Re: [declan and clementine, marvel]
[Clementine, she'd never felt like half. Or, maybe, she'd felt like that just made her better some. Her daddy, he hadn't cared any for the woman he married, and Clementine had always known real well that marriage was about standing and money. Her daddy, he'd been an MP, political, and he married the right kind of woman to wear on his arm at functions, but he'd always hated her some in bed. Clementine's momma had told her daughter the stories from the fainting couch in the master bedroom of their big old plantation home. And Clementine's daddy, he'd taken to her momma special. They had the plantation in Savannah, the country house across that big old pond, and the man came regular and without missing for all of Clementine's life. So that thing about halves, Clementine just thought that made it better than them kids born of a hated woman. It made her more entitled some, as if the little girl born on the Bay needed any extra entitlement to her. But it was too late to go changing things, and even her recent maturing hadn't made Clem any less herself than she'd been all those damn years.
As for cat and mouse, she'd played it real well once; better than any of her sisters. These days, she couldn't catch a starving rat with a hunk of cheese. Well, not the rat she'd been trying for, and that hurt a woman's ego some. But she was back on the mend from that too, and it showed real plain in the bright and confident smile she gave her brother, even as she took her iPod and plugged it into his system, like controlling the sounds around them was her right, just like being in his space was.
Music going, she glanced on over at his knee, even though she couldn't see it any beneath that cotton. But he had it bent some for driving, which made her feel something better about it. A second later, and her fingers were sliding on up to the butterfly bandage at her temple.] Stitches coming out tomorrow. Don't you go fussing over me, honey. [He wasn't, and she knew he wasn't; she was playing. She couldn't imagine Declan fussing over her, not even a stitch.
She took a sip of her coffee, and she set it right back down when he told her to hold onto it. It was deep enough in the dregs that it wasn't going to go sloshing on his pretty truck, but she didn't say that. She just grinned some at him. He opened the windows, and she reached an arm out, like it was all she was hoping for. Truth was, it was some.] Pelham. Get on the highway and head on east. Twenty minutes out, if you don't drive like someone real aged.