Chapter 25 Clover
Clover
“Wait!”
The three of us are halfway down the sidewalk when I turn to see Bennett jogging toward us, pulling his arms through his jacket.
“You guys go ahead,” I tell Briar and Daisy.
“Are you sure?” Briar asks, and if I weren’t dreading whatever is about to come next, I would feel touched by her hard-earned affection.
“I’m good,” I tell her.
Daisy gives me a tight hug, and I let myself sag against her for a moment. She steps back and earnestly says, “We’re just across the hall if you need us.”
Suddenly, I remember our discussion in the laundry room a few weeks ago. Forgiveness is only done willfully. It doesn’t just happen.
“Can we talk?” Bennett asks once he catches up to me. “Please?”
I suck in a deep breath and nod.
“I’m parked not far from here,” he tells me. “Come on. You gotta be cold.”
I follow him the two blocks to his car, staying just a step or two behind. I can’t bring myself to look at him right now or even talk, because suddenly I’m fifteen again and it’s that last day of summer.
I was wearing a dress I loved and had been saving for a special occasion. It was white with straps that tied into bows.
Josh. We’d spent all summer talking back and forth, about topics from the insignificant to immense.
From the moment I met him, we had this sudden and intense bond.
A lifeline. He was someone I didn’t realize I needed until he was there, from his first text in the morning to the last person I said good night to.
And everything that happened in between.
I should have been more savvy. More suspicious. But talking to him felt as natural as breathing.
I was in Texas when he messaged and asked if we could meet. He said things that made me blush. Things I’d only dreamed of a boy saying to me, much less one I was in love with.
I couldn’t get home soon enough. I kept imagining the colors of the fireworks reflecting off the white fabric of my dress as we met—and maybe even kissed—for the first time.
The So Long, Summer party at the Cannon Beach Country Club was the most beloved event of the year. Even when it rained, I remember people jumping into the pools and dancing in the muddy grass.
That year, we were gifted clear skies. Bennett had gone ahead with his friends, and I went with my mom and Sydney, who curled my hair. The three of us sat in her bathroom and they both seemed to know something was up.
“I’m meeting a boy,” I finally said, unable to contain my excitement. “He goes to CBHS and his name is Josh. We’ve been chatting for a while, but he’s been out of town all summer.”
Sydney gasped as she unwound my curl from the barrel and then held it coiled in her hand as she waited for it to cool. “Our little Clo has a gentleman caller!”
Mom looked wary and Sydney dropped my curl to smack her on the shoulder. “Beth, come on. No one meets in person anymore.”
“And we’re meeting at the rocking chairs out back, Mom,” I told her.
“That’s basically as public as you can get,” Sydney said.
Mom sighed and looked between us. “No wandering off. And you come and introduce us to him after you two meet. Don’t think I won’t be watching.”
Sydney laughed and pointed two fingers at her eyes and then at me. “We will be watching, Josh. Whoever you are.”
When we arrived at the club, Mom and Sydney veered off to the champagne wall and I headed for the rocking chairs that overlooked the cliffside golf course. On my way, I took a lemonade from a waiter and whispered a thank-you.
The thing with the rocking chairs was that all the teenagers congregated there while they slipped alcohol and joints back and forth among one another.
On the ground level below was a temporary dance floor with string lights hung overhead, heavy round bulbs and paper lanterns.
Bennett was there with his friends, clustered against the nearby railing. He kept running rough hands through his hair and he looked about as restless as I felt.
His eyes darted over to me a few times, but the way he acted toward me in front of his friends didn’t feel as important to me anymore. I had someone, and he was going to be there soon.
That’s not to say I wasn’t anxious. Josh didn’t run in any of the same circles as the Calvin Prep kids.
What if he was nervous to show up here? Maybe he worked part-time as a valet or in the kitchens and didn’t want me to know.
That would be a relief, actually. To know that he lived on the edges of wealth just as much as I did.
I opened my phone to check my messages, but the last message was from this morning.
JOSH
morning angel
CLOVER
Good morning! I can’t believe by this time tomorrow we will have met.
He hadn’t said I love you again, so neither had I, and the more distance I got from the confession, the more foolish I felt for it. But he hadn’t really given me any reason to feel that way.
Bennett’s friends—Valerie in particular—kept glancing back at me and laughing. It was something I was used to, but it still hurt.
Over the summer, Bennett and I had found a middle ground.
A sort of quiet contentedness. But then after I came home from Texas, he was cold and arrogant.
I felt cheated out of a week of normalcy.
Bennett usually loosened up over summer break, like those warmer months were a time of truce.
I would have been pissed if I weren’t so full of anticipation.
The sunset burned against the horizon and the blue night sky crept into the high points of the atmosphere above.
I checked the time. Josh was an hour late. I hate that younger version of myself for holding on to hope. For not just leaving then and there.
Forty-five minutes later, the maintenance staff at the club was preparing for the fireworks.
Bennett’s friends had dispersed a bit, though he’d remained, talking to some guy until he was all alone.
I’d kicked off my wedges and sat on one of the rocking chairs with one leg tucked under me. The distance between us was loud and I looked up, searching for stars, trying desperately to avoid Bennett as I came to terms with the fact that I was being stood up.
“Clover, you need to go,” he said.
I lowered my gaze, but he was standing with his back to me, hands resting on the stone railing ahead of me.
“I can sit wherever the hell I want, Benny.”
He shook his head and then turned around, taking a step closer to me with a pained expression. Desperate.
“Oh, Joshua!” a female voice called in a falsetto. “Josh!”
Slowly, I stood, my head turning to where all Bennett’s friends were inching closer to us. My mouth tasted sour as a terrible feeling began to dawn on me.
“There you are, Josh!” Valerie said as she flung herself against Bennett’s side, tugging on his arm before turning to me.
Oh my god. I looked back to Bennett, a vein bulging in his neck, anguish burning in his normally cool blue eyes.
It was all a lie. Every message. Every word.
Josh wasn’t real. Bennett had made it all up. This went beyond teasing and high school politics. This was cruel.
I wanted to disappear. I wanted the ground beneath me to open and just swallow me up.
The first firework went off with a whistle. I flinched as it exploded into the sky, soaking us in red.
The whole group of Bennett’s friends were laughing. People who laughed at me already for reasons I had either learned or pretended not to care about. I wasn’t actually rich? My mother worked for the Graves family? She was the help? I refused to be embarrassed by that.
But this—this … I was trembling with anger, tears spilling with every blink.
“Josh!” people started calling. “Josh! Josh! Josh!”
It was turning into a chant. A taunt.
“Hey, Clover,” Valerie cooed. “Were you waiting for someone?”
I looked to Bennett, hoping to find an answer there on his face, but his gaze was trained on the ground, staring at my discarded shoes as he shook his head softly.
I could practically hear his thoughts in my head. You need to go.
So, I finally did. I ran down the steps and through the dance floor.
“Clover!” someone called. Sydney, possibly.
Fingers wrapped around my arm, tugging me back.
Bennett stood, shocked, like he hadn’t expected to catch me. Like he had no plan for what he might actually say to me.
“Why?” I asked through a sob as every secret I’d shared—big and small—raced through my head.
His brow softened, and the words were there, waiting to be spoken. Words that could never justify but maybe explain.
Then he stumbled forward as his friends—Valerie in the lead—came to a halt behind him, still laughing obnoxiously and crooning, “Josh! Oh, Josh!” back and forth to each other.
Bennett’s expression hardened into something careless. Indifferent. “Because I could,” he said. “Because you were that desperate.”
It was me against them in that moment. People who had been born into privilege and opportunity and me, a girl who had dared to live among them. And then there was the boy—the boy I’d once called my closest friend. The boy I’d fallen in love with over a lifetime and then all at once.
“What’s going on here?” my mother shouted, parting the crowd of cruel teenagers.
The fireworks continued overhead as she put the pieces together, her eyes wild and full of anger and disappointment.
“Did you send him pictures, Clover? Did he ask you for anything like that? Baby, you have to tell me.”
I stood there frozen just as Sydney joined us, her arm coming around me, and my mother took my silence as an answer.
Mom turned on Bennett, the closest person she’d ever had to a son, and drilled a finger into his chest. “Predator!” she shouted and despite the music and the pyrotechnics, the word echoed.
Sydney’s arm dropped away from me as she stepped toward Bennett and then in front of him.
Something irrevocable passed between the two women.
Mom took me home immediately. I never went back for my shoes. A valet drove us home and we went straight to the guesthouse.
She held me for hours as I sobbed into her chest until I fell asleep in her bed.
I woke up the next morning to the news that we would be moving out by the end of the week.
Sydney offered to continue paying my tuition, but Mom declined, and it was the only relief I felt for quite some time, knowing I would never have to return to that place.
When we make it to Bennett’s car, he opens the door for me, but I don’t take the hand that he offers.
He gets in and fat, slow raindrops begin to hit like pellets against the windshield the moment he closes the driver’s side door.
“What you’ve done over the last few years with other people is none of my business.”
He turns to watch me, but I hold my head straight, watching the wet leaves blow off the trees overhead.
“Clover, I’ve rehearsed this apology in my mind over and over again since that night.
” He sighs, and from the corner of my vision, I can see his hands twisting his steering wheel.
“And I saw that look on your face again just now. That—that look of embarrassment. Of being caught off guard. And it took me back to that night all over again. I’ve wanted to say I’m sorry since the moment I saw you at the diner, but the words I managed to string together in my head were never right or big or—god, I was such a fucking awful human. Sometimes, I still am.”
I turn to him now, but I don’t know what to say.
I had resigned myself to the fact that the whole ordeal would live in the past and we would dance around it until the end of the semester when we would get a divorce.
After that, maybe we would be polite. Wave to each other from across campus.
And we’d never have to confront the hulking shadow of our past.
“I need you to know, Clover, that everything I said to you—everything I shared with you—as … as Josh, was real. I meant it all.”
My heart thunders in my chest as I remember the heaviest words of all. The words that have haunted me since that summer.
My cheeks are wet and I’m crying without even realizing it. “Why did you try to meet me?” I ask, my voice cracking.
He shakes his head. “That was Val. I passed out at a party while you were in Texas and she got into my phone and … she’s a vicious bitch, okay? But all of this? It was always my fault.”
“You had a whole week to warn me.”
He looks down at his hands, now in his lap, fingers twisting, as he searches for what he wants to say.
“I was a coward. I kept holding out hope that something would work out. That I would find a time alone with you to confess and that I could make you understand.” He pauses for a long moment.
“I’m just so fucking sorry. I have regretted it every day since. ”
My chest heaves and I have to breathe through the threat of sobs burning in my chest. “I forgive you,” I tell him. “I think I did the moment you showed up at the courthouse. But I’m still upset with you. I wish you would have told me about last year.”
It’s unfair. I know that in every possible way. But I’m jealous and angry for always feeling like I’m on the outside when it comes to him.
His head rolls back against his seat and no tears fall, but his lashes are wet as they kiss the thin skin under his eyes.
“Can you take me home, please?” I am exhausted on every possible level, and the only thing I want is to lay my head down and close my eyes.
He lifts a hand, fingers flinching as he reaches closer to me, and then pulls away. “I can do that,” he says. “I can do that.”