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One night in mid-October, Bellamy falls asleep with his head in Clarke's lap, and she starts to card her fingers through his hair. Outside, a hard wind blows against the sides of the house. Intermittent strong gusts, rising up from short, still pools of silence in between, rattle the windows, threaten like angry spirits at the seams and cracks of the old wooden walls. An eerie sound. Too loud for the middle of the night, too strong for the city, as if they were far away in the unknown and all alone with the wind. Clarke wonders how Bellamy's roommates can sleep through the noise. How Bellamy can.
The house—Miller's, an inheritance—is tall and narrow, set on an angle at the near-top of a hill. Sometimes the stairs creak, or the bedroom floorboards; the faucet in the second-floor bathroom always hesitates before it turns on, and the hot water knob squeaks and whines. Bellamy's bedroom looks out on the alley between Miller's house and its neighbor, and never feels full sunlight, but only a shifting pattern of shadows across the long span of the day. Clarke has passed winding summer afternoons there, alight with breezes through the open window, and early winter evenings, turning on every last light against the growing gloom, the latest snow building up against the sill.
Before Bellamy fell asleep, they were watching a movie, and their bowl of popcorn, now mostly kernels, sits on the coffee table next to a dog-eared paperback and somebody's misplaced keys. The table, and the popcorn, and the book and the keys, and Bellamy's face, are all ill-lit by an artificial blue light from the television screen, and the rest of the room is dark and quiet, and they are alone.
And only Clarke is awake, in the whole house, in the whole world. Only Clarke and the wind, blowing, whistling at the edges of the windows and the doors. The movie's almost over and it's late and she should be getting ready to go home. But she's tired, too. Her head feels heavy and ungainly on top of her neck, and her legs have fallen asleep, from Bellamy's sleep-heavy weight on them.
She and Bellamy have stayed up late watching movies before, sometimes as part of the group, with his roommates and their other friends, sometimes alone. They've fallen asleep together on the couch, or him on the couch and her in one of the armchairs, curled up with her legs underneath her and her hands tucked in against her chest. But never like this. Never with his head on her lap. She starts playing with his hair, not on purpose, but because she needs a place to rest her hands, because she has one on the armrest and one resting lightly at the top of his arm, but she can't stop thinking about the warmth of his arm, the softness of his t-shirt and the hard muscle beneath.
She glances down at him. The sheen of TV-light sharpens his cheekbones, his eyelashes. The movie has settled into its last long action sequence, so she reaches for the remote, and turns it down. Now the hard bluster of the wind sounds louder, more prominent, and she cannot stand the thought of getting up soon, disturbing Bellamy, driving home in the dark. She slides her fingers through his hair, absently. The strands are long enough to curl now, a soft ink-black over his forehead and the top of his ear. Wonderfully soft. Much softer than she would have imagined or guessed, soft like animals are soft, and this thought strikes her as so absurdly funny, that here she is petting him while he sleeps, that she has to hide a sudden spike of laughter behind her other hand. He feels so nice. She could stay here all night letting the half-curls of his unruly hair fall between her fingers, calm and quiet despite the raging of the wind outdoors, pleasant and warm in the fading of the year. He shifts in his sleep, and she hesitates, but the sound he makes is only slight and quiet, as if her touch were calming to him despite his dreams, and she smiles.
The movie fades into its end credits. Clarke yawns, and lets her eyes close, briefly. Her fingers are still tangled in the wonderful, soft curls of Bellamy's hair.
*
Bellamy pulls on a sweater before he steps outside, but the chill, sharp air seeps right through, raising goosebumps up along his arms. From the front door, he can survey the damage from the previous night's winds: one of the neighbor's empty trash cans, rolled halfway down the street; the last of the burnt red and orange leaves strewn from the trees and out across the lawn. Evidence of a scattering of rain in the early morning hours: a puddle on the front walk, and a light dew along the porch railings.
The tree branches, now almost completely bare, stretch up toward the steel gray sky like the first harbinger of winter, come too soon.
From behind him, back in the kitchen, he can hear the dull thuds of cabinets being opened, the ceramic chime of mugs taken down: his roommates waking up and searching out coffee and breakfast downstairs.
He steps back inside and closes the door behind him, shoving his shoulder hard against it to make sure it settles fully into the frame. The wind, quieter now but still forceful, pushes back, but he's stronger, and when he's alone in the entrance hall, he feels the comfortable warmth of the indoors starting to settle upon him again. "Already got it," Clarke's voice calls from the kitchen, cheery and happy and sounding like home, and Bellamy straightens his sweater, a half-smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
He finds Clarke pouring coffee into a line of four mismatched mugs, Miller sitting at the round, wooden table in the middle of the kitchen, Murphy poking around in the cabinets next to the sink.
"Clarke made us coffee," Miller announces. Bellamy, not yet fully awake, has a hard time placing the tone of his voice: an underline of judgment, a twist of surprise. "I think she's trying to bribe me into not asking her to pay rent."
"I'm not around that much," Clarke answers, before Bellamy can. She sounds, he thinks, put upon but only jokingly so, an exaggerated pout as she slides Miller's coffee in front of him. "So I fell asleep watching a movie. It's not a big deal."
"And I woke up to the smell of coffee I didn't make myself, so I have no complaints," Murphy adds. He turns on the stove, a tiny hiss of flame as he lights the gas under the burner, and Bellamy falls heavily into the closest chair. Murphy has taken out all of the ingredients necessary for Saturday morning pancakes, and even though Miller shoots him a low reply—"No one asked you, you know,"—he's already started to sip at his coffee, which Clarke brews better than anyone who actually lives here, and the bitterness has seeped out of his voice.
Clarke walks around the table to bring Bellamy his mug, sets hers down at the spot next to him and then, instead of sitting in one of the free chairs, drags a stool from the kitchen island and perches on it instead. If Bellamy glances down and to his right, he can see her bare foot, peeking out beneath the hem of the same ripped jeans she was wearing last night. She's resting it on the low bar of the stool, curling her toes.
"Trying to pretend you're tall, Griffin?" Murphy asks, throwing the question out over his shoulder with a smirk.
"We can't all naturally be giants like you, can we?" she shoots back, and gives him a long and exaggerated once-over that makes him grin.
Bellamy smiles too, softer and subtler, the expression near-hidden against the rim of his mug. His coffee's still too hot to drink, but he sips at it anyway. In the slight pause of conversation, only the random, off-beat sounds of Murphy cooking, utensils set down against wooden countertops and the scrape of the frying pan against the burner, Bellamy briefly closes his eyes, and the warmth of his first morning shot of caffeine seeps all the way through him, dulling the after-chill of the cold, gray, windy, world outside.
"You know your hair is all messed up," Clarke says, abruptly, and reaches out to rearrange his still-unruly curls. He hadn't so much as pushed them out of his eyes since pulling on his sweater, and the sudden touch, from behind him and just above, surprises him so fully that he almost drops a scalding mug of coffee in his lap. Crisis is averted, but the hard crack of ceramic hitting wood as he sets the mug down sounds unnecessarily jarring and makes him wince. Clarke is still trying to fix his hair. Her fingers are combing carefully along his scalp, untangling knots, taking detours, he thinks, just to ruffle through his curls—
"I think that's a lost cause," Miller says, and Bellamy is absolutely certain he's biting back laughter when he reaches for his mug.
"I know," she answers, with a sigh, to which Bellamy takes great offense. He tries to turn, but she only runs her fingers all the way up and through his hair in a gesture at once surprisingly pleasant and horribly annoying—because if his hair wasn't a mess before, it certainly is now—and adds, "Your hair just feels so nice. Really soft."
Then she leans back again, her hands falling down into her lap, and won't meet Bellamy's eye when he looks back over his shoulder. She slips off the stool and onto her feet, and picks up her coffee, wrapping her hands around the mug as if it weren't still scalding. Clarke has an uncanny ability to look absolutely blameless in every situation, and Bellamy is so familiar with this talent that he can no longer tell what innocence is feigned and what is real. She blows ripples across the top of her coffee, her eyes down-tilted, as if these slight disturbances were the most fascinating sight in the room.
"Thanks," Bellamy answers, belatedly.
Murphy and Miller are both watching them. Murphy flips one of his pancakes, sending it sizzling with a bit too much verve.
"So," he says. "Anyone ready for breakfast?"
*
Bellamy's hair, which is silky, and soft, and falls in the most delicate waves between her fingers, becomes Clarke's new obsession. She takes every opportunity she can to pass her hand through his curls: ruffling his hair when she greets him, even when this requires standing up on her toes; fixing stray strands when she happens to run into him before class; even playing absently with his hair sometimes when they sit together on his front porch swing, grading papers or working on lesson plans. Bellamy tenses sometimes, almost imperceptibly, when she reaches up to scratch her fingers against his scalp. The first time, feeling that awkward uncertainty in him, she paused, still not looking up from her work, still pretending that perhaps she could pull her arm away and they could both pretend it had not moved. But then he relaxed, incrementally, purposefully, and she swiped her thumb across the back of his neck, and he let out a shaky breath and somehow, she felt it was okay.
She figures that her touch must be a surprise, and that is why he hesitates when he feels it. But he never tells her to stop or tries to bat her away. She's not sure if what she’s doing is right but she can pretend, at least, that it's not wrong.
Sometimes she plays with his hair, twisting the strands around her fingers, or mussing it up on purpose with both hands, making faces at him as she does. Sometimes the movements of her fingers are more like a massage, like when they gather for another movie night, this time with the rest of their friends, and sit squashed together on the couch and she puts her arm up along the back, behind him, wonders if she can make him feel good in the dull unraveling of exposition at the start of the film. Hard to hear beneath the booming soundtrack, which Octavia always turns up way too loud, but she thinks she can hear him murmur something quiet and pleased when she hits a certain spot above his ear.
Sometimes she is selfish, and just runs her fingers over and over through his curls, takes them between her fingers, swipes her thumb through the soft texture of them, again and again.
Clarke has known Bellamy a long time, has known certain intimacies with him that have no parallel anywhere else, not with her parents, not with her exes, not with her other closest friends. But this, a strange physical intimacy, which seems to grow in tiny, immeasurable increments in the same way that the fall deepens with each passing day, has no precedent between them. She does not know what to make of it. She does not know why, when her fingers wander low, bump against the top of Bellamy's spine, she pictures herself, for one half-second, leaning over and pressing a kiss to the outline of the bone, as if she could not otherwise determine the softness of his skin.
She pulls her hand away, pretends that she needs to focus her attention on her work. But she can tell that Bellamy is watching her out of the corner of his eye. He shrugs up his shoulders and Clarke pulls the sleeves of her jacket down over her knuckles, and one of them, not even she is sure which one, tilts the porch swing slightly beneath them. It creaks, a gentle whine, as a light wind swirls the unraked leaves across the lawn. She's not warm—there's a shiver passing up her spine, triggered by the breeze—but she can feel an unpleasant heat burning along her forehead and her cheeks.
Odd: she's always understood, before, everything she feels at the moment she feels it, and what she does not want to feel she has swiftly and cleanly bottled up and put aside. Starved of oxygen, unpleasant emotions wither easily away.
Now there are glowing embers, sparking, burning somewhere hidden, and all she knows of their source is that they flare, briefly, every time she hears Bellamy sigh under his breath at her touch.
*
November brings an early cold snap: frost etching its way up the windows on the first Saturday after Halloween. Bellamy rummages through his top dresser drawer, searching out the oversized woolen socks he only wears in winter, so thick they can double as slippers against the cool, old floorboards of the house. His phone buzzes, and he reaches out to grab it with his spare hand.
Clarke is inviting herself over, bribing him with promises of food.
I hope it's not anything you made yourself, he answers, sets the phone down and two seconds later, it vibrates again.
Ha ha.
And then:
ha.
Bellamy rolls his eyes, and pretends to himself that he is not smiling, that whatever this expression is, he can worry it away from the corner of his mouth with his teeth. He finds the socks and walks back to the bed to pull them on. Clarke, who has been driving him crazy for weeks, has just sent him three dry, deadpan has. He is going to text her back and tell her to let herself in; he's going to spend his Saturday with her. He is going to do this against his better judgment and even though every time they hang out, she starts messing with his hair, and the gentle, eager play of her fingers through his curls sets off five-alarm-fire warning bells in his head.
Clarke is not a tactile person and never has been, not as long as he's known her. She doesn't hold hands, or give gratuitous hugs, or cuddle, almost ever, not even when she's half asleep and falling down against the pillows next to him. He's never even seen her engage in PDA with her exes, and that's fine. He respects her limits. His life is made easier, in some measure, by this natural aloof quality of hers, what other people think is frigidity or pride. Until three weeks ago, he never had to worry about what her touch might do to him, how he might feel at such extended, purposeful, intimate contact with her. He could rest easily within the defined limits of their friendship, secure in it and the unique bonds they'd formed between them. For days at a time he could even forget that he's been in love with her for the better part of a year.
Now when she reaches up and ruffles his hair with both hands, taking her time about it, beaming with pure delight as she does, his lungs hitch and his palms start to sweat. He can't tell if she's teasing him, or if this is something else. If she's figured him out and is being cruel, or if she's figured herself out and—
She texts him again when she's at the front door, and he texts back:
Are you expecting a royal escort up the stairs?
Just giving you a heads up, lazy bones.
From the doorway of his room, he can hear her in the foyer, stomping off her boots on the welcome mat. The burst of cold air through the door feels like winter, winter already seeping in from the crisp and chill outdoors.
Her nose and cheeks are still tinged pink when she arrives upstairs. She's wearing a fisherman's sweater that falls down to her knees, her hair tumbling down in loose waves over her shoulders, and carrying a large tray with two plates and two mugs. Curls of steam rise up from all four. After she enters, she kicks the door closed behind her with one sockfoot.
The food is left over from one of her mother's charity benefit dinners, the drinks two mugs of tea brewed from teabags she found in the cupboard. They eat, sitting up against a pile of Bellamy's pillows, side by side on his bed, while watching The Princess Frog on Netflix.
"This is the most decadent Saturday I've had in a long time," Clarke sighs, as the credits roll. Now that their dishes are out of the way, stacked precariously on the bedside table, they’ve slumped low against the pillows, lounging with unrestrained excess on top of the half-tangled blankets. Bellamy's hands are resting over his stomach, and Clarke has started to slide sideways, her head too close to his, one leg dangling off the edge of the bed.
"Your mother really knows how to throw these charity events," Bellamy answers, with a contented sigh of his own.
"She didn't throw it so much as she knows the caterer but—yeah."
"Your mom knows everyone."
"Pretty much."
Clarke shrugs, then reaches out lazily and swipes her fingers through his hair, starting at the top of his head and dragging her nails forward against his scalp. The sensation is not unpleasant, and he would force himself simply to ignore it, except that afterward, she sits up, slowly and with some effort, settles back against the pillows, and settles her hand in his hair again. She lets her fingers roam through his curls, while a silence that would otherwise be comfortable settles between them.
And it's that silence, even more than the slow, practiced movement of her hand, that gets to him at last.
"Can you just—"
He snaps his jaw shut, goes as still as if he were prey caught in a rifle’s sight, and Clarke stiffens next to him, too. Her hand stops moving. But she doesn't pull it away.
"Is this... not okay?" she asks, after a long moment, and Bellamy, abruptly agitated, hauls himself to the edge of the bed and to his feet. He doesn't want to look at her, so he turns to face the window instead. Only the edges are still patterned with frost now as the strongest rays of sun filter, narrow and bleak, through the glass. He puts his hands on his hips. He knows that Clarke is watching him, can feel it, can picture her staring, but he doesn't know what to say, and she doesn't ask again.
"I don't get—why—"
There is no good way, he sees now, to ask this question without sounding foolish. Without sounding like he's having a meltdown over nothing. He turns around again, and finds Clarke sitting in the middle of the bed, her legs tucked under her, her expression alert and curious, but patient.
"Do you not like it when I play with your hair?" she asks.
"It's just weird."
"Weird."
The word is not a question, only an echo, fainter and less certain, and she tilts her head to the side but does not break his gaze.
"It's just not the sort of thing you would do, usually. I mean. No offense, Clarke, but you're not exactly a... physically affectionate sort of person."
A muted hurt expression shades across her face. "I can be affectionate."
Bellamy drops his hands to his sides, torn between apologizing and wanting to laugh. "Clarke, you gave me a pat on the back for Christmas."
"I gave you a first edition—"
"You know what I mean."
She does, the response just a way to stall. She drops her gaze at last and rearranges her legs underneath her, crossing them and pulling her sweater down over knees. "I wasn't trying to be weird," she says eventually, slowly. "I just discovered how soft your hair is and how nice it feels to play with it... I didn't think it bothered you. But if you don't like it, I'll stop."
"It's not that I don't like it." He's never seen Clarke speak with such hesitance before, feels himself set off base by the embarrassed pink tinge at the top of her cheeks, her inability to quite meet his eye. He wants to reassure her. He wants to be honest with her. "It's that... I don't think it means the same thing to you as it does for me."
Her gaze snaps up, immediately shrewd. "What does that mean?"
"Clarke, come on—" He lets out a hard, short breath through his nose and turns away, passes his hand down over his face. He'd thought his confession was obvious. Just saying those words had cost him enough, felt like they were being formed from pieces of himself even as he'd said them, and now, somehow, she wanted more—
He hears her bounce off the edge of the bed, the skip and slide of her feet against the floorboards as she comes to stand in front of him, steadying herself with her hands on his arms, staring up at him. The glint in her eyes is familiar, and that familiarity is soothing, even as he feels his heart beating against the soft skin at his throat. She looks serious and determined and brave. Brave enough to meet a moment that cannot be walked back, now, by either of them.
"You're right," she admits. Even when he pulls her hands from his arms, she keeps looking insistently into his face. "It's not fair of me to feel the way I feel and then tell you it's nothing and I'm just being friendly, just because I don't know how to be honest with myself. It's just that we've been best friends for so long. I'm comfortable with you. I’ve never had to second guess myself around you. Except now—doesn't this bother you at all?"
"No." He's not even sure he understands what she means, by this, by bothered; he just knows he's hearing the tail end of a conversation she's been having with herself, now spilling out of her, half-comprehensible, and that from him she needs only reassurance and confidence. And it's no lie to say he isn't bothered. Caring for Clarke has never been a burden, hasn't caused him a moment of confusion or even surprise since the first time he looked over at her, arranging tinsel on the tiny little Christmas tree in her living room, and thought to himself, I'm in love.
Clarke doesn't answer, doesn't say a word for a long time.
He sighs, the hard tension in his shoulders deflating. "You don't have to make this so complicated, Clarke. You can just tell me how you—”
And then her hands on his arms again, fingers lightly curled around his biceps, as she rises up onto her toes and cuts him off with a kiss—brief—her lips against his and then gone.
Bellamy is so stunned, so abruptly and completely caught off guard, that for a moment, he can do nothing but stare at her, his lips still parted, his mind blissfully blank.
Then he wraps his arms around her and pulls her close, crushed against him, and kisses her with purpose and passion, as if he could never stand to let her go. Clarke's hands frame his face, then slide up until her fingers are tangled again in his hair, tugging at his curls as he opens his mouth to the insistent press of her tongue. His hands hold steady at her waist. One palm splays against the small of her back, feeling the way she stretches up to meet him, to be close to him. He spins her around and off her feet, hears the way she giggles, a delighted shriek, muffled against his mouth, as he catches her off guard. The backs of her knees hit the side of the bed. He starts to lay her down, but just before she loses her balance and falls back, she grabs him by the front of his shirt and twists herself back onto her feet.
"Ah—laptop, remember," she murmurs, out of breath but smiling, a hint of the devilish in her grin. "Don't want to crush it."
"Right. Right, don’t—yeah." He lets her go, reluctantly, slowly, as they untangle their arms and legs, then steps back enough to give her room to stand. He feels slightly embarrassed and very lightheaded, too quickly snapped back to himself, too suddenly shaken out of a wonderful dream. "That would be... bad." He reaches around her to grab his computer, then walks it safely over to his desk. "So, I guess that killed the mood."
Behind him, he hears Clarke bounce back onto the bed. "Didn't kill my mood," she says.
When he turns around, he finds her sitting back against the pillows, her cheeks still flushed, smiling like she's never smiled at him before, and this stuns him perhaps even more than the kiss did, that Clarke should ever stare at him like this. Like he makes her happy. Like kissing him makes her happy. Like she wants him; like she's waiting for him.
He wants to jump onto the bed just as if he were a kid again, wants to jump right on top of her and cover her in kisses.
He restrains himself. Barely.
Instead, he settles down beside her, tangles his fingers up in her hair, which is soft and feels just like waves, smooth and light against his palm, and pulls her in, and kisses her. This kiss is slower than the last, the drawing of her body against his slower, the slide of her hand against the back of his neck and her fingers through his curls again, slower. Her knee knocks against his knee. His feet play absently with her feet. He does not even mind when she pulls away, a whisper's-breadth away, and murmurs his name.
"Yeah?"
A kiss to her cheek, her chin.
"I want you to know—"
"Yeah?"
A line of kisses along her jaw and to her mouth again.
"I don't—" She lets out a shaky breath, then tries again. "I don't know what this is but I need you to know—I'm all in. I mean—"
As if Clarke Griffin were ever halfway into anything. But he pulls back just the same and meets her eye.
"I mean I have feelings for you,” she says. “And I want to figure them out, together."
The corner of his mouth lifts briefly, a soft smile. "I have feelings for you, too. If you couldn't guess."
"I’m serious, you know.” Her fingers scratch against his scalp. Her eyes jump back and forth across his face, trying to read him.
“So am I. I’ve had feelings for you for a while.” He bumps his nose against her nose, hoping the gesture will make her smile. Light cascade of relief when it does. “Real feelings.”
She kisses him, briefly. “Real, scary feelings."
And then she kisses him again, two, then three times, and he finds his own smile widening, and he feels the last of her tension seeping from her, leaving in its wake only the same relaxed and easy feeling that has sunken through all of him: that this is right. That this feels right.
"Real, scary feelings," he echoes, between kisses, but in truth, he isn't scared at all.