[Fic] Six in One (Pt. 1)
Title: Six in One
Author: cutthroatpixie
Character(s) or Pairing(s): Romano/Fem!Romano/Spain/Fem!Spain. That is alphabetical-ish order, it has nothing to do with who is doing who. They are all doing all of them.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Human names (except for Romano), mentions of sexy times, this is really long and I developed a billion piles of headcanon for it so if something doesn't make sense that is probably why, and this is unbeta'd because I want Superman to just have it already
Summary: Lovina can't stand her roommate. Or her roomate's boyfriend. Either of them.
Notes: TL;DR TL;DR. I wrote this for counterheist because she is my classy lady buddy FOREVER. Also I didn't want things to be too matchy-matchy so everyone's name are as such:
Antonio Fernández Carriedo (Spain, duh)
Romano Vargas (Romano)
Antonia Hernández Castillo (Fem!Spain)
Lovina Vella (Fem!Romano)
Also Edmée = Belgium, Francine = Fem!France, and Felicia = Fem!Italy
Lovina stood in front of the building that would be her new home for at least the next few months, cursing loudly as she attempted to drag her insane amounts of luggage all by herself. Her parents had been more than happy to send her on her way with any amount of things she might want or need, but they had been unable to actually accompany her on the long trip from Palermo, so she'd been left to deal with the fact that her suitcases didn't seem to want to go up the stairs of the residency hall by herself.
"Fucking pieces of shit," she grumbled, kicking the heaviest suitcase, which had the audacity to topple down the stairs just when she'd finally made some progress. She almost wished she had asked the driver who took her from the airport to help, almost, but not quite, because he'd had a creepy look about him and she didn't need that sort of person knowing where she lived.
"Did you want some help, bella?" Lovina jumped and cursed when a voice came from behind her and a hand reached out to take the suitcase from her. "Or were you wanting to keep blocking the stairs all day?"
She spun around to face the main, who appeared to be a fellow Italian judging by the faint accent he spoke with, the accent that got thick and heavy when he'd used the one Italian word. She narrowed her eyes at him. "All the sluts around here might fall for that random use of Italian you've got going on," she replied, scowling. "But it isn't going to work on me, cretino."
She smirked in triumph when the man's face was soon flushing just as red as hers felt.
"Whatever, lady, do you want my help or not?"
"Not. I can handle myself, thank you very much."
Another suitcase chose that moment to toppled down the stairs, narrowly missing Lovina.
"Sure you can."
"...Whatever, just don't break anything." Lovina stomped back up to the top of the stairs to where the rest of her bags were waiting for her, Wearing-an-Obnoxious-Pink-Shirt (Lovina was trying out different names for him in her head, since the two of them combined still had less manners than the average person, apparently) following behind with the other two suitcases. She gave him a dirty look when he beat her to the door, but stepped inside nonetheless, secretly thankful because she wasn't exactly sure how she would have opened it herself given all the things she was carrying. "I'm in room 1302," she told him, glancing around the inside lobby. "I'm assuming there's an elevator somewhere around here? No way in hell I'm walking up thirteen flights of stairs."
She didn't have to wait for an answer, as she spotted an elevator to her left and made a beeline for it. Her plan was foiled, however, when Needs-To-Stop-Looking-so-Smug started heading off in the other direction. "Where the hell do you think you're going?!"
"You don't want to take that elevator," he replied, continuing to walk down the hall, not even bothering to look back and see if Lovina was following. "It's on the wrong side of the building from your room, and it'll be hell trying to carry all this shit through the hallways up there."
Lovina followed, because this asshole didn't seem to be stopping and he still had her bags. "How would you know? Isn't that floor only for girl's rooms?" She walked a little faster to catch up with him, thankful that she'd had the forethought to wear flats while she was travelling. Running after people in heels was a bitch. "If you're some kind of pervert, you can fuck off right now and give me back my bags, I don't need your help."
The "correct" elevator dinged as Seriously-Stop-Giving-Me-That-Smug-Look pressed the up button. "Of course you don't."
"I don't."
"That's what I said."
The elevator ride was silent, save some huffing from Lovina, but the second they arrived at her floor, Lovina understood why they hadn't taken the other elevator. Bags and boxes lined the hallways, waiting to be taken in through all the doors left ajar as students and parents ran back and forth from the stairwells and elevators, into the rooms and back out, carrying more bags and boxes and suitcases and anything else that might be needed to settle into the dorms. Cutting through the crowd trying to get from one side to the other would have been near impossible, judging by the annoyed looks of the students trudging through without bags. No doubt they had finished unpacking earlier, but were still fated to have just as much difficulty getting around as everyone who was currently arriving.
Fortunately for Lovina, Walks-Too-Damn-Fast quickly cut a path for them, arriving right outside room 1302 in no time. Her bags were promptly dropped onto the floor beside the door (he was so lucky nothing breakable was in those ones). "I'm not helping you unpack, think you can get everything inside okay?" Coming from any other person who actually, you know, had some manners (not that Lovina was one to talk about that), that might have been a sympathetic, caring sort of question, but coming from this man it was clear he was teasing her.
"I'm not some damsel-in-distress, bastard, fuck off." She too placed her bags down, gently, thank you very much, and reached for the door handle, but Needs-to-Fuck-the-Hell-Off beat her to it, opening the unlocked door and peaking inside for some indiscernible reason before shrugging, an action that confused Lovina.
"I'm Romano, by the way," he said. Her, "Like I care," was swiftly cut off before she could even utter the first syllable as he continued. "Yeah yeah, you're tough shit and I'm a "pervert". But you'll be seeing a lot of me, might as well have something to call me that you don't have to mutter under your breath."
Romano tossed a small brown box onto the pile of bags, much to Lovina's confusion, and made his way back through the crowd. "Tell Antonia I'm not making her anymore tiramisu. Ciao."
---
Two hours and a ridiculous amount of unpacking later, Lovina still had no idea who Antonia was. She was guessing she was probably her roommate (she wasn't stupid, she could determine that much), or at least somebody who lived in a room nearby, but nobody else had shown up to the room yet. She flopped out on the newly made, entirely too small for it's own good bed she'd decided was hers (well, the other one was already made, but she hadn't wanted that side of the room anyway), and glanced over at the box of apparently homemade dessert when her stomach growled.
"If this Antonia bitch doesn't show up in the next ten minutes, I'm eating it myself," she mumbled, rolling over onto said growling stomach.
"Eating what?" For the second time that day, Lovina found herself jumping in surprise, and she was really hoping this wouldn't be a common occurrence, because dear lord was it embarrassing. "Oh, hi! You must be my new roommate!"
"I'm guessing you're Antonia?" She sat up and pointed at the brown box she'd placed on the counter of their pathetic excuse for a "kitchenette". "Romano says he's not making you anymore of that, and if he's not even going to bring anymore stuff, I hope he's not going to stop by very often because he's an asshole." An asshole who helped his friend's (girlfriend's?) roommate carry her things to their room, but an asshole nonetheless.
Antonia just laughed and grabbed two forks out of the a cupboard before making herself nice and cozy on Lovina's bed and passing her one of the utensils. "Roma's a lot nicer once you get to know him." She opened the box and started digging in, as if it was totally normal just to start eating tiramisu on your roommate's bed without even asking. "Well. More like you get used to him more. He's a little rough around the edges but if he said anything mean to you, he probably didn't mean it."
"You're on my bed."
"He used to say all sorts of mean things to Anto--Hm? Oh, sorry!" Antonia scooted to the edge of the bed. "Do you have enough room now? I forgot how small these things are, my bed at home is so much bigger. Here," she held the tiramisu under Lovina's nose. "It's really good."
Lovina gave Antonia a dirty look, but she scooped up some of the tiramisu nonetheless.
"...Mine's better." She couldn't exactly make tiramisu in their room to prove this to Antonia, or to treat herself with its superior taste, so she went back for another bite. But only because it was the only tiramisu around.
"I'm sure yours is really good too," Antonia paused. "Sorry, what was your name? Obviously you already know mine, but I totally forgot I don't know yours yet."
Lovina swallowed another mouthful of tiramisu. "Lovina."
"Aw, what a cute name! Can I call you Lovi?" Antonia reached out and Lovina was expecting some sort of awkward handshake, but was instead surprised to find two arms around her in a squeezing hug.
"What? No!" Lovina attempted to shove Antonia off, but she was a lot stronger than she looked.
Antonia eventually pulled back. "Sorry, sorry!" Lovina rolled her eyes, glad the other woman had finally taken a hint. "I forgot I was holding the tiramisu, don't want to squish it between us." Or not.
"This is going to be a long year," Lovina mumbled, quickly stuffing another bite of tiramisu in her mouth to avoid having to repeat herself when Antonia gave her a confused look.
---
Unfortunately for Lovina, Romano was indeed dating Antonia, and he was a near constant presence in their room. Whenever Lovina asked why the two of them couldn't just go to Romano's room, Antonia would say something like, "Oh, Antonio's really busy this term," or Romano would mutter something about some stupid bitch teacher "Antonio" had, but in the two weeks Lovina had been asking them to go somewhere else, who exactly Antonio was had never been explained to her. She'd never asked, but it wasn't her problem if some people didn't have enough manners to tell her exactly who the fuck they were talking about was.
Certain people were also apparently so rude that they mixed up their laundry with hers on a frequent basis, which was how she came to know that the man’s shirt currently occupying her laundry basket did not belong to Antonia’s boyfriend. Romano, Lovina had quickly learned, always dressed nicely, and his wardrobe consisted of many a pair of slacks and dress-shirts (most of which were pink, for some strange reason). Even when he was just bumming around their dorm, he looked nice (Lovina would deny she was looking, though, she wasn’t some slut who looked at other people’s boyfriends... or at the girls with said boyfriends, for that matter), and this shirt, well. Didn’t look quite so nice. It was a ratty old yellow t-shirt with a smiling tomato on the front. It was much too big to be Antonia’s, and even though Lovina had only known the man for a couple of weeks, she didn’t think Romano would be caught dead wearing a shirt with such a creepy looking rendition of his favourite fruit.
“Oi, Antonia.”
Antonia looked up from folding her worn laundry and grinned. Lovina ignored any happy fluttery feelings the grin induced, because Antonia always grinned like that, at everyone, it wasn’t anything special. “Did my clothes get mixed up with yours again? I don’t know how that keeps happening!”
“Not your clothes this time.”
“Romano’s?” Antonia walked over to inspect the garment Lovina was holding. “Romano hasn’t left any clothes here recently-- Oooh. That’s not Romano’s either.”
“Nope.” Lovina scowled at Antonia, and she suddenly felt a little like a parent, about to scold their child for some unknown crime until the child just admitted to their wrongdoing on their own. In her eighteen years of life, she’d become quite the expert on being involved in those sorts of conversations, though never from this perspective. Usually it was her admitting that she’d been doing certain things with certain people her parents thought she ought not to.
“It’s Antonio’s.” It wasn’t any of her business who or what Antonia did, but if she was going to be parading random men in and out of their room Lovina did not want to have to deal with it. She may not have noticed before, because her evening classes probably left Antonia with a lot of alone time in the room, but-- why did she care about this at all again? “I’ll just give it to Romano next time I see him, he’ll pass it along to Antonio if I don’t see him first.”
Wait.
“What?”
“Romano grabbed it instead of his own pajamas when he stayed over the other night.” Antonia plucked the shirt out of Lovina’s hands and started sloppily folding it. “It was so cute, I wish he’d wear Antonio’s clothes more often.”
Lovina raised an eyebrow at that remark, but chose not to comment on it. “So Antonio didn’t leave it here?”
“Of course not, Antonio hasn’t been to our room yet this term, he’s been way too busy.”
---
After a month of listening to Antonia talk about Antonio, Lovina still hadn’t met the guy. She’d occasionally see his clothes pop up in either hers or Antonia’s laundry, and while she seriously didn’t believe that Romano was the one leaving them in their room, she’d stopped asking about it. She’d also somehow managed to learn quite a bit about him-- he was studying to become a pre-school teacher, she’d learnt that after overhearing (not eavesdropping on) a conversation Antonia’d had with him over the phone, he apparently really liked tomato sandwiches with pecorino romano if all the sandwiches Antonia kept having Romano bring to him were anything to judge his preferences by, and he was so totally banging his roommate’s girlfriend. She had no proof of that, but she’d somehow convinced herself of this ever since she’d first found that t-shirt of his in her laundry.
She didn’t know if she was jealous of Antonia for having two guys when she was having problems getting to know anybody at all, or jealous of those two guys for having so much of Antonia’s constant attention. All she knew was that the familiar envy she’d felt all growing up whenever somebody ignored her in favour of her sister her was there, and she didn’t really know why.
Perhaps that’s the reason she’d found herself at a frat party on a Friday night, when she’d normally never go anywhere near the things. Parties had booze, booze was really good at drowning out uncomfortable feelings, and Lovina was sorely in need of some of that, so there she was, standing alone in a corner with a bottle of wine, curiously eyeing up some tanned, dark-haired, green-eyed stranger. Her drunken self ignored the fact that he looked a bit like Antonia.
Her drunken self could not ignore that fact that Antonia herself appeared next to the man, passing him a drink and giving him a kiss on the cheek before she noticed they were being stared at. Instead of looking like she’d been caught doing something bad, or looking ashamed, or something Lovina might have expected, Antonia’s slightly flushed face just split into a wide grin when she saw who it was that was staring at her and the nameless man.
“Lovi!”
“I’m pretty sure I said no calling-- not to call me that.” She added a half-assed, “Bitch,” to the end of that, to make sure Antonia knew she was being serious. It didn’t really work at all.
“But it’s such a cute nickname! Way cuter than the nicknames you have for me.”
Lovina had no idea what she was talking about. “I don’t have any nicknames for you.”
“You just used one!” If Lovina didn’t know Antonia, she might have thought she was joking. Well, Lovina really didn’t know Antonia, not all that well anyway, but she still knew her well enough to know that she really must have thought all the rude names Lovina kept calling her were some bizarre attempts at nicknames. That or she was teasing her, Lovina really couldn’t tell.
“Stop teasing me, Antonia,” she said with a huff. “Who was that guy you were with?”
“That’s Antonio! Haven’t you met him before? Oh, I suppose you haven’t. This is the first party he’s really had time to come to since school started. I’ll introduce you two.” Antonia turned around, seemingly to wave Antonio over, but the space he had previously been occupying was not empty. “When I find him again,” she added with a laugh. “He probably found somebody else to talk to, I’ll keep you company instead.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Of course I do! You’re sitting over here all alone, that’s no fun at all.”
Lovina put her feet up on the only other chair nearby, but this didn’t deter Antonia in the slightest. The other woman just lifted Lovina’s feet up and placed them in her lap after taking her seat. “Do your feet hurt?” she asked, continuing to be the bizarre, inappropriate sort of person she always proved herself to be and taking off one of Lovina’s heels. “You should get some of those cushiony pads for your heels, it’ll make your feet feel a lot better probably.”
“My feet don’t hurt.”
“You don’t have to lie to me, we’re friends, sí?” Antonia pressed her thumbs into the ball of Lovina’s left foot and Lovina let out a hiss of discomfort. “Sorry! I’ll be gentler.” True to her word, Antonia continued to massage Lovina’s foot, her touch firm yet gentle against the sore muscles. Lovina wandered how many other people out there had been on the receiving end of a drunken foot massage from Antonia.
“Shouldn’t you be massaging your boyfriend’s feet or something?” A soft cracking noise came from Lovina’s ankle when Antonia rotated it slightly and the slight pain caused by the movement quickly faded into a dull sense of relief as the joint relaxed. Maybe Antonia shouldn’t have been massaging anyone else’s feet right at that moment, because Lovina was drunk and Antonia was pretty and damn her feet had been bothering her for weeks.
“Naw, I think you’re the only one who needs one right now.” Both Lovina and Antonia fell silent as Antonia continued her massage, stopping only to place Lovina’s left shoe back on and move onto the right foot to repeat the process all over again. “You must be really drunk,” she spoke up after what felt like an eternity of silence. “I thought for sure you’d kick me or something.”
“I have never kicked you before, why the hell would you think that?”
Antonia shrugged, a soft smile on her face. “You kicked Romano when he complimented you on your dress last week.”
“He wasn’t looking at my dress,” Lovina insisted. “It’s not my fault if your stupid boyfriend can’t keep his eyes where they should be.”
Antonia just kept on massaging away, her fingers occasionally straying up Lovina’s calves and it was surely a testament to the amount of alcohol flowing through her veins that Lovina didn’t make Antonia keep her hands to herself, because any other time kicking her would have sounded like a good idea as soon as those bitten-down nails started scraping lightly across her knees. If anyone had bothered to ask, she would have claimed the blush staining her cheeks was from the alcohol, but she knew what was really causing it, and truth be told, even at her drunkest she was extremely vocal whenever somebody was doing something she didn’t like.
“Well,” Antonia had apparently decided to continue the conversation at some point during Lovina’s musings. “I’m sure he wasn’t looking at you inappropriately, he actually did like the dress, but I really couldn’t blame him if he was, you are way too cute, you know that?”
“...Just finish my foot massage and stop saying weird shit, Tonia.”
Lovina woke up the next morning in Antonia’s bed, with Antonia’s lipstick on her cheek, and when Antonia laughed it all off, saying they hadn’t been able to figure out the thermostat the night before and that’s why they’d shared a bed, she most certainly did not feel a little disappointed.
---
After that incident, Lovina decided to avoid both stupid parties and Antonia for awhile until she could look the other woman in the face without blushing horribly. This turned out to be fairly easy, because Lovina had mostly evening classes so she could sleep in, and Antonia had mostly morning classes so she could take a nap in the afternoon and have her nights free. Antonia was already gone by the time Lovina woke up, and Lovina was usually leaving as soon as Antonia came back, if she came back at all.
The whole blushing horribly thing was a bit harder to avoid, especially when a certain green-eyed man suddenly ran up to her, shirtless, while she was outside eating a late lunch before class.
“C-can I help you?” she managed to stutter out after nearly choking on her tomato sandwich.
“Are you okay?” he asked in return, patting her on the back until she shoved his hand away. This apparently had no effect on him. “You’re Lovina, right?” The man clapped and sat down next to her when she nodded. “I thought I recognised you! I saw Antonia with you the other night, but I got distracted and by the time I went looking for you two, you were both gone already.”
“Oh, right. You’re Antonio.”
Antonio nodded. “That’s me! Antonia’s told me a lot about you.”
Lovina tried to will down her blush, but it didn’t work. It never did. “Has she now?”
“She talks about you all the time, every time we go out it’s Lovina this, Lovina that.” Antonio may have meant something completely innocent when he said “going out”, but Lovina was still semi-convinced the two had something going on, so of course she took it to mean that she was a topic of conversation during their illicit dates.
“Good for her,” Lovina responded dryly. “Is there a reason you’re running around shirtless?”
Antonio's look of confusion was so akin to Antonia's it was almost comical. He looked down at himself, then back up to Lovina, a sheepish look replacing his confused one. "I was just at the pool, I guess I forgot to put my shirt back on. I'm really tired, I was up all night writing a paper."
“You should go find your shirt, then.” She glanced at her watch, hoping it was time for her to leave so she’d have an excuse to get out of this awkward conversation. For once, time seemed to be on her side and she was due to be heading off to class. “I need to go, good luck with that.”
She stood up, and before she could make a quick getaway, Antonio grabbed her by the wrist. “Hold on! Before you go, here’s my number.” He snatched the paper bag out of her hand and quickly ripped a piece off before writing his number down in red ink. “We should hang out sometime. I feel like I already know you, from Antonia, but it’d be nice to get lunch or something.”
Lovina wanted to smack Antonio, call him a pervert, tell him to stop dating his roommate’s girlfriend and stop making it sound like he was asking her when he obviously wasn’t and to stop being so damn attractive and just . Stop. But he was gone in a flash, off to find his shirt hopefully, and all she could do was pocket the number with a huff and walk off to class.
---
Lovina never bothered to call Antonio, despite Antonia bugging her to after she found the piece of paper with his number sitting on Lovina’s bedside table, and the next time she ended up seeing Antonio, she’d given up on avoiding any and all parties, and may have been halfway to completely plastered. He may have been more attractive without a shirt than with a shirt, and he may have been a total sleaze in her mind, but Drunk Lovina was willing to look past any issues she had with him apparently, as she stumbled sauntered over to him with a bottle glass of wine in hand.
"Hey, bastard."
There appeared to be an echo in the room, because Lovina wasn't the only one who deigned to address Antonio in that particular fashion.
"Oh, hey Roma! Hey Lovina!" Antonio pulled them both into a hug and kissed their cheeks. "I didn't know you two were coming to this party!" Lovina also wasn’t the only one who’d apparently had a little too much to drink that night.
"I told you I was coming, stupid." Romano pulled himself out of the embrace and grabbed Lovina's arm, saving her from the drunken man's hugs as well. "And Antonia told you Lovina was coming, you were just too busy staring at her tits to pay attention."
"I wasn't staring at Lovina's tits!" Antonio protested. Lovina flushed. And felt offended. What was wrong with staring at her tits?! (Okay, maybe she was more than a little drunk...)
"...Antonia's. You were staring at Antonia's tits."
"Oh." Antonio laughed and nodded. "Was she wearing that new red dress?"
"The one that's way too small in the chest? Yes."
"That's what I keep telling her, but she says it's her favourite," Lovina chimed in. She'd seen quite a few fights started when one guy thought another guy was checking out his girlfriend, and she wasn't exactly keen on witnessing another. She wondered if Romano knew about what Antonio and Antonia were totally doing behind his back, and she couldn’t decide if she’d feel more pity for him if he did and just pretended not to, or if he honestly had no idea.
Romano and Antonio continued to chat, moving on from the topic of Antonia’s dress, and it made Lovina feel a little sick to her stomach, seeing them being so friendly with one another. Well. As friendly as Romano could be. While the two men were distracted with “arguing” over whether or not something Antonio had just done was perverted, Lovina stumbled away with her bottle of wine to go sulk in a corner.
An hour later, Romano found her there in the corner, the first bottle of wine empty at her feet, having been replaced by a second, decidedly more full one. “You should probably stop drinking all that wine, idiot, one of these perverts here is going to stop just leering at you and try something.” Lovina lurched forward when the wine bottle was stolen out of her hand, nearly falling out of her chair, but Romano quickly caught her. The green shirt he was wearing felt nice and soft against her flushed face, and if she didn’t immediately pull back away from him and shout at him for daring to touch her, that was the only reason why. “Ugh, I don’t see why Antonia likes you so much, you’re more of an idiot that she is.”
Lovina meant to protest against being called an idiot, because Romano was the idiot here, he was the one just letting his girlfriend go messing around with his roommate. She had half a mind to tell him so, but all that would come out was, “Antonia likes me?”
“Antonia likes a lot of people, don’t get too excited.” The wine bottle was long gone by the time Lovina managed to pull herself away from Romano, which was probably a good thing because the second she wasn’t being held up by the wall or the jackass boyfriend of her roommate, she was toppling face first into the sticky-with-alcohol floor beneath her.
Again, Romano caught her. “You are so lucky I’m a fucking gentleman. I’ll take you back to your room in a minute, stay here.” Lovina was gently placed back into the chair, and Romano cut his way through the crowd to where Antonio was standing, happily chatting away with some blonde girl Lovina had seen around her and Antonia’s dorm once or twice, Edmée Something-or-Other. She felt light-headed and sleepy, and she was sorely tempted to just fall asleep in that chair. Romano would drag her back to her dorm, she wouldn’t have to listen to his bitching or worry about accidentally saying something stupid herself, it was a win-win situation. The only thing keeping her from dozing off right then and there was the fact that she didn’t know how long Romano was going to spend talking to the other man, and the only person who was more wary of all the perverts running around at that party than Romano appeared to be was Lovina. She snapped awake when she felt herself falling asleep and glanced at the pair of men, only to be met with a sight that she definitely was not expecting.
Perhaps she really was an idiot, because it looked like Antonia wasn’t the one running around with other men.
---
Everything else after that was nothing more than a blur. The next morning when Lovina woke up, she couldn’t quite remember what had happened after Romano finally came back to retrieve her from her chair. She did, however, remember, quite vividly in fact, what took place before Romano had taken her back to her room.
She rolled over onto her side, ignoring her body’s protests against movement, and looked over to see Antonia laying on her side as well, looking back at her. “Morning,” Antonia whispered. “Are you feeling okay? You seemed pretty upset when Romano brought you back last night, you kept mumbling to yourself in Italian-- no, Romano said it was Sicilian, because he couldn’t quite understand it all-- anyway are you feeling better?”
“No,” Lovina replied, holding a hand up to silence Antonia when the other woman tried to say something in response. “Just be quiet for a minute, I have to tell you something.”
Lovina and Antonia had only been roommates for a couple months now, and Lovina didn't exactly like her (though perhaps that wasn’t justified, and maybe she actually liked her a bit too much), but she was pretty sure there was some unwritten code somewhere that said you should probably tell your not-really-a-friend/roommate when you saw her boyfriend macking on another guy at a stupid frat party. Especially after you’d spent the better part of the short time you’d know her silently accusing her of things she probably wasn’t really doing.
She expected her to get upset (it would be a nice change of pace from all the happy and cheer, maybe), or to accuse her of making things up or just being confused about what she saw. What she hadn't expected her to do was laugh and go, "Oh, Antonio? He's our boyfriend, silly." Lovina could do nothing more than blink in response. “Didn’t you know that? I could have sworn I told you.”
Lovina definitely would have remembered something like that. “You never told me that!” The sound of her own voice reverberating in her already throbbing head caused her to cringe “Ugh.”
“I’m sorry if that’s what you were upset about.” Antonia stood up and made her way over to Lovina’s bed, sitting on the edge and running a hand through Lovina’s messy hair. “Though that might explain why you punched Romano after he wrestled you into your bed. Were you worried about me?”
“No,” Lovina mumbled, trying to move her head away from Antonia’s hand before deciding maybe moving wasn’t the best of ideas. “Romano put his hand up my dress, that’s why I punched him.” Lovina actually had no recollection of punching Romano, but she was sticking to her story no matter what Antonia said.
“You wore pants last night, Lovi.”
“...I hope I bruised his stupid face either way.”
Apparently the idea of her boyfriend (one of her boyfriends?) having his “stupid face” bruised was hilarious, because Antonia just giggled in response and kept petting Lovina’s hair. “You’re sweet. You should probably say sorry to Romano later--”
“No.”
“--but it’s kind of sweet that you’d punch him because you thought he was cheating on me. You’re a good friend.” Lovina tried to kick Antonia but she only ended up getting her foot stuck between the mattress and the footboard. “...Did your foot just twitch? Do you have that problem too? Romano’s feet and hands twitch sometimes, but not as much as they did when he was a kid.”
“Antonia, what the hell?!”
“Shh, Roma! Lovina’s head hurts!”
“Yeah well my face hurts, and you’re not supposed to tell anyone about that!” Romano closed the door to their room behind him and stomped over to Lovina’s bed. Lovina steeled herself for more yelling, but was pleasantly surprised when all Romano did was reach under her blanket to pull her foot out of the mattress dip. “Her foot was just stuck, Antonia, pay attention and stop telling random people shit about me.”
Antonia pouted and grabbed Romano by the front of the shirt, pulling him in for a kiss with the same ease Romano had pulled Antonio into one the night before. For what wasn’t the first time since meeting the couple, Lovina had no idea who she was jealous of when that familiar ache stirred in her chest. “Get a room, assholes,” she mumbled.
“You didn’t seem to care about anyone getting a room last night when you were getting all cozy with my girlfriend.” Despite the fact that the bed was barely big enough for one person, Lovina felt a second dip in the bed when Romano sat down next to Antonia. She thought about attempting to kick him too, but decided against it because that damned dip between the mattress and the footboard was still way too close to her toes.
“Aw, don’t make fun of her, Roma, she had a bad night.” Romano snorted in response. “She did! You should have brought her home before you and Antonio decided making out was a better idea, or called me, or had Edmée bring her, or something.”
Lovina wasn’t looking at them, but she could practically hear the amused look on Romano’s face. “You never cared when your last roommate came back drunk after parties.”
“I did!”
“You didn’t. You hated her, that’s why she switched rooms after a term and you didn’t have another roommate until Lovina showed up.” Lovina couldn’t imagine Antonia hating anyone. She tried to, but then the memory of her clinging to Antonia on her bed the night before suddenly assaulted her instead and she was blushing beyond all belief while Romano and Antonia bickered in the background. She was so busy being embarrassed and exhausted and not hungover that she didn’t notice when the background noise stopped and suddenly changed to Antonia calling her name.
“Lovi? Lovina? You okay? You’re really red.” Antonia leaned down and kissed her forehead, which only increased Lovina’s blush. “You don’t feel like you have a fever.”
Lovina felt eyes on her and she looked up to see Romano giving her a knowing look. She scowled at him and he just shook his head, obviously amused by something that wasn’t entirely apparent to her. “She’s not sick, stupid, just leave her alone.” He stood up and pulled Antonia with him, ignoring the woman’s protests.
“Why don’t you both leave me alone,” Lovina muttered, pulling her blankets up tighter around herself. “Go bother your boyfriend instead.”
“Actually, that’s why I stopped by.” Romano knelt down by Lovina’s bed and pulled the blankets back from her face. “Call him or something when you’re not so hungover.”
“I’m not hungover.” Lovina didn’t get hangovers. Just sometimes alcohol made her very sleepy the next day. And have a headache. But it wasn’t a hangover. “Why would I do that?” Lovina tried to grab the blanket back but Romano kept a tight grip on it.
“Because you were being a bitch to him last night and now he’s all upset thinking you don’t like him. And when Antonio’s upset, shit sucks for the rest of us, so go apologise or I’ll,” Romano faltered. He’d threatened a lot of people in his life, but most of those people were just his little brother or Antonio himself, and they were easier to threaten than anyone else on earth. They also didn’t have quite the right hook Lovina had. “Or I’ll eat all your tomatoes.”
“Bastard, stay away from my tomatoes, it’s bad enough Antonia keeps eating them all.” She finally managed to yank the blanket back out of Romano’s hand. “I’ll call Antonio later if you’ll just let me sleep, okay?”
“I’ll tell him to expect your call, so you better not blow him off.”
“Yeah yeah.” Lovina pushed at Romano’s shoulder, hoping he’d fall over on his ass and finally leave her alone. He didn’t. “Fuck off, I want to sleep.”
Antonia looked at her phone and gasped. “C’mon, Roma! We’re late for getting breakfast with Francine, we should go.”
Romano sighed exasperatedly and mumbled something to Lovina about how she should never, ever meet Antonia’s crazy French ex-girlfriend, no matter how much Antonia insisted otherwise, but Lovina didn’t quite catch it because she was already drifting back off to sleep.
Part 2
Author: cutthroatpixie
Character(s) or Pairing(s): Romano/Fem!Romano/Spain/Fem!Spain. That is alphabetical-ish order, it has nothing to do with who is doing who. They are all doing all of them.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Human names (except for Romano), mentions of sexy times, this is really long and I developed a billion piles of headcanon for it so if something doesn't make sense that is probably why, and this is unbeta'd because I want Superman to just have it already
Summary: Lovina can't stand her roommate. Or her roomate's boyfriend. Either of them.
Notes: TL;DR TL;DR. I wrote this for counterheist because she is my classy lady buddy FOREVER. Also I didn't want things to be too matchy-matchy so everyone's name are as such:
Antonio Fernández Carriedo (Spain, duh)
Romano Vargas (Romano)
Antonia Hernández Castillo (Fem!Spain)
Lovina Vella (Fem!Romano)
Also Edmée = Belgium, Francine = Fem!France, and Felicia = Fem!Italy
Lovina stood in front of the building that would be her new home for at least the next few months, cursing loudly as she attempted to drag her insane amounts of luggage all by herself. Her parents had been more than happy to send her on her way with any amount of things she might want or need, but they had been unable to actually accompany her on the long trip from Palermo, so she'd been left to deal with the fact that her suitcases didn't seem to want to go up the stairs of the residency hall by herself.
"Fucking pieces of shit," she grumbled, kicking the heaviest suitcase, which had the audacity to topple down the stairs just when she'd finally made some progress. She almost wished she had asked the driver who took her from the airport to help, almost, but not quite, because he'd had a creepy look about him and she didn't need that sort of person knowing where she lived.
"Did you want some help, bella?" Lovina jumped and cursed when a voice came from behind her and a hand reached out to take the suitcase from her. "Or were you wanting to keep blocking the stairs all day?"
She spun around to face the main, who appeared to be a fellow Italian judging by the faint accent he spoke with, the accent that got thick and heavy when he'd used the one Italian word. She narrowed her eyes at him. "All the sluts around here might fall for that random use of Italian you've got going on," she replied, scowling. "But it isn't going to work on me, cretino."
She smirked in triumph when the man's face was soon flushing just as red as hers felt.
"Whatever, lady, do you want my help or not?"
"Not. I can handle myself, thank you very much."
Another suitcase chose that moment to toppled down the stairs, narrowly missing Lovina.
"Sure you can."
"...Whatever, just don't break anything." Lovina stomped back up to the top of the stairs to where the rest of her bags were waiting for her, Wearing-an-Obnoxious-Pink-Shirt (Lovina was trying out different names for him in her head, since the two of them combined still had less manners than the average person, apparently) following behind with the other two suitcases. She gave him a dirty look when he beat her to the door, but stepped inside nonetheless, secretly thankful because she wasn't exactly sure how she would have opened it herself given all the things she was carrying. "I'm in room 1302," she told him, glancing around the inside lobby. "I'm assuming there's an elevator somewhere around here? No way in hell I'm walking up thirteen flights of stairs."
She didn't have to wait for an answer, as she spotted an elevator to her left and made a beeline for it. Her plan was foiled, however, when Needs-To-Stop-Looking-so-Smug started heading off in the other direction. "Where the hell do you think you're going?!"
"You don't want to take that elevator," he replied, continuing to walk down the hall, not even bothering to look back and see if Lovina was following. "It's on the wrong side of the building from your room, and it'll be hell trying to carry all this shit through the hallways up there."
Lovina followed, because this asshole didn't seem to be stopping and he still had her bags. "How would you know? Isn't that floor only for girl's rooms?" She walked a little faster to catch up with him, thankful that she'd had the forethought to wear flats while she was travelling. Running after people in heels was a bitch. "If you're some kind of pervert, you can fuck off right now and give me back my bags, I don't need your help."
The "correct" elevator dinged as Seriously-Stop-Giving-Me-That-Smug-Look pressed the up button. "Of course you don't."
"I don't."
"That's what I said."
The elevator ride was silent, save some huffing from Lovina, but the second they arrived at her floor, Lovina understood why they hadn't taken the other elevator. Bags and boxes lined the hallways, waiting to be taken in through all the doors left ajar as students and parents ran back and forth from the stairwells and elevators, into the rooms and back out, carrying more bags and boxes and suitcases and anything else that might be needed to settle into the dorms. Cutting through the crowd trying to get from one side to the other would have been near impossible, judging by the annoyed looks of the students trudging through without bags. No doubt they had finished unpacking earlier, but were still fated to have just as much difficulty getting around as everyone who was currently arriving.
Fortunately for Lovina, Walks-Too-Damn-Fast quickly cut a path for them, arriving right outside room 1302 in no time. Her bags were promptly dropped onto the floor beside the door (he was so lucky nothing breakable was in those ones). "I'm not helping you unpack, think you can get everything inside okay?" Coming from any other person who actually, you know, had some manners (not that Lovina was one to talk about that), that might have been a sympathetic, caring sort of question, but coming from this man it was clear he was teasing her.
"I'm not some damsel-in-distress, bastard, fuck off." She too placed her bags down, gently, thank you very much, and reached for the door handle, but Needs-to-Fuck-the-Hell-Off beat her to it, opening the unlocked door and peaking inside for some indiscernible reason before shrugging, an action that confused Lovina.
"I'm Romano, by the way," he said. Her, "Like I care," was swiftly cut off before she could even utter the first syllable as he continued. "Yeah yeah, you're tough shit and I'm a "pervert". But you'll be seeing a lot of me, might as well have something to call me that you don't have to mutter under your breath."
Romano tossed a small brown box onto the pile of bags, much to Lovina's confusion, and made his way back through the crowd. "Tell Antonia I'm not making her anymore tiramisu. Ciao."
---
Two hours and a ridiculous amount of unpacking later, Lovina still had no idea who Antonia was. She was guessing she was probably her roommate (she wasn't stupid, she could determine that much), or at least somebody who lived in a room nearby, but nobody else had shown up to the room yet. She flopped out on the newly made, entirely too small for it's own good bed she'd decided was hers (well, the other one was already made, but she hadn't wanted that side of the room anyway), and glanced over at the box of apparently homemade dessert when her stomach growled.
"If this Antonia bitch doesn't show up in the next ten minutes, I'm eating it myself," she mumbled, rolling over onto said growling stomach.
"Eating what?" For the second time that day, Lovina found herself jumping in surprise, and she was really hoping this wouldn't be a common occurrence, because dear lord was it embarrassing. "Oh, hi! You must be my new roommate!"
"I'm guessing you're Antonia?" She sat up and pointed at the brown box she'd placed on the counter of their pathetic excuse for a "kitchenette". "Romano says he's not making you anymore of that, and if he's not even going to bring anymore stuff, I hope he's not going to stop by very often because he's an asshole." An asshole who helped his friend's (girlfriend's?) roommate carry her things to their room, but an asshole nonetheless.
Antonia just laughed and grabbed two forks out of the a cupboard before making herself nice and cozy on Lovina's bed and passing her one of the utensils. "Roma's a lot nicer once you get to know him." She opened the box and started digging in, as if it was totally normal just to start eating tiramisu on your roommate's bed without even asking. "Well. More like you get used to him more. He's a little rough around the edges but if he said anything mean to you, he probably didn't mean it."
"You're on my bed."
"He used to say all sorts of mean things to Anto--Hm? Oh, sorry!" Antonia scooted to the edge of the bed. "Do you have enough room now? I forgot how small these things are, my bed at home is so much bigger. Here," she held the tiramisu under Lovina's nose. "It's really good."
Lovina gave Antonia a dirty look, but she scooped up some of the tiramisu nonetheless.
"...Mine's better." She couldn't exactly make tiramisu in their room to prove this to Antonia, or to treat herself with its superior taste, so she went back for another bite. But only because it was the only tiramisu around.
"I'm sure yours is really good too," Antonia paused. "Sorry, what was your name? Obviously you already know mine, but I totally forgot I don't know yours yet."
Lovina swallowed another mouthful of tiramisu. "Lovina."
"Aw, what a cute name! Can I call you Lovi?" Antonia reached out and Lovina was expecting some sort of awkward handshake, but was instead surprised to find two arms around her in a squeezing hug.
"What? No!" Lovina attempted to shove Antonia off, but she was a lot stronger than she looked.
Antonia eventually pulled back. "Sorry, sorry!" Lovina rolled her eyes, glad the other woman had finally taken a hint. "I forgot I was holding the tiramisu, don't want to squish it between us." Or not.
"This is going to be a long year," Lovina mumbled, quickly stuffing another bite of tiramisu in her mouth to avoid having to repeat herself when Antonia gave her a confused look.
---
Unfortunately for Lovina, Romano was indeed dating Antonia, and he was a near constant presence in their room. Whenever Lovina asked why the two of them couldn't just go to Romano's room, Antonia would say something like, "Oh, Antonio's really busy this term," or Romano would mutter something about some stupid bitch teacher "Antonio" had, but in the two weeks Lovina had been asking them to go somewhere else, who exactly Antonio was had never been explained to her. She'd never asked, but it wasn't her problem if some people didn't have enough manners to tell her exactly who the fuck they were talking about was.
Certain people were also apparently so rude that they mixed up their laundry with hers on a frequent basis, which was how she came to know that the man’s shirt currently occupying her laundry basket did not belong to Antonia’s boyfriend. Romano, Lovina had quickly learned, always dressed nicely, and his wardrobe consisted of many a pair of slacks and dress-shirts (most of which were pink, for some strange reason). Even when he was just bumming around their dorm, he looked nice (Lovina would deny she was looking, though, she wasn’t some slut who looked at other people’s boyfriends... or at the girls with said boyfriends, for that matter), and this shirt, well. Didn’t look quite so nice. It was a ratty old yellow t-shirt with a smiling tomato on the front. It was much too big to be Antonia’s, and even though Lovina had only known the man for a couple of weeks, she didn’t think Romano would be caught dead wearing a shirt with such a creepy looking rendition of his favourite fruit.
“Oi, Antonia.”
Antonia looked up from folding her worn laundry and grinned. Lovina ignored any happy fluttery feelings the grin induced, because Antonia always grinned like that, at everyone, it wasn’t anything special. “Did my clothes get mixed up with yours again? I don’t know how that keeps happening!”
“Not your clothes this time.”
“Romano’s?” Antonia walked over to inspect the garment Lovina was holding. “Romano hasn’t left any clothes here recently-- Oooh. That’s not Romano’s either.”
“Nope.” Lovina scowled at Antonia, and she suddenly felt a little like a parent, about to scold their child for some unknown crime until the child just admitted to their wrongdoing on their own. In her eighteen years of life, she’d become quite the expert on being involved in those sorts of conversations, though never from this perspective. Usually it was her admitting that she’d been doing certain things with certain people her parents thought she ought not to.
“It’s Antonio’s.” It wasn’t any of her business who or what Antonia did, but if she was going to be parading random men in and out of their room Lovina did not want to have to deal with it. She may not have noticed before, because her evening classes probably left Antonia with a lot of alone time in the room, but-- why did she care about this at all again? “I’ll just give it to Romano next time I see him, he’ll pass it along to Antonio if I don’t see him first.”
Wait.
“What?”
“Romano grabbed it instead of his own pajamas when he stayed over the other night.” Antonia plucked the shirt out of Lovina’s hands and started sloppily folding it. “It was so cute, I wish he’d wear Antonio’s clothes more often.”
Lovina raised an eyebrow at that remark, but chose not to comment on it. “So Antonio didn’t leave it here?”
“Of course not, Antonio hasn’t been to our room yet this term, he’s been way too busy.”
---
After a month of listening to Antonia talk about Antonio, Lovina still hadn’t met the guy. She’d occasionally see his clothes pop up in either hers or Antonia’s laundry, and while she seriously didn’t believe that Romano was the one leaving them in their room, she’d stopped asking about it. She’d also somehow managed to learn quite a bit about him-- he was studying to become a pre-school teacher, she’d learnt that after overhearing (not eavesdropping on) a conversation Antonia’d had with him over the phone, he apparently really liked tomato sandwiches with pecorino romano if all the sandwiches Antonia kept having Romano bring to him were anything to judge his preferences by, and he was so totally banging his roommate’s girlfriend. She had no proof of that, but she’d somehow convinced herself of this ever since she’d first found that t-shirt of his in her laundry.
She didn’t know if she was jealous of Antonia for having two guys when she was having problems getting to know anybody at all, or jealous of those two guys for having so much of Antonia’s constant attention. All she knew was that the familiar envy she’d felt all growing up whenever somebody ignored her in favour of her sister her was there, and she didn’t really know why.
Perhaps that’s the reason she’d found herself at a frat party on a Friday night, when she’d normally never go anywhere near the things. Parties had booze, booze was really good at drowning out uncomfortable feelings, and Lovina was sorely in need of some of that, so there she was, standing alone in a corner with a bottle of wine, curiously eyeing up some tanned, dark-haired, green-eyed stranger. Her drunken self ignored the fact that he looked a bit like Antonia.
Her drunken self could not ignore that fact that Antonia herself appeared next to the man, passing him a drink and giving him a kiss on the cheek before she noticed they were being stared at. Instead of looking like she’d been caught doing something bad, or looking ashamed, or something Lovina might have expected, Antonia’s slightly flushed face just split into a wide grin when she saw who it was that was staring at her and the nameless man.
“Lovi!”
“I’m pretty sure I said no calling-- not to call me that.” She added a half-assed, “Bitch,” to the end of that, to make sure Antonia knew she was being serious. It didn’t really work at all.
“But it’s such a cute nickname! Way cuter than the nicknames you have for me.”
Lovina had no idea what she was talking about. “I don’t have any nicknames for you.”
“You just used one!” If Lovina didn’t know Antonia, she might have thought she was joking. Well, Lovina really didn’t know Antonia, not all that well anyway, but she still knew her well enough to know that she really must have thought all the rude names Lovina kept calling her were some bizarre attempts at nicknames. That or she was teasing her, Lovina really couldn’t tell.
“Stop teasing me, Antonia,” she said with a huff. “Who was that guy you were with?”
“That’s Antonio! Haven’t you met him before? Oh, I suppose you haven’t. This is the first party he’s really had time to come to since school started. I’ll introduce you two.” Antonia turned around, seemingly to wave Antonio over, but the space he had previously been occupying was not empty. “When I find him again,” she added with a laugh. “He probably found somebody else to talk to, I’ll keep you company instead.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Of course I do! You’re sitting over here all alone, that’s no fun at all.”
Lovina put her feet up on the only other chair nearby, but this didn’t deter Antonia in the slightest. The other woman just lifted Lovina’s feet up and placed them in her lap after taking her seat. “Do your feet hurt?” she asked, continuing to be the bizarre, inappropriate sort of person she always proved herself to be and taking off one of Lovina’s heels. “You should get some of those cushiony pads for your heels, it’ll make your feet feel a lot better probably.”
“My feet don’t hurt.”
“You don’t have to lie to me, we’re friends, sí?” Antonia pressed her thumbs into the ball of Lovina’s left foot and Lovina let out a hiss of discomfort. “Sorry! I’ll be gentler.” True to her word, Antonia continued to massage Lovina’s foot, her touch firm yet gentle against the sore muscles. Lovina wandered how many other people out there had been on the receiving end of a drunken foot massage from Antonia.
“Shouldn’t you be massaging your boyfriend’s feet or something?” A soft cracking noise came from Lovina’s ankle when Antonia rotated it slightly and the slight pain caused by the movement quickly faded into a dull sense of relief as the joint relaxed. Maybe Antonia shouldn’t have been massaging anyone else’s feet right at that moment, because Lovina was drunk and Antonia was pretty and damn her feet had been bothering her for weeks.
“Naw, I think you’re the only one who needs one right now.” Both Lovina and Antonia fell silent as Antonia continued her massage, stopping only to place Lovina’s left shoe back on and move onto the right foot to repeat the process all over again. “You must be really drunk,” she spoke up after what felt like an eternity of silence. “I thought for sure you’d kick me or something.”
“I have never kicked you before, why the hell would you think that?”
Antonia shrugged, a soft smile on her face. “You kicked Romano when he complimented you on your dress last week.”
“He wasn’t looking at my dress,” Lovina insisted. “It’s not my fault if your stupid boyfriend can’t keep his eyes where they should be.”
Antonia just kept on massaging away, her fingers occasionally straying up Lovina’s calves and it was surely a testament to the amount of alcohol flowing through her veins that Lovina didn’t make Antonia keep her hands to herself, because any other time kicking her would have sounded like a good idea as soon as those bitten-down nails started scraping lightly across her knees. If anyone had bothered to ask, she would have claimed the blush staining her cheeks was from the alcohol, but she knew what was really causing it, and truth be told, even at her drunkest she was extremely vocal whenever somebody was doing something she didn’t like.
“Well,” Antonia had apparently decided to continue the conversation at some point during Lovina’s musings. “I’m sure he wasn’t looking at you inappropriately, he actually did like the dress, but I really couldn’t blame him if he was, you are way too cute, you know that?”
“...Just finish my foot massage and stop saying weird shit, Tonia.”
Lovina woke up the next morning in Antonia’s bed, with Antonia’s lipstick on her cheek, and when Antonia laughed it all off, saying they hadn’t been able to figure out the thermostat the night before and that’s why they’d shared a bed, she most certainly did not feel a little disappointed.
---
After that incident, Lovina decided to avoid both stupid parties and Antonia for awhile until she could look the other woman in the face without blushing horribly. This turned out to be fairly easy, because Lovina had mostly evening classes so she could sleep in, and Antonia had mostly morning classes so she could take a nap in the afternoon and have her nights free. Antonia was already gone by the time Lovina woke up, and Lovina was usually leaving as soon as Antonia came back, if she came back at all.
The whole blushing horribly thing was a bit harder to avoid, especially when a certain green-eyed man suddenly ran up to her, shirtless, while she was outside eating a late lunch before class.
“C-can I help you?” she managed to stutter out after nearly choking on her tomato sandwich.
“Are you okay?” he asked in return, patting her on the back until she shoved his hand away. This apparently had no effect on him. “You’re Lovina, right?” The man clapped and sat down next to her when she nodded. “I thought I recognised you! I saw Antonia with you the other night, but I got distracted and by the time I went looking for you two, you were both gone already.”
“Oh, right. You’re Antonio.”
Antonio nodded. “That’s me! Antonia’s told me a lot about you.”
Lovina tried to will down her blush, but it didn’t work. It never did. “Has she now?”
“She talks about you all the time, every time we go out it’s Lovina this, Lovina that.” Antonio may have meant something completely innocent when he said “going out”, but Lovina was still semi-convinced the two had something going on, so of course she took it to mean that she was a topic of conversation during their illicit dates.
“Good for her,” Lovina responded dryly. “Is there a reason you’re running around shirtless?”
Antonio's look of confusion was so akin to Antonia's it was almost comical. He looked down at himself, then back up to Lovina, a sheepish look replacing his confused one. "I was just at the pool, I guess I forgot to put my shirt back on. I'm really tired, I was up all night writing a paper."
“You should go find your shirt, then.” She glanced at her watch, hoping it was time for her to leave so she’d have an excuse to get out of this awkward conversation. For once, time seemed to be on her side and she was due to be heading off to class. “I need to go, good luck with that.”
She stood up, and before she could make a quick getaway, Antonio grabbed her by the wrist. “Hold on! Before you go, here’s my number.” He snatched the paper bag out of her hand and quickly ripped a piece off before writing his number down in red ink. “We should hang out sometime. I feel like I already know you, from Antonia, but it’d be nice to get lunch or something.”
Lovina wanted to smack Antonio, call him a pervert, tell him to stop dating his roommate’s girlfriend and stop making it sound like he was asking her when he obviously wasn’t and to stop being so damn attractive and just . Stop. But he was gone in a flash, off to find his shirt hopefully, and all she could do was pocket the number with a huff and walk off to class.
---
Lovina never bothered to call Antonio, despite Antonia bugging her to after she found the piece of paper with his number sitting on Lovina’s bedside table, and the next time she ended up seeing Antonio, she’d given up on avoiding any and all parties, and may have been halfway to completely plastered. He may have been more attractive without a shirt than with a shirt, and he may have been a total sleaze in her mind, but Drunk Lovina was willing to look past any issues she had with him apparently, as she stumbled sauntered over to him with a bottle glass of wine in hand.
"Hey, bastard."
There appeared to be an echo in the room, because Lovina wasn't the only one who deigned to address Antonio in that particular fashion.
"Oh, hey Roma! Hey Lovina!" Antonio pulled them both into a hug and kissed their cheeks. "I didn't know you two were coming to this party!" Lovina also wasn’t the only one who’d apparently had a little too much to drink that night.
"I told you I was coming, stupid." Romano pulled himself out of the embrace and grabbed Lovina's arm, saving her from the drunken man's hugs as well. "And Antonia told you Lovina was coming, you were just too busy staring at her tits to pay attention."
"I wasn't staring at Lovina's tits!" Antonio protested. Lovina flushed. And felt offended. What was wrong with staring at her tits?! (Okay, maybe she was more than a little drunk...)
"...Antonia's. You were staring at Antonia's tits."
"Oh." Antonio laughed and nodded. "Was she wearing that new red dress?"
"The one that's way too small in the chest? Yes."
"That's what I keep telling her, but she says it's her favourite," Lovina chimed in. She'd seen quite a few fights started when one guy thought another guy was checking out his girlfriend, and she wasn't exactly keen on witnessing another. She wondered if Romano knew about what Antonio and Antonia were totally doing behind his back, and she couldn’t decide if she’d feel more pity for him if he did and just pretended not to, or if he honestly had no idea.
Romano and Antonio continued to chat, moving on from the topic of Antonia’s dress, and it made Lovina feel a little sick to her stomach, seeing them being so friendly with one another. Well. As friendly as Romano could be. While the two men were distracted with “arguing” over whether or not something Antonio had just done was perverted, Lovina stumbled away with her bottle of wine to go sulk in a corner.
An hour later, Romano found her there in the corner, the first bottle of wine empty at her feet, having been replaced by a second, decidedly more full one. “You should probably stop drinking all that wine, idiot, one of these perverts here is going to stop just leering at you and try something.” Lovina lurched forward when the wine bottle was stolen out of her hand, nearly falling out of her chair, but Romano quickly caught her. The green shirt he was wearing felt nice and soft against her flushed face, and if she didn’t immediately pull back away from him and shout at him for daring to touch her, that was the only reason why. “Ugh, I don’t see why Antonia likes you so much, you’re more of an idiot that she is.”
Lovina meant to protest against being called an idiot, because Romano was the idiot here, he was the one just letting his girlfriend go messing around with his roommate. She had half a mind to tell him so, but all that would come out was, “Antonia likes me?”
“Antonia likes a lot of people, don’t get too excited.” The wine bottle was long gone by the time Lovina managed to pull herself away from Romano, which was probably a good thing because the second she wasn’t being held up by the wall or the jackass boyfriend of her roommate, she was toppling face first into the sticky-with-alcohol floor beneath her.
Again, Romano caught her. “You are so lucky I’m a fucking gentleman. I’ll take you back to your room in a minute, stay here.” Lovina was gently placed back into the chair, and Romano cut his way through the crowd to where Antonio was standing, happily chatting away with some blonde girl Lovina had seen around her and Antonia’s dorm once or twice, Edmée Something-or-Other. She felt light-headed and sleepy, and she was sorely tempted to just fall asleep in that chair. Romano would drag her back to her dorm, she wouldn’t have to listen to his bitching or worry about accidentally saying something stupid herself, it was a win-win situation. The only thing keeping her from dozing off right then and there was the fact that she didn’t know how long Romano was going to spend talking to the other man, and the only person who was more wary of all the perverts running around at that party than Romano appeared to be was Lovina. She snapped awake when she felt herself falling asleep and glanced at the pair of men, only to be met with a sight that she definitely was not expecting.
Perhaps she really was an idiot, because it looked like Antonia wasn’t the one running around with other men.
---
Everything else after that was nothing more than a blur. The next morning when Lovina woke up, she couldn’t quite remember what had happened after Romano finally came back to retrieve her from her chair. She did, however, remember, quite vividly in fact, what took place before Romano had taken her back to her room.
She rolled over onto her side, ignoring her body’s protests against movement, and looked over to see Antonia laying on her side as well, looking back at her. “Morning,” Antonia whispered. “Are you feeling okay? You seemed pretty upset when Romano brought you back last night, you kept mumbling to yourself in Italian-- no, Romano said it was Sicilian, because he couldn’t quite understand it all-- anyway are you feeling better?”
“No,” Lovina replied, holding a hand up to silence Antonia when the other woman tried to say something in response. “Just be quiet for a minute, I have to tell you something.”
Lovina and Antonia had only been roommates for a couple months now, and Lovina didn't exactly like her (though perhaps that wasn’t justified, and maybe she actually liked her a bit too much), but she was pretty sure there was some unwritten code somewhere that said you should probably tell your not-really-a-friend/roommate when you saw her boyfriend macking on another guy at a stupid frat party. Especially after you’d spent the better part of the short time you’d know her silently accusing her of things she probably wasn’t really doing.
She expected her to get upset (it would be a nice change of pace from all the happy and cheer, maybe), or to accuse her of making things up or just being confused about what she saw. What she hadn't expected her to do was laugh and go, "Oh, Antonio? He's our boyfriend, silly." Lovina could do nothing more than blink in response. “Didn’t you know that? I could have sworn I told you.”
Lovina definitely would have remembered something like that. “You never told me that!” The sound of her own voice reverberating in her already throbbing head caused her to cringe “Ugh.”
“I’m sorry if that’s what you were upset about.” Antonia stood up and made her way over to Lovina’s bed, sitting on the edge and running a hand through Lovina’s messy hair. “Though that might explain why you punched Romano after he wrestled you into your bed. Were you worried about me?”
“No,” Lovina mumbled, trying to move her head away from Antonia’s hand before deciding maybe moving wasn’t the best of ideas. “Romano put his hand up my dress, that’s why I punched him.” Lovina actually had no recollection of punching Romano, but she was sticking to her story no matter what Antonia said.
“You wore pants last night, Lovi.”
“...I hope I bruised his stupid face either way.”
Apparently the idea of her boyfriend (one of her boyfriends?) having his “stupid face” bruised was hilarious, because Antonia just giggled in response and kept petting Lovina’s hair. “You’re sweet. You should probably say sorry to Romano later--”
“No.”
“--but it’s kind of sweet that you’d punch him because you thought he was cheating on me. You’re a good friend.” Lovina tried to kick Antonia but she only ended up getting her foot stuck between the mattress and the footboard. “...Did your foot just twitch? Do you have that problem too? Romano’s feet and hands twitch sometimes, but not as much as they did when he was a kid.”
“Antonia, what the hell?!”
“Shh, Roma! Lovina’s head hurts!”
“Yeah well my face hurts, and you’re not supposed to tell anyone about that!” Romano closed the door to their room behind him and stomped over to Lovina’s bed. Lovina steeled herself for more yelling, but was pleasantly surprised when all Romano did was reach under her blanket to pull her foot out of the mattress dip. “Her foot was just stuck, Antonia, pay attention and stop telling random people shit about me.”
Antonia pouted and grabbed Romano by the front of the shirt, pulling him in for a kiss with the same ease Romano had pulled Antonio into one the night before. For what wasn’t the first time since meeting the couple, Lovina had no idea who she was jealous of when that familiar ache stirred in her chest. “Get a room, assholes,” she mumbled.
“You didn’t seem to care about anyone getting a room last night when you were getting all cozy with my girlfriend.” Despite the fact that the bed was barely big enough for one person, Lovina felt a second dip in the bed when Romano sat down next to Antonia. She thought about attempting to kick him too, but decided against it because that damned dip between the mattress and the footboard was still way too close to her toes.
“Aw, don’t make fun of her, Roma, she had a bad night.” Romano snorted in response. “She did! You should have brought her home before you and Antonio decided making out was a better idea, or called me, or had Edmée bring her, or something.”
Lovina wasn’t looking at them, but she could practically hear the amused look on Romano’s face. “You never cared when your last roommate came back drunk after parties.”
“I did!”
“You didn’t. You hated her, that’s why she switched rooms after a term and you didn’t have another roommate until Lovina showed up.” Lovina couldn’t imagine Antonia hating anyone. She tried to, but then the memory of her clinging to Antonia on her bed the night before suddenly assaulted her instead and she was blushing beyond all belief while Romano and Antonia bickered in the background. She was so busy being embarrassed and exhausted and not hungover that she didn’t notice when the background noise stopped and suddenly changed to Antonia calling her name.
“Lovi? Lovina? You okay? You’re really red.” Antonia leaned down and kissed her forehead, which only increased Lovina’s blush. “You don’t feel like you have a fever.”
Lovina felt eyes on her and she looked up to see Romano giving her a knowing look. She scowled at him and he just shook his head, obviously amused by something that wasn’t entirely apparent to her. “She’s not sick, stupid, just leave her alone.” He stood up and pulled Antonia with him, ignoring the woman’s protests.
“Why don’t you both leave me alone,” Lovina muttered, pulling her blankets up tighter around herself. “Go bother your boyfriend instead.”
“Actually, that’s why I stopped by.” Romano knelt down by Lovina’s bed and pulled the blankets back from her face. “Call him or something when you’re not so hungover.”
“I’m not hungover.” Lovina didn’t get hangovers. Just sometimes alcohol made her very sleepy the next day. And have a headache. But it wasn’t a hangover. “Why would I do that?” Lovina tried to grab the blanket back but Romano kept a tight grip on it.
“Because you were being a bitch to him last night and now he’s all upset thinking you don’t like him. And when Antonio’s upset, shit sucks for the rest of us, so go apologise or I’ll,” Romano faltered. He’d threatened a lot of people in his life, but most of those people were just his little brother or Antonio himself, and they were easier to threaten than anyone else on earth. They also didn’t have quite the right hook Lovina had. “Or I’ll eat all your tomatoes.”
“Bastard, stay away from my tomatoes, it’s bad enough Antonia keeps eating them all.” She finally managed to yank the blanket back out of Romano’s hand. “I’ll call Antonio later if you’ll just let me sleep, okay?”
“I’ll tell him to expect your call, so you better not blow him off.”
“Yeah yeah.” Lovina pushed at Romano’s shoulder, hoping he’d fall over on his ass and finally leave her alone. He didn’t. “Fuck off, I want to sleep.”
Antonia looked at her phone and gasped. “C’mon, Roma! We’re late for getting breakfast with Francine, we should go.”
Romano sighed exasperatedly and mumbled something to Lovina about how she should never, ever meet Antonia’s crazy French ex-girlfriend, no matter how much Antonia insisted otherwise, but Lovina didn’t quite catch it because she was already drifting back off to sleep.
Part 2