“Why did I choose Italian as my elective?” Percy groaned aloud.
He knew why, of course—it was a rhetorical question. The answer came down to a younger Italian transfer student with silky dark curls and impossibly dark eyes who sat next to him in English. Percy didn’t even have the boy’s name and he was already doing stupid stuff like signing up for an actual class and not just another blow off language like Ancient Greek. Nope, that would have been too easy, so now Percy was stuck trying to figure out why the nouns he was learning had genders.
He let out a long sigh, leaning back in his chair for a moment, before resolving to nut up and stop complaining. Okay, so the book said that, as a general rule, if it ended in ‘o’ it was masculine. He’d had to read it a couple of times to be sure, because his dyslexia was annoying like that. Still, he picked up his pencil—blue, of course—and started back on his worksheet. So, it would be ‘il’ or ‘un’ for ‘porto’, ‘tavolo’, ‘foto’—
“That’s wrong, actually.” A voice corrected from Percy’s blindside, startling him into a tiny jump that he was extremely grateful wasn’t a scream of fright when he saw who the voice belonged to.
It was him. The boy. The cute Italian transfer with the soft curls and the big eyes, his pouty pink lips twitching upwards in amusement as he watched Percy awkwardly settle back into his seat.
“Oh, is it?” Percy asked, trying for nonchalant. The boy didn’t seem to buy it, but didn’t call him on it.
“Yes. ‘Foto’ is short for ‘fotografía’, which is a feminine noun, so you would use ‘la’ or ‘una’,” the boy explained, his voice lilting almost musically over the Italian. Italian was so much prettier coming out of those lips, Percy mused distractedly. Too distractedly, as the boy raised an impatient brow at him when Percy just stared. “Are you going to write that down?”
Percy blinked. Realized he’d been staring at the other boy for a solid minute and let out a nervous chuckle while rubbing the back of his neck, desperately hoping his cheeks weren’t as red as they felt.
“Right, sorry, guess this stuff is harder than I thought,” Percy offered in explanation. “Thanks a lot, umm…”
“Nico. Nico di Angelo,” Nico replied easily—or at least, it looked that way on the surface, but Percy caught his fingers playing with his jacket sleeves. A nervous habit? Whatever it was, it was cute. Everything the boy did was cute, even his name was cute—and god, Percy was in way over his head.
“Well, thanks then, Nico,” Percy said, mustering up his very best smile before he forced himself to turn back to his worksheet. Cause Percy could be casual about this, totally, 100%—
“If you’d like,” Nico started, cheeks ever so slightly pink. “I can help you with the rest?”
“I’d love that!” Percy blurted out immediately, followed by wanting to hit himself over the head. How was that ‘casual’? He might as well just blurt out he had a crush and get rejected already!
Before Percy could beat himself up any further, Nico smiled, his dark eyes lighting up like the lights on Fifth Avenue at Christmas—and Percy’s heart started playing jump rope in his chest. ‘Here lies Percy Jackson’, it would say on his tombstone, ‘14 years old, died making an angel smile’.
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