Work Text:
If Abby Griffin knew that this arrangement was her daughter’s idea, she’d have a heart attack.
*
Which is fine, as far as Murphy is concerned.
*
What Abby Griffin thinks the narrative is: her daughter, with her wardrobe of rosy pink sweaters and tiny gold earrings, is studious and smart, and spends her free time with the right sort of friends. She attends high school football games. She went to the homecoming dance on the arm of the Mayor’s son. In two years she’ll be pre-med, taking detailed, round-lettered notes in the vaulted library of one of those Northeast colleges, the ones with brick buildings and a quad. She likes the right sort of boys. She has never been kissed.
*
Most of that is true but here’s the rest of the story: Clarke in ripped jeans, a bit too purposefully frayed, in the front row of the degenerate crowd at Mecha on Saturday night, watching John Murphy and his band thrash through a thirty-minute set. They’re calling themselves The Wasteland at the moment. Mostly they’re between names, though, just file onto the stage and start playing, because everyone knows everyone else in Arkadia’s version of an underground punk scene. Everyone’s been mixed up with everyone else.
He’s been there and back himself with Raven, on bass, and still spends half his time at Miller’s, sleeping on his couch when rehearsals run long. Miller plays the drums with what sounds like pent-up rage but is really only strength with nowhere else to go. Murphy plays guitar and does most of their singing, and this is the most honest he ever is, up on stage with his three chords and his excuse for yelling. He is outside himself. He’s inhabiting a new layer of his own skin.
He doesn’t look for faces in the poor light: the view from the stage is mostly glare and shadow, anyway. But he sees her when they break. Catches sight of her by chance as he’s turning to walk offstage, and then pauses, not because she’s Princess Clarke, minus the crown, but because she’s staring right at him. And she doesn’t look anything like the prissy girl with the straight shoulders who sits in the front row in English class.
Raven throws him a towel from the side of the stage. It hits him in the face, and Clarke laughs; he wipes down the worst of the sweat from his forehead and his neck, then tosses it to her.
“This your version of a backstage pass?” she asks, a few minutes later, waving it at him and grinning as he puts his guitar back in its case.
“Didn’t know you needed one,” he answers, by which he means: I thought you just go where you want. A quality he admires in a woman. He doesn’t ask her why she’s here, because backstage is narrow and crowded and noisy, and they’re trying not to trip on extension cords as the next band pushes past them to the stairs. It seems like a question for another time. Maybe he already knows: curiosity goes a long way.
Right now their shoes are sticking to the floor and he’s curious about the stray touches of her hands, the daring way she looks at him, every possible taste of the inside of her mouth.
*
On Sunday night Clarke becomes the soft, persistent glow of light on the second floor of the Griffin house: safe at home, behind locked doors, sitting at her desk and reading with her hair over her shoulders in loose curls. Probably. Abby Griffin in the role of the warden. This is the easy story she tells herself, about where Clarke should be and what she should be doing.
John Murphy on the front doorstep, in his combat boots, with his safety pins, his hair grown long enough now to fall into his eyes, is the wrench in the plan. Maybe the villain.
He rings the doorbell, hands in his pockets as he listens to it echo inside the house. They’ve got flowers growing up against the porch, and cheery red curtains in the windows. He feels a sick sort of thrill already, because he knows how this will go.
Clarke’s mother opens the door and her eyes immediately narrow. For a long moment, she says nothing, just stands at the entrance to the house with her hand on the doorframe, as if she were blocking the way, and takes him in.
“Can I help you?” she asks. Ice woman. Which is where Clarke gets it, her whole attitude when she’s mad.
Good thing, for him, that when they’re together, she’s all heat.
“Yeah—is Clarke home?” He tries to see over Abby’s shoulder, but she steps to the side and blocks his view.
She tells him, “I think it would be best if you went home.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—is this the wrong house?” He grins. Everything she thinks about him is written across her face, and she knows that he sees it, and that he’s pretending he does not. “Clarke’s a friend of mine and—”
“It’s late.”
He pretends to check his watch. He is not wearing a watch. “It’s nine.”
“It’s Sunday. It’s late.”
Why he’s here in the Griffins’ nice neighborhood at this hour on this particular day, he cannot entirely explain, even to himself. The decision was like a dare that he made up in his own head, a joke without a proper target, or maybe just a test. He doesn’t want to be the guy who holds her hand, who sits with her at lunch, who carries her books. But maybe he doesn’t want to be the guy she’s only using to make her parents mad, either. Maybe he needs to know if that is all he is.
He takes a step forward, but Abby Griffin doesn’t budge.
“Go home,” she says again, a frantic, angry note undercutting her voice so he knows that she’s about to snap—“and don’t come back until you get—”
“A job? A life? A clue?”
Standing too close to her space and smirking, until she spits:
“A haircut.”
And that really pisses him off.
*
He’s not Clarke’s boyfriend, and he won’t be. He’s lazy makeout sessions, like roads that lead to nowhere, on the couch at the back of the band’s rehearsal space. He’s stolen kisses underneath the stairs at school. He’s every urgent touch that has no purpose beyond itself. He’s every need that can be satisfied and the sweet, lingering taste it leaves behind.
He does not have to be a boy her parents ever see. All the better if he’s not.
Yet he’s still crouching out behind her recycle bin, waiting for her mother to disappear from the front window, because he’s decided that he needs to see her, out of longing, out of spite.
Clarke’s bedroom window looks out on a one-story addition at the back of the Griffins’ house, the roof of which is easy enough to reach from the branches of one of the trees that marks their property line. He edges across it with the scuttling motions of a crab. Hidden in the shadow of the house, he reaches out one hand and raps his knuckles against the glass.
No answer, at first, except for a tense waiting, a bubble of uncertainty that he can feel in his chest. Inside, vague strains of music, indecipherable guitar, cut off abruptly. He considers knocking again.
Then, so suddenly that he almost falls back on his ass, the window slides open and Clarke sticks her head outside. He grabs onto the window frame, pulls himself forward onto his knees. She’s close enough to kiss now, and he almost does. He wants to. Such are the rules of the arrangement: that they may find themselves kissing whenever they are together and alone, and they need never worry about the rest, periods of separation, spikes of feeling.
But then showing up at her window is not exactly in line with the rules. She’s staring at him as if she might be gearing up to slap him in the face.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she asks instead, and he grasps on to the hint of giddy excitement in her voice, his best hope that maybe she won’t push him off the roof.
“I’m here to serenade you,” he grins, and then starts singing, picking one of his own songs on a whim but still trying, incongruously, to croon.
Clarke rolls her eyes and pretends she is not laughing. Then she tells him to shush and waves him in.
Getting through the window proves more difficult than he’d guessed, and Clarke starts laughing harder, still telling him to be quiet, glancing again and again over her shoulder at her bedroom door, as he struggles to pull his body into the room with some measure of grace. He almost falls head-first onto her soft blue carpet, and realizes much too late that he should have turned himself around and slid in by his feet.
“Thanks so much for the help,” he says, deadpan, as he picks himself up and brushes himself off.
“Sorry, sorry—” She does not sound sorry at all. She sounds amused, and distracted, and she looks beautiful, pink-cheeked and clean as if just out of a shower—she smells like soap and a flowery, citrus shampoo, when he wraps his arms around her and buries his nose in her hair. She does not push him away but only slips her hands up to his shoulder and tilts her face up, brushes her lips against his in a kiss that is, for a moment, subtle and sweet.
“You know you actually have a nice voice,” she murmurs as she pulls away. “When you’re serious about it.” Then she stretches onto her toes, drags him in with a hand to the back of his neck and kisses him once more, decisively and urgently, before she finally steps back. “Now you have to go. Seriously. My parents would have a fit if they found you here.”
“Yeah, your mom is not my biggest fan.” He takes a half-step back toward the window, but his hands are in his pockets, and he’s too distracted by taking in the pale blue of Clarke’s walls, and the overwhelming, flawless light provided by her many lamps to make any serious effort to leave.
Clarke’s brow furrows. “My mom hasn’t—wait, fuck, was that you at the door?”
“Guilty.” He holds his hands up, smirking, wonders what Clarke is gearing herself up to do, the meaning of the high spots of color on her cheeks. He wonders if the answer might be kiss him again. This is the sort of thing she knows she should not want, Murphy showing up to piss off her mom on Sunday night, but which excites her anyway, despite herself, just like open-mouthed kisses in the back seat of her car do, just like secret glances shared in public do.
“Don’t worry,” he adds. “I told her I was your friend.”
“Well.” She hesitates, and the uncertainty looks odd on her, even mixed with exasperation as it is. She throws up her hands. “That’s not untrue.”
Before he can answer, they are both caught, frozen, by the creak of approaching footsteps in the hall, then the soft rap of knuckles on the door.
“Clarke?”
Murphy has forgotten how to move. He has forgotten how to breathe, how to think. Clarke gestures wildly at him, uselessly shushing, then chases him, not to the window, but to the bed. He dives under the covers.
Clarke slaps the lightswitch, turning off the overhead and sending the room into gloom and shadow. Then she jumps into the bed with him and pulls the blankets up and over their heads.
“Yeah, Mom?” she calls.
“Is everything all right? I thought I heard voices.”
Murphy’s heart is hammering, battering-ram style, in his chest.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just watching a video.” She calls the words over her shoulder, so Murphy cannot see the expression on her face. But he’s impressed by the steadiness of her voice. “I’m going to bed now.”
For a long moment, Abby doesn’t answer. A very long moment. Too long. What is that saying, Murphy thinks, as he tries to remember his prayers, about no atheists in foxholes? No atheists in Abby Griffin’s daughter’s bed?
“All right,” Abby’s voice, still wary, says through the still-closed door. “Goodnight, Clarke.”
“Night, Mom!”
As soon as Murphy hears the retreat of her footsteps, the full absurdity of the situation strikes him, and he feels no longer terrified but as if he could laugh, endlessly, at himself, in relief. “Hiding under the covers?” he asks. “Really, Griffin?”
His voice is pitched just above a whisper, and Clarke shushes him again. “She would have heard you going out the window!”
“And why are you under here?”
“Because I’m going to sleep!”
“It’s nine-thirty.”
“It’s a school night.”
“And you always sleep with your head under the blanket?”
“Just be quiet!” she hisses, and claps her hand over his mouth.
But no more noise can be heard from out in the hall, no more footsteps, or voices, or knocks on the door. Only a long moment of silence, his breath hot against her palm.
Murphy raises his eyebrows. Slowly, Clarke lets her hand fall down again.
“I think we’re safe,” he whispers.
She nods.
The space under the blanket is narrow and warm. He searches out the crystalline blue of her eyes in the dark, too aware of how close they are, how he can see every minute movement of her gaze, across his face, meeting his gaze. Her lips are slightly parted. When she leans closer, their knees knock together.
Gently, she reaches out again, and traces the curve of his eyebrow with her thumb.
Like she’s fascinated by him, or something.
And all at once, he wraps his arm around her waist, pulls her close against him with a soft rustling of the sheets. She curls her leg over his leg, opens her mouth to his mouth; his hand grabs, just above her waist, at the thin material of the soft t-shirt she sleeps in.
When they part, he feels that his face is burning. She blinks at him, exhales hard breaths against his lips.
“So—we’re friends?” he asks, and Clarke has to bite down, fast, on the sound of her own laughter, sudden and sharp.
“Yeah.” She nods, an exhale of breath. “I think so. I mean—if we’re not friends, that makes me your groupie. And your band isn’t that good."
She grins, and he pretends to be affronted, sighing dramatically and rolling onto his back. “You wound me, Griffin. You wound me."
“Don’t be dramatic. But also get out, before my mother finds you here and kills you."
That—that is inarguable logic, there.
He throws the blanket back and scrambles to the edge of the bed, dragging his heels along her sheets. Clarke’s desk lamp is still on. He switches it off before he goes. Then there’s just the light under the door left, and the ambient suburban light outside.
“Hey Murphy?” she calls, and he pauses in the window to look back at her, one foot already out on the roof.
Clarke is leaning up on her elbows. Her hair is mussed, her expression unexpectedly warm and fond. He feels, what he cannot quite describe, something like a similar warmth in his chest.
“Mecha on Friday?” she asks.
He nods. “Mecha on Friday."
Then he disappears again into the darkness, closing the window quietly in his wake.