This slightly-less-frothy AU takes place two weeks after my first fic on this platform, 'Arrogance and 'Aggression.' You might want to read that first (and the foreword in my bio to explain what in the world I'm doing here!). If you see clichés ... don't worry. They get overturned. :)

There was no possibility of going to sleep that night. Lucy Bennet fell all the way down on her back in a bed that creaked just a little too loudly for her taste. She let out a protracted sigh as Dallas Winston sidled up beside her, kissing her bare shoulder simply because he could. He'd been doing it every night for two weeks. By now, she was expecting it, and he couldn't just let her down.

"Glory," Lucy said. Her voice was that kind of flat you save for when you're too stunned to express yourself. "You ever considered giving up jockeying and doing that for a living? I think it'd pay a lot better."

"Thought about it," Dally said. "Don't think you'd like it very much. Would ya?"

"On the one hand, every woman in the world deserves to feel what you just did for me. On the other, no, I'm not sure I'd like it if the attention was off me, even for a minute. Better stick to jockeying, cowboy."

"I hate it when you call me that."

"Oh, but I love how it makes you mad."

Lucy laughed to herself, then rolled over to the nightstand and grabbed the clock. She smirked when she read the time. She knew he probably didn't want her to bring it up, but she was going to, anyway. It was good for him to know she was paying attention.

Dally wrapped his arm around her midsection and tried to pull her all the way back into the bed. "What're you doin', Bennet? C'mon, get back here."

"It's 12:03," Lucy said.

"So what? You told your folks you were stayin' overnight with Sadie, not me. You don't gotta be anywhere till that school of yours lets out in the afternoon."

"That's not what I mean. It's 12:03 on November 9."

Dally grumbled a few choice words—not for Lucy, but for the day. And to think, he'd almost forgotten it. It was his birthday. Worse yet, it was his eighteenth birthday, which meant he was sure to get that draft card in the mail sooner than he knew. It was almost funny, but it was that kind of funny where everything was awful. Before, he thought about getting drafted, going to war, and getting blown up all the time. It didn't sound too bad back then. His sister, Violet, would be real pissed at him for dying, but she was always pissed. It wouldn't make much of a difference after a minute or two—maybe a day. It seemed like an easy way to go, and he almost welcomed it. Of course, that was before.

Now, he had the toughest, most beautiful woman in the neighborhood in his bed every night, and dammit—she gave him something to look forward to when he woke up in the morning. The idea of turning eighteen looked pretty bleak if it meant losing his nights with Lucy. Those were worth staying alive for.

They were? He could hardly believe his own thoughts. He didn't sound like himself at all, and it was bugging him something awful. Maybe it was worth it to get blown up, after all. Then he wouldn't have to feel so … it occurred to him that he didn't even know the right word to describe how he thought about feeling for Lucy Bennet.

He felt her lips on the corner of his mouth, and suddenly, he no longer wished to be blown up in the war. Yeah, this was worth dodging the draft. Better this girl's lips on and around him than a bouquet of bullet through him.

"You better not make some deal outta this," he growled. "It's just a fuckin' Tuesday."

"I know that's how you see it," Lucy said. "It's how I see it, too. If I had it my way, we'd stay in this room all day, back and forth like this until morning."

"What do you mean, if you had it your way? Don't ya?"

"C'mon, Dally. You know I don't."

He thought of Sadie Curtis and how disappointed she'd been two weeks earlier when she prepared a cake for Lucy's eighteenth birthday, but Lucy never got a chance to eat it because Dally had gotten in the way. Surely, now, she'd get her revenge by making it on his birthday—the day he always threatened they'd get killed if they ever mentioned. Of course things were different now that they knew he spent all of his nights with Lucy. Getting shipped off to the jungle began to sound mighty appealing again.

Then, he looked at Lucy out of the corner of his eye, remembering how damn good her skin felt against his. Better than anyone he could remember (There may have been plenty he couldn't remember, of course, but he wasn't about to mention that in front of Lucy.). If it meant walking into this room to the guarantee of this every night, maybe he'd suffer through the rest of the day.

"What time does Sadie want you to drag my ass over there?"

Lucy laughed. "After eight."

"Gives you and me some time, don't it?"

Before Dally knew it, Lucy was moving around on the bed, suddenly hovering over his body and smirking down at him in a way he'd only ever let her do. When she took charge, it never felt any shade of wrong.

"Don't you know me at all?" she asked in a low voice. "I'm pretty good at making time."

"Oh, yeah? Then show me."

Sure enough, she showed him, and she did not disappoint.

It had been two weeks, and Lucy still wasn't sure what she and Dally were doing. Literally, of course, she understood quite perfectly. She'd been a virgin on the night of her eighteenth birthday, but she hadn't been (nor would she ever be) a saint. When Dally seemed surprised that she wasn't squeamish or nervous, she reminded him that she wasn't just reading all those old plays and books for the sake of reading them. She read the bawdy stuff because she knew it would come in handy someday. He'd made a comment on her use of the word handy, and she didn't say so out loud, but the fact that he said something made her fall a little bit more in love with him. He had all the physical prowess and wit as the libertines she so loved to read about. She would call him the rover in her head, after her favorite old play.

Lucy didn't know what her relationship with Dallas Winston was. Obviously, they had something, but she couldn't tell if it went beyond the body. When she first came into his room, she was convinced that would be the end of it. They'd quite literally bang out their differences—or similarities, depending on the way they wanted to look at them—and then, they would pretend it never happened. Lucy wouldn't even tell Sadie about it. But it had been two weeks of touching and talking, talking and touching. After the third night, she had to tell Sadie, who (after turning red with embarrassment) promptly teased her about having a new boyfriend.

But apart from hematoma (a word she heard all the time out of her nurse grandmother), Lucy thought that perhaps boyfriend was her least favorite word in the universe. It was juvenile, and though Lucy was only eighteen, the terms boyfriend and girlfriend carried connotations of inescapable childhood, something that directly contradicted the way she felt when she woke up in Dallas Winston's bed. The words also conveyed a sense of permanence and commitment, something she couldn't imagine Dallas Winston ever wanting. She knew he liked her, and for more than just what she could do with her body. But Lucy wasn't stupid. She knew that it didn't matter if he liked her because he could always find a way to up and leave her, anyway.

Of course she knew that. She knew it because she knew the same thing was true of her.

It wasn't that she didn't (albeit secretly) want to be committed to Dallas Winston. She did. She thought of it when she should have been trying to figure out how the hell to properly finish her math homework (Though she'd begged her parents to let her take Refresher Math for her senior year, they'd told her she better advance into trigonometry since it would show up on her transcripts when she applied for college.). She thought of it during her lunch period now that Lilly Cade was too busy grilling Sadie about her dates with Johnny to check in about Lucy and Dally. Most of all, of course, she thought of it when Dally kissed her shoulder—an odd choice, she thought, but she liked it for that reason—every night. She got a real kick out of being with him. Dally was smart, both in ways that she was and ways that she wasn't. He understood her wordplay, but where Lucy was plainly awful at devising new and creative cover stories for where she went off to every night (as she still hadn't told her parents about him), Dally could come up with convincing fictions on the spot. When she made allusions to things she was relatively sure he didn't know, he never asked her to explain … but when she did, anyway, he always at least seemed interested in what she had to say. Much to her pleasant surprise, Dallas Winston wasn't a terrible companion. Depending on the hour, Lucy may even call him a good one.

She couldn't, however, just say any of that to his face. It wasn't simply that she was afraid he would laugh at her and send her on her merry way, although that fear bubbled up in her unconscious like no other. It was that she still didn't want to look weak in front of anyone, let alone the toughest person she'd ever known. Lucy liked to be in control of her feelings and hated the idea that anyone out there could mess with them. If she told Dally that she wanted something more from him, she was giving him permission to mess with her. For Lucy, there was nothing much scarier.

She exhaled deeply, exhausted from what felt like paragraphs of interiority. In truth, she had to have a laugh at herself. She'd been thinking on the questions of Dallas Winston and commitment for so long that she almost forgot she was standing in the Curtis family's backyard with her friends, who were still giggling about Sadie's most recent date with Johnny.

"You know, Lil," Sadie said, "I would think you'd be pretty grossed out hearin' about my dates with your own brother. Doesn't it bother you?"

"Not as long as he seems happy," Lilly said. "And he does. Well, happy for Johnny, anyhow."

Sadie's eyes impishly flickered over to Lucy, who was ambivalently twirling a lock of her hair around her index finger. When she felt Sadie's gaze on her, she wanted to smack it off her face. Did she not realize that the stories she told Sadie and Jane about Dally were private? Did she not realize they were for the oldest members of their group alone?

"I think we should take the heat off me for a minute," Sadie said, "and focus back on ole Lucy over here. Haven't heard a peep outta her since the night of her birthday. Have we?"

Suddenly, every eye in the yard turned to Lucy's face. She looked up, feeling arrant dread at the thought of sharing her stories about Dally. She knew he would hate it if she divulged too much, mostly because she knew she would hate it if he divulged too much about her. But it was more than that. She wanted to be with him, but she didn't want to look like the fool when (if?) he turned her away.

Was she really hoping that much? She pushed the question out of her mind. It didn't do any good to worry about it before she knew where Dally's head was. Of course, that was assuming Dally knew where his head was, a possibility that seemed, at the time, wishful at best.

"There's not much to tell," Lucy said.

"That's a damn lie!" Katie laughed. "I'd like to say I know Dally, and if he's around, there's always somethin' to tell."

"More than somethin', if you ask me," Jane Randle chimed in.

Lucy rolled her eyes. Fine. If they wanted to probe, she'd give them true answers … in her way.

"You wanna know what it's been like with Dally and me?" she asked. She could almost hear Sadie dying on the inside. If Lucy prefaced herself with something like this, it was never going to turn out well.

"Of course," Lilly said. "We've only been waiting two weeks."

"Never an imperfect enjoyment," Lucy said. "Never a disappointment."

Sadie, who was well aware of Lucy's bizarre fondness for seventeenth-century English satire, rolled her dark eyes. Leave it to Lucy to disguise her real feelings in poetry and comedy.

"Does that mean what I think it means?" Lilly asked.

"If you think that's what it means, it's probably so," Katie said.

"How much thought did you put into that before you did it, Lucy?" Carrie Shepard always came prepared with the exhorting questions.

Lucy shook her head, a sly smile across her red lips. She wouldn't tell them anything they didn't need to know … which, from Lucy's point of view, was pretty much anything. She wouldn't even tell them how she felt about wishing to be Dally's girl for more than just a few hours every night and a few minutes into the next morning. Dally's girl? That couldn't be. More of her wanted it than didn't, but that didn't make it all right. If she said it out loud – if she even thought it again – he'd find out the truth, and he'd never look her in the eye again. Wasn't that right?

Then she thought of the way his lips twitched with an almost smile when she talked about how much she thought was left unsaid about The Scarlet Letter, especially how Hester Prynne's big, red A wasn't her real punishment for having sex, but her daughter, Pearl—a corporeal reminder and a constant responsibility. She asked him why he was looking at her that way, and he took a moment before he said something dirty. Even then, she knew he was thinking something different. He liked her. He was just never going to say it … unless she figured out a way to make him. She didn't know that two other people were trying to figure out how to do the same thing at exactly that moment.

"These are too many questions," she said. "Well, they're the wrong kinds of questions, anyway."

"What would be the right questions?" Lilly asked.

Lucy opened her mouth to say something snarky, but Sadie (who had recently appointed herself as the group's voice of reason) interrupted her. In that moment, what she said was mortifying for Lucy, who wanted nothing more than to forget the possibility of her complex feelings for a boy. Later on, however, Lucy would never stop thanking Sadie for her interruption that night.

"I think we should come out and ask her the big question," Sadie said. She was taunting, but it was for good reason, she figured.

"No big questions, please," Lucy said. "Medium questions are off limits, too. And for that matter, damn the small questions. Let's talk about something neutral. Food, for example."

"I'll go first!" Katie piped up. At last, a part of the conversation that really interested her. "I've never cared much for grape jelly. Thoughts?"

"My thoughts are we ain't talkin' about food, Katie," Sadie said. "I still haven't asked Lucy the big question, and she's gonna answer it."

"What makes you think I'm gonna answer it?" Lucy asked. Immediately, she regretted posing that as a question, for Sadie knew her far too well.

"I dare you."

The other girls whistled and gasped. Lucy's expressionless face turned into a nervous smile. Yes, Sadie knew her far too well. In the years they had been best friends, Sadie quickly realized that if she dared Lucy to do something, Lucy would always do it. Two years earlier, Sadie had dared Lucy to drink a raw egg mixed with chocolate syrup, and she'd done it without even throwing up. A little while later, she confessed that she had to fight the urge to throw up for an hour before she ran home and eventually got sick in her own toilet. She was just too nervous to puke in front of the Curtises. Regardless, that was when Sadie realized exactly how committed Lucy Bennet was to that sentence: I dare you.

"Fine," Lucy said, equal parts angry with Sadie and excited to answer her question. She didn't understand the contradiction, but she knew it was there. "You got me. What's the big question?"

"Are you really in love with Dally?" Sadie asked. "Do you really wanna be his girl?"

Lucy's awkward smile only became more awkward. Part of her wanted nothing more than to reach out to Sadie—to all of them, really—and tell them she thought about Dally more often than she thought about anything anymore, and she couldn't believe how long she'd been blind to how she felt. She wanted to reach out them and tell them that she was in love with him, that she wanted to be with him, and that yesterday afternoon, she couldn't even finish her lunch because she was so angry (not angry, sad) that he wouldn't see it that way. But she couldn't do that. Just like Dally, she had a reputation to keep up.

Then again, part of that reputation was accepting any dare that was thrown her way, and Sadie had, after all, dared her. Being vulnerable wasn't great, but refusing a dare was even worse. At least the dare could be her excuse. She took a deep breath and let out what she had been keeping in.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I think … well, I know … yeah. Yeah, I guess that's true. Both of those things… I guess they're true."

Jane clasped her hands together as though she hadn't seen it coming (though of course she had). Lilly squeaked. Katie told her Lilly sounded like a mouse. And Sadie just stared blankly at Lucy, waiting for her to say more. She knew where she was going with these questions (and out in the front yard, so did Sodapop—they were twins, after all). She just needed Lucy to play ball for a few seconds longer.

"But it doesn't matter," Lucy quickly added. "I know whatever this is, it's not going to last. It can't."

Sadie looked at her like she knew something Lucy didn't. Lucy frowned and leaned forward to make sure Sadie knew who was in charge. When Sadie noticed this, she laughed a little under her breath. If only Lucy knew how easy it was for Sadie to get the drop on her. It was the one thing she hadn't thought over when she decided to have a best friend.

"What are you playing at?" Lucy asked.

But Sadie said nothing. Not yet. She would figure it out soon enough. After all, if the plan played out the way she and Soda had already figured, Lucy was the kingpin.

"So, every night with Lucy, huh?"

Dally looked up to see that Soda was asking him the question he least wanted to answer. He rolled his eyes. It wasn't that he didn't have anything to say about Lucy. For as much as he thought about her (as much as he had been thinking about her for months), he'd never say anything about her out loud. That would make him look weak for her. Somewhere, down inside himself, he knew he was weak for her. He'd figured it out when he realized he got a kick out of lying next to her while she was taking notes in those books of hers. Every now and then, she'd pipe up and say something like, "Why would they use this word and not a different one? Can't be a coincidence." He wasn't exactly sure what she meant by any of that, but she was sure funny to watch. Over the years, he'd seen Ponyboy read all the time, only when Pony was reading, he was always dead quiet. Lucy was the only loud reader he'd ever met—maybe the only loud reader in the world. Some part of him got a kick out of that. That didn't mean Soda and the others got to know the truth.

He wasn't even sure he wanted Lucy to know the truth, and she was the one rolling around in his bed and in his head every night. Everyday, Lucy got closer to getting her responses from colleges (She reminded him once, sometimes twice an hour.). He figured she'd get into one of those fancy schools she was always going on about, pack up, and forget she ever knew him. And if she did, well, that was good for him. He didn't need her, anyway.

He lit up a cigarette and rolled his eyes again. It didn't do any good to worry about something that hadn't even happened. He was starting to sound like… well; he was starting to sound like Lucy. Either way, he wasn't going to tell her the truth—that if she got into that fancy Pennsylvania school she was always talking about, he'd want her to stay because he kind of liked being around her. She'd just laugh at him, and he'd be left standing there by himself. It wasn't that he couldn't handle it if she left. He'd been alone all his life, and whether or not she was there didn't make any real lick of difference, he supposed. It was that if he told her the truth, then she'd just … know it. She'd always know it, and it wouldn't be his to keep close to the vest anymore.

"Dally, I asked you a question," Soda broke into his silence. Damn. Had Soda always been this big a pain in the ass, or was it just tonight?

"I've been seein' Lucy a lot," Dally said. "But that's all I'm gonna say."

"That's a damn shame," Steve said. "Way she was hangin' on you when you walked in here tonight, we figured you'd have a ton to say."

"I could. But do you really want me to tell ya in front of the kid?" He tipped his head in Pony's direction.

Ponyboy blushed with embarrassment and groused at the same time.

"I ain't a kid," he said. "I know what you and Lucy been doin'."

"Don't mean you're ready to talk about it," Two-Bit reminded him. "Remember when we was watchin' that movie, and the girl said somethin' about putting your lips together to blow? Thought you about died."

Ponyboy turned a deeper shade of red, almost muttered a few choice words for Two-Bit (an opportunity Darry quickly killed off by shooting him a look). Soda stepped forward, remembering Sadie's instructions, and tried to get more out of Dally. He didn't know why she thought he could be the one to break him, since he and Dally had never been particularly close. But she was Sadie, the mastermind of all the pranks and plots they'd pulled as twins, and he had to respect that.

"I ain't askin' you to take a picture for me," Soda said. "I just wanna know if ya like her."

Dally stared at him blankly. Did Soda really think he was going to answer that question? Inside of himself, he knew the answer. Yeah, of course he liked her. She was pretty, and always understood what he meant. That didn't mean the boys got to know about it. It was bad enough Lucy already knew some of it.

"Of course he likes her," Two-Bit said. "Who wouldn't like Lucy?"

"Lotsa people, man," Dally said. "She's kinda mean."

"Ain't that why you like her, though?"

Dally nearly swallowed his tongue. It would have been easy to answer Two-Bit's quick question, but he was smarter than that. Finally, a different voice drew him out of his thoughts.

"C'mon, Dally," Johnny said. "You know we ain't gonna care if you like Lucy. Besides, we already know you do. Why's it matter if you just say it?"

Dally took a drag and thought about what Johnny was asking him. Why did it matter if he just said it? He'd never admitted to really liking a girl before. Maybe that was because he never quite had. He'd been with a good amount of them, and he liked the way they all looked (at least at the time he was with them). With Lucy, it was that he looked forward to the things she might say or do that night. He was getting good at predicting her next move, too. He was getting to know her, whether he liked it or not. But what made him think he deserved that? What made him think she was getting a kick out of being around him, too?

"I don't know, Johnny," he said. "Don't seem worth it. I don't know where she's at, so it don't seem worth it."

"But ain't that the best way to find out where she's at?"

Why was Sodapop Curtis asking him all these questions? Had Lucy put him up to this? No, of course it wasn't Lucy. Dally could tell just by looking at Lucy that she didn't need to know how he thought about her. No, this was a plot. Between the Curtis twins, only one of them could stir up a good plot, and it wasn't Soda.

"What?" Dally asked.

"Ain't that the best way to find out what Lucy thinks?" he asked. "To tell her what you think and then ask her what she does?"

"How can I do that, man? I don't even know what I think."

He smirked a little, but only to himself. It reminded him of some of that philosophy bullshit Lucy had taught him about in the weeks before her eighteenth birthday. She'd probably like to hear him say that. Maybe he'd mention it later that night … if there were a later that night; he quickly revised his own thoughts. After the first night he spent with Lucy, he told himself never to just think she'd come back for the next one, guaranteed. She was trickier than that.

And yet, she did keep coming back for the next one and the one after that, too. What was that? What was she trying to get out of him?

"I think ya do know," Soda said.

"Could you please shut the hell up? I ain't gonna tell you anything."

"I dare you."

In that second, it felt like all the air had been sucked out of the atmosphere. It wasn't just that Dallas Winston had been challenged. It was that Sodapop Curtis was his challenger. The two had never been particularly close—it was, thanks to his personal doing, damn near impossible to be close to Dally—but they were also thought to be the other's antithesis. Where Soda was kindly gregarious, Dally was coldly brazen; where Soda was movie-star handsome, Dally always looked fresh from the fight; where Soda felt no shame in opening up and pouring his whole heart out of his body, Dally went to extremes trying to hide the fact that he had a heart at all. Who did Soda think he was, trying to get a rise out of Dally like that? It pissed him off … and yet; he had to admire the kid's guts. Had it been another night, he might have had to curb the instinct to beat the tar out of Soda for talking to him like that. But there was something on Soda's face that just plain … amused him. For some reason, he decided to play along.

Maybe it was that he was looking for an excuse to play along, and a dare was a decent one. He didn't spend much more time on that thought, but it wasn't because it was untrue.

"You dare me?" he asked.

"Yeah," Soda said, his voice shaking a little, but not enough to get him to stop talking. "Yeah, I dare you. D'you like Lucy?"

It was the emphasis Soda had put on that word that bothered Dally something awful. Like. You couldn't just like Lucy Bennet. It wasn't a strong word, and if there was one thing Lucy hated, it was weak words. Dally knew that from watching her write her poems. She'd get pissed if she couldn't think of a word stronger than good or bad. When Dally asked her why the fuck it mattered, weren't words just words, she said that feeling something didn't count unless it was all the way. He knew she wouldn't want to just be liked. And yet, he didn't think he could give her what she wanted. He could try—he'd tried before, just not with a girl—but it never worked. He couldn't figure it out. At least, he didn't think he could.

"Lucy's a pretty tuff broad," Dally finally said. "If I'm gonna spend every night with a broad, she ain't a bad choice."

Most of the gang was surprised. Out of Dally, that was almost as good as a declaration of undying love. Soda smiled to himself, thinking of Sadie's instructions again. If their timeline had worked out the way they planned (Sadie was fairly certain it would.), the girls would be making their way to the front yard in about …

He turned his head, and there were the girls. Lucy, Sadie, and Jane were leading the troops, while Lilly, Katie, and Carrie trailed behind them, nervously giggling. Yes, this was exactly what Sadie had said would happen. Quietly, he admonished himself for all the times when he was a kid and complained that he and Sadie had to share a birthday cake. He'd never been prouder to be a twin.

Dally moved toward Lucy, almost unaware of what he was doing. She was beaming up at him like she had a trick up her sleeve, and he hoped she did. As he was quickly discovering, Lucy's tricks were some of the best in the world.

"Hey," he said. "You ready to get outta here?"

"I know you are," Lucy said.

"I was ready to go before we ever left. You know I don't wanna be eighteen. These bums can't seem to stop remindin' me of it."

He gestured to the group of six guys behind him. Soda looked at Lucy and gave her a tiny wave. She narrowed her eyes at him. She should have known he was in on this plot the whole time.

"Yeah, I know," she said. "You know what you're gonna do now that you're eighteen?"

"I'm gonna get shipped off to the jungle."

"Maybe not. 'Cause you're gonna marry me. 'Cause I dare you."

To the surprise of none, especially not himself, there was nothing Dally wanted more than for the ground to open up and take him right down in it. As far as he could tell, there was only one reason Lucy Bennet would be asking him to marry her, and he wasn't itching to hear it.

I have an agenda here, and it's not as … well, it's not as cliché as it looks! I'm not going to spoil the entire plot here, but this isn't going exactly where you think it is. Let's just say Lucy's rationale for that question (or, uh, demand…) isn't incredibly strong.

Hinton owns The Outsiders, obviously. I reference Aphra Behn's comedy, The Rover, and her poem, "The Disappointment," John Wilmot's "Imperfect Enjoyment," and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which are all in the public domain, but I wouldn't own those, either.