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Thanksgiving Eve, 2020
The bar is overheated, under-lighted, and loud. Bellamy is slumped over the counter on his seventh beer, breathing alcohol fumes into the face of a pretty bartender, begging for the eighth.
He thought it would be okay coming home this Thanksgiving, the first one since his mother died, but his Aunt Callie and his little sister Octavia are both driving him up a wall, and, and–
God, he misses his mom.
“Quarterback,” a familiar voice says, dry and amused.
Bellamy turns his wobbly head to see a pretty blonde, hair cut to her chin, eyes enormous and ocean-blue.
Clarke fucking Griffin.
His high school nemesis.
The last person he wants to see tonight.
“Jack and Coke,” she adds, to the bartender. “He’ll have the same.”
“I don’t like Jack and Coke,” Bellamy grumbles, draining his beer. “What’re you doing here, Princess?”
“You think you’re the only person trying to escape their family?” Clarke takes a giant swig of her drink. “Or what’s left of it, I guess.”
Bellamy softens, but only a little bit, slurs: “Yeah, heard about your dad. Sucks.”
“Your mom, too. She was a really nice person. I was so sorry to hear about it.”
Maybe the less drunk a person is, the more genuine their condolences sound. Princess Griffin’s only just arrived, so she can appear as she always has: real and sweet, up until the last moment. Up until it all goes wrong, and she spends the next two years haranguing Bellamy in all of their AP classes.
At least he doesn’t have to go to school with her this time, or even ever see her again.
Of course, that’s what he thought at graduation.
Clarke’s dad was nice though, always, kind to Bellamy and inviting him to dinner, never looking at him funny or like he didn’t belong in their fancy neighborhood.
Bellamy should be more sorry, is probably more sorry, but god, he’s drunk, and Clarke’s raising up old wounds, things that haven’t hurt for years, or that at least hurt deep under the surface, things that he could pretend were gone.
“Thinking of how much you hate me?” She sips at her glass again, her voice reproachful. “And after I bought you a drink. Ever heard of bygones, Quarterback?”
Bellamy snatches his Jack and Coke, Clarke motions to the bartender for a second, and belts that one, too.
She examines him closely, her eyes narrowing a bit, but continues: “how’s your sister?”
“Up my ass. Can I have another beer?”
The bartender shoots Clarke a questioning look.
“You’re drunk,” Clarke says. “How many beers have you had?”
Bellamy draws himself up, sitting tall in the stool to glare at her. “You’re not my keeper, Princess.”
Her voice is reasonable: “I think it would be kind of sad if another Blake died. Especially of something as stupid as alcohol poisoning—“
Bellamy digs his keys out of his pocket, only to have Clarke snatch them away. “—or drunk driving.”
“I wanna go somewhere where I can avoid people I hated in high school,” Bellamy’s tongue feels thick, and he knows he’s being cruel.
He watches pain cross Clarke’s face, but she keeps a firm grip on his keys. She turns away from him to dig in her bag. “I’m calling you an Uber.”
“Don’t need your charity, Princess.”
“You’re cut off, Quarterback.”
The bartender nods, her shiny brown hair shaking. He knows her name, or he did at the beginning of the night. She went to high school with Bellamy and Clarke, one of the smart kids, someone Clarke would lean over the table and whisper to, their eyes on Bellamy. “Sorry, Bellamy. You’re fucking soused. Can’t sell you anything else. I’m gonna close your tab.”
“I’ve got it, Raven. Close mine too. I’m gonna drive this idiot home.”
“I’m not an idiot–” Bellamy begins heatedly, because this was between them, always always, Clarke’s brains and Bellamy’s lack of, her smart mouth arguing him down at every opportunity. Teachers sighing and rolling their eyes, classmates snickering, because Clarke the Princess took down Bellamy the quarterback every time. He was so sick of it by the time they got to graduation that he stopped engaging, stopped trying, just filled in his worksheets and turned in his assignments and avoided her in the hallways.
It was a seething hatred, the way he felt about Clarke, in the end. She pretended to be his friend and dropped him just as they got close, and he never knew why or what caused it, could only assume it had something to do with the fact that Clarke was rich and accomplished, and Bellamy lived on the wrong side of town.
She grabs his arm, unexpectedly strong, (she plays the cello, and it’s heavy) and hauls him off the seat. “Fine,” she slides a hundred dollar bill across the counter, easy, like it means nothing to her. “Sorry for the trouble, Raven, does that cover it?”
“Barely,” Raven sniffs, so Clarke adds two more twenties, and the girls smile at each other with a sense of familiarity that breaks Bellamy’s heart.
Why doesn’t anyone he grew up with ever look at him like that?
“Let go of me,” he tries to shake Clarke off, but she only holds on tighter, some kind of blonde barnacle.
“I’m walking you home. It’s not too cold, and you need the air. Stop trying to shake me off, because I’m not going to let you out of my fucking supervision until you’re home.”
He shakes her once again, and she stomps on his foot. “Quit! Do you ever think that your family would be fucking crushed to lose you? I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but I am going to make sure you get home safe tonight, this night.”
“Why?” Everyone in the bar is staring at them. “Trying to absolve some of your guilt for being a total bitch to me in school?”
He expected, maybe, that would hurt her feelings, but she only sets her jaw. “That’s fucking rich, coming from you.” She yanks his arm, propelling his shaky legs towards the barroom doors. “Now come on.”
Bellamy can barely stand. He didn’t realize how messed up he was getting, sitting on his little stool, so he leans hard on Clarke’s shoulder, even though he wants to tell her to go fuck herself.
He staggers past his own truck, then Clarke’s little Beamer, onto the slightly damp sidewalks. She smells like clean laundry and lavender shampoo, her curls bouncing in the streetlights, golden, like Clarke herself, someone’s gleaming trophy.
Not Bellamy’s, though.
Out of Bellamy’s grasp, just like she always was, even when he thought for a fleeting second that maybe she wasn’t.
Oh god, he feels suddenly sick, and pushes off of her to lean over the grass and gag.
“Gross.” (But she sounds sympathetic.) “I knew you were gonna barf. Better to do it here than at home where everyone can hear.”
“What do you care about my home? And I’m not gonna barf, it’s just a dry heave. I’m fucking fine. And I can walk from here. Go back to your car, and leave me alone.”
“You can barely walk,” she snaps. “And I know your aunt, your sister. You’re all they have. So quit acting like an idiot–think about someone aside from yourself, and let me walk you home. Jesus Christ. You might be an asshole but you aren’t stupid, so don’t act like you are.”
“You always treated me like I was stupid, so don’t try to take that back now!”
“If I thought you were stupid, I would never have bothered with you, Bellamy. In any sense of the phrase.” She pulls him from the grass. “Let’s go, Quarterback.”
Bellamy dizzily ponders what she means. Could it be that Clarke doesn’t think he’s dumb as a box of rocks?
Nope, not possible. The disdain with which she spoke to him for two years solid showed something different, a mean Clarke, a vicious one.
He’d never seen that Clarke before, but once he did, there was no going back. The sweet girl he’d grown up with, the beautiful girl who invited him to family dinners and ferris wheels at the county fair, that girl–
Gone, gone.
“I hate you,” he says. “You hate me.”
“Bygones,” she replies. “And if you think I hate you, Bellamy? Maybe you are stupid.” She shrugs away, stomping off down the sidewalk, breathing deeply.
Bellamy sways back and forth, then stumbles forward as they approach the high school, chasing Clarke, suddenly convinced this is the conversation he wanted to have with her for six years.
“No–” he shouts after her, “no, because I wanna know, Princess, why’d you do it?”
She spins, stopping so abruptly that he nearly slams into her. “Do what, Quarterback? You’ve been tacitly accusing me of something for the past hour, so out with it. What, exactly, do you think I did?”
He doesn’t mean to sound plaintive, or sad, but there it is: “You stopped being my friend.”
When they were younger, she would poke his shoulder as they argued, but now her lips tremble, and she grabs his shirt, pulling him closer: “I heard you, Bellamy.”
He’s confused, and not because of the drinks. “You heard me…what?”
“Week before homecoming, sophomore year. We’d been talking about going together, maybe. As friends, or possibly more. Just…something was happening. You were standing at the bottom of the History Hall, in the little alcove, and Echo was hitting on you.”
Bellamy’s stomach starts to sink, he feels sick again.
“She asked why you’d been hanging around me so much. When I wasn’t popular, just a symphony nerd. Who played an instrument, for Christ’s sake. That’s what she said. That it was so embarrassing for you to be friends with me.”
Bellamy remembers. He remembers how close Echo’s lips were, how she smirked into his face. Her perfume was something expensive, something vanilla and spice.
No matter how much he liked Clarke at the time, Echo was sexy, and her opinion mattered to him for some reason he could never explain.
And what he said next, he knows Clarke didn’t deserve.
“You told her that we studied together and that was it. That I was snotty, entitled, and selfish and probably just using you for your popularity. You didn’t mention that we’d been in the same classes since fucking kindergarten, you didn’t talk about the times you came to my house because things were fucked up at yours, before your dad left. You never said that we’d kissed under the oak trees on the edge of campus. None of that. You said that–I was probably a virgin and that my entire personality was being smart and practicing my cello. Like we hadn’t spent hours upon hours watching horror movies together or like we didn’t ride a bus into the city to go to the record stores.”
There are tears in her eyes, like the betrayal happened yesterday.
“And that–that, Bellamy Blake, is why I stopped being your friend. Because you turned around from that moment and you walked up the stairs and smiled into my face like I meant something to you and I wanted to slap you. So I just fucking–”
She turned around and walked away, that’s what she did, and he went to homecoming with Echo, still smarting from the fact that Clarke Griffin wouldn’t take his phone calls or respond to his texts.
His cheeks are burning, the memory so clear he can feel the way her hair hit his chin when she was leaving him standing in the hallway, trying to understand why she greeted him with, “fuck off, Bellamy.”
She never called him by his name again, he was a disparaging Quarterback for the rest of high school.
And her formerly affectionate nickname of Princess became ice cold, an epithet for an enemy, forged in the halls of Arkadia High School.
Still, he blusters: “I’m–hey–Clarke–I can’t believe you’d hold that against me. I was a stupid, horny teenager. I was just trying to impress her, and keep her–I didn’t want her to gossip about us. About you.”
Something hard as nails flashes across her face: “So you called me names. And acted like my personality was completely fucking defective, like you hated me, like I was a burden, like I bothered you–”
“No, I–I’m fucking sorry, Princess, I really am. That was just…I thought she was gonna talk shit about me. And you know, like, my family situation was messed up. Being popular was all I had, at the time.”
She shakes her head. “You had me, Bellamy. Not as your potential homecoming date. As your friend. Don’t you stand here and accuse me of quitting our friendship. From what you said to Echo, we never had one in the first place, which is just insane to me, because I fucking remember one. Before that day–before that moment–I remember one.”
She takes off down the sidewalk again, her shoulders set against the pleading look on his face.
He shambles along, torn between grabbing her shoulder and begging for her forgiveness, or yelling out that she shouldn’t have made him pay for one stupid moment for two goddamn years–
“You’re still drunk,” she calls over her shoulder. “Let’s walk the track until you’re not fucking falling over.”
She cuts across the front of the schoolyard, aiming for the football field where Bellamy’s throwing arm made him something of a legend. Sometimes they’d run the track together, him jogging backwards while she did knee-highs, telling her jokes, making her laugh.
And Clarke Griffin has the purest laugh he’s ever heard.
“I don’t wanna walk the track,” he yells after her. “It’s not my first time going home drunk.”
But he still follows her red coat across the grass where he sat with his fake friends at lunch when the weather was nice.
The stadium lights are on, casting a glow over the fake grass, and instead of continuing to walk away from him Clarke sits in the middle of the field, crosses her legs under her. “I still watched you play, you know.”
Bellamy gives up, throws himself down on the ground next to her, staring up into the star-filled navy sky. Clouds are clearing away, the air is unseasonably warm. He unbuttons his jacket.
“You were in the crowd. Couldn’t look at you, though. Distracting.”
“That so? Distracting that you talked so badly about me, yet I dared to exist after that moment? Make you feel guilty?”
“Clarke, I didn’t know you heard me. If I’d known, I would’ve apologized. It was stupid, I shouldn’t have said it– I was just–dumb. I was a fifteen year old boy.”
“I know.” Clarke is gentle, shrugs her shoulders a little. “I forgave you a long time ago. Hence making sure you get home safe when you’re clearly fucked up.”
“But your feelings are still hurt.” Bellamy rubs his eyes, the molecules of the air seem to be spinning.
“Of course they are. I loved you. Hearing you say that stuff broke my heart. And I was only fifteen, too.”
It isn’t hard to remember her at fifteen, when her face is soft and dreamy, and everything around them seems like it circled down to this very moment, on purpose, bringing them home and to the bar and now to the field, and he opens his mouth to make it okay but she’s already on the next subject.
“My mom, she goes to this grief support group. At the Methodist church? And she sees your Aunt Callie there.”
Bellamy doesn’t want to talk about this, sighs. “It’s only been six months. She seems fine, though.”
Clarke shifts, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Thing is, Quarterback, I don’t think she’s fine at all. And I worry. About you, about them. You forget that I knew Octavia when she was a literal baby.”
Bellamy raises up on an elbow, looking into her eyes for the first time. “Princess,” (and it’s not antagonizing, for the first time in practically a decade) “did you stalk me to The Dropship to start an intervention?”
“No. It was a coincidence. But who can fight the universe? Here’s your intervention, Quarterback.” (And it’s not provoking, for the first time in nearly a decade.) “Your family needs you, so stop wallowing in your own grief and start sharing it with them. Instead of drinking your way through this, you could be telling your sister that you miss your mom, too. Instead of describing her as up your ass.” Clarke touches his shoulder, fingers brushing. “She needs to feel connected to you right now. And you? You need to feel connected to her.” She flicks her thumb across his chin, tapping the dimple in the center. “You’re gonna get through this, but only if you support Callie and Octavia and they support you too.”
He catches her hand. “I really am sorry about your dad.”
She lifts a shoulder, her mouth twisting. “It’s been a couple of years. I miss him, but I can cope.”
“He was always really nice to me, even after–everything.”
Clarke bites her lower lip. “I never told him. Either of them. I just said…that we’d grown apart. I was so hurt. I didn’t want anyone else to know.”
Bellamy props up on his elbow, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Princess, I’m so sorry I was such an idiot back then. I didn’t really believe any of that. I was just worried about dumb shit, being popular, having Echo like me. You were my friend. You were more than my friend, we–we had something, and I’m sorry I fucked it up.”
Her eyes are tender, she smiles into his palm. “We were just kids, Quarterback. Maybe if I’d said I heard you–”
“I feel like we wasted a lot of time,” he says, and her whole body is twisting towards him, leaning forward, and he closes his mouth over hers.
Clarke gives a little hum, a little sigh. “I’m going back to Dallas on Sunday,” but then she kisses him again, and they lay on the field the way Bellamy thought they might, when he was fifteen.
Thanksgiving Eve, 2021
The bar is overheated, under-lighted, and loud. Raven’s still behind the counter, but Bellamy isn’t so drunk he can’t remember her name. He’s only just arrived, hands stuffed in his coat; it’s far colder this year than the last.
Raven eyeballs him when he bellies up to the counter, but she pulls out his usual. He moved back to Arkadia over the summer, and The Dropship is his usual haunt. Raven’s almost forgiven him for last year, he tips extra every time he comes in and she’s softening.
Slowly.
But she’s softening.
She looks over his shoulder at the swing door, grinning, warmly greeting: “Clarke! When did you get in?!”
“About fifteen minutes ago,” Clarke says, kissing Bellamy’s cheek, “how’s my favorite bartender?”
“Ouch,” Bellamy covers his heart with an open hand, “not your favorite quarterback?”
“Him, too, yeah.” She squeezes his elbow, and she smells so good, so familiar, his Princess. “Mom’s gonna kill me for coming here first, but I was dying for a drink and gossip with old friends.” She turns to Bellamy: “How’s it going, living in the hometown?”
“Sucks, without you,” Raven slides a Jack and Coke across to Clarke. “When’re you gonna drag your cello home and hang out with us 24/7?”
Clarke blushes, a deep pink that rises from her chest to her cheekbones. “Thing is,” she says, fiddling with her glass, then unrolling her scarf, “thing is, I got hired on as a music teacher, at the middle school.”
“Our middle school?” Bellamy tries not to let his voice crack, but it does, of course it does.
She bites her lip, flushes again. “My mom wanted me closer. And I have good friends here. And I—uh, my priorities have changed, you know?”
“By priorities, do you mean the 72 texts a day you’re sending to your quarterback, here? Because you used to send those texts to me, but now—“
(And the texts were like picking up threads of a conversation from high school, her first one was about a horror movie, and her last one was about the traffic from Dallas.
That’s what you get for living in that Godforsaken city, Princess, he’d written back, and now she doesn’t live there anymore.)
(Holy shit.)
Bellamy places his finger on Raven’s nose, pushing her back from the counter. “Shut up, Reyes.”
She bats at his hand. “I will bite that finger off, Blake, swear to God I will.”
They were not friends in school, no, Bellamy wouldn’t say that. But in a class the size of theirs, you could never pretend that you didn’t know everyone, at least to tell hello in the grocery store or nod to at a football game. And all those who remain in town have a sort of kinship, ask after each other’s children and are invited to each other’s barbecues.
Bellamy is only now beginning to belong to that crowd. Turns out, if you’re kind of a dick in high school, it takes people time to be convinced that you’re not still kind of a dick.
And sometimes, you’re not even sure that you’re not still that dick, yourself.
Raven’s giving him that time. She serves his regular, a couple of times a week, makes a cheeky joke or shares town gossip.
Bellamy thinks that in a year, they might actually be friends, real friends.
Maybe less than that, if Clarke’s really coming home.
They are leaned over the counter far too late in the evening, until everyone’s gone and Raven’s cheeks are red because she keeps drinking the shots Clarke’s buying her, and it’s not really Thanksgiving Eve anymore, but Thanksgiving morning instead. The waitresses are cashing out the drawers as Clarke and Bellamy escort the now-tipsy bartender to an Uber.
In the freezing parking lot, Clarke turns to Bellamy with a shy smile, offering a mittened hand. “Show you something?”
And he’s not exactly drunk but he was planning on making her walk him home, instead kisses her knuckles and follows her down the street, turning up his collar against the night air.
Her ponytail’s bobbing as she crosses the schoolyard, and he rushes to keep up, “Princess, where the hell’re you going?”
“C’mon,” she calls over her shoulder, “it’s just down the street.”
He catches up to her under the oak trees, spins her in a circle and kisses her dizzily, and her laugh sings out across the old football field.
“Just a little further,” she says, urging him on, both of them practically skipping, until she stops short in front of one of the small houses that line the neighborhood behind the school, and he bumps into her.
“What the–”
“Hold out your hand,” and she’s smiling up at him so prettily that he turns his palm flat without question.
And into it, she drops a set of keys.
“What’s this?”
“I bought it,” she says, heading up the sidewalk. “It’s mine.”
Wonderingly, he jogs up the sidewalk to unlock the door, Clarke flips the lights on and they grin together in the empty room.
“Whaddya think, Quarterback? Does it look like a good place to start, brand-spanking-new? I was thinking of painting the living room blue.” She pulls off her gloves, finger by finger, a quick-flash smile at Bellamy. “And the kitchen red, something bright and cheery?”
“Is this really happening?” He tucks a stray curl behind her ear. “You’re actually moving back here? We’re gonna live in the same town?” He touches her cheek. “No more text messages and Facetime calls?”
“I’m sick of that. And my mom’s missing me. And–the job opened up. And–”
“--and blue’s gonna be perfect, I think.”
“Good,” she steps into his space, chin tipped, smile soft. “I wanted your input, since you’ll be spending a lot of time here.”
“Oh, will I?”
She unbuttons her coat, stands on tiptoe, grasps his coat lapels and kisses him, “yeah, Quarterback. Yeah, you will.”