a/n-THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT. a) Sorry for the really long chapter. b) I forgot to accredit the inspiration for this stupid story to Hum Hallelujah(Fall Out Boy) and Coco(Gregory and the Hawk). What do those two songs have to do with Harvar and Jackie? . . . um, nothing. :) Enjoy.
Two-Harvar Freaks Out Over Wrinkles
Light danced in through the window, and for a second I was absolutely terrified.
An extremely male voice groaned as if just waking up, making my terror complete. My eyes closed against the appearance of the bedroom I didn't recognize and I involuntarily muttered something to the like of, "dear Death, tell me I'm dreaming."
Something creaked, and I opened my eyes again to see someone getting out of a bed opposite mine. His head was down, but I recognized the dark blue waffle-weave shirt. "Harvar?"
He turned his head to look down at me. "Oh. You're here." He sounded about as excited about that as I felt. I sat up and clutched the blanket of the bed to my (thankfully)clothed chest. "What the hell happened?"
He shrugged, which I was coming to see as his default answer to everything, and started rummaging through the drawers of a clothes chest. I looked around, realizing that I was in the dorm room that he shared with Ox. It was the first time I'd been there without Kim around to act as a buffer; even if I hadn't been in Ox's bed, I would have been freaked out.
"Did we have sex?" I blurted out, hoping that Harvar wouldn't be his usual nonverbal self about answering.
He froze almost comically, entire body going stiff before he deliberately laid down the shirt he was picking out, closed the dresser drawer, and said, "No." The slam of wood against wood punctuated his reply.
I did a quick scan of my clothes and body-everything seemed in order, so I guessed he was telling the truth. Well, duh. Harvar was about as sexual as a geranium. And I was in a different bed from him. What can I say-I jump to the worst conclusions.
"The last thing I remember is crying," I hinted, hoping to garner some kind of explanation about, oh, I don't know, what I was doing in his room.
Harvar nodded absently. He was holding a plastic clothes hanger up to eye level and slipping it through the collar of the t-shirt in his other hand. While I watched, he pulled a tiny pink bag out from under his bed and unzipped it.
I guessed that was all I was going to get for the time being. Oh, well. It wasn't like I was actually expecting answers out of Tall, Dark, and Chronically Stoic.
Harvar took two pink plastic things out of the bag-one was shaped like a pot, with a handle and a mouth like a water bottle without its cap, and the other looked the the head of an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner, the kind with the hose. Harvar disappeared into an adjoining room that I guessed was the bathroom, and came back with the pot filled about half-way with water. Then he screwed the vacuum-head onto the bottle top and attached a power cord to the bottom. He then plugged the whole thing in.
My curiosity got the better of me. "What is that?"
"Miss Housewife Portable Steamer," he replied. With a straight face, I might add. "Ox got it for Christmas from his mother."
"What does it do?"
Just then, the-what was it? Miss Housewife something-it started making a keening noise like a pot coming to a boil. Steam poured from the vacuum head, and Harvar held his shirt up by the hanger with one hand while, with the other, he ran the steamer over the fabric. "It's like an iron," he explained, apparently more talkative about his cleaning supplies than, say, why he dragged hapless crying girls to his bed(which sounds really bad when I put it that way).
I wanted to laugh. There was something about badass Harver, wielding that tiny pink steamer as if it was his only hope against a world full of wrinkled clothing, that just struck me as hilarious. What was next-a ruffled apron? I snorted at the idea of Harvar in the getup of a 1950s housewife, and fell back into the bed to muffle any further chuckles with my pillow before he noticed and took offense.
The sheets smelled like Ox, which sobered me up right away. There's nothing more of a turn-off than your best friend's boyfriend's cologne. Trust me-it's gross. And as soon as that dawned on me, I realized that this was Ox's bed and he very well might have been making out with Kim on it. And stuff.
I sat up quickly, resisting the urge to bolt out the door and take a shower in bleach. "Seriously, how did I get here?"
Harvar said abruptly at the same time, "Take off your clothes."
"What?" I shrieked, before remembering I was in the boys' dorms and likely to get both of us in trouble if I raged in indignant fury quite so loud. My ears were probably steaming, though; I know that my fingers scorched tiny holes in the sheets, like ten identical cigarette burns.
Cigarettes. I would have died for a smoke right then.
Harvar gave an impatient sigh. "Not all of them." He brandished the steamer at me. "Or do you want it to be immediately obvious that you're wearing the same thing that you did yesterday?"
Oh. Right. I slid out of bed and eyed my jeans and tank top. They weren't really wrinkled. "How about I just borrow one of your shirts? Because, really, aside from the tank nobody would be able to tell."
He sighed again. "Ox would know."
"It would be for, like, half and hour," I promised. "Just long enough for me to run to my dorm and lie to-explain to Kim what happened." Which he still hadn't fully explained and I still couldn't fully remember. I just remember a lot of crying, and the feeling that I was somewhere quiet and safe.
He dug around in his drawers for a long while until he pulled out a red button-down shirt, which he insisted on steaming before giving to me. Well, "insisted" implies that he actually said something about it-really he just did it, impervious to my eye-rolling and foot-tapping. I found my shoes, lined up neatly at the foot of the bed, and put them on while I was waiting. Finally, he handed the now-crisp shirt over with apparent reluctance.
It was only then that something registered in my mind. "Where is Ox, anyway?" I looked around, ridiculously, as if he was hiding under a pile of magazines or in the laundry hamper.
"It's Saturday," Harvar said, like that explained everything. I gave him a look, and he elaborated, acting like I was wasting his precious time. "He stays with his parents on the weekends." He paused, then added, "Sometimes." As if that distinction was important.
"Oh." I opened the door a crack and surveyed the hallway. It was mostly empty, but I didn't like the look of a couple of the first-year boys at the end of the hall.
"You could creep out the window," Harvar suggested, and I jumped. He had been so quiet when approaching me that I hadn't noticed any movement or sensed his presence. Now he was standing behind me, close enough to peer over my head and out the door. If I stepped back just once, I would be pressed against his chest, feeling the same muscles that had been my sounding board last night. My body flooded with heat.
Ugh. What was wrong with me? I had a perfectly good boyfriend, and there I was checking out the last person on earth who would be interested in me, and the last person that I should be interested in, as well. I mean, dating your best friend's boyfriend's best friend is super-tacky and reserved solely for girls in Barbie movies who have double weddings with their sisters.
Then I realized something else, and the surprise was enough to make me whirl around, proximity or not, and jab a finger at Harvar's chest. "You just made a joke, didn't you?"
He ignored me. "Just act like you came over extremely early in the morning."
"Because that's normal."
No answer. Harvar walked away from me, stripping off yesterday's shirt without compunction. He'd probably forgotten, already, that I was there.
I hadn't, and I quickly clicked the door shut again, leaning against it to prevent some curious boy from coming in at the wrong time and getting the wrong idea. I slipped Harvar's shirt on over my tank top and brushed my fingers through my hair while watching him put on deodorant, change clothes, and comb his hair out of my peripherals-and no, I wasn't peeking at his abs. Much.
Finally, Harvar came over and opened the door, holding it wide so that there was no chance of either of us ducking back into the room out of cowardice. He looked expectantly at me.
Oookaaay.
It took me a long five seconds to realize that he was holding the door open for me. Whoops. I slipped out, glad to see that the boys were gone, and started walking purposefully down the hall, composing my story in my head if I was stopped by anyone. I'd woken up early-really early-just dying to figure out this assignment that I didn't understand. I'd come to ask Ox for help, but he wasn't there, and then-
"Jackie." It was probably the first time that I'd heard Harvar say my name-my actual, friend-given name, not the impersonal "Jacqueline". I wasn't really prepared for the way my stomach lurched. I would have been cool with him, if he weren't so damn scary, and didn't have such a damn scary voice to go along with it.
I half-turned. "What? You want my number?"
Naturally, the joke went over his head. "I already have your number. You're going the wrong way," he told me, jerking his head towards the other end of the hall, where a giant picture window had fooled me into thinking it was just a dead end. On closer inspection, the hall veered to the right.
"Oh." I reversed direction, and when I passed him, he fell into step with me.
If I'd expected conversation, I would have been disappointed. I wasn't really in a chipper talky mood, anyway, so things were kind of dead as Harvar led me out of the boys' dorms.
The courtyard between the two dorm buildings hadn't filled up with students yet; it was too early on a Saturday for most teenagers to have emerged from their cocoons of blankets an pillows. I thought wishfully on my own bed and, before Harvar could disappear to wherever freak jobs with no life disappear to, I asked again, as casually as I could manage, "So, what happened last night, anyway?"
Pause. Then, levelly, "You were upset."
No, really, Sherlock? I thought that I had just been yelling at him because I enjoyed it. Which I did, but that's besides the point.
"I'm just trying to figure out how I ended up in Ox's bed!" I snapped. I'd forgotten that it was best to be direct when dealing with literal-minded Harvar.
"Oh." If I didn't know better, I would have sworn that his ears were turning red. But impassive rock walls of people don't have emotions like embarrassment. "You fell asleep."
Yeah, I had guessed that. What I wanted to know was why he hadn't brought me to my own dorm like any sane person would have. Whatever. I shook my head, let it go, and said, "Thanks."
But he was already gone.
You can bet that Kim bombarded me with questions, not the least of which was my fashion choices. Away from her boyfriend, her nicey-nicey behavior was officially off, and she was back to her usual(hardcore)self.
"You better still be a virgin!" was her opening line, just seconds after I slipped into our room.
I sighed, having expected as much, and rolled my eyes. "Yes, Kim, I am." It was ironic, how concerned she was over my virginity when her own was so questionable; but whenever I brought that up, she had a tendency to hit me with whatever was in her hand at the time. Since she was, at that moment, holding her Pre-Calc book, I didn't risk commenting that morning.
I unbuttoned the shirt, too concerned with fending off my best friend's wave of nosy questions to associate the funny feeling in my heart with reluctance to be rid of the garment. Wearing it, it felt like I belonged to someone, like I had a part of them-but it didn't really mean anything. Harvar and I were barely acquaintances.
"-and where did you get that?" Kim wound down the tirade that I hadn't really been listening to and pointed at the shirt now tossed carelessly on my bed.
"It's Harvar's." I said, mock cool, knowing that it would drive her nuts.
It did.
"Whaaaat?!" Her shriek was heard in China, I'm sure. "You slept with Harvar?"
"For crying out loud-I didn't sleep with anyone! Is that all you ever think about?!" I shrieked back, and we both clammed up, waiting to see if the dorm head-a fat and bad-tempered woman who was jealous of pretty much all of her charges-would come hollering at us to 'shut the 'ell up b'cause she needed 'er beauty rest, dammit!'.
"Well, why do you have it, then?" Kim asked, once it became apparent that we had escaped the Wrath Of The Mud-Masked Matron.
I sat on the bed. To explain would mean to tell her that I had fallen asleep crying, which I only did when I was really upset, and then she would want to know why, and once she knew why she would be angry with me for not telling her earlier that I had a boyfriend, and she would slip in another lecture on virginity because she wouldn't believe that I hadn't gone into the hotel with him, and all in all it would be a helluva big deal over something that was really small small small, and so-I lied.
It was simple to do, actually. "After you and Ox ran off into the sunset, Harvar and I started talking. Arguing, really, and I got so upset that I tried to jump him. He knocked me out by accident-in self defense!" I hastened to add, seeing her gear up for a weapon-hunt. "He felt bad, but he didn't want to have to explain to our frankly scary matron what he'd done so he took me back to his room. Sweet and all, but you know guys; totally clueless. He didn't realize that people would think . . . would think what you did, about us being together. So I swiped one of his shirts in an effort to pretend that I'm wearing different clothes and dashed over here."
"Poor thing," Kim sympathized. "Did it hurt?"
"Did wh-Kim, I didn't sleep with him!" I snapped.
"I meant being knocked out, you pervy idiot!" she yelled back. "You're lying, aren't you?! You slept with him!"
There was no winning.
For breakfast, we went down to the outdoor pavilion where a lot of students ate their meals; there was a snack shack up against the near wall, and the rest of the enclosed area was full of iron-wrought table-and-chair sets, patio umbrellas, and intricate stonework.
"So, Ox is gone," Kim finally wound down after forty straight minutes of talking, taking a giant bite of eggs and bacon.
"I know." I was eating a bowl questionable oatmeal that morning, too busy trying to decide if the gray lumps were raisins or moth larvae to check my words. "He went to his parents', right?"
Kim gave me a suspicious look. "How do you know that?"
I shrugged, caught revealing more than I probably should have. "Harvar told me."
Kim slanted her eyes at me, tilting up her chin, her mouth tightening. One eyebrow inched its skeptic way up to her hairline. "Riiiight. You and Harvar are best buds now," she said archly. "Explain that to me."
"It's nothing." I peeled the top off of a container of yogurt. "Nothing to explain."
"Mm-hmm." She was totally unconvinced. That's the problem with having a best friend who knows you back to front; your lies never work half as well as you want them to, unless you don't want them to. If that makes sense. "Jacks, you never get upset enough to attack someone. Ever. He must have really gotten under your skin for you to go off on him. Or is something else the matter?"
"Everything's fine," I lied firmly. "Except that this oatmeal is lumpy, Harvar is an asshole, and there are children starving in Africa."
"And China," Kim reminded me, and pulled my bowl over to examine its contents. "Is this brain tissue?"
My stomach turned over, and I set aside my yogurt. "I'm not hungry anymore. What do you want to do today?"
"Do?" she echoed, and a faintly lost look drifted over her features. "My God, I have no idea. Without Ox around to screw up our plans-what's the point?"
I was dying to point out that, once, the point would have been that she actually wanted to make plans with me, not just make up fictional trips so that he would get moony and expatiate(SAT word, yay!)on how much he loved her. Instead, I just said, "Why don't we go shopping? It's been ages since we've been to that place . . . what's-it-called . . . remember? Uh-" I snapped my fingers as it came back to me, "Year-Round Christmas! That's it!" We'd found it our first year at Shibusen; the weirdest little thrift shop, dedicated to selling nothing but Christmas items year-round. As you might have guessed from the name.
"Um . . . I don't know . . ." Kim said slowly. "I was sort of hoping . . ." she blushed, and stopped there.
"Hoping that Ox would call?" I guessed dryly. I hated sharing Kim with a boyfriend; but it made it easy to guess what she was thinking because it was always something unbearably soppy.
"S-sorry," she mumbled sheepishly, fiddling with her napkin. "I know this isn't like me."
"It really isn't. I miss being the Badass Sisters." I piled the remains of our breakfast onto a tray and stood up. "Tell you what. We'll have a girl's day in-rent some movies, eat popcorn and ice cream until we're sick, and stay up so late, we're going to bed tomorrow. Sound good?"
"Sounds good." Kim smiled at me, though it looked a little forced. I guessed that she really missed Ox.
"Okay. I'm going to run an errand-you pick out, like, ten movies from the common room. I'll get the food on my way back," I instructed.
"Captain, my Captain!" Kim saluted, looking a little more like her perky self, and then giggled. "Ox does such a good impression of that-you should see-he looks just like-" She kept babbling on, even as I walked off(which, yes, was a jerk move, but I had places to go!).
I dumped the tray in the cafeteria and headed up to our room, swiping Harvar's shirt from the bed. I had to return it before anything else; and return any weird feelings along with it.
It was just that he was nice, I thought as I crossed the green once more. Nice-ish, anyway. Nice compared to Alan, who was a teensy-weensy bit of a bully sometimes. It was just that he was a guy who wasn't a total idiot, didn't want to go out with me, and said that Alan was a jerk for pressuring me into having sex.
I knocked on Harvar's door, feeling silly and self-conscious. Boys were staring; whispering; and one whistled. Just as the door opened, I saw Alan turn the corner-shit!-and I quickly dived into the room, pushing Harvar out of the way so that I could slam the door shut.
"Whew!" I sighed, and then noticed that I had unintentionally shoved him so hard that he had landed on his ass and was now glaring up at me.
"You do have the prettiest eyes," I told him, hoping that he would forget that I'd just body checked him. "Don't know why you wear glasses all the time."
"Why are you here?" he asked, apparently not in the mood to be appeased. I held up his shirt, which was balled up in my sweaty fist; he made a face. I could almost see how disgusted he was by the wrinkles.
"You could have handed it to me and walked away," was all that he said, though whether it was out of politeness or because he had given up trying to get me to be neat, I didn't know. I shrugged sheepishly. "I, uh, saw my boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. Alan." I wasn't actually sure if we were broken up or not-all I knew was that I didn't want him seeing me going into another guy's room the day after we'd broken up. I would be labeled the school slut for the rest of my life.
"So you hid?" Harvar raised one eyebrow. He really was excellent at saying the most obvious things as if they were absurd.
"Yes, I hid!" I snapped. "I didn't want to see him, and I wanted to give your stupid shirt back so, here!" I threw it at him; it unfolded in midair and draped itself across his torso. "It's back!"
He just stared at me, totally unimpressed. He made no move to get up from the floor.
"Don't look at me like that! I'm really pissed right now!" The more he didn't talk, the greater an urge I had to fill the silence with words; not because I had to, but because I could. Unlike Kim, who always listened to my stories ready to pepper me with questions and interjections, he just let me ramble on, even when I was making an idiot of myself. "My best friend's so freaking obsessed with her boyfriend that she won't even leave her room when he's gone in case he calls, and we never go out just the two of us anymore except on missions, and even on those Ox manages to come along. And now my boyfriend is really being a major jerk but if I dump him, he's going to go around telling everyone that I'm a freshman slut, which is so totally wrong but that's what he says about all of his exes, and I just wanted to give you your dumbass shirt back and for crying out loud, what respectable teenage boy keeps a portable steamer in their room?! You aren't supposed to care about wrinkles!"
I threw up my hands and leaned back against the door, looking at Harvar. "Nothing?" I asked. "No comment?"
"You'll just tell me to shut up," he observed.
"Damn straight. Want a smoke?" I climbed over him to his bed, which was surprisingly still unmade, and cracked open the window so that I wouldn't get him in trouble.
"Is this going to become a habit?" he asked as I lit up.
"Is what?" I replied, around a mouthful of blissful nicotine.
"You being in my bed." He got up from the floor, letting his shirt fall away, forgotten(the shirt I'd thrown, not the one he was wearing. What kind of scenario do you think this is?), and sat next to me on the bed, leaning one elbow on the windowsill as he took a cigarette from me.
"If it is, I'm making you bring your own smokes," I said, and blew a stream of it in his direction. This time, he didn't cough as he inhaled, just closed his eyes as though indulging himself. "I shouldn't let you encourage my bad habits," he murmured.
"What will you let me encourage?" I asked, grinning. It had been too long since I'd talked like that-just easily trading words back and forth, not delving into the logistics of hair gel or what Ox meant when he said "I'll call you".
Harvar held my gaze for a second longer than necessary, and stopped throwing the ball back to me. We smoked in silence for the second time in eight hours. If this was going to be a habit, I considered, it wasn't a bad one. As long as he kept his mouth shut, I could forget that he was a horrible excuse for a human being that had run my meister through with a sword and didn't even have the decency to apologize-and, worse, had been a total jerk to me after I'd just had a fight with Alan.
I finished one cigarette, and was reaching for another when Harvar stopped me, his larger hand guiding my wrist away from the pack with surprising gentleness. "It's a bad habit," he explained when I looked askance. "And I don't want to be an enabler."
"Enabler." I rolled the word around in my mouth, enjoying the feel. "I think I like you as an enabler, Harvar. Enable me to be selfish. And a crybaby. And a smoker." Talking nonsense again; it was my favorite language. For some reason, my companion's eyes were fixated on my wrists as I waved my hands around languidly. I love to gesture while I talk.
"Why?" Harvar asked quietly, still following the movements of my hands.
I sighed, and leaned on the windowsill. "Because it makes me feel . . ." Special? Loved? "important."
If I didn't know better, I would have sworn that the corner of his mouth turned up, ever so slightly, in a smile. "You aren't important," he said.
"You're horrible," I said.
He leaned forwards, towards me, taking the pack of cigarettes from my hand. "And terrible."
"And terrible," I agreed. "I'm beginning to think that you get off on it."
He held my gaze for a second. And smiled.
Like some magic spell, it turned him from an ugly, cranky, pedantic, overgrown lightning rod into something gorgeous, untouchable. He barely even looked like Harvar.
"Oh . . ." I think I swore, probably, but it was barely audible. The sun coming in through the open window turned his skin golden. His eyes were brown. Everything filtered into my brain as though through a camera, each moment a separate picture.
"Jackie?" His voice was rough, as if he already knew what was going on but was doing his best to pretend that we weren't totally having a "moment".
I seized his face in both of my hands and kissed him. It was crazy stupid, but I did, and the only thing that shocked me more was that he actually kissed me back; fiercely, restlessly, forceful in a way that neither surprised nor threw me. This wasn't some idiot of a third-year boy. This was Harvar, and nothing he said or did could hurt me, because I didn't care what he thought.
That's what I told myself, anyway.
He pulled away from me briefly, grabbing my hands and pressing kisses down my wrists. His mouth was hot, his tongue sliding across my skin in a way that didn't exactly seem orthodox. I was regretting that last cigarette; it was hard enough already to breathe without smoke clogging the air; and then he returned to my mouth, filling me with the scent of ivory soap and Marlboros and salty skin cells.
I freed my hands from his grip, cupping his face, pulling him closer, pulling myself closer, too, until we were two beings occupying the same space, and his fingers dug into my thighs, and mine gripped his shoulders, and I suddenly realized what was going to happen next.
And that, no matter how quickly it was going down, I didn't want to stop.
I somehow had enough thought left to work the hair tie out of his black locks; that was when he seemed to realize it, too, because he gasped into my mouth, less than stoic for once, and slid one arm around my waist. He was shaking, actually shaking-well, so was I. I bunched up the fabric of his shirt, pulling at it; and he left me at once, moving away so fast that I was sure he was about to order me out. Instead, he stripped off his shirt and looked down at me, black hair cascading around his face. There was a question in his pretty eyes.
I nodded.