Archive of Our Own

Pullin' down backstreets, deep in your head
Slippin' through dreamland like a tourist

                                  — "Dreamland," Glass Animals

She walks down Post Road barefoot. The street is alive with bustling nightlife, but it all feels distant to her, muffled like it’s happening on the other side of a wall. Tears blur her vision, objects and light sources bleeding together as if the buildings around her are a watercolor painting turned sideways.

This place is a ghost town to her now, and she’s stuck here. She walks the same streets where she and Wells studied at the public library in their middle school days and got ice cream if they had the cash, where she went on her first date with her high school girlfriend, where she still meets up with her very few high school friends when they’re on break and feel like pretending for a while.

Clarke is good at playing pretend; she lives like she isn’t bitter and unhinged. But anger rots away at her insides, makes her hate the people around her—the people laughing inside the bar as she passes—like it’s her default setting.

She isn’t this dolled-up sorority girl with more friends than issues, who parties every weekend and has never had it anything but good.

But she is. It is the story that she lives, that lives her.

She wants to shake these feelings off and knows that she wouldn’t be feeling them if she wasn’t having a bad night, but she feels like such a fucking fraud. She’s been trying to sell this image of someone she just isn’t.

Maybe Finn didn’t buy it.

A fresh sob wracks her body as she remembers the outline of them on the bed: their two bodies. She had been out with her friends and thought she’d stop by Finn’s to sleep there instead of walking all the way back to campus. But he already had someone in his bed. Her whole body went hot as he jumped up, his eyes wide as he said stupidly, “I thought you had to study tonight!” as if it were Clarke’s fault for coming and not his for sleeping with another girl.

Then the other girl was yelling at him for answers, and Clarke was slamming the door shut and stumbling down the hall, shaking off Murphy’s hand when he tried to help her.

Then she was outside with nowhere to go, and now she’s walking in a trance down Post Road at midnight, feet bare because her new sneakers have been giving her blisters, tears still streaming down her cheeks. Every time she tries to wipe them off her hand comes away streaked with black.

Every few minutes, the phone in her back pocket vibrates. She doesn’t check it.

She keeps walking.

Maybe you should transfer, Wells said to her over the phone the other night, pity in his tone. But Clarke doesn’t want to transfer, because transferring would mean more student loans, more money out of her mother’s pockets. And Clarke doesn’t want to owe anyone anything after these four years. As soon as she gets her degree she’s out of this condemned, ghostly town in the Middle of Nowhere, Connecticut.

She just wants to forget herself, to wake up in a body that has never been hurt, to get that fresh start Wells is always telling her that she needs.

She hears a car on the road behind her and the sound of its passenger window rolling down.

“Princess!”

She looks up and to her left. The car has slowed down, moving at a crawl to keep her pace.

Only one person in this town knows her by that name. Everyone else had the money and the motivation to hop on planes and go to school in bigger, better places.

Go home, Bellamy! She wants to scream, but instead she wipes her tears one more time and meets his eyes.

“Need a ride?” Bellamy asks.

“Since when do you drive a Mini Cooper?”

He shrugs. “Mini Coopers are cool.”

“Since when?”

“Just get in the car, Clarke. Before someone gets behind me.”

She shakes her head. “I’m fine, Bellamy. I know my way home.” Please, just leave me alone. She can't humiliate herself in his eyes tonight; she won't be able to handle it.

“Where’s your dorm?” he asks.

She can't think of a lie fast enough, so the truth spills from her lips. “I live in the Polis Apartments.”

“That’s a twenty-minute walk.”

She shrugs. “I like to walk.”

“Really? Because you look miserable.”

“Do I?”

He reaches across the center console and pops the passenger door open. “Get in the car.”

Wordlessly, because she hates admitting defeat, Clarke obeys. He turns down the stereo as she buckles her seatbelt, so whatever indie song he was listening to now fades into a distant whine.

It hits her again that this is Bellamy Blake. As if this night couldn’t get any worse, now she’s in Octavia’s brother’s beat-up Mini Cooper, wishing she was dead, hoping to God that he doesn’t ask—

“So, what happened?”

Clarke stares resolutely out her window. “Can you just take me home?”

He doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then, at a red light, she feels his gaze travel over to her, analyzing her as if he could figure out what happened just by looking at her.

She looks at him, too, and if her breath stops for a second she hopes he doesn’t notice. She’s only ever gotten fleeting glances of him from a distance around campus. He looks older now. His curls still tumble down his forehead, but somehow he’s lost that edge to him that has always made her feel like starting an argument with him, or maybe she’s not in the mood. He’s as attractive as ever, even in his worn, green Arkadia Law sweatshirt, even with his glasses on.

She feels ridiculous sitting here in her ripped jeans and low-cut black crop top. Bellamy was probably up late studying until the library closed while she was dressing up to go to a party and then stop by her cheating boyfriend’s house. She stares down at her dirty feet and feels shame bubble in her stomach.

“I caught my boyfriend cheating on me tonight,” she admits, not even realizing she’s saying it until it’s out there in the air between them. Maybe it’s the alcohol still lingering in her bloodstream.

The light turns green. Bellamy tears his gaze away from hers, shaking his head ruefully.

“Then he’s a goddamn idiot.” He sounds so convinced, so angry on her behalf, that more tears spring to her eyes.

“You don’t have to do that,” she says.

“Do what?”

Pretend that you care? That sounds mean in Clarke’s head. “Nothing.”

Clarke has never known how to approach Bellamy. Last year when it was her first year at Arkadia University and he was a senior, she used to worry about bumping into him on campus. She doesn’t know where she stands with him—hasn’t known for a long time.

The last real conversation they had was in high school, a month after the accident. He caught her while she was waiting for her babysitter—a college student who could drive her places because her mom had been refusing to get behind the wheel of a car—in the parking lot after band practice. She remembers feeling like her head was going to explode. She closed her eyes so that the sunlight hurt less.

He came up behind her and sat next to her on the curb.

“What’s going on with you and Octavia?” he asked, because that’s all Clarke ever was to him: his little sister’s friend.

Her cheeks went hot with nerves and shame. Of course this would happen today, of all days. “None of your business.”

“It’s my business if she complains to me about how you've been ignoring her.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Clarke muttered. “I thought you would be relieved.”

Bellamy shook his head. “Of all her friends, you’re the best influence on her.”

She gave a mirthless laugh. “Yeah? Well, I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

“What happened?”

At that exact moment, like a godsend, the babysitter drove up. “That’s my ride. See you, Bellamy.”

She knows that if she had been there longer, he would have pushed her to talk until she made up with Octavia, and maybe her high school years would have gone differently. But that didn’t happen.

She never really spoke to Bellamy after that. After weeks of halfhearted attempts at getting through to Clarke, Octavia gave up and found better friends. Clarke still doesn’t know if she had made a conscious decision to isolate herself or if that happened naturally as a result of her mental state following the accident. She does remember the overwhelming feelings of inferiority. It started when her grades dropped because of her head injury, and then snowballed from there as her denial faded and grief took control of her life like a cruel dictator. They shouldn’t have to see you like this, Clarke remembers thinking to herself. She would be curled up on her bed for most of the day, trying to read or watch Netflix even when nothing quite made sense to her. The few times she had tried to talk to Octavia and their other friends, she’d had nothing to say. It’s because you’re stupid now, the voice in her head said. And you’re too sad to make them happy.

Then, one day, Octavia texted her. If you don't want to be friends anymore, then fine. We're not friends anymore.

Clarke missed progressively more days of school until her mom enrolled her in online classes instead. After growing up together, she hasn’t seen Octavia in years.

Bellamy has been quiet for a minute now, probably since Clarke shut him down when he tried to start a conversation. Feeling bad, and desperate to be separated from her own thoughts, Clarke gathers herself. “So how’s law school?”

Bellamy clears his throat as if caught off-guard by her aggressively casual question. “It’s fine.”

“I didn’t know you wanted to be a lawyer.”

“I didn’t know either. But it’s one of the only things I can do with an English degree that will actually pay.”

“What do you want to be?”

“I don’t know.”

She can hear him lying. “I think you do, though—you’re just embarrassed to say.”

Bellamy chuckles. “You never let me off the hook.”

She blushes. They don’t know each other very well, never did. Maybe she should shut up and just let him drive her home. “Is that a good thing?”

“I think it is, yeah,” Bellamy says, glancing over at her because they’re at a stop sign.

Even though it’s after two a.m. in this small, woodsy town and no one else is on the road, he still stops. Clarke smiles to herself.

“I want to be a writer, eventually,” he says quietly. “But I doubt that’ll ever make enough money for it to be my only job.”

“You write?” Clarke asks.

“Yeah, a lot. But I’m not published or anything. Probably won’t be. I mean, I don’t even know if I’m good.”

“You’re good,” she says, suddenly sure of it.

He actually laughs. “Sure.”

“I know you’re good.”

“And how do you know?”

She hesitates. He’s always been on the quieter side compared to the loud, rowdy friends he had in high school. Even if he wasn’t speaking, there was always something happening behind his eyes. But her still-drunk brain doesn’t know how to put that into words so comes out as, “You like, think about things, Bellamy.”

“And that alone means I’m a good writer?”

“It means that I think you must be a good writer.”

“If you say so, Princess.”

Clarke wants to keep talking about him. If he’s talking, she can’t think about all that happened tonight. Finn’s face keeps flashing in her mind, his eyes wild and desperate like he was afraid of her, like his whole world was falling down around him, and all she’d done was open the door to his room. He’s so good at that: making her feel bad for him, even when he’s the one who fucked up, even when he should be on his knees begging her for forgiveness.

“What do you write about?” Clarke asks, pulling her mind’s fingers away from the open wound.

She thinks she sees him blush.

“Oh—just like, little stories.”

He clearly doesn’t want to answer. She should let him off the hook. “Stories about what?”

Bellamy drums his fingers on the steering wheel. He has nice fingers. “The things that I like, think about,” he drawls, mimicking the way she said it.

“All right. I’ll stop prying.”

“No, you’re not—I just—not a lot of people know that I write, so I’ve never had to explain it before. I wouldn’t know how to word it without making it sound stupid.”

“Okay. Then you don’t have to.” She feels a need to make conversation, but she isn’t sure how to do that in her current state, with him. She wishes that he’d caught her at a better moment.

Clarke is almost disappointed when they pull into the parking lot by her apartment. She instructs him which building is hers, and they take a right, but there’s a person standing there when they pull up to the entrance.

“Shit!” she slides down in her seat, ducking her head.

“Is that him?” Bellamy asks, already putting the car in reverse.

“Yeah.” She put her phone on silent when she’d been walking and got tired of the constant vibrations, but she checks it now and sees at least ten texts and a handful of calls from Finn.

Clarke, I’m sorry. I can explain. I’m coming over. I’m outside. Can you let me up? Clarke, please, let me fix this. I’m so scared this will ruin everything. Clarke can you at least get back to me —

She shuts down her phone completely as tears fill her eyes again. There it is, the instinct to feel bad for him. She hates it.

Bellamy pulls into a spot on the opposite side of the parking lot.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Clarke says, still spooked from seeing Finn appear in front of her as the headlights caught him there, like she’d caught him with that girl.

“You could stay in the car, and I’ll tell him to leave,” Bellamy suggests.

She shakes her head. “You don’t have to do that,” she says, and thankfully he seems to understand that she really means, I don’t want you to do that. All she wants right now is to curl up into a ball and stay there until she doesn’t have to worry about this anymore.

He meets her gaze with his gentle brown eyes. “Then let’s keep driving, okay? We’ll wait him out.”

Guilt claws at Clarke’s conscience. She shouldn’t be such a burden to him. “No, it’s okay. You can just drop me here. I can deal with Finn.”

But he doesn’t let her get away with her attempt to cut him loose. “It’s clearly not okay,” he says. “So no, I’m not going to do that.”

“But Bellamy, it’s late—”

“And I’m an insomniac with nothing better to do, Princess. Might as well kill time with you.”

Clarke crosses her arms. He isn’t going to budge, and there is nothing she wants less right now than to face Finn Collins and try to tell him to leave her alone when she already wants to take him back. Without Finn, she doesn’t know what her life would look like. They’ve been going out since the beginning of freshman year, and most of her friends are actually his friends. If she doesn’t take him back, her life will fall apart. Her entire social circle will crumble, and all of her effort to put on a nice face and have a normal college life will be for nothing. Even Harper and Emori, her roommates, knew him first. She has visions of becoming a stranger in her own home because Finn would somehow find a way to make everyone take his side; she knows this.

Bellamy doesn’t wait for an answer from her. He pulls out of the space, then the parking lot, and soon they’re continuing down Fairfield Road, heading back toward Post Road and the beach.

“Anywhere in particular you want to go?” Bellamy asks.

“Not really.”

“Okay. Then I’m taking you somewhere I want to go.”

“Okay.”

They turn back onto Post and keep driving past the student housing by the beach where Finn lives, past an art studio where Clarke took a few classes as a kid, and farther down until they’re almost at the edge of town.

“Where are we going?” Clarke wonders aloud.

“Patience, Princess.”

If she asked him to stop calling her that, she knows that he would. But she doesn’t know if she wants him to stop. She usually hates anything that reminds her of her past, but Princess doesn’t really remind her of anyone or anything but Bellamy. She knows that it started out as an insult; she isn’t stupid. Princess came from the nice part of town and went to the Blakes’ house on the other side of it. Princess had two rich parents and pretty blond princess hair and a house that echoed on the inside.

Princess was in the backseat when her mom crashed the car and killed her dad. Princess was in the ICU for a week.

Princess is more of a term of endearment, now.

Maybe it’s weird, but she likes it when he calls her that. It makes her feel like she did before everything went to shit.

She sometimes thinks about what it would have been like if she never detached herself from her friends in some sick form of self-destruction disguised as self-protection. Wells was the only one stubborn enough not to let her. He still came over every once in a while, and in a way, he didn’t count in Clarke’s mind because he’s been her friend longer than anyone. He didn’t even go to her school anymore; he got into Hopkins and started driving up to New Haven for school in their sophomore year.

“Where the hell are we?” Clarke asks as they turn onto a street that’s leading them to the coast but to a beachfront unfamiliar to Clarke.

“Just wait.”

They drive almost to the parking lot, but he pulls onto the side of the road first and parks.

“Let’s go,” he says, getting out of the car.

“Go where?” Clarke asks as she pulls on her sneakers and joins him on the asphalt. 

He holds out a hand to her. “Somewhere we can see the stars.”

“I can walk on my own, you know,” she says, eyeing his hand.

He chuckles and takes it back. “All right, I just know that it’s dark, we’re about to be on sand, and you’re still a little drunk.”

“Not true!”

“A little true.”

They do reach the sand. Clarke does stumble. Bellamy holds her hand to steady her and then keeps holding it. The moon is full and provides enough light to see the illuminated outlines of things. It’s September, just a degree shy of summer. The air is starting to bite at night, but his hand is impossibly warm.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have cold hands?” Bellamy asks.

“No,” Clarke says, numbly. Now that she’s thinking about it, Finn didn’t really hold her hand. Lexa never had that luxury either, since they weren’t out freshman year of high school. “Maybe your hands are just hot,” she argues.

“Had no idea you thought so,” Bellamy says, wiggling his eyebrows at her.

Her cheeks heat up, and she’s just tipsy enough not to think of a comeback right away.

“You know what I meant,” she says, though she sounds lame to her own ears.

He squeezes her hand, like he’s reassuring her, and something warm swirls in her stomach.

She’s not blind; you’d have to be in order to not to have a crush on Octavia Blake’s older brother. When Clarke was a kid, she was more annoyed with him than anything else, but as she got older and more aware of him, it got harder to ignore his tendency to make her cheeks hot. She had the kind of crush on him that made her feel stupid, like just a dumb little girl who would never have a chance with him. And he was never interested, anyway. She had braces while he had a car and a leather jacket. He made fun of her; he thought she was ridiculous and rich. He called her princess.

But he saw her on the sidewalk today, and he pulled over. He gives a shit about her, calls her princess with something else behind his voice now.

Get it together, she immediately scolds herself. This is the kind of thinking that made you trust Finn. Look how that turned out.

But Bellamy isn’t Finn. He’s so far away from Finn that Clarke wonders how she was attracted to her ex-boyfriend at all.

Maybe she got cheated on and maybe she has a stupid little girl crush but maybe that’s okay.

He’s holding her hand.

*

Bellamy doesn’t know if it was a vague sense of obligation to the girl who disappeared in high school or something else that compelled him to pull over when he saw Clarke crying on the sidewalk, but he’s glad that he did.

It was weird at first, having her in his car with nothing to say other than all of the questions that she clearly didn’t want him to ask. But somewhere between her apartment complex and the beach they fall into a rhythm of small talk and maybe something that could be flirting, and he doesn’t want to let go of her hand. He has an excuse; she’s tired and tipsy, which is also why he can’t do more than hold her hand. And she just got cheated on. Add that to the list.

Part of him had needed a lifeline too, when he pulled over.

Octavia called while he was studying with some new, tentative friends in the law library, and he’d gone outside to take it. He hadn’t heard from her in weeks. He got his hopes up, as always, that maybe she’d gotten a job, maybe she’d move home and agree to go to school. But it was more of the same, her asking him for money again, and if she could use his car.

He agreed to give her some money but said no to the car. He can’t live in this town without his car, he knows that, but he still feels like he should have said yes. Octavia does that. Demands everything and then makes you feel guilty for not being able to give it to her. She takes and takes and takes.

Maybe it’s because his car is more than just the necessity; it’s his escape. Post Road was not on the way home from the library; he needed to go on one of his night drives after Octavia’s call. He knows that they’re a waste of gas, the drives, but they clear his head. He wishes that he didn’t know this town like the back of his hand, that he didn’t have memories lurking on every street corner, both good and bad. But driving still helps.

“What are you thinking about?” Clarke asks, pulling him from his thoughts.

“Nothing,” Bellamy lies. “Do you like Arkadia?”

“The University?”

He nods.

“It would be great if it wasn’t in Arkadia the town.”

He laughs, feeling a surge of compassion towards her. “That’s exactly how I feel.”

“I can’t wait to graduate and get the hell out of here,” Clarke says.

That sparks his interest. “Where are you gonna go?”

“I don’t know. New York City.”

He tries to picture Clarke in the city and can actually see it. She’s the kind of person that could make places her own if she weren’t stuck in Arkadia like him.

“And what are you gonna do there?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “Get a job. Or sell my artwork.”

He gets a vivid image of her painting that’s been hanging in Becker Hall since she won a contest or something last year. He started staring at it while waiting in between classes last semester and only just recently noticed her name under it.

It seems almost too personal to ask her about her reimagining of Ophelia; it feels too personal to admit what it means to him.

“Glad to know you have it all figured out,” he teases instead.

“Hey. I’m only a sophomore. I don’t need to know everything yet.” She lets go of his hand to put her hair up and doesn’t pick it up again. Bellamy tries not to feel disappointed. “What about you? Where are you gonna go when you’re done with law school?”

“I don’t know. It’s expensive, but there are a lot of good jobs in New York City,” he says. “You might have to put up with me there, too.”

“Sometimes I think it’s not far away enough for me,” Clarke says. “Maybe I’ll end up on the West Coast.”

“I could see you there. You’d have to learn to be a little more laid back, though.”

“Oh, shut up. Look at me, Bellamy. I’m not the Clarke you knew in high school; I go to parties now.” She gestures to her aggressively basic frat party outfit.

Bellamy shakes his head. “There’s a difference between going to parties and being laid back.”

She frowns like he struck a nerve. “I guess you’re right.”

They reach his destination: the set of swings, the picnic table, and the firepit.

“Watch your step,” Bellamy warns. The sand is littered with shards of broken beer bottles; this beach is not as well-manicured as the other ones in town. It’s not technically a public beach anymore; the maintenance house was washed away in a hurricane years ago and the town never bothered to fix it because no one comes here anyway, not when there are beaches with fancy pavilions and boating clubs just down the road.

“Why are we here?” Clarke asks, sitting atop the picnic table.

Bellamy shrugs, using his phone’s flashlight to inspect the firepit. “I thought it would be a nice place to hang out. Monty, Murphy, and I came here a lot in high school to smoke.”

“Are we gonna smoke?”

He snorts. “No. You’re already tipsy.”

She shakes her head. “Whatever. Weed doesn’t work on me, anyway.”

“That’s definitely a lie.”

“Why would I lie about that? I’ve matched my friends hit for hit. Nothing.”

“Huh. You’re a medical marvel, Princess.”

She scoffs, probably thinking about the same thing that popped into his head only a millisecond after he said it, and it makes him want to ram his head into the metal bars of the swing set. 

“Yeah, I am,” is all she says.

She probably doesn’t remember, but he went with Octavia to visit her in the hospital once. It was right after Clarke was moved out of the ICU, and she was still in pretty miserable shape even though she was stable. Her face was all black and blue, and she was hooked up to an IV. She was sleeping; the nurses told them to come back later. Octavia looked scared, seeing Clarke like that. She didn’t try to visit again.

The image is seared into Bellamy’s memory, even today. He had never given Clarke much thought; she was an extension of his little sister, a girl who was often over at his house and had an exceptional ability to get on his nerves. But seeing her in that hospital bed made him realize that Clarke is a person; she’s a thing capable of being taken away, and he missed her as soon as Octavia started pulling away and finding more exciting friends.

Clarke hardly left her house for a year after the accident. That, he knows. She tried coming back to school, and he saw her at band practice and that one day when she was waiting for her mom to pick her up, but soon after that, she disappeared. He pressured Octavia to reach out to her, to try to mend the friendship, but she was stubborn about it. “I’ve tried, Bellamy. It’s not my job to make Clarke better!”

“But you could at least be there for her, O. She just lost her father!”

“Yeah, well I lost mine too, and I’m fine !”

He didn’t know how to tell Octavia then that everyone handles pain differently, and that it’s never a contest to be won, no matter how bad you think you have it. He should have yelled at her then, or gone to Clarke’s house himself just to sit with her.

But he can’t go back, he can only be with Clarke tonight, if that’s what she needs. He knows that he needs it. He can’t imagine going back to his dark apartment, where Miller is undoubtedly studying quietly in his room like Bellamy should be. He can’t imagine not being here with this version of Clarke who fascinates him.

She crosses her arms in front of her, and he watches her shiver.

He licks his lips. A warm feeling washes over him for a second, but he pushes it away. “Cold?”

She nods.

Bellamy starts walking to the woodsy outcrop between the sand and the parking lot, searching the ground for kindling. “I brought matches. I’ll make a fire.”

He comes back a minute later with a handful of twigs and a few more substantial sticks.

“Do you even know how to do that?” Clarke asks.

“Sure I do. I was a camp counselor.”

“And that makes you an expert?”

“Don't worry, Princess. I won’t burn the beach down.” He forms a triangular structure with big sticks. “What do you do in the summers?” he asks, making conversation, scattering kindling in the center.

“I worked at a coffee shop last summer, but every year before that I was mostly still doing schoolwork through the summer. It was slow-going after the accident. I got really behind.”

“I’m sorry, Clarke,” he says carefully. “About what happened. I know that Octavia can be selfish, but I couldn’t believe that she ditched you like that. I’m sorry.”

Clarke smiles sadly. “Bellamy, it wasn’t Octavia’s fault.”

Confusion blooms over his perception of reality. “What do you mean?”

“I kind of… isolated myself for a while.” He can see that she’s uncomfortable by the way she plays with her fingers in her lap. “I didn’t want anyone to see me like that.”

“I didn’t know that,” Bellamy admits. “But she could have tried harder. She did kind of take it as an opportunity to make other friends. I know that she knew better. I tried to get her to reach out to you, I did.”

He lights the fire, blowing on it until it catches, and sits on the table beside her. He feels her place a hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t think anyone can get Octavia to do anything that she doesn’t want to do.”

“For what it’s worth, I think she did want to reach out at first. But once her confidence is shaken she tends to lash out.” Memories of her outbursts come unbidden to his mind. He tries to shake them off. “I’m sorry if she made your experience any harder. You shouldn’t have had to go through that alone.”

“It wasn’t the worst thing in the world,” Clarke says, staring at the fire. It flickers in her eyes. “I forget about it a lot, you know? And then I remember, and I feel different for a bit. But then everything goes back to normal. That’s the weird thing about time passing. I don’t know how something that once took over my life can feel so distant and small now. I feel guilty for forgetting, but it’s also all that I want to do. Does that make sense?”

Hesitantly, he places a hand on her knee. “It makes perfect sense.”

Sometimes he likes to pretend that he’s like everyone else at school, that he has a sturdy home life instead of what it is: a distant mother and a rebellious trainwreck of a sister who’s essentially his responsibility.

“Thanks for making a fire,” Clarke says.

“No problem, Princess.” He takes his hand away from her knee and feels hers leave his shoulder.

“Hey Bellamy,” she murmurs, looking from the fire to his face. “Why do you still call me that? I have my own reasons, in my head. But I want to know your reasons.”

“Do you want me to stop?” he asks, suddenly worried that he’s been offending her this whole time. He can be so stupid —

“No. I don’t want you to stop,” she says earnestly.

He swallows and has to break eye contact with her. The warm feeling in his stomach is back, making him feel like a bad person.

“I call you that because it’s what I’ve always called you. It just makes sense. But I don’t mean it in a mean way, Clarke. I’ll stop—”

“No, don’t.”

“Okay, as long as it’s fine.”

“I like it when you call me that because it makes me feel like you don’t see me any differently, even after everything that happened.”

Bellamy shakes his head. When he thinks about it, that isn’t true. “I do, though. You’re very different now, Clarke. You’re tougher than you used to be.”

“That’s not true. I wouldn’t have been afraid to face Finn if it was.”

He’s only caught a brief look at this Finn character, but he doesn’t like him. “He doesn’t deserve your time.”

“No,” Clarke insists. “I avoided him because I’m afraid that I’ll take him back. He’s just—he’s good at making me feel bad for him. Like, he’ll mess up, but after we talk about it I’m the one who ends up apologizing.”

“That’s all him, Clarke. That’s not your fault, and he shouldn’t be manipulating people like that. It’s fucking stupid.”

“I know. But it’s like even if I know better, I still fall for it.” She covers her face with her hands, and he can tell she’s getting tired. “We can stop talking about him now.”

He feels a spike of guilt for upsetting her. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s talk about stupid stuff instead.”

Clarke lets her hands fall from her face. “Okay, like what?”

“We have a lot to catch up on.” He pokes the fire with a stick, rearranging the kindling so it stays strong. “Like… if you had to bring one book with you on a deserted island, what would it be?”

“How to Survive on a Deserted Island.”

He nudges her. “You know what I mean.”

“Hm.” She bites her lip. “I don’t really read, but I remember liking Pride and Prejudice when we read it for school. I wouldn’t mind reading it again.”

“Solid choice.”

“What about you?” Clarke asks but then stops him. “No, I know this one. One of those greek epics, right?”

“The Iliad ?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” He looks at her incredulously. “How did you know that?”

“You used to carry around a copy with you in school. A few of my friends started reading it so that they could have something to talk to you about.”

“Huh. I did think it was a little weird that it seemed like all of a sudden people were reading The Iliad. I thought maybe it was for a class or something.”

“Nope,” she says matter-of-factly. “They just liked you.”

He fiddles with the stick in his hands. “Did you ever like me, Princess?”

Clarke doesn’t skip a beat and says, “Don’t flatter yourself,” but smiles like she knows something he doesn’t. This girl is going to kill him.

“I’m wounded.”

“Oh, please. I bet you’re popular with the ladies at Arkadia Law. You’re probably even spoken for.”

“I’m not,” Bellamy says, making sure to meet her eyes. He thinks she blushes. He thinks about Echo, how she got into UCLA for grad school, and Bellamy called it off rather than bother with long distance. She was perfectly fine, perfectly nice. He doesn’t know why he couldn’t love her. Looking at Clarke now, he feels stupid for thinking that he could.

“You’ll find someone,” Clarke says absently, staring at the fire again. The crackling of the flames and the yawning of the waves fill the silence for a moment.

I found you, Bellamy almost wants to say, but thinks that would scare her off and it’s stupid anyway, so he doesn’t. “Maybe someday,” he says instead, and changes the subject. “So if you were stuck on a desert island and could only have one movie with you…”

Time passes, and Clarke seems less and less drunk, less and less down. She talks more, laughs easily, and soon the fire is dying before them. Bellamy is hesitant to breach the subject, because even though it’s nearly 4 a.m. he doesn’t quite want this time with her to end. But he should probably get her home. He’s terrified of tomorrow, of going back to never seeing her, but it might need to be done.

“Do you want me to take you home?”

Clarke’s gaze darkens and she tilts her head in a silent, suggestive question.

He coughs. “I mean—uh, drive you back to your apartment?”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean, I’m pretty hungry, so it’ll be good to make something and then go to bed.”

She’s hungry! Bellamy tries to sound nonchalant when he suggests, “Or we could hit Andrew’s on the way home.”

“Andrew’s?”

“The 24-hour diner.”

“I didn’t know we had a 24-hour diner.”

“You’ve been missing out.” It hits Bellamy that there are very real reasons behind Clarke not knowing all the spots where high school kids hang out in this town, that she still has a lot of catching up to do in life.

Clarke smiles and tucks a stray strand of hair behind her hair. “Then let’s go there.”

He holds out a hand to help her down from the picnic table. Her hand is warm now. “Let’s go.”

*

Bellamy turns on the same kind of indie song, atmospheric and moody, painting the night in brighter colors as Clarke stares out the window.

“What’s your favorite breakfast food?” Bellamy asks.

“French toast,” Clarke says automatically. Her dad used to make it for her every Sunday morning before church.

“They have that where we’re going.”

“Good to know.” She pulls her phone out of her pocket, powering it back on. She should probably make sure that her roommates aren’t freaking out wondering where she is. “What do you usually get?” she asks.

Bellamy shrugs. “Their pancakes are amazing.”

“You like chocolate chips in them,” Clarke remembers suddenly, memories of mornings at the Blakes’ after sleepovers with Octavia popping into her head.

“I do, yeah,” he says, glancing over at her because they’re at a stop sign. “Clarke, if reading his messages is gonna upset you…”

“I know,” she says. “I just need to let my roommates know where I am. They know that I went to see Finn, but if he showed up at our apartment, they might be worried about me.”

“Yeah. Makes sense.”

He stays stopped at the sign though, watches her as the phone comes to life, and messages pop up on the lock screen one after the other.

“Oh God,” Clarke says as she scrolls. Message after message from Harper and Emori glare up at her.

Where are you? Harper called Finn and he says you aren’t with him.

Clarke, we’re starting to get worried.

Clarke, Emori’s talking about calling the police. Please get back to us.

“I’d better call them,” she explains to Bellamy as she presses on Harper’s contact image.

It rings twice, before Harper answers.

“Clarke! Thank God. Where are you? Are you okay? Finn said you two had a fight?”

“I’m fine, Harper. I’m with a friend. I’ll be back before morning.”

“What friend?”

“A guy I know from high school.” She glances over at him. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Okay,” Harper says, though there’s a hint of uncertainty in her voice. “What happened with you and Finn?”

Clarke feels a surge of anger when she remembers how Harper phrased it, that Finn said they were fighting . “I caught him with a girl, Harper. Next time you talk to Finn you can tell him to fuck off and stop calling me.”

She gets choked up on the last part, and feels Bellamy’s hand on hers, heavy and warm and grounding.

“Oh,” Harper says. “I’m sorry Clarke, we had no idea.”

“It’s fine. I’m safe. I’ll be home at some point.”

“Okay, as long as you’re safe.”

“Yeah, I’ll keep my phone on so you have my location again.”

“Great. Thanks, Clarke. I’ll see you in the morning. We’ll egg Finn’s window.”

That makes Clarke giggle. “Sounds like a plan. See you in the morning. Sorry for scaring you. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

She hangs up and takes a deep breath.

And then she’s staring at her phone, at all of the missed calls and unanswered texts from Finn, and she sees words like You at least owe me a conversation, Clarke, and It was a mistake, and I love you, which they have never said to each other before.

“Clarke,” Bellamy says gently. They’re still stopped at the sign since no one else is on the road. He takes his hand from her shoulder and touches her phone with it. “May I?”

Clarke nods, handing the phone to him. She watches as he does exactly what she thought he would do: blocks his number.

“Just so you can have the night off,” Bellamy explains. “You can unblock him in the morning if you want to. Or now, if you want, because that might have been overstepping. Sorry if that was weird—”

She smiles at his sudden self-consciousness. “No, thank you,” she assures him. “I wouldn’t have had the guts to do it myself, and it needed to be done. I don’t think I’ll be unblocking it.”

He hands her phone back to her. She watches his hands as they meet again on the steering wheel. She loves his hands, pictures them on her knee like earlier.

She sighs, shaking off the thought. “Bellamy,” she says, mostly because she’s sober now and the night is starting to get to her and she feels weak and like she wants him to know, at this moment, how important he is to her. Even though they haven’t talked for years and she just about wanted to die when he pulled to the side of the road to ask her if she needed a ride, she can’t imagine what would have happened if he didn’t. “Why did you pull over?”

“Hm?”

“When you saw me walking home. Why did you stop?”

Bellamy licks his lips. She’s mesmerized by the movement, the brief sight of his tongue before it’s back in his mouth.

“I would have felt like a shit person if I hadn’t,” he answers. “It’s not every day you see Clarke Griffin crying while walking down Post Road at two-thirty a.m.”

Clarke’s heart sinks, and she immediately feels stupid. What did she expect him to say? I was enraptured by your beauty, Clarke? You just looked so sexy with mascara dripping down your face?

But he isn’t done. “And I was a little curious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry until tonight. I wanted to know what happened.”

She sighs. “Well, thank you. For giving me a ride, and for hanging out with me.”

He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “We’re not done, you know. I plan on being a pain in your ass until the sun comes up, if you’ll let me.”

“Really?”

“If you want. You did tell Harper that you’ll see her in the morning.”

A smile creeps across her face. “I did say that, yes.”

“So I’m down for an all-nighter if you are. Full send.”

Clarke laughs, and it comes from deep in her belly. She’s so fond of Bellamy at this moment, it takes all of her willpower not to lean over and kiss his cheek. “Yeah, I’m down.”

They pull into Andrew’s Diner at 4:30 a.m. Bellamy holds the door open for her as they walk in, and for a second Clarke pretends that they’re years younger, just two kids with new licenses and used cars looking to get away from their overprotective parents for a night. Well, Bellamy’s mom was never quite the overprotective type. If anything, she always struck Clarke as being somewhat neglectful, but it’s none of her business.

“We came here after prom,” Bellamy says idly after the host tells them to find a table. They pick one by the window, overlooking the parking lot in which only Bellamy’s Mini Cooper and two other vehicles sit.

“Really?” Clarke says. “No raging after-party in someone’s basement? I thought that’s what people did.”

Bellamy shakes his head. “I take it you didn’t go.”

She nods. “I was enrolled in online school so someone would have had to ask me.”

“It’s okay. You didn’t miss much.”

“Yeah, I know. But I still would have liked the choice to go, you know? Even if I only got a few bad stories out of it.”

“Well,” Bellamy starts, leaning forward on his elbows on the table. “Gina waited until pictures were over and then dumped me so she could dance with some other guy.”

She gives a pitying, “Aw,” as her hand comes up to cover her mouth. “How dare she!”

The waitress comes by to give them glasses of water and asks them if they want anything different to drink. Clarke says no while Bellamy orders a lemonade. As the waitress walks away, Clarke takes a sip of water.

“Like I said,” Bellamy says, still on his prom story. “You didn’t miss anything.”

“But like,” she begins, not sure how to put this. “That experience formed a part of your identity. All of high school does, even if you don’t enjoy it. You endure it for four years and come out with at least some semblance of an idea of who you are. I have no idea who I am; I spent most of those years in my house with nothing and no one to shape me. I feel like I’m being fake all the time. And I know a lot of people my age probably feel like this to some degree, but when it comes to finding a sense of self, they had a head start.”

Bellamy listens as she speaks. Really listens. And he waits a moment to digest her words before he nods slowly, in understanding. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re fake.”

She snorts. “Well I’m not being fake right now.” She wasn't thinking when she said it; the realization hits her harder than she expected. 

He’s smiling at her but it isn’t meant for her; he’s smug, proud of himself. “And why is that?”

She lifts her chin in defiance, not giving him what he wants. “I guess you’re just not as cool as my other friends.”

Bellamy looks down at the wrapper from his straw, folding it up into tiny little pieces until it looks like an accordion. “I think you’re wrong.”

“Agree to disagree.”

“No, I mean, about what you said, that you didn’t have anything to shape you. I think you shaped yourself. I’ve seen your artwork hanging in Becker Hall, Clarke. I’d give anything to be able to make something that beautiful.”

Clarke feels herself blush. She won a dumb contest last year. Hardly anyone even realizes that the art on the wall is hers, let alone looks at it for longer than a few seconds in between classes.

Because no one ever taught her how to take compliments or perhaps because she can’t sit here and listen to Bellamy put himself down, she says, “I bet you write things that are just as beautiful.”

“There you go making baseless claims again.”

“I call it having intuition.”

“Call it whatever you want,” Bellamy says, “but you’ve never read anything I’ve written.”

“Then let me read it.” She pokes his arm. “It’s only fair since you saw my painting.”

He makes a face but is saved from answering when the waitress comes to take their order.

Clarke is quiet while she eats, like she savors every bite more than she cares to make conversation. He’s secretly grateful; he doesn’t want her to ask to read his writing ever again.

What he writes doesn’t fit into a category. He doesn’t know how to market it to people. Evidently, it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, considering the fact that his most recent short story has been rejected by every magazine he’s sent it to thus far. 

It’s not that Clarke isn’t trustworthy; it’s that his writing feels too close to his heart to show anyone. It would be like opening up a hatch on the side of his head to allow her to crawl inside his brain and have a look around.

He thinks that her opinion would carry more weight than all of those literary magazines combined. The second he saw her on the side of the road, he wished that he was wearing something nicer than his Arkadia Law hoodie with a stain on the front, just below the logo.

She’s looking like every other party girl on the face of the planet, but there’s a reason why girls wear black crop tops and ripped jeans when they go out. It works. And Clarke has a certain elegance about her, even with maple syrup dripping down her chin.

When she doesn’t notice, Bellamy gestures to his own chin. “You’ve got a little something.”

“Oh.” Her cheeks flare red, and he immediately wishes he didn’t make her self-conscious. She dabs at her chin with a napkin. “Did I get it?”

“Yeah,” Bellamy lies, because even though there’s still a little left, he doesn’t think that he can reach over and wipe it off himself without wanting to keep touching her. He needs to stop noticing her lips. A nice Arkadia Hills girl can do much better than him, who grew up on the ‘bad’ side of town two steps from Polis.

He remembers coming here with his high school friends after band concerts or shifts at the hardware store, goofing around until parent-enforced curfews, catching a ride home with whomever had room because he couldn’t afford a car until his senior year.

He doesn’t know why, but he never comes here with his college friends. It’s a sacred place for him, a place for people who know how special it is. Clarke fits right in, engaging him in conversations about the good and the bad and everything in between, jumping seamlessly from one to the other like it costs her nothing.

She goes from opening up about her past to prying about his writing to poking fun at his glasses without skipping a beat.

“Why didn’t you ever wear them in high school?” she asks, finishing up her French toast.

Bellamy shrugs. “Please. High school Bellamy wore leather jackets and contacts. I wouldn’t have been caught dead in glasses.”

She laughs. “High school Bellamy played the trumpet.”

“The trumpet is the most fuckable band instrument. Plus my guidance counselor said it would look good on my college applications.”

“Who says that the trumpet is the most fuckable instrument?”

“Trumpet players are the most fuckable.”

“ Sure . Did the guidance counselor tell you that too?”

“You were just saying how I got girls in high school!”

Clarke takes an indignant sip of water. “You didn’t get any of them other than Gina. And even then you never noticed that she liked you until she literally announced it to the whole school.”

Bellamy covers his face with his hands, slumping down in his seat.

She continues, apparently relishing in his pain. “I didn’t go to a lot of school, but I was there for that day my freshman year.” She puts a hand over her mouth to muffle her voice, imitating the speaker over which Gina asked him to prom during her morning announcements. “Bellamy Blake, will you go to prom with me?”

“Pike sent me to the front office to give her an answer,” Bellamy says, recovering from his brief moment of embarrassment.

“Why would she be so desperate to go with you only to dump you there?”

He sighs. “I think she just wanted a date because the rest of her friends each had one. And her friend was going with the guy she ended up ditching me for.”

“That’s brutal,” Clarke says earnestly. “I would have never ditched you for another guy at prom.”

“Should’ve asked you, then.”

She gets a faraway look in her eyes, then, and he doesn’t know why. But she comes back as quickly as she left, recovering from whatever took her away for the fleeting moment. “Let’s just pretend you took me then. Then I get a prom story and yours gets a substantial upgrade.”

He smiles at her. “Deal.”

They pay for their food, separately, and then they’re back in the Mini Cooper. The dash lights up red and shows him the time. 5:37 a.m.

“Sunrise is in an hour,” Bellamy says as Clarke buckles her seatbelt. “Wanna watch it?”

She smiles at him, and it makes her eyes gleam in the light from the diner’s obnoxious neon sign. “Let’s do it.”

*

He takes her back toward the university and past it, into the part of town closer to where she grew up. Arkadia Hills. It’s mostly woods.

This part of town is dark at night. She’d almost forgotten what it’s like without streetlights and sidewalks after being at school without going home for the better part of two years. Her mother moved farther upstate as soon as Clarke had graduated from high school, and Clarke stays at Arkadia in the summers.

Bellamy drives and drives until there are more trees than houses, more branches than sky, except for the rare field on which horses graze during the day.

They settle comfortably into silence, listening to the quiet hum of whatever indie song he had queued up on his phone.

Clarke rarely feels this comfortable with people. Even with her roommates, the room feels incomplete without conversation. Somewhere along the way in life she began to think that silence meant that no one wanted to talk to her. But she doesn’t feel that in this car, with Bellamy. She feels the ease, the calm in the quiet. 

She can listen to her thoughts without worrying that he’ll hear them. Even if he could, she doesn’t think that she would mind. Part of her wants him to witness all that she’s remembering, all of the painful memories that these wooded hills bring back to her. When she tells him certain things, he doesn’t balk at them like other people would. Sometimes she thinks that people are uncomfortable when she opens up to them because it’s like she’s breaking the news to them that life can be unbearably hard. But Bellamy came back to her tonight fully-formed, fully aware that life sucks, fully ready to catch whatever she throws at him.

Finn didn’t like it when she talked about her dad’s death or the aftermath that the accident had on her body, her mind. Even if she mentioned something off-handedly, he’d go, “Whew. Heavy stuff,” and change the subject.

She never figured out a way to explain how unhelpful that was without hurting his feelings.

They turn onto a road that has a DEAD END sign next to it, not far from her old street.

“Bellamy, where are we going?” she asks as they drive through the neighborhood.

“Somewhere we can see the sun.”

The sky is already beginning to lighten when he parks on the side of the road. She sees a trail marker just out her window.

“Brett’s Creek,” Clarke realizes aloud. This nature preserve had a trail near her house.

Bellamy cuts the engine. “There’s a spot I like.”

They exit the car and walk the trail with the help of their phone flashlights. After they cross a rickety bridge over a brook, the trail begins to tilt upwards.

They travel in the same comfortable, contemplative silence until they reach the top of the hill, and the trees part to reveal a clearing that falls off into a cliff and the firepit in the center. To the right of it, an electrical buzz comes from the tower that holds six power lines suspended in the sky, traveling in either direction to the nearest towers, probably about a mile apart each way.

Here, they shut off their flashlights because the sky is a pale periwinkle, and its light is no longer obscured by the forest’s canopy.

They sit on a log and watch it quietly: the periwinkle turning slowly to blue, the sun peeking its gaze over the horizon. And then it’s blinding light, but Clarke can’t stop looking, can’t get enough of the warmth of it on her face. The clouds are gurgling red, blooming into rosy pinks that stretch upward into blue branches. She feels so alive in this moment that she doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to thank Bellamy.

She wishes that she had more , that her entire life could have been this moment repeated over and over again until now. She never again wants to be the girl in the hospital bed or the sorority girl whose boyfriend cheated on her or the crying girl walking down Post Road barefoot, never wants to be anything but who she is right now while she’s watching this sunrise.

I think you shaped yourself, she recalls Bellamy saying over their 4 a.m. breakfast.

But she didn’t shape herself. The accident shaped her. Even to the people who didn’t know her when it happened, she’s still trying to prove that she’s fine.

But maybe she can begin to shape herself here, under this sunrise, with him.

“Bellamy?” she says quietly, suddenly needing to know, wanting to see him under the new sun in the way she was seeing herself at this moment. “What shaped you?”

She looks over at him, at his golden brown skin brilliantly glowing against the fiery sunlight. He meets her gaze, his eyebrows furrowed in response to her question. She can see him thinking. She wants to know each and every one of his thoughts as he’s having them.

“I think—” He clears his throat, swallows. Stares back out at the sun again. “I would say Octavia. But I think it was my mom. She’s the one who made Octavia my responsibility.”

Clarke wants to tread lightly, but she also wants to know. “She wasn’t around much, was she?”

Bellamy shakes his head. “She didn’t have health insurance. She gave birth on our living room floor and put Octavia in my hands right before she passed out. I thought something was wrong, so I called 9-1-1. She yelled at me as soon as she came to. And she’s still on my case about Octavia, whom I hardly hear from anymore. It’s like—like I had to be the bad guy for both of them my whole life, always reeling them back in when they got too far away from reality. But it didn’t work. I failed them.”

 He looks surprised when he’s done talking, like he didn’t expect to say that much or in that way, like the words were spoken for him by someone else.

Clarke scoots closer to him, placing a hesitant hand on his. He turns over his palm and laces their fingers together.

“You shouldn’t have had to,” Clarke begins, “but you did the best you could, Bellamy. Now you deserve to shape yourself.”

And then his other hand is cupping her cheek and he’s kissing her, soft and exploring, asking permission but firm, asking an important question. She kisses him back, letting her lips follow his, gasping at the first tease of his tongue, feeling his lips push more insistently against hers as she cards her fingers through his dark curls. Every part of him is warm like the sun.

His hand lets go of hers and wraps around her exposed waist, pulling her closer and stroking her skin, leaving fires in its wake.

And then he’s pulling away and standing up.

“I should get you home,” he says suddenly, like he’s snapped out of a trance.

Clarke feels as though someone has dumped a bucket of ice water over her head, but she manages to keep her composure as she stands up, wiping the back of her jeans with the hand that was just holding his.

“Okay,” she says slowly, trying to read his now unreadable face. She feels her lip quivering. She begs it to stop. “Is something wrong?”

His face softens then, and he takes her hand. “No, not at all. I just—I just think you’ve been through a lot tonight. I should get you home.”

Not this. She senses it again, him treating her like a little girl. But she doesn’t want to fight him on it in fear that she’ll start crying, and then she’ll really seem like a little girl.

I’m an adult, Bellamy! I don’t do anything that I don’t want to do.

But she follows him back down the trail, feels her phone vibrate in her back pocket. She takes it out.

“Who is it?” Bellamy asks.

“Harper, up for her morning run. Wondering where I am.” Home soon, she texts back with one hand, refusing to let go of his hand to do so.

“That’s some serious dedication.”

Thankful for the change in topic, Clarke says, “I know; she’s crazy. She like, runs marathons and stuff.”

They fall into small talk as they climb back in the Mini Cooper, though Clarke is aware of an undercurrent now, of nervousness and tension and something hot to the touch.

She wishes he never stopped kissing her.

*

Bellamy drives back to campus with guilt and desire at war in his mind. He should drop her in the parking lot outside her apartment like a gentleman. Well, a gentleman would walk her to the door, but he’s afraid he’ll want to press her up against it and kiss her until she invites him in to let him do more than kiss her.

He does allow himself to hold her hand as he drives back to the university. He tells himself it’s for her sake; he thinks he gave her the wrong impression earlier, when he stopped the kiss. 

He doesn’t want to mess this up. This is Clarke. She means something to him now, more than he thought possible after a childhood of almost-friendship and then one night together after not speaking for years.

But it’s all happening so fast. Just six hours ago, he almost drove by her on Post Road.

They pull into the parking lot and he parks where he almost did that night before Finn appeared like a phantom in front of them. Despite his earlier decision he finds himself saying that he’ll walk her up, and takes hold of her hand again as soon as they're inside and climbing the stairs. He tells himself that this is all he’s allowed of her: just her warm fingers laced with his.

They come to her door.

“Thank you for tonight, Bellamy,” she says sweetly, earnestly. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

“I’m glad I stopped for you, Princess,” he says. He leans in, telling himself that he’ll only kiss her cheek. And he does.

But then she’s turning her head just as he’s pulling away, and their lips are a breath apart, and then he breaks. She surges against him just as he pushes her forward, and this time the kiss is ravenous, almost desperate.

Her hand is back in his hair, and his hands find her waist, gripping her tight. His fingers snake higher under her crop top, finding the underwire of her bra. He rubs his thumbs against the undersides of her breasts.

He’s terrified of this ending, of her going back to being just a distant memory to him. He doesn’t want this night to end, even though the sun has already risen.

But this time it’s her who pulls away, and she smiles at him, almost devilishly.

“We should both get some sleep,” she says.

He kisses her hard. “Sure.”

“Bellamy,” she says, giggling.

It takes every ounce of self-control in his body to pull away from her. “Your number hasn’t changed since high school?” he asks. He used to have Clarke in his phone in case he couldn’t get in touch with Octavia. He still has her number, though it’s gone untouched for years.

“It hasn’t,” Clarke confirms.

“Then I’ll call you.”

“Okay.”

He steals one last kiss and then he’s forcing himself to take a step back. But he can’t leave yet.

“Clarke,” he starts, not knowing how to say this. “Just—thanks.”

She gives him a curious look, her nose all scrunched up like he’s being stupid. “For what?”

“For walking down Post Road all by yourself.” He’s trying to say that he needed her just as much as she needed him.

She seems to know that, somehow. She smiles. “You’re welcome, Bellamy.”

“I’ll see you,” he says, and he means it like a promise.

“See you,” Clarke says, turning the lock on her apartment door. It sounds like a promise from her too.

On his way home, Bellamy drives through Arkadia with his music turned way up, thinking about campfires and French Toast and all that has shaped him.