Thank you all for the tremendous response to the last chapter, positive or otherwise. I know this is a rough direction for the story but I promise you that I'll make it worth your while. Some sexual language in this one but I wouldn't call it NSFW.

Hiccup Haddock, haver-of-girlfriend.

No—you don't have a girlfriend, you just have a date.

"Wow, do you think this one is big enough?"

Astrid had pulled on a giant puffer coat and, grinning, spun around to show it off. Hiccup started slightly—he had been daydreaming, staring at the red-and-white sign reading Women's Outerwear.

"Huh." The store's fluorescents scrubbed at his eyes. "Well. Considering you thought this constituted a winter jacket—" He raised the thin peacoat he'd agreed to hold while she tried on replacements. "—I don't know if you're qualified to be judgmental, here."

"I thought it would be enough," she pouted.

"You know this isn't SoCal, Az."

"Don't call it SoCal, Hic." Looking not unlike a red marshmallow, she poked her insulated belly. "I feel like I could go run into a bunch of sharp objects and be fine."

He shook his head to dislodge the word girlfriend, like shaking water from his ears. "Yeah?" They should get sushi. He would take Heather to get sushi. Heather seemed like the kind of girl who would really like sushi. It should be a casual thing. He wouldn't dress up. He needed to find a casual sushi place. But still nice. Nice casual. But not so nice she would think she had to dress up, because he wasn't going to dress up. Unless he did dress up. He could lie and say he'd just come from a job interview if she wasn't dressed up too. But it would be bad to lie. On their first date. Maybe they should get Italian instead—

"Hey." Astrid had come to lean on the clothes rack nearest him, arms folded along the top, chin resting in the crook of her elbow, squinting. "What's up?"

"Up?" he echoed stupidly. Great, now he was distracted to the point of rudeness. It had been four straight days of this, the constant monologue, departing conversations.

Astrid peered at him. "Is this about this weekend?" This weekend. He stared back at her but saw Heather's face, smirking, laughing about the sushi. Astrid pursed her lips, then asked slowly, "How was it?"

"How was what?" he replied, unthinking.

Astrid rolled her eyes—Hiccup's face felt warm, but maybe they had the heat turned up in the Target? "You know," she intoned.

"It's hot in here, huh." He craned his neck, looking past her, hoping to see Tuff returning from the grocery section with one of those huge cartons of Goldfish. No such luck.

Astrid threw up her giant, puffy arms, glaring at him. "I'm fine and I'm literally wearing an oven."

Hiccup eyed her for a moment, then let out a groan, twisting his hand around the cool metal of the clothes rack. "Nothing happened, okay?"

"Tuff said you had a girlfriend."

"Tuff said what?"

She leaned back, deflecting responsibility for this blight. "That's just what he said."

"I may have…" Hiccup sort of slumped into the parka selection. "I may have wondered aloud about how—crazy it would be, if I was the first person in the apartment to get a girlfriend."

She looked at him with wide eyes for a split second, then smirked. "So nothing happened, huh?"

He saw Astrid again, in a flash: the short hair where her cheek met her ear had curled into a vortex. It looked oddly deliberate. "Yeah. Well."

She asked again, leaning toward him with earnest sympathy, "So how was it?"

And now a recollection ousted the tired, deafening debate over sushi on private repeat—the bathroom stall flashed across his mind. Astrid, who had almost been… asking him how it was. He could have laughed, he could have locked himself in the changing room of this Target superstore and refused to come out. College will be hard, they'd said, you'll have exams!

"We just kissed." He could see Heather's room, lit by the off-season Christmas lights crawling across her furniture. He could feel his own voice in his throat, as he'd drawn away from her, saying, let's slow down.

"Oh." Astrid straightened up, processing this information. "But you did, you kissed."

"We're going on a date. Friday night." Sushi. Dress up.

"That's exciting," she said, doing a little too much to seem properly supportive. It only embarrassed him more, and she must've seen that in the way he ducked his head. "Do you not want to talk to me about this?"

"Well, it's just—"

"Because I'm the best person to give you advice, in this situation."

The confidence with which she delivered this statement drew him from his anxiety. "Wait, how do you figure?"

"Well, okay." Astrid started to extract herself from the puffer coat. "We've kissed, so there's no like, weird unanswered question there, right?" (The noise that came out of him did so with such force that it was more of a strangled sob, which Astrid bluntly ignored. Maybe she thought he was just scandalized that she'd mention it. Which he was, but—but everything else about that question, too.) "I know all—well, I know two of your secrets, and they are pretty significant ones." No weird unanswered question there. Try forty questions! A hundred! "And I'm a girl who's great at sex, which gives me a leg up over, hm, all your other friends." Now free of the cumbersome jacket, she did a little pose, like Vanna White. "See? I'm the best relationship counselor you'll ever have."

He was smiling in spite of himself. If he had to lose Astrid that way, he had her friendship. A wave of intense affection came over Hiccup; he tried to imagine coming to Fish or Tuff with his Heather-related concerns and surmised, quickly, that she had a point. "Yeah. All right. Can't argue with that."

"Okay," she said, beaming, "let's start with Dr. Hofferson's sex tips for virgin boys—"

Oh, no. "Oh no—"

"No, this is good—"

"You know, I think I'm good, actually—"

"Shut up, Haddock." Whimpering, he removed her coat from his arm and draped it over his head. Her certainty about his being a virgin was unsurprising, and somehow still humiliating. "Okay, first off," came Astrid's muffled voice from the other side of the fabric. "Know the anatomy. This isn't 1965. Google the clitoris."

He ripped the coat from his face, scowling. "Astrid, we are in public."

"Yeah, so?" She waved to some other customers, perusing the next section over. "This is free advice. Stuff everyone should know." She nudged him in the shoulder. "May I continue?"

"Could I stop you?"

Immune to his sass, she went on, "Two, go down on her. You will be terrible at it but she'll appreciate the effort."

"Oh my god," he muttered, looking to the carpet for some kind of assistance.

"Which brings us to three." Astrid paused, and he glanced up. She gave him a smile, well meaning, gentle. "Listen. And if she's not talking, ask. She's the only person who can actually make you good at sex." After a moment, he smiled back. Astrid cleared her throat and grabbed the puffy coat. "There'll be a quiz later, so I hope you were taking notes."

"Thanks. I love sex quizzes in Target," he said, hoping the sarcasm disguised the weird hitch in his voice.

"Just looking out for my roommate. And you, I guess." She held up the puffer, grin splitting her face. "What if I bought this?"

"I would have trouble being seen with you in public."

"Perfect," she joked, and tucked it under her arm. They started to leave the section, walking toward the register. He felt raw, as though they'd both just witnessed something gory. Her advice, on first pass, embarrassed him for its lack of shame; now that he turned the suggestions over in his head, everything looked a little more—vivid.

"We're still just getting to know each other," he thought out loud.

Astrid gave him a sideways grin. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. I mean, I don't think we'll… We haven't even been on our first date yet." This was his way of rejecting her advice—rejection meant not having to consider how she'd come to know these wild truths, or whether Heather knew them too.

"Right. It's your first time." Astrid said this as though she had understood him, but he didn't see how.

"It's my first time?"

"You want it to be with someone you really like."

Yes. He wanted to know Heather better before he thought about—that. So Astrid had understood, even better than he did himself. He wondered if Heather would get that, too; she had seemed a little shocked when he'd stopped her on Friday, but he had to get it right, this time. "You're not making fun of me," he realized.

Stopping short in the aisle, Astrid turned to him. "Oh, Hiccup." She had on that smirk again, the kind of smirk that made him have to crush a couple thoughts, a tiny flare-up of feelings he was getting over, with hard work. "Easy target. I like a challenge."

He did it to practice for Heather, and squashed any consideration of his own selfishness. He'd always said: it was his disability, his right to tell whom he pleased.

He sat them all down in the living room that Saturday. Astrid had been right, the longer he waited, the harder this would get. So he'd gathered Fish, and Tuff, and even Snot, who none of them had even seen much since he got in with the Delta Psi crowd.

"Who died?" Tuff had asked merrily, feet up on the coffee table.

Hiccup began, "So, gang. Remember how we were all so excited to get the handicapped suite, because of the huge bathroom, with the bench in the shower?"

Fishlegs sighed. "I love the shower bench."

"Well, funny story about that." And he took a seat, and told them the rest. And Astrid had one less secret to know about him.

Astrid made a countdown on the dry erase board in the kitchen. Thirty days until Thanksgiving break. Twenty days until Thanksgiving break. Ten.

"You have to come out tonight," demanded Ruff, standing over her. She had curled up on the couch beneath her fuzzy blanket, pajama-clad and un-made-up. Astrid drew closer to her laptop, warm on her belly.

"I'm watching a documentary on the failures of the American health care system," she said, as if this were a perfectly sound excuse.

"That's the worst thing I've ever heard in my entire life."

"I have a pint of Cherry Garcia in the freezer!"

Ruff threw her head back and groaned. "This is so stupid. You didn't go out for Halloween. You didn't go out last weekend, even though it was Eret's birthday." Astrid rolled her eyes; like she actually cared about Eret's birthday. "Come on."

"I've had a meet every week."

"Do you have one this week?"

Astrid hesitated before saying, honestly, "No."

Folding her arms across her chest, Ruff glared down at her, expectant. Astrid squirmed under her gaze. Finally, her roommate insisted, "What's going on?"

"Nothing's going on."

"Then come out tonight!"

Frustrated, Astrid sat up. "Why does it even matter, you're going to spend the entire night with your boyfriend, anyway—" Couples, she thought bitterly, trying not to get any more specific than that. "—everyone's just going to be involved with their—whatever." She snapped her computer shut.

"Maybe I don't want to spend the entire night doing that." Ruff inflected her reply as you would a plain counterargument, but Astrid heard a note of discomfort beneath it. She glanced up at her roommate. Ruff was chewing her lip.

"Ugh." Astrid's head fell to her hands, feeling herself being worn down.

"Maybe you could get a 'whatever'," Ruff suggested, grinning.

"I don't want a whatever."

"Seems like you could use a little stress relief, though."

They might not even be there, Astrid realized. This party was probably at Eret's, and Hiccup hated Eret almost as much as she did. Probably more, because Eret couldn't mollify him with being not so horrible to look at.

Three weeks. It had been three long, fraught weeks.

She'd seen Heather, she'd seen Hiccup, but she hadn't seen them together. She didn't know if she'd be able to maintain her aura of maximum cool-with-it-ness if they were… Well. In her best display of friendship, she supported him—played the cool girl friend, shrewd knower of female things, dispensing the advice he needed but wouldn't ask for—all the while trying to forget that he'd chosen for this honor, of all people, Heather. She didn't think she could be quite so discerning if she had to see the two of them attached at the mouth.

"All right, fine," she grunted, tugging her bangs. "A little stress relief."

Some hours later, crammed into the hottest corner of Eret's Chelsea apartment, she thought, I'm stressed.

It was a party like all the other parties. Maybe a little less crowded. She could have maybe carried on a conversation, if she'd had a megaphone. Ruff, regardless of what she'd been feeling earlier, disappeared with Eret almost immediately. She left Astrid leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping water from a red cup. If only Snot had been there to yammer in her ear, it would've been a real callback to that first party of the year. That felt like a million years ago—what had Hiccup said to her that was so rude? Something about D&D not being her kind of thing. She wondered if this would be her weekend, every weekend, for the next four years: standing to the side and not drinking and wondering where your friends had gone. Being alone. Being alone when you could've been alone watching a documentary, that no one had any right to make you feel bad about finding fascinating! She didn't think she could live with that, something would have to change, eventually.

Looking into the living room, she saw the front door open, and recognized the flash of mussed auburn hair and his skeletal, ruddy form. For half a second, she had to close her eyes; of course.

Behind him came the swinging hazel presence of Heather. The two of them spoke animatedly, laughing at the surrounding crowd, leaning toward one another. The writhing body of people obstructed Astrid's view, but her hand might have lighted on his forearm, or he was reaching to touch her shoulder. They looked like people who had been together for a million years, and it was hard to remind herself that they weren't even fucking. Yet, anyway.

He talked out the corner of his mouth to her, but Hiccup's eyes were scanning the room. They spied her in the kitchen, and he raised a hand in greeting. The music suddenly grew louder, as though someone had slipped off her headphones.

Astrid turned to the garden of alcohol overwhelming the kitchen counter, poured a shot of vodka, and took it. She stomped out of the kitchen and tried the door to one of the bedrooms, where they'd all piled their coats when they came in. There was a guy sleeping on the bed, pants around his ankles, surrounded by no less than thirty coats. The window was open and the air stung her bare arms. She pushed the guy aside until she found her big red parka, and then paused by the window. She spied some dark metal—a fire escape.

The only thing to do was climb out the window. A part of her had been waiting many years to climb out a window, she realized.

Except that she nearly fell three stories to her death once she got outside—there was someone else on the fire escape, his short legs dangling off the edge.

"Fish," breathed Astrid, in relief. "I didn't know you were out here."

"Yeah," he said, staring sadly at the dark windows of the building across from Eret's. In the past couple of weeks, Hiccup being busy with Heather, she had struck up more of a friendship with his soft, dweeby roommate. She knew more about him, now—that he was a soon-to-be English major, and a writer himself, who hailed from New Jersey—and Fish had gotten over what might've been a fear of her, to seem comfortable enough that they could watch Scandal and have arguments about who, if anyone, could ever be as horrible as Fitz.

"What are you doing?" She took a seat beside him on the metal balcony, letting her own legs dangle next to his. The alley below them was dark, and faintly the smell of urine wafted upwards.

"Thinking about Robert Frost."

"What about him?"

"Before I built a wall," he quoted, "I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offense."

She didn't recognize this, but turned the words over in her head for a moment. Her gut told her what this was. "Did Hiccup…"

Fishlegs turned to her, scowling. "You knew? He told you before any of us?"

She winced; she had been afraid to ask for just this reason. "In all fairness, I kinda forced it out of him."

He looked back out across the gap, at the empty windows. In the street, a cop car flew by, wailing, shedding them in blue and red light for a half-second before it was gone. A late, busy night in New York.

"Isn't it weird," said Fish pensively, "that we've all only known each other a few months? But we don't have anyone else, so it feels like forever."

She hesitated. She was not a girl who spoke eloquently about these abstractions of life; she left the postulating to Fish, to Hiccup and Heather who would chat about their educations over breakfast. Astrid liked a solid problem. She liked to hold it in her hands and turn it over and see the scratches where people had tried to crack it open before. "Fish. I think you and Hiccup are going to be fine." And that was the best she could do.

"I know we are. That's not what I meant." He gave her a pathetic smile. "I just forgot I don't know him that well."

Astrid thought of what she knew about Hiccup, the tapestry she'd knit together over days and weeks and months. She thought of his cat and his leg and his mom and his dad in the sofa commercials. She thought of his weird little sketchbook and she thought of him watching Heather on stage at the showcase, lips parted, like he'd never seen a woman dance before. And she thought of him coming into the party just now—and she'd walked away.

She patted Fish on the shoulder. "Yeah. I think I get that feeling, too."

The cold got to her and she pulled on her red coat, just in time for a series of wooden bangs, like doors being flung open, to issue from inside the apartment. Then the shouting started up—Astrid and Fishlegs exchanged a worried glance, as the noises grew louder.

Ruff's head appeared in the window.

"ASTRID, WE ARE LEAVING."

Astrid scrambled to her feet, clinging to the fire escape's thin rail. "What the fuck is going on?"

"It's—come in here," said Ruff, dragging her back inside. Fishlegs followed shortly after, looking nauseous. "Eret is a turd," Ruff announced.

"What?"

"I've told him a thousand times no one gets to talk about Tuff like that—" Ruff had a hand around Astrid's wrist and drew her out of the coat room, into the kitchen, shouting. "—but he never fucking listened—"

Eret's voice rang out above the music. "FINE, LEAVE, AND TAKE YOUR IDIOT BROTHER WITH YOU, YOU IDIOT." Tuff stood, wasted and confused, by the front door, and Astrid made sure to help him out as the four of them escaped into the hallway, evading Eret's cry, claiming he didn't care, he didn't care at all.