Watcha doin' August 8th, baby? How 'bout a dance or two? I gotta say since our first date, baby, I've had my mind on you.

Cause you laugh at my corny jokes When you speak all your words they soak Into my brain, into my soul, and parts of my body starts singin'.

Kiss me all up on my lips Show me where my hip dips As we sway from side to side We can get it down on Prom Night

When the lights are this down low No one can see where we'll go Disappear into the crowd Where our love can live out loud.

She half turns to the band, "you know, that one?," before turning back to shyly face Aisha and launching into the next verse with the band backing her up. Maybe her voice cracks a bit, maybe she mumbles some of the words, and maybe she blacks out a little because what in the afterschool special is she actually doing, but she still gets through it.

Once the song is done, Jaz returns the guitar and steps up to the mic again. "Sorry I don't have a sign or anything."

Sheets tangled, fingers clutching at blond hair, open mouths panting against sweat-slick skin, tongue tasting where it caught in corners - neck, throat, shoulder.

A palm slides over a hip, taking the shirt resting there with it, fingertips groping up stomach, chest, resting at the base of a throat, teeth nipping down the column of skin exposed. That groping, exploring hand moves further down, cupping through sweatpants, thumb at the waistband, as one of them groans —

Angelo's stomach rolls as he's flung into reality. A reality. It's dark, at first. He almost thinks he's awake, the lights in his room gone off, but he isn't cold, despite his breath misting around him.

Then, something moves.

A figure. Tall, furry. Cloven hooved. Large horns, the kind that curled toward the sky and back. Cow's ears, bovine nose....

....fuck.

"He is cute," the voice says, amusement dripping off every word, accent thick and voice thunder-rolling deep. "But it is a little on the nose, yes?"

Angelo glares as Pan laughs.

"Just wanted to say hello, lamb. Sweet dreams."

Angelo wakes, again.

This time he can feel the sweat, his heaving chest beneath tangled covers and more evident...problems at hand. Groaning, Ange runs a hand down his face and glances at the clock.

The numbers wink, fluorescent green. 5 o'clock.

He could do that.

*-*

“You’re late,” is what he’s greeted by, and it startles him into dropping the box. While he’s crashing about in the doorway, Oly pushes past him with her own box full of his stuff, and dumps it unceremoniously on his bed.

(“If you wanted a roommate, you could’ve asked me,” she had said when she’d found out he’d be rooming with some guy called Vincent Patterson. She’d been incredibly offended, since he knew full well she was moving to a flat by herself paid for by her fathers’ money, and that there’d be plenty of room for a roommate. Travis had ended up having to explain that he’d mostly applied out of spite towards his sister, which had gone a long way to getting his favourite person to stop with the damn adorable angry pout.)

“Nine thirty fits between eight and ten arrival,” Oly retorts, and when Travis finishes recollecting his dropped stuff, he finds her with her hand son her hips. He doesn’t have to look at her face to know she’s raising a challenging brow. He bites his lip as he looks at her, taking in her form the same way he always does, and ignores the thrill of want that’s familiar, too, and when he looks up, he meets the eyes of someone who is doubtlessly incredibly human, just like Tyler feared.

This Vincent guy is paler than Travis and Oly, is his first realization, closer to white than Oly’s olive skin. Dark hair and warm, friendly eyes light up his face, and there is a smirk on his lips as he responds to Oly. “Barely. You’d think you don’t wanna join in on the icebreakers Jayden has planned.”

“Who’s Jayden?” Oly asks, opening a drawer to make sure it’s empty. She removes something from it and cracks open the box to start putting away whatever is in the box Travis packed. He doesn’t complain; she knows him better than his own family, and he trusts her to put everything where he’ll be able to find it later.

“RA,” says the guy who must be Vincent, shifting focus from Oly to Trav. “I take it your lovely self isn’t Travis? Will you be here to visit?”

Oly snorts, and ignores the flirting. Travis bristles, because he usually does, and he’s well aware of the fact that she’s letting him deal with it – she could discourage unwanted attention if she wanted. “I’ll be visiting Oly just as much, if not more, than she’s here, not that it’s any of your business, thanks.”

“Woah, mate,” says probably-Vincent, and even raises his hands in surrender. “No need to get defensive. If you don’t want me hitting on your girlfriend, just say so.”

Any hope of a good first impression and a positive start to their roomatedom evaporates with that sentence. “Olympias isn’t my girlfriend,” Travis mutters, refusing to look at either of them. Oly doesn’t know about his gigantic crush that may or may not involve him being hopelessly in love with her, and he gets the feeling Vincent is the sort to spot it and see it as a weakness to be taken advantage of. Better to avoid that, he thinks.

Still, when Oly leaves him and Vince half an hour later – she isn’t supposed to be there for Irileth Dorm’s icebreakers, and he’s pretty sure she and Pandora have plans, anyway – he’s fully aware of the look Vince gives him.

“Not your girlfriend, huh?”

“Shut up.”

*-*

“So if she isn’t your girlfriend, does that mean you’re awkward, oblivious, paranoid, or gay?” Vincent-don’t-call-me-Vincent-I’m-Vince asks thirty minutes later. The two of them are tangled parts of a much larger whole, an attempt at a human knot that Travis resents the implications of – he can smell at least one other non-human in the bunch, a sickly-sweet tang he thinks ties back to a small blonde woman – and also resents the reality of: he’d assumed the icebreakers wouldn’t place him close to his roommate very often, but the guy is persistent. “Because I’m perfectly happy to offer myself up for your experimentation if you aren’t sure about that last one.”

“Can we maybe not have this conversation right now,” Travis requests. His voice is slightly higher than normal, but he just heard some person he doesn’t know squeal in excitement and he’s willing to bet it was based on Vince’s comment. Ladies nowadays have weird fetishes – a fact he learned thanks to Pan’s curiosity and Oly’s rants.

“Well, why not? Is it because you’re repressed?”

“We’re in public,” he snaps, instead of the actual response, which is that they’re strangers and he does not want to talk about this. “Stuck in this stupid knot.”

“Oh, right, this thing,” Vince seems to realize, and Travis watches in horrified fascination is the guy moves three times, maneuvering around people he chats with easily, and undoes the entire knot easily. “So can we talk now?” he asks, still holding Travis’ left hand, which he’d grabbed earlier.

Travis drops the hand the second the RA calls an end to the activity and leaves to find water. It’s a handy cover, and he can lose the roommate in what he hopes will be an easily repeatable fashion.

*-*

“Why,” Travis asks the room. It’s empty, he thinks, or at least there’s no one he can see, but it’s a mess. It looks like Pandora came in here like a whirlwind and then got chased by Oly when she was in a mood to trash everything worse than usual, too. Except he’s fairly sure neither Oly nor Pan have been here, but he’s been avoiding his roommate since the fiasco of their introduction.

The door opens again behind him, not that it had closed, and he turns quickly to come face to face with the guy he’s been avoiding.

It has only been a month, and yet the change in Vincent – Vince – is readily apparent. For one thing, there are shadows sprawled dark and heavy under hazel eyes that have lost the spark Travis remembers from the first meeting. Vince is tan, but now he looks a kind of washed out, like a vampire victim. “Shit,” Vince mutters under his breath, and as Travis watches, he manages to both draw himself taller and pull in on himself in one motion. “Sorry for the mess. I’ll – it’ll be taken care of.”

Travis stares at him for a moment longer. “Did someone bite you?”

Vince blinks slowly, and the next thought Travis has is to wonder if he’s taken something stupid: meth or pot or something, maybe, he hears those are weird on humans. “No. Is that an offer? Are you secretly a vampire?”

Travis’ eyes narrow, and he shakes his head. “Like I’d tell you if I was. ‘Sides, you’re the one who looks like a corpse.”

The roommate deflates, and sighs heavily. Travis almost wants to reach out to keep him from falling. “Family shit – my sister’s AWOL, like usual, and my parents are being dicks about it, not that that’s new. And the clubs I’m in are crap. I’m bored, man.”

“We’re not talking about the not sleeping thing?” Travis asks after waiting for the guy to add it in.

Vince, to Travis’ displeasure, laughs. It’s actually kind of nice to hear, warm and cheerful. Travis isn’t impressed. “That’s just the insomnia. It isn’t new, man, don’t worry about it.”

Travis is horrifically overprotective of the people he meets. It’s always been true: he defends humanity to his father, although that often ends badly and Oly’s suspicions that his old man is a terrible father shoot up whenever he turns up bruised. He would move the earth to protect Oly and Pan, and Ethan, too, if he would allow it. He’ll even pick a fight to defend a stranger in the street. And like it or not, he knows Vince, and although he can’t help with his personal demons, he knows how to treat insomnia. It’s what caused their semester of Pan on the track team, forced by Oly to see if she was right about exercise being a decent treatment for insomniac tendencies.

“Oly and me are meeting some people for a game of soccer,” Travis says reluctantly. “You want in?”

Vince’s eyes absolutely light up at the offer, and the nod is the closest he’s been to the annoying dick Travis met on day one in – well, a month, so far as Travis knows.

He refuses to feel guilty for it, but at least he can fix it.

*-*

There’s a dance for the people who live on campus late first semester. Travis finds out about it when Oly texts him.

Oly: Pan just came in gloating that she got me a date with that weird roommate of yours. She’s planning on continuing to fake me to trick him. Wants me to come along on the night to ruin his life, apparently. Travis: what? Oly: Oh, she was playing me to fuck with you and broke into your dorm – she has a copy of the key, sorry about that. Vince came home first, thought she was me, flirted like he tried when we met, and asked her to the dance. So. That’s happening. Travis: the fuck Travis: they’re both nuts, they’re made for each other Oly: Travis. Travis: I’ll apologize to pan with chocolate later Oly: Right. Oly: Anyway, are you up for smuggling me in so I can pull the ‘how could you’ routine? We can get burgers after. My treat, since we’ll probably have to dress up. Dad probably has a suit that’ll fit you. Trav: sure, I’m in Trav: how bad could it be

*-*

Turns out that there is something worse than Vince (and this is after they have, begrudgingly – at least on Travis’ end – started to get along) is Vince in cahoots with Pan.

Pandora is convinced that Oly and Travis should be together, and she shows it with passive aggressive commentary and infuriating asides. She has Travis’ number and ninety per cent of the texts the sends him are romcom friends-to-lovers plots, or links to date ideas she knows Oly would enjoy. Travis doesn’t need any of them, because he’d hate-watched countless friends-to-lovers movies in the hopes of convincing himself that telling Oly the full truth wouldn’t go badly, and because he has all of the date ideas and then some more bookmarked for ‘one day’.

Vince catches on way too quickly to what Pan is playing at, and now Travis can’t study in their room without being subjected to commentary and ideas.

“I think Morgan has a thing for the twins,” Vince says one day over the top of one of his engineering textbooks. He’s on Travis’ bed, because his own bed is an unmade mess beneath their combined laundry that needs to be folded and put away, while Travis is at his desk hunched over a borrowed laptop and grumbling about how the thing isn’t designed for left-handed use, with its trackpad aligned to the right of the damn thing.

“At least she has taste,” Travis says. It’s probably incriminating, but he will refuses to imply that Oly doesn’t deserve the attention. “She might have a chance with Pan, but Oly’s straight.”

Vince snorts; Travis gets a sense of satisfaction when he chokes on it. “In that case, I have a friend who’d fall in love with Oly in about ten seconds,” Vince goes on conversationally once he’s finished choking on his idiocy. “He’d treat her like an absolute queen.”

Travis’ hand freezes on the trackpad, and after a long moment, he forces himself to go on with his homework. “Anyone I know?”

“Your attempt at nonchalance isn’t fooling anyone. You sure there isn’t something else you’d like to say?”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe begging me not to ruin your chances with the girl you’ve been in love with since you met her in, like, elementary school?”

Pan’s theories are bullshit, is how Travis would usually respond to that. He doesn’t this time. He’s suddenly exhausted, tired of being teased and bullied for what hasn’t been a stupid crush since, yes, elementary school, a week after he accidentally stole Pandora’s seat when he was starting at a new school. He remembers watching Oly tear apart some jerk who’d tried to pick on Pan, and thinking that’s who I want to marry one day, and not knowing what to do with that information. “You know what?” he says instead, and it spills out of him: “You’re right. You and Pandora are right. I’m in love with Oly, and it’s the worst thing in the fucking world, because she’s my best friend and she’s so human, you know? She’s so sporty and brave and smart and she’d have to be stupid to want me as anything but a friend, and I can’t even tell her, because either it’d ruin our friendship or she’d feel obligated to date me so it wouldn’t be weird, or so it wouldn’t be over. And it’s the best thing ever, too, because Oly’s enough to remind me of why I even like people. You know, people say our family are cursed because my dad’s a racist asshole? And I’ve never been like that, I begged to go to school and then she was there and it’s just – it sucks, okay? Because I’m in love with her, and it’s the most amazing feeling, but I can’t do anything about it because it’ll either ruin everything or it won’t, but either way something will change, and I don’t want it to.”

Vince is silent for a long while after that, and Travis is breathing hard. He unpacks what he said, and his warm face – flushed red – turns white. He’s just told Vince he’s not human. He’s been told all his life to keep the secret – not even Oly knows – and he’s just told a guy he doesn’t even like tolerating the biggest secrets of his life.

“Dude,” Vince says at last, and Travis tenses as the guy puts a hand on his arm. “It sounds like you could use a drink.” He sidesteps the entire episode of word vomit, skips the psychoanalysis and judgement in favour of cutting right to what Travis could actually benefit from, even if they aren’t quite old enough to drink yet.