#danmcdaniel

Claire had been doing ok, she liked to think. Then again, “ok” for Claire Belfront meant something entirely different than it meant to others.

She didn’t kill her boyfriend. Or her ex-boyfriend. Or whatever it was that people called it when the person you had been dating kicked the bucket while the both of you were doing illegal substances and it looked very very suspiciously like you had done it. Ex-dead-boyfriend?? The problem was, despite the fact that she claimed she hadn’t done it, there was a very real possibility that she had. After all, she didn’t like him very much.

It didn’t help that the very next week she was back in jail for something minor that she did, in fact, do and was back out on the streets the next night with her new vampire best friend who was kind of a psycho and claimed he was an ex-mob boss despite the fact that he looked 12. Then again, Claire and age didn’t always go hand in hand.

It was one of the reasons she left in the first place, right?

She had herself convinced that she was doing it for him. She didn’t know what love was but she knew the gist of it was keeping the person that she had slept with out of jail in case anyone ever found out what they had done. He had worked too hard to have it all come undone at the hands of a blonde beauty queen with the last name Belfront. She knew very well that she could ruin the lives of men with the snap of her fingers but it didn’t mean that she wanted to ruin his. It was probably best to bow out before the town caught on to past demeanors like cutting his ex-girlfriends brakes out of her stupid little car.

She was so messed up. She had hit 18 and lost all semblance of control. In fact, she probably had her head on straighter at 16 than she did at 23.

Claire couldn’t pinpoint why she came back in the first place. Claire and her parents could go rounds about Claire’s level of interest in Belfront Construction or dealing front desk with her idiot male counterparts whom she loved very dearly but hated all the same. It didn’t help that she had chosen to go off and travel instead of persue a career or head off to college. Not that any of it mattered anyway when Claire had been looking at possible jail time only to have her name cleared after her daddy had hired the best district attorney in the state of Mississippi all for his little Claire Bear.

How thoughtful.

Said best district attorney hadn’t even let Claire properly thank him before he rushed off again leaving Claire to her own devices. She deserved that. He deserved it, too; she still firmly believed he deserved much better and if Claire were a better person she probably would have hoped that he had found much better. But Claire was basically the worst and so she just found herself at his front door, instead. Or rather — she found herself climbing up his neighbor’s tree, her boots kicking bark and dead branches as she climbed up and up and up and over onto a limb before reaching out to grab the window to pull open so she could slide inside.