Chapter Text
It had been nearly four months since Erwin had broken up with his girlfriend of nearly a year and a half. Looking back now, over his third or fourth or sixth beer of the evening (and, really, who was counting?) he thought that quite possibly he should have seen it coming. The college acceptances had come in, and they'd both been thrilled at the time to be going to the same university, had made plans about rushing co-ed service fraternities and about what dorms they would stay in and what classes and recitation sections they would have together. They'd been excited, but, as he mulled over the Natty Ice that was currently numbing the palm of his hand, they'd also been young and foolish. He tipped the contents of the can back into his mouth, grimacing against the piercing chill of the bubbles of carbonation at the back of his throat.
She'd found someone else in her organic chemistry lab, had found someone who 'understood' her better, she'd claimed to Erwin when he'd confronted her about the text he'd seen coming in on her mobile. "Let's face it," she'd told him, hands on her hips as she shooed him out of her apartment. "We're just not the same people we were in high school, anymore, Erwin."
His friends had taken him to his first frat party that night and poured drink after drink down his throat until he'd been laughing giddily up at the way the bright white stars punctured the velvet overcoat of the midnight sky above them. Until their faces blurred into one, and the music became a pounding bass line in his head, until somehow he'd managed to slot his key into the lock of his apartment door at around four-thirty AM, a girl whose face and whose name he couldn't remember clinging to his arm and giggling, tottering around in stilettos that seemed far too delicate to be walking around in.
He'd woken up the next morning, his mouth dry, his tongue swollen and fuzzy in his mouth, and a sharp pain located directly behind his eyes. She had still been asleep, her head pillowed on her arm, turned away from Erwin in the far-too-small extra-long twin bed, and her chocolate hair covered any features of her face that he might have been able to make out in the early afternoon sunlight that seemed to be shining too brightly into his bedroom. His roommate was nowhere to be seen, his bed uncrumpled and obviously unslept in, and Erwin had about three seconds to feel guilty before a rush of nausea had overwhelmed him, and, stumbling over her shoes, he'd staggered to the bathroom to empty the contents of his stomach into the toilet.
And while that had all been very well and good, Erwin felt horrible about it. When he really and truly felt like guilt-tripping himself, he would muse over their states of inebriation and the issues of consent and alcohol-influenced decisions. He hadn't been able to find any physical evidence of purported sexual activity, no stains on the sheets, no telltale ripped foil corner off a rubber wrapper, not even the stale smell of sweat. And the girl, when she'd left, had said nothing, nursing her hangover with a cup of black coffee that Erwin so graciously provided, handing it to her without meeting her gaze, ashamed of his own behaviour.
He'd never seen her again, and even if he had, he wasn't sure he'd remember.
That bothered him, how he seemed to be losing parts of his life without realising it, but, then again, he thought to himself as he swallowed another mouthful of beer, revelling in the cool slick and burn down his throat, it was university, and university was a time for getting drunk and finding oneself in acid trips and maybe doing a bit of learning here and there.
And, if one was a business major, it was almost practically unavoidable. His classmates were all sociable, all had invites to the best ragers on the row, all had perfectly manageable fake IDs that would get them past even the most critically scrutinizing bouncers at the most exclusive clubs downtown. It had been all Erwin could do to adjust to the new lifestyle, but adjust he had, and every weekend of his now consisted of heading out at eleven thirty with a group of his friends, identical in dark button-down dress shirts and black jeans, exuding youth and perhaps not the wisest choices of aftershave.
After that first time, he'd made it a point to try his hardest not to leave with someone, but promises easily made are easily broken, and there had been a few weekends in the past few months where he'd woken up to an unfamiliar face, sometimes to unfamiliar sheets and unfamiliar posters decorating the white stucco walls of an unfamiliar apartment. Those particular mornings/early afternoons, he'd carefully disentangled himself from their limbs and had just as quietly left their apartments, a ghost weaving silently through their lives, never to be seen again.
During the week, he kept making promises to himself regarding his behaviour on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, swearing to himself that he would never wake up like this again, losing names and losing time and losing track of where he was. That he would never again find receipts for drunchies (drunk munchies) tucked behind his driver's licence in his wallet. That he would never have to leave someone's apartment with his hair smelling like Berry Blast Shampoo because his skin and hair had collected a film of grease and the scent of smoke overnight, and it had been absolutely intolerable. But of course, these things had a way of sneaking up on him and getting out of hand, and Erwin Smith no longer seemed to have the willpower or the desire to try and stop their advances.
But tonight, he'd definitely made a promise to his friend that he wouldn't bring anybody home; he had a month's worth of gas money riding on it, and his friend's car didn't exactly have the best mileage on the highway.
Catching sight of his friends out of the corner of his eye, Erwin unsteadily wended his way through the throngs of people over to them, smiling and clapping them on the back and slurring that he would see them in class on Monday. They nodded at him, grinning blankly, smiles of sticky sweet acerbic white, and he could just make out a tab of something crystalline already dissolving on one girl's tongue.
"Stay, Erwin!" she commanded him in a voice that trailed upwards at the edges, and the low lights of the house's backyard cast her pretty and beautiful and ethereal in a way that Erwin was only about 25% sure was due to the amount of alcohol currently running through his system. "You've got to stay, this is my favourite song!"
He laughed as she grabbed his wrist, tugging him down for a kiss; the half-dissolved tab passed between them and sent sparks up and down his tongue as he insistently tried - and failed - to press it back into her mouth. When he opened his eyes, he found that hers were a deep blue, the color of the ocean, and they mesmerized him with their hue, framed by long lashes and a constellation of freckles scattered across her cheeks like Orion, and he thought that perhaps, just for tonight, a bit of alcohol-fueled love was just what he needed to top it off.
He woke up the next morning in her apartment, his head pounding with remnants of the bass from last night, and he winced as he opened his eyes to a shaft of sunlight that peeked in through the dusty Venetian blinds of her bedroom. She wasn't in bed; the trickling sound of water running in a shower came from the other room, and reminded Erwin of the insistent pressure in his bladder. He turned his head, closed his eyes again and nestled back into the pillow, wondering if it would be worth it to continue to feign sleep and alleviate the growing headache at the base of his neck, or if he should just make a break for it now.
The bright chirp of a cellphone made him open his eyes again, fumbling around her desk with his left hand for his phone. He winced at the brightness of the phone screen as he swiped to unlock it, rubbing his bleary eyes with his free hand and blinking furiously a few times to clear his vision.
"Congratulations! You have a new match!" the screen read, the same notification filling the screen all the way down.
Perplexed, he tapped on the notification; another white screen came up, headlined with the picture of a smiling girl and her dog: 'With Affection, from the Tinder Team,' the note on the photograph said.
He wrinkled his nose. Tinder was commonplace among his colleagues and acquaintances and among the university population as a whole, but he'd somehow managed to avoid the temptation of downloading it, had even on his darkest and loneliest nights at least convinced himself that he didn't need to sink to that level quite yet. But secretly Erwin knew he was a hypocrite, knew that he'd already become quite well-versed in hookup culture through trial and error and many sessions of practiced, several of those only remembered at the very tail end of the occurrence. And, the German portion of his blood whispered to him now, at least this was a much more efficient and straightforward way of going about looking for a potential partner for a night.
The water dripped to a stop, and the bathroom door opened, releasing a haze of steam and the smell of something fruity and flowery. She came back into the bedroom, dressed in a tank top and a pair of shorts that seemed made of just enough material to cover the essential parts. Plopping herself down on the bed next to him, all clear-eyed and awake, he thought it positively criminal that one should exude such freshness the morning after a party.
"You don't remember my name, do you?" she asked, but she didn't look particularly upset about it; in fact, her eyes, seemingly violet in the ray of sunlight that fell across her face, twinkled with amusement. "It's alright. We didn't do anything other than introduce you to Tinder. You saw a notification on my phone and you demanded that I download it for you." She giggled in remembrance, the sound light and bubbly. "We almost got a noise complaint because you were very insistent in the people you wanted me to swipe right on for you; you said your thumbs weren't working."
She really was rather beautiful, Erwin thought to himself as she looked down at the mobile he held in his hand, her long dark lashes casting stick-thin shadows over her cheekbones.
"He's cute," she said, suddenly, nodding her head towards the person whose face filled his screen at the present moment. "Looks all dark and mysterious, probably just a touch of goth."
Erwin looked down, following her gaze. Levi, 20, less than 1 mile away, the words at the bottom proclaimed. The young man in the picture stared out at the two of them, storm grey eyes taking in the blonde heads curved together as they looked down at him. His thin lips were drawn together, curving up into a slight semblance of a smile that was more visible in the crinkle at the outer corners of his eyes.
"Let's swipe right," the girl suggested. "He looks interesting."
"Let's not," he muttered, already swiping his thumb left across the screen. Levi's picture disappeared, to be replaced by a redheaded girl blowing bubbles into the camera lens. "I'm not into guys."
The girl looked at him doubtfully, but he didn't catch the raise of her eyebrows or the questioning look in her eyes.
As if to prove something to her, he almost savagely swiped right on the redhead's picture, and the screen turned grey with the words, 'Congratulations! It's a match!' and, even as the app proclaimed their attractiveness to each other across the telephone wires, Erwin Smith made a mental note to himself that he would never, never ever talk with her. Or anyone else from the app, for that matter.
But, once again, promises easily made are promises easily broken, and university is a time for drinking and illegal substances and self-discovery.