She stretched up towards the ceiling, luxuriating in the morning light like a sun goddess might. Annie felt like a goddess right now – a sweaty one with a sore back from sharing a twin bed with a man who didn't really fit into it by himself, yes, but a goddess all the same. She hoped the aforementioned man was appreciating the show she was putting on right now. It felt lovely to stretch, but she wouldn't do it for this long just for her own amusement.
Annie peered over her shoulder to see a sleepy but smiling face watching her. She loved the way his eyes trailed down as she turned to face him. "Sleep well?" she asked.
"Very." Finnick's voice was still husky with sleep, and his hair still poked up at odd angles from last night, and she found herself braving a case of morning breath for a kiss. Mmm, he had no business being this good of a kisser, and he was stroking the back of her thigh just how he knew she liked it. Now, he was bringing her closer, up onto the bed, and –
Annie broke off the kiss. "Come on, I want to get out of here before it gets too hot." Currier wasn't air conditioned like the newer dorms, and in May, the fourth floor was an absolute furnace. She wasn't spending a minute longer up here than she absolutely had to, not even for another round.
"Can we leave yet?" Finnick asked. "I thought it was no boys allowed up here from ten until nine or something."
She shrugged. "What are they going to do? Kick me out? I've graduated. They've got no power over me anymore." Annie snatched his shorts off the floor and tossed them to him. "Come on, we don't have all day."
Finnick laughed as he caught them one-handed. "Naughty senior Annie is going to turn all her freshmen bad." She had to give him the evil eye for that one. "I mean, textbook-perfect RA Annie provides such an excellent role model to the young women on her floor that she manages to reform the scoundrels from their misbehaving ways." He managed to keep a straight face almost all the way through, only cracking up at the last couple words.
"That's more like it. Now, stop being lazy. These boxes aren't going to move themselves." Unfortunately. One perk of her RA job had been that she'd been assigned a double room to herself. The downside, of course, being that she'd filled with far too much stuff that she now had to move out. Accepting her parents' old bookcase had been asking for trouble. Annie wanted to kick her past self, and she settled for cursing naïve last-autumn Annie while she got dressed. She was stuck in her t-shirt, not quite having found the hole for her neck yet, when a terrible thought came to mind. The second her head popped out, she asked, "Do you think it's all going to fit?"
Finnick looked at the stack of boxes and grimaced. "Maybe? We can always take two trips if we really need to."
She studied the boxes for a moment, trying to picture how they would fit in the back of Finnick's crappy old sedan. He had driven an hour and a half to get up here, and she really couldn't ask him to make the trip again, especially since she didn't have any money to give him for gas. Finnick cut off her thoughts with a kiss on the cheek. "Don't worry about it, Annie. It's an extra three hours that I'll get you to myself." He patted her arm as he moved away, then hoisted up a couple of the bigger boxes. "We were leaving, right?"
"Right." Together, they maneuvered the boxes downstairs and into Finnick's car. "The traffic's going to be a mess, especially for the second trip," she said as they struggled to find space for the last few boxes.
"It's Iowa City, the worst-designed town around. The traffic's always a mess, but it'll be okay once we get on Twenty-Seven." Finnick frowned, then shifted a few of the boxes in the trunk, almost magically creating enough space for two more. "Y'know, I think we might be able to do this in one trip, if you're okay with being a little squished."
"Being squished sounds great if it means I don't have to be in the car for an extra three hours."
"That's the spirit." He pushed the passenger seat as far forward as it could go and motioned for Annie to get in. Once she had wriggled into her seat and was somewhere close to settled, Finnick handed her the final three boxes: one for the floor, one she could squeeze in next to her on the seat, and one for her lap. "You going to be okay in there?" he asked.
She forced a smile. "It's great. Super comfy."
"I'll make it as fast of a trip as I can. Next stop: Burlington." He got into his seat and turned the key in the ignition. Just as she always did, Annie held her breath for a second and prayed that today wouldn't be the one that Finnick's car finally gave out on them. Nope, not today. The rickety click-click noise was far from comforting, and the way the boxes were shifting before they'd even started moving was even less so, but in two hours max, she'd be back home. That was all that really mattered.
While they were escaping the mess that was Iowa City rush-hour traffic, their conversation consisted mainly of whether or not they could switch lanes, if it was this left or the next, and what the hell the speed limit even was here. But once they got far enough from the university that the traffic thinned out a bit, the conversation shifted to what was going on back home. Katniss had left town to be closer to Prim while her younger sister went to college. Cashmere had gotten married the week before, and Gloss' wedding was next month. Sometimes, it felt like her friends from high school were so far ahead of her that she had no chance of catching up. Annie didn't have a job set up, would be living with her parents… all worlds behind them. No, she refused to dwell on this today. "I'm excited to see your new apartment."
"I'm excited to have you over. I think you'll like it. The bedroom's kind of shit – I'm convinced it's really just a closet that the old owner managed to squeeze a double bed into, but the living room's nice. It's got this big window and a real pretty view of the downtown."
"It sounds great."
"You should come and live with me. It'd be more fun than your parents' house." He winked, and she hoped she'd never stop getting that twisting in her stomach when he did that.
As nice as it sounded, Annie had to shake her head. "I think my parents would disown me. You remember how angry they were when we saw them at Hy-Vee that one time?" Junior year, Mags, Finnick's great-aunt and longtime legal guardian, had taken a long weekend to go visit a friend in Lincoln. Annie had seen it as the perfect opportunity to spend some quality time with Finnick. After all, Mags had given him permission to have some friends over while she was away. Annie hadn't bothered to tell her parents that she was back in town, and they'd been less than thrilled to see their daughter at the grocery store late on Saturday night with her boyfriend that they'd never liked much anyway. The fact that it had been a late-night cheap wine and condoms run probably didn't help things. Annie was still a little surprised there hadn't been a shotgun wedding the next day.
Finnick shuddered at the memory. "Yeah, let's not have a repeat of that incident. We'll just have to wait and have you move in when we get engaged."
The words hung in the air between them, almost permeable. Finnick blushed, but he didn't try to take that last sentence back. Annie let him be uncomfortable for a moment before pushing the conversation back on track, asking him if there were any half-decent movies coming out this summer. He snatched hold of the life preserver she'd tossed him and started going off ono some new dinosaur movie that was coming out soon. Annie sat back and listened, but the smile she sported the entire way home had nothing to do with Jurassic Park.
"I'm going to burn my uniform the minute I get a real job. I thought I'd let you know so you don't panic when you come home to a fire on the balcony."
Finnick looked up from where Martha had him pinned to the rug. "You won't give it back as per company regulations?"
Annie sighed and collapsed backwards onto the couch. "You could have at least let me have my little fantasy." She hated that scratchy red-striped not-quite polo shirt more than anything else about working at McDonalds, and that was saying quite a bit. Even the free french fries didn't seem good anymore.
"Found anywhere to apply?"
She shrugged. "Kind of. I think I'm going to put in for the library. They've got a position posted, and I spent every spare minute there as a kid. Who knows, maybe the English degree will actually get me somewhere."
"Isn't that the degree librarians have?"
"Nah, they've got library studies degrees for that. The most I'd get to be is the assistant book checker-outer."
Finnick grinned. "Is that the technical term?" She wasn't going to respond to that one, and instead glared at him. "I bet you'd be good at anything you ended up doing there," he added. "You've collected enough books here to be a library." True enough. Finnick's apartment was cozier than her parents' house, and Annie had found herself spending all her time here, only going home at night or when she felt guilty about not spending enough time with her family. With Annie had come the books, mountains of them. They weren't pretty to display, for she loved the dog-eared, water-damaged ones she found out by people's curbs and in rummage sales as much as hardbound first editions, and they'd collected in stacks of five or six or ten all around the living room. Far from pretty, but they did make the place feel more like home.
"Maybe I wouldn't have to bring so many books home if I spent all day surrounded by them."
"One can hope."
She rolled her eyes at him. "We both know you don't mind it."
Finnick pushed the giant sheepdog off of him so he could sit up. "No, I guess I don't. You got work tonight?"
"Unfortunately."
"Mind if I eat there tonight and keep you company?"
"Not at all."