Chapter 15 Clover
Clover
I’m in and out of it for another three days. When Bennett isn’t in class, he’s in our room, watching movies with me and forcing me to eat and stay hydrated.
On the fourth morning, I wake up clearheaded and feeling much less corpse-like. Beside my closet is a shrine of period products that I hadn’t noticed before. Huh.
Bennett walks in carrying some shopping bags while I’m investigating a menstrual cup.
“What is all this?” I ask as he sets the bags on the bed.
He’s wearing dark jeans and a blue Oxford shirt with enough buttons undone to be considered slutty.
His scar and the divot in his chest are visible and I quickly avert my gaze back to the feminine-hygiene-product drive happening in our dorm room.
“You asked for tampons the other night.”
“I did?” Oh, yes, I vaguely remember. “I did. But I just needed one box.”
“Yeah, we weren’t sure what exactly that meant. Like, one box per day or…?”
“This is more than just tampons,” I tell him.
“Julian panicked. So he just bought one of everything.”
A smile flickered on my lips. “Right, well, we should put these out in the common room for whoever wants some and then donate the rest. And Bennett?”
“Yeah?”
“Out of curiosity, how many times a day do you think a person changes their tampon?”
His eyes bug out a little, and he is completely perplexed. “I don’t know? Fourteen?”
I pat him on the shoulder and his eyes, full of warmth, follow the movement. “Not quite. What’s in the bags?”
He shakes out the bags to reveal brand-new linen sheets in a soft dove gray, and a feather duvet plus four fluffy pillows. “We can keep the wall of pillows, of course,” he says. “But I just figured the room looked a little out of place. And if you don’t like it, we can—”
I stand up on tiptoe and use his shoulder to balance while I give him a light kiss on the cheek.
His whole body goes rigid, and I immediately step back.
“Sorry,” I say. “I just wanted to thank you for taking care of me and now this.”
A hand drifts to his cheek briefly and he nods. “I’m going to run to the gym, but I’ll get these laundered so we can—”
“I know how to use a washing machine,” I tell him. “It’s the least I can do.”
The apples of his cheeks have a pink tinge as he clears his throat and throws a few things in a bag. “I’ll see you later, then. Glad to see you’re feeling better.” He lingers in the doorway for a moment with an air of regret.
“Have fun at the gym.”
“Just doing what I can to maintain this cute butt,” he says with a smirk.
He’s gone before I can offer up any kind of retort about how it’s ungentlemanly of him to even bring up anything I said while I was deliriously ill, so I just hold my pillow to my face and let it swallow my muffled scream.
After I get the duvet and the sheets started in two different machines, I sit on top of a recently used dryer, which is a warm relief in the damp basement of Haystack Hall.
I answer a few texts from my mom and nibble on the corner of my pencil as I consider the roughed-out concepts I sketched for my pottery midterm.
Even though Tate and I still make fun of the art majors in a good-hearted sort of way, I’m finding that I actually enjoy letting my brain shut off as I focus on the sole purpose of creating something out of nothing.
“Mind if I join you?”
When I glance up, Daisy is in the doorway with an overflowing basket of laundry, cheeks flushed and eyes puffy.
“Come on in,” I tell her. “In fact, the dryer next to me is still warm if you want. If I close my eyes I can pretend that I’m in a really nice car with a seat heater.”
She sighs and begins to throw things into the machine. “That’s perfect. I’m on my period and if I could just numb my uterus with heat, that would be ideal.”
“Preach, baby.”
After she drops her coins in the machine and adds detergent, she hops up next to me.
Daisy is taller than me, and her upper body is narrow with small, perky boobs.
Her hips, though, are magnificent. I’ve been attracted to a few girls in the past, and Daisy’s hips make me understand the phrase biological imperative, because I don’t even have the right equipment and even I want to get her pregnant.
She sighs again, and this time it’s a little more tortured, reminding me so much of when we were little and Bennett would pout, dragging his feet until someone finally asked him what was going on.
“Is something wrong?” I oblige her. “You seem a little upset.”
As if on cue, she tosses her book to the side and swivels to face me. “My hockey player won’t sleep with me until I agree to be his girlfriend.” The words practically steamroll out of her.
“And that’s a problem?” I don’t know Daisy very well, but she screams relationship material.
“Uh, yes. A huge problem.” She jumps down from the dryer and then shuts the door to the room. “I’m a virgin,” she whispers. “Like in every way. I’ve done some hot making out, and I gave half a hand job once, but that’s basically it.”
“Only half?” It’s not the point, obviously, but that’s a story I want to hear.
She leans on the machine next to me with her head in her hands.
“Yes! It was the hockey player, actually. His name is Aaron, by the way. Anyway, things were going great. I practiced over the summer with cooking oil on a cucumber. I didn’t mean to, but I was just in the kitchen and then—whatever.
I was in the middle of, you know, and—is it weird that I felt powerful when I was …
holding it?” She pauses and I realize she’s waiting for a response.
“I mean, you’re married, so obviously you’re getting the most action out of anyone else on our floor. ”
“Oh! Right, yeah. I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“Stop me if this is TMI, but is Bennett, like”—she holds her hands up, creating different circumference sizes with her fingers.
“Um, it’s not like a two-hand situation or anything, but yeah, he’s …
average, I guess.” Except I have no fucking clue.
The closest I have to a clue is the time his boner was poking into my ass after our first night here and then only vague memories of a boner when we—oh shit, I made him take a shower with me.
I knew that happened, but this is the first time since waking up from my fugue state that I’ve actually let myself consider what a bad idea that was.
No wonder he looked like he’d just made a horrible mistake earlier this morning.
“Okay, good to know. I just didn’t know what to expect and anyway … Things are going great. And then I tell him, maybe this whole part could be a warm-up for the main event—you know, sex. And that I’ve never done that before.”
“Right, right. That seems … normal. And he said no?”
“No! He said be my girlfriend. And I laughed. Well, it was more like a flirtatious giggle. And then he literally removed my hand and told me that he couldn’t let me have sex for the first time if it wasn’t with someone I cared about.
He wanted it to be special.” She says the word like she’s allergic to it.
“I don’t need it to be special. I just need it to be over!
“I guess I could have just said I would be his girlfriend and then broken up with him, but that felt wrong, so I just said we didn’t want the same things and to call me if he changed his mind.
Then—this might be the worst part. He patted me on the head, like I’m his little cousin or something, and said he knew I was a nice girl. ”
“Oof! A real knife to the gut.”
“I know! Anyway, now I have to start all over again. You’d think it wouldn’t be this hard to just find a college guy to screw.”
One of my washing machines beeps, and I scoot off the dryer to change it out. “Well, Daisy, I don’t know you very well, but there is something … respectable about you. So maybe guys are picking up on that vibe.”
Her lips turn into a devastating frown. “I know. I’m such an effing lady.
Anyway, Briar told me that your darling hubby was in an absolute tizzy when you were sick.
She heard him pacing up and down the hallway on a call with a doctor and said that he basically had an entire pharmacy delivered. That boy loves you something fierce.”
“I’m pretty lucky,” I say, but my voice is flat.
“Trouble in paradise?” She perks up a little and I can’t blame her, because misery truly does love company.
“Oh, um…” God, I wish I had someone to talk to about this, but I’m also not sure about letting anyone in on our secret.
“We just … we have a sort of past. I mean, of course we do. But this is something that happened between us a few years ago and it ended up causing a rift between us and our mothers. We were all very close. Like, vacations and holidays together.”
“But he came back to you and swept you off your feet?” she asks wistfully.
“Yeah, sort of like that. And every time I think that maybe I’m over it, the whole ordeal feels like this big shadow I can’t let go of.”
“Wow. This is so West Side Story. Very Montagues and Capulets coded.”
“You make it sound so romantic.” God, if she only knew.
“Because it is!”
“Says the girl who just wants to have sex and get it over with.”
She rolls her eyes. “This is different. This is forever. I’m not really an expert on healthy relationships, but you’ve both overcome so much to be together.
All that’s standing in the way now is your ability and willingness to forgive each other.
One thing my dad says that is actually true is that forgiveness is a choice. ”
Daisy can pack a punch. My god. But there’s something to what she’s saying, isn’t there?
Forgiveness is a choice. And I’ve never even considered making the active choice to forgive Bennett.
What might it be like if I just tried? “Goddamn, remind me not to ask for your advice unless I really need it.”
She smiles. “I get it from my mom. Tough love with a soft touch.”
We spend the next hour or so chattering back and forth while I tinker with my pottery sketchbook and she color-codes some notes.
She lived in Vegas with her family. Her parents are divorced.
She has a complicated relationship with her dad.
When she orders ice cream, she asks for a cup of sprinkles on the side and dips every spoonful.
I tell her about working at the diner and how essentially my only friend is a twenty-nine-year-old single mother.
I also explain that we used to be more well-off in a sense and she divulges that her dad has Money with a capital M, and she should feel guilty about spending it because his job is rather unsavory, but she doesn’t.
By the time all my stuff is dry, I find myself wishing that I had more laundry to do.
“Let’s hang out sometime,” Daisy says, and it occurs to me that I don’t need laundry as an excuse to spend time with her.
“That’d be great. Though I don’t think Briar is my biggest fan.”
She snorts. “Briar is no one’s biggest fan, but she’s a softy deep down. And trust me, if she doesn’t want to hang out, she won’t bother keeping it a secret. Besides, she’s an awful wing woman.”
I give her a chivalrous bow. “I would happily be your wing woman again sometime.”