a/n: okkkk don't kill me for not writing anything in forever but this rly bad fic is what helped me get through my writers block so deal with it. anyways i love lucaya and i love this show called the mindy project and there is a scene in this fic that i kind of based off of a scene in one of the episodes of the show so yeah. don't hurt me
disclaimer: i don't own girl meets world.
It's that hazy moment right after the sun sets and the lights don't quite leave the sky yet, and Lucas finds a girl on the roof, sitting on the ledge of the high school building, her back toward him.
It's a little disconcerting to him, because he just wants to be alone, and to his inconvenience she is smoking and Lucas thinks fleetingly of his asthma, before thinking, fuck it, there's no other place for me to go anyways.
He takes a seat on a bench nearby, squinting through her smoke cloud to see the last of the sunlight fading through the clouds. Unfortunately for him, she is blowing smoke rings, and it doesn't look like she's stopping anytime soon.
It's been an hour and the girl is still smoking. It's getting to the point where he feels like she's doing it on purpose, because from the looks of it, the cigarette can most definitely classify as a stub, and yet he can still see the glowing embers in against the backdrop of the night.
Lucas is positively fed up with her―and for good reason, he thinks; he's starting to wheeze from all of the smoke and he hasn't brought his inhaler with him, and the sign literally five feet away from her has the words NO SMOKING in bolded capital letters.
"Hey, you," he calls out to the silhouette sitting on the edge of the building.
First, there is no response. Then the girl slowly swivels around, as if the very action is tiring.
"Hey stranger," she says, "is there a problem?"
She looks about his age, her hair tumbling down her shoulders in blonde curls, her eyes a startling, brilliant blue, and wow, she is gorgeous, but too bad that he is the one with asthma and she is the one smoking on the roof.
"Yeah," Lucas says politely, attempting to avoid a terse tone. "There is a problem… Can you please stop smoking?"
"Why?" she asks nonchalantly, flicking some ashes at him. He flinches.
"I've got asthma."
"Don't you have an inhaler?"
He lets out an impatient sigh. "I left it at home."
The girl pouts mockingly. "Poor baby."
"Can't you just be considerate of other people?"
Her lips quirk up. "What's in it for me?"
"The satisfaction that you made another person's life easier?"
The girl pretends to think it over.
"Nah."
Lucas can feel pinpricks of annoyance and tries to ignore them. "C'mon, please."
"Well… only if you take a drag," she singsongs.
Lucas is definitely irritated now. "No way."
"Just one drag. It won't kill you, you know."
Lucas hesitantly takes a seat next to her where she pats on the ledge, and swings his legs over she that they're hanging off the side like hers. She hands him the cigarette and says, "Don't burn yourself, kiddo."
Lucas carefully places the stub between his fingers, raises it to his lips; the girl is smiling almost devilishly…
He promptly throws it off the building.
"What the fuck was that for?" the girl snaps.
He presses his mouth into a tight line and he raises an eyebrow. "Don't you know better than to smoke? It can kill you."
"Like you know what's good for me," the girl scoffs. "You just littered by dropping my last cigarette, you son of a bitch."
He frowns.
"One cigarette isn't going to do that much damage to our environment."
"That's exactly what I was saying about how one cigarette isn't going to kill me."
This time Lucas scoffs. "That's different, and you know it."
"Yeah, well," the girl says, "that's my own business, Huckleberry, butt out."
"Alright, geez…" Lucas mumbles.
And then something hits him.
"Huckleberry?"
"Yeah," she replies. "From that one cartoon on TV? The one about, like, the cowboys?"
"You don't need to spell it out for me," Lucas says hotly. "I know what it is. Just… how do you…?"
"It's not that hard," she says, brushing off some ashes from her jeans. "You draw out some syllables longer than others, and you pronounce some of the vowels differently." She smirks. "Don't act so surprised, I'm good at these things."
Lucas couldn't help but still feel shocked, "Seriously, how though? I thought I covered up my tracks pretty well."
"I've been places," she replies casually, "with my step-dad. He's journalist who has to travel around a lot of work."
Lucas decides not to push, because it might lead to personal territory. "Okay then."
"So do you go to this dump for school?" she asks him. It's chillier now, and the girl starts looking cold.
"I used to," he says, sighing. "Then I got expelled."
"For what?"
He hesitates, before saying, "For breaking someone's nose in a fistfight."
"So you're that kid," says the girl, grinning. "Lucas Friar, if I remember correctly?"
"You're right," he says, shifting on his spot on the ledge. "I'm better now, I think."
The girl hums her agreement. "You look like a demure cow, unable to hurt a fly," she says.
Another hour has gone by, probably, Lucas isn't certain, but it doesn't matter all that much to him right now. It is plain to see that the girl is freezing, but every time he brings up how cold she looks she glares at him, as if telling him if he tries something gentlemanly she'll kill him.
Finally, he decides that enough is enough, and takes off his jacket and drapes it over her shoulders. The girl stiffens, and then relaxes, and Lucas can't help the smile on his face.
"Thanks," she mutters.
"No problem…" Lucas searches for a name, but comes up empty.
"…Maya," she finishes. "It's Maya."
He looks at her, with her raunchy red lipstick and completely ripped jeans and blue eyes almost black in the darkness, and says, "It suits you."
Maya's silent for a while.
"I guess it does," she finally says.
It's somewhere near midnight, and Maya, for some reason, brings up Lucas's expulsion again.
"Why did you punch that guy's nose?"
"It's nothing."
Maya presses on, much to Lucas's discomfort. "I would definitely believe you… if you had grown up on the streets, traveling with gangs and had a prominent New York accent."
"You should believe me."
"C'mon, tell me."
Lucas swallows. "You really want to know?"
"Why else would I be asking?"
"He called me a bastard," he says. "Not the joking kind, like 'I can't believe you slept with her, you bastard!' but the 'You don't have a father' kind of bastard. And it was true, I guess, and I suppose that's why I snapped that day, even though my father left more than a decade ago."
Maya is silent―for longer than he would like, to be honest―and Lucas subconsciously prepares himself for a "boo-hoo" response, somewhere along the lines of "that's too bad" or "that's so terrible!"
"Wow, that's surprising," she replies with a brittle laugh, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. "I didn't think we would have anything in common at all."
"What?"
"Now we're really diving in personal territory." Maya straightens her back and Lucas's jacket slides a little off of her shoulders. It is unbelievably tempting for Lucas to adjust it for her. "My dad left too."
"How old were you then?"
"Barely three," she sighs, and her breath forms a cloud swirling from her lips. "I guess it was good that he left early―would've been too hard for my mom to explain if he left later―but even though I didn't know him, it just―sucks. You know?"
Lucas stares at her. All of her hair is swept back behind and it's wild and tangled and her eyes are partially closed and he thinks about how they aren't so different after all. He thinks about how after years of "that's too bad" and "that's so terrible!" there is finally someone who understands.
He scoots closer to her and she doesn't complain. "Yeah," he mutters. "I know."
Lucas's phone buzzes sometime later, probably from his mom, but he's sitting next to Maya and he can see her chest rise and her face is reflected by the streetlights and the dim shadow of the moon, and she's wearing his jacket―
He lets it go to voicemail.
It's around one when Maya says she has to leave.
It's embarrassing but disappointment washes over him entirely. He gives her a half-hearted smile and asks, "So soon?"
Maya laughs. "It's one-fifteen, Ranger Rick."
"Still."
"Getting clingy, aren't we?" she teases. "I'm sure I'll see you around."
Lucas smiles. "You still have my jacket, you know?"
"Really?" Maya looks at herself. "Oh shit, I forgot!"
"Don't worry, just keep it," Lucas says dismissively. "Just consider it a favor. You walk home, don't you?"
"Yeah, but ―"
"Just keep it. You can return it the next time we see each other."
"Well, thanks, then," she says, putting it back on. "See you around."
She leans down and kisses him on the cheek, and then she's gone, disappearing around the corner to the stairs leading up to the roof.
Lucas is frozen in his spot, his hand slowly coming up to touch his cheek―he feels dumb, he can't move, and everything suddenly is brighter through the polluted night sky; the moon, he thinks he's even able to catch a glimpse of stars, though he thinks that it's really just his imagination―and he scoots closer to the edge and thinks he could be going crazy, but for the most part he feels overwhelmingly euphoric and something near high. And now he tries to remember what her eyes look like, and looking up again, he's thinking they look a little like the brilliance of all the stars combined.