Chapter Text
Token arrives at the dorm room to find one of Clyde’s shoes wedged between the door and the jamb — a flashy enough sneaker that there was no doubt who it belonged to, but not flashy enough that Clyde wouldn’t risk utilizing it as a doorstop.
A propped-open door like this was usually a universal sign of invitation in the college dorm world, but Token knew Craig and Clyde a little better than that. Were he in charge of things, Clyde would have the door wide open at all times, ready and willing for any spontaneous party to explode in his room whenever the mood struck. If Craig had his way, the door would be perpetually sealed and would require a series of trials, including a keypad, a riddle-telling sphinx, and an Indiana Jones-style boulder, just to even cross the threshold.
This half-open door was less of a friendly welcome into their room and more of a compromise on their part, and so Token knocks twice just to announce his presence before pushing his way in.
The room is illuminated by the hallway light for as long as the door remains open. When Token allows it to fall shut behind him, he finds himself shrouded in mostly darkness, which is disorienting, given that it’s still three in the afternoon. It’s dark enough to make him wonder if these idiots weren’t even home, had stepped out and left their door propped open for God knows how long. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.
Then his eyes adjust, and he spies the weak glow of the neon flamingo lamp sitting on the dresser between the two beds, underneath the drawn drapes of the window. Its small circle of pink light reflects off the body on the bed to its left. Token can just barely make it out as Clyde stretched out on his comforter, playing a softly-beeping game on his cell phone. Without lifting his head or even peering at Token, he raises a hand in a small greeting before replacing it back on the device.
The other bed is empty, not only of another person, but of all its blankets and pillows. Those were piled high on the floor in the center of the room. Token could just make out the moon phases printed on the pillow cases and the constellations pattered on the sheets, as if the bare bed wasn’t enough of an indication of whom they obviously belonged to. Circling the mountain of linen like offerings to summon a demon were a small stack of notebooks, various packets of paper, scattered highlighters, blank index cards, and an open Macbook that was in sleep mode.
“Um,” Token says, squinting into the darkness. “Where is Craig?”
The dark room by itself wasn’t completely weird by this room’s standards, but it was odder that Clyde might be participating in this voluntarily as a solo act.
In response to Token’s question, Clyde simply jerks his head once at the mysterious heap on the floor.
Token takes a second to process the meaning of this.
“He’s…?” He frowns and tilts his head slightly. “What?”
“Look,” Clyde mumbles. “Don’t ask me. I found him like that.”
Token glances down at the pile again. He was too smart to not translate the implication in Clyde’s words immediately, but some part of him was hoping maybe that he was wrong. Like, maybe Craig had been sitting there in the middle of the room and had left at some point before Token had shown up. Unlikely but…maybe.
He reaches out a single foot and gently nudges a random edge of the mound. It connects with something vaguely solid, and he sighs, suddenly tired.
“Craig.”
There isn’t an immediate response, not right away. Then, almost as an afterthought, the mountain stirs just the tiniest bit. From somewhere beneath it, Token hears a faint grunt that he couldn’t mistake for belonging to anyone else. He takes that as sufficient acknowledgement from the other party.
“What are you doing,” Token asks tersely.
The pile shifts a second time, a bit more vigorously. Somewhere between the folds of the comforter emerges Craig’s head, followed by the curves of his bare shoulders. His hair is tousled wildly from having just birthed himself out of a caved-in mass of bedding, something he only makes worse as hand wiggles out from somewhere to swipe through it lazily.
“Lying on the floor,” Craig says at last. He offers Token a brief sardonic quirk of his lips in greeting, something that might have been a smile if its owner didn’t also simultaneously look devoid of all life in his eyes.
“Why, may I ask?”
“Because I was sleeping.”
Normally this would not be shocking in the slightest, since Craig liked sleeping anywhere and anytime pretty much more than he liked doing most things. What was grating on every last of Token’s nerves was that he’d shown up here for a reason, that reason being that the last time he’d interacted with Craig, the boy had been complaining about how poorly he was doing in one of his introductory courses.
“College is fucking hard,” Craig had said at the time, staring off into the horizon while the three had walked back to their dormitories after class. He had his latest quiz paper crumpled in his hand. It was not pretty. “I should’ve settled for becoming a beet farmer or something. Literally anything else but higher education.”
Token had laughed, called him overdramatic, offered to help him study for the next one. Craig had agreed — in that noncommittal, aloof sort of way that he reacted to everything. Clyde had snorted at the time, muttered a, “good luck with that,” under his breath that Token didn’t understand until this exact moment.
“And now,” Craig says, glancing at his wrist as if there was a watch located there, “I am about to continue that. See you in a bit.” He flashes a half-hearted peace sign in departure before wriggling his way back into his cocoon.
“Whoa, wait, wait — ”
Craig is gone before he can even get a word in.
“…okay,” Token huffs, brows knitting together in consternation.
He knew it was bad with Craig. He knew Craig hated studying. They’d been going to school together for years, so it was kind of hard not to notice. Every time they had approaching tests, his whole demeanor would change. He could never focus, it overwhelmed him, made him moody and withdrawn — but Token had never seen a display like this before. Lights off, sprawled on the floor, sleeping away his problems as if they might disappear when he woke up. Craig used to mope, but nothing like this.
Token sighs before glancing down at the various paraphernalia littering the floor around Craig. From his angle and with the low light, he can only barely discern them; the index cards at least seem to have words on them, and so he crouches to better rifle through them, spotting key terms and half-completed formulas. An attempt made and promptly given up on. There’s literally a word on one of the cards that, half-way through, turns into a long line of ink that drags off onto the edge of the card, as if his hand just lost all motor-skills in the middle of writing. While he’s down there, he flips through the notebooks too, finds blocks of hastily scribbled nonsensical strings of thoughts and crudely drawn diagrams. Almost all the word are highlighted. He taps a key on the laptop, the screen illuminating to show the internet browser. There’s a tab open to a PDF of lecture slides. The other tab is opened to a two hour YouTube compilation of bad informercials.
“At least he was trying.” He glances up at Clyde. “Do you think he accomplished anything before I got here?”
“Uh, if it was anything like that last few times,” Clyde says, still not looking up. “He probably stared at a notebook for five minutes, griped about how much he hated his life, rolled around on the ground, and then retreated back into his blanket with all intent of sleeping off the rest of the day.“
“Alright, well, we are not doing that today.” He stands up again, this time with a fistful of Craig’s blanket, yanking it off the ground with a harsh tug. It unfurls to reveal Craig — shirtless and pantsless, but saved from complete nudity by socks and boxers — curled up on the carpet. He blinks wearily up at Token before clinging tighter around the pillow he’s spooning.
“You are getting stir crazy. Change of scenery is in order. Also — “
Two strides brings Token to the window, where he wrenches open the curtains to reveal the still bright afternoon sun outside. Clyde and Craig both hiss and recoil.
“Sunlight! How about that.” Token rounds on the two. “Let’s go, assholes, we’re moving.”
“What? Me too?” Clyde demands, still shielding his eyes from the harsh light behind his forearm. “I’m not the one who has a nervous breakdown every time I have to open my notebook.”
“I was just getting to you,” Token says, hands landing on his hips. “How’s your paper coming? I know you have one due in a couple days.”
Clyde visibly flinches. He tries too hard to hide how guilty he looks but that just makes it all the more obvious.
“Um? Can we go back to discussing Craig's bad habits here?” He sputters helplessly, hiding behind his phone again.
Token simply points at the dorm room door. Clyde reluctantly trails his eyes up, follows the direction of his finger, and after a moment of silent resistance, heaves himself off the bed. He drags his feet over to his desk and begins shoving things into his backpack, muttering under his breath all the while.
From the floor comes a chuckle. Craig has long since rolled onto his belly, his head propped up on his folded arms as he watches Clyde move around the room.
Token shoots him a look that shuts him up immediately, then snaps three times, aimed right at Craig’s face. Craig pouts briefly, then pushes himself to his feet and pads his way over to desk as well, tugging a shirt on over his head before doing anything else.
“You’ll thank me later,” Token says brightly. He punches them both on the arm as he passes them and heads out into the hallway.
A half an hour later finds the three seated at a table in some mostly secluded corner of their campus library. Midterms are still a ways off, so the building is sparse enough to have rendered their hunt for a table as brief.
“When did Token become our mother,” Craig asks. He’s slumped over the table, folded arms wrapped around his head, eyes trained on his iPhone laying face down a few inches away from his face.
“When your actual parents told me to take care of you hopeless morons on graduation day.”
“Hey, no, I’m still just your lazy idiot best friend,” Clyde says. He at least is sitting behind his open laptop and a small stack of books, but he also hasn’t touched said books and the laptop screen is currently displaying their dining hall’s dinner menu. “Craig, on the other hand — yeah, you’re definitely his mother right now.”
Craig’s hands suddenly reach for the phone and lift its screen into view. With an inhuman speed, he unlocks it and begins flipping through the same three social media apps in rapid succession, not particularly interested in anything on either of them but considerably more invested than what was going on beyond the screen.
“Hey,” Token snaps, both vocally and literally. “No phones. This is a study group right now.”
Craig hardly looks as if he’d heard him. His expression remains unchanged, his eyes still focused on his phone as his thumbs go to town all over the touchscreen.
“Gimme a sec.”
“Who are you even talking to,” Clyde mumbles against his palm where it’s squashed against his cheek. “Everyone you know is sitting at this table.”
Token holds out an open hand. “Give that to me.”
Craig doesn’t react right away, though his thumbs still. It proves to be something of a game of chicken between them, as Token doesn’t move either, arm still outstretched. At long last, Craig’s eyes slowly and begrudgingly travel up and over the top of his phone to meet Token’s stern gaze. He holds the passive stare for barely seconds before blinking away, sighing, and relinquishing the phone into his hand.
“Ugh.”
“You'll get it back when we're through,” Token says with a smile as he stuffs the phone in his bag.
Despite the lack of phone in his hands, Craig remains slumped over on the table, arms now stretched out to their length. His gaze is faraway and unfocused on the wall across from him. He already looks bored, and it’s worrisome to Token, who was hoping to get at least an hour of studying out of him before he slowed down again like this.
“Okay, well,” Token says hastily. “Let’s start with opening your text book maybe.”
“Um.”
“…what?”
Craig glances to the side, not even attempting to look innocent.
Token stares at him. “Did you even bring your book.”
“Um.”
Not only had he forgotten his book, it was still in its shrink wrap, still sitting in the bag from the student store from the day he purchased it, still stuffed at the bottom of his desk drawer under a bunch of other crap. The fact that it had even made it that far was miracle enough; he almost hadn't even bought the thing to begin with.
They didn’t need to know all that, though. Its very apparent absence was sufficient information enough.
“Oh my god, Craig,” Token groans, pinching the bridge of his nose. “How do you not bring a text book to a study session!” In his frustration, he practically shouts the words and has to be shushed by a nearby librarian.
“My bad,” Craig mumbles.
“Yeah, your bad.” Token rolls his eyes. “Fortunately this is the library, so, assuming your professor has some copies on reserve, you should be able to check it out for a few hours.”
“Mmhm. Great.” Craig pauses. “How do I do that.”
“Holy shit.” Token grips his forehead, then releases it. “Go find the reserves desk -- “
Craig stares at him with a blank expression. Token returns the look.
“Do you know how to read a map.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“Okay, then no problem. Go.”
Craig makes a big show of sighing laboriously and hauling himself to his feet like his limbs weighed a thousand pounds. He saluted lazily with one hand.
“Aye aye, mother dear.”
“I will literally kick your ass in this library.”
His salute turns into a single finger gun, aimed right at Token, before he shoves both hands deep in his pants pockets and ambles off.
Unwilling to wander around this labyrinth for longer than necessary, Craig opts for the laziest route imaginable and goes to hunt down somebody that works here to ask them instead. Librarians and library assistants tended to be old women and work-study students that didn’t exactly wear anything out of the ordinary to make them particularly identifiable, so this venture ends up almost as time-consuming and troublesome as Craig trudges up and down rows of shelves without finding a single person that looked like they could help him. His patience and already low-interest in his task steadily wane the longer he walks and he almost gives up entirely in favor of retreating back to Token empty-handed.
He makes it about halfway across the length of the room when he catches something in the corner of his eye that forces him take two steps backwards until he’s peering around the corner down a random aisle of shelves. There he finds a boy touting a little push cart teeming with books and juggling a handful of his own that he’s carefully shelving in front of him. The boy reaches back over to his cart to grab a couple more books and a badge dangles from a lanyard around his neck.
He looked helpful enough to get the job done, and so Craig shuffles over. His footsteps are just soft enough and he stops far enough away that the library assistant, so wrapped up in his task, doesn’t seem to notice Craig’s presence.
“Um,” Craig grunts, the sound of his voice abruptly disrupting the buzzing white-noise silence that permeated the library. “Hey.”
The resounding shriek is unholy. The entire armful of books the boy was holding clatter in a loud crash around his feet at the same time that he slaps both hands over his mouth to cut the cry short. This causes him to cry out again, remove his hands from his face to grasp at the air as if it wasn’t too late to grab the books, then quickly press them back over his lips as he hears the sound of his own noises.
It’s disastrous. Craig stands there with a blank expression, too mildly surprised and all-around awkward to react appropriately.
The boy’s face is bright red and his eyes are flooded with the sort of mortification that suggested that death would be a more preferable alternative to what was taking place. He whips around quickly to mouth a very emphatically articulated apology to someone across the room. Craig follows his gaze and sees an older woman, likely the head librarian, watching the boy from behind her glasses with a mixture of confusion and concern and just enough disapproval to cause him to shrink just the tiniest bit under her stare.
Library assistant turns around to face Craig again and Craig gets to witness the exact millisecond where the fear on his face sharpens into a venomous scathing glare.
“You scared the shit out of me,” the boy whispers fiercely, teeth clenched and lips tight.
“Sorry,” Craig mumbles. It's only now that he remembers the books scattered around the floor and he hastily swoops down to gather them into his arms.
Craig hears the boy sigh above him, and when he stands again, he sees his face relaxed into a mild exasperation. He accepts the books from Craig before dumping them unceremoniously onto the cart, and when he speaks again, his tone lacks any kindness or professionalism one would expect out of somebody whose job description expected him to interact with people.
“Did you need help with something?”
“Er…”
Craig had been startled enough by the initial display to have temporarily forgotten what he was doing over here in the first place. There was also something mildly distracting about this guy that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Did he know him from somewhere? No, that wasn’t it. Did he look like someone? Remind him of something? It was something about his appearance that made it difficult for Craig to think properly for a moment.
“Oh.” Craig snaps his finger as his memory reboots itself. “Text book. You rent those, right?”
Library assistant arches one eyebrow. “Yeah? This is the library.”
“Okay, cool.” Craig nods. “I need to do that.”
“Alright. You can take care of that at the reserves desk.”
“I don’t know where that is.”
“Near periodicals.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Craig doesn’t move right away and so the boy doesn’t move either, staring at him as a frown slowly forms between his eyebrows.
“Did…” the boy starts, cocking his head. “Did you want help finding it…?”
“That would be nice.”
“Right. Okay.” The boy is still frowning. He wheels his cart off to the side where it wouldn’t be in the way, and then strides past Craig, not bothering to wait for him.
“Follow me.”
One brisk walk across the length of the main floor later, they reach the desk. It’s a short curved desk, enough room for maybe three people to stand behind. Against the wall is an open doorway leading to the shelves of reserved books, and sitting on the desk itself is a single computer facing the side of the desk closer to the wall. There is nobody there.
The boy seemed willing at first to simply leave Craig here when they arrived, stopping at a distance and holding a hand out in presentation as if to say, ‘alright, well here it is.’ The two observe the noticeable lack of anyone standing behind the desk itself, however, and the boy groans. Reluctantly he stomps through the small swinging door separating the back of the desk from the rest of the library and stands behind the lone computer. Craig approaches him.
The boy poises his fingers just above the keyboard keys, not quite touching them.
“Do you have the book’s call number?”
Craig shakes his head.
“Okay, then we can start with the title.”
Craig didn’t even know his text book had a title. His face surely projects this sentiment, so the boy tries again.
“Er, class?”
“Physics.”
“Which one?”
“104?” Craig glances at the ceiling. “Or was it 105?”
The boy removes his hands from the keyboard altogether, fixing Craig with the sort of stare that Craig himself normally reserved for most other people.
“You’ve got to know the professor’s name at least.”
“Barnes.” Craig pauses. “I think. Or Bart maybe? Uh. It’s definitely a B name.”
Library assistant says nothing this time, still staring. Craig feels small all of a sudden and he’s not sure why.
“Listen,” Craig says hastily. “It’s a morning class. I’m barely conscious enough to register the fact that I’m alive.”
The boy continues to say nothing, looking more unimpressed by the second.
“It was a blue book?” Craig tries, smiling sheepishly. “I’m pretty sure there’s a dolphin on the cover?”
The boy rolls his eyes. “Oh my god, alright.” His fingers meet the keyboard again, typing and clicking away.
In the amount of time he does this, Craig watches him. The boy is…nice to look at, weirdly enough. It’s not a necessarily conventional sort of niceness. His hair is wildly askew and his clothes are loose rumpled; his eyes are tired and his lips, the bottom one trapped between his teeth, have apparently been gnawed in excess. A pencil is tucked behind his ear and there’s a tear on the lapel of his forest green jacket and the skin on the back of his hands are dry. His entire look is kind of messy and lazy, as if it was the last thing on his list of priorities. But all of it is collectively charming in its imperfection.
Dwelling far too long on anyone’s appearance, let alone in a positive manner, was a privilege Craig afforded to few. Kindness in any capacity was a sentiment seldom expressed toward anybody. That the thought, ‘he’s actually cute’ would even crossed Craig’s mind was startling.
But it had.
Suddenly, it became very clear what exactly had been distracting about this boy.
“Okay,” the boy says, startling Craig from his reverie. “104 and 105 both have books on reserve. I’m going to get both of them — and, hell, for good measure, I’ll grab the book for 106 too. You tell me if any of them look familiar.”
Craig nods. The boy disappears through the door in the back, and Craig waits around for a few minutes, tapping away at the counter.
When the boy returns, he places three text books in a line on the desk.
“I hope you’re happy,” the boy sighs. “These were on the highest shelf imaginable.”
Craig stares at the three until his eyes land on the middle one.
“That one,” he says, pointing down at it. “I guess it was a whale, not a dolphin.”
“Great,” the boy says, not sounding particularly enthused about it. He holds out his hand, into which Craig deposits his ID card. The boy scans the book and then the card. “This is due back in two hours — “ He glances down at the card. “ — Craig. And look.”
He tears a sticky note from a small pad of notes shaped like a fat cat. He plucks the pencil from behind his ear and scribbles on it before sliding it across the counter to Craig along with his ID card.
“This is the call number. You keep this in case you need to do this again. Save someone else the exciting adventure we just went through.”
Craig accepts both the card and the note, staring down at the way the digits are written. He’s still looking at them when he says, “thanks.”
“No problem. Is there anything else you need?”
Truthfully, no. But along with the realization that this boy was nice-looking, Craig is suddenly overcome with some inexplicable urge to appear interesting to him. Impress him maybe. At the very least, not appear a complete idiot. That last bit he knew was beyond his means to accomplish, but he’d done enough throughout this entire interaction to prove it as true and so he feels motivated to perhaps undo a bit of that.
“Did you know — “ Craig blurts. The boy watches him expectantly, mildly surprised, probably not expecting his next words to start out like that. Craig has a weird out-of-body experience as he speaks where he can almost witness what is happening to himself, knows what is about to happen, knows it is a bad idea, and yet is powerless to stop it.
“Did you know that lobsters pee out of their eyes.”
The library assistant stares at him, blinks twice, and frowns.
“Uh, what?”
“They, um — “
oh god just shut up please
“Their bladders are in their heads and the urinary tract leads to their eye sockets so…so they pee out of their eyes.”
“Okay.” Library assistant glances around the room as if he is being pranked or something. He waits for some sort of punchline to the rest of this statement before looking back at Craig. “And you are telling me this because…”
“It’s just an interesting lobster fact.”
It wasn’t even his fucking fact. He’d overheard some marine bio major in his speech class mention it to someone else and just logged it away in the back of his mind because he genuinely thought it was interesting. He figured he’d unload on someone at some pivotal moment in his life, he just didn’t picture it happening quite like this.
“Oh,” the boy says.
And then…
And then.
He laughs.
It’s a small laugh, brief, half amused and half confused, out of the corner of his lips where they’re quirked up in a half smile, coming out like a breath, hidden behind a fist that he suddenly raises to his mouth. It is stupidly, terribly cute.
“Well,” the boy says, voice still a little breathy from the laugh. “I guess it was interesting. I’ll keep it in mind.”
Craig is pretty sure he just experienced the closest thing to death that he could while still being very much alive.
“Yes,” is what he manages to squeak out. “Okay. Thanks.”
It is painfully awkward. The boy laughs again, the sound just as small and as amused as the last one.
“You’re welcome.”
Craig turns and walks away very quickly.
Token and Clyde are exactly where Craig left them, Clyde with a book and his notebook actually open beside him while Token scribbles away on a page in his open binder. They don’t look up right away when Craig quietly makes his way over to the table and plops down in his chair. It’s when he doesn’t move beyond that, simply stares down at the book he’d placed in front of himself on the table, that Clyde seems to notice his presence. He blinks up once over the top of his laptop, studies Craig for a moment, then averts his eyes downward to his computer again.
“Was he cute?” Clyde asks offhandedly
“What?” Token says, looking up too.
Clyde glances at Craig once before turning to Token. “He gets quiet like this when he’s interested in something. Definitely not a book. Probably a boy.”
“He’s always quiet,” Token retorts, rolling his eyes.
“You don’t know, man,” Clyde insists. “When you live with the guy, you learn to differentiate the silences.” He nods over at Craig. “Yo, am I getting sexiled later today or what?”
“It was nothing,” Craig says, idly flicking through the pages of the textbook until he finds the chapter they were being tested on that week. He slumps over onto his bent arms and begins reading. Or at least he attempts to. He can feel the other two exchange a glance with each other, but they say nothing more about Clyde’s accusations.
Predictably enough, Craig does not pass his test the following day. He doesn’t know that for sure, of course — results wouldn’t be posted for another week — but the fact that three-fourths of the questions had him staring hopelessly off into space without any conceivable notion of how to answer was perhaps clue enough that passing was out of the realm of realistic possibility. What little he was able to actually answer had everything to do with the few pages of text he’d managed to reread a thousand times the day before in the library. He’s, for the most part, unperturbed and unsurprised by the results of his exam, but, okay, admittedly it was nice to know he retained something from that study session, despite having been unable to focus for most of it.
It’s chilly when he steps out of his lecture hall and so he flips the collar of his coat up until it nearly touches his chin, zipping up tight and shoving his hands deep into his pockets. He slouches over on himself as he trudges listlessly across his campus, the defeated march of someone resigned to his fate of a lifetime of failure.
He’s supposed to meet Clyde at the fountain on the north end of campus because this is where the two met every day after their Friday afternoon classes, but his beeline for his destination happens to take him past the college library. Normally this means nothing to him; he passed this building at least once at some point every day he had classes on campus.
Today, though, he slows his gait to a stop just outside the front steps, staring up at the imposingly tall paned windows and intricately layered red brick walls. Students are filtering in and out of the main doors, which seem to beckon him invitingly every time they swing open. He finds himself fixing the building with a stare that lasts far longer than he’d feel unashamed to admit, gnawing on his bottom lip and clenching and unclenching his fists in his jacket pockets. After enough time, he suddenly shakes his head, muttering a small curse and burying his face, warm from cold and something else, just a tiny bit further behind his collar. He stomps his way up the stairs, hands producing his phone from his pocket and punching out a quick message to Clyde:
i’ll catch you back at the room.
He’s met with a wave of heat upon crossing the building’s threshold. It’s warm enough to absentmindedly tug his zipper down until his jacket hangs open off his frame, though he keeps his collar high, tucks his face behind it and stuff his hands in the pockets once again. The sudden quiet of the library is such a stark contrast to the bustling busy sounds of campus outside and it makes the scuff of his footsteps seem impossibly loud in his head, makes him more conscious of himself, as if the entire world would now know he was here and surely why he was here.
He wanders aimlessly through the building, a self-guided tour with no conceivable goal in sight. A visit to the library twice in one week was impressive; prior to this, the last time he'd been here was to take a nap in between classes, and the time before that was for a tour during orientation. It was not a habitat he normally found himself. Left to his own devices now, he finds rooms he thinks he’s never seen before, with stacks of shelves to slink between, with nooks and crannies for students to hide themselves in an effort to study with as few distractions as possible. It’s massive enough that he could realistically see himself getting lost here, and this was all just on one floor.
His floating brings him to some random aisle of literature that he genuinely has no interest — volumes on philosophy and metaphysics, he learns in a quick glance, all of which are beyond his scope of comprehension. It’s as he’s taking careful steps around the corner to relocate himself that he suddenly he seizes back, slamming his back up against the shelving of books beside him. After a moment of staring wide-eyed across the aisle, he lets out a breath slowly through his nose, composing himself, then cranes his neck just the tiniest bit to peek around the corner of the shelf again.
There
He hates himself for thinking it almost immediately. The thought is too hopeful, too anticipatory, something he’d been hoping not to acknowledge so as to feel less stupid about walking in here in the first place. In any case, it’s still the first thought he has, if only because, tucked in the opposite row of shelves about three aisles away, is the library assistant from yesterday. Seeing him feels a little like exhaling after holding air in his lungs for far too long.
Craig stares. Just… stares. It’s probably weird but he doesn’t know what else to do. He watches the boy shelve three books, two at eye-level and one he has to crane on his tip-toes to nudge into place on a high shelf. He sticks his tongue out the corner of his mouth as he reads the stickers on the books he’s putting away, cocks his neck at a sharp angle as he studies the spines the volumes already shelved, absentmindedly plays with the same loose hair-strands framing the side of his face every time a text leaves his fingers. He lingers in this aisle for maybe thirty seconds before touting his cart of books in front of him and wheeling off in the opposite direction of the room.
When he’s completely out of sight, Craig feels his entire body relax, eyes sliding shut as he leans his back against the shelf again. A hand goes to his face, squeezing his temples between his thumb and index finger as he groans gently against the skin of his palm.
He waits like this only a few moments more before pushing himself off the shelf and stomping out of the aisle, out of the room, out of the library altogether and hurries on back to his dorm.
Craig does his best not to think about the library. Ideally, the weekend would make this a fairly simple feat. He fills his Saturday and Sunday with movies and video games and junk food and laundry and lots of sleeping and empty promises of homework that he never really touches at all. He and his friends even leave campus for an afternoon just to bum around downtown before hurrying back to their dorms to veg out in front of Token’s television. It seems ample distraction.
It fails. Spectacularly.
Ever present, quietly, in the back of his brain, lingers the memory, the stupid, simple, nothing of a memory that basically boiled down to a meaningless interaction between himself and some dude that checked out a book for him. A really cute dude with a nice voice and nice hair and a nice smile. And distract himself as he might, every brief second his thoughts weren’t otherwise occupied, they drifted so easily to all that niceness. It was annoying. Maddening.
So he attends his classes on Monday determined to steer his path in such a way that avoids intersecting the library at all, no matter how inconvenient. Out of sight, out of mind. If it meant ridding himself of these feelings, he could probably keep this up for the rest of his college career. This plan seems promising enough until later in the afternoon, during which his and Clyde’s final classes of the day were located in close enough buildings to meet up immediately after. Clyde ends up subconsciously dictating the route they take back to their room, leaving Craig helpless to follow along beside him. Clyde has no issues walking past the library, so they of course take the shortest most direct path home, which happens to bring them right past it. Craig can only mentally scramble to think of some reason why they shouldn’t be walking this way, all without outright admitting that he’s just super gay and can’t handle it. He’s got nothing by the time they’re strolling right in front of it.
Craig blinks up at the building as it looms into view before them. Suddenly all the pent up frustration from the weekend made the sight more enticing than he’d realized. It was probably because of the brevity and simplicity of the initial interaction that he had to keep replaying the memory all weekend. It was like getting a taste and having his interest piqued just severely enough to leave him starved for more. It was so mindlessly tempting that he couldn’t fathom for the life of him why he was trying to resist this.
This is exactly why he didn’t want to be anywhere in proximity to this place. He couldn’t trust himself.
Clyde is in the middle of some ramble about his lecture that Craig was only half-paying attention to before Craig suddenly interrupts the conversation.
“Do you have any papers coming up or anything?”
“Huh?” Clyde asks, caught off guard. “No, man, I just wrote one, like, four days ago. You were there.”
“Oh. Right.” Craig is silent, thinking. Clyde frowns at him. The library is getting closer with each step they take. “Anything you need to study for?”
“What? No.” Clyde backhands his arm. “You sound like Token, dude.”
“I just — “ The library is literally right beside them, but Craig has enough time to weasel away from Clyde before they cross the entrance. “I got my exam back. Wasn’t great.”
Which wasn’t a lie. Although Craig still hadn’t actually looked at his — he never did — as per usual, he quickly glanced at the first page, saw the unsightly amount of red, and without bothering to read at the score itself, stuffed it into his backpack. Out of sight, out of mind.
“So? What, you wanna,” and Clyde laughs before he can even finish the thought, the idea hilarious enough without giving voice to it, “study again?” His second laugh comes out in a loud uproarious bark. “Gonna hit the books? Get your little highlighters and color-coded index cards out? Library’s right there, homie.”
Craig knows Clyde’s being a facetious little shit, but he decides he's going to feign an inability to read sarcasm for the sake of high-tailing out of this conversation without receiving the third degree.
“Yeah.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder as he abruptly changes paths to walk backwards toward the library. “Okay cool, so see you back at the room?”
Clyde’s laughter comes to a record-scratching halt as any ounce of amusement on his face falls away to utter bewilderment. He stops walking altogether, too stunned to even react.
“Later.”
Craig waves once before spinning around, grabbing onto the straps of his backpack and doing a little half-jog up the library steps, getting away as quickly as possible before he has to explain himself further.
Some part of him entertained the thought of Clyde still standing out there by the time he left later. Craig wouldn’t blame him. He was just as shocked at his own actions.
Still clinging to his bag straps like a nervous kindergartener, he wanders around the quiet confines library again. It’s a little more familiar than last time time, but he doesn’t really have an idea of where to go or what he was gonna do.
Conveniently enough, Craig discovers not too long later, the boy is located at the reserves desk today, standing this time and flipping through the top book in a stack of books. It saves Craig the trouble of wandering around hopelessly, which is something he had been hoping not to repeat from last Friday. Unfortunately, for all the eagerness with which he plowed in here, Craig realizes a bit too late that he does not exactly have a plan. All he can manage to do is stand there and stare, unable to bring himself any farther forward to bridge the several yards between them.
He retreats when he can think of nothing else to do with himself, slipping further away until he’s at an inconspicuous distance. He grabs a random book off a shelf along the way then almost trips as he drops down into a chair behind a small round study table near a large window. He props the book up on the table in front him, forcing himself to stare down into it so as to look preoccupied. It’s only now that he can see what he’s grabbed — volume 7 of what is apparently a encyclopedic collection of books on art from the Qing dynasty. The book is also currently upside down. He fixes that.
Craig's eyes travel over the top of the book. Library boy is still behind his desk. He appears to have not noticed Craig’s embarrassing display from a moment ago, still idly engrossed in his own task. Craig sighs with relief.
It’s a short-lived relief. He gazes across the room and watches transfixed as, in between whatever he's doing, the boy pauses to read a page and starts doing that...thing again with his hair, absentmindedly tugging at a loose tuft until the ends curl ever so slightly against his cheek. Something about the action makes Craig feels like he’s been sucker-punched and now he can't even pretend like he's reading this book anymore.
A hand suddenly slams down on the table right next to Craig’s face. He jumps, hissing a sharp, “shit,” under his breath before whirling around to find Clyde grinning widely behind him.
“That doesn’t look like studying,” Clyde says, moving his hand to pat Craig’s back. He plops down into the seat next to him, draping his elbow off the back of Craig's chair and gazing off in the same general direction he'd been staring in before the interruption. “Sooo, what’s the dealio? Who’re we scoping out?”
“Nobody says dealio anymore, jackass,” Craig mutters, hiding his face in one hand.
Clyde ignores him.
“Is it him?” He points at a study table on the opposite end of the room. There’s three individuals sitting at it, ample space between each, all keeping to themselves. One of them is male, bulky and bespectacled.
“Don’t be rude." Craig slaps Clyde's pointing index finger out of the air. "And no.”
Clyde looks around once more before refocusing his gaze on a second boy — this one tall, well-dressed, and with a slight stubble — approaching from their left to stride past them. Clyde nods once in his wake, then looks to Craig questioningly. Craig shakes his head.
“If I get this on my third try, you owe me a bag of chips from the vending machine.”
“Go for it.”
The third attempt requires slightly more concentration, involves scrutiny and evaluation of each and every person in their field of vision. A few minutes of intense surveying later and Craig watches Clyde’s head pivot ever slightly until he his attention is caught as the librarian boy moves from the desk and steps over to a nearby shelf. Clyde’s eyebrows shoot up behind his bangs, then he turns to Craig with an eager smile.
In response, Craig merely digs into the front pocket of his backpack before sliding a dollar and fifty cents in quarters across the table to him.
“Frankly I’m more embarrassed I didn’t just guess that the minute I walked in the door,” Clye says smugly as he collects his winnings. “Blond and scrawny. That’s got your type written all over it.”
“Quiet,” Craig mumbles. He slumps down into his seat until his face is buried behind his arms where they’re folded on the tabletop. His eyes, peeking over the crest of his jacket-clad forearm, do not leave the boy.
Unfortunately Craig could not bring himself to refute Clyde’s accusation. He didn’t consider himself one to have a “type;” that required a certain sexually-charged view of the world that he was not built with. And yet — he was here, wasn’t he? He could have likely been doing a million other productive activities right now, but instead he was hunched over a study table in the campus library watching a boy he didn’t know move across the room shelving returned library books and tug on that same loose lock of hair forty seven times. Looking at him makes Craig feel like the once foreign concept of having a “type” was suddenly being defined for him for the first time right before his very eyes.
As Craig stares, his fingers clench ever so slightly on the material of his jacket where he's hugging his arms close to his face. This small action does not go unnoticed by Clyde, who sighs and smiles a bit fondly.
“I see,” Clyde says quietly to himself before addressing Craig again. “So have you talked to him yet?”
“Yes,” Craig mumbles into his jacket sleeve, nodding confidently. “The first time I met him. He checked out my textbook to me. I told him that thing about the lobsters.”
“Oh my god, NO, not the peeing eyeball fact, dude, come on,” Clyde moans, slapping both hands over his eyes. “God, you’re going to die a virgin.”
“Hey, it’s interesting.”
“But is it going to get you LAID?”
“I don’t care about that, holy shit.” Craig pauses. “Also I may have just blurted it without thinking, so…”
“Of course you did. That’s the only explanation as to why any sane person would ever say that to someone they wanna bone.”
“I don’t —“
“Okay, yeah, yeah, you’re ace as hell, I get it.” Clyde rolls his eyes. “What about his name? You know that, right?”
“That never exactly came up in our brief five minute transaction, shockingly enough.”
“Cool, so you don’t know anything about this guy and yet you hang out here like a creep and don’t actually talk to him,” Clyde says. “You’re the worst.”
“Excuse me,” Craig says, sitting up now as he rounds on him, “When was the last time you were in a relationship? Or is that thing with you and your right hand still going strong?”
“Okay that was rude, and I think you owe me an apology.”
“Bite me.”
“Look, this is really very simple,” Clyde continues. “You just go up to him and start a conversation. I know socializing is not your strongest suit, but it’s easier than you think.”
“Says you.”
Rolling his eyes, Clyde suddenly stretches forward in his seat, leaning far across the table to wave frantically at a girl that was sitting at the neighboring table. She’s got earbuds in her ears and appears engrossed in her notebook pages until she spots Clyde in the corner of her eye. She blinks up at him and frowns slightly before removing the right earphone to give him her partial attention.
“Hi,” Clyde whispers to her. “You’re hot. You wanna hook up?”
Craig socks him on the arm at the same time that the girl’s expression sours. She flashes her middle finger and mouths out a sharp, ‘fuck you,’ before gathering her things and moving to a different section of the library.
“Dude, what the hell.”
“Super easy, right? Like nothing!” Clyde was smiling too brightly for someone who’d just been rejected and was now tenderly rubbing at the spot where Craig had punched him. “So what’s the big deal?”
The big deal was that Craig did not trust himself to open his mouth or move or do anything really without embarrassing himself. The big deal was Craig did not know how to be charming or likable or sociable in general. The big deal was Craig had never approached another human being out of romantic interest in his entire life and wasn’t sure how this was supposed to play out.
Perhaps the biggest deal of them all was that this boy was impossibly cute and Craig was very acutely aware of this.
Craig says nothing in response to Clyde right away, not until his gaze catches library boy striding across his field of vision until he slid his way behind the reserves desk, this time to sit behind one of the computers. From this vantage point he was obstructed by a computer monitor and thus no longer visible. Craig is immediately bothered by this and it makes him feel one hundred percent more pathetic than he had a moment ago. This seems to be his breaking point.
“What should I say.” Craig is still talking into his arm.
Clyde perks up eagerly before patting him on the back. “Anything, my dude. Tell him you wanna hang out sometime, compliment him, ask for a number -- “
It sounded like a lot of work and with too much room for Craig to flub it somehow.
"A pick-up line maybe? Hey baby, are you a library book, because I'd like to check you out -- "
Craig holds up a hand. "That's enough."
“Just -- for the love of all that is good, please eradicate the word ‘lobster’ from your fucking vocabulary. Whatever it is you say, make it not that.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Craig sighs, sluggishly pushing himself to his feet. “Well, I guess I can’t possibly strike out as badly as you did a few minutes ago.”
“Yes! Use that as motivation! Do it better than I did!” Clyde says it a little too loud while slapping the table with his open palm. A woman shushes him from somewhere and he shrinks a bit in his seat before flashing Craig a thumbs up.
Craig takes a deep breath then leaves the table, stomping across the room before he can change his mind. It’s only when he’s halfway there and his nerves suddenly catch up to him that he realizes his fists are balled at his sides and that he probably looks like an angry gorilla. He shoves them in jacket pockets, feels awkward about it, removes them to clasp and twist his fingers behind his back, feels awkward about that, then leaves his now sweaty palms to just swing openly at his sides.
The boy does not look up when Craig finally stops in front of the desk. He’s staring a bit too intently at his computer screen, the tip of his thumb gently caught between his teeth. Craig doesn’t want to be rude, so he stands there quietly, patiently. He idly glances backward to where he’d left Clyde at the table. Clyde, watching him, gestures enough with his hands to express a very clearly articulated, ‘what the hell’. Craig shrugs with one shoulder. Clyde frantically swats at the air, encouraging him to move things along. Craig glances at the ceiling, then turns back. He clears his throat.
The boy jumps at this, holding a hand over his mouth to stifle a small startled squeak, before blinking up over his monitor at Craig. He looks both surprised and embarrassed to see him.
“Oh, God, sorry about that!”
“Uh, it’s cool -- ”
“You weren’t standing there for too long were you?”
“No, I, um -- ”
“My bad! Seriously. Sorry. Can I help you?”
Overall, it was a friendlier greeting than Craig had received last Thursday, if not a bit over the top, but — this was not the reaction Craig had been hoping for. He was hoping for instant recognition. The boy and those big eyes of his were staring up at him now like he had never seen him in his life.
“Um, yeah,” Craig croaks out, glancing away. “I was here…last week.”
He hoped this would be sufficient information to jog the boy’s memory. The boy instead continues to wait for Craig to finish the rest of his thought, as if he couldn’t fathom how anything Craig had just said should matter to him in the slightest and surely the actual important thing had yet to be stated.
“I…” Craig doesn’t know what to say without feeling awkward.
You checked a book out to me?
That really narrowed things down.
I was the moron who couldn’t remember his professor’s name or what his textbook cover looked like?
He didn’t really want his idiocy to have made a lasting enough impression for that to be his sole identifier.
In desperation and without any better ideas, he digs his hand into his pants’ pocket, produces his thin leather wallet, and tugs the little sticky note from inside. He places it on the desk in front of the boy, who blinks down to read it before looking up at Craig again.
“Did you want me to get this for you?”
Craig can only nod. He hadn’t meant for this to be the direction this interaction was going to go, but sure.
The boy takes the note and disappears into the back room again. When he returns with the book a moment later, his gaze has long since relaxed out of that polished polite customer service visage and into something significantly more exhausted. The book cover brandishes its whale image right at Craig.
“Ah yes,” the boy says as he approaches the desk and dumps the textbook right on top. “Lobster guy.”
Great.
“That’s me,” Craig mumbles.
“You kept this,” the boy says incredulously, waving the sticky note still in his hand.
Craig shrugs. “Proud of me?”
“Yes, actually. I assumed this was going to end up in your trashcan.”
On any other occasion, with any other individual, it might have. Sentimentality played a decent role in convincing him to hold onto it. He’d stared at the scrawl for way too long a time when he’d first pulled it out of his pocket last week.
What he admits instead is: “I didn’t want to put you through the hell of locating it for me again.”
“How kind of you.” The boy smiles wryly before drawing his gaze back down to the book. “I still need a foot stool to reach this thing, so — I think the best way to ease my suffering would be to just not check this out ever again.”
“Well, if you’d prefer that I fail my class, that can easily be arranged."
"If it means I never have to scale the side of a skyscraper just to grab this physics book for the rest of my life, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make." He holds out a hand for Craig’s ID card, which Craig quickly obliges.
"Have you considered purchasing platform shoes," Craig says.
“Hilarious,” the boy mutters, scanning the card before scanning the book's barcode as well. "Should just make you come back here and get this thing yourself."
"Not all of us can be blessed with slightly above-average human height. No need to be jealous."
"Jerk." The boy struggles to fight down the grin tugging on the corner of his lips as he busies himself scanning the card and the book's barcode. He sounds begrudgingly amused, as much annoyed as endeared, and it was oddly satisfying, the sort of reaction Craig loved receiving for his toneless straight-faced sarcasm. It was almost better than laughter itself.
Craig’s so busy staring at the little curl at the corner of his mouth that he’s slightly startled when the boy hands the book back over the counter, Craig’s ID card tucked snugly behind the front cover.
“Back in two hours, smartass.”
It suddenly hits Craig like a truck that he had successfully navigated his way through this entire exchange without saying something stupid, had instead managed to sound, dare he say, passably funny and maybe a bit charming in his snark. How quickly he’d gone from nervous to this distinctly comfortable in a matter of a few words was surprising, and giddiness fills him like a flood. He almost wants to smile, but he doesn’t, because cool guys don’t grin like dopey lovestruck idiots.
Instead he decides not to push his luck any further -- he hadn’t achieved anything he’d come over here for, but he was going to ride this cloud for as long as humanly possible before he found a way to fuck it up -- and gathers the book in his hand. He gives a tiny two-fingered salute, then turns to stride off. In his head, he looks like a fucking badass.
“What,” the boy laughs from behind, “no lobster fun facts today?”
This brings Craig to a cringing, shuddering stop before he’s forced to pivot back around. The boy is now leaning across the desk, elbows propped on the counter, cheeks in his hands, fluttering his lashes and smiling with an innocence that only thinly veiled how smug he actually looked right now.
“Are…” Craig glances around. “Are you serious.”
“Oh, yeah, it was real interesting. I love being educated by an expert.”
Fucking…
“Um.” Craig blinks once, twice, wracks his brain for something, anything, literally anything. “Lobsters...mate for life.”
He’s not sure where this came from but he feels he might be vaguely reminiscing an episode of Friends that he wasn’t watching but had been playing in the background in his dorm common room.
“...is that true?”
“Yes.” Craig pauses. “I don’t know.” He pauses again. “That might be penguins.”
The boy nods in agreement. “It’s an easy mistake.”
“Yeah, y’know,” Craig chuckles, and he can hear how stupid and nervous he sounds, which only makes him want to throw himself down a well. “They’re practically identical.”
The boy snorts softly and derisively, and Craig could stand here and try and come up with something witty to save himself right now, but he decides to just let him have this.
“Alright.” Craig points at him. “Um. I will get back to you. On the lobster fact.”
“Looking forward to it.”
He wiggles his fingers at Craig in a dismissive wave goodbye. Craig nods (Why did he nod? Who the hell says goodbye like that? Jesus fucking Christ) and turns around too quickly to leave before he nearly rams into a girl walking up behind him. He drops his book, she drops her book, he hears the laugh behind him as he quickly crouches to retrieve both items. When he finally leaves, he does so without looking back.
Clyde wastes no time when Craig returns to the table a moment later.
“That looked fucking exciting. What happened?”
Craig retells the encounter, during which, for the most part, Clyde nods along approvingly. He was especially impressed by the lead-in with the textbook, commending him for his smoothness but berating him by not following it up with his shitty pick-up line.
Then Craig mentions the last bit.
“Are you fucking kidding me,” Clyde says. “He asked about the fucking lobsters? If that’s the kinda shit that turns this guy on, he deserves you.”
“I’m pretty sure he was making fun of me.”
“Nah, that was totally flirting. You were too, by the sounds of it.”
“I was just talking normally.”
“Yeah, well, he looked pretty dazzled from over here, so I’m gonna chalk that up as a win for you.”
Craig hadn’t considered that what they were doing was flirting. Was it really that easy? The snide commentary had been so natural, as if this was a friend he’d had for years and could rip on all he wanted because the underlying affection was loud enough to remain unspoken. The boy had returned it just as well and it had been so nice, he kind of wants to get back up and do it again.
Craig places a hand on his cheek, feeling a heat crawl onto his face as he replays the conversation in his head.
“You dope,” Clyde says with a grin, shoving him gently. “You’re cute as hell.”
Craig glares at him and it only makes Clyde laugh.
“So what’s his name then?” Clyde asks.
The prolonged silence that follows causes Clyde’s smile to fall.
“I’m actually going to kill you.”
“It never came up!”
Clyde places his entire face in both hands and groans. “Oh my God.”
“Calm down -- ”
Clyde removes his hands to stab a finger down at the textbook. “You deserve to actually study. That’s your punishment. Read a whole chapter and atone for your idiocy.”
And because Craig figures, well, he’s already here and he went through all the trouble and he did have this book for the next two hours, what else could he do with his time but open it up. He makes it through about ten pages within the two hours, leaving about twenty leftover, which really wasn’t going to do him much good come quiz day.
When he slips the book through the return slot, the desk behind it empty like a ghost town, he decides that for the good of his grade, it’d be irresponsible not to come back and do this again tomorrow.