His car, it turns out, is a truck. It's old, probably 89', but it's in impeccable condition.
It isn't until he looks over at her that Clarke realizes she said it out loud.
"87' actually." It starts up with only a dull roar, "Where are we going?"
"Union Square. East 20th and Broadway."
He glances over at the name, and Clarke folds her arms across her chest defensively. People are weird about money in New York.
"So, you like cars?" he asks, turning his eyes back to the road.
"Not really. My dad was an engineer, and he decided he wanted to learn how to build the stuff he designed, so he got really into…um…" she pushes against the fog of whiskey in her brain, but it pushes back.
"Mechanics?"
"Yeah. Mechanics. When I was a kid. We worked on some of it together. Cars, old junk planes, stuff like that." She feels the familiar pang of sadness that comes with talking about him, but it's dulled by the alcohol.
"That's cool," he says. She hums her agreement.
"So, what do you know about drawing and quartering?" she wonders, and he snorts.
"More than I want to. There are probably easier ways to deal with Birthday Boy, though. Ones that don't involve you having to get your hands on a bunch of horses." His eyes drift toward her again, and the silence in the car is punctuated by the buzzing of her phone. "What's the running total?"
Clarke glances down at the screen.
"Forty-seven."
The truck stutters as Bellamy stares at her in surprise, missing third gear.
"You're kidding, right?"
She shakes her head.
"You know that's not normal," he says quietly. She sighs.
"Well, you know. Normal would be too easy." The mood in the truck has dampened significantly, so she looks over at him, thoughtful. "So, what's your story?"
"What?" He takes his eyes off the road again, just for a second, to frown at her.
"You're the bartender, you get to hear everyone's life stories. What's yours?"
"I'm a History major who works in a bar." He shrugs. "And on occasion, I drive drunk blondes around the city so that my boss won't lose his liquor license."
Clarke rolls her eyes, even though she knows he can't see it in the dark.
"That's not a story. That's the press release they put on the book jacket."
He's quiet for so long that Clarke begins to think she overstepped, that he's not going to answer.
"My mom died when I was fourteen, my little sister was ten. My dad wasn't around, so I convinced CPS that we were going to live with him, and then I dropped out of school and got a job. I raised her, and took night classes to finish high school. And now I work at a bar, which is called Johnny's, by the way, and I'm writing my dissertation."
It's a lot of information to take in, especially with her blood alcohol content probably hovering somewhere near twice the legal limit. She watches his fingers tighten on the steering wheel.
"My dad died. He was…they said it was radiation poisoning, from one of the projects he was working on. But he was so careful. And I found out that he was about to blow the whistle on some stuff before he died, inspectors signing off on work that wasn't up to code. He gave his boss an ultimatum, either fix it, or he'll go to the press. And then he died." She blows out a breath, because she never talks about his death, never, not even with her friends. Bellamy is silent beside her, but he doesn't interrupt. "The company he was working for at the time, Phoenix Aerospace, my mom married their CEO a few years ago."
"Do you…You think he had something to do with it?"
Clarke shrugs.
"I know him. He used to come around the house sometimes. I don't think anything happened in that company that he didn't know about."
"That's…pretty terrible," he admits. Clarke giggles, she can't help it.
"Yeah." Then the smile slips off her face. "Sorry. I didn't mean to make it a competition. I was just trying to-"
"Relate," he finishes. "It's okay. Considering how much you've had to drink, you've been surprisingly appropriate all night. Discounting the lime thing."
She flushes, and finds herself glad his eyes are on the road.
"I'm sorry about your mom," she says softly.
"I'm sorry about your dad."
She turns to look out the window, watching the streetlamps burn streaks of light into her vision.
"It's just a thing I have, now," she muses. "Everyone's got one. You know it will be there when you wake up in the morning, when you get a promotion, when your best friend dies." Outside, grungy restaurants slowly transition into clean brick and bright storefronts as she speaks. "Or when you find out your boyfriend is cheating on you, on his birthday, and you're drunk and a stranger is driving you home. And you're thinking 'you know, if my dad were here, I could have called him.' That's a thing dads do, clean up their daughters when they get messy. And he's gone. So now I have to clean myself up."
Bellamy is quiet again, the cab of the truck falling into silence until they pull up in front of Clarke's building.
"For what it's worth," he says suddenly, as she reaches down to undo her seatbelt. "You're not really a mess."
Clarke peers incredulously up at him, still struggling with her seatbelt.
"I got so drunk the bartender had to drive me home. On a Tuesday. And I'm stuck," she mutters, tugging fruitlessly at the buckle keeping her strapped to her seat. He reaches over, pressing the red button and pulling the buckle apart.
"I've seen a lot of scorned lovers sit where you did today," he reminds her. "Most of them didn't hold it together as well as you. I think you're going to be okay."
She nods, finally free to go, and opens the door. Then she pauses.
"Thank you. For everything."
He looks uncomfortable.
"Just doing my job."
"You could have called a cab."
Her words hang between them, and he doesn't deny it. Suddenly, he reaches down to unbuckle is own seatbelt, pulling the keys from the ignition.
"I'll walk you to your door."
Something about Clarke wants to argue, to tell him that she can get there on her own, thank you very much. But another part, a bigger part, isn't quite ready to watch him go. So she shrugs, climbing out of the truck, and she hits the pavement with a stumble. His arm is around her before she has a chance to fall, and she wonders vaguely how he got there so quickly. She points to the brick walk-up with double oak doors, one of the only ones on the street without a doorman. He helps her up the stairs, and it surprises her a little how much she needs it. There's something about sitting while drinking that fools you into thinking you're a lot better off than you are. The moment her feet had hit the sidewalk, the full impact of four hours' worth of whiskey hit her meanly.
Her hand is in her pocket before they make it to the door, and she digs out a green New York-Presbyterian lanyard, fumbling with the overloaded keyring.
After a few failed attempts at locating the right one, Clarke just passes the lanyard over to Bellamy.
"It's the gold Weiser one, the bottom's all wiggly," she mumbles, leaning against the wall for support.
"See," Bellamy mutters, sifting through a couple gold keys before fitting the right one into the door. "If I'd just dumped you in a cab, how would you have gotten inside?"
He has a point, but Clarke ignores it, holding out her hand for the lanyard. He closes his fingers around it.
"How about I walk you up?" It's phrased as a question, but she recognizes it for what it is, an order.
"You're bossy." Clarke pushes past him, but doesn't object when he follows her inside. Jabbing at the elevator button, she fights the urge to stick out her tongue at him.
"So I've been told. Many times."
She sneaks a glance at him as the elevator doors open, and they both step inside. She hits the 4 button, and the doors glide shut.
"Sister?"
He shrugs.
"It was kind of an adjustment, having to be the one to tell her no all the time, to eat her vegetables, to go to bed. I was fourteen, I knew I was way too young to be taking care of her, so I just worried all the time."
"You were so worried that something would happen to her that you smothered her. And then you were worried that you were ruining her childhood."
He stares at her, and she realizes, again, that she accidentally spoke out loud.
"Wh-yeah," he mutters. "That's pretty much it exactly."
Clarke smiles sadly.
"My mom was like that, after my dad died. All of a sudden I wasn't allowed to step foot outside after dark, or take the subway, or walk anywhere. It only got worse after my best friend was killed. She was holding on so tightly I felt like I couldn't breathe. I didn't really understand it until after I moved out, I was all she had left, and she was terrified of losing me."
A small ding alerts them to their arrival on her floor. He still has her keys, so she just says Silver, Schlage, L-shaped, and listens to the jingling behind her as they pass units 4A and 4C.
"It fucks you up." His voice mixes with the sound of bouncing keys. Clarke comes to a halt outside her door, waiting for him to finish. "Losing family." There's a long pause, and then the key sounds stop. Bellamy appears beside her, and slides her key into the lock, swinging the door open.
Clarke thinks about the way it felt when the doctor had hovered above her father's bed, voice low when he uttered the words radiation poisoning. She hadn't known what they meant, she was only eleven at the time, but the way her mother's face had turned white told Clarke all she needed to know. Her father died less than twenty-four hours later. Clarke was holding his hand, and she knew he was gone when it stopped shaking. He'd been trembling with pain for days, it didn't seem to matter what they gave him. He said it was like his nerves were on fire. Clarke wasn't supposed to hear that, but.
And then it was nine in the morning, and his hand stopped shaking. So she cried. She cried because he was gone, because even at eleven she was glad he wasn't in pain anymore, and because he'd left her all alone. Abbie had told her not to cry in front of her father, but he wasn't here anymore. So she sobbed until she threw up, and her mother yelled at a nurse to come take her away, and when the sedation kicked in, she'd dreamed that she was burning.
And then, years later, she found out about Wells on the news. CNN with breakfast was just a routine in the Griffin household, Abbie liked to be prepared in case there was some kind of disaster that would be flooding the hospital with casualties when she got to work, and one day Clarke looked up to see her best friend's face plastered beside a picture of a cop car. And then she saw the caption.
Governor's son, gunned down by police.
It was a fucking mess. He'd been out for a run, headphones in, hadn't heard the cops calling out for him to stop. They shot him six times in the back, he was dead before the ambulance arrived. The officers had given a statement saying they thought he was a suspect in a home invasion. The first glimpse they got of his face was when the paramedics rolled his body over on the pavement.
The Governor's son. Sixteen years old.
Her memories get foggy after that. She knows Abbie tried to turn the TV off, remembers screaming at her to leave it on, because they had to wait, this was all a mistake, any second now they were going to retract it. They need to leave it on.
But it wasn't a mistake.
A week later she was sitting in the front row at his funeral, and there were a million people in various uniforms standing stiffly across from them, but the press wanted to talk to her.
She only did it because she could see the reporters eyeing Thelonious hungrily, like wild dogs stalking a rabbit in the woods. It hadn't gone well.
They asked her if she was dating the Governor's son. No. How she felt about the shooting. Sad. Angry. What was the Governor's son like? Did he do drugs? Did he drink? Did he ever get in trouble?
And then Clarke snapped.
His name is Wells. Not the Governor's son. Wells. He didn't do anything wrong, and now he's dead. The officers who killed him made a mistake, a fatal mistake, and they killed a sixteen year-old boy who was my best friend and hadn't done anything wrong. Go ask them if they do drugs, and get the hell out of here. This is a private service.
The officers lost their badges, and Thelonious lost his next election, and Clarke lost whatever shreds of her innocence had survived losing father.
Now, she looks at Bellamy, realizing neither of them have spoken for a few minutes. He's watching her curiously, obviously wondering where her head just went.
"Yeah. It does," she replies, in answer to his previous statement. "Do you want to come in?" He looks good, very good standing in her doorway, dark eyes focused on her. His lips part in surprise.
"I…don't think that's a good idea. You're well past my usual three drinks rule," he says quietly, tongue darting out to wet his lips as he frowns down at her thoughtfully.
"You have a rule?"
"More like a code." When she smirks, he seems to decide he hasn't offended her. "You going to be alright?"
She will be. Eventually.
"It's funny," she muses, "that after everything, this still hurts. This is nothing, you know? Nobody even died this time."
His brows draw together, turning her keys over in his hands.
"You're kind of a tragic drunk, you know that?"
She smiles, a little bitterly.
"Only on my bad days." She holds out her hand, and he drops the keys into it. "Thank you for taking me home."
"Sure." He just bobs his head, hands in his pockets. "Drink water. Take Advil. Don't call the ex."
Her grin widens.
"I bet you're a great big brother."
A subtle flush creeps along his neck, barely noticeable on his olive complexion.
"Uh, thanks. Goodnight, Clarke."
All of a sudden, her bed begins to call to her, eyes drooping.
"G'night Bellamy." She closes the door, and doesn't hear his footsteps begin to retreat until after the lock clicks into place.
.-.-.-.-.
She wakes up the next morning with a punishing headache and a hundred and fifty dollars tucked into the slit in her keyring.