Chapter 10:

The cold glass connected with her mouth as she tipped back the brown bottle, her nails scrapping against the German label. Her phone started to buzz as she sat at the bar by herself. "Hello?" She answered the phone, her eyes widening as she looked down at the deep scratches in the wood. Clarke recognized the phone number but she never expected to see it flashing across her screen again. "Mom…"

"Don't worry, I'm not calling you because I want to chat. Your friend, Nathan Miller, came in for stitches and you're his emergency contact. He needs someone to pick him up." Her mother was completely cold. After eight years, she assumed her mother would have a better greeting but it was expected. Their relationship was complicated to say the least. "We need the room, Clarke. He's being discharged. Can you be down to MUSC by then?"

"Yeah…yeah, I'll be there soon." Clarke set down the beer and paid off her tab. She was only ten minutes away from the hospital but she took her time in spite of her mother. She drove five miles under the speed limit and gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. It seemed like Bellamy was getting his way indirectly. She would have to face the woman she'd been avoiding since she was 18 years old.

It all started with her father's untimely death.

Clarke spent her entire life looking up to her elitist parents. Her mother was a successful doctor, her father was an even more successful engineer. They were convinced their daughter was going into a field that involved science. She had the mind for it and the intelligence. Instead, her father was murdered and she found comfort in the law. She found comfort in knowing that lawyers would prosecute his killer to the fullest extent of the law. So, she changed her major and broke her mother's heart. Then, she broke her mother's heart with a pregnancy scare after Bellamy cheated on her.

Even thinking about it—those two torturous weeks when she thought she was pregnant and alone and tied down by Bellamy Blake and his reckless attitude—made her shiver. Her life would have been completely different if that test hadn't been a false positive. She would have married him because that was the traditional thing to do when a guy knocks up his girlfriend. She would have been forced into a technical college and she would have become a nurse or something in the medical field to appease her mother…and she couldn't say that she wouldn't have loved her child but she thanked god every time the thought presented itself that she wasn't pregnant.

Her mother never liked Bellamy although she never had a good enough reason until they broke up. Of course, Abigail Griffin thought her innocent daughter was a virgin until the moment Clarke uttered the words, "I think I'm pregnant…" and out of grief, or pain or whatever emotion Abby managed, her counter to Clarke's words happened to be something Clarke carried with her every single day. "Your father would be so ashamed of who you are." And for a moment, they almost moved on from that until she found out from the family lawyer, Marcus Kane, that her mother had been having an affair for years.

So, in summary, it was easy to avoid Summercreek/Charleston when she had nothing there for her. Now, she had a job and she was reunited with her friends…and then there was the whole Bellamy debacle. She was building a new life that didn't involve her mother whatsoever.

She parked in the E.R. lot, locking her car before she slowly walked into the hospital. "Bellamy?" Clarke called over to him as she watched him lean over the counter, demanding information about his friend. He turned around and looked at her. Relieved. What the hell happened? "What are you doing here?"

"Miller texted me." He furrowed his eyebrows, "What the hell are you doing here?"

"My mother called me." She said with such distaste that his mouth turned into a frown. "Listen, I'm not about to launch into my mother issues but I'm still Miller's emergency contact from that time you shot him with the BB gun."

He started to laugh, "That was a good day."

"Oh, yeah…sure until my mom walked into the room." She cleared her throat awkwardly, tired of the ride down memory lane. "I haven't talked to her since graduation, Bellamy. You?"

"Wow, eight years…almost nine." He sighed, "That's a lot of time. You ever going to tell anyone why you ran away from home and stopped talking to everyone for the better part of a decade?"

Clarke opened her mouth to speak but she stopped when she saw her mother through the medical bay glass. Her breath stuck in her throat in the most painful way. She fought back tears she hadn't realized she was even holding in. Seeing her—actually seeing her reminded her of so many things she'd tried to forget over the years. Her absence during her childhood, the mysteries surrounding her father's murder, the loneliness and the emptiness of her house after her father died and her mother's affair with an unknown man. "You got this, right?"

"What? Clarke, no…you're seriously not going to leave after driving here because you're scared of your mom." Bellamy informed her, "It can't be that bad…whatever you've been avoiding can't be that bad. It's your mom. You love her."

"It's really not something I want to talk about right now." Clarke shook him off, "Seriously it's a lot of shit Bellamy… that whole last month of high school wrapped into one and I'm not ready to face it."

"You face me and I put you through hell." He said quietly before the doors opened and Miller was rolled out like he just underwent a dire situation. "This conversation isn't over." She wanted him to stop pushing. She wanted him to shut up because everything was floating around in her head like it was the day it happened.

Clarke sighed, "You're wrong. This whole goddamn thing is over." She stepped away from him and walked over to Miller, sucking in a deep breath before she put her hand on his shoulder. "What the hell did you do?"

"The keg table is broken." He replied as if that was the most important thing going on around them. "It's just broken."

Review!

What do you think of Abby and Clarke? Should they make up? What about the full story concerning Bellamy and the reason she left? Should she tell him or should she just let the past be the past?