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It doesn’t exactly start because Kane’s too conflicted about who to choose between his two favourite students who should do the big concerto piece in the Spring concert (the last concert for the Year Thirteens), traditionally reserved for the best musician in Year Thirteen, but that’s a big part of it.
Everyone in their music class, and probably everyone in their year, knows that it’s between Clarke and Bellamy. They know it, too, which is why, for months leading up to January, the two have been vying for Kane’s favour. Clarke’s made him brownies and shamelessly taken advantage of the fact that he’s friends with her mother, which is probably deeply unethical, but this competition with Bellamy Blake has stretched to the point where she’s willing to break many of her principles to be the soloist in the Spring concert. And although Clarke does have the whole ’daughter of best friend’ thing going for her, Bellamy’s probably Kane’s favourite student - and maybe, marginally, the better musician. It hurts her to admit it, but he did beat her - but only by two marks - in their respective diplomas. They: Bellamy and Kane, that is, have a weird bond, and they both play oboe, which is probably where it’s originated.
But because Kane can’t choose between Bellamy Blake and Abby Griffin, he gives Clarke and Bellamy a concerto each.
Raven is not amused.
“It’s dumb that Kane is making us learn two concertos, just because he’s too weak to decide between you and Bellamy,” Raven says to Clarke, in physics class. She leans back in her chair. “I mean, obviously, he likes Bellamy more. And Bellamy sort of beat you in the diploma, so he had fair ground.”
“Yeah, but he likes my mum even more,” says Clarke, punching numbers aggressively into her calculator. “Anyway, why are you complaining? You’re always moaning about semibreves. And the Dvorak, which I chose, has a really interesting cello part,” says Clarke, beaming. “Be grateful to me.”
Raven sighs, and mutters, “At least I won’t vibrato into insanity.”
“Quiet, everyone!” says Kane, and the sound dies down. “Welcome back. So, the concert’s in ten weeks, and this year we’ve got two soloists, Bellamy and Clarke, which means double the work.” This emits the usual sighs from the orchestra, which Kane ignores. “You should all know by now that, in a concerto, it’s all about following the soloist. The soloist is the most important person: not you, or me, or the leader of the first violins.”
Now that Clarke’s been upgraded to soloist, that position goes to Anya, and her face doesn’t change when Kane mentions her, but she’s one of those people who are always glaring, so it’s still effective.
“Got that?” asks Kane. Everyone nods, except Clarke and Bellamy, who are locked in a staring contest behind him. “Fantastic. So, Clarke, Bellamy: which of you would like to go first?”
They snap out of it. “Ladies first,” says Bellamy, holding his hand out to her. Clarke smiles sweetly in response.
“Such a gentleman,” she replies, and Bellamy joins the orchestra.
Kane nods at Anya. “Konzertmeister,” he says in a terrible German accent, gesturing to her.
Anya takes German, but still, she cringes more dramatically than she really ought to. She stands up. “Oboe, an A, please.”
Bellamy plays the flattest A Clarke has ever heard in her life, and she squints at him suspiciously. He’s definitely doing it just to wind her up.
Anya is not impressed. “I said an A, not a G sharp,” she says, in a voice that manages to be both bored and terrifying, and even Bellamy looks a little mollified.
The orchestra gets tuned up, and so does Clarke. Bellamy and Clarke have an argument over whose A is actually right, and each insists that it’s their own, until Raven, bored, in the cello section, says, “Can you take your belligerent sexual tension somewhere else, please?” Most of the orchestra gasps, because someone said sexual in front of a teacher, but it manages to make Clarke shut up, because she and Bellamy do not have any kind of sexual tension, just belligerence. Raven just thinks everyone has sexual tension.
The rehearsal goes fine, as much as you can expect of a first rehearsal. Bellamy catches her after it ends, when she’s packing away her violin. “Not bad,” he says, sitting on the table next to her, and swinging his legs obnoxiously. She’s sitting down on the floor, so she has to crane her neck to talk to him. “I mean, if you like runs, and double stopping, and really high notes.” He makes a face, which suggests that he does not. “That sort of thing.”
Clarke thwacks his legs with her bow, which leaves a thick, smudged line of rosin all over his trousers.
“Thanks,” he says.
She loosens her bow gracefully, and slides it into its compartment. “Don’t act like blowing the reed, or whatever it is, isn’t the worst sound ever heard in an orchestra.”
Bellamy raises his eyebrows. “That’s the worst sound?” Clarke, very graciously, doesn’t respond. “Have you ever heard a squeaky violin? When they’re pressing down the bow way too hard, and practically on the wood thing in the middle?”
Clarke rolls her eyes and stands up. “It’s called a bridge,” she says, haughtily.
“I know!” he calls, as he’s walking away, backwards. “O plays violin, the traitor!”
“So, you and Bell.”
Clarke looks up from her phone and almost chokes on her apple.
“Hey, Octavia,” she says. She checks her watch. “Don’t you have a lesson on right now?”
Octavia flips herself onto the beanbag next to Clarke in the Sixth Form common room, and shrugs. “Nah, a free.” Clarke raises her eyebrows. “Year Eleven, remember?”
“Oh,” says Clarke, and feels like an idiot. “Yeah, duh. Sorry. What did you want me for?”
“Not much,” says Octavia, and begins examining her nails. Clarke knows Octavia fairly well, because they sometimes share a desk in orchestra, although Octavia’s ditched this term to work on her composition. And she talks to her, because Octavia’s one of those people who isn’t scared of anything, much less a sixth former. So Clarke knows when Octavia begins examining her nails, it means she’s going to drop a real bombshell.
“You and Bell are good friends, huh?”
Clarke prepares herself for more prying around of her nonexistent love life. “More enemies than friends, I’d say. Why?”
“Oh, no reason,” she says. She lifts her head and looks up at Clarke. “Just, Bell keeps talking about you, and I mean, even more than usual, so it’s getting kind of weird.” She pauses, and says lightly, “Also, I asked Raven, and she said you two have some kind of playfully intense rivalry that she’s pretty sure translates into unresolved sexual tension.”
Clarke rolls her eyes. “Don’t listen to Raven. And you’re, what, fifteen? You shouldn’t even know what sex is.”
“I know way more than you’ll ever suspect,” Octavia says, grinning brightly. “Anyway, this is just warning you for when Bell finally gets over himself, and asks you out. And this is also giving you my approval, for when that happens.”
Clarke very much suspects Octavia is actually being serious. “Well,” she says. “When that happens, you’ll be the first to know.”
The thing is, she and Bellamy don’t hate each other. At all. They like to pretend they do, and they like to argue a lot, but in reality, they work really well together. She can kind of play piano, and so can he, so they accompanied each other for their GCSE performances, and playing with him was fun and easy. It’s too bad there are never any good duets for violin and oboe, because if there were, she and Bellamy would play the whole lot.
She doesn’t really want to dwell on what Octavia said, though.
Firstly, it’s Bellamy. He joined in year ten, and he’s always been the tall oboist in her music class. She doesn’t even think they’re friends. Friends know each other’s favourite colours and guilty pleasures, and all she really knows about Bellamy Blake is that he plays oboe, loves history, has an offer from Oxford to read it next year and loves his sister.
She texts Wells. Why does Octavia think Bellamy is in love with me, or something?
Wells takes a while typing. You do flirt a lot.
After composing and discarding outraged reply after outraged reply, Clarke decides to just call him. Wells picks up rather reluctantly.
“What do you mean?” demands Clarke.
Clarke doesn’t even have to see him to know that Wells is doing his diplomatic face. “Well, I mean, you and Bellamy do argue a lot.”
“Maybe,” says Clarke, trying not to shout, because she knows that’ll just prove his point. “But I argue with everyone! And no one thinks you’re in love with me.”
Wells makes a pained sound. “No, but that’s different. You two always just argue quite... passionately. But you’re both smiling when you do it, so obviously you don’t hate each other. And it’s not normal, friendly smiling. It’s like, romantic smiling.”
“I see,” says Clarke, slightly frostily. “Romantic smiling. And when were you - or anyone else - going to tell me about this romantic smiling?”
There’s a silence from Wells’s end of the receiver. “Well,” he says. “We’d all assumed that you knew what you were doing.”
Clarke had thought that that was it for the bombshells, but clearly there were more to come. “I’m sorry, what? You thought I was knowledgeably flirting with Bellamy?”
Wells makes another pained noise, and Clarke almost feels sorry for him. Almost. “Clarke, come on. I mean, yeah, we all sort of thought that you were secretly pining for Bellamy. But if you don’t think you are, then what’s the big deal?”
“What if Bellamy think I’m secretly pining for him?”
Wells snorts. “I highly doubt it. But if it’s bothering you so much, just tell him. Or stop acting in a way that could make him think that.”
Clarke sighs. “Alright.” She pauses. “Sorry for yelling a bit earlier.”
“No problem,” says Wells. “What else are friends for?”
At the next rehearsal, Clarke makes a point of not responding to Bellamy’s teasing. When Kane asks them to tune up, she accepts Bellamy’s suggestion that her D string is a bit flat, with: “Probably. My ear is a bit off today,” even though that’s probably not even possible, and it physically pains her to tune her D string a quarter-tone above what it should be.
She congratulates him at the end of the rehearsal, sincerely, and he gives her a weird look.
“Your perfect pitch ear was off?” he asks.
“Yep,” she says. “By the way, what’s your favourite colour?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Blue. Clarke, are you alright? You seem a bit off.”
“Off? Me?” she asks, cheerfully. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He scratches the back of his neck. “Um, yes, you are. You haven’t disagreed with me once today.”
She shrugs and loosens her bow cheerfully. “We don’t disagree that much,” she says. He raises an eyebrow. “I mean,” she says, ploughing on, “we might have our differences, but even so…” He raises the other eyebrow. “I’m fine, really!” she says. Abort mission. Abort mission. “Right, bye, gonna miss my bus, see you later.”
She power walks to the bus stop, and tries not to think about what the hell she just did.
“Listen,” says Raven, as she slides into the chair next to Clarke in further maths, and dumps her stuff on the desk. “I know that it’s your life, and you’re free to make whatever choices you want to, however bad they are - ”
“Thanks,” says Clarke.
Raven glares at her more fiercely than Clarke thinks is really needed. “I’m just saying,” says Raven. “Please, figure out whatever it is you’re doing with Bellamy.”
Clarke groans and buries her head in her arms. “Why does everyone seem to think I’m carrying this huge, secret crush for him?”
Raven pats Clarke’s hair and flips open her textbook. “Because you do, and have done for a very long time. You’re just in huge, huge denial.” Clarke groans. “You’ll figure it out eventually,” she says. “Just, like, do it soon, because you’ll only be seeing him every day for a few more months.”
“Thanks,” says Clarke, sarcastically. She pauses. “I mean,” she continues. “Even if I do - ” Raven rolls her eyes - “what am I supposed to do? I’ve spent the last three and a half years arguing with him. I can’t just suddenly turn around and be like, ‘Oh, actually, I was just super into you and couldn’t express my feelings like a normal person, so I channeled them into insulting you’. That’s not going to work.”
Raven rolls her eyes. “It isn’t that hard,” she says, which is unfair of her to say, because Raven is one of those naturally confident people who don’t tremble, or want to die, at the thought of rejection. “Just go up to him and tell him how you feel. Ask him out, or something.”
“But I don’t know what I feel,” says Clarke. She’s fully aware of how melodramatic she’s being, and she doesn’t need Raven’s facial expression to assure her.
“Oh my god,” says Raven, throwing her hands up. “Obviously you are, if you’re freaking out so much about it.”
Clarke makes a face.
“I give up with you,” says Raven. “This was supposed to be a gentle kick up your butt to tell you to just figure it out, but it’s changed into a self-esteem boosting session, and I’m not up for that.”
Clarke sighs extra dramatically, just to spite Raven.
Raven snorts.
Clarke misses the next rehearsal because she’s ill, but for the one after that, she decides to revert back to normal. If he asks about last time, she’ll just say that she was feeling weird that day, and then she’ll insult oboes, and he’ll forget about it, because he’ll be caught up in defending his instrument. It’ll be fine.
“So,” says Clarke, appearing behind him, as Bellamy’s tuning up. “Ooh, way too sharp,” she says, instinctively.
He stops adjusting his oboe, and turns to mock-glare at her. “I know,” he says. He pauses. “Got your pitch back, I see.”
“It was a dark time without it,” Clarke agrees. An idea flickers in her mind. “Hey, can I just see your oboe for a minute?”
Bellamy hands over his instrument far too precariously for any self-respecting musician, and Clarke grabs it, and holds it up above her head. “Come and get it,” she says, grinning at him.
Bellamy narrows his eyes, and they flick to her right.
“You would not,” she says, as she realises her fatal error. “Monty, can you grab my violin - ”
It’s too late. Bellamy’s holding it, lightly, by its neck and it’s dangling far too much for Clarke to be comfortable with. “There’s a window behind me,” he says, casually, leaning against the wall. “And it’s open, as well.”
She knows he’s not going to throw it out - of course he isn’t, he’s not an idiot, but the weird, irrational protectiveness she gets over her violin shoots up in her.
“You wouldn’t,” she says, accusingly. People are watching them, and Raven is giving her a look that says this is exactly what I was talking about. She doesn’t care. He grins at her, and she plays along, folding her arms and brandishing his oboe: “Bellamy Blake, you give me back Dmitri this second, or I swear to god - ”
A delighted smile creeps onto his face. “You named your violin?” he asks, relaxing briefly, and in that second Clarke darts forward and grabs her violin off him.
“I win!” she says, dancing around and smiling smugly at Bellamy, who has his arms crossed and whose moody expression is something, Clarke suddenly realises, she would really like to kiss off his face.
Before she has time to react, Kane comes in, she hands Bellamy back his oboe, and takes her place at the front of the orchestra.
Fuck, she thinks.
And so it goes. Now that she knows she wants to make out with him, it’s hard to see anything in the same way ever again. She finds herself thinking of him all the time; if they bump into each other in the corridor, she’s still smiling from their interaction ten minutes later, and she goes over fragments of conversations they had months ago, just to see if he said anything that could somehow be interpreted as ‘I really want to make out with you’.
God, she is so bad at crushes.
“Why can’t you just tell him?” asks Wells. They’re going through the independent study work for chemistry, and the weather is actually nice, so they’re sitting on a picnic bench out in the front lawn. “Raven reckons he fancies you back, anyway.”
Clarke is flicking through her textbook distractedly. “Esters,” she mutters, flipping to the index.
“Clarke,” says Wells, patiently.
“Wells,” she replies. Her eyes are trained on her textbook, and she’s hoping if she pretends not to know what he’s talking about long enough, maybe he’ll let the topic go.
He sighs. “What are you scared of?”
“So many things: being trapped in a dark prison cell, people I love dying, committing genocide… you?”
“Clarke,” says Wells. “You like Bellamy. Bellamy likes you. You’re going to regret just leaving this.” Clarke is avoiding his eyes. “What’s stopping you?”
She finally stops pretending to look up textbook pages in the index. “I don’t know,” she admits. “I mean, I don’t know if he likes me back, and I don’t want to ruin our kind of friendship.”
Wells nods, and there’s a silence.
“Well, you’re never going to know if you don’t - ”
“I know,” says Clarke, miserably. “Just, give me some time.”
That’s how things continue for a few weeks. And she’s probably imagining it, but it feels like he’s acting differently towards her.
For example. She passed him in the corridor yesterday, and instead of making fun of her, or winking, he just waves awkwardly. Awkwardly. She doesn’t think Bellamy has ever been awkward in his life.
She tries to catch him before rehearsals, but he always turns up after they’ve tuned, so the best she can manage is a quick “hey”. And he rushes out at the end, so she can never say anything then.
She tells herself that Kane keeps dragging the rehearsals out longer, so he probably has a really urgent bus to catch, and it’s Year Thirteen, anyway, so he’s probably talking to teachers beforehand. But every week?
She doesn’t get it.
“He’s avoiding me,” she announces to Raven at the end of another rehearsal, after Bellamy’s dashed off, and Raven’s decided to take the later bus. “How can I tell him I really like his face if he can’t even look at mine?”
Raven sighs. “I mean, we do get a lot more done in rehearsals, now that you’re not bickering all the time.” Clarke raises an eyebrow. “What I’m trying to say is: when you do finally accost him, or whatever; just let it be away from all of us.”
”Gosh, thanks, Raven,” says Clarke. “That was really the most of my worries.”
Raven actually cracks a smile at that. “You’ll figure it out, Griffin.” She slings her cello case over her back. “Bellamy’s just an idiot who can’t face his own feelings.
And weirdly, in her own, Raven way, she’s made Clarke feel a lot better. “Thanks.”
”It’s cool. Just don’t do it in front of all of us.”
When it finally happens, it’s after the last rehearsal.
Bellamy’s talking to Kane about his reed, or whatever it is that oboe players talk about, when Clarke decides that that’s it; she won’t be able to live the rest of her life clearly or freely, if she doesn’t kiss Bellamy Blake beforehand.
He actually hung around for a conversation last week, and there were a lot of silences, but Clarke’s pretty sure they were the good, nervous kind. She thinks she caught him looking at her mouth. And he’s started doing this thing where he looks away just when she looks at him, and it’s completely unsubtle, but it makes her smile, and reminds her, as if she could forget, that she really, really, really likes him.
And maybe she chose a shit place and a shit time to do it, and she briefly remembers Raven telling her not to do it in front of everyone, but she can’t stop herself now. So as soon as Bellamy and Kane stop talking, Clarke taps Bellamy on the back, Bellamy turns around, and Clarke kisses him.
It’s a few seconds into the kiss when Clarke remembers she - they - are in a room full of people, one of whom is Mr. Kane, and the room’s gone suddenly silent. He’s definitely turned around and seen them, and now there’s no way he’s going to put her last in the programme, which is the coveted spot - but does it really matter?
Then, she remembers that she sort of accosted Bellamy, and for all the teasing and flirting and smiling, she doesn’t actually know how he feels about her.
She begins to pull away: reluctantly, because this feels too good to let go of, and almost succeeds - but then he’s pulling her back and she doesn’t melt, exactly, but it’s something like that.
Then, someone coughs, and Clarke’s pretty sure it’s Kane.
Bellamy relaxes his grip on her waist that she didn’t even realise he had, and turns just his head to where Mr. Kane is standing, behind them. Around him, all the other students are doing a very good job of pretending to pack up their instruments, but very clearly watching the incredibly entertaining conversation that’s about to happen.
“I must say, this has been many years in the making,” says Kane, a little amusedly. “Thank you, Miss Griffin, for letting us all watch the thrilling conclusion. But now that it’s happened, there’ll be a new rule: no kissing in rehearsals.”
Then, he walks back into his office.
There are a few bursts of scattered applause, but Clarke’s just focusing on Bellamy, and his easy smile.
“Good job, guys,” says Raven. “Clarke, you broke my only request, but I forgive you.”
Bellamy kisses her again. "Hey, no kissing in rehearsals!" yells one of the bassists, and Bellamy flips him off.
“I’m not complaining or anything,” he says, after they break apart again.
“Mm-hmm.”
“But why did you have to do it in front of all of these guys?”
She pulls back and an expression of indignance fills her face. “I didn’t have any other option!” she says. “You were running off after every rehearsal, and I couldn’t just attack you in the corridor - ”
“I wouldn’t have minded,” he says, mildly.
Clarke pauses. “Well, I’ll remember that,” she says, as she kisses Bellamy for a third time. Apparently, three kisses is too much for the rest of the orchestra, and Raven yells at them to stop.
She ignores them, and leans in again. She’s been waiting on this for years, apparently. She's not just going to stop now.
After the concert, Bellamy catches Clarke when she’s packing up her violin.
“Last on the programme!” he says, sliding onto the table like he always does, and kissing her forehead. She grins up at him. “I don’t want to say you were better than me, but you did really well out there.”
“I know,” she says. “I think Kane might just like me a little bit more than you, now.”
He makes a pfft sound, and kisses her again. Her parents are just outside, waiting for her, but Bellamy’s here, so she sets her violin down, leans forward, and kisses him back.
There’s a knock at the door. “Clarke?” her father asks.
“Coming!” she says, and hops off the table. She grabs Bellamy’s hand. “Get ready for the congratulations.”
He raises his eyebrows. “What, for us?”
She rolls her eyes and smiles automatically. “If it were that, they’d only be congratulating you. On getting me to like you.”
“Hey, who was it who basically attacked me after rehearsal, in front of everyone?”
Clarke ducks her head to hide her blush. “Shut up. Anyway, it worked.”
It’s a shame that this is their last concert. She would’ve liked more chances to break Kane’s kissing rule.