The Tailgate

by Elin Hilderbrand

Genres: Family Life; Marriage & Divorce; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A digital original short story about young lovers at separate colleges, exploring the early years of the central relationship in Elin Hilderbrand's forthcoming novel, The Matchmaker.

Clendenin Hughes first kissed Dabney Kimball during a Nantucket snowstorm freshman year of high school. Ever since that moment - God, the rush, the chemistry! - Dabney has known that she and Clen are an unsplittable unit - essentially the same person in two different bodies.

Of course, with Dabney now at Harvard and Clen at Yale, those bodies are 140 miles apart. And traveling is a serious challenge for Dabney, for reasons she'd prefer not to discuss, reasons having to do with her mother (or lack thereof). But with the big Harvard-Yale game coming up, Dabney is determined to make the trek to New Haven to see Clen. She's even borrowed a sexy black outfit from a classmate down the hall.

But when she arrives at the tailgate to see sparks flying between Clen and Jocelyn, a girl with dark blue eyes and luscious black hair, Dabney fears the collapse of a bond she has never questioned before, a bond so important that she'll be lost without it. A stirring portrait of young love at a crossroads, THE TAILGATE introduces two irresistible characters and invites us into a world we don't want to leave. To learn the fates of Dabney and Clen, read Elin Hilderbrand's forthcoming novel, The Matchmaker.

Release date: May 6, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 38

Sample

Dabney had no problem finding a ride to the game; everyone on campus owed her. Three weeks out, it looked like she would be driving to New Haven with two seniors from Owl, but she didn’t know how to announce this fact to Clendenin without making him uncomfortable. Though he tried to hide it, he clearly became threatened every time Dabney mentioned another boy’s name. Dabney and Albert Maku, for example, were just friends, but Clen was jealous because Dabney, apparently, went “on and on” about how much she enjoyed Albert’s accent.


“I could never be romantically interested in Albert,” Dabney said with a laugh during one of their Tuesday night phone calls.

“Why not?” Clen challenged. “Because he’s black?” Clen was studying journalism and was obsessed with probing “issues.”


“Because he’s Albert,” Dabney said. “You know Albert.”

“Yes,” Clen said. “I do know Albert.” His tone was accusatory, meant to emphasize the fact that Clen had traveled to Cambridge four times freshman year, had seen her dorm room and strolled her campus and met her friends, while Dabney had yet to visit New Haven even once.

There was a reason for that, which they left undiscussed.

But at the start of sophomore year, Clen had announced that he would not set foot in Cambridge again unless Dabney came first to New Haven.

She had promised to come the third weekend of September and canceled, and then promised again the long weekend in October and canceled, saying she had too much studying to do. Her father paid eighty dollars a month so she could park her car on campus. But every Friday afternoon when Dabney got behind the wheel of the Nova, it took her to Hyannis, where she caught the ferry home to Nantucket.

It was a pathology, both Dabney and Clen knew this, but they did not speak of it. Or rather, they did not speak of it anymore. The topic was exhausted. What else could they possibly say? Dabney had been seeing a therapist since she was twelve years old, but aside from the fact that she had matriculated at Harvard, not much had changed. Harvard was a big step, and from this big step, Dabney felt, might be born smaller steps. Such as a trip to New Haven. But not yet.


November, however, presented a unique opportunity: The Game. Clen had come north for the game the year before with a carful of his new “friends” from Morse, his residential college. It had been strange to see Clen unpile from the beat-up woody intermixed with all those other…guys/boys/men—Dabney was never sure how to refer to males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Clen had been one of them, part of the group, right there in the scrum, whereas all through high school he had remained friendless, except for Dabney. . .