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Danny met Maddy when she literally ran into him, spilling coffee everywhere and ruining the essay Danny stayed up all night to write. Danny had reached out instinctively, stopping the girl before she smashed headfirst into the ground. She shook her head and blinked up at him. She didn’t look old enough to be a student, but she had notebooks and that hapless look he sometimes saw freshmen wander around with.
“Late?” he asked, far kinder than he would normally.
The girl checked her watch and groaned, reaching up to shove her dark hair out of her face. “Not anymore,” she said bitterly.
Danny felt amusement spark under his skin. “Skipping by default?”
“Looks like it,” the girl said with forced cheer. She knelt and began picking up her scattered papers. Danny, ever the gentleman, bent to help her. “You? I ruined your homework, didn’t I?” She looked curiously at the matted paper still clutched in his hand.
He shrugged and balled it into a soggy lump. “Essay, actually, but whatever. Professor Mendoza doesn’t like me anyway.”
The girl snorted, flashing him a knowing grin. “Mendoza? From the Lit department? Yeah, I know, right? The guy’s a dick.” She shoved the majority of her papers into a folder and gathered herself together again.
Danny arched his eyebrows in surprise. Mendoza didn’t teach any freshmen courses, and he was notorious for doing his best to force the Kids These Days out of his classes. This girl, who had to be older than she looked, had to be, smirked at his shocked expression.
“I’m in his character development class,” she told him gleefully. “He didn’t want me, but the Dean made him. It was a glorious showdown.”
“How old are you?” Danny asked before his internal filter could kick in. He winced and wished he had the time to find a nice, private area to kick himself in. The girl, thankfully, didn’t look too offended, and maybe he should stop calling her ‘girl,’ even in his own head. “What’s your name?” he tacked on uselessly.
“I’m Maddy,” she said, rearranging her folders so that she could shake his hand without dropping them again.
“Danny,” he said, wincing at the almost-rhyme. Maddy just smiled at him, that halfway-infuriating cheer coating her like a thick layer of paint. Danny kind of wanted to peel it away and see what was hiding underneath.
“Hey, ah,” he said, thinking of his sudden hour of free time that had opened up in his schedule. “My essay is pretty much DOA, and you’ve passed whatever grace period your prof probably allows. You wanna get coffee?”
She was younger than him, probably by a lot, but she had interesting eyes and she was in one of Mendoza’s classes. Coffee wouldn’t hurt.
“Only if you buy me something to replace what you ruined,” she said after a slight moment of hesitation. She looked pointedly at the stained concrete below them, where her coffee was forming small brown puddles of caffeine.
“First one’s on me,” he said. He gentlemanly offered her his arm, and she graciously, and with much flare, accepted.
And that was the start of Maddy and Danny.
---
They met up once or twice a week. During that time, Danny learned that Maddy was: a double major in Drama and English, a scholarship student with two older brothers, a better writer than she thought she was, and nineteen fucking years old.
Danny, at the ripe old age of twenty-three and a half, felt like a pervert, even though all they did was hang out in pretentious coffee shops and pretend to study. In reality, it always ended with the pair of them talking excitedly about whatever Maddy was outlining in her notebook and discussing possible ways to break into Hollywood.
The first time he called her Mads, they had been hanging out for almost two months. Midterms were barely passed, and neither of them had slowed down enough to catch their breath, much less take a vacation. Maddy fell asleep before finishing her first cup. It was past eleven at night, and the barista was making shooing noises.
“Come on, Maddy,” he said softly. He shook her shoulder gently, trying to wake her enough to get her to her dorm. Her roommate hated her, something that amused Danny to no end. If Maddy didn’t get in by a certain time, said roommate jammed the door so she couldn’t get in at all. If they didn’t get moving, she would wind up sleeping in the hall again. Danny wouldn’t know until the next morning, when he spotted her strolling around campus in obvious back pain.
“Maddy,” he said again, shaking her harder. Her head lolled to the side, and she cracked one of her eyelids enough to glare at him hatefully. The effect was ruined by the hair falling over her eyes and the fact that she was wearing one of his shirts. It was two sizes too big.
“Mads!” he half-shouted. She started in surprise and jerked up, her hair flying in every direction. She blinked at him sluggishly before resuming her glare. Any threat she might have invoked fell flat; she looked like a disgruntled kitten.
After getting her out of the coffee shop -- and honestly, what kind of cafe closed at eleven-thirty near a college campus? -- he took a look at his watch and despaired. The Roommate had probably already barricaded the door, and he didn’t like leaving her to sleep out in the hall like a misbehaving dog.
His apartment was just a block away, right on the edge of campus. He had a couch. She would crash with him that night.
It wasn’t until he tucked his spare blanket around her that he realized what he’d called her back in the cafe. Mads. He liked it. Maddy was short for Madeline, and everyone called her that. Mads was unique, and his alone.
---
Danny always was a little...intense about his relationships. Maddy never hesitated to call him on it when she saw the signs. However, she never did notice how he acted towards her. That she just…accepted, in that easy way that made him love her even more. Easy as breathing.
---
Maddy moved in with him at the end of the spring semester, easy as pie, easy as breathing. Her relationship with her parents was strained -- he didn’t ask for details, but he overheard them arguing on the phone more than once -- and she seemed glad for the chance to spend a summer out from under their thumb. Danny set her up on the couch with her own comforter and some extra pillows, but, as she pointed out, it was better than sleeping on the floor with books underneath her head.
Danny had two jobs that summer, one as a production assistant for a local indie film and the other as an assistant manager at the nearby Walgreens. Maddy filled her summer with a job writing blurbs for two different newspapers, one of which was syndicated throughout the region. He never did find out how she managed it. She paid her half of the rent and had enough money left over for several boxes of pasta and an endless supply of coffee.
How she afforded that much coffee was a mystery solved when he accidentally caught her making out with the other barista from their usual cafe.
Other barista was a woman.
Later, he ordered Chinese delivery and decided to confront her about it. He didn’t care if she liked girls or whatever, it was just--
She hadn’t told him.
“Mads,” he said as she paid unnatural attention to the white rice. “We live together, for fuck’s sake. You’re my best friend. I’m pretty sure I’m your best friend. Why didn’t you just tell me?”
Maddy shrugged in that one shoulder, non-commutative way that meant it had something to do with her family. “It’s not like it matters,” she said. Her eyes stayed locked on the rice. “I fuck guys too, you know. Occasionally. You don’t need me to announce that to the world.”
“Hey,” Danny said sharply. She looked over at him wearily. “I’m not the world, okay? You’re my best fucking friend, and you’re barely even twenty, and you need to trust me if this is going to work out, okay?” He swallowed harshly.
He had only known her for a few months, but she was family, in whatever fucked up way that included his occasional shower fantasies about her. She was sleeping on his couch, which was now their couch; she was paying a share of the rent. They had clicked, from the moment they ran into each other and spilled Maddy’s coffee all over his essay. He liked her better than the remnants of his own family anyway.
“I love you, Mads,” he said forcefully. “It doesn’t matter who or what you fuck.”
Maddy paused for a moment, obviously considering her possible reactions to this announcement. He saw the moment she decided on humor.
“I hope you know what can of worms you just opened with that, buddy boy,” she replied in a way that translated to I love you right back.
---
The biggest downside to living with Maddy -- and there were quite a few; it turned out that her former roommate had good cause to lock her out whenever possible -- wasn’t that she left her wet towels on the floor of the bathroom or that she never did the dishes unless prodded. It wasn’t even the two weeks after Danny’s declaration of love, during which Maddy made a point to bring home every dyke she could find in a thirty mile radius for a night of raunchy sex on his couch or in his bed.
It was the fact that everyone thought they were dating.
Not fucking, which they weren’t. Yet. Dating. It really cramped his ability to pick up chicks. Every time he tried, just as he thought he was getting somewhere, one of the co-ed’s friends would lean over and whisper something in her ear. Then they would both shoot Danny glares full of poisonous venom, as if he’d run over their dog or something. He didn’t find out what was going on until he made an ass of himself and demanded to know what had been said.
“I don’t sleep with taken men,” his target said shortly. She gathered her purse and nodded to her friends. The whole troop of them left together, frowning angrily at him.
“Scumbag,” one of them spat as she passed. Danny gaped after them in confusion.
“This is your fault!” he accused Maddy later. She rolled her eyes and stole some of his popcorn. The second-rate sci-fi movie on television droned on and on about saving some distant planet no one gave a damn about. Her legs stretched across the couch, draping comfortably over his lap. He rubbed her calf muscle absently, giving her a lazy massage.
“These supposed relationship rumors don’t appear to be ruining my one-night stands,” she said smugly.
“Maybe I should change that,” he threatened vaguely. “Maybe I should take your picture around to all those lesbo bars you hang out at and ask if anyone’s seen my girlfriend.”
Maddy grinned at him eagerly. “You do that, and I look like the poor closeted girl with an overbearing boyfriend. Do you know how many pity fucks I’ll get out of that?”
Danny threw up his hands and resigned himself to finding bars farther away from campus. Surely not everyone had the wrong idea about him and Maddy.
---
The summer ended, and Maddy stayed right where she was, slouching around his apartment and growing like a weed. She’d hit that late growth spurt that girls sometimes got, and the result was that none of her clothes fit her quite right. She dealt with this by stealing his clothes and gleefully thanking him for it whenever there were attractive women around. Danny’s chances of ever sleeping with another woman without her thinking he was a cheating cad shrank even further.
Maddy finally finished working on a script that she wasn’t horrified by, and Danny celebrated by making it into a movie for a local film festival. The acting was so-so, full of stuffy jackasses from the theater department, but even that couldn’t hide the sly humor Maddy worked into each scene. It was a smart script, and better yet, it was funny. They won the festival and the prize money handily.
That night was the first time they fucked, sprawled out on Maddy’s couch like the teenagers neither of them were anymore.