"His heart swelled for a moment, overwhelmed by how sweet a gesture it was. The amount of time and care she must have put into doing the work for him was… was… well, overwhelming. As fast as the sight of what she'd done made him feel as… - happy? loved? - good as it did, they crashed just as fast, and he was sent spiraling."
He supposed that there was one benefit to not being able to fall asleep, which was that forgetting to set his alarm wasn't really a problem. Also, the sunrise really was quite beautiful. Not quite as beautiful as the young woman sharing his apartment - which was precisely the kind of thought he was meant to be avoiding! - but still nice enough to look at as he watered the plants on his fire escape from a stray bottle he'd found under his bed.
The discomfort of dried fluid still present on his body made itself known once again as he watched pink clouds float across the sky. How did the saying go again? Something about sailors and red skies? He hoped the pink clouds meant something good, although he supposed the little rhyme had more to do with weather than luck. Nonetheless, he ducked back in his room, tossing the water bottle that he'd hardly noticed he'd crumpled across his room where it dropped to the floor with almost no sound at all.
His need for a shower and his desperate desire to not accidentally run into Shea after the events of the previous night created a pool of fiery anxiety in his belly as he stared down his bedroom door. Even the lavender scent of the fresh towel he'd forgotten to put in the linen closet did nothing to calm him.
Swallowing his fear, along with the bile rising in his throat, Drew finally risked letting the door swing open. When he didn't immediately see Shea standing outside waiting to confront him he practically threw himself into the hall and made a mad dash for the bathroom across the hall. Which really was only just a few steps, so there was no excuse for him to be panting as hard as he was, he berated himself. Although it was likely more due to increased nerves than it was due to actual physical exercise. After a moment his breathing evened out enough for him to decide he wasn't having an asthma attack. Good. It would be the first in years. He wasn't sure he could handle that.
Throughout his entire shower, he was torn between being glad that the running water was taking away some of the lasting physical evidence of his body's late-night betrayal and listening for any sign that he'd woken Shea. By the time he made to get out, he realized he'd been so distracted that he couldn't remember what aspects of a normal shower routine he'd completed and which he hadn't. Trying not to let frustration bring tears to his eyes he stepped back under the spray and cleaned himself for a second time - or maybe a first if he really had just stood there for several minutes as he feared he had.
Clean and dressed he found he felt better than he had at any point in his tossing and turning throughout the night. That did not, in any way, shape, or form, mean that he was prepared to deal with the possibility that Shea would be awake. Attempting to prepare himself for inevitable disaster in the humidity of the fogged-up bathroom, Drew brushed his hair back for the third time. Immediately upon swinging the door open he gave into cowardice and started to rush back to his bedroom.
Glasses, he remembered quite suddenly, worked better when he actually put them on his face. Running head-first into the doorframe was always a good reminder of that. Sheepishly he shuffled the rest of the way into his room, pulling his glasses from where they hung on his shirt, and tried to ignore his now throbbing head.
He could only stall for so long. Soon enough he was ready to go... if he ignored the fact that he had to grab his textbook and notebook that he'd left on the coffee table the night before. He knew he would finally have to face the possibility of running into Shea.
Sure enough, she wasn't in her room. That she was asleep at the table brought only the slightest relief, which vanished the moment he realized he must have misremembered where he'd left his textbook because it was not on the coffee table as he'd thought, but rather under Shea's sleeping head.
Tip-toeing closer he weighed the risks of trying to pry the book out from under her. His notebook, at least, looked easy enough to grab. So, naturally, she had to stir the moment he did. Panic, as always, took over and he scrambled out the door, abandoning his textbook on the table, along with any hope of eating breakfast.
He wanted to believe he'd only imagined a quiet voice calling his name as he fled. Needed to believe it, or he'd swear his heart would break thinking about the fact that he'd decided overnight that she would be best finding somewhere else to go. Somewhere where he wasn't.
The pink clouds were not a good sign he concluded halfway to the bus stop when the first raindrop splattered on his glasses only moments after deceptively blue skies grew dark. He made the mistake of pausing to look up and was met with a brief moment of calm before a smattering of rain began to pour down over him. Throwing his bag over his head with a groan he failed to stifle, Drew hurried the rest of the way to the stop. A futile effort - every spot on the bench was full, and he was left standing in the torrent of water without so much as a coat to keep himself dry.
Soaked to the bone and colder than he would have expected for early September, Shea was the last thing that should have been on his mind. And yet he stood there shivering, wondering only if she was okay. Fearless as she seemed, he was sure she had to be afraid of something and as thunder cracked overhead he considered that she might be afraid of storms.
If the bus arrived even a moment after it did he might have turned around and ran back to check on her. Perhaps in an evidently rare stroke of luck, the bus arrived when it did, and the thought to go check on her as if that would resolve him of any of the guilt and awkwardness he felt occurred to him only after the driver peeled away from the curb.
The realization that he hadn't completed his homework finally pulled his mind away from his resident runaway pest. The respite was brief. Flipping open his notebook he was glad enough to discover that he'd closed his sheet of homework inside when he'd grabbed it earlier. Dread started to settle in as he realized he needed his textbook to complete it. His textbook, which was presently under the head of the most interesting, stunning, and mind-invading woman he'd ever met.
No. Not a woman. She wasn't. She was sixteen and he was twenty-one and he was the one who needed to back off. Even if he wanted nothing more than to spend his time with her, and get to know her even better. He would be better off trying not to get to know her well at all. Everything she said and did, even her pronouncement - announcement? - that she might have killed someone made his heart ache for her in more ways than one and—
His heart did not ache. This was a crush. Childish, immature, and stupid. And he was done. He had to be.
She liked to make things difficulter… no that wasn't right… more difficult for him.
Beside his sheet of homework, scribbled inside his notebook in Shea's perfect handwriting, were the answers. Complete with the page in the textbook she had found the answers on. That must have been the book she was reading when he'd woken up the first time. It explained why she seemed too embarrassed to tell him what she was reading.
His heart swelled for a moment, overwhelmed by how sweet a gesture it was. The amount of time and care she must have put into doing the work for him was… was… well, overwhelming. As fast as the sight of what she'd done made him feel as… - happy? loved? - good as it did, they crashed just as fast, and he was sent spiraling.
Why would she do his homework? Hadn't he said the night before that she shouldn't leave because she hadn't helped him enough? Was that why she did this? Would she be gone before he got back? He didn't want her to go before he could say goodbye. He didn't want her to go at all. Not even with his… uncomfortable feelings - emotional and otherwise. Whether or not she was right before and her leaving would be better he didn't care. He didn't want her to go.
Fighting back tears - he really was as much of a crybaby as she'd teased him for being - he filled out his homework sheet with the answers she'd left for him. Maybe she did it to prove to herself that she was a good person. She'd been upset about that the night before. Hadn't she? It was just the night before?
The few days that had passed since she followed him home like a stray puppy had been a whirlwind of chaos - the likes of which he was never fond of. He hated losing track of time like that. Had there really been nothing more than a measly matter of hours between her insistence that she was a bad person and when she… she kissed him?
She kissed him.
And he pushed her away.
Well, not physically but he told her she shouldn't have done something he'd all but directly asked her to do. If only he could wrap his mind around why she did it - it wasn't as if he'd tried to convince her, or even himself, that she wouldn't be able to kick his a— butt… if she wanted to.
She was drunk, he reminded himself. Er… drinking. She couldn't get drunk, she'd said. Or she couldn't get hungover? She'd been drunk, he was sure, that night. That night which had also been such chaos that he wasn't sure anymore which night it had been. Two nights ago? Three? What did it matter how much time had passed, anyway? She was only going to leave if she wasn't gone already.
But, then again, he argued, maybe she wasn't. Maybe she liked him too, although not likely in the same way he found himself drawn to her. The same reason, he remembered with a jolt of frustration that made him want to scream, that he had decided to help her find somewhere else to go after fighting himself all night.
As lost in thought as he was, he didn't notice the bus pulling up to his stop until the driver began to peel away from the curb. A panicked, "Wait!" bubbled out of him as he shot out of his seat, and promptly fell over when the driver slammed on the brakes. Scrambling back to his feet amidst the barely concealed laughter of people in the surrounding seats, Drew ran to the front of the bus, practically leaping out of the open door with a quick apology to the driver, who only growled something unkind in return.
The rain hit his skin like shards of ice. For a moment he paused, stunned into a blissful and rare mental silence as his brain practically reset, the rain a cold but appreciated reminder that the world still existed outside of the jumbled frenzy of his back and forth thoughts.
In a daze, he barely thought to hitch his backpack over his head as he began his trek to class. His… multitude of predicaments regarding Shea didn't entirely leave his mind, but he supposed his stomach had settled by the time he arrived. Without much thought behind it, he shook a hand through his hair, sending droplets of water flying through the air as he stepped into the room.
He heard a disgusted scoff behind him right before a girl he faintly recognized from various classes throughout the years knocked her shoulder against his in a manner he was sure was deliberately not nice. "Are you a dog?" she spat, loud enough to draw the attention of almost the whole small class.
He could feel his face heating up as, for the second time in a matter of minutes, people started laughing at his expense. He scurried to the back of the room and ducked into a desk in the corner, as far from the mocking as possible.
In high school, between the crack in his glasses, courtesy of one trip into the garbage can or another, and his generally being the shortest in the class, he'd always had to sit in the front row of every class. Back then it was a haven for him. Sure, people threw things at his head often enough, and certainly, on more than one occasion, someone had stuck gum in his hair, but he was safe from any real physical harm with a teacher so close by. The moment he arrived at MIST, however, he'd realized the situation was quite different. Students typically fought tooth and nail for a seat in the front row, which meant the back was the safest place to be if he wanted to avoid being humiliated.
But it was lonely.
High school had been lonely as well, of course, but this was worse. He wasn't quite certain he wanted to know what was so wrong with him that he found himself an outcast amongst outcasts. He had his friends and all, but he so rarely had classes with any of them since they'd moved onto the more subject-specific classes of grad school. He tried not to let it hurt that they'd all gone for some form of astro-science, and still had classes together most days of the week.
What did hurt, no matter how hard he tried not to let it, was that they all had friends outside of their little group. They didn't rely on his friendship nearly as much as he relied on theirs. It wasn't that he didn't want them to have friends and be happy but— but he was jealous!
He hated being jealous more than most things in the world because all throughout his life there had been someone to be jealous of. Children in his kindergarten class who could find their words in word searches while he was struggling to make the squiggly letters stay put on his page long enough to have the chance, kids who didn't have a dumb dyslexic brain like his that was never going to read right, anyone who didn't have a dead dad and a—
No! Don't think about that.
He slammed too hard on a computer key, in his desperation to stop his thoughts from spiraling any further than they already had. He watched the letter P fall to the ground and bounce three times before sliding under a shelf and out of sight.
Drew heard a voice in his head calling him a freak, even before someone in class actually did. He wanted to bolt out of the class, but instead, he shrank in on himself, hastily returning to typing with excess gentleness. If how lucky he was to be attending college at all wasn't so important to him, he may actually have run home.
The clicky-clack of typing around him resumed, and as he typed strings of letters he could only hope were correct without quadruple checking them, his brain slipped away from reality again. If he could just go home, he would change out of his damp clothes and into his warmest pajamas, heat up a can of soup - not as good as his recipes, but nostalgic enough to be pleasant - and relax on the couch. One of his favorite childhood movies would be playing, and even though Shea would tease him about the choice, she'd surely watch with him, curled up under the blanket with her head on his—
No, no, no! She could not become part of his stupid rainy-day fantasies! Not like that. Not like anything. He shouldn't be fantasizing about cuddling on the couch together, or having dreams about her moaning his name as their bodies joined into one, or wishing he'd slipped his tongue between her lips and stolen a taste of her while he had the chance, or…
Focusing on reminding himself what he wasn't supposed to be focusing on made it impossible to focus on anything else. Maybe if he knew just what it was about her that made it so hard for him to get his mind off of her, he would be able to find a cure for his lovesick heart. He just hoped he didn't discover he was actually just a pervert, attracted to her because of her age. He wasn't sure he could live with that.
But really, he wondered, what was it about her? It wasn't as if she was particularly nice to him. Well, she was nice, he had to admit. She teased him, but at the end of the day… She had stayed with him all night after they watched that awful movie together, making him feel safer than he was willing to have her know. She tried to help him through his nightmares, offered to check his work without even making fun of his dyslexia a little, and had felt so warm when she'd fallen asleep against him that he'd almost let temptation goad him into easing them both down and falling asleep. Not to mention, of course, that when he was supposedly threatened… she hadn't hesitated to protect him. And she'd kissed him.
He could still feel her lips on his, electrifying every atom in his body into a strange, energized state of excitement and horror. The back row, lonely as it may be, was also good for hiding embarrassing erections.
Glaring at the computer screen - which he was increasingly tempted to slam his head against - he couldn't help counting how many times she had brought about such a reaction from him. Well, it wasn't her fault, per se, but… He didn't want to think of how many times he'd popped a boner or whatever at the sight or thought of a sixteen-year-old in the span of five days.
Maybe it had something to do with those superpowers of hers! He hadn't gotten one until she'd sauntered over to him and lit her hands on fire in a dazzling light show the likes of which he'd never seen before. By the time she'd put her hand on his chest the very next day, in the middle of mocking him about sex, of all things, he'd gotten so many that he couldn't fight natural instinct any longer, and had had to lock himself in his room and… take care of the problem. Another two days of trying to ignore his body's disgusting reaction to her presence and, evidently, his body had elected to take care of things itself while he slept.
Boundaries. Boundaries had definitely been crossed. As the adult, it was his fault for not setting ground rules in the first place to prevent such feelings from emerging. Not that he'd ever had to worry about that before.
Reluctantly he admitted to himself that he was going to have to talk to her about establishing proper boundaries if she wanted to stay as much as he wanted her to. Ideally, he could find a way to bring up the subject without accidentally revealing the fact that, not only did he find himself with a crush, but also that he was also physically attracted to her to an uncomfortable degree.
He hardly even recognized that he'd left his programming class when everyone else did, too distracted by making a list of the rules he would have to suggest when they spoke. No more sitting so close together on the couch that they could easily fall asleep against each other. It was big enough for three, so there was no justifiable reason for it anyway! No more talking about subjects that were inappropriate for someone her age - more specifically no more talking about sex. And under absolutely no circumstance was he going to let her drink again. Well, she could drink water and such. He wasn't going to mistreat her for something that was his fault. Alcohol, he mentally amended. She shouldn't be drinking alcohol.
His resolve to man up and actually have a talk with her about things - including that she shouldn't be kissing him because she was so much younger than him, and apologize for making her think she had to - lasted all through his robotic engineering class and the entire bus ride back to the stop closest to his apartment.
And finally, he broke.
The fear of facing her - or worse, getting back to discover she'd already fled - overwhelmed him and he lost conscious control of his muscles. He found himself turning on his heel and walking in the opposite direction.
The library wasn't a place he usually preferred to go on his own, books weren't really something he enjoyed all things considered, but that's where he wound up. Climbing the stairs he considered that if he picked out a movie and forced himself to go back right away then… then maybe he wasn't hiding from her like a coward.
A wave of instant regret hit him the moment he opened the door. Did she ever go home? Drew wondered as he spied Paige Fisley working the desk. Again.
Shea had teased him about being oblivious to her flirting with him, but that wasn't quite the truth. And her attempt to use him hadn't been as simple as mere flirtations.
He tried to slip around the corner before she could spot him, but he was too slow and she squealed his name so loud that several people shushed. Don't shush the shusher! At least that stray thought made him snicker, even if turning to face her made every part of him feel queasy. He could imagine Shea rolling her eyes and telling him to just ignore her if he really disliked her that much, but she wasn't capable of being nearly as loud as the imaginary voice of his mother, reminding him how impolite it is to ignore someone - especially a lady.
He forced himself to offer a small wave. That was precisely the wrong thing to do. It prompted her to step out from behind the desk and damn near skip over to him.
"What can I do you for, Drew-doll?" she asked, linking her arm through his before he could stop her.
If only he could force his attraction for Shea onto Paige, he thought, things would be okay. Then Shea could stay, and he wouldn't have to have a terrifying conversation with her about already uncomfortable subjects, because the problem of his attraction to her would be gone. And maybe the memory of the night he'd finally realized why Paige had seemed so excessively nice wouldn't make his tummy turn anymore.
As it was, the memory overwhelmed him at her touch, clogging his throat and making his vision go funny. Or was the phrase "vision go fuzzy"? He wasn't sure and at the moment he didn't have the mental capacity to consider the difference.
He'd been thrilled to work on a project with her when the assignment was first given. She always sat next to him, whispering to him during class. While the distraction wasn't always appreciated, it was nice to not be completely alone in at least one of his classes. During the late nights they spent in the lab and typing at respective computers her usual niceness got dialed up too far for him to like anymore, but he couldn't quite place why. All of a sudden she seemed inclined to touch him whenever possible, attempting to massage his shoulders until he shrugged out of her touch, or twirling his hair between her fingers, her face unnecessarily close to his while they went over coding plans together.
He was too oblivious to what was happening to have realized he shouldn't invite her back to his dorm, but it had been late and the project had been due in a mere matter of hours. More stupidly, he had informed her that his roommate was out so they wouldn't have a problem working through the night.
Paige Fisley did not have the intention of working through the night.
An hour after they'd gotten to his dorm, and half an hour after Drew had given up trying to keep her from sitting pressed against his side despite how many times he'd shuffled away or reminded her she could sit on Bobby's bed, she'd brought up her twin brother, Darren. Darren Fisley, who was at the very bottom of Drew's class for lack of effort alone. He'd apologized to her, but confessed he could do nothing about his grade, even if they were there on a joint scholarship.
And that was his biggest mistake of the night, not that he knew it for another few hours. She brought him up again a few times, but he refused to do anything more than answer her the same way.
It was at about three in the morning that she finally stood off his bed, and he sighed, relieved at the removal of the ever-present feeling of her body so close to his.
"Are you sure there's nothing I can do to change your mind, Drew-doll?" she'd asked. Before he knew what was happening the part he'd been working on was ripped out of his hands, and her hands were… somewhere he most definitely wished they weren't.
He sputtered and stuttered and couldn't make himself tell her to stop, even as her rubbing her hand over him through his jeans made him so uncomfortable he wanted to cry. When she leaned in with her lips puckered, she slipped her hands inside his pants, and finally, he gathered enough sense to push her away from him. She shouted at him, all kinds of horrible sounding names he'd never heard before, and stormed out. He'd locked the door behind her, pushing a chair under the handle for good measure.
In class the next morning, she'd acted completely back to the way she was normally, which made him feel all the more unsettled. He didn't sleep well until after his request to transfer to the Tuesday/Thursday class was approved.
"Well, Drew-Drew?" Paige asked lightly, pulling on his arm and graciously enough, out of the memory of her touching him somewhere a little lower. "Looking for something special?"
"No," he choked out and jerked his arm from her grip. "I was just going to pick up a movie for Shea," he lied, noticing the way her eyes narrowed as he mentioned his runaway pest of a roommate, "but actually I think I already have it, so I'll be leaving now."
His mother would kill him for not saying goodbye, but Mother wasn't there and he no longer cared about being polite to Paige.
Racing back out the door, he hated himself just a little bit more. If Shea were to do what Paige had… he would probably beg her to keep going. Why couldn't he want Paige? She was a few years older than himself, and she certainly wasn't ugly, and he'd been quite fond of her collection of science pins. And maybe she really was attracted to him! So why did he have to find her touch so revolting?
Stronger than he had all day, he suddenly wanted nothing more than to just… be with Shea. And, he realized with an undue amount of pride, he wasn't even thinking that in a creepy way. He just wanted to get home, and do his work, and have her sit with him reading her book, and simply exist in the same space as her for a little while. And, he reminded himself, slowing his rushed pace back to his apartment, eventually have a chat with her.
It was a little less than halfway back that he spied an all too familiar Mighty Martian t-shirt on an all too familiar runaway superhero with an insane monetary reward promised to anyone who helps force her back to her old life. He'd spent half the day worrying that she might have run off before he got back home, but now that he actually spotted her outside the apartment, the only thing he felt was a shocking wave of fury at how stupid she was being. Didn't she realize how many people would do terrible things for money? Didn't she realize that included selling her back to her family?
Her face was broadcast on every other news channel, and front page on every paper, and there she was… out for a jog as if the world had never hurt her before.
Drew bolted across the street in hopes of reaching her and making - politely asking - her quit being stupid and get back inside before someone saw her. He didn't think much about how she might react to having her arm grabbed as she jogged (very quickly) past someone. Especially how she might react because he hadn't thought to say something to give her some indication of who he was before he touched her.
In one fraction of a second, too fast to comprehend, his fingers wrapped around her arm, and the ground disappeared from beneath his feet.