#sub rosa rooster

There were only a handful of times that Rooster made the drive up to your college apartment. Well, maybe a little over a handful. Work commitments and senior year deadlines kept you apart a lot of the time, and with your apartment up there being a shared space and his apartment back home being fifteen minutes from your father’s place — it wasn’t an easy operation to organise.

Maybe the stars had just aligned for this particular weekend.

Your roommates were gone, back visiting their own families for a while, and he had a whole six days of leave, four of which were all yours. He had arrived on the Friday, mid-afternoon, leaning against the hood of his car in a tight-fitting flannel and blue jeans as you had gotten out of your last class for the day.

Your third official date had consisted of mini golf and dinner and a walk across campus, pointing out the sights and telling him the stories of your four years there.

Although this was far from the first time that the two of you were sleeping together, there was still something strangely intimate about taking him home to your apartment. Something that always made you a little bashful.

It would have been easy enough to just go right to bed once he had gotten you home, it had been a month since he had seen you last and god knows that he’d missed you enough to have contemplated this night for a long time.

Long enough to have decided that he wanted to make the most of your time together.

The idea had started out as a joke, lounging across the couch and in the middle of your first real deep and prying conversation. You had made a throwaway comment about wishing this was more private, wanting a place within the four walls of your room that was just for the two of you and your new secrets.

It hadn’t ever been part of the plan for him to take you seriously, but he had seen the big smile on your face when he had pretended to begin the little project. The giggle that spilled from your lips as he started to rearrange furniture to make it work.

“Just so you know,” He had explained, tossing a thick and fuzzy blanket onto the floor for the base of his fort, amusement sparking in the warm brown of his eyes. “I don’t half ass things.”

“Oh no?” You had checked, beaming as you leaned back on your palms across your bedspread. “You’re not going to half ass your pillow fort?”

He had smiled at you with a look in his eyes that told you he was referring to much deeper things than pillow forts, but he had answered with a chuckle anyway. “Our pillow fort.”

In the months following, you would grow to learn that really, he doesn’t half ass anything when it comes to you.

Even then, when his work is meticulous and the pillows have been rearranged for the hundredth time — for structural integrity’s sake — you can’t help but lay back, stare at the blanket sky above your heads, and smile. He really had done a pretty fantastic job.

He’s got one arm under your head, draped around your shoulder as he cuddles you against his side, and the other resting on his stomach. Unashamed both in the way he admires his handiwork, and the way that you look in his arms.

Already decided, then and there, that this is much more than a fling.