. Her wedding day turned out to be so beautiful."
These words are, in part, only something to say, but an audible sincerity to them seems to catch Bellamy by surprise. He tilts his head, the corner of his lip curled up. "Yeah. I mean—" He takes another step closer, shifting his weight between his feet. "To be honest, I still can't believe she went for such a traditional wedding, you know? The white dress and the ballroom and the—hors d'oeuvres."
Clarke bites back a laugh. "Yes, how dare she have hors d'oeuvres," she mocks in a low, scandalized voice, and smiles when she catches the lightly embarrassed, self-deprecating way he rolls his eyes.
"I guess I just pictured her getting married in some little clearing in the woods or something. Probably barefoot. And we'd all have to hike there, we'd have almost no advance notice, and I definitely wouldn't have had to wear a tie." He tugs at the open collar of his shirt, and Clarke smiles.
"What Octavia likes even more than a woodland glen full of butterflies is surprising people, though," she argues. "And following random whims."
"This wedding took six months to plan," Bellamy answers. "It was not a whim." But the annoyance in his voice falls flat, only a joke, and with a short half-life. He's watching his sister, the long skirt of her dress flowing as she's pulled close again, into the arms of the person she loves, the expression on her face more soft and more perfectly serene than in all the wild, weird years that Clarke has known her, and she understands that Bellamy is seeing her in a new way, now, too. And he does not seem sad, but only wistful, and, briefly, distant, and this time she almost does reach for his hand.
Before she can, he turns back to her, so suddenly that she's certain he can read every hidden bit of longing in her, her long-held desire for him caught shining across her face. He holds out his hand to her. Maybe he has come to some conclusion, some resolve. "Would you like to dance, Clarke?" he asks, and she bows her head, pretends to curtsy, and slips her hand neatly into his.
"I would love to."
*
Their first meeting: freshman year of college, move-in day. He was standing in the doorway of his room, which was right next to hers, leaning back against the door frame with his arms crossed against his chest, waiting for the rest of the hall to gather for dinner. His hair was so short then that she did not yet know it would curl when it grew. And he must have taken a shower and changed his clothes, because he wasn't sweaty and red-faced like she was, didn’t look bone-tired and drained from moving in to a top floor room on the hottest day of the summer—later she won't remember the burning in her arms or legs or the way tendrils of her hair stuck to the back of her neck but only that she was leaning heavily against the wall and thinking that, maybe, he would turn out to be someone important. Her neighbor. The boy next door.
At the end of September, he helped her dye a thick pink stripe into her hair, his fingers stained a dreadful shade like candy cane blood and splatters of bright color in the bathroom sink, both of them laughing at themselves, while sunset reds and yellows seeped in through the one window and the bright overhead lights illuminated the mess they’d made. They both ended up with stray stains on their clothes, and she noticed for the first time how his hair was starting to curl over his ears.
That semester, they ate lunch together every Monday and Wednesday after their philosophy class, always sat by the big window in the dining hall, while outside the tree leaves turned red and orange and brittle yellow. He never let her get away with anything. When their discussions went well, they'd stay long while the lunch crowd thinned and the early dinner crowd filed in, or otherwise walk out to the library together, her hands tucked into the front pocket of her sweatshirt and the wind blowing her hair into her eyes. Bellamy always picked the best study spots: hidden nooks beneath narrow stained-glass windows, comfortable third floor chairs looking out on the path by the dorms. When her mind wandered from her reading, she'd watch students passing by beneath them. Or she'd watch him out of the corner of her eye, flipping the pages of his book, reading glasses slipping down his nose.
In the evenings, they'd brush their teeth side by side at the last two sinks in the bathroom, closest to the window, which was cracked open to let out shower steam and let in the deepening cool of autumn night air. They'd only known each other a few weeks, but the evening routine felt small and domestic and secure: her fuzzy slippers, his ratty flip-flops slapping against the tile floor, how she already knew what he wore to bed and what his soap smelled like and what he looked like coming out of the shower, or bleary in the morning, or distracted at night, leaning back against the side of the sink and telling her about his reading while she swished neon blue mouthwash around her teeth.
At the beginning of December, she strung blinking lights around her room, around the windows and over her desk and dresser and even over the doorway, and kept them on all night because she fell asleep, quite by accident, curled up next to Bellamy in her narrow twin. His arm was slung around her waist and her hands were tucked in between them. They were warm and soft and tired in the last weeks of the year. Already she felt as if she knew him not only intensely but deeply, knew all of him, understood all of him, with a bright, sharp clarity that she had never felt before.
He wasn't her first college boyfriend but he was there in the spring when her attempt at a relationship with a girl on the third floor fizzled, disintegrated, left her aching and numb in the rainy, humid, overcast days right before finals, when everything she'd wrapped herself up in during the year seemed to be falling apart. There he was, steady, tramping with her in the mud to the edge of campus and then letting her cry on his shoulder when she needed to, at last. They were sitting on a rock still damp and cold from recent rains. Her sneakers were so mud-splattered, she never fully got them clean.
They called and texted each other all summer. Her heart, floating, at the sight of his name. And the next year they were down the hall neighbors, and more than once she fell asleep on top of the neatly made covers of his bed, and in the spring they were invited to an off-campus party and somehow she found herself lounging in the bathtub upstairs, too hot from dancing and too tired of the noise, and he knelt down next to her and dropped his head until his nose bumped up against her arm. Buzzed and light and floating. She slid her fingers through his curls and tugged. Kissed his forehead and he laughed and kissed her cheek. And for a while they were nose-to-nose and staring at each other cross-eyed and she forgot to breathe, before she found herself laughing, laughing so hard and for so long that her lungs hurt.
Bellamy, her best friend. Movie marathons on Saturday night and finals study breaks in the dorm kitchens and long talks over lunch and dinner and at night. Cooking together in their senior apartment, pictures together at graduation in their caps and gowns. And after graduation long text chains and missing him when they lived in different cities, and when they found each other again, the strange and unexpected sense that no time had passed at all, that they were as they had always been. Seeing him outside her apartment door and hugging him close before she even let him in. So close, clinging to him, a desperate ache in the way his arms wrapped around her. Closing her eyes and thinking that he still smelled the same, still felt the same. Not letting him go for a long time.
*
The music changes just as they step onto the dance floor, leaving them for a moment uncertain, unmoored. A slow song now: a low note swells and builds and then abruptly stops, and a woman's voice begins to sing, low and earnest like a confession whispered right into the shell of Clarke's ear. She recognizes it as Taylor Swift and almost has to laugh: how funny it is, to be dancing with Bellamy to a song about falling in love with one's best friend.
At first, caught off guard by the sudden intimacy of the melody, they aren't sure what to do with their arms or their legs. They each step forward with the wrong foot, reach out with the wrong hand. Smiling, embarrassed, at themselves. Then he closes the gap between them with one short, decisive movement, holds his arms out, and she exhales and swallows down a nervous giggle, and steps into the space he’s made for her.
Her hands settle on his strong, wide shoulders, while his palms take the span of her waist. They leave a safe distance between them and this is funny, too, but also a relief: how they stay close, but not too close, like best friends might dance together. He is still her best friend first. She slides her palms against the fabric of his suit jacket, her fingers curling over his shoulders, and she thinks that he is solid and familiar and real, that she is comfortable with him, that she knows him and all the details of him: the way his hair curls down almost into his eyes, the steady way he holds her. What she cannot entirely read is his expression, which seems almost sad, or apologetic, and she wonders what of herself she has let slip.
The song alights into its chorus, and Bellamy surprises her by taking her hand and twirling her around. She stumbles a little in the turn, and when the circle completes, and she is facing him again, he pulls her so close that they are chest to chest and she has to tilt back her head just to see his face. To catch the subtle smile that reaches all the way up to his eyes. And now she cannot breathe. His hands fall again to her hips but this touch has more weight, and she does not place her hands on his shoulders but instead wraps her arms around them, hugging him close to her, all of the warmth of him surrounding her as they sway together in their place.
And this, this does not feel like best friendship anymore. This feels like being known, like being altered from the inside out, like being marked: a yearning so vibrant and so intense that it squeezes around her lungs and sets goosebumps along her skin, licks of flame along her arms and up her spine and warmth radiating out from every spot they touch.
Bellamy's expression has softened, and she sees it now for what it is: not apology, but a gentle longing of his own. She wants to take him home with her. She wants to bring him up to her hotel room and let him take off this new dress of hers. She imagines herself by the window with the view of the night-dark street below, staring at the reflection of herself thrown up against the glass, holding her hair out of the way with one hand while Bellamy, behind her, his suit jacket off and tie stripped and his shirt buttons already half undone by her hands, slowly slides the zipper down, the whisper sound of it the only noise in the room. This image sparks in her mind fully formed and clear, every detail of it, even the sweat on her palms and the hard beat of her heart. She sees it with such precision because it has been building up in in the back of her thoughts for a long time.
His arms wrapped around her waist, the palm of one large hand splayed across the small of her back.
"Have I told you," he asks, leaning in a little closer, his voice a rough whisper in her ear, "that you look really beautiful tonight?"
"No. And thank you." She smiles, a smile that in another circumstance might be teasing, or inflected with laughter, but now is only gentle and sweet. She stretches her fingers up into his curls. "You look pretty handsome yourself." She hesitates a moment, bites her lip and watches the way his gaze drops down, for those few seconds, to her mouth. "Bellamy, I'm glad you asked me to come to the wedding with you."
This is her confession, her moment of bravery: the even, deliberate cadence of her words. He sees it for what it is, she can tell, in the moment before he flicks his gaze away.
"O would have invited you by yourself—"
"I know." She settles her hand against his back again, between his shoulder blades. She looks at his jaw, the curve of his mouth, up to his eyes. Takes his gaze and holds it and won't let it go. "I know, but I mean—I'm glad I'm here with you."
Whatever he was not quite sure of before, he understands now, or believes, or allows himself to believe. She watches his realization like a slow dawning of the sun; she feels it in the exhale of his breath. The corner of his mouth curls up into a genuine, soft smile. “Me too,” he murmurs, and leans down to brush a kiss against her cheek.
He pulls away only enough to catch her eye, a quick question there, the slightest of hesitations. She responds with the slightest of nods. Then she reaches up to meet him, to kiss him, one palm coming to rest on the side of his face to hold him steady and her mouth opening to his. She breathes him in. The music swells around them, and she feels that she is waking up, coming alive.
Utterly joyful in the way he holds her close.