Chapter Text
Georgie hadn’t had the best first year of university. Year and a half, really, but she'd barely managed to finish the first semester.
But it was January, a year later, and she was picking her education back up. All her old classmates and friends were the year above her now, and she was being thrown into a new class, but the English department wasn’t small, so it wasn’t like everyone knew everyone by their first year anyway.
She walked in for the first class and took a seat next to a mostly-nondescript guy; half-long hair, nice trousers and a button down, but then a leather jacket over all of it. “Hi.” She smiled. “I’m Georgie.”
“Jon.” He returned her smile, but he also looked like she’d startled him. “Sorry, I didn’t see you.”
“No worries. Hey, who’s teaching this year? It was supposed to be Dr. Alcott last year, but I hear she retired.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Jon turned back to his book. “I don’t know, really, I haven’t checked.”
“Yeah, me either.” Georgie pulled out her own book. “By the way, which edition is this? If they’ve updated it I’m gonna riot.”
“Uhh…” Jon checked the title page of his book. “Eighteenth.”
“Thank God.” Georgie laughed. “I took a year out,” she clarified. “But I had time to buy my books for this semester last year.”
“I doubt there’d be many updates in just one year.” Jon smiled, but didn’t stop reading; Georgie could see his eyes moving even while he spoke. “Frankly this reads like it hasn’t been updated in a decade at least.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.” They were early, Georgie suddenly realised; the auditorium was only then beginning to fill. “Say, how did you like the first semester?”
“It was fine." Jon shrugged. "What about you?"
"Alright. Not the most interesting thing that's ever happened, but it's the first year of university."
"Yes, it really is." Jon actually looked up from his books to smile at her. "How come you took a year out?"
"I got sick." It was a practiced response. "Had to take a few months out, and at that point a whole year just seemed smarter."
"Makes sense."
The class started and both Jon and Georgie turned their attention to the lecturer. Well, Jon seemed to; Georgie kept half her attention on him. He was odd, seemed like he was likely to be a bit of a twat, but also just incredibly weird . Given her track record with Alex and the dead woman the year before, becoming immediately fascinated with the weird guy in her new class was probably not smart, and she should just go track down her old classmates for lunch.
When the class ended, Georgie was about to leave, but a hand on her shoulder stopped her. "Georgie?" It was Jon, of course. "Lunch on me?" He was smiling again, and had actually put his book away, and honestly, Georgie hadn't kept in touch with anyone at uni after leaving, so might as well make new friends.
She smiled back. "Oh, sure, thanks." She hitched up her back. "Any preferences on where to go?"
"Not really, but since you've gone here for longer you probably know more about what's here than I do." Jon led the way out of the auditorium. "But I normally just drink coffee."
"Instead of eating?" Georgie laughed. "Alright then coffee boy, I know where to go."
She led him to a coffee shop that she used to go to with Alex and let him buy her a sandwich and himself a coffee and took a seat. They chatted a bit about life — he was from Bournemouth, apparently, and had grown up with his grandmother and was, apparently, studying English because he didn't entirely know what to do with his life. She wasn't quite sure she believed that one; he seemed far too focused for any 18-year-old, let alone one who didn't know what to spend his life on. But he was nice enough, she supposed, and he seemed genuinely interested in her answers and, unlike literally any other boy she'd hung out with in the past year, he didn't flirt with her. Or maybe he did and it was just so badly that she didn't realise, but she'd find out soon enough, and until then, she was happy to be friends with him.
She had a literature class after lunch and he had… Something, she didn't quite catch it, so they said their goodbyes and moved on.
Jon was in several of her classes, so Georgie used him as a safety net and went and sat with him every time she saw him over the next few weeks. She was grateful that he seemed to seek her out as well, and every Monday, they'd go eat lunch together. Or well, Georgie would eat lunch, Jon would drink coffee. She saw him eat exactly once over the course of six weeks, and that was when he stole one of the starbursts she'd brought to class.
By the time they hit mid-March, she knew exactly four things about Jon: he was from Bournemouth, he'd grown up with his grandmother (not that she knew why, he was evasive about his parents), he drank his coffee black, and he could never read the same book twice. From observation she gathered that he didn't really have friends other than her, and sure, he was kind of insufferable, but he was nice enough and he listened . He listened to her talk about how hard it was to reconnect with her old classmates, and how hard it was to come into an established dynamic where everyone else had found their friends, and he was sympathetic to it all in a way she wasn't quite used to. So she liked him.
They paired up for their project, and it was fine. Georgie saw him eat, for once, when he went to her flat for dinner and work one evening.
It was that evening that Jon finally said something more involved than politeness or talking about schoolwork. "This is a nice flat," he said while they were eating. "I'm getting sick of student flats, it's so quiet here."
Georgie laughed at him a little. "Yeah, it's nice. Mind you, flats like this, you need to get a flatmate, and it's not nearly as quiet when Madeline is home."
"Yeah, I can imagine." Jon laughed. "But still, I have flatmates too, not nice ones mind you, and not ones I chose." He shook his head. "They're mostly okay, but Beckett has his girlfriend over almost every night…"
"Oh yeah that's rough." Georgie laughed with him, though a lot louder. "You could always give as good as you get." She didn't really mean anything by it, but she noticed the way Jon froze. "Or I guess that's hard without a girlfriend."
"Or with," Jon said, visibly relaxing. "Sorry, I just… Don't really—"
"Yeah that's fine," Georgie interrupted, probably too quickly. "It wasn't meant— Just a joke, that's all."
"Oh. Well." He sighed. "It's hard to tell."
"Of course." Georgie smiled. "Hey, I meant to ask, reading week is next week, are you gonna stay here?"
"Yeah, why do you ask?"
"Oh, Madeline is out, she's going with her boyfriend somewhere, so we can do work here instead of the library." She nodded to his plate, already empty. "I can make you dinner again, looks like you need real food."
"Thanks, but I can cook." He sounded just slightly affronted.
"You can, but do you?"
"No," he admitted, smiling slightly. "No, not much. My grandmother always cooked at home."
"What about your parents?" She'd never asked that directly, but she couldn't say she hadn't been curious.
"They're dead." Jon shrugged and reached for his glass. "Please don't say you're sorry."
"Alright, I won't."
"Thanks." He smiled. "I was very young and don't really remember them, so the real tragedy is my grandmother."
"How so?"
"I don't think she was really meant to have children, and certainly not to be handed a preschooler. She did her best, I'm sure, but…"
"Yeah, I know." Georgie smiled. "This past year, my parents haven't exactly been… Well. It was hard for them to understand."
"I thought you were out sick?"
"I was, just… Brain stuff." She did a vague gesture, because Jon was the most reasonable, down-to-earth man she'd ever met, and if she said she'd been bedridden with stress because she'd seen a corpse talk and then lost her ability to feel fear, well. She didn't think he'd want to hang out with her, and she liked hanging out with him.
He smiled softly. "Bit too early to university, then?"
She laughed. "Yeah, I suppose so." It was an easier explanation. "It's going better this year."
"I'm glad." The smile was sincere enough, she figured, but Jon could do with learning tonal emphasis.
Between lack of fear and poor impulse control, Georgie often said the wrong thing. "You know, when you say things that flatly it just sounds sarcastic."
Jon raised an eyebrow. "I'm… Glad?" Tone, sure, but hesitant. "No, judging from your face that's not good either. I'm glad."
"There we go." She laughed a little. "Sorry, I just… I don't know. I don't make friends easy."
"Me either." Jon shook his head. "Are you done eating? I'll do the dishes."
"You don't have to."
"Least I could do, you cooked." Jon got up and grabbed their plates and went to the sink. "And while I do the dishes, you can read over the assignment brief so you know where we're supposed to start."
She laughed. "So that's it, huh," she teased, but she went and got her folder and read through it.