Post sexual harassment (referenced near the end). First, if I'm right, Clare-fic. One-shot. Please ignore any mistakes as far as grammar and spelling is concerned; I used WordPad to write this because, frankly, I was too lazy to leave my bed and use the downstairs computer. So, I resorted to my laptop, which, for the record, was a full five feet away. It took me a good stretch to reach it.
Read. Maybe review. As always, it is greatly appreciated. Thank you, and do enjoy.
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A night in the Martins' (and one Edwards') house is a strange thing. It's a sort of poetry, Clare Edwards decides, when her lanky, soft-eyed stepbrother rounds the staircase's banister with a smile on his face that Clare thought she understood once (that is a matter all on its own, though one that doesn't seem to hold the ability to fluster her on this queer evening). Jake Martin smiles because he can, and not always because he has reason to.
Tonight, however, Katie Matlin is leaning against the side of her BMW, parked comfortably under the old oak that hovers above their driveway like it is a spot reserved, and the girl is sporting a lop-sided grin that makes her eyes melt. It's a rare sight, Katie Matlin with soft features. And it's a scene that, already, Clare knows best never to bring to the table. Some things are never to be seen, and Katie Matlin with her fluttering eyelashes of a school girl is one of them.
Still, it reveals one thing that does concern Clare. Jake does, in fact, have reason to smile tonight.
Below, somewhere in the kitchen, Glen Martin is talking in a slow, feather-light voice to his wife, a woman who so coincidentally (and might she add, a former kind of inconveniently) just happens to be Clare's mother. Clare supposes she could be his daughter, too. That is, if her real father, with his new girlfriend half his age and that dusty rack of not-so-dusty champagne bottles, would finally admit that he doesn't care anymore. Instead, there is this heavy sort of obligation chained in between the two, and her father's attempts at reaching out to her anger Clare more than they do anything else.
Randall Edwards gave up all morals when he led another woman into the bedroom down the hall. She wishes the man would stop offering out his little amends and move on with his routeless, lustful existence.
Glen Martin would make a much better father, Clare decides.
Besides her pretty, little oblivious mother, there is no one to share Clare's blood in the home. Not since her sister with her blue, doe-like eyes and train of damage left for the other side of the world. Darcy Edwards travels until the past gets tired of chasing her, and her little sister, left behind to make the same mistakes, hates her for it. If only she would just come home long enough to realize that no one blames her for the storm that tore apart a family. Long enough to realize that it wasn't her fault.
Jake and Glen have never even met Darcy. Clare fears that, even if they ever do, it will be too late.
The poem unfolds somewhere in these lines. A night in the Martins' (and one Edwards') home is a strange thing. There is a boy with indifference in the way his shoulders fall who smiles because he can and rarely because he has reason to. He sleeps soundly through the night, spares not a blink in the darkness while waiting for the sunrise. And outside, there is a BMW that's starting to belong. Inside, a girl grins like she is young and not-so-torn-apart by love anymore. (Clare may have a jagged past with Katie, but that doesn't mean she'll restrain from giving her brother a good round of the silent treatment if he so much as makes for a slight grimace on the girl's face. Woman, all of them, whether they're the kind like Clare who will admit it or the kind like Katie who will hide it, have fragile hearts.)
Clare thinks that perhaps Katie Matlin wouldn't make too bad of a sister one day. After all, there's a certain kind of art to getting around to people like her, and Clare likes heart-to-heart challenges like that.
After the boy indifferent to the world and the girl guarded from it, come the two people who call themselves the adults of the house, though sometimes Clare wonders just how wistful her mother and even her stepfather can be. After all, Jake Martin grew up without parents, per say; rather two people to keep him company while he figured out life on his own. See, Clare has a feeling that Glen Martin is only now starting to understand how to play the role of a father. She sees the guilt in his eyes when he offers her advice.
And she knows it's because he missed his chance to offer it to his own son.
Then, of course, there is her mother who gave up on the construction of love a long time ago. There are no pillars anymore - the faith, the trust, the honesty. Nowadays, Helen Edwards relies on luck.
It's something that Clare is realizing may very well be the most important element in a solid love.
Glen and her mother sleep together in a bed that used to be in a room down the hall. Her mother moved it when she felt the other woman's footprints on the floor, took the whole bedset apart, board by board, and carried it over to the smaller bedroom where she rebuilt it. Once, when Clare emerged from her room to find her mother lugging a particularly bulky piece across the upstairs hallway, she offered to asist her, and her mom started crying and pulling harder and insisting that no, this isn't your fault, Clare; it's ours; it's mine. This has nothing to do with you.
Even without her daughter's help, Helen Edwards managed to bring the bed back to its original state, headboard and all, and now she sleeps with Husband Number Two. Clare really hopes he is the lucky one, because there are no more spare bedrooms.
Clare worries about her mother and Glen, worries that each is relying on the other to be a constant while, in reality, both are changing and regretting. Glen Martin has lived his whole life like Clare knows Jake to live his. Like father, like son, she supposes. But now he's beginning to toss in his sleep, and it's just as her mother has stilled. Clare's mother, as said, leaves her life to luck now.
Clare really hopes that both of them have the sense to fall in love with someone who reminds them of themselves.
And then there leaves Clare at night, lying awake in the darkness, waiting for her heartbeat to slow down and her stomach to settle. Unlike the others, she doesn't feel a part of the poetry; she is but a secret kept away in the farthest bedroom from the road's view, a walking, breathing mask that smiles like her stepbrother and cries like her mother and regrets like her stepfather. She appears to be just like any of them, another piece belonging in the Martins' home.
But she is an Edwards, after all. And perhaps it is true that she takes after her scum of a father.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to make it to this point of your screen, and I do hope you decide to send me some sort of indication that, indeed, you have.