After You

v. history is a horror show

Clarke got her period at fifteen. The only one in her class who hadn’t yet gotten theirs, she knew it had to be just around the corner. She’d been worried, at first, that it hadn’t come despite other signs of puberty like breast growth and pubic hair, but her mom assured her that it wasn’t a big deal. She’d been a late starter too. Still, she took Clarke in for a thorough exam and everything checked out fine. So, Clarke just went back to waiting. At least, she figured, she was prepared for the damned thing. She had heard Octavia complain about hers enough times over the summer to know what to expect, or at least, she thought she had. One look at the weird brown gunk staining her underwear, however, and Clarke was convinced she was dying.

She allowed herself a full minute of silent freaking out, sitting on the toilet at six in the morning on the first day of sophomore year with her panties around her ankles and her breath shallow and sticking in her throat. She kicked her underwear off her foot and over toward the tub, not wanting to look at it any longer. The color made her cringe. She took another minute to get her breathing regulated and then shouted at the top of her lungs.

“Mom!”

The shout pinged around the tile bathroom, echoing harshly against her own ears and making her wince. The few seconds she spent waiting for a response felt like hours.

“What’s up, kiddo?”

Clarke groaned at the sound of her dad’s voice, muffled through the door.

“I need Mom,” she said, bending over and pressing her forehead to her naked knees.

“Mom’s about to leave for work,” Jake called. “You need toilet paper?”

“No.” Clarke winced as she felt a hot pain spread through her lower abdomen like water. Trickling in slow. But then it hardened and curled in on itself, and Clarke’s face grew hot. Too hot. She felt flushed and nauseated. “I think something’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“I ….” She wasn’t sure how to explain it, so she stuck with being as simple as possible. “My stomach hurts and there’s stuff coming out of my vagina.”

“Oh,” Jake said. “Um.” He cleared his throat. “Okay. Hold on, kiddo. I’ll get your mom.”

A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door.

“Clarke?”

“Come in,” Clarke called, and Abby slipped inside a moment later.

“What’s wrong?”

“It hurts,” Clarke said, one arm curled around her abdomen. She lifted her head and nodded toward her discarded panties. “There’s weird crap coming out of me.”

Abby walked over and squatted by the toilet, one hand settling on Clarke’s naked knee and the other reaching for the tossed underwear. After a quick look, she squeezed Clarke’s knee and said, “Oh honey, you’ve got your period.”

“But it’s brown,” Clarke said, shaking her head. “I thought it was supposed to be red. You know, like blood.”

Standing, Abby crossed to the sink. “It’s like that sometimes.” She wetted a wash cloth and then pressed the cold material to Clarke’s cheeks. “You’re overheated.”

Clarke felt the tension start to leak out and away. Her shoulders caved and her heart began to slow and steady. “I maybe panicked a little.”

“That’s okay,” Abby said, patting Clarke’s thigh with her free hand. “I’m going to get you some wet wipes and a clean pair of panties. I’ll send your dad to the store for some tampons and pads, and we can talk about which you want to try first. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Abby stood and kissed the top of Clarke’s head. “I’ll be right back.”

“Okay.” Clarke let out a slow, steadying breath, blowing the cool air up toward her burning cheeks. A quiet groan escaped as she pressed her forehead to her knees again and closed her eyes. What a way to kick off the school year. Puberty had been stringing her along for nearly two years, and her uterus just happened to choose this day of all days to catch up. Talk about luck.

At least, Clarke thought, it couldn’t get any worse.

“She’s here.”

The hand suddenly slamming into the locker next to hers startled Clarke. She jumped and blinked down hard, trying to adjust to the sudden rush of features swimming in front of her face. Dark hair. Dark, wide eyes. Rapidly moving lips. Ridiculous hat flipped around backward and begging to be confiscated.

“Um, happy sophomore year to you, too, Octavia,” Clarke said. “Since when are you so awake at 8 AM?” She let out a quiet laugh and went back to stuffing her new notebooks in her locker.

“Hello? Clarke?” Octavia grabbed Clarke by the backpack still partially slung over her arm and yanked her out of her locker. She then slammed the door closed and looked at Clarke expectantly. “Did you not hear what I just said?”

Clarke’s brow furrowed. She glanced down to Octavia’s hand, still curled around the strap of her backpack, and then back up again. “Not really. I’m a little distracted by the natural disaster taking place in my uterus right now.”

Octavia blinked as though Clarke had just shaken her out of a trance. “You finally got your period?”

“Yeah, and we’re already not friends,” Clarke said. “It was all brown and thick at first. I completely freaked for a minute.”

Octavia nodded. “Yeah, just wait ’til you’re passing huge blobs of tissue and having panic attacks thinking you’re pregnant every time your period is, like, two minutes late even though you’re a virgin.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Clarke said, laughing.

“I know, but trust me,” Octavia said. She shrugged and the movement jostled Clarke’s arm. She glanced down to see Octavia’s fingers still wrapped around the strap.

“Just so you know,” Clarke said, pointing to the strap, “that’s not a leash. You can’t drag me around by it.”

Octavia blinked again and looked down at her hand. Her eyes widened. “Oh my god,” she said. “You distracted me.” She glanced over Clarke’s shoulder and then looked back at Clarke. “I was trying to tell you that she’s here, Clarke.”

“Who?” Clarke glanced briefly around but didn’t notice anything or anyone out of the ordinary. “Who’s here?”

Octavia used her hold on Clarke’s backpack to swing her around. She pulled Clarke’s back to her chest and pointed over her shoulder toward the end of the hall. Clarke followed her direction to the main office, and at first, she didn’t see much of anything. Just a few students standing around inside, their backs to the large glass windows, and Principal Kane jabbering on at them. But then Kane pointed toward the windows and the three students grouped in front of him turned and looked. That one look was enough to suck the oxygen out of the hallway, and suddenly, Clarke couldn’t breathe.

Her chest immediately seized up, lungs burning. Her throat constricted as rapidly as her stomach plummeted to her feet, and the hallway spun and spun around her.

There, in the middle of the three, was a face she would recognize anywhere. High cheekbones and tired, light eyes, framed by a mane of long, bushy brown hair. Those features had haunted her dreams for months, since a chance encounter at the county fair.

Octavia’s words rang in Clarke’s ears. She’s here.

She.

Lexa.

Lexa was back.

Clarke’s immediate instinct was to make contact. Every hallway seemed empty, every classroom, the size of a shoebox, and all that remained was she and Lexa stretched across a gaping, abandoned bridge or pressed inside a shrinking space. They had made eye contact in that first moment, when reality swept Clarke up again and air spilled back into her lungs. Lexa had stepped out of the office and glanced down the hallway, and for just a brief moment, they connected. One look. That one look somehow felt like a lifetime, something fleeting and fragile and counting down, something to inspire action, but Clarke knew she couldn’t cave to her instinct.

She couldn’t go to Lexa, couldn’t spark up a conversation or push her to reconnect, to understand, to forgive. To open up and tell Clarke everything about where she had been, all the sights she had seen, who she had met and connected with and loved. She couldn’t ask Lexa who she was now, who she had become, chiseled out of experiences Clarke could only imagine because she didn’t know. She and Lexa, there was nothing but space between them, space and time and untold stories.

They had grown up together in pieces, scattered here and there, like an unfinished puzzle. In moments, sometimes tender and sometimes turbulent. In both careful and careless connection. They collided as two roads converging, two paths always intended to meet, only to diverge again. Everything they had ever been to one another, their entire fractured history, was but a blip in time, so miniscule in scale that one could blink and miss it. Their first words, their first touch, their first embrace. Their first secret and how it ached, how it echoed, how it lasted. Their first goodbye, its voice stolen, and then their second, their third, and all the hellos in-between.

But even a blip, Clarke knew, could alter a life, or two lives. Hers and Lexa’s. Their blip had been enough to alter Clarke at six years old, then again at nine, at ten, at fourteen. And now, on the cusp of sixteen, she was yet again shaken. She was breathless. It was enough to make her yearn for contact, and it was enough to restrain her. It sat like a hiccup in her chest, a hard, fast ache playing on continual loop and keeping her frozen, keeping them apart.

So, Clarke watched from a distance, mapping Lexa’s features from three rows over, across a packed cafeteria or a yawning hallway. She studied her, absorbing every detail of the young woman forged from the quiet fire of an affection-starved girl, a girl Clarke still held so firmly in her heart. A girl she still dreamed of, still pressed into paper with charcoal and color, still mourned. Still loved.

And in the evenings, she went back to her treehouse, long left lonely, and she sat on the old mattress and sketched. New, harder angles. Older eyes. Long, lanky limbs. Each new piece she tacked to the old walls created a story, and Clarke sighed as she lay back and followed along, watching Lexa Woods grow up in black and white.

She wasn’t happy with the situation, with staying away and keeping quiet. Clarke had always been drawn to fix and heal things. The thought of letting something broken simply lie ate away at her, because she and Lexa, they didn’t have to be broken. They didn’t have to be this way, torn apart and timid and always wondering about the other. But that’s what they were, and that’s what they would continue to be, because Clarke couldn’t bring herself to take that step. She’d taken so many steps before that had only led to their being separated time and again, so many steps that had only ever turned Lexa cold and distant.

She couldn’t push, couldn’t make demands. Lexa had been subject to that too many times in her life and by too many people. Clarke didn’t want to be a part of that. So, she decided to wait. She would wait for a signal, a sign, a window of opportunity, wait for Lexa to need her again or want her or love her like she used to.

She tried not to think about the possibility that such a sign might never come, that she was the only one paying attention. Perhaps Lexa never wondered about her at all.

Clarke lay her head on her desk, pressing her hot cheek against the cool surface. She felt overheated, flushed from head to toe, and pain crawled like an angry insect through her abdomen. Her uterus crunched in on itself until Clarke thought she would pass out. She was on the third day of her period, the third day of the school year, the third day of avoiding the one person she was desperate to talk to, and it wasn’t going so hot. Or it was going too hot, much too hot.

The chair squeaked as Clarke pushed it back and stood shakily to her feet. “Miss Pa…” She fanned at her face and closed her eyes, the name slipping away from her. The room spun and spun around her.

Miss Palmer turned and frowned. “Clarke? What’s wrong?”

“I need to go—”

She could barely get the words out, but as soon as what little she could manage made it across her lips, she stumbled her way out of the classroom and down the hall to the nearest bathroom. The first stall was empty, and Clarke slipped inside. She barely got her pants down before dropping onto the toilet, and then she wrapped an arm around her aching abdomen and bent over, pressing her heated face down between her knees. Sharp breaths in and out soothed her, air puffing down toward the floor with each exhale.

When the wave of dizziness finally passed, she reached between her legs and slowly pulled out her tampon. She dropped it by its string into the water, and her fingers came away coated in red. She had bled right through the damned thing after only a couple of hours. She glanced down and realized that her underwear was in much the same shape as her hand. A deep red stain covered the material, the blood having soaked completely through, and Clarke groaned when she pushed her panties aside to see the same stain on the inside of her jeans. She closed her eyes again and leaned over against the stall wall, exhausted. Tears burned under her eyelids, and Clarke took deep breaths to try to keep her anxiety at bay.

The sound of the bathroom door opening startled her, but Clarke didn’t move. She stayed where she was, eyes closed and mind focused on her breathing. But then…

“Clarke?”

The stall wall rattled a bit as Clarke pushed off of it, sitting up on the toilet. She was fully alert now. Her breath came faster, and she tried to keep it calm, keep herself calm, but that familiar voice was like a door swinging open inside her head. Suddenly, there was too much history spilling in.

She licked her lips, and her own voice escaped in a tired croak. “Lexa?”

Clarke closed her eyes again at the sound of her own voice, at the name slipping over her lips. She had wanted to say it, out loud, since the moment their eyes locked in the hallway, but she had kept it to herself. She had kept everything to herself. It felt good to say it, to say it in a way that acknowledged their familiarity. Lexa was a person she knew, even if only in little pockets of time and memory. So much had changed, like the way Lexa said her name and the way she carried herself, the way Clarke felt when she looked at her, like more of an adult than a teenager. It baffled and thrilled her and tore her apart from the inside. So much had changed, was still changing, would change, but Clarke knew her. She knew her. They knew each other.

“Miss Palmer sent me to check on you,” Lexa said. Her shuffling steps echoed in the empty bathroom. A moment later, two dirty, holey Converse shoes appeared under the door of Clarke’s stall.

Clarke licked her lips again. They suddenly felt too dry, the same as her throat. Every swallow was scratchy and slow. “Why you?”

“I was closest to the door,” came the reply, and Lexa was so close now. Her lullaby voice drifted in from the other side of the door, and Clarke was surprised by how easily it still managed to soothe her. Even altered, even older, it was still Lexa. It was still her Lexa.

“Oh.”

“Are you okay?”

“I….” Clarke didn’t want to admit just how not okay she was, but at the same time, she didn’t want Lexa to leave. It was ridiculous, but Clarke needed this. She needed a moment with her, any moment, no matter how mortifying. “No.”

“Oh.” Lexa shuffled in place, her feet visibly shifting in her shoes. “Should I get the teacher?”

“No,” Clarke said quickly. “No, I just...I don’t feel good. I bled through my tampon.”

“Oh.”

There was a lot of that going on. A lot of oh to fill up the silence, to drink up the space. An oh for every year they’d been part, for every bit of uncomfortable that had infiltrated their once dependable ease. There wasn’t enough oh, though, Clarke knew. Not enough to eat up the hurt.

“I have another,” Clarke said. “I just….”

She pulled the new tampon from her pocket and unwrapped it, snapped out the applicator stick, and then cleaned herself up before inserting it. She tried to wipe up the blood in her panties and on the insides of her thighs, but too much of it had already dried. The damage was done.

“I need new clothes.”

“Did you bring any?” Lexa asked, still hovering outside the stall. God, this was awkward, but Clarke couldn’t bring herself to care, because Lexa was there and she was talking. She wasn’t walking away. “I could go to your locker and g—”

“No,” Clarke said, taking a deep breath before standing and flushing. She pulled up her stained underwear and pants and tried not to cringe at the damp, sticky spots pressing against her skin.  “I don’t have any.”

It took Clarke a moment to psych herself up but then she opened the stall door and came face to face with one of the most painful, precious parts of her past. Lexa stood in front of her, spine stiff as a board and full bottom lip tucked under her top teeth.

“Clarke,” she said, meeting Clarke’s eyes, and Clarke felt a stab of pain at the sound of her name on Lexa’s tongue again. Something so familiar yet so foreign. So different yet still the same. It was strange and wonderful, and Clarke suddenly felt overwhelmed with the urge to cry.

“Lexa,” she breathed, a little timid, a little breathless. She expected it to be over then, for Lexa to see that she was fine and turn swiftly on her well-worn heel. Leave the bathroom with little more than a shrug of her shoulder or a nod of her head. Instead, Lexa stayed put, her baggy jeans making scratching sounds as she shifted on her feet again. Her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, and her eyes were hidden behind a pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses that she pushed up with her index finger. The sight made Clarke just a little more tender.

She imagined Lexa small again, all baggy t-shirts and one-word replies and timid touches that, as a child, always made Clarke feel like she had just climbed to the top of the world and planted a flag. It was in that moment she realized Lexa wasn’t so different now. She was the same girl, a little less timid, a little less quiet, but still reserved. Still swallowed up by too-big clothing. Still looking at Clarke, always looking at her.

“What do you need?”

Clarke was surprised by the question, surprised that Lexa was still standing in front of her; surprised by the words that jumped from her own lips in reply. “I need to get out of here.”

One of Lexa’s bushy eyebrows spiked toward her hairline, and Clarke let out a long sigh.

“I need to change my clothes,” she said, then deflated. Her eyes began to sting and water. She didn’t have a clue why, but she couldn’t stop it. The tears built up faster than she could blink them away, and her voice cracked when she spoke. “But mostly, I just want to go home.”

Lexa looked at her for one long, silent moment, then she surprised Clarke again by nodding. One firm dip of her head, and then, she left.

It was almost as if she’d never come, just like at the fair. Clarke blinked and she was alone. Tears came even faster, spilling over her lashes and sliding down her cheeks, and Clarke suddenly had the urge to crumple to the floor and curl into a ball. Disappear. Instead, she let out a heavy breath, wiped her cheeks, then washed her hands. How was she going to go back to class like this? She didn’t have a change of clothes, nothing to cover up with, and she was a mess. She was flushed and embarrassed and still hurting.

The bathroom door opened again, and Clarke jumped. A part of her hadn’t actually expected Lexa to return, but there she was, hovering just inside the door with her textbooks and Clarke’s.

“What did you tell Miss Palmer?” Clarke asked, and Lexa shrugged a shoulder.

“That I was taking you to the nurse.” She crossed to the sink and handed Clarke her things.

A small smile pulled at Clarke’s lips, a nervous smile. Something just as terrified and excited as her heart right now. “Where are you actually taking me?”

“Home,” Lexa said, and Clarke gawked at her.

“You want to ditch?”

Lexa’s brow furrowed. “You said you wanted to go home.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Which door is the easiest to escape from?” Lexa asked, and Clarke’s head spun a bit. They were actually going to do this.

One minute, they were avoiding each other. Not talking. Pretending like they didn’t have a hell of a lot of history humming in the air between them. The next, they were plotting their grand escape from inside a high-school bathroom as if they were never separated, never broken, never anything but Clarke and Lexa.

Clarke walked around Lexa to the door and poked her head out.

“Wait,” Lexa said, and Clarke slinked back inside. She turned to look at her and caught Lexa’s gaze just as it was darting up from Clarke’s backside. Clarke felt her cheeks flush as Lexa cleared her throat and put down her textbooks just long enough to remove the red flannel button-up she was wearing over her t-shirt. She held it out to Clarke and cleared her throat again. “You should wear it around your waist.”

“O-Oh,” Clarke stuttered, face growing hotter. The heat spread over her ears and down her neck. The blood stain. Of course. She tried not to feel embarrassed, but the feeling came anyway. All the ways she had imagined reconnecting with Lexa, and this was the crap scenario fate decided to stick her with? Come on. Clarke took Lexa’s shirt and knotted the sleeves around her waist so that the rest of the shirt hung down over her butt, hiding the stain. “Thank you.”

They stared at one another for a long moment, silent and uneasy, before Clarke stuck her head back out into the empty hallway. “It’s still clear,” she said. “Fourth period won’t be up for another half-hour or so.”

“Which exit?”

Clarke thought on that for a moment. “The door by the art room is our best bet. It leads out to the gym, so if anyone sees us, they’ll just think we’re going to another class. We can cut through the elementary playground and then over to Bowman Street. We should be clear after that.”

“Do you need to get anything from your locker first?”

“No, I’m good,” Clarke said. “Do you?”

Lexa shook her head, then followed Clarke out into the hallway. They hesitated, standing just outside the bathroom like two people who had somehow gotten mixed up and turned around and didn’t know where they were anymore.

“You sure you want to do this?” Clarke asked. When Lexa only nodded in answer, Clarke grinned. She was still overwhelmed, still a little dizzy, but now Clarke wasn’t sure how much of it was due to her period and how much of it was due to Lexa. “All right. Follow me then.”

“Okay, Clarke.”

The words hit Clarke like a heavy wave, crashing over her and making her stumble over her own feet. Making her heart thump hard and loud. Making her mouth dry. She could practically hear the old echo rocking between her ears.

Okay, Clawke.

She turned just enough to look at Lexa, just enough to remind herself, then she swallowed down the past and turned back, leading Lexa toward the south side of the building. Toward the art room. Toward escape.

The walk to Clarke’s house was silent to the point of making her skin crawl. There were so many things she wanted to say, so many things swirling around inside her head. A million different versions of I’m sorry and I’ve missed you and Let’s start over bounced between her ears. But nothing would come out. Every word stuck to Clarke’s tongue and wouldn’t move, bobbed at the back of her throat like a pill that wouldn’t go down. She spent the entire walk always on the verge of speaking and always not. It was maddening.

Lexa, unsurprisingly, seemed content in the quiet. She walked alongside Clarke, not close but not far either, with her hands fixed loosely behind her back and her eyes focused on the road. Their elbows didn’t brush. Their hips didn’t bump. They didn’t touch once, and Clarke was very aware of that fact. Lexa seemed to be as well, if the subtle glances she shot Clarke’s way every few steps were anything to go by.

The closer they drew to Clarke’s house, the more her mind began to race, questions buzzing around her head that she dared not put to voice. She wondered why Lexa hadn’t ditched her as soon as they were off school grounds. They hadn’t seen each other in a year and the last time they had, Lexa hadn’t seemed to want to be around Clarke at all. So, why now? Why hadn’t she scattered to the wind as soon as the opportunity presented itself? The thought led Clarke to wonder where Lexa lived now and who she lived with, maybe that girl who had been with Raven at the fair. Anya, Clarke thought her name was. She wondered if Lexa lived nearby or if she would need to catch a bus to make it home. If she wanted to go home at all. Why was Lexa back at their school? Had she found a good family? Was someone there to ask her about her day when she got home? Was someone helping her with her homework and making her dinner every night? Did she have a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a friend? Was someone loving her?

“Clarke?”

Clarke blinked and looked up. At some point, they had stopped walking. Lexa now stood directly in front of her and was looking at her with a curious expression, one brow raised. “Huh?”

“This is your house, isn’t it?”

Clarke turned. Sure enough, there was her house, just one short driveway and a freshly mown lawn away.  “Oh,” she said. “I…yup, that’s me.” She looked back to Lexa. “You remembered?”

The drop of Lexa’s chin surprised her, the way Lexa turned to avoid her gaze. She glanced away, at the ground, up at the sky, then finally back at Clarke. Her answer was little more than a shrug, and it only made Clarke’s head swim with more questions. More questions she bit back and swallowed down because she was terrified of screwing up whatever was happening between them. This shaky reunion, this shy sort of peace, this tentative something.

They stood awkwardly at the edge of the driveway for a moment before Clarke cleared her throat and tilted her head toward the house. “You want to come in for a bit?” When Lexa only continued to stare at her, still curious, still a bit shy, Clarke shifted on her feet and said, “My parents won’t be home for a few more hours.”

Her stomach flipped as soon as the words were out, and Clarke didn’t have a clue why. For some reason, she couldn’t hold still in Lexa’s presence, and the thought of being alone with her in her house, in her bedroom, made Clarke almost dizzy. It was a crazy sensation, like her system had malfunctioned somewhere between the kindergarten playground and her own empty driveway. Little fires sparked to life in her cells, and her face felt hot. She blew a bit of air up toward her cheeks and wondered if she was having another hormone-fueled hot flash.

She knew by the way it felt that her face had to be beet red, and Clarke could have sworn she saw Lexa’s lips quirk at the corner, just the tiniest bit, but when she blinked, it was gone. She wondered if it had ever actually been there at all, and if it had, should she be embarrassed or excited? Her body didn’t seem too keen on choosing between the two and settled on both. Her heart thumped hard against her ribs. Why she still cared so much what Lexa thought of her, why she still so desperately wanted Lexa to want to be near her, was beyond her. She couldn’t make sense of it, and she didn’t care to try. In that moment, all she cared about was the flicker of conflict in Lexa’s green eyes and how it deepened briefly before it cleared. Worry spilled through Clarke’s gut, but then the conflict cleared as quickly as it came, and Lexa gave her a gentle nod.

They made their way up the short driveway to the door, Lexa following silently along behind her, and Clarke suddenly realized that she didn’t have her keys. They were in her backpack in her locker, and she hadn’t gone back to get them. She double-checked her pockets to be sure but found only her phone.

“Shit.” She turned toward Lexa whose eyes were conflicted again and said, “I forgot my keys at school.”

“Oh.”

“Come on,” Clarke said, tipping her head to the side. “There’s a spare key around back. We can go in through the patio door.”

She led Lexa around the house and into the large backyard, the massive oak tree filling up most of its green space and cradling Clarke’s beloved treehouse. Clarke glanced back to see Lexa looking it over.

“My dad and I built it,” she said, and Lexa looked at her, surprised. “It used to be like my little home away from home.”

“It’s in your backyard, Clarke.”

Clarke laughed and nodded. “Okay, so my home slightly away from home,” she said, picking up a flower pot on the patio and snatching up the key taped to the bottom. “But it’s got everything a girl could want or need. A bed, a lamp, snacks, sketchbooks, even a few video games.” She slotted the key into the back door while Lexa continued to stare at the treehouse.

“Impressive.”

“Thanks.” Clarke opened the door and stepped just inside the frame. She leaned against one side and waved for Lexa to enter ahead of her. Lexa, however, didn’t follow Clarke’s cue. Instead, she leaned against the other side of the frame, back a little rigid, and continued to stare out into the backyard.

Clarke’s heart rate kicked up again at Lexa’s hesitation. She wanted to urge her inside, but she had learned over the years not to push Lexa. She was like a caged animal, a precious wild thing with the wild beaten out of her. She had to come in her own way, in her own time, and she couldn’t be rushed. She had to choose you, and Clarke had been lining up to be chosen since she was six years old. She wondered if the impulse to do so would ever stop.

So, Clarke let it be what it was. She leaned against the frame opposite Lexa and looked her over as Lexa looked over the yard. She took in every detail as they stood together in comfortable silence, every bit familiar and every bit new. A frizzy strand of hair hung around Lexa’s face, having escaped from her loose ponytail, and in the gentle quiet, Clarke didn’t think. She just reacted. She reached toward Lexa, intent on tucking the wild strand behind Lexa’s ear. Lexa turned just as Clarke’s hand neared her face, and their eyes locked. Clarke suddenly became conscious of what she was doing. She yanked her hand back before she could touch and smoothed it down her own shirt instead. She fixed her eyes on the ground and swallowed thickly. “Sorry.”

When there was nothing but silence, Clarke looked up and found Lexa watching her. Her gaze was soft, like that of an old friend or maybe something more, something newer, something Clarke couldn’t put a name to but melted at the sight of. She cleared her throat, dropped her voice to a whisper, and said, “I’m glad you’re here, Lexa.”

That time, she was sure. Lexa’s lips had quirked at the corner, a breath of a smile that lasted only seconds before it disappeared again, but it had been there. But then Lexa’s gaze turned, that same shadow of conflict from earlier once again clouding her eyes, and before Clarke could ask, Lexa shifted off the door frame and stepped away from her.

Clarke’s brow furrowed as Lexa walked off the patio and out into the yard. “Where are you going?”

“I hope you feel better, Clarke,” Lexa said, voice tinged with something thick like sorrow or history. Then she was gone, disappearing around the side of the house.

Clarke felt like someone had punched a hole through her chest. She stared at the place where Lexa had been only moments before, breath trapped somewhere just outside her reach, and tried to blink away the stinging sensation in her eyes. She waited a moment to see if Lexa would come back, if she would pop back around the corner and smile and follow Clarke inside, but she knew she wouldn’t. Like always, Lexa was gone.

With a heavy sigh, Clarke made her way inside and closed the door behind her. She shuffled off to her room and dropped her textbooks on her bed. She could still feel the sticky stain in her panties, uncomfortable and pressing against her thighs with each step, so she began to undress. Her hands went to the top of her jeans, fingers finding soft flannel. She looked down and saw Lexa’s shirt still tied around her waist.

Well, that would at least give her a reason to talk to Lexa again. She unknotted the sleeves and ran her hands over the shirt before bringing it up to her nose. When she breathed in, she didn’t recognize anything about the scents she found on the material. As much as Lexa was still Lexa, she was also someone new, someone older, someone different, and Clarke didn’t know how she smelled, but the shirt could teach her.

It smelled a little like wood smoke and a little like cologne, something older and masculine. It intrigued her. Clarke breathed in the shirt again before letting it fall on top of her pillow. She didn’t put much thought into why she wanted it there, into whether or not she would smell it again later or why she would care to in the first place. She didn’t want to think about it at all, because the more she thought about Lexa, the more she spiraled, and Clarke was just too tired to have another crisis.

She thought about it anyway. As she stripped out of her stained clothes, she thought about the way Lexa smelled. The way she smiled, like she was unwilling to give anything away, any secret or any sacred little part of her. The way she somehow managed to give so much of herself anyway, so much and yet nothing at all at the same time, every time. She’d been that way for as long as Clarke had known her, and it was frustrating. It was thrilling.

Clarke pictured Lexa in her mind, her conflicted eyes and her sharp angles. The hair hanging in her face, and the way Clarke had reached to tuck it away without thought, and in that moment, Clarke realized something. Something that seemed to knock the world right out from beneath her feet.

Lexa hadn’t flinched when Clarke reached for her. She hadn’t winced or objected, and she wasn’t the one who jerked away.

Clarke was.

The last thing Clarke expected when she walked up to Lexa in the hall, nerves humming like power lines and a freshly washed flannel shirt folded over her arm, was for Lexa to take the shirt with nothing more than a silent nod and walk away.

Clarke stood by Lexa’s locker, gaping, and watched as Lexa disappeared down the hall. The few pitiful attempts at conversation she had worked up the nerve to try still sat uncomfortably on her tongue, choking her. She’d thought, maybe, that the previous day’s events had been some sort of sign. Sure, she’d gotten a stern lecture from her mom about ditching, and her dad had eaten the last bit of peach cobbler right in front of her without even offering her a bite because he knew Clarke considered that a worse punishment than being grounded, but at least she had made progress with Lexa. A door had been opened, or so she’d believed.

Lexa’s back disappearing in the bustle of student bodies, however, was like having that same door slammed right back in her face again. She knocked, jiggled the knob, but it was closed. Sealed. Locked.

She was shut out again, and that single realization was like a stone dropping down Clarke’s throat, knocking against her insides, bruising, battering, and then sinking to the bottom of her stomach.

Clarke couldn’t sleep again. She lay in bed staring up at her bedroom ceiling and wondering when this feeling would go away, this emptiness in her chest. It ached as if it hadn't always been there, the raw soreness of a fresh, open wound, as if someone had punched a hole through her ribcage and nothing and no one had been able to patch it. It had always been a struggle, each time she’d had to adjust to Lexa leaving, Lexa being gone, Lexa possibly never coming back; but this, it was different. It was harder. Clarke didn’t know how to adjust to Lexa being in her life again but always out of reach. She felt like she was in fourth grade again, desperately trying to get Lexa’s attention, trying to understand what she had done wrong, trying to reconnect, only to be met with a solid, brick wall. With silence. With nothing.

It was the worst kind of feeling.

Two weeks had passed in a crawl, a shaky four-legged display of discomfort, and Clarke had gone back to watching Lexa from a distance. Octavia had tried to encourage her, tried to tell her that it would probably just take time and that they’d figure out a way to fix things, but the reassurances never sank beneath the surface. She was surprised to find herself leaning more toward Jasper’s outlook on things.

“That girl is just weird,” he’d said, and instead of clocking him or showing him to the nearest mirror, Clarke had just nodded.

Lexa was weird. But then, so was Clarke. They were weird when it came to one another. None of Clarke’s friends understood their history or their strange, silent relationship, and Clarke couldn’t even explain it to them because she didn’t understand it either. How was she supposed to make sense of a bunch of fleeting glances, strange gurgling sensations in her stomach, and awkward almost-conversations? And Lexa certainly wasn’t helping. She seemed just as confused as Clarke—always nearby but never any closer; always looking but never engaging; always caught somewhere between a confused frown and the hint of a smile.

Were they going to be friends, or just weirdos who liked to stare at one another from across the cafeteria every day?

History changed everything, it seemed, altering their interactions, or lack thereof, in little ways. It was a strange sort of horror show. A lot of little wonders dipped in discomfort, riddled with bursts of anxiety, rolled about in inexplicable want, speckled with spots of awkwardness and affection, and writhing around in her gut. Sticking at the back of her throat. Dancing about in front of her eyes like a puppet on a string.

Clarke huffed and rolled onto her side. The clock on her bedside table informed her that it was five in the morning. She groaned. Only an hour and a half before she had to get up to get ready for school, and she’d hardly slept at all. She threw back the covers and padded over to the desk under her large bedroom window. Her sketchpad was wedged under her math book. Clarke pulled it free and grabbed a pencil from the top drawer. If she couldn’t sleep, she may as well do something productive.

Plopping into the chair at her desk, Clarke wiggled around until she was comfortable, then opened her sketchbook. She stared out the window into the backyard for a while, willing inspiration to come. The sky was lightening up with the approaching dawn, turning a soft blue, and the colors had begun spilling back into the world in muted tones. The grass went from a blanket of shadows to a dark sheet of green. The light in the treehouse glowed like a—wait, what? The light in the treehouse?

Clarke stood and leaned over the desk. She stared out at the visible glow in the treehouse window and then blinked. Rubbed her eyes. When she looked again, the light was still on, and Clarke frowned. She hadn’t been in the treehouse in a few days. Had she left the lamp on all this time? She was about to grab a hoodie and go out to turn it off when it suddenly clicked off on its own.

“What the hell?” Clarke muttered under her breath. A moment later, she had no breath at all. It stuck hard in her throat and refused to move as Clarke watched the familiar form of Lexa Woods appear at the bottom of the tree house and slink slowly down the ladder nailed to the trunk. Her messy ponytail and round glasses were unmistakable. She hopped off the last plank and landed in a crouch before straightening again. Her mouth stretched in a yawn and she rubbed at one sleepy eye under her glasses before making her way across Clarke’s backyard, and Clarke could do little more than stare at her as she went.

Lexa was nearly out of sight when she glanced over. Her gaze shot to Clarke’s window and Clarke choked on her own saliva. Something crossed between a squeak, a scream, and a weird sort of gurgle jumped through her lips as she scrambled off her desk, trying to duck out of sight, and toppled onto the floor. A second later, her sketchbook, perched precariously on the edge, slipped off as well and smacked onto the top of her head. Clarke groaned and rubbed her head but didn’t otherwise move. She didn’t know why but she felt like she was the one sneaking around someone else’s property.

A few moments felt like hours, and Clarke half-expected her knees to creak when she slowly rose off the floor and peeked over her desk. A little higher still until she could see out the window again. Her eyes scanned the yard, every inch, every shadow, as if Lexa might spring from the ground like a new bloom any second, but there was nothing. No one. Only the dewy grass, growing greener under the rising sun.

Clarke let out a heavy breath and dropped back into her chair. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of what she had just seen, but in that moment, she wasn’t concerned with the details. The whens, the hows, the whys…they all scattered on a sigh, and Clarke was left with only the stark outline of what. The easy truth. Something that felt as simple as it did significant, as it did special.

Lexa had spent the night in Clarke’s tree house.