#*wnfaob

The class that cost her ... Fuck, a lot of zeroes .

Rey thinks in numbers , and , while her friends mock her for it , left brain crap makes more sense to her than just about anything else -- maybe if her wake up call was in binary, she'd actually have woken up .  

She huffs, as if by sheer an abject defiance, she can will time to turn back, and give her the strength to power down to a lecture that had absolutely nothing to do with aerospace design , but was a weird sidelined requirement in the engineering part of her degree .  Whatever . Rose took that class, Rose , whose notes were a verbatim recount of what their fossilized professor would have spewed over the last two hours. Rey smiles to herself , realizing that she'd never actually made it off the ground. 

I'm too young for this , bitterly, as her joints pop and crackle , a protest of her having moved at all -- least, when she's stretching towards the stucco ceiling that's got a concerning number of tac-mark holes in it , and she's never looked up long enough to notice them until  now .  She'd add it to her to-do list, buy some Spackle . 

Stumbling , Rey's arms only come down when she yawns, and nearly trips over herself on the way to the kitchen - the smell of coffee was , to the bleary eyed college student, a siren's song for which she'd brave the storm of her housemates . All of whom , have been up for hours . 

" Rey , no offense , but you look like crap . " Poe , who is currently side-eyeing Finn's choice in late-morning beverage ( something green and thick -- couldn't he have the common decency to pour it into something that wasn't transparent ? )  , was always the one for honesty , except , apparently , when it came to his partner's dietary habits. He simply raises his brows, and resumes drinking his coffee , " You okay ?" After a moment has passed and Rey, usually quick on her wit, hadn't said a word.

" Huh ? Yeah of course ! I'm just peachy ." Deadpanned , she's still glaring at Finn who has made a point to read a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal. Rey's half inclined to pour his kale-something-or-other all over it, she doesn't, and fishes around for a clean mug while grumbling , " I overslept. Missed my only class for the day, and with Spring Break around the corner i'm running out of things to do . Too much free time ." 

" You're the only person in the world who is mad that classes are out for two weeks , " Finn , finally choosing to speak , levels at her. They've mastered the art of copacetic trash talking and it unnerved anyone who didn't understand just how much these two cared for each other. ( its a lot , a lot a lot , and if he wasn't with Poe , people might have thought it was puppy love ). 

He's not wrong , but that doesn't mean Rey's any less annoyed with him for saying it . " Hey . " A snap , " Us scholarship kids have to pull our weight around here. Idle hands are the devil's play things , or however the adage goes ." She's slowly lost any heat to her words, lulled into a caffeine-induced complacency as she nurses her first of many cups of coffee . It was the only way she could balance her usual routine, but , with classes winding down, and her almost done with her degree three years in advance ( how it'd back fired, overlaying as many credits as she had ) , its bringing too much to light. Like the things she doesn't have, or what she never does .

Poe, who has an apparent death wish,( alongside psychic abilities )  quips , " If your hands had something to play with maybe you wouldn't be so tightly wound ." Finn chokes on his drink, and Rose, who'd just come in with a smile, frowns .

" You know Rey." Her voice is happy. How is she literally always happy ? The arch of Rey's brow , normally wilting, isn't even enough to stop her now , " He's got a point. You never even go out with us . You visit skeevy bars , but never take anyone home --- " Finn clearing his throat is a saving grace that's got Rey forgiving the panflutes from earlier in a heart beat . Rose concludes quickly , " It just might do you some good to have some er --- human contact ! Not that the engine of a 747 doesn't get you plenty hot ." 

Its a bad joke. The group collectively groans . 

" I date ." She corrects, but when all eyes turn on her , the burn of her cheeks is telling , " -- I mean, its not that I haven't been asked. I'm just not interested in ... college boys." Yes, that's believable . Let them think you're into older men, or something .  Rey's internal dialogue is more convincing than her outer one, as they continue to stare at her in growing disbelief , " Get off my case ." Is all she can manage through the thicket of their laughter . Her blush recedes, and she's left with a certain begrudged fondness for the ragtag group of people that were her friends . 

Its only two p.m , and Rey's run out of things to do . It's stupid , really, how a friendly jibe could unearth so many truths that she'd worked hard to keep at bay. There's a reason she focuses on numbers instead of letters , on equations instead of poetry . Math and physics didn't call on that certain romantic quality that always, always found its way into any art she'd dared be interested in . Romance is crap. All of it is just ... crap.

Or maybe it isn't.

Crap. 

She knows herself well enough that this nagging thought wont go away on its own . Its not that Rey's a virgin , or that she'd silently sworn herself to celibacy . More or less .. her feelings were baseless . She'd never known intimacy in a way that made her seek it out . It felt forced, uncomfortable , too-tight and too .. much . Rey knows Dr. Kanata and her had worked through a lot of her ' intimacy issues ' but that didn't make it an overnight fix ( A decade of therapy didn't qualify, evidently ). She' had boyfriends, but nothing that she could make sick .  Ninety percent of the time , Rey got tired of them , bored with the compulsory tenderness and saying shit that she did not , in earnest , feel. It was all to fit in , and placate herself more than anyone else . 

Crap.

Her legs are bouncing with nervous energy, sitting on the edge of her bed with her beat up phone in her lap - Rey frowns at the screen like it'd insulted her . She still can't believe that her own two fingers , in a flurry of doubt and defiance ( that'll prove them wrong is never sound reasoning ) have pulled up the app store , and typed in six letters , in that specific sequence , no less.

The only things she'd had downloaded to her phone besides the generic , standard set were : uber , youtube , a scientific calculator ( have you seen how expensive those things are ? this was free ) ,  a moon tracking bit , and something meant to organize her routine . 

Now , this garish gradient of pink and orange is sitting dead-center on her home page . She hadn't dragged it into a group , yet , but it certainly didn't belong with any pre-existing thing . The whole ordeal is stressing her out when it was meant to provide the exact opposite.  She nearly deletes. Nearly. but Poe's voice of all thing echoes , and then Rose's ... They'd sounded so ... pitying . Rey hates pity. And its with that intent -- to never see them look at her like that again, that she lets it download in full.

Her phone pings , and a groan runs through her at the sight of the notification that , really, only further cemented the fact that Rey at only twenty one years of age, was desperate to get laid. Tinder had downloaded successfully. 

Turns out, Rey's got a fascination with setting up profiles .  

She'd spent nearly two hours filling out the respective boxes , her interests , while minimal , had been gone into great detail - though , if this was solely for finding a quick lay, she can't imagine anyone would get past her profile picture ( a rather flattering one ) -- Rey'd never been any good with selfies, but Poe snapped a candid when they'd all gone out for a boozy brunch . Her smile takes up too much of her face, but her freckles glimmer under the nascent sun , a filter provided by the oversized red umbrella that kept their table in the shade , highlights her tan ( long lost to the unforgiving winter ) beautifully. All in all , with her hair in its standard ' space buns ', as Finn called them, ( the first astronaut with style , Rose had amended ) , she could call herself an attractive girl. Attractive enough to warrant a swipe , god , that felt silly, even just to think.

She smiles . Its been a long time since she'd felt this way. 

Unfortunately , she forgot about her pending beaus within the hour , busying herself with repairing the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink. Despite having warned her friends to stop shoving all their leftovers down its gullet, it was broken after only a two week lapse since she'd last fixed it.  More than once , she'd threatened to charge them for her services, but they all knew that Rey took mundane delight in doing things like this , her hands and mind preoccupied was just the way she liked it . She's smiling to herself , almost absurdly , as she hums along with the music trickling out from her phone's warped speaker -- the music's interrupted by a sound she doesn't recognize -- everything , every app , every reminder had been set to a certain Morse notification , this one was shrill and annoying and gave her a brief flashback to this morning's unfortunate Celtic incident. 

She cleans her hands off with a dish towel, and pulls it out of her coverall's front pocket .  ' congratulations ! you have a match ! ' bloody hell . Funneling embarrassment, and regret, she slides her phone open -- expecting a frat boy with a Ralph Lauren polo , or maybe some older 'gentleman' whose picture looked like a grayed big toe. 

Her assumptions had been ( mercifully ) wrong . 

'Ben Solo' , a name that was vaguely familiar , but in that sort of way you half-remember a dream, she shrugs it off - Ben wasn't uncommon , and being ' solo ' had become something of a plague .  She shouldn't chuckle at her own pun that was at the expense of a man that, apparently, thought she was someone he'd sleep with . 

He's handsome. Startlingly so . But not at all in any traditional fashion . Rey finds herself flipping through his pictures over and over, smiling when he did , which was only in one of the ten images he'd uploaded. Its enough , she's sold , her hearts beating frantically and her stomachs probably in her shoes, but she's riding the high that came with being .. wanted. However impersonally, through an app she'd trashed for months now , no less. 

' Hi !'    Crap  . is that too impersonal? She adds a smiley face emoji a minute later , feeling out of practice and , quite frankly , ridiculous for having been so eager to message him - she'd only gotten the notif moments before. What if he thinks she's some girlish little waif who has been waiting, tragically , by her phone for him to match with her ? 

' Hello .'   Oh . He's formal too, Rey worries her lip a bit before replying, 

' I'm Rey !'  ... that's spelled out for him above, dummy. She'd already hit send though, no going back. Typing bubbles appear before she can ad to that. 

' I see that . '  Was he being rude ? Or playful ? For whatever reason, she feels like he smiled to himself when he sent it. Her toes curl a little. 

She takes a deep breath -- better to be honest with it , if he didn't like her forward nature, this wouldn't work to begin with. 

' ive never done this  I mean  you can see that too I figure I'm not sure ... the protocol for these things . er .'  a.k.a How do I ask for casual sex even if that's the primary directive here ? 

He's kind, when he answers , about ten minutes after -- The whole time Rey's spent , still crouched under the kitchen sink , using the light of her phone to go by, but not accomplishing any actual work while she waits.

' Ah. I'm new to this , too .'  He's being oddly formal. Punctuation ,  capitalization -- Rey's immediately aware that she hadn't checked his age, she'd been so enticed by his images and the prospect of scratching a newly - woken itch . She scrolls back over to his profile, and sighs with relief. He's only thirty. Which is only nine years her elder . Her friends had dated professors twice that age -- oh , a new message.

' To be frank , I'm finding it hard to believe you're real . It isn't often a woman of your caliber resorts to using a dating app . Not that I myself have extensive familiarity with them. '   Okay .. He wasn't actually getting anywhere with this , and its edging dangerously close to a real conversation . Usually, now's when Rey's attention would be thrown sharply and wholly into whatever she'd been doing before -- but she can't seem to stop herself when she replies, 

' A woman of my caliber ?' Rey adopts his cadence , its easier to feel less like a messy child by comparison . 

' Yes. You're beautiful, and educated . Did you run out of characters in your bio ? I felt that it ended abruptly. ' She had, but that he'd noticed makes her blush furiously. Its so hard to confine a person to two thousand words or less -- she'd had that same issue in her papers , enough so that her teachers have given her a page limit in contrast to her classmate's minimum . 

' I did.'  She pauses.  ' I didn't think people payed that much attention to the girls they're trying to sleep with . '  Its crass, and she hopes it wouldn't chase him off. He's typing for a long while , a long ... long while ... oh no is he going to lecture her ? 

' You're not just any girl, though. Are you ?'  All that time an that's what he said ? He must've deleted and re-written that message a half dozen times ; she wonders at his first drafts of it , and then she's wondering at her wondering, and .... 

' I would like to take you out to a nice place. We can take an uber, so you're not trapped in my car with me, a public setting. Nothing too intimate or personal . But I think you are someone I'd rather like to hear speak before commencing in other activities.'    did he just make hooking up sound eloquent ?  Damn . Damn . Damn. Crap. 

Rey smiles again, for the fiftieth fucking time , in the half hour she'd been messaging him - he had a way with words, that's how she justifies this conductive energy spiraling through her limbs .

' Tonight ? I'm free around seven .' Which gave her ... two and a half hours to fashion herself into a human being . 

' Absolutely. I'll message you the address , one moment.'  

She did it . She had a date -- or whatever this qualified as. 

Wait. Rey had a date. Crap .