It started with a fountain pen.
Well, not exactly. It started with the Lord of the Rings... or maybe it started with Kolio and the guys... or was it Donald...
Doesn't matter where it started. All that Jesse Swanson knows is that he woke up this morning in the middle of the quad, shirtless, and... boxer-less beneath his pants, apparently.
And let's not forget his girlfriend's name tattooed on his upper buttocks.
Beca.
(That little...)
But wait a minute, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's rewind back a few weeks ago...
...
THURSDAY
"That still only counts as one!"
Beca hears Gimli say from the screen, as she stifles a short squeak from Legolas' trunk-surfing skills. She needs to get herself an elf. That was... hot.
(Blond, British guys with long, straight hair? Bring it on.)
"Hey, do you think we could—"
She tries to tell him of her elf-ideas (she would joke him to grow his hair and dye it platinum). He is lying on his side, his head on her lap facing the screen of the laptop, when he makes a snoring sound.
Sleeping? Seriously?
He had asked her to cancel out on a Bellas dinner just so the two of them could spend quality time together watching the extended version of the whole trilogy, goddamnit. Who does he think he is?
(Okay, so she's not really that mad. But she needs an excuse to be.)
She feels his fingers gently curl underneath the bend of her knees, as he snuggles his face on her legs. Her legs. Great. Now, she can't even move because he's sleeping, and she might wake him. And she knows that he needs to sleep, because he's been tired all throughout the week.
But then, she gets a super great idea.
It must've been the creative pull of Orlando Bloom's face on the laptop screen, but she gets excited when she looks for something that will leave a mark, and she sees his fountain pen.
Aw, yiss.
Careful not to disturb her sleeping boyfriend, she gently tries to turn him around. His fingers tighten underneath her kneecaps and she stifles a small yelp, because the bastard knows she's ticklish right there. But no matter. She will enjoy this.
He finally unbconsciously rolls a bit, now facing upward, eyes still closed, as he mutters something along the lines of "don't do it" in his sleep, and she has to bite back a smile.
Oh, she'll do it, alright.
Ever so slowly, she uncaps the fountain pen. It looks... weird. She hadn't exactly used one before, so she tries to draw a line on Jesse's nose with the tip. (His nose crinkles and it is adorable) The pen won't work. Huh. She shakes the pen a bit. Maybe the ink is old? Or maybe she has...
Whoops, there it is. She can see the black seeping from the long line across the tip.
Oh, so that's were the ink comes from. She shakes the pen some more, before gingerly placing the flat part against her boyfriends nose and drawing a...
Shit.
The sound that comes out of her is the most horribly-repressed snort she has ever made, because she didn't know that so much ink could spill from just one pen. And she needs to think about dead puppies or she will break out in hideous laughter and she might wake him.
"Bec..."
She hears him sleep-talk her name, and the smile that crawls up her mouth is genuine. Her nerd is handsome, okay, so she pauses to admire, before continuing to basically spill ink all over his face, her lip almost turning blue from how much she needs to bite down to keep from erupting in laguhter.
She needs to take visual evidence of this.
After properly desecrating his facial appeal (and he has a lot, but he's not gonna hear her say that), she takes her phone and tries to snap a picture.
She forgets to take out the flash.
So when his eyes flutter open, she sort of freaks and suddenly jumps.
"Whoa, my god..."
"Couldn't resist?" he groggily says, his mental faculties not quite awake yet. But he's conscious enough to see her biting back a smile and that's enough for him.
"You just... looked so peaceful..." she lies. Oh, god. Hold the barricade, woman. Don't laugh. Don't give it away. You can do this.
"Mhmm. Can I see..."
He makes a lame move for her phone but she takes it out of his reach.
"No! It's... a surprise," she says, quickly looking at the resulting snapshot... and almost losing it.
Jesse has never had much self-control when it comes to surprises (especially ones that make his girlfriend almost laugh), so when she feels his other arm reach over around her waste, and his mouth is suddenly on the skin of her stomach, and his other hand has left her kneecap to join her wrist and...
"Dude! No!" She swats his hand as it almost takes her phone while she's distracted (goddamnit, he used the stomach kiss). Pushing his laughing face away from her, he rolls over to place a lazy kiss on her knees before fixing his position on the bed and tucking himself underneath both her legs. He knows her sleeping habits, and she probably won't feel drowsy until Frodo says goodbye to Sam. So he wraps them around him.
Settling himself under her knees, his arm draped over her leg, his thumb draws circles on her calves until he succumbs to sleep again.
(To the immense excitement of his girlfriend, who is now tweeting the picture.)
FRIDAY
Jesse awakes to an unusually cold bed, and frowns.
Where is his girlfriend?
He misses her waist in his arm, the scent of her hair, the taste of her skin, the holy shit.
He rolls around in his bed, turning, only to face his reflection on the open screen of his laptop. His face. His face. What the hell happened to his face?! It looks like a giant squid just mass dumped all over his face! What the—
Beca.
He closes his eyes and mentally chastises himself for falling in love with the reincarnation of evil.
He tries to clean it off with hand soap. And then regular soap. Shampoo, bath gel, toothpaste... fuck. At this rate, he'll have to get his face acid bleached.
Oh, she is so dead.
That is, until he sees a small bottle of baby oil by his laptop, with a sticky note attached:
To my darling nerd,
Sorry. I hope you can forgive me.
(nope not sorry at all)
:) - B
Call him a hopeless romantic, but he was truly hoping that, the day his girlfriend would leave him a sticky note calling him her "darling nerd" and asking for forgiveness, it would be something of a big issue. Like, I-need-to-put-this-on-our-future-scrapbook-for-memories thing. But this?
He hopes to god this doesn't make it to their future scrapbook. Or any scrapbook, for that matter. In fact, let there be no evidence of this having ever happened...
And then he recalls how he woke up last night. To the blinding white flash of her phone.
(damnit.)
...
The Trebles would then trend the hashtag #StillNotAsBadAsJessesFace. He didn't go on Twitter for weeks, until it finally died down.
He will get her back, somehow. He's just waiting for the right... outfit.
AN: A brief interlude from writing the next chapters of HT.
Is this... fluff? Does this count? Help me out here, I don't know what fluff is. I don't even know what I'm doing with this story... No promises, though. :)
(Inspired by my need to watch 21 and Over.)
