Tertiary
Acepilot

AN – Alright, this chapter is kind of transitional, and continues the deepening friendship between these two characters. Tish makes an appearance and the others rate a mention. See if you can pick up on Phil's quiet revelation toward the end of the chapter. Hope you enjoy it!

Disclaimer - The characters from The Weekenders are the property of Disney, the characters from AGU are property of KlaskyCsupo.

8---8

"You look unusually pale," Phil tells me. "I can get you a bucket if you want to hurl. And some breath mints, of course. I understand you're meant to be kissing someone later."

I roll my eyes. "I'm not going to vomit. I'm not nervous."

He smiles. "It's okay to be nervous."

I raise an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Of course," he says. "Just because you're nervous doesn't mean you don't want to get married. It just means that you're extremely excited about the concept of spending the rest of your life with someone else."

"Voice of experience?" I ask.

He scowls at me. "Don't you start."

I reach out and squeeze his hand. "Thanks for coming to see me before the actual wedding, Phil. I couldn't do it without you."

And the scowl is gone and he's smiling again. "I'll see you out there," he says, squeezing my shoulder.

"You definitely will," I tell him.

A knock at the door precedes Tish's entrance. "All right, Phil, out. I have to do my Maid of Honorly duties now."

Phil turns around and faces Tish with a smirk on his face, the kind he gets when he has new trouble to cause. "Ah, Tish. You're a vision."

She glares at him. "Haven't you learnt yet not to smirk at a pregnant woman? After what happened with Angelica?"

He rolls his eyes. "Three weeks pregnant! It's too early for you to be able to claim hormones as an excuse. And I don't think Angelica meant to throw the plate at me - "

"Out, out, out! Time for a rare girly moment," she orders, pushing him physically out of the room.

"Alright, alright! See you guys out - "

His last words are cut off by Tish slamming the door shut. But at least she's smiling.

It's good to know that all my friends can at least get along.

8 - * - * - * - 8

I answer my door in trepidation. I had kind of hoped that, after a week of having my dorm mate in my face, I would be able to spend the night alone, catching up on my studying - I have this weird burning desire not to flunk out - but now, instead, I've got a visitor.

A pizza box greets me. "I come bearing greasy foods," Phil DeVille announces over the box, before raising a bottle of cola. "And greasier softdrinks. Have you eaten?"

My stomach gives a little kick reminding me that I have, indeed, not eaten since lunch. In fact, I can't even remember if I actually had lunch. "No. Come in."

Phil strides in, depositing the pizza box and drink on the table. He looks around at our surroundings before turning to me with a smirk on his face. "You got gypped," he tells me. "My dorm must be a half again the size of this pillbox."

I glare at him. "I hope your dormmate snores."

He grins darkly. "My dormmate dropped out yesterday - thank god, because he was a jerk."

I feel somewhere between bewildered and infuriated. "You mean to tell me that you have a massive dorm to yourself?"

"Some of us have all the luck, I guess," he drawls, before chuckling quietly. "Where do you keep the glasses?"

"Cupboard above the sink," I tell him. "Get some plates while you're there."

"So, started work on any of the dreaded assignments yet?" he asks, bringing the plates and glasses over from the tiny kitchenette.

"Yeah," I say, "this really rubbishy creative one for Literature. You?"

He flinches. "Uh...well, I was kind of hoping you'd say no, so it wouldn't make me look so bad when I say that I haven't actually started..."

I roll my eyes. "You're going to drop out next if you're not careful."

"Yeah, but I'll have had fun."

Sometime later, after we've demolished most of the pizza and downed the bulk of the softdrink, the room resembles nothing so much as a warzone. Phil lays strewn on the floor while I lie on the bed with my torso dangling over the side. "Dude, we are never eating pizza from that place again."

"Hear hear," Phil groans, clutching at his stomach. "I think I'm going to explode."

"I think I'm right there with you," I mutter. "I'll be back in a minute."

I get up and stumble over to the en-suite, throwing it open and sidling up to the commode. I consider throwing up for a minute, but decide just to sit and breathe in the cool air.

When the phone rings.

I'm about to get up and go back into the main room to answer it, when...

"Terry's Eats, we never close. Can I help? Lil? Is that you? How did you get this number? Ah. Okay. Yes, this is Lor McQuarrie's phone. She's...well, she's around here somewhere. You said this is Tish?"

I stumble out of the en-suite and grab the phone from Phil. "Tish, that you?"

"Who the hell is the guy who answered the phone and why did he call me Lil?"

Listening to their voices, actually, I can hear an eerie similarity. "That was Phil. We just had pizza."

"You're going out with someone already?" Tish asks, sounding surprised. "What happened to - "

"We're not going out, Tish," I assure her, noticing that Phil has gotten up and staggered out of the dorm, but has left his backpack so I assume he's not going far. "We're just friends. He's kind of cute, sure, but I'm definitely not interested in anyone else, and he already has a girlfriend anyway. Who, completely coincidentally, goes to CAA."

There's a pause. "Alright, that's kind of freaky. Coincidence wise, anyway."

"Yeah. She and Tino will probably end up being best buds. Anyway, how was your first week?"

Tish brightens at this question. "It was awesome. I have decided that University is what High School should have been. Everyone here really wants to learn, Lor! It's fantastic."

I smile at my friend's obvious enthusiasm. "I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it so much," I tell her. "I knew you would."

"Yeah, I guess I did too," she says. "Miss you guys like nothing else, though. Did Tino or Carver end up getting on to you?"

I sigh in frustration, and that appears to be all the answer she needs.

"Sorry to hear it," she tells me. "Look, I've kind of got to go right now - I'm meeting some friends for a little party thingy for surviving the first week. When can I call you?"

"Anytime. I'm really not doing anything."

"You won't be out with your new friend?"

"Don't put the emphasis like that," I tell her. "We're just friends, and nothing more."

"Good," she says, just as Phil opens the door gingerly and staggers over to the chair in the corner, slumping down into it. "Don't want to be rushing into a relationship or anything. You just started university. You have enough on your plate."

"How true," I agree. "Alright, we'll I'll let you go then."

"Thanks," she says. "Talk to you sometime on the weekend, okay?"

Those words hit me right in the gut. For the first time ever, I will not be spending the weekend with Carver, Tino and Tish.

I knew it was going to have to change eventually. But I reserve the right to be sad about it.

"Definitely. See you."

We hang up, and I turn to Phil, who is looking at me intently. "So, that was Tish?"

I nod. "Yes."

"One of the famous foursome?"

I smile at him. "Yeah. My best friend. I mean, Carver and Tino are my best friends too, but Tish is...well, she's just kind of - "

"Completely know what you mean," he says, reaching for the softdrink bottle and pouring himself a small glass. "You know how I told you I grew up with everyone? Well, though they were all great friends, we all had someone we could tell everything to that we even kept from everyone else. Tommy had Chuckie, Susie had Kimi, and I had Dil."

"What was he like?" I ask. "You haven't told me anything about your friends, other than that they exist."

He laughs, his eyes phasing back as if traveling to some distant memory. "Dylan Pickles is...unique, to say the least. Maybe that's why we were such great friends. He has a very odd way of looking at the world sometimes, but it never stops him from knowing exactly how things are, if you get what I mean." I can only nod in response. "What's Tish like?"

I grin. "She's the single most determined person on the face of the planet, bar none. When she makes up her mind to do something, she does it, and no-one had better try to stop her. She's very smart, and we all knew at about age nine that she was going to end up as the finest alumni from any one of a number of great universities. I think she would have gone and studied in England if she didn't get homesick so much. And she's always ready to listen - even when she's doing her homework, she's able to multitask enough to solve all my problems at the same time."

He looks vaguely envious. "If you interrupt Dil while he's working, then he tends to get cross at you for interrupting him while he's speaking to his muse." He sighs. "Good friend despite that, though. Game of cards?" he asks, digging through his bag and withdrawing a deck.

I shrug. "Sure."

A while later, as I'm considering what card to play against Phil's left bower, my newfound friend bursts out with, "So, tell me about Tino."

Startled, I look over at him quizzically. "What? Why?"

He shrugs. "I'm curious. You seem to really hold a torch for the guy, that's all. I mean, over the last week, everytime you mention his name, you get all...misty. Kind of like I do with Kimi, I guess, but you've never gone out with him. So..."

I sigh. Here comes the big question, of course. How good a friend is Phil DeVille. I mean, for someone who I only met a week ago, I've seen him pretty much every day since and we talk pretty much endlessly. But most of this stuff I've never even shared with Tish. She just knows that I was going to ask him out.

On the other hand, this is a person who, probably, found himself in a very similar situation to myself. After all, he's going out with one of his best friends.

"Tino is...well, he's kind of indescribable. He has this incredible zest for life - but he's subtle about it. It's what I like about him, I guess."

He smiles at me. "Yeah, I think I know the feeling. Though Kimi was never subtle about it. What makes you want to go from being friends to being in a relationship, though?"

I feel my forehead crinkle in a frown. "I...I dunno. It just feels...right. It just feels like...well, it's different from Carver. He was always just my friend in a very platonic sense. But Tino just feels...right."

He smiles. "Welcome to the world of being in love. You can't quite describe it. I'm guessing Tino's different to any boyfriend you've ever had so far?"

I laugh out loud at that. "Thompson and I were a very brief and impressive mistake. Crushes do not translate well to relationships, necessarily. We went out for a few weeks, but it ended because neither of us really knew what to do with a relationship once we were in one." I pit him with what I hope is an interrogatory stare, but I'm so slothlike from over-doing the pizza that it probably looks like I'm going to vomit. "Is Kimi your first girlfriend?"

He chuckles and shakes his head. "No," he says, lifting a hand and counting off on his fingers. "Wally - first girlfriend, hopeless crush, age 11 to 12. She was captain of my soccer team and seemed like the ideal girl at the time. Amanda - big mistake. Age 14, very pretty, thick as two short planks, and cheated on me. I wasn't really fussed. Susie - brief fling when she was in her Senior year and I was a Sophomore. Far too different to work out, however, and we parted amicably before she left for college. And then Kimi, in our junior year, after a convoluted and very abstract courtship."

I look at him to elaborate.

"Which is a story for when I'm able to move," he says.

I groan in frustration and he laughs.

8---8

more coming soon.