Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Annabeth started the year, she politely requested a room away from the communal bathroom. Apparently, that request never went through.

She's in the room directly across the hall.

So, she hears everything that goes on. Every time a toilet flushes, every time the sink runs, every conversation between late-night party returners too drunk to realize they were speaking nonsense. She’d invested in earplugs early in the first semester because cranking up her box fan all the way only drowned so much out; she'd ordered the bulk box a week ago after she realized her problem would never go away.

Tonight, Annabeth is even unluckier. She lost one side of her last pair of earplugs (the bulk order has yet to arrive), and her outlets had a short the maintenance staff couldn’t fix until the morning, so the fan was out of the question. She would put on her headphones if they were comfortable to fall asleep in (curse her inability to not sleep on her side). All Annabeth can do is throw her blanket over her head and hope the bathroom remains unoccupied until she falls asleep.

It doesn’t help that she has to go to sleep relatively early. Her economics professor only offered office hours between 8 and 9AM every other Monday (which makes him the most difficult person to get a hold of), and if she doesn’t get his help on this problem set, she could kiss her 3.8 GPA goodbye. A night’s rest and a coffee in the morning are all she needs.

But then a shower starts in the bathroom.

And approximately five seconds later, so does a loud, obnoxious cover of an ABBA song.

Annabeth is used to people singing while bathing. She does it too, albeit under her breath and not belting for the entire campus to hear, but it's not unusual. The only difference between this voice and the rest of the general population is that the general population is considerate of their perception in shared spaces; this person doesn't seem to be aware of people outside of his immediate eyesight.

The only solace Annabeth finds is that they don’t sound awful. Annabeth might’ve exploded if they were loud and terrible.

But then they keep going.

And the pillow and comforter over her head do nothing to help.

Seriously, how long does one shower take? Even on wash days, Annabeth might take 30 minutes max, granted she doesn't do a protein treatment. There's already a water conservation issue. Annabeth doesn’t want to add to the problem.

This person seemingly doesn’t care. And after 40 minutes of loud singing (she doesn’t even hear the shower turn off), Annabeth rips off her blanket, slips on her slippers, and swings her door open, stomping across the hall into the bathroom.

One person is standing at the sink. A blue towel hangs around his hips, and his hair drips onto his bare shoulders, and he’s putting shaving cream on the lower half of his face.

And he’s singing like he hasn’t noticed Annabeth in the doorway.

He picks up his razor, and Annabeth clears her throat. He whips around to look at her, fumbling the cap into the sink, and for the first time in the better part of an hour, he’s quiet.

“Are you really gonna sing and shave at the same time?” Annabeth asks, leaning against the frame and pulling her cardigan tighter around her. “I don’t think that’s safe.”

The man stands at the sink, mouth opening and closing for a few seconds, still gripping the razor in his hand. Annabeth raises an eyebrow and cocks her head.

“I’m…sorry. Did I wake you?” he says.

Annabeth knows of this person, but only vaguely. She knows he lives in her hall, which is obvious because he's using their bathroom. Annabeth may have remembered his name once upon a time, but their schedules and lifestyles didn’t overlap enough for her to recall it.

But now, Annabeth wishes she knew it so she could scold him better.

“Yeah. It’s past midnight. You realize people are trying to sleep, right?”

He rolls his lips, lowering his hands to his sides. His shower shoes squeak on the tile floor. She doesn’t know if his neck is red from the shower or her words. She hopes it's the latter, and he’ll keep this experience in mind and learn to be more considerate of the people around him.

“Yeah. I’ll shut up.”

That confirms the latter.

“Good.”

She spins back around and walks to her room without so much as another word.

She tries to erase the image of his bare torso from her mind.

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or the frequency illusion, occurs when a person’s awareness of something increases after gaining new knowledge. It typically applies when someone learns an unfamiliar word or phrase and then begins hearing it in the media they consume, even though they never noticed the word’s usage before. The illusion is called so because it’s not by magic that this new knowledge comes into use or recognition after learning it; before you acquire that knowledge, you subconsciously ignore everything having to do with it.

Annabeth learned this in the Psych 101 class she took her first year, and she can’t help but notice every time it takes effect.

For example: the frequency illusion is happening now with the person Annabeth met in the bathroom.

Annabeth knows she’s lived six doors down from this man for the past six months. She had to have, since the first time she could recall seeing him was move-in day, the most recent time being a few nights ago. But she never remembered seeing him outside the building, going to class, the library, dinner, or otherwise. Annabeth never really had a reason to look out for him.

But now, she sees this guy everywhere.

She sees him across the street when he goes to a cafe for breakfast. She sees him chatting with two girls on a bench when she's walking into the dance studio. She sees him laughing with their other dorm neighbors in the common area, sunlight soaking into his skin and reflecting off his teeth.

And she can't escape him.

The two do not speak to each other, and Annabeth resigns herself to the fact that she will relinquish the shower incident to a memory. She's content with this. She has no reason to mingle with the likes of boys with curly hair and smiles like sunshine; they add nothing to her life.

But then Annabeth is sitting outside one of the cafes with her friend and next-door neighbor, Silena Beauregard, as the man walks across the courtyard. Silena catches where Annabeth's gaze attaches and smirks, making Annabeth cut her eyes away. It's not like Annabeth could help staring; he's wearing this god-awful yellow hoodie like he's trying to become the sun, and it's ugly and obnoxious and not nearly heavy enough for mid-January, and Annabeth finds herself asking,

“What’s that guy’s name?”

She tries to be casual about the question, picking up her latte and chewing on the paper straw, but Silena is all-knowing.

"Percy Jackson. He's on the basketball team with Charlie."

Annabeth swirls the straw around. "Percy?"

Silena narrows her eyes and peels a layer from her croissant. "Yeah." She bites off a piece. "I think it's short for Perseus."

Perseus Jackson is the name echoing through Annabeth’s head as she stretches during dance class, and she doesn’t know why. Her interest in him is mild at best and amounts to disdain at worst. Her brief interaction with him shouldn’t be enough to miss the cue for the pose transition.

But it is.

“Is everything alright, Miss Chase?” her instructor, Beatrice, asks as her classmates stretch on the barre. Annabeth avoids looking at herself in the mirror, knowing she would be able to catch her own tell when she replies affirmatively.

Beatrice nods, telling Annabeth to pay more attention. Annabeth reaches far forward to touch her toes, hoping the pull of her hamstring is enough to let her forget Whatever-His-Name-Is.

Halfway through class, Annabeth plugs in her headphones to rehearse alone. For the past few weeks, she’s been working on choreography to present at this year’s Spring Dance Show. After hearing the performance would give her a major credit and a guaranteed recommendation from any professor in the dance department for any post-grad expeditions, Annabeth practically begged Beatrice to give her a spot. It’s not like she had to do much begging; Annabeth had worked her ass off as a dancer for more than half her life. A few minutes on the stage are all she needs to prove it.

If only she could get those few minutes right.

Annabeth spins through the first part of the choreo she has memorized—a series of dramatic, slowed spins and lunges, transitioned by a series of hurried steps to signify a shift in the song’s tempo. She’s falling, rolling, rising, then reaching, grasping, lunging. The thesis of her piece centers around a sense of loss and not knowing where to continue—a theme Annabeth knows too well—and while her mind knows what the dance should look like, nothing is working out as envisioned. It feels too rushed, wild yet controlled, and, ironically enough, she doesn’t know how to continue. Should the piece have more elements from her classical ballet training or follow more jazzy, contemporary stylings? Should she try a new style? Stick to what she knows? Pick a different song?

“I can hear your mind racing, Annabeth,” Beatrice says once Annabeth takes out an earbud. She pulls her thin arms into a long cardigan, a signal to Annabeth that the class is over. “You know my brain is always free to pick.”

Annabeth rehearses another spin, her arm dangling above her head. “I know. I’m just—I don’t know if this piece works like I want it to.”

The smell of polished wood, the lights reflecting off the mirror, the corn on her pinky toe rubbing against the inside of her shoe—these things usually ground Annabeth. These few factors let her know that even if everything around Annabeth changes, a dance studio will always be a dance studio. But that knowledge isn’t helping today, isn’t grounding her. Instead, all the stimuli are more overwhelming the more frustrated she gets.

Beatrice folds her arms over her chest. “What is wrong about it?”

“Everything.”

Beatrice chuckles and walks behind Annabeth until they make eye contact in the mirror. “Hm. Do you want my opinion?”

“Please.”

Beatrice tilts her head. “What if your thesis is more fitting for a partnership? The push and pull, not knowing where to continue in the relationship, feeling lost.” Annabeth makes a face, and Beatrice rolls her eyes. “I know you are not one for partner work, but dancing with another might showcase your skills more than if you were doing it alone, no? And I think doing something a little different will help you grow as a dancer. Even stronger than you are now.”

Annabeth gives Beatrice a once-over and considers her words for a moment.

The moment is fleeting. This spotlight is hers, and Annabeth worked hard to get it. Sharing isn’t an option.

After class, Annabeth is walking to the staircase when footsteps echo behind her.  Annabeth catches a glimpse of yellow in the corner of her eye, and when she turns to the person, he's wearing a grin.

“Heading up?” Perseus Jackson asks, leaning a bit onto the railing. Annabeth wrinkles her nose, knowing how little they clean the bar.

“No shit.”

“Beat you to the top.”

In another flash of yellow, Percy speeds off. Annabeth stands at the bottom of the stairs for three seconds before taking off after him, yelling about how he cheated.

Annabeth knows she’s athletic. She’s danced since she was five, ran track in high school, and still roller skates when she can in her free time. But even with all the muscle she's built up over the years, the stairs make her thighs burn. And Percy seems to be taking steps two at a time, and even with Annabeth grazing a step before she's on to the next, she can barely keep up.

She doesn’t know why she's entertaining the race. She has no good reason to chase after Percy Jackson like they're dogs. Plus, the stairs go up seven flights, and Annabeth would rather die than show up to class sweaty. She isn't a kid anymore. She is far past that.

Yet she bumps into Percy's side as she tries to duck underneath him.

It doesn’t work. Percy wins.

“You asshole,” Annabeth heaves once they’re at the top of all seven flights, folding over with her hands on her knees. “That wasn’t fair.”

Percy is panting just as hard but smiling all the same, tongue flicking out to lick his bottom lip. “You’re the one who participated.”

Annabeth is glad she ducked her face because she feels it warm. “You’re the one who started it, Perseus.”

“Percy.”

Annabeth’s head snaps up, hair flipping over her shoulder. “Sorry?”

He licks his lips again, and Annabeth wonders if he owns lip balm. “Call me Percy. Perseus is such an old guy's name.”

Annabeth squints and stands, inhaling through her nose.

“I’m not doing that.”

“Why?”

“I don't think we're close enough to start using nicknames.”

Percy huffs as Annabeth glances down at her watch. She has ten minutes until her next class.

Enough time to excuse herself to the bathroom and dab off sweat with paper towels until she's normal again.

“Let’s be friends then,” Percy says suddenly like they’re in kindergarten and making friends was as easy as asking. “I’m Percy. And you are?”

He sticks out his hand, and Annabeth looks at it. “What, are we in grade school?”

“We’re basically in, like, 15th grade.”

“I’m being serious. Why should we be friends?”

A look passes over Percy's face as Annabeth wonders if she is acting too callously. Percy isn't demanding anything serious from her, but what are friends anyway? Could she call the dining hall workers her friends because they know her name and ask how her classes are going? Is the cat that stalks the bushes outside her window her friend since it follows her when Annabeth has treats in her hand? Friendships require obligation—an obligation she doesn’t feel like she owes the guy who kept her up past her bedtime. She doesn’t want to feel responsible for nurturing a friendship she didn’t ask for.

Two and a half years of college and twenty years of life. Annabeth has done it mostly alone. She likes doing it alone.

“If this is about the bathroom thing, I really am sorry for that,” Percy says in a small voice. “I haven’t sung loudly past 9 PM since.”

Annabeth looks at his still-outstretched hand for several seconds, then back at her watch. She guesses she hadn’t heard him since that night, not that she really noticed given the billion other things keeping her up lately. Is the extension of his friendship his way of showing her he feels bad?

Tired of Percy’s expecting gaze on her, Annabeth sighs and gives Percy a firm handshake.

“Fine. It’s nice to meet you… Percy.” She tests how his name feels in her mouth and decides she likes it too much. Even more than the feeling of Percy’s hand encasing hers. She drops it. “My last name is Chase.”

Percy's previously warm expression falls into a frown. "That's not fair."

"I can be your friend, but I never said you were mine. You have to work harder than that."

"That's super not fair."

Annabeth smiles sweetly. "Neither is life, Percy."

Percy asks if she has somewhere to be when Annabeth glances at her watch for the dozenth time. Annabeth confirms, and together—as half-friends—they walk to the end of the hall. Percy goes in the opposite direction from Annabeth and waves goodbye.

When they part ways, Annabeth flexes her hand.

Every Tuesday and Thursday at 6 PM, Annabeth goes to the library closest to her dorm to study, and in the area she likes best, she's usually alone.

This time, someone is sitting at the table Annabeth likes to occupy. Even with her glasses in her bag, he doesn’t have to look up for Annabeth to recognize who it is. Wordlessly, she sits across from him; she’s had a long day, with an exam she was underprepared for and the emotionally draining therapy session she had earlier that morning, and she doesn't feel like putting up a fight.

Annabeth has been going to therapy for the better part of a year now, and it is…good, she thinks. Sure, spilling every intimate detail about her personal life to a person she doesn't know anything about is strange at best and downright devastating at worst, but…well, she supposes it is therapeutic. Her dearest friends had been telling her to seek help for years (in kinder words, more or less), and even though they were proven to be right as Annabeth's sessions continued, it still hurt to delve into.

Percy is studying two textbooks at once, which seems counterproductive. She has no clue what someone like Percy could be majoring in, so Annabeth asks instead of bugging him about how he took her spot.

Percy looks up, startled like he hadn’t even realized Annabeth sat down. He relaxes when he realizes who it is.

“Business management,” he answers, flipping a textbook page and scribbling on the notebook in his lap. Annabeth opens her bag and sets her glasses and her own work on the table.

“I see. Why business management?”

A tiny bit of Percy’s tongue pokes out as he scribbles more notes. “I want to open up a restaurant someday.”

Annabeth can’t stop the noise of surprise that escapes her. She didn't know what she'd been expecting, but it wasn't that. That's not to say she doesn't think Percy could do it—she doesn’t know enough about him to make that judgment—but it's… ambitious. Ambition Annabeth respects.

"What kind of food?" she asks, sliding her glasses up her nose before opening her notebook and clicking her pen.

Percy pauses his work to look up at Annabeth again, narrowing his eyes slightly. “Why do you care? I thought we weren’t friends.”

Annabeth cringes, knowing he’s only throwing her words back at her. Admittedly, the combination of a frustrating dance class and then running up the stairs did put her in a bad mood that day, but she does stand by what she said—friends take work, and he still hasn’t given her a valid reason why he should be her friend. But she also knows that the junk in her brain shouldn't affect the people around her, especially not-stranger-half-friends. Or at least she shouldn't involve them in a way that might hurt them. She doesn't want to hurt people; she doesn't want to continue the cycle.

(Maybe she should bring that up with her therapist next time.)

"Well, I did say I was your friend. And your friend would care, wouldn't they?"

Percy has a right to hesitate, and after a few seconds, Annabeth feels it would be best to leave him alone. Before she can pack her things, however, he says, "Italian food. I would cook Italian food."

Annabeth twirls her pen between her fingers, unclenching her stomach. "I've never been huge on Italian."

"Then let me convert you." He's grinning now, and Annabeth tries not to smile back, but it's contagious. "I'll cook something for you, and if it's not the best food you've ever tasted—"

"You'll what?"

Percy taps his pencil against his chin. "I'll shave my own head."

 “As opposed to someone else's head?"

"You're so funny."

“I know.”

Percy pretends to scowl before his eyes fall back to his work. Whatever it is seems important, much like the work Annabeth should be doing. But as Annabeth tries to take notes, the ink from her pen pools onto the paper.

"You know you move your pen to write, right?" Percy asks, knocking his foot against Annabeth's. Annabeth kicks back harder, but Percy doesn't flinch.

"Yeah, I'm aware."

"Is my presence distracting you?"

"You wish it was."

He chuckles and then it's quiet again as either resumes their studies. They don't talk, and while Annabeth usually does this alone, she doesn't mind the company. It's the precipice of the liminal space they existed in before, teetering on the threshold.

An hour passes before she realizes it, and when she does, it's because Percy asks her a question as she's looking at the clock.

"What are you studying?"

Annabeth looks up, then back down to her paper, sweeping her ponytail over her shoulder. "Dance."

“You're writing to study dance?”

She shrugs. “I’m working on a lot of choreography right now.”

“Is that why you're always leaving the dance studio?”

Annabeth glances back up from her paper, and Percy looks at her with his eyebrows raised. She opens her mouth to answer, but nothing comes out. When she finally speaks, she cringes at her voice crack.

“How…do you know that?”

Percy looks down again, but Annabeth knows it’s because his ears are turning red and not because he is trying to study. It’s cute. Annabeth pinches her thigh.

“I see you leaving, sometimes. It’s close to the gym. And you're always wearing, like, athleisure.”

Annabeth scoffs and ignores how her heart rate picks up. “Stalker.”

"Coincidence."

"How many times until it's not a coincidence anymore?"

Percy sees right through this line of questioning and ends it with an eye roll. “What dance style do you like?”

“Aren’t you nosy?”

Percy leans back in his seat to cross his arms. With nobody else around—not even the librarian, whose desk is on the other side of the building—Annabeth realizes she has Percy’s full attention. And she kind of hates it. She’s never had anyone’s full attention other than her professors during office hours or her therapist in therapy. At the firm she interned at last summer, she always faded into the background. With the few people she dated in the past, they were never there for Annabeth—they were there because they got to claim they had someone.

“I’m just curious. You're not very good at this friend thing, huh?”

But Percy is looking at her, peering into her soul like he could read her like his textbooks, and if this is friendship, Annabeth wants to cut it off here.

When Annabeth doesn't answer, Percy's eyes soften, and he leans forward until his elbows rest on the table.

Annabeth can’t take the intensity of his stare.

"Your manners are awful," Annabeth mutters, flicking a hand in Percy's direction. "Elbows don't belong on the table."

Percy's breath flutters the pages of his textbook as he sighs. Annabeth stares at the pen she balances between her fingers.

"Wise Girl, look at me."

Annabeth's eyes snap back to him, both brows raised. "Wise Girl?"

Percy blinks for a few seconds before his eyes widen with realization, and he sits up straight in his chair, shaking his hands.

"Sorry." A horrible, blotchy pink covers Percy’s cheeks, and it should not be as endearing as it is. "I just—I've been calling you that in my head. You know, and because you always have something to say, and when I talk to people who don’t know who you are—"

Annabeth doesn't think her eyebrows can go any further up, but they can and do. "You talk about me?"

Percy cringes. "Yeah. I mean, only in passing conversation. And it's never anything bad, I swear."

Annabeth doesn't want to believe him. Annabeth desperately wants to take this chance to back out before she gets too in over her head with meaningless things and ends up hurt.

Yet, God, if Percy doesn't look sincere—and a little nervous.

Relaxing back into her seat, Annabeth drops her pen onto the table. "It's fine. Just… call me Annabeth or nothing at all."

Percy's anxiety melts off his face and is replaced with a little grin. "Okay. Annabeth."

She regrets telling Percy her name as soon as he says it. Not because she doesn't want Percy to know her name, but because the way he says it sends so many confusing, conflicting emotions through her, she gets a bit of a headache.

And yet, when Percy asks if Annabeth wants that Italian dinner now, she can’t say no.

“So, you choreograph?” Percy asks, twirling his fork in his pasta. “What's that about?”

Annabeth slurps the noodles and flinches when a speck of cheese flicks up onto her glasses. Percy offers her a napkin, which she takes less than graciously. “I have for a few years now. It’s kinda like practice for my senior thesis. And I’m working on a piece my dance teacher wants me to perform in the showcase in April.”

Percy nods. “Do you like it? Choreographing, dancing, I mean.”

Annabeth smiles a little before shoving another forkful of noodles and sauce into her mouth. Cheeks puffed, she says, “I love it. I mean, it's only one of my majors, but I always want to take dance with me, you know? Tell a story in a way words can’t.”

"I 100% get that. I rarely create my own recipes, but if the feeling I get is even a fraction of the feeling you do…I see why you love it so much.”

While Annabeth wasn’t one to share her passion often, she's glad to be doing it with Percy, whose passion for cooking goes way beyond mere interest. The pasta—carbonara, she later learns—is good. Amazing, even.

He doesn't shave his head.

Percy’s hair is still wet when he walks into the library on Tuesday.

Basketball practice went unreasonably long today—their coach decided to run every drill three times over both in preparation for their game on Saturday and as punishment for whoever didn’t clean up after shooting around after their last practice. Percy couldn’t claim that one, so of course he didn’t cave when asked; but apparently, no one did it. His thighs already feel sore.

“I know it was Travis,” Percy’s teammate, Beckendorf, said before he and Percy split ways after they left the gym. “He’s the only one who uses the sports towels from the supply closet. Who knows how often they wash those.”

So, Percy isn’t in the best mood when he arrives at the table he likes to work at. The impending Environmental Science quiz he has to study for, combined with the damp collar of his hoodie from his hair, worsens his overall situation.

He’s so in his head he doesn’t notice Annabeth until he’s already walking up to the table and she looks up at him, blue notebook open and red glasses slipping down her nose.

She waves a little.

Instinctively, Percy smiles back.

And, listen—Percy Jackson is not good at keeping a routine. Yes, he showers, washes his face, and brushes his teeth. Yes, his night times are similar because he cares about basic hygiene (his mother raised him well enough), but none of these events occur in a particular order. His brain has kept track of every assignment he's ever had, a method that continually fails to prove itself tried and true, but he's gotten this far without it. It's his business if he eats his first meal at 9AM one day and 4PM the next.

So, it’s kind of an absolute miracle that his and Annabeth's study sessions become a bit of a… thing.

It’s not on purpose, at least at first. Percy walks into the library intending to get work done, and every Tuesday and Thursday without fail, Annabeth is either in that same spot with her textbooks and little blue notebook or arrives shortly after Percy does. After one week, Percy chalks it up to coincidence; when two weeks turn into three, Percy realizes they'd developed the same study habit.

One evening, Percy brings a box of Goldfish, and they're already sitting on the table when  Annabeth makes it there.

"We're not supposed to eat in the library," Annabeth tells him, popping a few crackers into her mouth. "We'll get in trouble," and a few crumbs fall into her notes.

"If you weren't such a messy eater, we wouldn't have anything to worry about," Percy says before spilling half the box onto the floor.

They clean up before any staff can tell them off.

Sometimes, he and Annabeth would get sandwiches from the dining hall or Chinese food from a local restaurant. On special and rare occasions, Percy tries a new Italian recipe on her. Every time he plates the food and sets it in front of her, he's scared of how she'll react, even though she makes him drag the review from her. “Your ego is big enough already,” she claims. She’s “not trying to inflate it by complimenting [his] cooking skills.”

She ends up liking the food, ten times out of ten. It does, in fact, inflate Percy’s ego.

"Okay." Percy stirs the pot on the stove one evening as Annabeth reclines against the counter. "Do you have any siblings?"

"Three brothers. One from my mom’s side, who's about a year younger. Twins from my dad, who are about six years younger. You?"

Percy lifts the spoon to his mouth and hums thoughtfully. "Uh, two. Tyson, from my dad's side, is a little younger. Estelle, my mom's with my stepdad, is almost four."

"You must have pictures."

"My mom sends some every day."

Last week, Dr. Brunner told him that this “thing” was a good thing as Percy sat across from him at his big oak desk, a long beard accentuating his long face and squared shoulders adorned in a typical tweed sweater. His office usually felt comfortable with its ceiling-to-floor windows and overgrown ferns lining the perimeter, but it had grown stuffy throughout the session. Maybe it was from the thick sweater Percy chose to wear or how his jeans were fitting too tight around his thighs. It was more likely that bringing up Annabeth was the first time he'd mentioned a recent positive relationship to his therapist.

"I'm glad you're making friends," Dr. Brunner said, and Percy noted that if his therapist called what he and Annabeth had a friendship, then that must be what it is. Dr. Brunner has a degree; he gets to throw around terminology like "friendship", and Percy gets that "ah-ha" moment the school paid Dr. Brunner to give him.

Whatever those days are—study sessions, dinners, excuses for Annabeth to throw wet noodles at Percy and hope they stick—they're fun, and Percy is starting to think his therapist was right.

A month after their study thing became a thing, Annabeth and Percy are walking back to their dorm late one Thursday evening when Percy gets a phone call from his mom. He tells Annabeth to head inside while he answers on the stoop.

They keep the conversation short. Percy's mom is twice as busy as he is, working and raising a toddler, and both knew they couldn't keep the other for long. He couldn't wait until Spring Break to see her again; sometimes, Percy regrets leaving New York City for college, but most of him knew he couldn't hold himself back. Sally would have killed him if he did.

The sound of loud music and yelling thump through the walls as Percy makes his way to his room. It isn't atypical for athletes to get drunk on Thursday nights—most of them had games on Saturday afternoons and drinking Friday nights to show up hungover to play sounded like a recipe for disaster. Percy never takes part in the ritual; he hates being drunk and feeling like he’s losing control. He’s already paranoid about saying things he might not mean while sober. And that whole “drunk words are sober feelings” thing scares him.

He pulls out his key when a quarrel at the end of the hall catches his attention. From where he stands, he can see the back of a tall guy talking to someone, and from how the guy is leaning close, Percy can tell he probably doesn’t want other people listening. It’s not Percy’s business what they were discussing; sticking his nose where he didn’t belong only brought more trouble for him.

But then, the guy shifts, and Percy realizes that the person the guy is talking to is a very, very annoyed Annabeth Chase, holding a stack of textbooks to her chest as she reclines against the wall, eyes rolling to the back of her head.

Percy’s moving before he registers what’s happening.

“...not even sure I’m gonna do it,” Percy hears Annabeth say the closer he approaches. “And even if I was, it sure wouldn’t be with you.”

The guy scoffs, sticking his hands in his pockets. “Chase, I’m the best guy for it. Name one other guy in our class who compares.”

Percy knows that Annabeth has this handled. She’s strong-willed to the point of stubbornness and knows what she always wants. She’s a dancer, so she’s strong enough to defend herself if things escalate—the guy is thin and has very few inches on her. Percy doesn’t have to step in.

But Percy doesn’t like that someone is making his friend upset. And this conversation without context is making him feel gross.

“I could name ten,” Annabeth says, and she’s about to make another retort when she catches Percy’s eye from over the guy’s shoulder.

“Do we have an issue here?” Percy’s voice says, unintentionally loud as it echoes in the empty hallway. The guy spins around and glares with his visible eye, the other obscured by an eyepatch.

“None that’s any of your business,” the guy says, sizing Percy up and falling back at their height difference. “I was talking to Annabeth.”

From the corner, Annabeth groans and shoves the guy aside to stand next to Percy. “You’re not anymore. Leave me alone, Ethan.”

The guy—Evan, or whatever the hell—looks between them, sneering. “What, your boyfriend’s coming to save you? You still haven’t answered my question.”

The way Percy rolls his eyes is not playful, but when he opens his mouth to speak, Annabeth is the one to interject. “The answer is no. Jackass.”

The guy spins on his heel and walks off with a lowered head, mumbling something under his breath. They wait in the hall for a few seconds before Percy turns them around, dragging Annabeth back down the corridor.

“I could’ve handled it, you know,” Annabeth says, tucking her books further into her chest as Percy guides her to her room. “You didn’t need to save me.”

Percy tenses beside Annabeth, and he looks anywhere but in her direction. “I know. But I hate guys like that. Just—” his fingers flex, and it’s then that Percy realizes he’d grabbed Annabeth’s hand— “I’m sorry. That you had to deal with him.”

Her hand is warm—calloused for reasons he doesn't know, but soft all the same.

Annabeth drops Percy’s hand to fish for her keycard in her pocket. He takes a step back as she swipes into her room.

“Uh, what were you guys talking about, anyway?”

She pauses before walking inside, looking at Percy over her shoulder. “Just…a dance thing. He asked if he could be my dance partner for the showcase. And frankly, I would rather not have that happen.”

Partner. Percy thought her showcase was a solo thing; Annabeth seemed all for the solo thing. What changed?

"Oh. Well, do you need a partner?”

“No. I don’t know. I’m still deciding.” She turns her torso a little more toward him, and for the first time in several minutes, she smiles. “Thank you for being there, though. I appreciate it.”

Annabeth enters her room and closes the door before Percy responds.

Percy doesn’t know why his face feels so hot.

The farmer’s market comes to town every other Sunday, and when Percy's schedule finally clears enough to go, he invites Annabeth to come with him.

“You didn't tell me it would be this early,” Annabeth says, yawning as they wandered between different tents selling their products, from fruits and vegetables to honey and jams, to different pieces of handmade jewelry. Percy mainly wants to look at the broccoli for a pasta dish he's going to make later that week, but the scent of that focaccia bread a few tents down was tempting.

“It's 11AM,” Percy says, pulling his beanie over his ears.

Annabeth zips her coat up to her chin. “Sundays are my “sleep in till noon” days.”

She pulls her scarf up over her nose and shoves her gloved hands in her parka pockets, and Percy chuckles as she waddles alongside him, wishing he himself had brought a heavier jacket.

Percy has loved going to the farmers' market since he was a kid, and his mom dragged him out of bed to pick out fruits she claimed were going to make him big and strong one day. Often, older women selling produce gave Percy a taste for free or let him behind the table to pet their dogs. The live acoustic music gave Percy his first taste of the blues he would come to love. The fact that eating the fruit his mom bought eventually made him big and strong—whether that was the direct result or not—made Percy fully invest in the magic of the market.

Percy's picking out the largest tomatoes he'd ever seen out of season when suddenly, Annabeth starts tugging on his sleeve.

“Percy!” she says with the most excitement he's ever heard come out of her. “They have kittens!”

She points to a tent diagonally across the one they're at, and sure enough, there's a sign that says “Kittens for Adoption!” and a dozen tiny cats in a pen. Even though her eyes are the only thing he can see, he can tell Annabeth’s face lights up with excitement.

“Do you want to see them?” Percy asks. Annabeth nods and takes off before Percy can pay the vendor for his tomatoes.

After the Venmo transaction goes through, Percy finds Annabeth crouched in the kitten enclosure, surrounded by a dozen tiny furballs. “This one has the same eye color as you,” she says, holding the smallest orange tabby between her red fuzzy hands and bringing it up to Percy’s face, leaning over the enclosure. Its eyes blink up at him, big, pale, and thoughtless. Percy feels his heart melt as he strokes a bare finger between its ears.

“You do know we’re not allowed to keep pets in our dorm, right?” Percy says, nodding to the lady next to the pen as he steps inside and crouches beside Annabeth. He holds his hand out to a cat resembling the soot sprites from the Studio Ghibli movies he grew up watching; the cat bumps against his fingers, and Percy scratches under its chin.

“No harm in looking.” Annabeth scoops another kitten into her chest, hugging them close and rubbing her chin over the tops of their heads; both cats close their eyes contentedly. “I’ve always wanted a cat, though. My parents never let me get one.”

Annabeth lets the now-squirming cats go and watches them run off before laying down and curling into each other. Percy watches Annabeth and the pure affection she has in her eyes and wonders if her parents would’ve changed their minds had they known how happy a cat could’ve made her.

“Did you get your broccoli?” Annabeth says, sighing as she stands up.

Percy clears his throat and shakes his head, following Annabeth’s suit. “Uh, not yet.” He holds up the paper bag. “I got tomatoes.”

Annabeth’s eyes widen as she pauses from where she was headed for the exit. A kitten bumps her foot. “Those are the biggest tomatoes I’ve ever seen.”

“And they were only 2 dollars a pound.”

It feels ridiculous and…something else, getting excited over produce prices with Annabeth. And looking at kittens with her. And noticing that the combination of kittens, Annabeth, and her genuine amazement at large tomatoes fills Percy with an affection almost alien to him.

He ignores that, though. Instead, when Annabeth says, “I’ve got to get her contact information,” he follows her back to the vendor and watches as she charms the lady with random tomato facts she’d gotten from a book she read in eighth grade.

And if there’s a little smile on his face…well, at least he’s not looking in a mirror.

Someone once told Annabeth that she was clingy, and it has stuck with her ever since.

Annabeth doesn't want to bother anyone; she knows she doesn't want anyone to bother her, but she hates feeling alone at the same time. Those feelings contradict each other at least once a day, and on top of everything going on in Annabeth’s brain at any given moment, it's a whole mess.

All of this made having friends difficult.

Annabeth—well, she knows having friends is something she can do if she sets boundaries. She gets lunch with Silena once a week. She calls her friends and family back home twice a month to keep in touch. She keeps her circle small but big enough to let a few people in—otherwise, she wouldn’t be as socially well-adjusted as she is.

Annabeth, so deep down it would take a team of excavators to uncover, wants to let Percy in. She wants someone to confide in when she inevitably explodes, to go to for advice, to call years down the road when she wants cheap ramen and a round of drinks.

But then, part of Annabeth remembers what happened the last time she let someone so deeply into her life. She remembers what happens when she lets her guard down. The people in her life left a large hole in Annabeth’s heart, and Percy was more than big enough to fill it.

So, Annabeth does what she does best and tries to distance herself before getting too attached.

Which would've been a lot easier if Percy Jackson didn’t live in the same hall as her.

Annabeth is coming home from a late-night study session when she sees a figure outside her dorm’s entrance. She moves closer.

"Are you okay?" she asks the figure sitting on the steps holding a box.  Her glasses are in her backpack, and in the dark, she doesn't realize she knows the person sitting there until she is much too close and can smell the scent of—pizza?—wafting through the air.

"Yeah, I just forgot my keycard and phone upstairs, and nobody comes in or out of the dorm this time of night. Except for you, apparently.” Percy jumps up and follows Annabeth up the stairs. She uses her key card to swipe in and holds open the door for him, and he enters graciously

"Why are you ordering pizza at 1 AM?" she asks. "Also, what pizza place is open at 1 AM? Also, if it’s so late, wouldn't you think about bringing your key card?”

"Are you always so full of questions?” He marches up the stairs in front of her, so he can't see Annabeth scowl at his back.  She's about to retort, but then her stomach growls—audibly. Audibly enough that Percy stops from opening the door to the hall.

"Have you eaten anything?" Percy turns to look at her, and Annabeth folds her arms over her stomach, embarrassed. She stayed out late studying again, and eating was at the bottom of her priority list. It wasn't the healthiest habit, but if she stopped for dinner, she knew it would be impossible for her to get back to work. It was the messed-up way her brain worked. It bothered her to no end. And now she’s starving.

“Where were you anyway? Hot date?” he asks, eyeing her backpack, tied-up hair, and baggy sweatshirt. Annabeth hugs her arms tighter, a frown deepening the wrinkles around her mouth.

"Yeah, totally. Super hot. They wore this cologne that smelled like old books and library chairs. And the dust jacket? Don't get me started."

"And they didn't feed you? Shitty date, wouldn't recommend going on a second." Percy holds up the grease-stained box, gesturing between Annabeth and himself. "Luckily, I have all this pizza, and I doubt I can get through it alone."

Annabeth hesitates. She has food in her room that she planned on eating—and needs to be eaten—but the allure of greasy warmth is tempting. She feels like one of those cartoon characters floating through the air, entranced by the smell of freshly baked pie on window sills.

So, that's how she ends up in his room, shoving slices of pizza into her mouth.

Percy's room is about how she'd expected it to be. It's not really messy—like, she can see the floor, and most of his clothes are in a laundry basket—but his bed is unmade, and two posters on his wall are rolling in the corners. Dust coats his shelf. And the floor they’re sitting on lacks a rug.

And his favorite color is blue, an observation she makes as she rips a piece of crust off between her teeth. His sheets are blue, and though most of the posters on his wall are of various action movies, she can tell he meticulously searches for the versions with the most blue on them. Even the framed family photos on his desk are blue in the background. In that way, his room is cohesive. It's not what she would expect from a guy his age, but it's also… Percy.

"How's your pizza?" Percy asks, wiping the corner of his mouth with a napkin. It was a cheese pizza, Annabeth’s second go-to behind veggie, and the cheese is obviously cheap, but there is heart to do it. Soul, substance. Annabeth's standards lower when she’s hungry.

"It's pizza." She wipes the crumbs from her hands. "Pizza's pizza and that's all there is to it, you know?"

She can feel herself blinking slowly. She can also feel Percy’s stare at the side of her head. She folds her knees up to her chest and squeezes her arms around her legs. Percy's stare persists.

"I feel like I said pizza too much," she mumbles into her sweatpants. Percy snickers and drops the napkin into the open, half-empty box. Off-handed, Annabeth notices that Percy's hair is like his room - not quite messy but not entirely neat. A piece of lint rests near the crown of his head, and Annabeth reaches over to fix it.

Hair, soft. These thoughts run through her head as she runs her thumb over the strands. Not the countless hours of notes she studied. Not the fact that she is going to wake up feeling terrible in the morning. His hair is soft, and it is information she doesn't know what to do with.

She drops her hand, her brain finally catching up with her motor functions. "Why'd you order all this pizza anyway? I feel like I asked you, and you avoided the question."

Percy clears his throat. "Up late studying. Junior year of college. Midterm tomorrow. You know. Reasons people eat late, reasons restaurants near college campuses stay open late."

She smooths over the inside of her wrist. "Easy enough answer."

"Was more concerned about you, Annabeth."

She cocks her head to one side. "Why?"

Percy Jackson has a tic when he's anxious; it's to rub the back of his neck. Sometimes, he does it subconsciously to the point his neck is red from friction; Annabeth has refrained from pointing it out, but she almost does it now.

"I don't know. If you're hungry for the same reason I am, it's not the best habit to develop."

Annabeth sucks her teeth. "Pot, meet kettle."

"I know, but Annabeth, it matters to me if you're taking care of yourself," Percy said, his voice softer than Annabeth had ever heard it.

She sucks in a sharp breath. Annabeth hates it when people worry about her, but... at this moment, it almost feels good. Good in a guilty sort of way, where she wonders if his voice ever went that soft for anyone else. Or if his eyes only looked at her like that. They’re pretty. Soft in a way that made her heart flutter.

"I'm okay," she says, trying to reassure him. "I would have eaten something eventually."

Percy unfurls his legs and then crosses his ankles, tapping his fingers against the ground thoughtfully. "Yeah, but...I think it's just a peace of mind thing."

The flutter picks up a bit as she scans his face. A face that doesn’t show any signs of apprehension over what he’d just said, one that was just… honest, in all the ways Percy Jackson was an honest person. Honest and kind, with a willingness to open his heart to people in a way Annabeth doesn’t think she ever could. She doesn’t know whether to envy that quality or bask in the warmth of it.

What had changed from that night in the bathroom to now? When did Percy find the time to find all the footholds in Annabeth’s way and make his way up and over her guard?

"If I wasn't the one to open the door, would you share this pizza with anybody else?"

He swallows. "Random—"

"Percy." She reaches out to touch his elbow. It's too serious. She's being too earnest and can't stop herself. He looks so awkward next to her on the floor. He belongs on the imprint on the bed or the desk chair; it’s his space, and here he is, crammed against the side of his bed, engaging in the same area Annabeth is.

“Probably not. I mean, you’re probably my only friend in this whole building.”

If Percy Jackson is lonely, Annabeth has no idea what that makes her. The only thing she had observed from the enigma that was Perseus Jackson was the endless number of people who seemed to be infected by the same gentle glow, the other cats that wound around his legs and nuzzled against his ankles. Before now, she hadn't cared enough to know whether those people knew him. Would he not classify those people as his friends? Couldn’t he make friends just by asking or holding out fists full of little treats? Annabeth is sure it could be that easy for him. It was that easy to her.

Is there something wrong with Percy Jackson that makes him friendless?

She stares at the contrast between her hand and his arm and realizes she should probably stop touching him. She retracts and circles her knees again, locking her hands. “Sorry.”

“I don’t mind. And I don’t mind sharing, either.”

Annabeth smiles as she looks up at Percy with her cheek pressed to her knee. “Good.”

The lighting in his room is awful, so Annabeth doesn’t know whether his ears actually turn pink or she’s imagining it. But by the way he abruptly turns away to grab another slice of pizza, she has her guess.

“Thank you for feeding me. Again,” she says.

His mouth is stuffed when he says, “No problem.” It’s endearing, and Annabeth thinks Percy Jackson might have broken her.

Seconds pass. Annabeth finds her voice breaking the silence. “I should head to bed.”

And still, she does not move. She feels stuck in the moment, stuck for the first time in her life, maybe. The girl who’s always on the move, afraid to settle for something good in case it got ripped away from her again. And Percy…

Percy is good.

Should she be selfish and absorb his goodness, his kindness, for just a bit longer?

She knows that she shouldn’t, that she shouldn’t seek value in another person, but—sometimes, she thinks a little selfishness doesn’t hurt.

So, in maybe the worst or best decision of her life, Annabeth asks Percy to be her dance partner.

Chapter Text

“You are coming to my game next week, right?” Percy asks, setting his bag against the wall of the dance studio. “Because…this already feels like a lot.”

Percy has no idea why Annabeth asked him to be her partner.

Granted, she’d only asked him to help her choreograph a partner routine until she found someone who could actually dance, but Percy doesn’t think he’s in the top one billion people who could effectively help her. He doesn’t feel coordinated enough for a one-two step, let alone a full-blown dance routine to be performed in front of people. Especially since he’s performing with a virtual professional. He wouldn’t have minded looking like a fool so much if this wasn’t for something important, but this is important, and Percy is…nervous.

“Of course I am,” Annabeth says, folding her arms behind her back. She’s wearing a leotard and a skirt over a pair of sweatpants, and Percy thinks the combination is odd, but she’s making it work somehow. “It’s the least I can do.”

Percy also has no idea why he agreed to be Annabeth’s dance partner.

He thinks he meant to say no. He meant to say he was going to be an awful partner, that he has two left feet, that he would have to check his schedule before agreeing to such a time commitment but—

She asked. And that’s all she had to do.

Maybe it was the setting. Maybe it was because the lights were dim in Percy’s room, and he was tired and groggy from shoving too much pizza into his mouth to avoid saying something he didn’t quite mean yet, and Annabeth’s eyes had a little sparkle in them.

Maybe it was because he wanted to get to know the part of Annabeth she hadn’t shown him yet.

“I’ve only been working on partner choreo for a few weeks now, but now that I actually have a partner to rehearse with, I definitely have to workshop it a bit.” She crosses the room to the sound system in the corner, and Percy is so glad she reserved the studio space so no one could walk in and see him flailing around like an idiot. “Let me know if you have any notes. I’m open to change. It is now your dance too.”

She plays the music. It’s an upbeat song that sounds straight out of Carnival.

She places a hand under his shoulder blade and grabs his hand. He follows suit.

She pulls herself close.

He's been getting really close to Annabeth Chase lately.

The night he officially met her, Percy knew who she was. Sometimes they'd cross paths when she came back from class and he had to take his trash out, or vice versa, and every so often, he'd see her leaving the dance studio in an outfit not dissimilar from what she's wearing now. No matter where he saw her, she always had this serious, contemplative look on her face, one that told everyone around her she didn't feel like talking.

And Percy always thought she was kind of…pretty.

But just in the way you acknowledge someone's attractiveness from a purely objective standpoint. She has these big brown eyes that never fail to soften even her harshest expressions, and no matter which hairstyle she chooses, she always leaves two braids in the front to frame her face. And she carries herself with this sense of dignity Percy lacks. And more often than not, whenever they're studying together, she wears those glasses that make her big eyes look even bigger.

Now, as she tries to lead him to lead this dance (“You step and I follow, not the other way—yes, I know you don't know what you're doing, just—,”), Percy realizes that her personality is kind of cute too.

“Samba is all about being bouncy. That's what characterizes it. Always bend your knees, when you step forward and step back.” She bends her knees, and Percy suppresses a laugh as he bends his knees in return. “And remember, ball of the foot to flat on the floor for leading foot, ball of the foot for following foot, then the ball of the foot to flat on the floor for leading foot again.”

And does any of that make sense to Percy? Absolutely not; he’d have an easier time raw-dog translating the Iliad if it wasn’t for the time Annabeth took to make sure he understood everything in his learning style.

Percy isn’t very good at leading, and he can tell it’s taking everything in Annabeth not to take over. She tells him it’s because she wants to choreograph the dance properly for someone who can lead to take over without any arguments.

“I don’t have time for the…people I can choose from.” She doesn’t suppress the eye roll, telling Percy everything he needs to know as she follows his step. “The quicker I nail a choreo, the quicker I can teach it, the more practice we’ll have, and then before I know it, the dance show will be here, and I don’t have to talk to that individual for at least an entire summer.”

Percy thinks through all the guys he knows who dance. There’s one guy on the basketball team who took Ballet I with his girlfriend last semester. He’s half sure his lab partner for the only Computer Science class he ever took double-majored in dance. Was there drama in the dance department? He remembers that guy—Eric, or something—talking to Annabeth in the hallway that one time. Was Annabeth thinking about picking him as her partner?

A sour taste builds in Percy’s mouth.

“I don’t know how quick you’ll be able to nail a choreo with a guy like me,” Percy says, ignoring the way Annabeth’s mouth flickers into a smile. “But I’ll try my best.”

“That’s all I ask of you.” Her grin widens, and Percy’s heart thumps. “And you’re already the best for doing this.”

Percy hopes Annabeth thinks the flush on his face is from the lack of AC in the studio. “Least I could do.”

Annabeth’s face (ever expressive) tells him that they both know that’s not true. This was up there on the list of things someone could do for someone they’ve known for less than two months. Still.

Percy finds himself willing to do a lot for Annabeth.

The fire alarm goes off at 6AM, and it takes Annabeth five minutes to exit her room.

She'd been right in the middle of a dream, and now that her legs are moving and her eyes are blinded by the hallway lights, there is no way she is getting back to sleep anytime soon. She was just getting to the good part of the dream, too; now, she would never meet Aphrodite in the form of Beyoncé.

She only thinks to grab her keycard, her glasses, and sandals; no part of her factors in that it might be cold outside at dawn in early March.

It is, in fact, cold at dawn in early March.

She realizes this the second she steps outside amongst a sea of blankets and jackets. She's thankful she's at least wearing pants.

She spots Silena leaning against a tree, eyes closed and pouting, draped in a long fluffy coat, and Annabeth is immediately jealous—though her pants are pants, they and her shirt are thin.

Upon hearing Annabeth approach, Silena cracks one eye open and says, "I hope it's an actual fire and not someone waking and baking or burning something in the kitchen again. It's too damn early for this."

Annabeth rubs her arms, nodding in agreement. It's the third time this semester that their dorm's fire alarm had gone off (once a month, without fail), and none of them had been drills, let alone actual fires. It was just some idiot smoking in their room with the windows closed, and their building's fire alarm had a hair trigger. If Annabeth has to hear that alarm shrill one more time, she might go insane.

Campus safety goes into the building without even an ounce of urgency, which would have angered a more-alert Annabeth. Half-awake, she’s worried the cold might give her fingers frostbite.

"I'm honestly okay with the dorm burning down if it makes me warmer," Annabeth mumbles, tucking her hands into her armpits. Silena opens her mouth to respond, but then—

"Wanna share?" a voice thick with sleep asks from over Annabeth's shoulder. She turns around;  Percy stands behind her, hair mussed from sleep, his pajama pants ending above his ankles, and wrapped in a fleece blanket, his arms spread.

And while Annabeth is rarely one for physical contact, she’s about to freeze her ass off. She steps into Percy’s embrace and hugs his torso as he wraps both arms and blanket around her shoulders.

"Bless your soul," Annabeth says, voice muffled in his shirt. "You're like a space heater."

"So I've been told," Percy says, resting his chin on top of her head. "Do you want to join, Silena?"

Annabeth doesn't have to see Silena's face to visualize the giant smirk she's wearing. "Nah, I'm good. The jacket's plenty warm."

Percy’s arms tighten, and Annabeth breathes deeply, relaxing into his hold. He smells like laundry detergent and generic men’s deodorant. She sinks deeper, inhaling softly.

She’d recognized a few things about Percy when she first met him. One is that he was tall, and two, that he was strong. The observations were objective; he was on the basketball team, so of course he was both. The fact that she’d danced with him for three hours the other day had nothing to do with the resurgence of those thoughts.

At the same time, she’s more comfortable standing upright with him in the cold than in her own bed. And that thought of everything that's happened this morning is the one that sends alarm bells ringing through her head.

“Doing alright?” Percy says near her ear, his deep voice reverberating through her chest. His breath grazes across her neck, and a shiver runs down her spine. She squeezes her eyes shut and rubs her nose deeper into his shirt, humming her confirmation.

When campus security lets everyone back into the building, Annabeth is reluctant to let go, so Percy shuffles awkwardly toward the door with Annabeth's cheek pressed to his sternum. She knows she's being stubborn, but he doesn't push her away. In fact, he doesn't say anything until they're in the stairwell, the last two people to make it there.

"Annabeth," he says, gently shaking her shoulder. "You should go back to bed."

"Do I have to?"

She looks up at him, eyelids drooping and glasses slipping down her nose. Percy chuckles and lifts his hand from her shoulder to push them back up. Annabeth thanks him with a sleepy smile.

He looks between her eyes. "You probably do."

She's still hugging his waist, and one of his arms is still around her shoulders. It feels like they're about to start dancing.

"Probably?"

His face is hesitant before his words aren’t. "Yeah, it's early. And you have class in less than three hours."

She hates that he knows that and even more that he's right. The corners of her mouth flick downward, but she sighs and slips out of his grasp, tucking her hands back into her armpits.

No, Annabeth isn't one for physical affection. She didn’t get much attention when she was little—everyone claimed Annabeth was “mature” and “independent” when she was seven—so she didn’t get hugged. Or kissed, or played with, or looked after with much care. She didn’t think of it as a problem until she was older and got weirded out when people touched her, but it’s something she’s working through. Slowly but surely.

"Well, uh, goodnight," she says, biting at the skin peeling from her lip. "See you later?"

"Definitely."

He walks back toward his room, and Annabeth stares at his retreating figure for a few seconds before she calls his name again. When he spins around, the blanket swishes like a cape.

“Yeah?”

She doesn't allow her mind to tell her no before she walks up to him and rests her head on his chest. After a few seconds of unresponsiveness, Percy pulls her into another embrace.

Slowly but surely.

The lines in the dining center are always the longest on Chicken Tender Day, so Percy gets there fifteen minutes before the lunch rush.

He'd been lucky enough to schedule one day off a week, so before coming to get food at 12, Percy had done nothing, and it had been bliss. Extra sleep, time to scroll through his phone, and not having to encounter people in the bathroom while he was washing his face were things that felt like oases at this point in his life. Percy does not take his Fridays for granted; he will savor every one he has until next semester.

Fridays are also the days he can get lunch with Annabeth.

Annabeth doesn’t have the privilege of a day off, but her afternoons are free until 3 on Fridays, so it's become their designated meal time outside of the times they got dinner together on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Unfortunately, Annabeth had to meet her study group immediately after last night’s study session, so they hadn't gotten a chance to really talk since Tuesday.

“More?” the person serving the chicken asks Percy as she dumps four tenders on his plate.

“Yes, please.”

She gives him two more, then puts a tall pile of fries on top. Percy nods gratefully and heads toward the drink station.

Tuesday had been a little weird for Percy and Annabeth.

One, the fire alarm had gone off that morning. For longer than reasonable, Percy had convinced himself that the fire alarm was happening in his dream—until his eyes opened, and the sound was still blaring. He hardly remembered making it down the stairs, let alone outside.

He did remember seeing Annabeth there, shivering and talking to Beckendorf’s girlfriend, Silena Beauregard.

Percy had known Silena adjacently since she and Beck started dating two years ago. He thought she was nice for the most part (if not, a little nosy) but she was their most enthusiastic cheerleader—literally, since she was captain of the cheer squad. She’d even gotten the whole team little basketball keychains with their numbers on them before their last game last season. Percy had no clue she and Annabeth were friends until that morning. It wasn’t that it didn’t make sense; Silena and Annabeth were just two very different people. It was an interesting observation at most.

And it seemed like Silena had also made an interesting observation, judging by the face she made as soon as he opened his arms to Annabeth.

Percy had offered without a second thought, honestly. They were friends, it was 45 degrees, he had more ability to be warm than she did, and in a thin shirt and pajama pants, Percy was concerned Annabeth might freeze to death. She already runs cold—he wouldn’t have heard the end of it if he hadn’t at least ask.

Percy almost regretted it the moment that sly smile slid across Silena’s mouth, though. He could already hear Beckendorf questioning him after their next practice.

But any thoughts of regrets, teasing, or embarrassment vanished the second Annabeth surged into his arms.

And if Percy hadn’t been awake any moment before that, he definitely was then.

Percy swore to himself up and down that he never meant for the gesture to be anything more than friendly and that if he had any other intentions, he would have at least checked a mirror before he left the building.

But the feeling of her arms around him, the warmth of her head laid against his chest, the way she seemed to breathe him in and press as close to him as physically possible…

It was…nice.

And yeah, Annabeth was just cold. Percy was cold too, especially from the neck up and ankles down, so his brain told him this closeness wasn't anything other than a means of survival. And sure, they had that dance practice and had less-than-personal space between them for a more extended period before, but—

Tuesday was their first hug. Which, for some reason, meant something to Percy.

Which, two (finally), made later that day all the more awkward for him. As Annabeth marched into the library and to their table, fully awake (“I just had so much caffeine,” she'd said) and well bundled in two scarves and a pair of mittens, Percy's thoughts immediately teleported to that morning and the way she looked up at him when they had to go back inside.

The way she blinked so sleepily. The way she hadn't wanted to let go. The way her glasses slid down her nose. The way Percy, even 5% more tired, would've let Annabeth cuddle with him until they both missed class.

He thought of that morning every time she fixed her glasses.

Every time she used the word probably.

Percy was being weird, and he knew it. He couldn’t muster more than a few words at a time ; if Annabeth noticed, she hadn't let on, which Percy was grateful for. He was just overthinking it. Percy hadn't hugged a girl who wasn't related to him in a long time, and it was the first hug in their friendship—a milestone Percy's heart took upon itself to celebrate.

So maybe Tuesday had just been weird for Percy.

But today is a new day, and it's Friday, and he hasn't thought about the fire alarm incident since…well, right now, but before that, since Wednesday afternoon.

He finds an upstairs table with two seats by a window and chooses the seat facing away from the stairs, putting his tray in front of him and his jacket in the seat across. Annabeth had texted him, saying she'd ‘be there in three.’ Why the ETA was so specific, Percy doesn't know, but he trusts her accuracy.

Chewing on a french fry and scrolling through his school email, Percy notices a figure approaching him from the corner of his eye. He glances up, thinking it's Annabeth, and prepares to smile. Instead, it's another girl.

“Hi, Percy,” she says, waving and clutching a plate with what has to be an entire foot of lettuce piled on top. “How are you?”

It takes Percy an embarrassingly long time to recall where he knows her from, but then he scans over her curly red hair, and it clicks; they were in the same art class last year. They had to draw each other as an icebreaker activity on the first day of classes, and Percy had spent way too long drawing out her freckles.

“Rachel!” he says, and her face lights up (thank God, he'd gotten her name right). “I'm fine, how are you?”

“Good!” She tucks a curl behind her ear, glancing over Percy’s plate, making him too aware of how monochromatic and sans-vegetables it is. “I just realized that we haven't spoken in a while, and I saw you sitting here, so I thought I would say hi.”

Percy smiles. He and Rachel were never super close, but she was the only one Percy felt kind of comfortable talking to during class critiques, even though her skill far exceeded his and every other student's. “Well, hi. It has been a minute. Still doing art, huh?”

She rolls her eyes playfully but in a way that tells Percy, well, no shit. She's wearing crimson overalls, which would be enough to give him a clear answer, but they're also splattered with paint, and her eyeshadow is yellow, and her fingertips are stained blue. It's like primary colors threw up all over her, which Percy means nicely. Kind of.

“My officially declared major, Mr. Jackson,” Rachel says, then she notices the jacket in the chair across from Percy. “Are you waiting for someone?”

“Yeah, one of my friends. Should be here any second.”

Rachel nods, but then her gaze catches on someone behind him, an unreadable expression on her face before she looks away. Before Percy can turn around, though, a loud voice goes,

“Boo!”

Right next to his ear, sending Percy out of his skin, and both Rachel and the voice he quickly realizes is Annabeth into a fit of laughter.

“I'm sorry,” Annabeth says, chuckling as she sets her tray on the table. She spares a glance at Rachel, whose shoulders are still shaking. “Please tell me his face was worth it.”

“Oh, it was,” Rachel says. “I should've had my camera.”

Percy can't help but feel conspired against as the two girls giggle at his expense. He frowns exaggeratedly, shoulders hunching as he picks over a fry.

“You guys totally set me up,” he says, pointing the fry at them. “Was that on purpose?”

Annabeth shakes her head, having relaxed into a smile. She's wearing lip gloss, Percy thinks. And her eyelids are sparkly.

Zero minutes since he's thought about the Fire Alarm Incident.

“She just saw me walking up the stairs and didn't say anything," Annabeth says. "I don't think we've ever met.”

“I don't think we have,” Rachel says, tilting her head at Annabeth. “I'm Rachel. Percy and I had an art class together last fall.”

Annabeth clasps her hands together. “Well, it's nice to meet you, Rachel. My name is Annabeth.”

Percy scoffs, disbelief settling in his chest. “You sure told her easily.”

Annabeth shrugs, turning back to Percy. “Rachel didn't do anything to wrong me.”

“I don't know if you can count singing in the bathroom as wronging you.”

“It's wronging me if it keeps me up late. You also raced me up the stairs.”

“You chose to participate in that.”

“You would've waited for me up at the top if I hadn't.”

“You don't know that.”

“Would you have?”

“...maybe.”

Annabeth underlines her invisible point with her hand. “Hence why you had to earn my name.”

That doesn't make any sense to Percy, and he's about to ask when Rachel shifts, and Percy suddenly remembers she's there. He grimaces, looking back at her.

“You two argue like an old married couple,” Rachel says, looking back and forth between the two, her expression once again unreadable. “I'll leave you be. But—” she looks at Percy— “we should grab a meal together sometime. To catch up.”

Percy, feeling warm, avoids looking back at Annabeth. “Sure. See you later?”

With that, she nods and walks away, and Percy watches her leave, kind of mortified. An old married couple? He's not old, and neither is Annabeth. And he's certain old couples had way less petty arguments.

Percy cringes as he faces Annabeth again. She's staring at her plate and stabbing her fork into broccoli.

“Sorry,” Percy says, though he's not sure what he's apologizing for. “That was weird.”

Annabeth snorts. “No shit.”

She brings her fork to her mouth and bites down, obviously trying to avoid smudging her lip gloss and dropping it onto her nice sweater. She chews carefully and, after a few seconds, raises an eyebrow.

“Why are you staring at me?”

Percy hates how easily he blushes. “I'm not.”

He was. “You were.”

He finally picks up a chicken tender, dipping it into a pool of ketchup and secretly wondering why she dressed up today. He takes a bite to avoid saying something he doesn't want to.

After waiting for an answer, Annabeth shakes her head and sips her water. There are several seconds of silence before Annabeth sets her glass down and clears her throat.

“Anyway.” She twirls her fork into some cold noodle salad, fixating her gaze on Percy. “I have a question.”

Percy's heart skips a beat. “What?”

There's a mischievous glint in her eye that he places immediately, which doesn't ease his chest pain.

“Do you guys sing “Get’cha Head in The Game” from High School Musical before every basketball game?”

Percy is glad he swallowed his chicken before he bursts out laughing, drawing the attention of the table next to them.

“Um, unfortunately, no.” At Annabeth's aww of disappointment, he feels the tension slowly drain out of him. “But I listen to “Now or Never” from High School Musical 3 whenever I practice alone.”

“Aha!” she exclaims, pointing her fork at Percy, “I knew it!”

“What made you think that?”

“I just thought to myself, ‘Is Percy an HSM fan?’ on the way to the dining center, and decided, well, probably. So that’s what I wanted to ask you when I got here.”

Probably. It was Pavlovian at this point.

Zero minutes since he's thought about the Fire Alarm Incident.

“What are you thinking about?” Percy says, paused in the middle of spinning Annabeth outward. “I thought you were supposed to like…come back.”

“Yeah, but what after that?” Annabeth says, letting go of Percy’s hand to place a finger on her chin in thought. “Because I think too much spinning is going to make me sick.”

Percy reaches up to scratch the back of his neck, sweaty from the last thirty minutes of dancing. “You could do a jump or something. Some kind of jump move. I don’t know.”

Annabeth hums and walks back over to where she left her blue choreography notebook against the wall. She flips open a page and clicks the pen she’d hooked on to the front.

“I could do something jumpy,” Annabeth says, scribbling something down. “Or like—” she walks back up to Percy and suddenly grabs either of his shoulders before pressing down to boost herself off the ground. Percy stumbles before righting himself and grabs Annabeth’s hips before she hits the ground again, letting go quickly after— “okay, well not exactly this, but—”

“Something like it,” Percy says. Annabeth nods and scribbles something else into her notebook, and Percy exhales softly. “Good thing you’re not a basketball player, with that attempt.”

Annabeth stops writing. She glances at Percy and narrows her eyes. “Please. I could dunk on you any day.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Annabeth’s attempt to look serious only lasts for another few seconds before her lips twitch. “I could.”

Percy smirks, crossing his arms. “I have like, four feet on you—”

“Hey!” She laughs and crosses her arms back, notebook tucked into her armpit. “Dunking is a mindset.”

“What does that even mean?”

When Annabeth finishes furiously scribbling in her newly prescribed journal, her pen falls to the floor with a clatter as she slumps onto her desk.

“Did you just die?” Thalia asks from her starfish position on Annabeth's bed. “Because if you did, those baseball cards stacked up in your closet at home are mine.”

Annabeth’s head snaps up, and she glares in Thalia's direction. “What, so you can sell them in thirty years and become an instant billionaire rather than working a day for it?”

“Exactly.”

Annabeth’s friend, Thalia, had come to visit for the weekend, and so far, Annabeth is happy with the distraction. As much as she adores the friends she made here, Annabeth is glad to have a piece of home to ground her in reality. Especially Thalia Grace, whose radiant presence attracted many stares as she and Annabeth walked through campus earlier. Thalia told her it was because they were starstruck; Annabeth refuted that it was her new blue hair and lip piercings. Maybe it was a combination of both or the fact that the two friends looked odd together. Not that Annabeth ever really cared what people thought about their friendship. She loves Thalia for all she is, eccentricities and all.

Annabeth picks herself up from her chair and forces her legs to move their way to her bed, where she promptly collapses next to Thalia, haphazardly flipping through an issue of a magazine. The mattress squeaks from under her. Annabeth cringes.

“Where'd you even get that?” Annabeth says, nodding towards the cover of an actor with a sultry stare Annabeth wishes she could pull off.

“Corner store.”

“Why?”

“I got curious.”

Annabeth looks up at Thalia, who looks up at Annabeth and smirks. “Should I even ask?”

“It's best you don't.”

Annabeth sighs, listening to the whir of the box fan and the dog barking at a squirrel a block over and the pages of Thalia's magazine flapping in the light breeze. She likes moments like these, where there isn’t any reason to talk. She likes existing with Thalia; it doesn’t feel weird or liminal. Her heart rate isn’t abnormally high. She tucks herself into Thalia’s side, resting her chin on her shoulder.

Thalia doesn’t glance up from her magazine flipping. The following title reads, “Is He the One? Find Your Perfect Guy Using Our Foolproof Quiz!” Annabeth doesn’t understand how that would even work; magazine quizzes are one, outdated, and two, full of crap the editors throw on a few pages to get sales from teenage girls and everyone who wishes they were one. And maybe it’s the realist in her, but there is no quiz in the world accurate enough to determine someone’s perfect guy.

(She may be upset that the quiz wouldn’t give her a fictional character.)

“What were you writing?” Thalia asks, skimming her thumb over the page. “It has to be more interesting than this.”

Annabeth glances over the questions.

What is your ideal date?

1. The beach—long walks along the shore are uber romantic! (Plus, showing a little skin might leave him wanting more ;))
2. Dinner and a movie—nothing like getting to know each other over yummy food and discussing a movie on the way home! (Bonus if he takes you to a scary movie; all the more opportunity to snuggle closer ;))
3. A pottery class—how he forms and decorates his artwork could say a lot about him! (Also, if you’re terrible at throwing on the wheel, maybe he’ll give you a Ghost moment ;))
4. Axe throwing—nothing like friendly competition to foster a little romance! (This could also give you a chance to ask for a rematch—or rather, a second date ;))

“Enough of this heteronormative bullshit,” Thalia says, tossing the magazine aside and rolling over until she can face Annabeth. “Is that what you were writing about? Liking men?”

Annabeth blinks, not realizing that she’d been mulling over her answer to the quiz question. "Very funny," Annabeth says. "But I was writing in a journal my therapist prescribed for me."

Thalia raises an eyebrow. "He can prescribe school supplies? Is that what the school's health insurance is paying for?"

"It's not just school supplies." Annabeth rolls her eyes. "And it's not, like, an actual prescription. He just told me that I should start writing my shit down. To process what I'm feeling at a given moment.”

Thalia rubs her lips together, smearing lipstick around her mouth. "I see. That's good. Is it a daily thing?"

"It's just a whenever thing, I guess. It's becoming a daily thing. It's… well, it's good. For me."

And it has been helping, to an extent. A written stream of consciousness allows Annabeth to gather her thoughts, redirect the train, and get to the root of what's eating away at her. Just then, it had been about the struggles of letting in new people and why she keeps trying to reinforce the fragile bubble around her. Annabeth talked about the few friends who had her back during her early years and ranted about her middle school bullies. She spoke about her years at summer camp attached at the hip to a boy with hair that grew like horns and enthused about the enchiladas everyone else hated. She had a few choice words for both of her parents. Feeling abandoned at the ripe age of 5; running away from home at 7; meeting Thalia, the tumultuous beginning of their relationship, and how they got to where they are now. Her first complete and utter heartbreak.

She wrote about being sure she would never get close to anyone again. She wrote about how she spent her last year of high school and first year of college partying with people she wouldn't call the next day. Meeting her friend, Piper, just before graduation and moving across the country from her. She wrote about meeting Silena, and though Annabeth couldn't fully lower the gate, Silena's warm smiles and genuine regard for humanity made her want to try. She wrote about the days she spent alone in her room, in a library, in a classroom, in the dance studio, working herself to the bone and trying to finish her degree as quickly as possible.

She wrote one sentence about meeting Percy.

(She collapsed onto the desk at that point.)

"I'm glad it's helping," Thalia says, sharp eyes going soft as she places a hand over Annabeth's cheek. "Proud of you."

Annabeth tilts her head into Thalia's hand, half cringing and half smiling. She isn’t exactly the type to open up about things to people who aren't professionals, but she trusts Thalia. Friends are for sharing.

"Thanks," Annabeth says, sitting up and twisting around until her feet hit the floor. "Well, enough of the sappy stuff. How about we do something? I would be a terrible host if I didn't take you out.” She hops off the bed and goes to slip on her shoes. "There's this basketball game I promised someone I’d go to tonight, and while I know you don’t know anyone here, I think it could be fun?”

Thalia stares from where she’s still lying in Annabeth's bed. Her features soften in a way that’s so Thalia, and Annabeth is about to call it out when Thalia suddenly springs from the bed and grabs her chunky boots.

“Sure. But I saw this bookstore on the drive in, and I want to stop there first.”

So, Annabeth lets Thalia meander through the aisles, picking up every book that seems mildly interesting and putting it back after skimming the synopsis. It's not that Annabeth really had the time to read a new book, considering the piles of homework she had to do and the stack of unfinished books currently sitting on her shelf, but she loves supporting local bookstores. The owners, an older gay couple, were working the cash registers when Annabeth and Thalia walked in, and they were ecstatic to "see some new faces around." Annabeth made the decision to spend all her money here.

After abandoning Thalia in the manga section, Annabeth glances over some new releases. Most of them are young adult romances, and the covers are as colorful as the titles are vague. All of them are some [insert trope]-to-lovers, and they all start to blur the more she looks at them. She doesn't understand the media's obsession with falling in love—at best, it seems inconvenient, and at worst, a heartbreak waiting to happen. Maybe escapism via literature is a necessity to deal with that whole mess.

She peeks at the magazine section. It's chock-full of the latest issues from Glamour to Vogue to People, with models looking stunning on the cover, like in Thalia's magazine. Beautiful yet unachievable. Easy, breezy, CoverGirl, and whatnot.

Then Annabeth's mind drifts back to the question in Thalia's magazine. The date questions. Annabeth had always thought something cheesy like a picnic would be cute, so maybe she would pick dinner and a movie. Especially if her date had a passion for cooking. That could be nice, getting to taste their food and look at the fondness in their eyes as they watch Annabeth slurp up the cheesy, noodle-y goodness. He’d bring her a bouquet of daisies because they were her favorite. And they would chat over the dinner, getting to know each other's life goals and plans. And maybe afterward, they could cuddle in a blanket on the couch and watch a movie, and Annabeth would probably fall asleep in their warmth, but her date could find that endearing. Maybe that would let them know that Annabeth trusts them. Trust is a necessary foundation for a relationship.

Or maybe axe throwing would be a good answer. Annabeth likes good competition, and her date probably would too; maybe her competitive instinct would flare up too much, and they'd be put off by the intensity with which she rubbed her win in their face, but Annabeth thinks her date would be the one to start it. Annabeth's the type of person to go for someone who would go toe-to-toe with her.

Or the beach would be fun. Annabeth’s date would be a great swimmer; they look like they belong in the sea anyway. Head full of seaweed.

Or a pottery class, with his strong arms wrapped around her.

"Ready?" Thalia asks, swinging her tote bag in her hand. "I'm dying for a snack right now."

Annabeth licks her lips and nods.

"Yep. A snack sounds good."

As he and his teammates shoot around on the court before the game, Percy finds himself searching for her in the crowd.

It doesn’t help that it’s already packed. People, from students to alumni to parents to the general community, always fill the arena to watch the Centaurs play. The audience is filled with a sea of blue and orange, signs with horses and numbers and players’ faces raised as hundreds of voices combine into a hum Percy’s learned to tune out by now.

This hasn't been their best season—their win-loss record is tied, and if they lose this game, they have to win the next three and some other team would have to lose their next two to make it to playoffs—but Percy himself has been doing pretty well. He’s the starting point guard, averages 17 points and 6 assists a game, and has the best free-throw percentage on the team. His teammates nominated him for team captain at the start of the season, but Percy declined and nominated Beckendorf instead. He's the better leader anyway; Percy could hardly manage his own shit for a while, let alone 14 other people’s.

Percy bounce-passes the ball to his teammate, Will, as his eyes scan the crowd for the fifth time in two minutes. Will looks at him with an eyebrow raised.

“Expecting someone?” He smirks as Percy’s ears flame red. Percy scoffs and catches the ball as Will passes it back.

“Maybe.” Pass.

“A friend?” Pass.

“Maybe.” Percy dribbles the ball for a few seconds. “Yeah.” Pass.

Will hums, his own eyes sweeping the crowd. They settle on someone close to the sidelines, and he waves, face breaking into a giant smile. Percy looks over to find Will’s boyfriend, Nico, shyly waving back.

Percy is probably the only single person on the basketball team, which honestly feels ridiculous to him. 12 guys and almost all of them are dating someone? Half the guys show up to practice smelling bad; how they pulled a significant other like that, Percy has no clue.

And Percy isn’t bitter (he swears on his own life). He is genuinely happy for everyone; he has just never really been into the idea of a relationship. He’d had to let a couple people down easy in the past, and it sucked hurting their feelings, but Percy didn’t feel ready to open up and give himself to a person he didn’t already have a close bond with. It felt…exhausting. And it wasn't easy.

Percy almost misses Will passing him the ball back, fumbling before steadying it between his hands. Will wiggles his eyebrows.

“What does ‘maybe’ mean?”

Percy shrugs, his ears still hot. “I don’t know. She’s—”

“She?”

Percy’s blush travels as he passes the ball back. Will catches it easily. “Guys and girls can be friends, Will.”

Will scoffs, circling the ball around his middle before holding it against his hip. “Oh, don’t preach at me about that. I know.” A smile flickers on his face. “But I don’t blush when talking about my friends.”

Percy reaches up to touch his ear, feeling it get hotter. “It’s not like that.”

“Do you want it to be?”

Before Percy can answer, their coach blows the whistle, signaling them to head back to the locker room. As Percy and his teammates trudge toward the exit, Percy surveys the crowd one last time.

In the middle, he spots her.

She’s talking to a girl with a leather jacket and blue-black hair, gesturing wildly with her hands like she does when passionately explaining something. Her braids are down around her shoulders, clipped behind her ears with orange pom-poms. Her shirt is too big and bright blue, ‘Go Centaurs!’ written across the top and a picture of their mascot plastered proudly in the middle.

As if she could sense him, her eyes stray over her friend’s shoulder and lock with Percy’s.

She waves, her face breaking into a giant smile.

Percy waves shyly back.

Will walks behind him, clicking his tongue knowingly. “Ah, the illustrious Annabeth Chase, hm? She’s cute.”

Understatement. “Shut up, Will.”

Will giggles as Percy opens the locker room door, emanating with the stench of sweat.

And even though it’s his goal with every game, Percy is determined to give it his all.

Annabeth actually really likes basketball.

She and her dad were never close but watching basketball together on the couch on evenings when Annabeth wasn't swamped with homework, and he wasn't locked in his office away from his family were standout memories from Annabeth's childhood. Standing, yelling at the TV when the ref made a bad call, laughing when players fell over hoping to get a foul. The anticipation of a player at the free throw line, the last two minutes of a game when it was tied, and you prayed your team wouldn't foul and let the other team get free throws. It feeds her competitive spirit.

She never got to attend a game in college because of her crazy schedule and her interest in the sport generally decreasing as time passed, but being here reminds her of why she liked it so much.

“Traveling is when a player takes more than two steps before dribbling the ball,” Annabeth says, leaning over to Thalia as the ref makes the call (on the other team, thankfully).

“Why does that matter?” Thalia says, popping a Sour Skittle into her mouth. “Like how does that hurt the game at all?”

Annabeth shrugs. “It's against the rules. Dribbling is half the game.”

Thalia shakes her head, unconvinced, and pours the rest of the pack into her mouth. “Seems petty.”

Now that she's here, Annabeth regrets not going to a game before. The crowd's energy fuels Annabeth with a sense of school spirit alien to her; that and the t-shirt she just bought from the merch stand.

“Yeah!” Annabeth shouts, jumping out of her seat when Charles Beckendorf shoots for three. She spots Silena courtside with the cheerleaders, yelling and shaking her pom-poms. Even Thalia gives a little ‘whoo,’ though she doesn’t move from the bleachers.

Annabeth also likes watching Percy play.

He’s fast on the court, on the other side before Annabeth can find him. He’s excellent on the rebound, always right there when a teammate blocks, or the other team misses, a shot. He’s slightly taller than the other team’s point guard, and he uses every centimeter to his advantage, blocking passes and dribbling to the end of the court to either pass to Travis Stoll, their center, or Will Solace, who can probably shoot from anywhere in the building, let alone the court.

At the end of the third, Percy goes for a layup when the opposing team’s point guard fouls him, knocking him to the ground. He falls hard, which nearly sends Annabeth into a panic until he recovers quickly, brushing off his jersey.

“Why is everyone lining up?” Thalia whispers to Annabeth, chin in her hand and elbow on her knee as she watches.

“Percy got fouled, and since the shot didn’t go in, he gets two free chances to make a basket. Other players can’t touch him.”

He stands at the free-throw line, Annabeth and the crowd watching intently.

He dribbles the ball, then arches his hands, and with a flick of his wrist, he shoots. It swishes effortlessly through the net.

The referee returns the ball to him, and with just one more dribble, he takes another shot, making it with the same ease as the first. The arena erupts in cheers as Percy's teammates clap him on the back. Percy, his cheeks flushed and lips curved with a bashful smile, jogs back to his position on the court.

Before she can even think it, someone behind Annabeth says, “God, he's so cute.” A second person hums in agreement. “Do you know if he’s dating anyone?”

“Not that I know of,” the friend says, sighing. “You should shoot your shot. Get it?”

“Haha. And yeah, right,” the first person says, Annabeth trying desperately to look like she’s watching the game and not listening to their conversation and hoping they were talking about someone else. “He’s practically untouchable.”

“He’s a person, not a god.”

“Hot like one.”

“Please. You’re hot too.”

Annabeth can practically hear Friend One roll their eyes. “Listen,” they say, “Percy Jackson is like, ubiquitous as far as crushes go. You ask every male-attracted person on this campus to name their top five crushes, and Percy’s name will come up 9 times out of 10. It’s a fact of life. The sky is blue, the grass is green, and everyone is in love with Percy Jackson. I have no shot.”

Annabeth's stomach drops.

Try as she might, she can’t pretend like the words aren’t true; people like Percy. She sees the people staring at him when they’re studying at the library, the people that go up to Percy in the food line when she’s waiting for him at the dining hall (or when he's waiting for her at a table when she's running late). When they aren’t together, Percy’s surrounded by people Annabeth would always assume were his friends or teammates, but he never really talks about them. At least, he doesn’t talk about them with Annabeth.

Her eyes follow the team up and down the court, but eventually, they settle on him, his bouncy curly hair, and the 18 on his jersey. If 90% of the male-attracted people on the campus have a crush on him, chances are he likes one of them back. Out of all the people vying for his attention, is there one who actually caught it? Is there one person he thinks about as much as they think about him? That he wants to impress?

Annabeth suddenly feels nauseous.

Percy told Annabeth last week that his mom watches every game streamed live on their website and that if there is one person out there he cares about cheering him on, he would be motivated to play his best.

What if there was one other person he didn’t tell her about?

The fourth quarter winds down, and the game is no longer close. The Centaurs pull away 84-60, and even with the other team (who are apparently called the Bumblebees, how intimidating) trying their best to stop the clock and shoot free throws, a comeback is next to impossible. People around Annabeth and Thalia start packing their things and leaving to get ahead of the nightmarish post-game traffic, but Annabeth stays even when their coach switches Percy out for one of the benchwarmers, finally getting their chance to play. Percy squeezes a water bottle into his mouth as he laughs at a teammate’s joke. Then he starts choking, making the whole team laugh at him instead.

Annabeth smiles behind her hand. Thalia side-eyes her suspiciously.

The game buzzer sounds, and everyone cheers some variation of “Let’s Go Centaurs!” Then people leave the stadium in droves as the team heads back into the locker room.

“We can just wait it out,” Annabeth says to Thalia as both girls shrug on their jackets. “Less chance of getting trampled.”

“Sure.” Thalia pulls out of her phone and then pauses. She looks at Annabeth slowly, putting her phone back into her pocket as a knowing grin transforms her face. “Annabeth?”

Annabeth furrows her eyebrows. “What?”

“This friend that you promised you’d come for…Percy, right?” Annabeth nods. “He’s not, like, your boyfriend, is he?”

Annabeth nearly chokes on her own saliva, thumping her fist on her chest as the couple in front of her glance over their shoulders. “What makes you say that?”

Thalia raises her hands in defense. “I don’t know. Maybe the way you were staring at him the whole time…maybe the way your eyes lit up when you saw him before the game…maybe the way you tensed when those people behind us started talking about him…”

Annabeth scoffed, feeling her face get hot. “You heard that?”

“They weren’t quiet. Or subtle.”

Annabeth sticks her hands in her jacket pocket, digging her nails into her palms. Screw Thalia and her observation skills, but it’s not like Annabeth could ever hide her emotions. Her closest friends could read her like a book.

“You still haven’t denied it,” Thalia teases. She leans closer to Annabeth’s face, smirk deepening. “Is he?”

“He’s not. I would’ve told you. It’s not like that.”

“Do you want it to be like that?”

Annabeth opens her mouth to answer, but then her phone buzzes in her pocket. She pulls it out.

Percy: Are you still here?

It’s insanely hard to resist the stupid smile that wants to take over her face. She glances at Thalia, and Thalia watches her, shaking her head.

“Oh, you have it bad,” she says, standing suddenly and grabbing her tote. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

Before Annabeth can refute it, Thalia is walking down the bleachers and cutting across the gym to the exit, both of them knowing good and goddamn well Thalia doesn’t know where the restrooms are. Annabeth has no doubt that she’ll find them eventually, though, with her delusional self-confidence. She turns her attention back to her phone.

Annabeth: yes, i am.

Percy responds in a few seconds. Cool, give me a minute.

Immediately, Annabeth’s heart starts pounding in her chest. Is he coming out to see her? Does he want her to meet him? And where? She refuses to go anywhere near the locker room for health reasons, and she doubts she’ll be able to make it outside within the next minute.

But then her phone buzzes again.

Look up.

Annabeth looks up.

In the middle of the court, Percy stands, phone in hand and hand in the air, eyes locked on hers.

Annabeth’s heart rate triples.

She stands and grabs her things, and her feet are like cinder blocks as she walks onto the court, so much bigger on the ground. People surround them on either side, players with their partners and families, people at any of the four exits still waiting to leave, chattering and squeaking their shoes against the hardwood floor. And Percy stands directly in the middle, waiting.

For her.

“Alright, Troy Bolton,” Annabeth says upon approach.

Percy chuckles. “Hi.”

He tucks his hands into his bright orange hoodie pocket. He’d ditched his basketball shorts for sweatpants, his basketball shoes for slides, and Star Athlete Percy Jackson is now just the Percy she’d come to know. “You came.”

Annabeth tucked a braid behind her ear. “You asked me to.”

It’s loud still, even with a fourth as many people, but Annabeth can’t hear any of it, ears flooded with the sound of her heart and eyes blurry to anything that isn’t Percy and his slightly damp hair glistening under the harsh arena lights.

Percy rubs the back of his neck. “I know. But you still made the effort.”

“Well, I would have been a shitty friend for backing out on a promise. I even bought a shirt for the occasion.” She unzips her jacket and gestures to the gaudy logo on her front. Percy laughs.

“Yeah, you would’ve been pretty shitty if you didn’t get the shirt.” He laughs harder at Annabeth’s sour expression. “But a true friend gets the bright orange.” He gestures to his own outfit.

“Psh, I could not pull that off.”

“Annabeth, you could pull anything off.”

Annabeth snorts, zipping her jacket back up to avoid meeting Percy’s eyes. “Please.”

When she looks back up, Percy's expression suggests he has more to say, but ultimately, he decides not to. Instead, he extends his hand from his pocket, revealing a fruit in the center of his palm. "Want one?"

Annabeth raises an eyebrow. “A…clementine?

“Tangerine,” he says. Annabeth takes the fruit to save both of them from any further embarrassment. “Coach always has them in his office because it’s the team’s official color, and he’s corny, but I’m the only one who eats them. Plus, they’re my favorite fruit, so I can’t complain.”

Annabeth finds this gesture annoyingly cute. Annoying because of just how cute she finds it. She pockets the fruit.

“Thank you, Percy. For the fruit and for inviting me. You played amazingly.”

Percy nods, one curl bouncing at the top of his head. “Thanks. I try, sometimes.”

Behind Percy, Annabeth sees a door open, and in walks Thalia Grace. She freezes immediately upon seeing the two of them talking. She mouths something to Annabeth, gesturing to Percy, and Annabeth glares daggers at her. Thalia stops just in time for Percy to turn around.

“Is that your friend?” Percy asks, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder.

Sighing, she waves Thalia over. “Unfortunately. Watch out, she’s feral.”

In the time it takes for Thalia to saunter over, Annabeth realizes what Thalia was mouthing.

Is it like that?

Luckily, Annabeth refrains from throttling her.

Chapter Text

Annabeth isn’t exactly sure how she ended up in Beckendorf’s apartment living room watching a movie with him, Percy, Silena, and half the basketball team, but it probably happened sometime after they all crashed her and Percy’s dinner.

After seeing Thalia off to the airport, Percy asked Annabeth if she wanted some of the leftover spaghetti he made the other night because he “had too much and [he] [hadn’t] seen [her] at the dining hall all week and wanted to make sure [she] had a good meal,” whatever that meant. Annabeth chalked it up to him wanting someone to eat a meal with after spending the past eight hours holed up in the library studying for his 19th Century African American Inventors midterm exam on Wednesday, but she agreed nonetheless. Home cooking beat the SunButter and jam sandwich she was going to make at the dining hall anyway.

They sat at the table in their floor’s kitchen, talking about travelling.

“I mean, I’d love to go to Italy someday, obviously,” Percy said, twirling pasta between the prongs of his fork. “Learn how to make spaghetti from scratch from someone’s mean Italian grandma in an old cottage in the Tuscan countryside. My ideal vacation.”

“I’d pay to watch that.” Annabeth wiped tomato sauce from the corner of her mouth and smiled wistfully. “You getting smacked with a wooden spoon for folding in the flour incorrectly.”

“The pain would be an honor.” Percy sighed, bringing the fork to his mouth. “What’s your dream vacation?”

“Greece,” Annabeth said immediately, reclining in her seat and patting her full stomach. The food was delicious, as it always is, even two days old and sans garlic bread. “I’ve always wanted to visit—”

“The Parthenon,” Percy inserted, mouth half full. Annabeth paused, blinking at him, and Percy blushed as he swallowed. “Right?”

She didn’t remember when she told him that; maybe in passing when they ultimately got distracted during their study sessions or dance rehearsals, but it couldn’t have been more than a comment. Unless she really didn’t keep track of the things she said.

Annabeth nodded. “Right. Someday.”

Before either could say anything more, Silena and her boyfriend, Charles Beckendorf, walked into the kitchen, giggling and heading for the cabinet. They paused when they saw Percy and Annabeth sitting at the table.

“Hey guys,” Silena said, sliding from underneath Beckendorf’s arm to open the pantry door and grab a huge bag of kettle corn. “How are you?”

Annabeth readjusted in her seat and turned her body toward the couple, who exchanged a glance Annabeth didn’t feel like interpreting. “Good. Just finished dinner. What are you up to?”

Percy gathered his and Annabeth’s plates and forks and walked them over to the sink before rinsing them off under the faucet. He nodded at Beckendorf who nodded back at him, both of his eyebrows raised. He glanced between him and Annabeth (a look Annabeth interpreted much too easily), to which Percy rolled his eyes and grabbed a sponge.

“We’re going to watch a movie at Charlie’s with a couple friends,” Silena said, opening another cabinet to grab a bag of chips, which she handed to Beckendorf. “What is it again?”

“Spirited Away. Couple guys on the team haven’t seen it, so we thought it’d be a fun study break.”

Percy paused his dish washing and looked over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed. “Who hasn’t seen Spirited Away?”

“I haven’t,” Annabeth murmured, shrugging. All three pairs of eyes turned to stare at her with varying levels of disbelief.

So Annabeth guesses she does know why she’s sitting criss-crossed on an old leather loveseat, in a room with six boys and Silena fixated on a tiny laptop balanced on a textbook on a coffee table.

Beckendorf’s apartment, which he shares with Chris Rodriguez, the basketball team’s power forward, and a tennis player named Michael Yew, who’s away for the weekend, is more spacious than any other near-campus housing Annabeth has been to. The living room is big enough to fit eight people, which is more than she can say about the entirety of her room, and decorated with framed action movie posters and little metal trinkets on the bookshelves filled with books on handiwork, machinery, war history, and blacksmithing. It reminds Annabeth a little bit of her dad’s study back in San Francisco, knick-knacks and models covering every surface not occupied with his actual research. Their living room also smells a little like her house: home-y, with the scent of the cookies Silena bought raw at the grocery store and baked, and the sandalwood candle burning next to the laptop.

Annabeth twirls her hoodie string around her finger as she watches a huge sludge monster get doused with herbal essence in the fantasy bathhouse. There’s something…comfy about watching a kids’ movie with a bunch of people also in that weird stage in-between childhood and adulthood. Especially with most of the lights off and a light rain pattering against the window. Annabeth didn’t bring an umbrella with her, so she hopes it’ll stop by the time the movie’s over; right now, though, it helps to ease her into a contentment she doesn’t expect to feel in a room mostly full of people she doesn’t know.

Silena sits next to Annabeth, feet tucked underneath her as she leans over the arm of the loveseat so she can hold Beckendorf’s hand, attached to the man sitting in a recliner next to her. Chris, Will Solace, and two players she’s yet to learn the name of, cram onto a big gray sofa next to Annabeth, curled into each other like little puppies in a litter. Percy sits on the floor underneath Annabeth, head leaned against the cushion she’s sitting on. He and the rest of the room chuckle at the noises the tall masked spirit in the movie makes as he offers the main girl some gold. Annabeth smiles, and before she realizes it, she reaches down to graze one of Percy’s curls creeping onto her pant leg.

She guesses he felt the movement because Percy tilts his head up to look at her. Annabeth pulls back, heat creeping up her neck. ‘Sorry,’ she mouths.

Percy shakes his head. ‘It’s okay,’ he mouths back before turning to the movies again. A few seconds later, he glances back at her and whispers, “You can if you want to.”

“Can what?” Annabeth whispers back.

“Touch my hair.” It’s dark in the room, but the light of the laptop shows the splash of color across his cheeks. “If you want to.”

The heat on her neck travels to her ears. She reaches her hand back down to run her fingertips over the ends of Percy’s hair, soft like he just conditioned it. Percy looks back at the screen as Annabeth grows a little bolder and strokes her hand over his head, not unlike how she would pet a dog. Percy sighs and melts back into her touch, and Annabeth grins softly, carding her fingers through his hair once again.

She spends the rest of the movie just like this: watching a beautiful story about a girl coming of age and finding her own, feeding off the energy of people both watching a movie for the first time and enjoying it like it’s the first time, and scratching her nails lightly over Percy’s scalp as he breathes deeply, resting against the cushion.

Once the movie’s over, Beckendorf gets up to flip the lights on. People stand up to stretch and comment on how good the movie made them feel; Chris Rodriguez glances down to where Percy’s sitting and chuckles.

Annabeth pauses her hand and leans over to look down at Percy’s face.

He’s fast asleep.

When Annabeth gently shakes him awake, he claims he was only resting his eyes.

Annabeth only mentions the drool at the corner of his mouth when they’re headed back to their dorm.

Annabeth is brushing her teeth when Silena Beauregard enters the bathroom. She’s wearing an oversized t-shirt and a giant grin. Annabeth tenses and starts to brush her teeth harder.

“Hey, Annabeth,” Silena says, retrieving her toothbrush from the shower caddy she sets on the counter. Her toothbrush is electric and red, with a little timer that dings when it’s time to stop; Annabeth’s green plastic toothbrush feels inferior. “How have you been?”

For the most part, Annabeth’s relationship with Silena is pleasant; she’s the only other person in her hall who bothers to talk to her, and Annabeth looks forward to having lunch with her sometimes. Annabeth doesn’t know whether it’s because she’s friendly or nosy, but she appreciates the gesture. Human interaction is necessary—or, at least, that’s what she’s been told.

Except when Silena has that look on her face. That grin only the devil could rival.

Annabeth spits foam into the sink. “I’ve been okay. You?”

Silena squeezes toothpaste onto her brush before running the bristles under the faucet. “Fine. Work load’s been crazy with midterms and everything.”

“Oh, I bet. Same for me.”

Silena sticks the brush in her mouth, cheeks still stretched until dimples appear. She obviously wants to say something. It’s written all over her face. The two keep eye contact through the mirror as Annabeth spits again.

“What is it?” she says, sighing and wiping her mouth. “What do you know?”

Silena shrugs, moving her brush in circles around her teeth. As much as Annabeth enjoys Silena’s friendship and the balance they bring to one another, Annabeth can’t stand how lowkey she is about everything. The discretion is why Silena is friends with everyone, but sometimes Annabeth wants to squeeze the information out of her. She swears Silena wears her I know something you don’t face to annoy her. The only time she enjoys her tea is during their weekly lunches.

Annabeth looks toward the bathroom entrance, then glances underneath the stalls. No one else is here, and she doesn't hear anyone coming. Annabeth rinses her toothbrush and swishes water around her mouth before slotting her toothbrush in her caddy and sidling closer to Silena.

“C’mon, it’s definitely something.” She grabs her glasses from the counter and slides them back on her face. “I could spot that look from a mile away.”

Silena used the backside of her brush to brush her tongue before finally spitting and wiping her mouth clean. “You’re right.” She tucks away her toothbrush and turns back to Annabeth. “How’s your love life?”

Annabeth blinks. “Sorry?”

Silena’s smirk deepens. “You’ve been spending quite a bit of time with someone lately. I’m just curious about the parameters of said relationship.”

Annabeth frowns, leaning her hip against the sink. “Um, I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

Silena moves closer. “Percy Jackson. Getting kinda cozy, aren’t y’all?”

Annabeth has no control over the heat that crawls to her face at the statement’s suggestion. She looks away and readjusts her glasses. “No. We’re just friends.” Even the words coming out of her mouth sound unconvincing. “That’s it.”

It’s the truth, gospel, and all. Still, as Silena hums, Annabeth begins to doubt her own words.

“Okay.” Silena picks up her shower caddy and presses her lips together. “Fine.” She spins around and walks through the door, but when Annabeth thinks she’s safe, Silena turns back. “But I did see you two during the movie last night. And at the basketball game the other day. And I have never—” she angles her shoulders toward Annabeth, tilting her head back— “ever seen Percy stay behind a game for somebody. Or be so comfortable with someone touching him.”

Silena picks her head up and trots into the hall. After a second’s hesitation, Annabeth grabs her own caddy and follows.

“When you say that,” Annabeth says, keeping her voice low in fear of someone in their dorm eavesdropping, “what do you mean?”

Silena rests a hand on her door handle and tosses Annabeth a genuine, sympathetic smile. “Look, I don’t know Percy all that well, but he’s kinda been in my circle for a few years now.” She turns the handle and enters her room. “I don’t know why, and it’s not my business but… I don’t know. Percy doesn’t seem to be the type to get close to people easily—but when he does, he’s in it for the long haul.” Silena sighs. “He’s a good guy, Annabeth. And I think you could be good for each other. Take that for what you will.”

With that, Silena shuts her door, leaving Annabeth alone in the hallway.

“Did you take the ‘I have four feet on you’ thing seriously?” Percy says when Annabeth shows up to a dance rehearsal in heels. He scans her up and down; Annabeth snorts and tries not to let the look affect her.

“No.” Annabeth puts her things down and meets Percy in the middle of the floor. “I just realized that I have to do the dance in heels, so I need to start practicing now.”

Annabeth, for some reason, forgot that a whole part of this dance was the costuming that’d come along with it. So far, Annabeth had only done the routine in various stereotypical dancer attire—sweatpants, leggings, tank tops, tennis shoes. But that was never the vision she had in mind when she finally got on stage to perform the whole thing. In every samba video she meticulously studied, the women wore heels. And while she knows she doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to, Annabeth wants to look the part.

She had to borrow a pair from Silena. Luckily, they wear similar sizes.

“Won’t you blister to all hell?” Percy says as he gauges their new height difference. He still has several inches on her, but Annabeth thinks she can hear him just a tiny bit more clearly now. “Or, I don’t know, break an ankle?”

“Yes and maybe.” She smiles with fake confidence and plants her hands on her hips, not that Percy looks very convinced by either. “But that's what bandaids are for.”

Percy rolls his lips into a thin line. After a few seconds, he says, “You’ll probably need blister pads.” He goes over to his bag and rummages around inside before he takes out two items: a small plastic container and a roll of medical tape. He brings them over to Annabeth. “You put one on a blister then tape it on. Works way better than bandaids.”

Annabeth takes them, subtly weighting them in her hands. “How do you know that?”

He chuckles. “Do you know how many pairs of basketball shoes I’ve had to break in?”

Annabeth tries to make a joke. But then she looks back down to her hands and just feels…

Just feels.

“Thanks,” she decides. “I will use these.”

“That’s why I gave them to you.”

Annabeth had taken up roller skating as a hobby a few years back, and it’s her favorite mode of transportation when she’s running late for an event around campus.

The wind whipping through her hair, the rumbling wheels against the pavement. The freedom. When she’s roller skating, she feels like she isn’t confined by class projects or essays or choreography or weird feelings.

It’s why she decides to skate around campus as a break from the half-done choreography routine sitting on her desk. Laces tied tight and hair surrendered into pigtails, she loops through parking lots and academic buildings until she’s breaking a sweat.

She builds a rhythm, crossing her feet in figure-eight motions to the beat of the music in her headphones. She does her best to avoid pebbles in her path—her legs are already littered with scars and bruises from not being careful enough. Maybe she should invest in knee pads. It’s what her mom would have told her to do if she approved of Annabeth doing such a frivolous activity in the first place.

Taking a break isn’t the only reason she’s skating.

She's also trying to clear her mind of the increasingly intruding thoughts (if she can call Silena an intruding thought) telling her she might value the friendship of Percy Jackson.

Or, like, more than value it.

Treasure it, maybe. Hold dear to her heart.

The terminology is dismissive, but using distancing language might aid in containing the nature of what she feels. If she’s cold to the acknowledgment of her emotions, maybe they’ll wilt before they bloom into something like a crush.

But maybe it’s too late for that.

Every time she sees Percy, Annabeth remembers every good thing about him—his generosity, his loyalty, his kindness. And his warmth floods her brain like differential calculus equations during quizzes—overwhelming to the point where she can't think straight. Shiny teeth and shiny eyes. When she’s between classes, she hopes to run into him; when they’re together, she dreads having to leave. She had even considered going in to brush her teeth when she could hear him humming in the shower.

So, is it a crush? Maybe she’s fallen into the capitalistic trap of succumbing to feelings of romantic love for another person. Is it capitalism? Maybe not; perhaps it’s human nature. She just likes to blame things on American politics and economic policies. All are stupid: politics, economics, crushes. It's why she doesn’t major in any of them.

She avoids another rock in the path. It's all she can do while her mind is racing, trying to figure out whether her feelings stem from romance or the appreciation of companionship. It's confusing, and it's a mess.

The wind blows a piece of grass into her lip gloss, where it sticks. She fixes it and readjusts the strap under her chin, continuing to glide around the path until she comes to a familiar landmark: the entrance of her building. The exact entry where Percy Jackson sat with a pizza. The Very Pizza that gave her the crisis she's having now.

Annabeth turns and skates back up the path, zips around the library, down through thick lines of trees, in front of the admissions office. Because her thoughts are so focused on Percy Jackson, she doesn't realize Percy Jackson is about to come out of a building until she slams into him. On instinct, Percy catches her.

“Whoa, there,” Percy says, hands wrapped around Annabeth’s shoulders to steady her. She opens the eyes she’d squeezed shut to see Percy staring back at her, worried. Inches from her face. Annabeth hopes her flushed cheeks can be explained away by her physical exertion.

It’s just her luck, isn’t it? She pushes off his chest and rolls backward until she’s a reasonable distance from him—which honestly might be a little far to have a personal conversation.

“Sorry,” she says, brushing invisible rubble from her pants. “Was going faster than I realized.”

Percy readjusts the straps on his backpack and squints at the sun shining in his eyes. “You’re fine.” His tongue runs along his bottom lip, and Annabeth hopes he doesn’t notice her looking. “I didn’t know you roller skated.”

She taps one of her skates on the ground before crossing it behind her leg. “I do. Sometimes.”

"That's cool. I couldn’t roller skate to save my life." Percy takes a few steps forward until Annabeth needs to step back again, and he gestures toward one of the braids on her shoulder. "Also, your hair looks cute like this."

It’s a genuine compliment; she can see it in how he smiles at her. She's almost at eye level with him with the roller skates on. Nose level and mouth level too. If she wanted to, she could pull herself in by his belt loops and press her lips against his.

"Thank you," she says, staring at the ground. "I wanted to try something different."

“I get that. I've always wanted to do something different with my hair, but I feel like any other style would look stupid on me."

"I like your hair as it is,” Annabeth says, and because her filter is deteriorating, “it works for you. The whole cute messy thing.”

Percy beams like he won the lottery, and Annabeth immediately regrets her words. “You think I'm cute?”

They're still standing at the entrance of the building, but with it being midday on a weekday, most people are in class or at lunch. Besides the two of them, presumably. Annabeth hopes no one else walks out the door.

“I said your hair is. You’re not your hair.”

“My hair is a part of me.”

“If you shave it off, you lose all your cuteness.”

“So, you admit I have cuteness.”

Yeah, the flush definitely isn’t from physical exertion. Annabeth scoffs and half-turns away from him, gazing over the parking lot instead. “You’re so annoying.”

Percy moves back into her line of sight, a shit-eating grin still plastered over his stupidly cute face. “You’re not denying it.”

A giggle catches in Annabeth’s throat, and she can’t tell whether it’s genuine laughter or an outburst of disbelief. How did she even become friends with this guy? And why doesn't she want to stop the friendship?

"I'm… not," she says against her better judgment. She winces at her admission, and genuine surprise flashes across Percy's face. "But I'm not confirming either."

Annabeth begins to skate away, a smile hidden behind a bitten lip. She only recently taught herself to go backward, which works to her benefit as she watches Percy's face morph between several different emotions. She lets out a giggle when his ears flame red again.

"You're not fair, Annabeth," he decides when Annabeth is almost too far away to hear him.

She cups her hands over her mouth and yells,

"I never claimed to be,"

And it is then she knows two truths:

One: her spatial awareness skills are better than she thought; she manages to not fall.

And, two:

Annabeth Chase really likes Percy Jackson.

The night before Annabeth has to board a flight, she asks Percy if he would be willing to practice with her again.

And it’s not like Percy can say no.

“Thanks for doing this,” Annabeth says, pulling her hair into a hair tie as Percy stands in the middle of the room, waiting for him to tell her where she wants him. “What time are you heading out tomorrow?”

It’s the Friday before Spring Break, so most people are already off campus or on their way to being gone. Percy has a car, so he’s completely in control of when he leaves— and he already decided he was going to leave tomorrow before Annabeth asked him.

“10-ish, I think,” Percy says. “What about you?”

“Mm, early. 6.” She’s wearing a hoodie, so she pushes her sleeves up past her elbows as she comes to stand in front of Percy. She’s also wearing heels again, and Percy can see the tape around the side of her foot. “And it’s like, a six-hour flight, so that’s even more annoying.”

While Percy is going back home to his loved ones in New York City, Annabeth is visiting her family in San Francisco for the week. She hadn’t been looking forward to it until a few days ago when Percy mentioned it was already beach weather over there. “Ugh, you’re so right,” she’d said, staring wistfully into the distance. “Sand and sea, here I come.”

“I’m so jealous,” Percy said, pouting as he clicked his pen.

“You can go to Coney Island.”

“I’ve been to Coney Island a billion times. And it’s too cold for that.”

Annabeth shrugged, looking at Percy with a warmth that made him feel it physically. “I would take you with me if I could.”

Percy swallowed hard, eyes falling back to the notes for his quiz the next day. “I wish. Just tell the Pacific I say hi.”

Annabeth sighed exaggeratedly, her foot shaking beneath the table as she went back to writing. “I will. Seaweed Brain.”

Percy thinks about those words as he takes Annabeth's hand in his, her hand below his shoulder blade. He wonders if she meant it.

“Are you excited to see your mom?” Annabeth asks, following Percy’s gentle lead as the music flows from her phone speaker. At 9PM, the dance studio staff had locked the stereo away in the storage closet, but Annabeth insisted they rehearse one more time before break so she could finalize the choreography she would teach the person who would inevitably replace Percy.

This first part, Percy had gotten down well enough for Annabeth to not reprimand him for everything he did wrong. He smiles gently at her question.

“Yeah. Her and Estelle. And Paul. And Grover.”

Annabeth nods as she softly hums along to the song. He spins her out of his grasp and then back in, catching her as her hand rests on his bicep.

“Grover’s the one next to you on that picture on your desk, right?” she asks, sliding her foot behind her before standing upright again. “Dark curly hair?”

Percy doesn’t remember telling her that explicitly. “Yeah. Grover Underwood.”

He’d been Percy’s best friend since they were in middle school and Percy was the only kid who defended him against bullies. In return, Grover offered Percy his unconditional friendship, going with Percy to fast food drive-throughs when he didn’t want to go by himself or the store when his mom sent him out to retrieve groceries. He’d even been Percy’s date to his prom when Percy's actual date stood him up.

(Grover had taken his own girlfriend to his school’s prom, but Percy was okay with that. Going to two proms with a guy he wasn’t dating felt like a bit much. And it was probably for the best that Grover didn’t go with him, as he and his girlfriend, Juniper, have been going out ever since.)

“You two look alike,” Annabeth says after a while, tilting her head up toward Percy with a wistful smile.

Percy arches an eyebrow. “I don’t…think we do?”

Annabeth shakes her head. “I mean, you guys smile the same. You know how people say that the longer you love someone, the more you start to look alike?”

The music loops, and they automatically go back to their starting position. “I’ve heard that about married couples and dogs and their owners.”

Annabeth grabs his hand, and her thumb rubs over the back of it. “Yeah, but I think it goes for anyone who’s been together for a long time. You’ve known him since you were 12, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s almost ten years. And maybe in another ten, your eyes will turn brown too.”

Percy is still a little clumsy in the second part. He doesn’t know where his feet are at all times, he’s still stiff, and both his leading and his height make him feel like he’s going to step on her constantly, but it’s enough for now. And it’s enough for Annabeth, so he’ll accept where he is and settle with never quite meeting her.

“I think I’ve loved enough brown-eyed people in my life to turn my eyes in less time than that,” Percy says.

He hadn’t been thinking when he said it; it’s hard to think when he’s around Annabeth. But he doesn’t miss the way Annabeth’s brown eyes widen before flitting away from his, her grip on him increasing ever-so-slightly.

Percy opens his mouth to take it back, but the words don’t come.

It’s quiet through their next run of the third part. Percy is the least confident in this part, the least practiced with Annabeth still workshopping how she wants the dance to finish. Before the song stops, she replays it twice from the beginning, like she’s avoiding the ending.

“I think it should end with a dip,” she says quietly after a few minutes, drumming her fingers against Percy’s back. “I think it…I think it’s fitting, right?”

Percy doesn’t know anything about dance or the type of dance she’s doing, but from the limited knowledge Annabeth has given him, he thinks she’s right. It needs a finish, and a dip is the most advanced move Percy can muster before he needs to take an actual dance class.

“Okay. Am I the dipper or the dippee?”

Annabeth rolls her eyes, repositioning her arm around his shoulder.

“As much as I would love to pull off being the dipper, I would drop your gangly ass.”

She tells him to put one hand on her waist and the other across the top of her back, hand near the base of her neck. She emphasizes that he needs to bend his knee off to the side as he lowers her, because,

“You will fall on top of me and crush me to death if you don’t.”

Annabeth lets him go to play the song again, and when she returns, Percy feels like he’s going to burst out of his skin. The mood of the entire practice is off—whose fault that was, he doesn’t know—and he doesn’t think holding her and staring into her eyes will help it.

The end of the song nears, the familiar build-up filled with dramatic string instruments, and Percy knows Annabeth can feel how sweaty his hand is. Just before the song ends, Annabeth spins under his hand to put her arm around his shoulder, and Percy’s hands go where she showed him.

He slowly bends his knee, lowering her to the floor at an angle.

The back of his mind tells him that they don’t need to practice this fourth part. Her actual dance partner would know what a dip is.  If Annabeth had it in her mind to choreograph it, she could try it with the person who wouldn’t be scared to drop her, wouldn’t enjoy having her so close, wouldn’t hope that her tiny inhale means more.

But he's the one here. And he's the one holding her in his arms.

The music ends. Their chests heave heavier than the dance called for.

Her eyelashes flutter as she looks at his mouth.

She's so pretty it makes Percy breathless.

He'd thought it a thousand times before, but now Percy realizes the severity of the thought. Annabeth is probably the prettiest girl he'd ever seen. Her smooth brown skin, her round nose, her thick eyebrows, the tiny hoops in her ears. Like the girl he would see on the front of a magazine or around campus but never get the guts to talk to.

For maybe the tenth time since he’s known her, he looks at her lips—bare and seemingly dry, as she licks them.

For the third time, he consciously thinks about kissing her.

Percy looks into Annabeth's big, deep brown eyes sparkling in the fluorescent lights. Then those eyes flicker closed, and her breath fans over his mouth, and holy shit, this isn’t real, this isn’t happening, and Percy is milliseconds away from finally closing the gap that’d been shrinking between them for so long when—

Her phone rings. Of course, it does. Percy's eyes squeeze shut at the shrill sound.

Annabeth takes a deep breath as she wriggles out of his hold, tucking the braids she’d left out of her ponytail behind her ears. She turns away from him to grab her phone, and Percy’s heart pounds to the beat of a song too fast to dance to.

Annabeth clears her throat as she leans against the opposite wall, holding her phone up to her ear. “Hey, Piper,” she says, staring at the floor, “what’s up?”

The conversation is nothing to be concerned about—presumably one of Annabeth’s California friends asking when she would arrive (“Well, the east coast is like, three hours ahead, so I guess about 9 PST. It’s alright, we all know your timing isn’t the best”)—but it feels tense anyway. When Annabeth hangs up, she slides her phone into her pocket.

“I, uh, think that’s all I need,” she says as she picks up her bag, still refusing to make eye contact with him, which hurts more than Percy expects it to. “It’s late, and I still have to pack. So…”

Percy waves his hand dismissively, then sticks his hands into his pockets. “Yeah, sure. I have to pack too.”

Annabeth nods, smiling shyly, and it kills Percy. “Okay. Well, since I probably won’t see you…have a nice break, Percy. Tell the Atlantic I say hi.”

She turns around, and Percy watches her shoulders raise as she takes another deep breath. He wants to call out to her: to ask what happened, to apologize, to explain, to tell her something. But once again, the words don’t come.

Until he realizes one thing.

He grabs his jacket from against the mirror and slips it on as he catches up to her, startling her when he falls into step.

“I’m also going this way. We live in the same building.”

Annabeth’s mouth forms a tiny ‘o,’ then she laughs, folding her arms over her stomach. “I forgot for a second. Guess I withdraw the goodbye until we get to the dorm.”

The moment is gone, but Percy will take it; any time he gets to spend with Annabeth Chase is time Percy will savor.

It’s quiet on the way back, with the campus so empty. But amongst the moon and the stars and the sound of crickets chirping between rustling leaves, Percy doesn’t think it’s all that bad.

In the last therapy session Percy had before the break, Dr. Brunner gave him a journal.

“This doesn’t work for everyone, but I think it’s worth a try. I’ve noticed that it’s hard for you to express yourself sometimes, so maybe working through it in writing will help.”

It took three days for Percy to open the journal, sitting untouched on his desk as piles of papers stacked on top of it. He only remembered it was there when he was up late the night before he left for Spring Break (the night of their last dance), staring at his ceiling unable to sleep because of his racing thoughts.

Percy has had trouble sleeping for a long time. It was even worse when he was younger and nightmares about being unable to save his dying loved ones plagued his sleep nearly every night. Percy’s mom, Sally, had taken him to a sleep specialist to see if they could help. It proved to be of none; no matter how many brain scans or how much sleep monitoring they did, no matter the amount of tea or melatonin or imaginary sheep in his head, Percy would be up for hours before his body took over and dragged him under.

Percy just stopped telling his mom after a while. She was strained tight for money as it was.

Eventually, his physical exhaustion from playing basketball and trying to keep up with his academics was enough to make his brain shut down to recover for at least a few hours a night. But then, when he was in high school, there was a new baby in the house who didn’t sleep through the night for months, and while most of that responsibility fell on his mom and stepdad, Percy woke up all the same. He was okay with it because he knew Estelle couldn’t help it. But then when he did fall back to sleep, his nightmares featured a brand new tiny addition to the people he couldn’t save.

That night before he left for break, as he laid in his dorm room bed, staring at the ceiling, Percy thought about his life.

You know when your mind boards one train of thought, and suddenly, every train arrives at the station? The tracks of your mind start to merge, intertwine, and converge, creating the worst transit lines you've ever seen. The sheer weight of every emotion you've ever felt bears down on your chest, making it difficult to catch your breath.

It was like that.

He thought about his mother losing her parents, then her uncle, so early in her life. He thought about her falling in love with a man and getting pregnant only for him to leave, claiming they could never be together. He imagined her having to raise a lonely boy who always got into trouble because of his undiagnosed attention-deficiency and hyperactivity. Her, begging schools not to expel him. The nights she spent on the phone with the father of her child, asking him what she should do.

Her marrying a guy who could provide.

Him being a piece of shit.

Percy having to keep his joy on the inside when he died.

There was so much Percy had yet to process at 21. So much that just had to happen, and he had to move on from, on to the next thing, the next milestone. And there was so much still happening, so many new changes and new feelings for people (or for a person) that were starting to make his old feelings feel both insignificant and like he was experiencing them for the first time.

Because it wasn’t that Percy didn’t feel anything; he felt so much, all the time. But putting words to the feelings he felt was the most difficult thing in the world.

Brunner had helped with that a little. He told Percy that it wasn’t anger he felt at the world, but something more complex and layered: frustration, confusion, grief, empathy.

“And a lot of those emotions stem from love,” Dr. Brunner said, sliding the new journal across the table. “Not all of them, and not directly, but loving and wanting to protect something or someone can cause a litany of other emotions to brew. Don’t let them consume you, Percy.”

He didn’t always have to give a name to an emotion, but maybe he could isolate one that he wanted to start processing. Brunner’s words echoed in Percy’s head when he remembered where he left the journal. With an exhale, Percy got out of bed to turn on his desk lamp.

He opened to the first page.

Sat in his chair for ten minutes.

Then woke up the next morning, his head on his desk, a crook in his neck, and drool where words should have been.

Percy isn't really a writing kind of guy, anyway. He is definitely a word-vomit-until-his-words-make-sense person.

So, when Percy makes it home—gives his mom, sister, and stepdad a big hug each and promises to cook them dinner he will tell them everything over—he immediately calls Grover.

Grover pulls up in his car less than five minutes later.

“Hey, man,” he says as Percy opens the passenger door. His car smells like flowers and ketchup, but it fills Percy with a sense of relief. “How have you been?”

It’s only been a few months since Percy last saw Grover, but it felt like forever. Grover’s hair is longer now, curling around his ears and brushed from his eyes. He’s wearing a shirt Percy has never seen him wear, a green long-sleeve button-up Percy thinks is kind of ugly, but his girlfriend probably got it for him so he can’t say that. He has dark, straggly hairs on his chin now, the very early makings of a goatee at best. And he seems happier. The smile he gives Percy tells him as much.

“I’m doing alright,” Percy says, closing the door and buckling his seatbelt. “How are you?”

Grover puts the car into reverse and pulls out of the parking lot of Percy’s apartment building. “I’m good.” He drives into the street, even though neither has any plans on where to go. “But you wouldn’t have called me this soon after making it in if you were doing alright.”

Percy groans, leaning against the window. “I guess. How much do you want to know?”

“Everything. You can always tell me everything.”

They decide to go to the skate park they frequented in early high school when Percy was going through his skating phase, and Grover watched on the sidelines, bandaids in hand. That skateboard was all types of scraped and scratched, but it is still in the closet in his room, faded Gorillaz stickers and all.

The skate park is empty at 1PM with all the skater teens still at school. Percy sits on the edge of a ramp and Grover follows suit, leaning back onto his hands.

“Life is hard, man,” Percy says, flicking a pebble across the ground.

Grover exhales shortly. “No shit. What’s up?

“I don’t even know,” Percy says, watching the trees around them shake in the light breeze. “It’s not even anything, really. I mean, we have playoffs coming up in a few weeks. I’m not failing my classes. Therapy has been helping, I think, and…and I’ve even made a new friend.”

Grover raises an eyebrow in Percy’s periphery. “A new friend?”

Percy already regrets bringing her up. “Yeah.”

Grover rotates his hands, looking at Percy intently. “Okay, and…what is their name?”

Percy doesn’t know why he already feels so awkward when he’s the one who mentioned her. It’s not like he’d never brought up Annabeth to anyone before—he’d mentioned her to Will and Beckendorf a few times, and after she showed up to his game and then Beckendorf’s apartment for the movie, the basketball team teased him incessantly about her—but talking about her to someone in his home life feels like a lot.

But he started it, so.

“Annabeth,” Percy says, hoping he isn’t as pink as he thinks he is. “She’s…cool.”

“Cool?” Grover brings one knee up and rests his arm over it. “That’s it?”

Percy swallows hard, trying to gather courage. “No. She’s more than cool. She’s great.”

“I don’t know if that’s more than cool.”

“She’s awesome. How about that?”

Grover smirks, looking at Percy with an I can see through you expression he’d been getting from a lot of people lately. But suddenly, his expression turns quizzical.

“You said her name was Annabeth, right?” Percy nods. “What’s her last name?”

“Chase. Why?”

Grover’s eyes grow wide as he pulls his phone out of his pocket. “One second.” He taps out for a few seconds and when he turns his phone, an Instagram page is pulled up. “Is this her?”

Percy takes the phone. Sure enough, @annab_chase is full of pictures of Annabeth, posting about the books she’s reading, photos of her in the dance studio, posing with friends, selfies with coffee cups and various breakfast pastries. Grover already follows the account.

“It is,” Percy says, glancing up at Grover. “You know her?”

“Yeah!” he says, and his smile is infectious as he takes his phone back. “We went to summer camp together for a few years. Dude, she is awesome. Total badass.”

Percy laughs a little. “Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah. You should ask if she still knows how to knife throw.”

“Knife throw?”

“She could nail an apple off your head without nicking a hair. But it’s been almost ten years, so I wouldn’t ask her to do it now. Unless she’s been practicing in her free time.”

Percy shakes his head. Annabeth hadn’t mentioned knowing Grover, but she seemed to know who he was in that picture on his desk. Percy chalked it up to her using context clues, but he guesses it’s more than that. He would have to ask later.

But for a while, Grover gushes over how cool it is that Percy knows someone he used to know. Everything Grover says about Annabeth—her hard exterior and soft interior, her hatred of being cold, her passion for everything she commits to—are all things Percy knows to be true. Percy wonders if she’s changed at all since she was 12. Wonders if green was her favorite color, if strawberries were her favorite fruit then too.

“And,” Grover says with a bright grin, “ there was this one time we were assigned to look after the horses in the stable, and a horse shit all down her leg, and—”

It’s nice to hear Grover holds Annabeth (at least the eight-years-younger version of her) in high regard but—there’s a pang of something behind Percy’s ribcage. And he knows what it is this time.

It’s jealousy.

And it’s not that Percy thinks Grover likes Annabeth or anything. He has his own girlfriend, and Annabeth is just a childhood friend he hasn’t talked to in a long time. So Percy isn’t worried that he would…he doesn’t know.

Take her away from him?

It’s not that.

It’s just the fact that Grover has known Annabeth for longer than he has.

That emotion both sounds and feels ridiculous to Percy, but it doesn’t stop it from rising inside of him. Grover got all those years with Annabeth, knowing her, being her friend, getting to be a part of a foundational part of her life. Grover knows that she could throw knives, that she practiced judo, that she used to run the 100m dash and beat everyone except one girl named Clarisse back at camp. And while Percy realizes that he’s only known Annabeth for a few months, it's weird knowing that there is so much he doesn’t know. That she had a whole life before she entered the bathroom that night.

It’s unfair to all three of them to be jealous of Grover being friends with her for a couple years early on. Grover has been Percy's friend longer than he’d known Annabeth; Percy had a whole life before he met Annabeth too.

But listening to Grover know Annabeth?

It makes Percy want to know Annabeth more. And, deep down, he wonders what they would be if they had met when they were 12 too.

“Percy,” Grover says suddenly, startling Percy out of his reverie and making him realize that Grover had stopped talking a while ago. “Can I ask you a question?”

Percy nods, tapping the heel of his shoe against the ramp wall.

“Do you like Annabeth?”

Percy’s breath catches as he plays with another pebble on the ground. “What makes you say that?”

“Two reasons.”

“Which are?”

Grover holds up two fingers. “One, the scowl written all over your face as I was talking about her.” He puts a finger down. “Two, the fact that you didn’t deny it.”

He puts the second finger down and then laces his fingers together. Percy’s heart pounds, threatening to break out of his chest. He turns to face anywhere that isn’t Grover, settling on the teenage boys who skipped their last classes to grind the rails several feet away.

The words slip out before he realizes he's talking.

“We almost kissed last night.”

He can hear Grover’s jaw drop. “What?!”

Percy scrunches his face as he turns back to Grover, an odd sense of relief flooding through him at the confession. “Yeah. We were practicing for her dance performance, and one thing led to another, and…”

Grover jumps up and throws his hands in the air. “Percy, that’s awesome!” He reaches out to grab Percy’s shoulder, shaking him until Percy grins and stands as well. “Why was it almost?”

“Someone called her phone right as it was about to happen. Just my luck, right?”

Grover scoffs. “That sucks. What are you going to do now?”

It’s not like he hadn’t thought about it. From the moment Percy dropped her off at her room and lingered a little too long in her doorway after she closed the door, Percy thought about Annabeth Chase and the kiss that didn’t happen. Like the title of some corny mystery novel.

Percy sighs, running his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. I’ve never liked someone so much before.”

Grover squeaks and claps his hands over his mouth, and Percy laughs and shoves his shoulder, cheeks burning. “Shut up, man.”

“I didn’t say anything!” Grover’s eyes still twinkle with amusement as he lowered his hands. “But you should talk to her. Don’t let it linger.”

-

He lets it linger for a little; Grover’s words fester in his brain until Wednesday evening.

While stirring a bubbling pot of béchamel sauce, Percy's phone vibrates twice. He wipes his hands on the towel draped over his shoulder and checks it.

There are two notifications from Instagram.

annab_chase started following you.

annab_chase mentioned you in their story.

Immediately curious, Percy taps the second notification.

It’s a video of the ocean, vast, clear, and blue, gently rolling and crashing against the sand. The text at the top says, “Relaying a message,” and when Percy turns up the volume, he hears a voice he recognizes as Annabeth’s shouting, “Hello!”

The video then flips and shows Annabeth, hair in a ponytail and sunglasses perched on her nose, giving a thumbs up. Behind her, a friend with short brown hair flashes a peace sign. The video ends with the two of them laughing.

Percy’s heart nearly bursts.

He watches her story three more times, trying to absorb every detail. The seagulls swooping down toward the glittering water, the sun still high in her sky as it’s setting in Percy’s, the degraded sandcastle at the shoreline Percy is sure was Annabeth’s doing. Her friend, who now knew of Percy’s existence. Annabeth’s face, glowing.

Using one hand to swipe up on the video, he turns off the stove before he rests his back against the oven handle. Before he can think too hard, he types out a message and sends it.

Percy: Wow. Beautiful.

He goes to her profile and follows her back.

Percy is boiling lasagna noodles when his phone buzzes again, this time from his pocket.

Annabeth: you message like an old man

Percy chuckles as his mom, Sally, comes into the kitchen, sniffing the air like a dog catching a scent. “What are you cooking?” she asks, coming toward the stove. “And what are you laughing at?”

He looks up from sending back a ‘WTF does that mean?,’ feeling his cheeks go a little pink. He gestures to the ingredients cooked on the stove behind him. “Veggie lasagna. And nothing.”

“Mhm.” She suspiciously eyes Percy as she sits at the kitchen table, picking up the book she’d been reading; ironically, it was a book about tips for writing books. She picks up her glasses and slides them up her nose, peering at him over the frames as he glances back at his phone.

Annabeth: you know, like those creepy old men that comment on young women’s photos on instagram

Percy: I was commenting on the ocean :(

“You’re texting someone,” Sally says, more an observation than a question.

“Um…yeah,” he says. He clicks off his phone and slips it into his pocket, ignoring the dopamine rush that flooded through him when it buzzed again. “Did you get Estelle down for a nap?”

His mother narrows her eyes, and Percy knows why. Percy isn’t a texter, not as much as he is a caller. He always preferred to call people so he could talk through his thoughts and not blow up someone’s phone with a billion texts trying to get his point across, or so he wouldn’t forget to respond to someone’s text and seem like an asshole. If he does text someone, it’s for little, immediate things. Not for things he’d smile at his phone about.

His mom knows him too well. Luckily, she lets it go.

“Out like a light. But the minute the lasagna is done, she’ll probably come running out of her room just from the smell.”

Percy waits until the pan is in the oven before he ducks into his room to check his phone again.

Annabeth: just teasing :P how's new york?

He sits on the edge of his bed, tapping his foot on the carpet. Good. I just made some veggie lasagna. How’s the beach?

It’s been nearly half an hour since Annabeth’s last message, so he doesn’t expect a quick response. He falls back into his bed sheets, the same shade as the set he has on his bed at school, and stares at his ceiling, covered in those plastic glow in the dark stars every kid had at some point. His eyes follow the Perseus constellation his mom traced when they first put them up there (“he’s your namesake for a reason, Percy.”); they jump to Andromeda next before his phone vibrates again.

Annabeth: fantastic :,) i honestly wish you were here. you would love it

Annabeth: also, veggie lasagna!! i’m sooo jealous. my dad has some conference he’s going to for the next few days (my stepmom and brothers are going with him), so i’m stuck with pb&js because i’m too lazy to cook

Percy: I’d send you some if I didn’t think my little sister was going to eat it all.

Percy: I could probably make you some when we’re back?

A text bubble pops up for a few seconds before disappearing, and the rush of anxiety that floods through Percy makes his palms immediately sweaty, even though he’d cooked for Annabeth before. He lets out a slow breath as he waits for another response.

Bzzz.

Annabeth: i would like that <3

Percy and his family eat dinner, and it feels good. He’d missed it more than he realized, bogged down with the hurts of college and the weight of expectations to succeed. He missed hearing Estelle talk about the friends she made at pre-school, Paul about the students in his ninth grade classes roasting his cardigan addiction, his mom about this regular at the coffee shop she likes to write at falling in love with one of the baristas. It reminds him that despite it all, he’s lucky to have a family that cares about him. Now, he does. Things are good now.

They ask about basketball, of course. How school was, what things he’s been doing in his free time. And maybe Percy’s a little too honest.

“You’ve been dancing?” Paul says after a sip of water. Estelle sits in the chair next to him, scraping the remnants of her plate into her messy mouth. “What for?”

Percy feels his cheeks warm as he pushes around a piece of zucchini. “A friend asked me to help with her dance performance for the dance show.” At Paul’s raised eyebrow, he adds, “I’m not performing in the actual thing, but she wanted me to help her choreograph.”

“Oh,” Sally says on the other side of him, balancing her fork between her fingers. “Is she who you were texting earlier?”

Paul makes a little humming sound, and Percy makes a big show out of rolling his eyes. He stands from the table and picks up his plate then Estelle’s, to Sally’s protest and Paul’s chuckles. “You’re the only one on my side, Stella,” he says, and Estelle smiles at him with pieces of broccoli between her teeth.

After dinner, Percy washes the dishes as Sally dries them while Paul gives Estelle a bath. She hums a song from a TV show Estelle likes to watch and tries to make Percy laugh with her dorky dances. Once the last plate is clean, she leans against the side of the sink and crosses her arms, a telltale sign that she’s going to question him about something. He glances at her and tries not to look nervous.

“I’m not trying to pry,” Sally says, slinging a dish towel over her shoulder, “and you don’t have to tell me more than what you’re comfortable with. But I’m just curious.”

Percy tries to play dumb, but he’s never been the best at schooling his facial expressions. “About what?”

“This girl. The one you’re dancing with, the one you’re texting.” Sally smiles gently and when she tilts her head, her ponytail falls from her shoulder and swishes behind her. Percy’s eyes track the movement. “Just tell me this: are you happy?”

He thought he’d be more caught off-guard about the question. He expected his defenses to go up, to shrug it off and feign an innocence they both know he doesn’t possess. But as soon as it leaves Sally’s mouth, there’s only an answer that comes to Percy’s mind.

“I think so. Yeah.”

That answer isn’t simple or concrete, but Percy knows it’s honest. Because even when everything comes to a head and nights like a few nights ago happen—ones where he thinks until his head hurts and feels the echoes of all the growing pains his childhood left him—right now, in this moment, and in a series of moments he’s experienced with a girl he’d known all of a couple months, a girl he’s falling for—Percy believes himself.

He's ready for bed around 11:00, much earlier than he plans to go to sleep. He slips under his blankets, laptop with Hulu on his lap as he scrolls through the shows he added to his watchlist months ago and never really planned to get to.

His phone vibrates again; he picks it up with a speed he’s embarrassed about. It’s only a text from some company’s marketing list he signed up for months ago, but then he accidentally clicks on Instagram and finds that Annabeth posted another story.

It’s a photo of a brilliant orange and yellow sun setting over the ocean, overlaid with a photo of Annabeth in a hoodie on a lounge chair, sunglasses pushed into her hair, and lips pursed at the camera. The photo is captioned with curly white text that takes Percy several seconds to decipher as ‘beach bum.’

Percy: Wow. Beautiful.

A text comes through seconds later.

Annabeth: do you have my post notifications on, seaweed brain? i posted that less than a minute ago

Percy’s ears burn. Perhaps I’m just an Annabeth Chase fan.

get in line ;)

Percy snorts softly and goes to put his phone down when another message pops up.

Annabeth: what are you doing right now?

Percy: Nothing really. Probably gonna watch Hulu for a while.

…

Annabeth: can i call you?

Chapter Text

Annabeth enjoyed spending time at the beach. It was still a little too cold for a ton of people to be there, so she and her friend, Piper, spent most of the day alone, dipping their feet in the water before chickening out and making sandcastles decorated with as many seashells as they could find. At some point, Piper fell asleep on her towel as Annabeth read one of the many books she bought and never got around to starting; Annabeth grabbed Piper’s phone, took a close-up picture of her face, and set it as Piper’s lock screen, to Piper’s horror upon waking up and checking her texts.

Being chased down the beach was worth it; getting knocked into the frigid water was not. But the shock of the cold sent enough adrenaline through Annabeth to chase and tackle Piper into the sand, so maybe it was worth it after all.

She never forgot Percy’s request to greet the ocean in his absence. She repeated it over and over again until the view was ideal enough to show him. That was important enough to her. He was important enough to her.

“That’s definitely story-worthy,” Piper said, peering over Annabeth’s shoulder as the video played back. She sighed contentedly then threw her hands in the air, spinning in a circle. “God, I love spring break.”

Annabeth giggled as she knelt down in the sand and opened Instagram. She hadn’t been active on Instagram in months due to everything happening in her life, but pretty views made her want to share them with the few people who followed her.

But a small part of her (teeny, absolutely tiny) wanted the video to just be for Percy. She intended to text him the video and keep this little bit of the Pacific Ocean just between the two of them (and Piper). But that part was drowned out by the onslaught of anxiety that washed over her whenever she thought about the fact that she…

Liked him.

A blush burned her skin more than the sun could, deflected by her melanin and the sunscreen she religiously reapplied. She went to post the video to her story before deciding she’d kill two birds with one stone and tag him—only to realize they never followed each other. She quickly found his page, bare except for a profile picture likely years old, and a bio with a fish and a basketball emoji with their school and graduating class underneath, and she followed him without letting herself think twice. Then she posted the video to her story and stuck her phone in a bag in an attempt to forget about it.

“I only brought hummus sandwiches,” Piper said as she and Annabeth sat on either side of a picnic basket on their two towels. Piper opened the basket and withdrew a Tupperware full of wheat bread. “And carrots and water.”

“I like hummus,” Annabeth said, taking the sandwich Piper gave her. “And carrots and water.”

Annabeth was biting into a carrot spear when she felt her phone buzz in the bag against her side. Despite everything inside telling her to wait and enjoy lunch with a friend she hasn’t seen in months, she caved and dug her phone out of her bag.

“Is that him?” Piper said around the crust in her mouth. Annabeth’s eyes snapped up to her.

“Um…yeah.” She turned her phone over in her lap. “Sorry, that was rude—”

“Annabeth, you know I don’t care about that,” Piper said, swallowing and wiping her hands with a napkin. “I texted my partner like, two minutes ago.”

Annabeth smiled as she put the bitten carrot by her side. Upon Annabeth’s arrival, Piper had a thousand catch-up questions: about dance, school, what movies she’d seen, where she got the jeans she was wearing, when she’d found a new braider, if she liked the car fragrance she’d bought last week. It eventually wandered to relationships, as all Annabeth’s conversations seem to home in on these days—though that was most likely due to the lack of her outright refusal to engage in those conversations and an increase in her receptiveness to them. For some reason. A reason those closest to her clocked nearly immediately.

Annabeth had been hesitant to tell Piper about him. She wanted this break, or at least a few days of it, to be about hanging out and not worrying about imminent deadlines. But all Piper had to do was prod a little, and Annabeth spilled like a broken pinata.

It was hard, keeping everything inside all the time. Dr. Brunner told her as much; bottling up what she felt helped nobody get anywhere. And though telling her one friend who lived all the way on the West Coast and had nothing to do with anybody involved in the grown-up-non-childhood-related stressful aspects of Annabeth’s life didn’t actively resolve anything, telling someone about it felt like it did. Saying the words, “I like someone,” for the first in forever, felt like a little resolution, and if not, a revelation. To Piper and to herself.

Annabeth turned her phone back over. “Yeah, but he’s not like…my partner or anything.”

Piper tilted her head as she closed the hummus container. “I know. But I remember how hard it was to not be with my person all the time.”

Her person. Her person. Percy wasn’t that—right? It wasn’t like Annabeth owned him; he could do whatever with whoever, whenever. Annabeth had no say in his life.

“I wouldn’t call him that,” Annabeth said, heart skipping as the little text bubble popped up again.

“Do you want to?” Piper leaned her hands back into the sand, eyes sparkling in the sun. “Like, I know that you have feelings for him and everything, which is awesome, because he sounds like a nice guy, but like…Annabeth, do you want to be with Percy?”

Annabeth paused her texting fingers. Seagulls squawked over her head; waves gently rolled over the shore; a family of three laughed as they buried the dad underneath the sand a dozen yards away; at this point in the afternoon, it felt a little warmer than it had when they first got there.

None of those sensations competed with the intensity of her heart thudding in her chest.

“I mean…I-I think so.”

“You think so?”

Her phone buzzed again, but when she checked, it wasn’t a reply from Percy; instead another person seemed to have swiped up on her story.

From an account called @rachedare: hey! this may be an odd question considering we’ve only met once, but i was just curious and couldn’t glean a clear answer, so i thought i’d just ask you directly: are you and percy dating?

“Ooh, you’re making a face,” Piper said, leaning over the basket to glance at Annabeth’s phone, now gripped tightly in her hand. “What’s wrong?”

Annabeth scoured her brain for who she’d met that would send her such a thing. Then she remembered: Rachel, the girl Percy was talking to that time they got lunch together. When had she followed Annabeth on Instagram?

And what gave her the nerve to message her?

“Some…one just texted me asking if Percy and I are dating.”

“What convenient timing.”

Annabeth took a deep breath, trying to ignore the way her face flushed hot. She truly had no real opinion on Rachel; she hardly knew her, so how could she? The most that Annabeth thought was that her red hair was pretty, and she was kinda cool for letting her prank Percy, and the way she looked at Percy kind of made Annabeth upset in a way that probably wasn’t warranted.

“Right,” Annabeth said, tapping on the notification. The top of the page showed Rachel’s profile picture, a photo of her smiling brightly with paint splattered among her freckles. Annabeth stared at the cursor blinking in the message box.

“Who is it?” Piper asked, moving the basket so she could scoot closer. “Someone you know?”

“Kinda.”

A dozen replies flicked through Annabeth’s mind, and admittedly, most of them were unkind and fell along the lines of ‘that’s none of your business’. Because what was it to Rachel if they were? What was it to anyone whether they were dating or not? Annabeth’s relationship with Percy was hers, and hers alone.

Annabeth: why do you ask?

“That’s not an answer,” Piper said in a sing-songy voice, leaning into Annabeth’s arm. Annabeth cut a glare at her friend. “Sorry.”

Rachel started typing seconds later.

Rachel: i was just wondering. you two seem so close.

Rachel: i think it’s cute

“What does she mean by cute?” Annabeth said, wrinkling her nose. Cute was used to describe two kittens playing, or two kindergarteners holding hands on the playground. She and Percy weren’t cute. They were—

Well, she didn’t know. Because suddenly, friends didn’t seem to cut it anymore.

“Maybe she ships you guys,” Piper said, sitting back on her knees and readjusting her cover-up. “Or maybe… she’s interested in him.”

That thought made Annabeth feel sick. Just like hearing those people behind her at the basketball game, or whenever she saw Percy flocked by people on campus or thought about the fact that she’d hardly get to see him when they get back from break. And the image that flashed through her mind of Rachel messaging Percy, asking him out, them being together and leaving Annabeth in the dust made her angry.

Her mind conjured another image: Percy's face hovering above hers, his warm, kind eyes and soft, pink lips mere centimeters away as he dipped her during their last dance rehearsal. The feeling that rushed through her at the prospect of him kissing her.

Annabeth ran a hand over her head, dropping her phone on the towel next to her.

“I do want to be with him.”

Piper blinked. Then she smiled, and Annabeth felt a tiny smile grow on her face as well.

“Then let him know that.”

–

And that’s what led her to her decision to call him later that night.

After Piper dropped her off, Annabeth was left in a big, empty house with nothing but her thoughts—thoughts that mostly contained anxieties surrounding 1) the fact that she actively had a giant crush on someone and 2) she only had a few weeks before the Spring Dance show. She paced in her dark kitchen eating crackers, wishing she had access to some homemade veggie lasagna. She recounted the dance steps across the tile floors and struggled to forget the last full run through she had with a partner.

She ended up in her teenage bedroom, curled in a giant fluffy purple armchair and under a fuzzy green throw blanket. The drawings she’d taped to the walls were starting to fall now, sketches and renderings of magnificent buildings with impractical proportions. Clothes leaked from her suitcase and were strewn around the carpeted floors. She reached over to switch on her floor lamp light, casting the room with a light orange glow.

She decided to post another few photos on her story, thinking once again about her friend/dance partner/study buddy/brand new shiny object of her affection. She thought about their text exchange, his promise to cook for her when they got back (if they ever find the time again). Her stomach flipped at the thought of eating dinner with him as if they hadn’t done it a dozen times before.

She thought about Rachel’s messages again. Annabeth, despite everything, decided to be honest and answer with a ‘we’re just friends’. Anything else would have felt like lying; she’s not Percy’s girlfriend, as much as she may want to be. But part of her couldn’t help but think her feelings weren't completely one-sided, and if an honest answer was enough to completely complicate that, then maybe her falling for someone wasn’t worth it.

Her story posted. Before Annabeth could even think, her phone vibrated.

It was Percy. And after a tiny exchange signaling he was probably about to go to bed, Annabeth remembered Piper’s words and got a little bold.

She feels like she’s going to explode as her phone rings. Though she’s in the house alone, she scrambles for her headphones and puts them over her head just in time for the call to pick up.

“Hello?” says Percy’s voice on the other end.

Annabeth wipes her palms on her blanket. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

Annabeth doesn’t know why she did this. She hates phone calls; she thinks they’re worse than in-person conversations. But what else could she do about the little love monster gnawing at her ribcage, threatening to escape and wreak havoc? She nearly crumples at the sound of his voice, raspier through the speaker, and she knows then that she was kidding herself trying to deny how she felt for so long.

They stumble through the formalities: how’s your break been, how was your day, how’s your friends/family. It’s so odd hearing Percy speak over the phone after talking to him nearly every day in person; at the same time, having someone to talk to in a vacant house is comforting.

“You didn’t tell me you knew Grover, by the way,” Percy says. “He told me you went to summer camp together.”

Annabeth sinks further into her chair, smiling slightly. “Uh, yeah, I actually adore Grover. I was gonna tell you eventually, but I didn’t really know how to bring up ‘your childhood best friend is actually my childhood best friend’ in a casual way.”

Percy hums over the phone, and the sound reverberates in Annabeth’s eardrum. “I guess that’s fair. Is that why you said we look alike?”

Annabeth’s grin grows. She remembers the years she spent at camp with that frail boy with curly hair that grew like horns and with as much passion for the environment as the trees themselves. Their treks through the woods, their expeditions in the horse stables. It was one of the few happy childhood memories she had.

“Yeah. I stand by that. I adore both of you.”

The conversation ambles like it usually does, to Annabeth’s relief. She closes her eyes and leans her head against the back of the chair as she lets her mouth run. Percy speaks quietly, likely due to how late it was on the East Coast, but she likes it. Through her headphones, it’s strangely comforting, the tiny inkling of a New York accent that peeks through with some words. He tells her about his baby sister, Estelle, and her weird affinity for vegetables. He tells her about the times he spent at the skate park when he was a kid. He tells her about the book his mom is trying to write, about the dog he had when he was a teenager, the time he broke his ankle tripping down the stairs.

"I worked as a lifeguard last summer," Percy says, the sound of fabric shifting around on the other end, "at a waterpark. They gave us these whistles with chewy rubber, so I was chewing on them all the time, and one day, I accidentally nearly swallowed and choked on one. But it was attached to a lanyard, so I pulled it out before anything could happen."

And Annabeth finds that story cute.

Having a crush on the person who choked on a whistle as an adult is as perplexing as it is fascinating and as frustrating as it is damning. At moments like these, she digs deep into her brain, trying to figure out why, of everyone in the world, she chose Percy Jackson to be the one to make his way over her walls.

Yet here she is, all heart-eyes over him. She can feel her gaze going soft.

"Why are you like this?" Annabeth asks, picking at one of her pencil callouses. "Why am I friends with you?"

"Because you love me."

It's a little closer to the truth than she'd like to admit. "Sure. We'll go with that."

Percy chuckles. "Alright, since I told you that embarrassing story, you tell me one."

Annabeth hums thoughtfully, cleaning sand from under her thumbnail. "You told me that voluntarily. I don't have to tell you anything."

"Oh, c’mon, Annabeth."

“I don’t know if I’m ready to expose my deepest, darkest secret to you yet. How do I know I can trust you?”

"You're the only person I've told that story to. Not even Grover knows, and I tell him everything."

She thinks back to the photo of him and Grover on his desk back home and finds herself wishing she was a part of it. Over the past few months, she’d gotten to know Percy a fair bit, but hearing this and all the things she’d only discovered now over the phone—it makes her want to know him more.

Annabeth wants to know how he spends his holidays, and which grandmother passed the family recipes down to him. She wonders if he has a favorite song he likes to sing in the shower and whether it’s ABBA or if that was just his pick for the night. Does he keep a light on in his bedroom because he’s a little afraid of the dark at twenty-one? Does he have any tattoos nobody knows about but him?

She wants to know. Annabeth wants to learn everything about him.

And that’s the part that gets her the most—worries her the most, tortures her the most. Realistically, she will find out whatever Percy tells her, which is probably a fair bit, given they remain friends for however long it is deemed reasonable. For the remainder of the semester probably, until they graduate, maybe. Lifelong seems presumptuous, as their career and life goals would diverge the second they walk across the stage. She’d settle in some big city with a well-paying job, and he’d land himself in a nice house just outside of New York, running a successful restaurant people from surrounding areas would flock to. With a spouse, two kids, and a dog.

And Annabeth would be… alone. Even in her fantasies, she ends up alone.

(Or, at least, she used to.)

But the little nuances—whether Percy sleeps on his back, stomach, or side, if his relationship with his mother’s husband is amicable, the order his family does Christmas morning—will be something he shares with the person he spends forever with.

And if a tiny—okay, well more than tiny—part of her wants that person to be her, then sue her.

She’s weak when it comes to Percy Jackson. One little poke, and she caves.

“Fine. But promise you won’t make fun of me.”

“I promise. But I don’t think it’ll be worse than choking on something completely avoidable after age three.”

Annabeth bunches her blanket in her fist. “Fair enough. You are an idiot.” She smirks at Percy’s huff of exasperation. “But, uh. Freshman year, at a party I went to, I got…really drunk. Embarrassingly so. You know, the first time away from home, too much access to alcohol.” She feels her skin warming as she recalls the events of that night. “Long story short, I threw up in front of everyone, which consisted of probably a hundred people, though, in hindsight, I doubt most of them were paying attention. Or sober enough to pay attention.” Her hand clenches a little harder like it’d ease her cringe. “But I don’t remember much after…that whole thing. I woke up the next morning in the same clothes, though thankfully back in my room, and my roommate chewed me out when I came back from the shower. So I haven’t been to a party since.”

Annabeth squeezes her eyes shut and tries to recall why she chose to share that story instead of the countless less emotionally-scarring events she's experienced at this point in her life. Percy’s quiet on the other line for several horrifying seconds.

“Did you go to the party with anyone?”

Annabeth shakes her head before she realizes he can’t see her. “No. I was kind of…a lot at the start of college. I didn’t have many friends, which was bad because I went out a lot.”

“Why?” His tone is more gently concerned than she expected.

“Why I went out a lot?” Percy hums in confirmation. “I just…well, how deep do you want to get?”

“As deep as you’re willing.”

Annabeth lets out a shaky breath, picking at fibers. “I mean…those years were hard for me. I—well, my senior year of high school, I kind of lost someone really close to me.” She swallows hard and closes her eyes again, trying her best to focus. “He got into some really…bad shit, and he just turned into this person I hardly knew anymore, someone I didn’t want to know anymore, which hurt so bad because he—he had always been there for me when shit got bad at home. He was there when things started getting bad at home. And to see someone I knew and loved become this shell of a person, become mean and nasty and…not who I used to know? It ruined me, Percy.”

A pregnant pause. “Yeah?”

Her vision is blurry when she opens her eyes again. “Yeah. Because he didn’t die, but the version of him I knew did. And losing a person I considered family…I took it so hard. And I didn’t have much of a support system. I had my friend, Thalia, but she was rarely ever in town. I lost touch with Grover over the years. Piper went to a different school, and I hated my school, the way I was treated by the teachers and other students, and the mirrors in the dance studio only reflected a sad, sad little girl. And I think at the start of college, I was sick of being sad, so I took a hard left and tried to fill some sort of void. In all the wrong ways. Obviously.”

Percy sighs over the phone; Annabeth’s pulse races. That felt like too much. That felt like something she should’ve kept inside for at least another few months until she was sure that Percy was someone in her life and not just another temporary—

“Thank you for telling me,” Percy says softly, and more than anything, Annabeth wishes she could see his face. “I…I know that grief can be a bitch. Especially when the person you’re grieving is still alive.”

Annabeth sniffles as she stares down at her hands. “Yeah. Shit sucks, man.”

Percy laughs, and even with the weight she’d draped over their entire conversation, she still feels her heart skip.

“It really, really does,” Percy says. “My dad left before I was born, but I didn’t really resent him for it until middle school—I think that’s when I developed conscious thought or whatever. I was probably an asshole about it until I was 16 and realized that there wasn’t a point because he was already gone, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Then I started therapy about a year ago, and my therapist helped me realize that I was really kind of…grieving the fact that I grew up without a dad. So…I think I get what you were going through.”

Annabeth paused her nail-picking and looked up at nothing in particular. “Thank you for telling me that, Percy. I really appreciate it. Also—you go to therapy?”

“...yes?”

“Me too. Is it Brunner?”

“Haha, yes. I assume you got a similar lesson?”

“Yep.”

He snorts, and Annabeth wants to be where he is, and she suddenly resents the fact that she traveled across the entire country to land in a vacant house she didn’t even grow up in. She should’ve had Piper visit her school for a few nights, take her up to New York so they could go to Coney Island and explore Times Square before Piper had to leave to help her mom with another photoshoot on Friday. Then Annabeth could, maybe, eat dinner with Percy and his family who loves him. Meet the woman he gushes about. Have this conversation in real life.

“I wish I’d known you back then,” Percy says once the laughter dies. “Our first year.”

Annabeth purses her lips. “You wouldn’t have liked me.”

“Who knows? At least you wouldn’t have been alone at that party.”

“Would you have gone with me?”

“I’d like to think so.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“Why not? I would go with you now. And you weren’t the easiest to get along with when we first met.”

Annabeth flushes at the memory. She hadn’t been kind to Percy at all a few months ago, so how would their relationship have fared had they met two and a half years ago? It wouldn’t have been great; her nineteen-year-old self would have never let herself get this close to a man again.

“That’s fair. But…I’m glad that I met you when I did. Any earlier, I would’ve been too self-destructive to nurture any real relationship. Any later, I would’ve been too caught up in academic responsibilities to even consider branching outside of the little group that I have. I think…I think you entered my life at exactly the right time, Percy.”

It’s quiet for a while. Annabeth can hear the blood rushing through her ears and her words playing back in her head, and she knows she meant every syllable of it.

Truly.

“Annabeth,” Percy says. There’s a chord of anxiety Annabeth recognizes immediately. “Can I tell you something?”

The same chord strikes her, making her heart beat so loud that she’s sure her neighbors can hear it.

“Of course you can.”

“I—” Percy clears his throat, and Annabeth slips further into her blanket— “I miss you.”

Now she’s positive her neighbors could hear her heart; Percy might be able to over the phone. She giggles lightly and she’s not sure if it’s out of nervousness or pure affection for his words. “I miss you too, Seaweed Brain. But it hasn’t been a week, and I’ll be back in less than a week.”

“I know. And I know you’re having fun in San Francisco, and this is the one time you get to not think about dance practice or the fact that you have to perform with that asshole or just academic work in general, but—”

“I’m not having that much fun,” Annabeth says quietly, though loud enough for Percy to stop talking. “I mean, I’m glad I got to see Piper and spend time at the beach all day, but…I don’t know, today was probably the peak of it.”

There go Piper’s words echoing through her head again. Let him know. She’s still beating about the bush, avoiding the elephant in the room, another idiom she can’t think of at the moment. What is she so afraid of? Losing someone again? Opening herself back up to hurt? Ruining a friendship that has meant so much to her this semester, one of the only reasons she might still be sane?

Yeah. All of those things.

But she can’t live her life so guarded anymore. Letting down her defenses, even a little, allowed Percy to enter her life in a way that positively affected her well-being; what’s lowering them a little more?

“I’m sorry, Wise Girl,” Percy says, so softly her heart begins to melt.

“You have nothing to apologize for. Getting to call you definitely contributed to that peak. And, um, I really look forward to seeing you again. And studying together. And watching you play in your playoff games. And…I don’t know, whatever else.”

It’s difficult staring the elephant in the eye, it turns out. Percy chuckles. “Whatever else?”

“I mean, like—you know I like spending time with you. I like seeing your face. I like studying with you in the library, I like running into you on campus. I like talking to you. I like…I like being with you.”

Annabeth braces for impact. Those words are vague. They don’t encompass all the feelings that she has for Percy, and they don’t tell the full story. But she hopes it’s enough. She hopes he gets the point that she’s trying to make.

She can hear Percy’s smile in his voice. “I like being with you too.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course, I do. But Annabeth—can I ask you something?”

Annabeth scrapes her teeth over her lip. “You don’t have to ask to ask or tell me something.”

“Okay.” There’s a pause like he’s hesitating. Then, “Do you…like me?”

Annabeth’s cheeks erupt—then she squeaks and tries to bury herself in her chair despite knowing she can't get any further.

“I—Maybe.” She sucks in a deep breath. “Yes.”

She hears the faintest breath on the other end. “As more than a friend?”

Annabeth’s voice raises an octave. “Yes?”

Percy chuckles again, though not unkindly. Annabeth’s heart gallops around her pulse points as she feels the weight of her confession slide off her shoulders and the weight of anticipation replace it. After a few more seconds, she whines indignantly, “Stop teasing me! I’m trying here.”

“I’m not—I’m not teasing you,” Percy says, sighing. “I like you too, Annabeth. Romantically and probably one hundred other ways. I’ve been mustering the courage to tell you since our last dance practice.”

Annabeth feels like she’s going to burst at the seams. “Really?”

“Really. I was just…terrified of messing up something good.” Annabeth doesn’t have to look at her face to know that her smile is ridiculous. “But I was laughing because that was probably the most Annabeth way you could’ve told me.”

She pulls her blanket tighter around herself. “Words and feelings are hard.”

“Yeah, and you definitely don’t make it easy for me.”

“I’m never going to make things easy for you, Seaweed Brain. Get used to it.”

“And one hundred other ways?” Piper says as Annabeth recounts last night’s call as they sit on the trunk of Piper’s car. “Annabeth!”

“I know!” Annabeth laughs, pressing her hands to her cheeks. “I didn’t even know what to say.”

“Gosh, you two make me sick already, and I don’t even know the guy.”

Annabeth lightly smacks Piper’s shoulder, and Piper grins before looping her arm through Annabeth’s. Annabeth leans her head on Piper’s shoulder. “Shut up. Be happy for me.”

“I am happy for you. And proud of you.”

Annabeth sighs contentedly. “Thanks. Now let’s go, I’m starving."

When Percy gets back from Spring Break, he hits the ground running with basketball practice.

“Playoffs start in a week,” their coach, Coach Hedge, says as the Centaurs basketball team pant along the court lines, fresh from two miles around the track behind the gymnasium. “And I know most of you didn’t follow the workout routine I outlined over the break. So I expect to see all of you—” he looks at each person pointedly— “in here every day at 6PM until then. So eat dinner before or after. That’s your business.”

Everyone groans, which Hedge quickly interrupts with a whistle and a shout for them to pair up to practice guarding and shooting. Percy locks eyes with Beck, who nods then gestures toward the farther hoop.

“How was your break?” Beck asks as he grabs a ball from the rack. He dribbles it a few times before passing it to Percy. “You went home, right?”

“I did,” Percy says, bouncing the ball between his fingertips as he waits for everyone to take their places. “And it was…it was good.”

He hopes the flush he’d gotten from running conceals the heat spreading beneath his skin.

His break had been good—great, even, but for reasons he doesn’t quite want to reveal to anyone else yet. This he wants to keep to himself, even for just a little. And maybe that makes him selfish, but—sometimes, he thinks a little selfishness is warranted.

But it’s hard to keep it to himself when half of him wants to explode and tell someone who so much as mentions relationships, or romance, or crushes or feelings or dancing or words that start with the letter A. He wants to shout it from the rooftops.

Only—he’s not quite sure what it is.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of break had been spent balancing time with his family and staring at his phone, waiting for Annabeth to respond to his text, a video he sent her, a selfie of him and his sister, his request for a FaceTime call. A week spent nearly 3,000 miles apart felt like she was right there with him the whole time. When he walked around his neighborhood, went to the store, and cooked meals, she was on the other line roller skating down San Franciscan hills, attempting a beginner crochet tutorial, and going to animal shelters to look at cats she couldn’t adopt. It took until Saturday—in their fourth month of knowing each other—for Percy to learn that Annabeth also majored in architecture.

“Did it not come up?” Annabeth said, glancing up at her phone propped up on something Percy couldn’t see as she looped yarn around her crochet hook. “I could’ve sworn I’d talked about Greek architecture ad nauseam.”

“I mean, yeah,” Percy said, bacon, egg, and cheese warm in his hand as he walked back from the bodega, “but I thought that was, like, your special interest.”

“It is. It’s both.” She squinted at the paused YouTube video on her laptop before looking back down at her stitch. “I’m getting most of my dance credits out of the way now so I can really lock in next year.” She undid her previous loop, lips pulled downward. Percy smiled a little at the sight.

He stepped over a tree root cracking the sidewalk and readjusted the earbud slipping out of his ear. “Why’d you choose to study both?”

“Because I’m in love with both,” she said, so immediately and plainly Percy almost felt dumb for asking. “Dancing gives me an outlet to express all that I am in ways that I struggle to put into words. Architecture…well, architecture allows me to create something permanent.” She paused crocheting and looked a little to the side. “My lasting legacy on this Earth, something that will be here when I’m gone. Something stable.” She glanced up at her screen, at her camera, at Percy. And he knew he shouldn’t have been looking at his phone and walking at the same time, but years of pacing these streets carved memories of the paths into his muscles; it was what saved him from running into anything when a melancholic look formed in her eyes as she shrugged a shoulder. “Hopefully.”

That was when the distance truly felt far. Because more than being careful of where he was going, Percy wanted to just…hold her. Be there, hold her, and tell her she could do anything she could put her mind to because she was brilliant.

“You will,” Percy said, not because she needed to hear it, but because he believed it wholeheartedly. “And I can’t wait for that day.”

Despite the hours of conversation and communication, though, never once did it get brought up again. After the revelation that his feelings weren’t one-sided (thank God), they kind of just left it at that. He likes her, and she likes him. And Percy wouldn’t dare complain about that—it took him hours to come down from that high before he could go to bed, and even though he was tired the next morning, you would’ve thought he’d downed a dozen Red Bulls—but the question of ‘what’s next’ never really came up. It permeated through the subtext: the lingering phone calls, the texts goodnight, the dull ache in his cheeks from smiling too much. And he liked being there over the break, but now that it’s over and the next time they speak will be face-to-face, ‘what’s next’ repeats in his mind over and over again.

He’s…new to this; he didn’t even think he would get this far.

“Are you sure?” Beck asks, raising an eyebrow before he stands on the three-point line. “Or was it more than good, and you’re not saying?”

Percy doesn’t know why he’s worked on expressing his feelings when, apparently, his face says it all. Percy rolls his eyes at Beck’s growing smirk and stands in front of him, raising his arms in defense. “Just shoot the ball, Beck.”

Practice ends an hour later than their coach projected, much to the dismay of Percy’s rumbling stomach—which is only made worse by the fact that he volunteered to put up the equipment so everyone else could make it to one of their campus’ many self-care events advertising free burritos. Percy claimed he hadn’t been in the mood for Mexican food, but every second he spent in a gym reeking of sweat is another one he spends wishing he had gone with the rest of them.

He’s putting the last ball on the rack when the door opens, the loud creak echoing against the floorboards. Percy jumps and turns toward the sound, expecting it to be one of his teammates forgetting their phones or something.

Then his heart skips several beats.

Annabeth catches the door from slamming shut behind her and eases it gently closed, face cringing at the initial loud sound. “Didn’t mean to scare you,” she says, sheepish. “Those hinges need some WD-40.”

The first thing Percy notices is that she took her braids out between the last time they talked and now. Her thick, coily hair is slicked back into a ponytail, shiny under the much-too-bright lights. The second is that she’s wearing her red wire-framed glasses, which makes him realize that he hasn’t seen them in a while and that he maybe, kind of, missed them and the way they magnify her doe-brown eyes.

Suffice it to say, Annabeth Chase looks beautiful—which makes it really hard for Percy to find words.

“Those doors have been creaky since my first year,” Percy says, running a hand through his hair, still damp with sweat. “Doubt it’ll change anytime soon.”

“I'm sure you can file a maintenance request or something.” She walks further into the gym until she's stood on the other side of the ball rack. “I could do it for you. Also,” she says, noticeably taking a breath before she looks up at him with a tiny smile, “hi.”

Percy can't stop his idiotic grin as he grips the rack’s handle. “Hey.”

It's only been about two days since they last spoke. But seeing Annabeth, in real life, for the first time since both their almost-kiss and the mutual confession, feels like the start of something new. Something different—exciting, but scary all the same. Which is only made worse by the fact that Annabeth looks the way she does, and Percy has a huge (albeit drying) sweat stain on the front of his shirt.

“How'd you know I was in here?” Percy says, remembering his task at hand and wheeling the rack back to the open supply closet.

Annabeth trails beside him, hands tucked into the pockets of her large gray hoodie. “I was coming from dance rehearsal and saw the lights on in the gym. So I decided I'd peek in.” Percy walks into the dark closet to align the rack against the back wall; when he turns around, Annabeth leans against the doorframe, backlit. “I hoped it was you. I’m glad it was.”

The reminder that her dance rehearsals would now be with some other guy gnaws at Percy with sharper teeth that he expects it to. He knew from the beginning that was what the deal was, and still, the acknowledgement of that reality…sucks. Especially since, even after only meeting him once, Percy hates that guy’s guts. But ultimately, Percy’s hands were washed of the whole ordeal, so he doesn’t really get to have an opinion about it.

(It doesn’t stop him from having one, though.)

Percy makes his way back to the front of the closet, but Annabeth doesn’t move from her spot in the door. He stops about a foot in front of her, and he sucks in a shallow breath when she glances up at him.

“Well,” Percy says as Annabeth’s eyes flit over his face behind her lenses, “I’m glad you found me. And I’m glad it was you that did.”

He can feel his pulse in his eardrums, being this close to her now. He’s hyper aware of the scent of her perfume, something spicy and vanilla, and the earthy scent of her conditioner. And the red tint of her lip gloss. Annabeth’s fingers wrap around the strap of her bag as her teeth drag over her lip for just a second before she says, “I have a surprise for you.” Her fingers tighten, ever so slightly. “But you have to close your eyes.”

Percy furrows his eyebrows, but he complies without any fuss. Annabeth disappears as his eyelids shut, the pulse in his ears becoming even louder, his palms sweatier. A surprise, hm? He can’t even lie to himself about what he thinks the surprise is—or, rather, what he wants the surprise to be. He’d spent longer than he’d willingly admit imagining all types of surprises and the situations in which they may occur. A supply closet in the practice gym was not one of those situations (especially as the setting of their first surprise), but if it was coming from Annabeth, he’d take it and call it perfect.

But instead of feeling Annabeth move closer, feel—he doesn’t know, her mouth against his—he feels a weighty bag of something being pressed against his chest.

“Open.”

He does, more confused than before. But then he looks down to see a mesh bag full of fruit being thrust into his arms. He blinks.

“Are these—”

“It’s just about the end of their growing season,” Annabeth says, taking her hands back once Percy grabs hold. “And I know Florida is like, most known for their production, but I’ve always been fond of California oranges. Or tangerines, I guess. And, uh, I found myself at a farmer’s market after I did my hair, and I saw a lady selling them, and I thought of you, so—”

Percy pulls Annabeth into his chest, one arm squeezing around her tight and the other clutching the tangerines. Annabeth squeaks, then giggles softly and wraps her arms around his middle.

“Thank you, Annabeth. That’s so sweet.”

“It’s no big deal,” she says into his shirt, which Percy realizes now probably smells. He immediately drops his arms and steps back, but Annabeth’s arms slip down to hold him around his waist as she looks back up at him again. “Piper convinced me to get them for you.”

He’s brought back to that morning of the fire drill. Annabeth, so sleepy in his arms, the very first time they ever shared a hug like this. That time, it’d been about keeping warm (or that’s what he told himself then); now, it feels like more, because it is more, and that warmth seeps into his chest like green tea.

“It’s sweet that you thought about me, though.” He doesn’t know what possesses him, but he cups her cheek with one hand, brushing his thumb over her cheekbone. “Also, I like your hair.”

“Thank you,” she murmurs, her skin growing warmer by the second. He can feel her fingers play with the back of his shirt, and he knows he’s turning pinker too. “Are you, uh, headed back to the dorm soon?”

“Yeah. Gonna stop at the dining hall to pick up food first, though.”

Annabeth feigns a hurt expression. “I just gave you a bunch of tangerines to eat.”

“And waste this precious gift you gave me in a day? I’d probably turn orange.”

“Ooh, you’re right. And I don’t like orange men.”

Percy laughs, and Annabeth beams, and it takes the willpower of a thousand people to not kiss her right there. Because as much as he’d hoped that was the surprise (though the tangerines far exceeded his expectations), he doesn’t want their first kiss to be right here, right now. Annabeth deserves more than that. She deserves the moon and all the stars.

So he contains his bursting affection and steps back, pulling his hand from her cheek. Annabeth’s eyes blow wide before she actually pouts, far cuter than she has any right being.

“You’re more than welcome to come with me,” Percy says, lips twitching. “I’ll buy you a cookie.”

Annabeth fixes her face, rolls her eyes, and turns so Percy can finally leave the closet. “Fine,” she says, sighing. He jogs over to the bleachers where he left his bag and unzips it so he can put the tangerines inside. “You didn’t have to bribe me, but I’m holding you to it.”

Percy slings his bag over his shoulder as he and Annabeth walk toward the exit. Mustering up the courage that’d been slowly building for the past several minutes, he lets their hands brush before looping his pinkie around hers.

Without a word, she grabs his hand and interlocks their fingers.

“You pruned your ferns,” Annabeth says as she sits in the large leather chair across from Dr. Brunner. She crosses one of her legs over the other. “They look nice.”

Dr. Brunner folds his hands over the notebook in his lap. “Ah, it was about time. Makes it easier to navigate around the place.”

Annabeth hadn’t exactly planned to make another therapy appointment this week. She’s been so busy with class and dance rehearsal, she hardly had time for herself, let alone to continue working on her mental health. And she knows that both work in tandem and are probably synonymous, but she’d much rather curl up on her twin-XL mattress watching the latest season of The Great British Baking Show than remember the first time she felt anxious for seemingly no reason.

But then a few things happened.

One:

Annabeth now has to deal with Ethan Nakamura as her dance partner.

She knew the day was coming and still, the second she stepped into the dance studio and saw him stretching on the floor, she nearly turned around.

“I’m glad you came around,” Ethan said, smirking as he approached Annabeth shedding her jacket. “Just wish I had a say in what we’re doing.”

“My dance piece,” Annabeth said, going to set up her phone for the music and trying to keep the edge from her voice. “But if there are any tweaks you want to make, feel free. I don’t want to make you…uncomfortable.”

Dancing with Ethan wasn’t the worst. He was a good partner and a quick learner, but that was all Annabeth was going to give him. Nothing about their personalities meshed—they were both too prideful to bend, which felt even worse for Annabeth who had to follow his lead. And he’d make suggestions about the dance that would change key elements to the choreography to a degree way too difficult to execute well less than a week out from the dance show.

Which led to two:

Annabeth realized she’s less than a week out from the dance show.

Inherently, she knows she’s ready. She’s worked her ass off for the past couple months perfecting her choreography, so much that she performed it in her dreams. The song is permanently stuck in her head—in fact, she kind of hates the song now. She could perform the choreography in ten years and nail it beat for beat, how ingrained it was into her muscle memory.

But then she remembered she would be performing in front of hundreds of people.

“Your body will carry you through it,” Beatrice said upon Annabeth’s complaints after dance class. “You will not even have to think.”

“But I always think,” Annabeth said, pacing across the studio floor. “Like, I know that I’ll know it, but what if I overthink everything and freeze up.”

Beatrice folded her sweatered arms behind her back and sighed. “Just breathe. Plus, you have Ethan there to help you.”

Which did not help Annabeth’s nerves; Ethan would never let her live it down if she forgot her own choreography, and he had to save her ass. She wished Percy was still her partner. He wouldn’t do that to her. He’d be kind and clumsy, but he wouldn’t make her feel like a complete idiot; if anything, they would be idiots together.

Which led to her to the third reason she made her appointment.

“So,” Annabeth says as Dr. Brunner settled across from her, “I have a question.”

He tilts his head. “That’s what I’m here for.”

Annabeth clears her throat. “Right. So, um—I want to tell you about….someone…but we both recently came to the realization that we’re both clients of yours. Which I think is a conflict of interest, right?” Brunner’s face doesn’t change. “So like…will we have to end this?” She gestures between him and herself.

Brunner exhales softly in what Annabeth believes to be a chuckle. After a few seconds, he straightens in his wheelchair and looks at Annabeth with an expression she can’t place. “It is my job to maintain strict patient confidentiality. It is my job to remain neutral and maintain objectivity. I am one of only three therapists on this campus, and I believe I’ve built substantial rapport with you over the past year. Feel free to say whatever is on your mind, and I will inform you whether we’ll have to revisit that question at a later date.”

Annabeth sighs, relaxing into her seat. “Cool. So, um, first, I think you’re going to be proud of me when I say this. I…like somebody. A lot.” She drums her fingers against her thigh and wrangles in a grin. “And this is the first time I’ve felt like this in a long time. And I’m really, genuinely happy for the first time in a long time, for the most part, but… I don’t want to contribute all my happiness to him.”

Dr. Brunner cocks an eyebrow. “Why would you?”

“Because this semester has been so much better because of him. I…I find myself always wanting to be around him because of how he makes me feel, and I feel safe being myself around him, and he’s allowed me this…this space to be me? I guess.”

Brunner hums but remains generally silent for a few seconds. Then his eyes soften, and he says, “Well, I think you’re conflating two things here. One, consider the fact that you are the one who has allowed yourself to open up to this person. You’ve grown a lot since I first started seeing you, Annabeth.” He smiles, and she warms. “Letting yourself open up to people and experiences. Letting your friends in. Doing this dance piece with someone you don’t like because you know it’s for the best. Your happiness is all thanks to you. But also consider that someone else contributing to your happiness isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

Annabeth presses her hand to her leg. “It’s not?”

“Of course not.” Brunner readjusts in his seat. “Relationships, in any form, are supposed to aid in the growth, development, and maintenance of your humanity. You shouldn’t have to find your happiness alone. Love is supposed to make you feel happy. At least, that’s one of the things love should make you feel.”

Love.

Oh.

Annabeth spends the rest of the week with his words in her brain.

It’s difficult balancing all of it at once; project and paper proposals due for class, trying not to purposefully crush Ethan’s toes as they samba, thinking about the fact that she’s let herself maybe love someone. But nearly three years into college, she thinks she’s gotten this juggling act under a bit of control, though not without the help of the people around her.

On Wednesday, two nights before the show, Annabeth is in Silena’s room standing with her arms out as Silena adjusts the fit of the outfit Annabeth has to wear during the performance.

“God, this color looks so good on you,” Silena says, looping the tape measure around Annabeth’s hips adorned with a short, golden, swishy sequined skirt just a bit too big for her, a pair of green leggings underneath. “I’d bark if I weren’t such a respectful friend.”

“Define respectful,” Annabeth says, smirking. Silena snorts as she drops the tape and jots a number into her notebook.

“Respectful is doing this for you so last minute. And not chewing out the costume department for ordering the wrong size for you.” She hands Annabeth the matching gold top. “And not mentioning how a certain someone may or may not go feral after seeing you wear this on stage.”

Annabeth rolls her eyes, but her heart skips at the thought. “Oh, please shut up.”

The second Annabeth entered Silena’s room, Silena somehow just knew something had changed between Annabeth and Percy. It was like she could smell it. And then she used her I know something you don’t face to draw it out of Annabeth, which may have been easier because she’d been primed to spill after walking back to their dorm from the library.

Since spring break ended, the campus has been buzzing about the playoff game. The men's basketball team hasn’t made it to the playoffs since years before Annabeth started college, so the excitement for Saturday’s game is palpable. Banners with GO CENTAURS! plastered across building entrances, flyers plastered to every bulletin board, time, date, and location of the game written in chalk on walkways—Annabeth couldn’t escape the hype if she wanted to (not that she did want to, but she could barely conjure appropriate eagerness for it without a wave of nausea about Friday’s dance performance overwhelming her).

Annabeth had been walking past a group of freshmen on their way to one of the many study spaces on campus, minding her business as they chattered amongst themselves. She was almost past them when she heard a familiar name leave one of their mouths.

“I think Percy Jackson would be able to get anyone he wanted if they win Saturday,” one of them said, giggling. “I know a few people dying for a chance.”

“As if you’re not one of those people,” someone else said. “As if he isn’t one of the most common names on the campus crushes Instagram page.”

Annabeth walked faster, hoping to escape earshot before she heard anything that would make her eye twitch more than it already was.

Part of Annabeth had forgotten that Percy wasn’t just the Percy she’d come to know; he has this whole other character outside of himself. The Percy Annabeth knows isn’t the one everyone else knows; to most of them, he’s the hot, cool basketball player who can shoot well and dazzles people with his generally agreeable personality. And to Annabeth, he’s so much more.

She wouldn’t necessarily call the feeling jealousy (at least to herself). She acknowledges that what she has with Percy differs from a superficial crush and that someone liking him isn’t a threat to that connection (she hopes). People are allowed to feel how they want about people; people are allowed to like Percy.

She just wishes that what she feels for Percy—or more specifically, what Percy feels for her—was a little more…broadcasted.

“You know I’m right,” Silena says as Annabeth slips the costume top over her t-shirt. “I’ve seen your little exchanges in the hallway. He adores you.”

Silena pulls the band of the top tighter. Annabeth smiles. ”Really?”

“You just like hearing me say it.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“It’s crazy that y’all haven’t kissed yet—” Silena pins the adjustment as she shrugs behind Annabeth— “but I guess everyone’s on their own timeline. I think I kissed Charlie the day I met him.”

Annabeth recalls Silena meeting Charlie and calling him her boyfriend three days later. Annabeth at the time thought that was crazy, but they've been together for two years and will live happily ever after, as far as Annabeth is concerned.

“Well—” Annabeth says, lifting her arms at Silena’s poke, “I mean, we’ve been busy all week—”

“Hey,” Silena says as she loops the tape measure around Annabeth’s ribs, “there’s no rush. All in good time, or whatever.”

For two people who live in the same hallway, Annabeth and Percy haven’t seen each other much at all these past couple of days. She had to miss their study time on Tuesday to talk to Beatrice about the choreographer’s note for the program, which was fine since Percy had to take team photos. She didn’t get a chance to eat any meal with him, spending her last few meals catching up on all the reading she failed to do over the break. The most she saw of him was this morning, when he texted her asking to brush their teeth together; she’d woken up to the message and all but popped out of bed and across the hall to find Percy at the sink he always used, blue toothbrush primed with toothpaste and eyes too bright for the 8:28 that flashed on Annabeth’s phone screen.

(“Good morning, sunshine,” Percy said, holding out his tube of toothpaste so he could squeeze some onto Annabeth’s brush. Annabeth accepted as she stared up at him, readjusting her glasses with her other hand. “I know this was a weird request.”

Annabeth turned to stick her toothbrush under the faucet. “What, did you miss me?”

“Of course I missed you.”

Through the mirror, Percy looked at her with eyes that made her stomach flip. Her gaze dropped to his mouth, parted in anticipation for his toothbrush. She looked back down to her toothbrush before sticking it into her mouth.

“Sap,” she said. But then she leaned into his arm, and he threw his arm around her shoulders, and she forgot to complain about thirty minutes of doom-scrolling being taken away from her.)

Annabeth knows that it’s for the best. They each have their own things going on. She likes that they live separate, independent lives. But in this weird limbo between friends and not, she just wishes she had the time to have the whole ‘what are we?’ conversation.

And maybe she’s being impatient. Maybe this period is normal for relationships. Maybe the societal pressure to give everything a label and a timeline affects her more than she thinks it does. Because does defining the relationship really matter if they’re on the same page? If they’re happy? If they know that they’re exclusively seeing the other and nobody else is going to enter the picture? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But to Annabeth, whose whole life has revolved around uncertainties and inconsistencies and the knowledge that she’s the only person she can truly rely on at the end of the day—she thinks it would be nice to alleviate some of that with someone and know that she can. Because while language is arbitrary and used to ascribe ways to communicate representations of abstract concepts, assigning a word to the way she and Percy feel about each other would give her something… concrete to hold onto. Or more concrete than walking on the thin ice between her and falling in love.

Silena finishes Annabeth’s outfit just in time for dress rehearsal Thursday night. She changes backstage in the vanity room with all the other female dancers, ranging from ballet to tap to hip hop. Annabeth is the only one doing a dance not correlated to one of the courses taught at their school, and she feels like the black sheep, especially when she steps out from behind the curtain in a sparkly two piece that bares her stomach and legs to the room.

“You look like you’re gonna be on Dancing with the Stars,” Katie, a ballet dancer, says when she sees Annabeth. She smiles warmly. “I love it.”

Stepping on stage, dark at first then lit purple via the lighting instructions she gave the lighting technician, Annabeth imagines the faces of the people in those seats, watching her finally perform the dance she’s been working on for months. Hours and hours and hours of hard work culminated to this moment. People she respects finally taking her seriously as a dancer. Completing the last credit she needs to finish her dance major. Grounding herself with that face in the crowd cheering her on.

This is everything to her.

And Annabeth is determined to give it her all.

Percy has never been to a dance show, so he doesn’t exactly know what to expect when he gets there.

He finds the theater easily, thanks to the signs around campus pointing him in the right direction. The closer he gets, the more people he sees heading toward the same building; older people from the surrounding community, young kids with their families, students coming to support their friends or for general Friday night entertainment. Just inside the lobby, Percy spots Beckendorf, Silena, Will Solace and his boyfriend, Nico, who’d come to visit for their playoff game tomorrow. Will spots him first.

“Hey,” Will says, making the other people in the group turn to look at him. “We’re just about to take our—ooh, what are those?”

He glances down to the bouquet of flowers in Percy’s hand then to the envelope in the other. Silena makes a little ooh sound, and Beck smirks knowingly, and Nico looks at everybody with his eyebrows furrowed.

“You’re seeing someone?” Nico asks, making Percy blush even harder. His words draw the eyes of other people waiting to enter the theater, who look at the gifts in Percy’s hands then to the people they’re standing with, expressions equally as curious. Percy struggles not to cave and hide them behind his back. It’s not like he’s the odd one out. At least a quarter of the audience is holding some sort of flower for the people they’re coming to support.

Percy takes a deep breath, gripping the stems of the flower a little harder. “Uh, yeah. I am.”

Percy hasn’t known Nico for long and doesn’t know him well, but for some reason, he almost looks…proud—which makes Percy wonder what Will has told him about Percy’s love life. “Cool.”

The ushers open the theater and hand out show programs as people funnel in. Percy grabs one and thanks them with a slight smile. The front cover of the program features several ballet dancers dressed in white posing on a brightly lit stage. As he and his friends navigate the aisles, he flips through the pages to find Annabeth’s piece, the fourth performance. It’s titled You’ll Always Be My Tangerine with a note from the choreographer underneath:

When I started choreographing this piece, I didn’t know what I wanted the point of this to be. All my life, I’ve danced alone. I didn’t like partner work; I never two-stepped or second lined or Cha-Cha slid. Because I’ve been so hyper-independent since I was a little girl, I never wanted to be a part of a narrative I didn’t get to control; when I got the opportunity to be a part of this dance show, I saw it as an opportunity to take back the narratives that controlled me. Loss, grief, that feeling of slipping through the cracks because the foundation was never solid. I wanted to show the world that that story didn’t define me.

And then I met someone.

Samba was just something I tried at first. Something new and different to break me out of my creator’s block. But this bright Afro-Brazilian dance that put front and center notions of freedom, joy, and exuberance—combined with this new reminder that I have so many people that care about me—made performing this piece finally make sense.

There is so much to say about the history of samba that I can’t fit into this blurb (though I have coupled this performance with an essay you are free to read after it’s graded). There’s so much to say about finding joy, in being free and happy, with somebody new. And there’s so much to say about the importance of dancing as expression. So, instead, I’ll just say this: enjoy.

Percy hasn’t cried in a long time, and tonight isn’t the night he breaks that streak. But as he finds a seat and sinks into the cushion—in the middle of the row, slightly closer to the stage than away from it—he discovers a tiny lump in his throat that he can’t quite swallow.

Once everyone settles, the lights in the room dim; an announcer drones about cell phone usage and emergency exits; Will leans over to Percy and whispers about how excited he is to see the tap piece; a hush falls over the room once the curtains draw open.

The first to perform is the titular ballet piece. Percy’s only experience with ballet is Barbie’s The Nutcracker he watched as a kid, and as far as he’s concerned, it’s fairly similar. And it’s pretty. The dancers leap across the stage in huge white tutus and sparkly leotards, and the lighting is all Twilight blue, and for a guy who knows nothing about the art of dance, he thinks he enjoys it.

There are seven total performances in the show, meaning Annabeth’s is in the middle. And Percy doesn’t know why, but he feels almost…nervous about it. He’s not the one performing it; he’s not the one expressing this vulnerability in front of a nearly at-capacity theater. But as the performances begin and end, each beautiful in their own unique ways, he realizes that Annabeth’s piece is a little piece of him too.

The hours they spent together in the dance studio, going step by step as Annabeth figured out her routine. The laughs they shared when he stepped on Annabeth’s toes, the way she gently led to teach him to lead. The song he’d hum in the shower before he realized what he was doing. How often Annabeth stared into space while she was trying to figure out the next steps. The YouTube videos of samba dancers they’d watch over and over again to try to figure out a move.

Almost kissing for the first time.

Watching her perform on stage would be like watching it all play back again, archiving the moment they became friends all the way up until now. Every step would ache with familiarity. Every twist, lunge, dip would remind him of when he would do them with her, just the two of them alone.

Would it hurt a bit seeing someone else in his place? It probably would. But even more than that, he’s proud of this creation of hers and the part he got to play in it. He is proud of Annabeth. How could he not be?

The tap piece finishes. Everyone claps and cheers. Will leans over to Percy and whispers that he’s not impressed. Then he points to his program and shows that Annabeth is next, and Percy feels his heart in his throat.

It begins with no fanfare. After a minute or so after the end of tap, the curtains draw open again and showcases a stage bathed in deep purple lighting. From either wing, a person walks toward the middle of the stage. From the right comes Ethan Nakamura, dressed in an open white button-down shirt and black slacks; from the left enters Annabeth Chase.

And Percy Jackson forgets how to breathe.

Of course, she’s beautiful. She’s always beautiful, in every way, shape, and form. But on the stage, Annabeth is…

Radiant.

She’s golden like an Oscar, her sequined outfit and matching heels twinkling under the stage lights. Her dark brown skin glows like it emanates light; her hair, shiny and coily and free from constraints, surrounds her head like a halo, and Percy is convinced she’s an angel. She has to be.

They meet. Annabeth grasps Ethan’s hand as his other falls to her hip. Then the quietly swelling music explodes, and the dance begins, and the crowd cheers, and Percy cheers the loudest of them all.

Annabeth is a star on stage.

It’s like her dance partner isn’t even there, the way all the attention turns to her (but Percy is biased). From the twirl of her skirt to the way the lighting catches her as she spins away from and into Ethan’s arms, Annabeth moves like it comes as easy to her as blinking. Because of course she does; Percy was there to see it come to fruition and knows how much work she’s put in to make it look like she’s been doing this routine since the dawn of time. She glides across the stage with a rhythm it took her weeks to get, moves with her partner in ways she would’ve stumbled through a month ago. She leaps with Ethan as her anchor, and he catches her with ease. She smiles as she sweeps her leg out, and he knows that it’s genuine.

Almost as quickly as it began, Annabeth and Ethan are back to center stage. On the last beat of the song, he dips her. They hold a look for half a second before Annabeth drops her head back, looking back toward the left wing as the music stops and the light fades.

It’s silent in the room for another beat. Then there’s uproarious applause, and Percy feels his heart burst as he joins his friends for a standing ovation

When the lights come back on, Annabeth and Ethan are standing at the front, hands clasped as they take big bows. When Annabeth comes back up, she’s beaming.

And Percy doesn’t know if Annabeth can really see anything from where she is on stage. But then her eyes sweep the crowd and seem to land on him, and her smile gets just a little brighter, and Percy’s heart squeezes.

There’s a brief intermission after her performance. People stand to stretch or go to the bathroom, but Will, Nico, Silena, and Beck all turn toward Percy and exclaim some variation of “That’s what you and Annabeth were rehearsing,” “Holy shit, she is so talented,” and “That was so amazing.”

All Percy could say is, “I know.” Then he must’ve made a face, because then they all start teasing him about his gifts again.

Once the show is over, the theater floods back into the main lobby to meet their dancers. People swarm around the stairwell the performers will emerge from; Percy hangs against a wall a little farther back, cradling the bouquet of flowers in his arms.

“We’re, uh,” Silena says, tugging on both Will’s and Beck’s sleeves and nodding toward the exit of the building, “we’ll be just outside. Meet us when you’re ready.”

Percy rolls his eyes, but he agrees. As his friends leave him and dancers come up to greet their loved ones, Percy’s pulse races.

It’s crazy that this semester is almost done. When the summer comes around and ends again, he’ll be a senior. His last year in college before he’s supposed to come to some grand decision about what to do with his life. Those discussions never really bode well for Percy. When he was younger, nobody really expected anything from him. He was a troublemaker. Fatherless. Didn’t have a bright future ahead of him.

And now, he has goals, but who’s to say that he won’t wake up tomorrow and completely change his mind? Yes, he thinks a part of himself will always love cooking for people and playing ball, but what if doing that for the rest of his life is just a pipe dream? Like a kid wanting to be an astronaut while failing at all fundamental math skills, or a wanting to be a ballet dancer with two left feet: it’s not super likely that his dreams will come true. But he also knows that thinking like that is pretty much putting the final nail in the coffin. And if Percy’s going to take anything from tonight, it’s that if he wants to do something with his life, he has to try.

That’s not the end-all-be-all. Of course, there are numerous other factors and obstacles between him and getting what he really wants (which pretty much boil down to the fact that his parents aren’t any semblance of rich). But if Annabeth can get on stage and do that—Percy feels like he can take a small step.

The crowd thins. Percy stands in place, waiting for Annabeth. People walking by glance at him and the flowers in his hands. He makes eye contact with someone across the room. It’s Rachel. Percy smiles at her, and she smiles back. Then she notices his bouquet and her expression falls to something…resigned. But before Percy can think anything more of it, he spots Annabeth coming up the stairs.

She doesn’t see him until Percy calls her name. Then she whips around and all but bounds over to him as he peels himself from the wall.

“Hi,” Annabeth says. She’s no longer in her sparkly dance attire, now wearing a hoodie and pair of green leggings, hair pulled back from her face with a headband. “What’d you think?”

Her face is sparkly with gold glitter. Percy scans over her as he tries to find the words.

“Fantastic. That was…spectacular.”

Percy isn’t sure he’s ever seen Annabeth smile so much. “Really?”

“Yes. I’m so proud of you,” Percy says, then he holds the bouquet out to her before he chickens out. “Also, these are for you.”

Annabeth looks at the flowers in her face as if she had just noticed them. Then she grabs the crinkly plastic, and her eyes widen.

“Daisies?” Her face softens. “How did you—”

“Your friend, Thalia,” Percy says, shrugging. “She followed me on Instagram a few days ago, and I…I asked her what your favorite flower was.”

Annabeth takes the bouquet and holds it in her arms, not unlike how someone would hold a baby or a sack of flour. She strokes her fingers over the stems; her eyes are watery when she looks back at Percy.

“What the hell?” she says, laughing a little. “Why are you so perfect?”

Percy could combust under the heat that smothers him when Annabeth steps closer to him. “I’m not—I just…you deserve them. You deserve your flowers.” He feels for the envelope in his back pocket. “I also got you something else.”

Annabeth’s mouth drops open. “Stop!”

“It’s nothing big!” Percy says, grinning at her reaction and handing the envelope to her. “Open it.”

Annabeth looks skeptical. Then she tears the envelope open and pulls out at an index card. On the front, it reads, "One free, homecooked meal of your choice," written in Percy’s best handwriting.

“Doesn’t expire,” he says to Annabeth’s adorable little pout. “All I ask is for a little heads-up.”

She stares at the note for a little longer. Then she puts it back into the envelope, slides the envelope into her hoodie pocket, and steps even closer to Percy.

She smiles and blinks her tears away.

Then she stands on her toes, presses her fingers to his cheek, and kisses him.

Percy’s brain melts through his body.

His eyelids flicker closed as her lips meld with his, warm, soft, full, and everything, and he couldn’t believe he waited this long to allow himself this feeling. Percy sighs as his hands find her hips and pull her closer, steadying her. Her hand cups his jaw as she curves into him, inhaling deeply.

He wants to tell her that he loves her.

Percy wants to hold her like this for the rest of his life and tell her words he would never mean if he said them to anyone else. He wants to be the only one who gets to know what flavor her lip gloss is (cherry, maybe) and how clammy her hands can be when it's warm inside and she's nervous. He wants to be the reason she sees a bag of tiny oranges at the supermarket and smiles.  He wants to discover everything that makes her laugh into his mouth and pull him closer instead of pushing him away when they're kissing.

And he doesn't want to hope that he'll become that person to Annabeth. He wants to know that he will be, someday, and that some day a week or a month or a year from now, when the want to tell her that she's everything to him becomes a need, she will have him for everything he is.

"Thank you."

Her words are so quiet he barely catches them. When he does, his eyebrows furrow.

"For what?"

Annabeth exhales, one hand gripping his jacket, the other still holding onto her flowers. She draws back a little, settling back onto her heels.

"For the flowers. The card. For being you." She shakes her head as if she's trying to gather her words. “For being my friend, for—”

He takes her hand from his jacket and intertwines their fingers.

“Annabeth.”

She pauses and looks up at him through dark eyelashes. “Yeah?”

The lobby is nearly empty now. A few groups of people linger, still chatting excitedly about the show, but they're all closer to the entrance than Percy and Annabeth are.

Percy’s thumb slides down the back of her hand.

“Can I be yours?”

Annabeth blinks. Then her lips stretch into a tiny smile.

“My what?”

He holds her hand tighter and doesn't waver. “Your boyfriend.”

Annabeth gasps softly. Then she surges up to quickly press her lips to his again; when she pulls back, Percy chases her mouth to keep the kiss for just another second, never wanting to let her go.

“Yes,” she exhales once they break. “As long as I can be your girlfriend.”

“I think that was implied.”

“Well, I want to make sure we're not half-dating.”

“Darling, I think we've been half-dating for longer than we’ve both realized.”

She looks like she wants to retort. But then she looks around the room and realizes that nobody else is around.

“Fair enough.” She keeps hold of Percy's hand as she walks toward the exit, tugging Percy along with her. “Darling.”

Percy matches her pace and reaches out to open the door, a blast of cool air wafting over them. He spots Silena, Beck, Will, and Nico chatting on a bench nearby. When they see Annabeth, Silena pops up, and Annabeth passes the flowers back to Percy just in time for Silena to rush over to crush her into a big hug.

Percy stands back and watches the display with a huge smile; Beckendorf comes over to clap Percy on the shoulder.

“No longer the most single on the team, huh?”

Silena spins his girlfriend around; Annabeth squeals as she locks her arms around Silena’s shoulders, trying to keep her balance.

“Not anymore.”

Watching Percy drive a basketball up a court is quickly becoming one of Annabeth’s favorite sights. The concentration, the focus, the control; he handles the ball like it comes as easy to him as blinking.

He tries to shoot, but another player comes up to block him. In a split-second decision, he passes the ball to Will Solace, who immediately shoots for three. Nico, who’s sitting next to Annabeth in the bottom row, lets out a sharp “Yes!” just under his breath. Annabeth cheers with the crowd.

At halftime, the Centaurs are up by five points. Just before they head into the locker room, Percy looks between his coach, his teammates, and then to the bleachers. He finds Annabeth immediately.

She grins and gives him two thumbs up.

He visibly exhales and gives her a thumbs up back before following his team inside.

And when they win the game, he runs over to where Annabeth’s sitting, wraps his arms around her waist, and kisses her in front of everyone.