Chapter 9 Clover
Clover
Sure enough, there is one single strand of auburn hair on my bed. Gross. At least it’s on Bennett’s side. I pick the hair up using a pair of tweezers and drop it into his trash can.
After I got back from pottery, I skipped the TA-led college financial-accounting tutoring group because I had a catering shift with Marianne.
There was some sort of afternoon tea hosted by the dean with goats from a local farm in honor of Crumpets the goat, and she said it would be a simple event and a good time to train me.
I picked up on it all quickly enough, and despite the tragic uniform of unflattering black pleated pants, matching vest, tux shirt, and bow tie, it was fine.
I wanted to literally crush teacups with my bare hands, but it was fine. And the goats were smelly, but cute.
“You okay over there?” Marianne asked.
“No, but I can’t get into it without losing my temper and inadvertently fucking up something my first day on the job.”
I was already miserable enough from the required shoes.
The female waiters are forced to wear these hideous pumps that aren’t even comfortable, which violates every law of footwear.
All shoes should ideally be comfortable, but they can’t be both ugly and painful.
And yet … Oh! And as I left for the night, Marianne’s brother informed me that the cost of my uniform would be deducted from my first check. Pyramid scheme bullshit if you ask me.
After my shift, I ran back to the dorm and changed before stopping for a quick bowl of cereal in the dining hall and showing up for my shift at the library.
My feet were killing me and my irritability was off the charts, so when they asked for one student worker to volunteer to go home at eleven instead of one in the morning in order to rectify some sort of payroll overage, I jumped at the chance and would have probably stepped over a dead body if I had to.
Financially, it was a bad decision, but that would have to be future Clover’s problem.
Now, at fifteen past eleven, I’m lying in my bed with my feet up against the headboard in the hopes that the blood will drain down my legs and I won’t be able to feel the throbbing in my toes.
There’s a sequence of knocks at my door that creates an almost sunny tune. “Sorry!” an upside-down Daisy calls as she lets herself in. “The door was cracked. But oh good! You’re here!”
“Physically, yes,” I tell her. “Got out of work early.”
“Perfect,” she says. “I need a wing woman.”
“I’m not really wing woman material,” I tell her in the hopes that she will see that my current form is comparable to a cicada exoskeleton.
Undeterred, she plops down on Bennett’s side of the bed so that she’s beside me. “You can’t be worse than Briar,” she says. “We went to a party last week and she left after an hour to go home and set up her black-market grilled cheese stand.”
“Wow. So that’s a real thing, huh? I saw her the other night and honestly thought I was hallucinating. I admire the hustle.”
She nods. “Very real. And she’s definitely using my iron. She said it was a business investment and that I would get my money back when her profit margins were—gosh, I don’t even know.” She waves her hand around. “I just ordered another one online.”
“Sounds like you really won the roommate lottery,” I tell her with obvious sarcasm.
Daisy smiles. “It could be way worse. Some girl on the third floor joined some group called Boxwatch. Apparently, like, sixty people get together every Wednesday at three in the morning and stare at a box in the quad. Now this girl won’t let anyone on her floor throw out or recycle boxes.”
“To watch a box?”
She shrugs. “Paul, the guy two doors down … his roommate has a scrapbook of his favorite autopsies. He’s majoring in forensic science, so I guess it’s not that weird, but next to his bed he keeps a mouse, which is also named Paul, in a jar full of formaldehyde.
The roommate swears it’s a coincidence, but I don’t know. ”
I laugh and silently decide that at this point I would take the creepy roommate over my own husband. “Okay, you win. So when do you need a wing woman?” I ask.
“Um … right about now?” Daisy says as though it’s an apology. “Honestly, an hour ago, but as soon as you can be ready will do just fine. I was invited to a party by a hockey player from my speech class. I hate to objectify someone, but he is what most women would refer to as pantie-dropping.”
“Oh god, I can’t tonight,” I tell her. “I’m exhausted and Bennett and I are—”
“In a fight,” she says. “I know. Most of the floor heard you screaming at him to get out.”
“Was I really screaming?” I ask.
“Loud enough for the reclusive Dylan to stick his head out of his door.”
“Christ,” I mutter.
“Don’t worry. He must have decided no one was in danger of being murdered, because he immediately retreated to his hidey-hole.” She yanks on my hand. “So come on. You need a drink and I’ll call us a car so we won’t even have to hoof it.”
I rub the heels of my palms into my eyes.
I should do this. I should go out and do college things. Daisy is nice. I have no friends and I do not want to be here if and when Bennett comes home. I’m a few weeks into the semester, and I have hardly had any experiences that could be classified as distinctly college.
“Fine, fine, fine,” I tell her. “But I can’t promise how late I’ll stay.”
True to her word, Daisy orders us a car, and we are caught in a minor traffic jam when we get stuck behind a herd of students walking to the football stadium for some late-night pep rally.
The party is ear-splittingly loud, but it does the trick of making my brain quiet.
Daisy’s hockey player is huge, burly, and very objectifiable in his navy blue hoodie that reads GRAY IVY—Wexley’s unofficial nickname—in tall white letters.
I hang out with them for a drink while she sits on the counter as he creeps closer and closer between her thighs and she becomes increasingly giggly.
When he goes for a beer, I lean over to her. “Are you good if I roam for a bit?”
“I am so, so good,” she says as she watches him pop the top on a glass bottle with his bare hands. “He has good hands, right?”
“Sure,” I say, even though I can’t really distinguish anything other than that they are huge.
I polish off my drink and grab two cans of some sort of spiked seltzer before heading out to the backyard.
In high school, I went to a handful of parties, but I never lasted very long and usually showed up because I’d been casually invited, only to find that the person who invited me was preoccupied and had probably just extended the invitation to be polite.
It was easier not to make friends, because I could live with never attempting, but a failed attempt would play over and over again in the middle of the night.
String lights hang over the backyard. It’s still loud and there are people dancing near the firepit, but simply being outside diffuses the noise.
I settle on the top of a picnic table since all the stumps by the fire are full, and I’m kicking myself for not bringing a jacket.
It’s that time of year when a sunny day is still warm and summer-like, but the moment the sky goes dark, everything is damp and chilly.
I don’t drink often, so once I finish off my first hard seltzer, I am feeling sufficiently buzzed.
“I didn’t take you for a hockey groupie. What do you call yourselves again? Puck bunnies?”
I peer over my shoulder. A bottle of beer hovers at Tate’s lips, and with an easy smile, he helps himself to the empty spot beside me.
“Definitely not a puck bunny,” I tell him. “Whatever the hell that is. I’m here as a wing woman. Honestly, I don’t even know whose party this is.”
“Sort of just an ice-sports-in-general party, I think.” He motions with his beer. “I think the house is mostly hockey players, though. It would at least explain why the place smells like a jockstrap.”
“What are you doing here, then?” I ask. “Or are you a puck bunny as well?”
A dry laugh rumbles in his chest as he leans over, bumping shoulders with me. “No, no. Hockey players aren’t my type, but I do enjoy betting on their little games.”
Like most other people at Wexley, Tate has money to lose.
He’s shared a pottery worktable with me since the start of the semester, and just this afternoon we put the finishing touches on our air-dry mugs.
Between trying to one up each other with vulgarly shaped clay, I’ve learned that he’s prelaw and wants to specialize in patents.
He’s on the lacrosse team, too, which isn’t in season until the spring, and his mom has been married four times.
She’s engaged to tech-bro husband number five.
Her cat, Pepper, has six toes on each paw, is famous on TikTok, and has recently signed with a pet talent manager.
They have a summerhouse in Cannon Beach, so the likelihood that we have actually seen each other before is high.
I shiver through a sip of my drink, and he takes off his fleece zip-up and throws it over my shoulders.
“Thanks,” I tell him, something in my stomach sparking, and pull my arms through the sleeves.
I might be curvy, but Tate is tall, so the jacket is plenty big and covers my legs at least a little.
It’s so silly, but a guy giving you his jacket is the kind of thing I thought only happened in books or movies and it is impossible not to be charmed by the small act of chivalry.
He points to the people dancing on the other side of the firepit. “Dance with me.” It’s not a question, but it’s not a demand. “It’ll warm you up without going inside and subjecting yourself to the stink of jockstrap.”
Tate is already standing and pulling my hand to help me step down from the table.
The music isn’t the kind I would normally dance to even if I could dance. It’s a little slow and folksy and the couples who are dancing are swaying dangerously close with their arms wrapped around each other. It feels a little intimate, and my muscles tense with uncertainty.
Tate gives me a spin as we join the small cluster and a genuinely surprised laugh slips out of me like a hiccup as he pulls me back to him, the warmth of the fire welcoming me.
He holds one of my hands to his chest, and the other rests at his waist while he softly rubs up and down my back with his free hand.
“I feel like I need to spin you around a few times just to get you nice and toasty.”
“I think that would make me feel like a rotisserie chicken.”
He looks down at me from under his pale lashes. “You’re weird, but you’re fucking funny.”
“Is that good?” I ask.
He winks. “Very good.”
We dance for a little while, mostly in a comfortable silence interrupted by a few pieces of clever commentary from him.
Again, it’s the sort of romantic moment that I didn’t really let myself imagine much past the age of fifteen.
That was the year that the dream of happily ever after burst, and I realized that no one actually gets that kind of fairy tale. They just pretend they do.
Eventually he asks about my family.
“My mom works the front desk at the ER,” I tell him. “Over in Cannon Beach.”
“And your dad?”
I think for a moment. I don’t freely offer up information about my dad very often, because I don’t have much to share. He was a surfer, driving up and down the coast in a van full of guys. Honestly, Bennett’s Grandpa Dean was more of a male parental figure in my life than my own father.
Now, I don’t even have that. We had heard that Grandpa Dean passed away last summer.
It was a private funeral, and Mom didn’t feel comfortable reaching out beyond a condolences card, which meant I never got to say goodbye in any real way.
All the grouchy old man cared about in his retirement were his beehives and following tennis.
But when I went through my stage of being deathly scared of thunder and lightning, he would let me sit curled up behind him in his rocking chair while he watched the storm with Bennett. I felt safe without being left out.
God, we were a little Frankenstein of a family, but at least if Bennett’s mistakes and lies hadn’t led to our lives imploding, things would be how they used to be. Even if they were never perfect. And I would have had a chance to say goodbye to Grandpa Dean.
“I never knew him,” I finally tell Tate, my gaze lost in a dark corner of the yard over his shoulder. “My dad died in a car accident a few years after I was born.”
Tate gives my hand a gentle squeeze, and I glance up at him before laying my head against his chest. His fingers stroke up and down my back. “That fucking sucks,” he says.
I hum and give a little shrug. “There’s no missing what you never had.”
“Well, if that’s true, I think I’m going to be disappointed the next time I have to spend a Friday night doing anything but dancing with a pretty girl with a bizarre sense of humor.”
I smile up at him to hide the flush of pink staining my cheeks.
We sway for a while longer until Tate spins me out again, and this time when he reels me back in, my back is to his chest, and this feels even more intimate than before.
He leans down so that his words tickle my ear when he says, “I think we have an audience.”
When I look up, I see him glaring at me furiously from the other side of the firepit.
My husband.