[FIC] picking up trash in dresses (2/3)
interlude
The general consensus regarding Arthur and Francis' first meeting involves a party, copious amounts of liquor, and a drunken one-night stand.
This, however, is false, for that was how their second meeting went, not their first.
Their actual first meeting took place in the lecture hall of the social sciences building, mid-semester, all due to Arthur attending a different class time because he'd missed lecture the day before and sitting down in the first available chair, an unremarkable aisle seat in the middle of the room.
"Excuse me, but this is my seat.”
Arthur looked up, unimpressed. "There aren't any assigned seats in this class."
"True," the stranger said, "but I've had this seat since the beginning of the semester, and I'm rather fond of it."
"Bugger off," Arthur snapped, and the intruder, apparently giving up the fight, retreated. He took a seat directly behind Arthur, deceptively calm.
He then proceeded to make as much noise as possible without attracting the attention of the professor - tapped his pen against the back of Arthur's seat, cleared his throat incessantly, breathed louder than necessary, even poked at the back of Arthur's neck once or twice. By the end of the lecture, Arthur was ready to rip each strand of hair from his head (the stranger's head, not his own) in sheer fury.
And perhaps it could have ended that way, a short-lived acquaintance founded on mutual dislike, never to be rekindled again.
But it didn't. For reasons unknown even to himself, when Francis saw the grumpy first-year with the eyebrows slouched in the corner of the room at a party the following evening, he slid into the seat across from him, teased him into a decent conversation, and, inevitably, took him home that night. Arthur screeched at him in the morning, Francis ignored him while cooking scrambled eggs, and the entire episode, drunken sex and strangely not-awkward morning-afters, was repeated multiple times over the course of the next two weeks, without the slightest hint of their ever desiring anything more.
Until Arthur showed up one night, completely sober, with defiant eyes and even more defiant eyebrows, and Francis, with a smile containing something like relief and not-quite-love, let him in.
But Alfred has no way of knowing this, any of this, so this is all, as others might say, merely extraneous information.
|| three ||