#damn actually exactly chidi rn

[bad-bitch-beauchamp]

Songs About Me

Alright, here we gooooooooo! My very first fic! I have the first three chapters written out. This will definitely be drawn out, so stick with it! Lots of fluff, lots of angst! Inspired by Driver’s License by Olivia Rodrigo. You can also catch me over on Twitter @ tessaactually.

READ ON AO3

“What do I even wear to something like this? Jeans? A sweater? Fuck, Geillis, I can’t believe you talked me into doing this.” Claire tossed her phone to the middle of the bed. With her hands on her hips, she stood in her closet staring at all the clothes that wouldn’t work for tonight. Things were strewn from the doorway of her bedroom across the floor, up onto the bed, hanging off the dresser from hangers, and into the closet that led to her bathroom. Geillis Duncan, one of Claire’s best friends, had started a tradition of going on Friday nights. Geillis was always the life of the party with her outgoing personality, uncanny ability to read just about anyone, her fiery red hair swinging as she danced regardless of what song was playing. In Geillis, Claire found a soulmate. Someone to dance with, someone to laugh with, someone to drink with, someone to be truly best friends with. Sometimes, though, their ideas of a good time differed. Tonight just happened to be one of those times. 

 “Stop thinking sae hard. Maybe after a few drinks, ye’ll have a little more fun, aye?” Geillis responded hopefully through the speakerphone. Having more fun is indeed what she promised herself she would do, so she’d go out with Geillis -- damn her -- and try her best to have a good time tonight. It sounded like a nightmare, but she’d try. She’d try to have fun. Memories of the days when she made that vow to herself came flooding back unbidden, and she sat in the middle of her bedroom floor next to a discarded cardigan as she slipped into an unwanted reverie. 

When Claire left Oxford College five years ago and gave up studying medicine, nearly everyone she knew tried to convince her she was making the biggest mistake of her life. Classmates staged interventions, friends tried to reason with her, and her professors pleaded with her to not waste her talent. No one was quite as angry as her boyfriend at the time. Claire expected frustration, sadness, maybe a little resentment, but never anger. 

“I don’t think I can keep doing this, Frank. I really don’t.” Tears pooled in her eyes as she sat slumped on the floor against their bed. Raindrops ran down the windowpanes, thunder cracked the sky. 

“I truly don’t understand how you could be so selfish! You have the talent for the coursework and the money to go here and you’re just, what? Going to through it all away?!” Frank stood across from her, forearm braced on the wall above his head. It was going on two hours since he had looked her in the eye. Claire sniffled in the background. Frank’s fist came to the wall with a sound rivaling the storm raging outside. His storm was not over. 

“Don’t you think I’ve thought this through? I have a plan. I’m going to take the rest of my savings, maybe move back to the states and…” Her voice started to break then. Frank spun around on his heel to finally look at her, to really look at her. His chest was heaving, 

“And what, Claire? And do what with your life? What about the life we planned together?” He stomped toward her, shaking the floorboards under her body as she clung to her knees. When she looked up, tears starting to fall from her lashes, he dropped to his knees in front of her, grasping for her hands. Claire finally saw more than anger. She finally saw the fear he was trying to reign in but quickly losing control of.

“I’m figuring it out, Frank. I’ll figure it out. We can figure it out. Maybe… maybe I’ll finally open up a greenhouse. You know how much I’ve always wanted to do that. Please, I… I can’t keep going on like this here. I’m so worn down and I can’t -- I know that I can’t -- survive it here another year.” The tears fell. She had been bottling up these thoughts for three years, and couldn’t hold back any longer. “Please, say you understand. Say you love me. Say you support me.” The teardrops turned into rivers. “Say you love me.”

For a few moments, Claire wondered if he had heard her pleas through her wrecking sobs. Finally, Frank let out the breath he was holding, letting his shoulders slump. He dropped her hands without ceremony. He ran a hand through his ordinarily perfect hair. He sat back on the floor, one knee bent up and the other outstretched. His arms reached behind him to hold him up. He just, stared at her. 

She was jolted. She had expected outrage. She studied him as best she could through her swollen eyes and water-stained glasses. Everything was silent. The room they had shared for the past three years, was silent. Absently, she noticed the thunder and lightning and pounding rain had stopped, leaving only an occasional trail of water down the old glass windows. With every second the sky turned brighter shades of purple and pink and orange with the impending sunset. On a different day, maybe in a different place, she might have appreciated their beauty. Instead, she noted the silence. 

Looking back at Frank then placing her face in her hands once more, she pleaded one last time: “Please say you love me.”

Frank blinked. 

In one swift motion he was off the floor and moving toward her. She heard the old floorboard creak. She felt the air whoosh around the room with his movement. She waited for him to reach her. 

“Claire. Look at me.”

Ah. Not moving toward her after all. Standing in the doorway with an air of having concluded a business dealing, Frank was watching her with not a single trace of emotion. Claire’s head rose. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and glanced his way with a smile, until she saw where he stood. 

“I have never been so disappointed in you. Goodbye, Claire.”

Frank took a breath and looked her up and down, from wild curls to curled up toes. Claire opened her mouth to speak. Frank closed the door behind him as he left. Everything was silent. 

Claire shook her head, making her curls bounce like springs. Geillis was still talking but hadn’t seemed to notice the lack of responses coming from the other end. Claire pulled herself up and tried to figure out what Geillis had been talking about. 

“... They’re really sweet and kind and they’re really great about buying ye more than a few drinks, plus they’re fellow Scots and just the nicest! I mean, sometimes they’re a little rowdy, ye ken, but I think that’s what ye get when ye go out with Scots --” Geillis was rambling, and Claire didn’t have the foggiest idea who she was referencing. 

“Hold on a sec,” Claire tugged an oversized oxblood sweater over her head. “Okay, fill me in again, please. Who did you invite tonight? I thought this was a girl’s night out after a long week!” She tugged on a pair of black faux-leather leggings, bracing on the dresser for balance and she began to tip over. 

When Claire left Oxford, she moved back to Boston into her uncle’s old brownstone. Although her Uncle Lamb died during her freshman year at school, he had left her a hefty inheritance. Claire and her uncle were each other’s only family and when he died, he left her everything he had. In his will, he left Claire a note that simply read, “These things are only things, my dear. Use them to follow your dreams, however you may see fit. Love you always, Lamb.” Everything he left her gave her a home in the states far away from everything she wanted to leave behind in England, and the means to start her own little greenhouse in a tiny historic shop in Beacon Hill. After her two closes friends from Oxford graduated, they both ended up in Boston with her. Joe Abernathy was going his residency as Mass Gen, and Geillis had come to do the same until she saw Claire’s shop and declared, “Fuck it, this is way more fun.” She helped in the shop with supplying a small zero-waste shopping section for patrons interested in doing more to protect to earth. 

Geillis giggled like a school girl when she started describing the friends she had invited out with them that night. “Weel first there’s Angus. Remember him? I went on a date with him two weeks ago to Seven Ales, ken?” 

“Oof, wasn’t that the one you got blackout drunk with?”

“That’s the one, dearie! And a braw time it was! I mean, I assume it was because I don’t really remember the wee hours of it if I’m being honest.”

“Shocker. Who’s next?” Claire kept Geilliss on speakerphone as she rummaged through a pile of shoes in the corner of the bedroom. 

“Och, that’d be Rupert. I went out a week ago to Cheers and met the guy who made me laugh until I fell off the barstool?” She giggled to herself at the memory. 

“Oh yes, I remember that one. He actually sounded pretty decent.”

“He’s a right sweetheart! Angus is as wheel, just a wee bit more crass, aye?” Claire could practically hear her winking through the phone. 

“Alright, that’s not too bad. I can handle two more besides you and me and Joe. I’m actually getting excited for tonight! This week at the shop has been a lot.”

“Agreed, babe. I’ve got tae go, but I’ll meet ye there? Eight o’clock sharp, I want to get our names put in for karaoke!”