Queen Of Linkon City @darebearinlads - Tumblr Blog

Rockin' Your World

── ⊹ ࣪Metalhead!Zayne x Partygirl!MC College AU

Synopsis: You used to think you had Zayne Li figured out. Then he spent a night taking you apart in your own dorm, and now two weeks later, he's standing in front of you in his silver framed glasses on a sunlit Wednesday afternoon, looking every bit the brilliant med student that he is. What throws you off is him asking for your number with the same patient hazel eyes that watched you come apart from between your legs. Content warnings: College AU, Med-Student Zayne with a side flavor of Metalhead, he has tattoos & piercings in this one (+his sexy mullet), Lots of flirting, Heavy sexual tension, slice-of-life, Tara and Simone are girl's girls, Slight jealousy from yours truly/Zayne, Mutual pining, Mutual crushes (cw will be updated with each ch) Word count: 8.2k Author’s note: sooo bear with me guys cuz this is more of a filler-chapter haha~ i promise it gets good again after this, but i still have to build a little around what's gonna happen next. have some trust in your lex, okay~?🤭

chapter 1 - chapter 2 - chapter 3 - chapter 4 - chapter 5 — posting 2ch/week

Chapter 3 - Askin' for an encore

You wake in fragments. The ache behind your eyes kicks in first, sharp and relentless, followed by the stale taste coating your tongue. Then comes the unfamiliar weight pinning your legs. You crack one eye open against the daylight slicing through the dorm curtains and find Tara sprawled face-down across your pillow, her mascara leaving a dark smear on the fabric of it. Simone has curled into a tight ball at the foot of the bed like a cat that lost a fight, one arm dangling off the edge like she lost whatever fight she started with gravity.

There is no Zayne.

You let out a slow breath of relief and stare at the ceiling and let the memory of last night come back the way it wants to come back, in slow uneven pieces, like a song loading on bad wifi.

You got him out. You remember that much. You remember the way he zipped your dress up for you with steady, careful fingers while you were still trying to remember your own name, the soft press of his mouth to the back of your shoulder as he did it, the way he’d run a thumb under your eye to wipe a smudge of mascara before he stepped back to look at you and the corner of his mouth had pulled up in a soft smile at whatever he saw. You remember Tara’s key scratching at your door not two minutes after Zayne had slipped out the stairwell, you and your bra still crooked under your dress, the room still smelling like sex and his cologne.

The rest comes back in pieces too. The Uber ride and how Zayne had kept teasing you all the way back to your dorm. The line of ink at the back of his neck under his mullet, which was such a shock to your drunk mind, and you can’t lie it’s still a shock even now. His palm sliding from your knee to the soft skin of your inner thigh like he had nowhere else to be, and it had felt so damn good.

The way he looked up at you from between your legs, hazel eyes steady while his tongue and that small metal bar dragged slow and sensual over your clit, which had you shuddering in pleasure.

Heat flares across your cheeks instantly. You squeeze your eyes shut, trying to will away the unholy thoughts.

Hazel. That’s what does it. That patient hazel staring up your body, calm in a way that had no right to be calm given what his mouth was doing down there, and the small slick drag of metal against your clit every time his tongue moved felt out of this world—or maybe you were just too drunk. You feel it like a phantom between your legs even now, and immediately curse yourself because your thighs press together under the duvet on autopilot and you are absolutely not doing this right now, not with Tara’s elbow in your ribs and a hangover trying to crack your skull open from the inside.

You sit up slowly. The room tilts, so you close your eyes, wincing, waiting for it to stop.

Two orgasms. Two. From the guy you had mentally thought of as quiet, serious, future doctor for two full years. You’ve had sex partners before. You’ve had good sex partners, even—ones who knew where things were and how to use them, and not one of them had ever made you make the noises you made into your own duvet last night. The boys you usually go for would be insulted to learn that the bar was, apparently, Zayne Li with his neat notes and steady hands.

Except he is not only that. Not anymore.

You shuffle off the bed without waking the dead, find the water bottle you keep on your desk, drain half of it in one go, and stand there for a long second staring at the small dent in the duvet where, last night, he had pushed your spine into the exact arch he wanted.

By the time you’re all upright and capable of forming sentences, the dorm has become a hangover triage center. Simone is in your hoodie. Tara is in Simone’s shorts, somehow. Nobody is in their own clothes. There are three glasses of water on the floor and someone has put a bag of frozen peas on the radiator for reasons no one can reconstruct.

You queue up the playlist Tara made for mornings like this. Quiet stuff, nothing percussive. Simone groans approval into your pillow.

Tara is the first one to actually look at you properly. She squints, head tilting, then her gaze lands on the side of your throat. She sits up so fast she nearly sends Simone rolling off the mattress.

“Babe.” Her finger jabs toward your neck. “Babe!”

You don’t even get to ask before Simone’s head pops up. Two pairs of bloodshot eyes land on the side of your neck where you can absolutely feel now the throb of every mark Zayne had left.

“Oh my god!” Simone clamps a hand over her mouth and then drops it because that was apparently too loud for her own head. “Oh my god,” she repeats in an aggressive whisper. “Babe! Your neck!”

“It’s covered in marks!” Tara adds, grinning despite her own headache.

“More like bruises—” Simone says, and gets interrupted.

“Stop.” You laugh into your water bottle, ducking your head, but the hair you’re trying to hide behind won’t cooperate and you have no defenses. “Stop, my head, oh my god! Lower the volume.”

“Was it Zayne?” Tara leans forward, eyes bright.“It was Zayne! Tell me it was Zayne—”

“I don’t remember,” you lie, keeping your face perfectly neutral.

“Liar,” they say in unison.

Tara drops her voice to something closer to tolerable. “You absolutely remember! Nobody forgets who devoured their neck until it looked like a freaking battlefield!”

“Maybe it was Zayne,” you allow, looking at the ceiling like the truth might be written up there. “Maybe it was somebody else.”

“There was nobody else,” Simone snorts, “I was there. I saw you both. You were all over each other on that wall and didn’t even seem to want to put any distance between you.”

“Were we?” You take a long, innocent sip of your water.

“Don’t make me pull out my phone.” Simone says, deeply serious.

Tara wheezes. You actually laugh, which makes your head pulse, which makes you wince, which makes them both immediately fuss and shove yet another glass of water at you even though you already have one in your hand.

You take a long sip, letting the cool water settle the worst of the dryness in your throat. You don’t tell them. You don’t tell them about the cab ride or the way he’d held your face up to his and told you to behave. You don’t tell them about the ink on his beautiful skin. You don’t tell them about the piercings. You don’t tell them about how Zayne Li would only fuck you sober. That part stays tucked behind your ribs, private and still too new to share. It sits there, warm and secret, while you laugh and deflect and let Tara spin wild theories about whether he is a biter or a sucker. Simone immediately begins plotting how to corner Caleb for intel. You give them nothing concrete.

The next two weeks slide by in that strange suspended haze where you insist you are not thinking about him while thinking about him constantly.

You don’t look for Zayne. You tell yourself you’re not avoiding him, and you’re not, exactly, but you also don’t take the long way past the library, and you don’t hover near the cafeteria coffee bar at the times you used to notice him walking past.

You don’t see him anyway. There is a research conference coming up, a big one, the kind that gets posters all over the faculty corridors and earnest second-years stopping you in the hall to ask if you’re presenting. Zayne is presenting. You know this because Caleb mentioned it in passing and because Zayne’s name is on three different posters in three different buildings. He is, you assume, in the deepest available stack of the medical journals in the library, surviving on coffee and too little hours of sleep.

You think about him anyway. Without meaning to. That’s the worst part.

You’ll be in a seminar half-listening to someone explain something you already know, and your mind will slip sideways into the back of an Uber, into the warm patient drag of a thumb on the inside of your thigh, to the low surprised laugh he gave when you called him doc-tor. You catch yourself doing it and you make yourself stop, and ten minutes later you’re doing it again.

The question circles back every time.

How? How is Zayne that, underneath the cardigan and the clean handwriting and the polite half-smile he gives professors when he gets a question right. How does someone who looks like the textbook definition of quiet future doctor hide the version of him that pinned you to your own bed and pulled two orgasms out of you without breaking a sweat? Who else has seen the ink? Who knows about the metal in his tongue and all his other little secret piercings? The thought twists sharp in your stomach. You hate how much you care about the answer.

He is so attractive. You’re not the type to lie to yourself about it. He was attractive before, in the quiet way that boys who don’t know they’re being looked at are, and now he is attractive in a way that has a body count. You knew the first kind. You met the second kind at midnight against a brick wall, and the second kind sat between your legs with hazel eyes that didn’t blink as he devoured you.

You used to find him endearing. Back when you were closer to Caleb, when you spent half of last year drifting in and out of Caleb’s dorm for reasons that were mostly between you and Caleb, you’d see Zayne in the kitchen sometimes, making tea at strange hours, reading something dense at the little shared table with one hand absently rubbing the back of his neck. You’d say hi. He’d say hi back, with that mild half-smile and you’d think oh, the quiet roommate, and that would be the end of your thinking about him.

He could not have been more different from Caleb. Caleb is sun. Caleb is volume. Caleb is the boy who kisses you against the fridge and laughs into your mouth and means absolutely none of it past the next morning, and you’d known that, and that had been fine. Caleb is uncomplicated.

Zayne is not uncomplicated. Zayne denied you a kiss in a pub corridor and got you wetter than anybody had ever managed with full use of both hands. That contradiction keeps you awake more nights than you want to admit. Zayne is a problem.

You think about his mouth. You actually let yourself, for one second, walking across the quad in the spring afternoon sun with a cigarette burning unattended between your fingers, you think about his mouth. About what kissing him would have felt like, properly, against that brick wall or in your dorm door. About what it would feel like now, after everything, with no alcohol in your blood and the lamp off and the door locked and—

“Hey. Earth to you??”

Your mind has wandered again, replaying the feeling of metal across sensitive skin, when Tara’s elbow connects with your ribs. You take a hurried drag to cover for the fact that your face is approximately the temperature of the sun.

“Sorry,” you say with what you hope is normal volume. “I zoned out.”

“I noticed.” Tara is squinting at you in the way she squints when she is about to be a problem. You are sitting on the wall outside the humanities building, the spring sun warm on the back of your neck, your boots scuffing in the gravel.

She lights her own cigarette off yours, takes a long drag, and lets the smoke curl upward. “Didn’t think Zayne Li was your type.”

She elbows you again, and you try to keep your face normal at those words. There is a smirk on her face that you would like to physically remove.

“Huh?” You give her your best blank stare. It does not work on Tara and has never worked on Tara, but you try anyway, on principle. “What makes you think that?”

“Oh please.” She rolls her whole face at you, clearly not buying your little act. “Like we didn’t all see how you were all over each other at the pub.” She taps ash into the gravel. “And I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s hot. Handsome, smart, annoyingly so if you ask me.” She takes a pause to drag another smoke, and to annoyingly smirk your way. “But he’s not really like the guys you go after.”

“Tara—”

“What? You know I have a point.” She tilts her head, eyes narrowing in a way that is more affectionate than mean. “Like, I would’ve expected something to happen between you and Caleb again, or—I don’t know, someone similar to him. Zayne is…”

“Definitely not like Caleb.”

It comes out a little quieter than you meant it. You feel the heat climb up the side of your neck and you take another drag of your cigarette to hide it, eyes very focused on a crack in the pavement, but the small chuckle that escapes you on the exhale is, frankly, evidence. You hope Tara is busy with her own smoke.

She is. For about four more seconds. Mercifully, the breeze pulls your hair across your cheek before she clocks the color in it.

“I’m saying!” Tara waves her cigarette for emphasis. “Sooo. Did anything actually happen between you two, or were you too drunk to realize who you were flirting with?”

You take your time with the next drag. You make her wait for it. The smoke curls slow up between you and her smirk gets wider with every second you don’t answer, because Tara has known you long enough to know that the answer you take time on is always more interesting than the answer that comes fast.

You look at her sideways through your lashes.

“Define anything.”

Tara’s mouth drops open. The cigarette nearly falls out of it.

You don’t get to enjoy the look on Tara’s face for long, because she opens her mouth and is about three syllables into something that begins with “Excuse me—” when there are footsteps in the gravel behind you and Caleb’s voice cuts in over the top of her.

“Heeey, girls! Watcha’ up to?”

You turn toward the very welcomed distraction. Caleb is loping toward you in a half-buttoned shirt with sunglasses pushed up into his hair, a duffel slung over one shoulder, looking every inch the boy who has never been hungover a day in his life despite all available evidence to the contrary. And half a step behind him, taking the longer route around the low wall, is Zayne.

The first thing you notice is the glasses.

He’s in his silver frames today. You forgot he wears them. You actually forgot, because the last time you saw his face it was an inch from yours in a lamp lit dorm room and glasses were not a concept your brain was operating on. He has them sitting low on the bridge of his nose where they always sit, dark hair falling soft around the frames, and he is dressed the way Zayne dresses on a school day, a plain dark long-sleeve under a half-zipped grey jacket and jeans, the whole future doctor reads in a library look that you used to take at face value.

His eyes find yours, hazel and calm, clocking you right through his lenses.

You feel the bottom of your stomach drop.

“Caleb …Zayne,” you say with all the casualness you can muster, which is honestly not much. You take another slow drag of your cigarette to do something with your hands and your mouth at the same time, not trusting yourself to say anything more and manage to still make it sound casual.

Tara recovers faster than you do because Tara recovers faster than anyone. She kicks the conversation right into the gear it needs to be in.

“Guys. You look unreasonably put together for a Wednesday full of boring classes and schoolwork.” She tips her chin at him. “Embarrassing for the rest of us.”

“I was raised right,” Zayne offers mildly, which gets Caleb snorting.

“He was raised by textbooks,” Caleb says as he drops his duffel on the wall next to Tara like he owns it. “He doesn’t even know what a hangover is. We had to teach him, like a child.”

“I know what a hangover is,” Zayne says unbothered, glancing sideways at Caleb. “I’ve simply chosen not to have one.”

“Anywaaay,” Caleb plows on, the way Caleb plows on when he diverts a subject, “we come bearing news. There’s this thing Friday, on the other side of Linkon, place called The Hollow or The Bunker or something I never remember, but doesn’t really matter anyway. What matters is that it’s an underground club thing, like, underground underground. Some rock band’s playing. You won’t have heard of them, they’re kind of niche, buuut the party is going to be absolutely unhinged. Cheap drinks. Good crowd. You guys should come.”

“What band?” Tara asks, because Tara always asks even though it’s not really of interest to her.

Caleb names them. You haven’t heard of them, which isn’t much of a surprise, really. Caleb did say they were niche. Tara’s face says she hasn’t heard of them either, so Caleb waves a hand like that’s exactly the point.

“Doesn’t matter. The point is the vibe. Friday. Yes?”

“Maybeee,” Tara says, which from Tara means yes, she is already mentally planning the outfit. “Depends if I can drag this one”—she elbows you too casually—“out of her current existential crisis.”

“I’m not in a crisis,” you almost hiss, because way to go Tara.

While Tara and Caleb dissolve into a tangent about whose car is taking who and whether Caleb is allowed to play the music, the conversation quietly splits. You don’t plan it, so it just happens, the way conversations split in groups of four, Tara turning a little toward Caleb on the wall, Zayne stepping a little to the side toward you with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans.

You don’t quite look at him for a second. You take another drag of your cigarette, smoke curling thin past your face. You feel him looking at you anyway, the steady patient weight of his eyes, and when you finally turn your head to face him you give him a small careful smile, because honestly you have no idea where you stand right now.

“How have you been, Zayne?”

“Busy studying.” A soft little smile plays on his lips. His head tilts very slightly, which makes you a bit nervous. “How about you? You seem quite restless.”

The way his eyes drop slowly down your face and then lower, taking in your hoodie sleeves shoved to your elbows, the cigarette between your fingers, the way you’re sitting on the wall with one boot kicking at the gravel, is so brief you could miss it if you weren’t already staring so closely to him. You absolutely catch it, suddenly feeling even more restless under his gaze. You shift your weight on the wall without meaning to, your boot scraping a little louder against the stone path.

“Oh!” Your voice goes a fraction too bright and you correct it fast. “I’m fine. I just finished my cigarettes and had to borrow from Tara.” You hold up the offending stick like evidence. You chuckle softly. “I don’t really like hers.”

The corner of his mouth pulls up. “I see.” The lenses catch the sun for a second and then his eyes are back on you. “Thought you only smoked occasionally?”

There it is.

The smirk is small, contained, an entirely different animal than the one he wore in the lamplight of your dorm, but it is unmistakably the same smirk. And even like this, in his nerd-ish Wednesday clothes, with the silver glasses sitting on his nose and his hair tucked behind one ear like he is about to take notes in a seminar, that smirk does something unsteady to your legs.

A flashback comes anyway, uninvited. The patient hazel of his eyes between your legs. The drag of a barbell across your clit. His thumb under your jaw, moving slowly. I’ll only fuck you sober.

You push it down hard. Take a too-fast drag of your cigarette.

“That was what you said, Zayne.” You scoff, eyebrow arched up and your voice shifting back at a normal pitch by some miracle. “Not me.”

“That’s true.” The smirk deepens slightly. He’s enjoying that you remember. He is also, you can tell, not going to bring up anything else from that night unless you do, which is both a mercy and a fresh kind of torment. He glances over your shoulder briefly at Caleb, who is now miming something to Tara that involves both arms, and looks back at you. “Are you going to take up on Caleb’s invitation?”

There’s a thing under his voice you can’t quite place. A small lean of interest, the kind that only registers if you’re listening for it. You are listening for it. You are listening so hard it is embarrassing.

You decide, on the spot, to be a problem.

“Are you?” You tilt your head, cigarette balanced between two fingers, your face arranged in something you hope reads as casual.

“I suppose I could.” He doesn’t look away from you as he speaks, and you try to not read too much into it. “I’ll have to think if it’s going to be worth my time attending.”

You can’t quite read what’s behind the small smile he gives you. It’s not the cocky smirk from that night and it’s not the polite half-smile he gives professors. It is some third thing that lives in between, and you find that you want to know what it is.

“You could help me with that.”

You blink up at him, a bit confused. Your boot stops scuffing the gravel. “With what?”

His eyes stay on you even as his frames catch the sunlight when he tilts his head, hazel through the lenses going thoughtful and amused and just a touch wicked. “Making it worth my time.”

You feel that one land low in your stomach. You take a drag of your cigarette mostly to give yourself something to do with your mouth, holding his gaze the way you’d held it in the corridor, lashes heavy and mouth tilting at one corner.

Behind you Tara is telling Caleb he absolutely can’t be in charge of the playlist. Caleb is taking it personally. Neither of them is paying attention to the conversation happening a few steps away.

You lean a fraction closer on the wall, just a little until your knee brushes the denim of his pants where he’s standing close.

“And here I thought,” you say, voice gone low, almost whispery, “you’d already had a pretty good time with me, Zayne.”

He just smirks at you fully now, making your stomach flip hard. “Mm.” His head tilts a fraction. “Then consider this me asking for an encore, sweetheart.”

The last word sits in the air between you like smoke. Sweetheart. So quiet, almost under his breath. You bite your lip on instinct and his eyes drop to your mouth doing it. It’s slow, unhurried, and you watch him watch you and feel the heat climb the back of your neck.

It catches you sideways, the pet name. Not because it’s new. He’d used it that night, low against your ear with his hand at your throat, his mouth a breath from yours. He’d used it like a weapon. You hadn’t expected to hear it here, on a Wednesday afternoon, in broad daylight on the humanities wall, with the sun warm on your face and Caleb three feet away arguing about playlists.

You think distantly that maybe it’s for the best that he isn’t bringing up what happened. He isn’t pretending it didn’t happen, not with that smirk and not with the way he just said encore, but he isn’t putting it on the table either. He’s leaving you room to breathe and do whatever you feel like doing. You suspect he’s also enjoying himself, as well. He is probably enjoying himself a lot. He likely thinks you’re a little thrown, a little uncertain about how to handle whatever this is, and he is content to stand there smirking gently and let you do the work of deciding what to call it.

Fine. You can do that too.

“Are you going to sweet-talk me into coming?” You tilt your head and drop your cigarette to the gravel, grinding the toe of your boot into it. “I didn’t think that was your way of operating, doc-tor.”

You can feel the weight of Tara and Caleb’s presence behind you still tangled up in their own argument, Caleb’s voice carrying about how he absolutely does have taste, so you turn your back fully to them and lean a hip against the wall, arms crossed loose over your chest, your body angled in toward Zayne. Closer. Casually. Like you’re only doing it for the warmth of sun.

His eyes flick once to your crossed arms, once to your mouth, back up.

“Who should sweet-talk you, then?” A small, lazy arch of one brow follows his words, still smirking but it’s got something different to it now, “Caleb?”

His tone is light. The words are light. The thing flashing behind the lenses, brief, is not light at all. His jaw works the smallest fraction, and you catch it because you are watching for everything he does, every little change in his face or tone. You blink up at him, a second of surprised silence pulling between you, and your stomach does something complicated at what he said—or rather implied.

You know that Zayne knows. About Caleb. About you and Caleb, last year, the half-handful of times you stumbled into Caleb’s dorm at 1am and didn’t leave until breakfast. Zayne walked in on one of them. He’d come home from the library a lot earlier than he was supposed to, and Caleb’s door had been a lot more open than it should have been, and you remember the mortified way Zayne had said sorry and shut the door and never mentioned it to you again, not once, not even by raised eyebrow.

You hadn’t thought he cared, though. He hadn’t given you a reason to think he cared. He had been polite-quiet-roommate Zayne, and you had been Caleb’s sometimes-thing, and that had been the entire truth of the situation.

Except. He is not exactly not caring right now. The tiny thing in his face when he said Caleb’s name is not nothing. It is, in fact, a very specific not-nothing.

The thought slips in before you can stop it. Does he like you? Genuinely? Not just enjoying your mess on his hand at one in the morning. Actually likes. Zayne is not, you suspect, the type to sleep around. He didn’t come for you the way men like Caleb come for women, with the easy charm and the half-arrogant offer. He didn’t take you out. He didn’t bring you flowers. He didn’t do any of the considerate things a man like Zayne should, in theory, have done first.

He started instead by letting you flirt him into a corner and then putting you on your knees on your own duvet. Which is, frankly, a lot more honest. And also, frankly, not how you’d imagined Zayne would behave with someone he liked. If he liked. If he—

Your cheeks warm and you break eye contact, looking down at the gravel and huffing out a small laugh, one eyebrow up to hide whatever just happened on your face.

“He can try.”

“But you wouldn’t say yes to him.” His voice has dropped, only just. His eyes flick briefly past your shoulder at Caleb and back to you. “Would you?”

There it is again. That small flash. You like the look on his face. You like it a lot, actually, in a way you don’t have time to interrogate. So you smile at him, casual and friendly on the surface, wicked underneath, and lean in another careful inch closer to him.

“How would you know I’ll say yes to you, then?” You drop your voice to match his. “Don’t you think you’re maybe too confident?”

His eyes move slow over your face. One hand comes out of his pocket. He raises it casually, the way you’d raise a hand to brush a fly off your shoulder, and tucks a loose piece of your hair behind your ear, knuckles grazing soft along the shell of it.

Your face goes warm. Your eyes widen the smallest fraction before you can stop them. You know he notices by the way the corner of his mouth pulls up an inch, looking pleased, like he just confirmed something.

“You could absolutely say no.” His knuckle drags slow down the side of your neck, a single featherlight line, before his hand retreats and goes back into his pocket. The skin where he touched you actually tingles. “But I think you’ll say yes.” He lets the words hang a bit. “You said yes to plenty of things the last time, didn’t you?”

You feel your knees do something embarrassing. You hope they won’t give up on you.

You blush, there’s no doubt to it. You scoff softly to cover for it, looking down at the gravel path, the toe of your boot scuffing in a small careful circle. You try very hard to keep it casual. Casual is rapidly becoming a theoretical concept between you two. You can smell his cologne now from this distance, it is the same one from that night, clean and dark and a little smoky, and the fact that he smells exactly like he did with his face against your neck in the back of an Uber is, frankly, a problem you can’t seem to manage to escape.

“Those were different circumstances.” You drag your eyes back up to his.

His pupils dilate just slightly behind the lenses. You see it. You are absolutely certain you see it. Whatever flashback hit you about thirty seconds ago has clearly just hit him too, and the small synchronized hit of it sits between you for a second.

You clear your throat gently and tilt your head. “Besides. Why do you want me to come?”

He hums. A small, considering sound before the tension in his jaw eases off, replaced by something softer and a touch curious.

“I like this band. And I think you’ll find it interesting, too.”

He says it plainly. No smirk in it this time. No double meaning hiding under the words. He says it like he actually means it, like he has thought about whether you would like the band and concluded that you would, and the simple sincerity of it catches you flat in the chest.

You had been bracing for something flirty. You had been bracing for because I want to get you alone again or because I haven’t finished what I started. You had not been bracing for I like this band and I think you will too, which is, somehow, worse for your composure. You had even, you realise with small humiliation, been quietly hoping he would say something close to I want to take you out.

He didn’t. He said he likes the band.

“Is that really why?”

“Part of it, yes.” There’s a small smile, almost soft. Then his hand comes out of his pocket again and he pulls his phone out, unlocks it with a thumb without looking at it, and holds it out to you, screen open on the contacts app, a blank new entry already waiting. “Give me your number.”

You look at the phone. Then at him. Then at the phone again. Your cheeks warm in a way you do not have permission to allow.

“That’s—” You laugh breathy, taking the phone but not yet typing. “You’re so straightforward, Zayne.”

“Would you like me not to be?” His voice has gone honey-low. His head tilts, the lenses catching the sun once again, making his beautiful eyes stand out even more. “We can speak in riddles all you want, but we both know you’d rather me be straightforward with what I want.” A small pause follows his words, letting them land on you. “Don’t you?”

You bite your lip.

The flashback is immediate and unkind. I’ll only fuck you sober. I want to make discoveries of my own. Was it the tattoos, darling? Cum, beautiful girl. Every quiet, exact, straightforward thing he’d said with his mouth against your ear comes back at once, and your stomach drops about an inch.

You fidget with the phone in your hand more out of nerves than anything. You don’t type yet. You smirk up at him instead, tilting your head, trying to pin him in place with your eyes alone, trying to read something past the calm hazel and the silver of his glasses.

“And what do you want?” Your voice is quiet, inquiring. “Besides my number.”

His mouth pulls up at one corner slowly, followed by the same calm cadence. “Are you sober enough to comprehend what I want, even if I say it?”

Your throat goes dry.

Heat climbs the sides of your neck, sharp and immediate, because there it is, exactly the same low tone he’d used over you in your lamplit dorm, exactly the same patient assumption that you can take what he says if he says it. He sees the color in your face. The corner of his mouth pulls a fraction higher. He is, you suspect, very pleased with himself at managing to make you nervous like this.

Three feet away, Caleb is still arguing about something. Tara is laughing too loud at another thing. Neither of them is paying attention to the quiet conversation happening on the other half of the wall, and you’re very grateful for that, because you’re pretty sure you’re this close to embarrassing yourself in front of Zayne in broad daylight.

You let out a small breath, airlight. “Yeah.”

“I want a lot of things.” His eyes hold yours. They do not blink. “Most of them are best spoken when it’s just the two of us. I think you’ll agree.” He glances down at the phone still in your hand. “Your number?”

You hold his gaze one more second. You let him wait for it. You let him see you decide to give it to him, lashes low, the smirk at the corner of your own mouth pulling up slightly before you finally look down at the screen.

You type the digits in. You take your time. You add a single small detail at the top of the contact field, just because you can, and you turn the phone around to hand it back to him.

He glances down at it. Where the name should go, you have typed Sweetheart.

His eyes lift back to yours. The smirk reaches his eyes properly this time, hazel warm and bright behind the lenses. He doesn’t change it. He just clicks save, slides the phone into his back pocket, and tilts his head toward the gravel path.

“Friday, then.”

“Friday,” you echo.

Behind you, Caleb finally clocks that you’ve gone quiet over here and shouts something about how he hopes you two are sorting out the carpool situation, which Tara immediately ruins by snorting.

Zayne doesn’t look away from you when he answers him. “We are.”

The walk back to the dorms is sunny in a way that feels personal, after all that happened, and Tara is bouncing beside you with like a girl who has been forcibly removed from a gossip conversation mid-sentence and is about to make it your problem.

You make it three paving stones from the wall before she explodes.

“You were flirting so hard with him!” Her eyes are bright. Her elbow is back in your ribs, nudging you excitedly as she is half a step away from skipping. “So hard. So hard, babe!”

“I wasn’t.” You bump her elbow off you casually, trying to not get more attention on yourself from passerby students. “We were just talking about the party and the band.”

“Sure you were, girl.” Tara’s voice drops into the sarcastic yet fond range that you have known since you were both nineteen. “What, does he want to scream the lyrics with you front row? Please.”

“Zayne’s not the type to do that.”

“Of course he’s not.” she rolls her eyes, amused, “So. What did you guys talk about?”

“I told you, the party.” You glance at her sideways, then add it quieter, like maybe quiet will smuggle it past her radar. “He just asked if I was coming and asked for my number.”

It does not smuggle past her radar.

Tara stops dead in the middle of the path. A boy with a long board has to swerve around her. She doesn’t notice. Her hand has come up to grab your forearm and her eyes have gone, predictably, the exact size and shape you’d been bracing for.

“Zayne Li asked for your number? Just like that?”

She is already walking again, already dragging you by the arm toward the dorm entrance, already vibrating with what is, by Tara’s standards, restraint.

“Damn girl, what did you do to him that night? Did you drag him into the pub toilet and suck—”

“Tara!”

Your hand goes over her mouth on instinct, both of you stumbling through the dorm door at the same time, you mortified and her chuckling into your palm. The girl from 14A is probably at the pigeonholes and you can imagine her ears physically swivel in your direction. You give her a smile that would crack glass. Tara waves at her with her eyebrows.

You wait until you’re halfway up the stairwell before you take your hand off her face and glare.

“Could you maybe whisper?!”

“Could I maybe whisper?! Could I maybe whisper.” she scoffs, playfully dramatic, “You walk in here telling me Zayne Li voluntarily put his phone in your hand and I’m supposed to whisper.” Tara puts her hand on her chest. “I’m being restrained, considering I have soo many unanswered questions!”

“This is restrained?” you deadpan.

“This is heroically restrained.” She nudges your shoulder, gentler now, and the smirk softens at the corners. “Okay, alright. I’ll drop it. Just because I think you’ll explode if I push you for any more details.”

The smirk says she knows that your face is, in fact, very red.

It is. You can feel it. The image she planted on the pavement has lodged itself somewhere unhelpful in your brain and won’t let go, because of course it won’t, because some quiet part of you that has been thinking about Zayne for two weeks straight is now sitting up and paying attention.

You did want to. You remember it clearly enough, the way you’d tugged at his belt with your fingers and pleaded with him to let you at least get your mouth on him, and you remember the small, considering tilt of his head when he’d said how about you let me have a taste instead. You hadn’t got to. You had wanted to. You had wanted, very badly, to know what he looked like when he wasn’t the one in control of the situation.

You know yourself with your mouth. You know what you can do with it. Caleb used to lose vocabulary entirely when you went down on him, the kind of dissolving that has nothing to do with technique and everything to do with confidence, and you know that if you got Zayne in your mouth, you could, at the very least, make a small chip in that mild, hazel-eyed composure of his.

The thought is sitting low and warm in your stomach by the time you’ve climbed the second flight of stairs. You shove it down. You can feel a flush trying to climb back up your neck and you absolutely don’t have the energy to explain it to Tara.

You scoff instead and shoulder the door to your dorm room open with your hip. “Gee. Thanks.”

“Welcome.” Tara flops face-first onto your bed, which is, mercifully, fully made and free of incriminating duvet creases since you stripped and washed everything that Saturday morning. She rolls over and stares at the ceiling. “So are you going with him, then?”

You drop your bag by the desk and sit down on the edge of the mattress, pulling one knee up under you. You can still feel the feeling of his knuckle on the side of your neck.

“I’m not sure.” You fidget with the hem of your hoodie sleeve. “Maybe it’s best if we all go together or just meet them there?” you sigh, unsure. “It’s not like he asked me on a date or anything. So I shouldn’t take it as that, right?”

Tara props herself up on an elbow. The teasing has dimmed a little, replaced by something gentler. This is Tara’s actual superpower. The flip from menace to friend, without warning.

“Well. Do you want it to be a date?”

You don’t answer immediately, because you’re not even sure of the answer. You pick at a loose thread on your sleeve.

“Zayne looks like the type to take you out to dinner at a fancy yet modest restaurant,” Tara continues, watching your face. “Or coffee for a first date. Not a party in an underground pub. And not with other friends there. Right?”

She is probably right. She is annoyingly often right. But the thing about Zayne is that everything you would have said about him three weeks ago has been gently set on fire by what you now know about him, and you’re not sure what assumptions are even still standing.

“I don’t know.” You bite your lip. “Maybe?” You shrug, smaller. “It’s not like I know him or anything. Clearly there are sides to the quiet nerd, soon-to-be doctor Zayne Li.”

“True.” Tara reaches over and tugs your sleeve. “Anyway. Since he is clearly, at the very least, attracted to you, I think things are definitely going to lead somewhere, right? And plus—” she grins, the proud playful one, the one you have learned to fear, “—when have you ever waited for a guy to ask you out on a date? From what I can remember, you basically dragged Xavier by the hoodie out on a date with you—”

“Okay, Tara!” You point at her with the same energy you’d point at a small loud animal. “Thanks for the reminder.”

Xavier. You hadn’t thought about him in months. Astrophysics student . Silver-blonde hair, the kind that almost looked white in the right light. Blue eyes you could absolutely drown in if he ever decided to actually look at you for longer than a sentence. Quiet. Reserved. The athletic-lean type who wore the same three hoodies on rotation and could explain something about gravitational waves with the soft conviction of a person who had thought about it more than was healthy. You’d gone out twice. Maybe three times, if memory serves you right. He’d been sweet, considerate, completely allergic to making the first move, and you had eventually given up on the chase because being the one who always pushed had started to feel exhausting.

You clear your throat and bring yourself back.

“But Xavier was different. Zayne is…” You trail off. You don’t know how to finish the sentence, so you don’t. You clear your throat again, more decisively. “He is not the type to just wait for the woman to ask him out. And the whole campus knows girls have tried throwing themselves at him. He refused all of them politely.” You squint a little at the memories, the parade of girls from your shared lecture last semester who had hovered too long at his desk, who had asked him to study together under the thinnest possible pretenses, every single one of them sent away with the mild half-smile and a polite no. You frown a little, suddenly less sure of your own theory than you were a sentence ago. “But. Yeah. I guess you’re right anyway. There’s definitely attraction there.”

“I KNEW it!” Tara grabs your shin through your jeans like she’s just been awarded a small prize. “I knew. I called it. I want it on the record that I called it!”

“Tara—” You pinch the bridge of your nose.

“Something did happen!” She is bouncing on the mattress now, clearly way too excited of your slip-up, “C’mon, why won’t you spill some juicy details to your best friend?!” She whines, and it is genuinely both endearing and the worst. You can already see the way she’s going to make this huge in her head, the way she’s going to text you about it three times a day for the next month, the way she is absolutely incapable of being chill about anything good that happens to you. “Did you at least kiss? Make out? Besides leaving marks all over your necks—”

“Stop talking!” Your hand is back over her mouth.

She raises her eyebrows at you over the top of your palm. Patient. Triumphant. She knows you’re going to cave. She has known you for too many years for you to win this round.

You sigh and drop your hand. You give up. “Fine. Yeah. Some things happened… But we didn’t kiss.”

“Wha—” Her face goes blank for a full second, the gears visibly turning in her head. Then her eyes go enormous and her voice goes up an entire octave. “Did you guys FUCK—?!”

“No!” You yelp it, wincing, both your hands flying up. “No, no—we just— He just dropped me to the dorm and stayed for a while…”

Tara’s hand clamps over her own mouth this time. Her eyes are saucers. “Did we interrupt you?!”

“No!” You laugh, a little embarrassed, dragging your pillow off the head of the bed and into your lap. “We had already… uh… finished by the time you and Simone came back.”

You bury your face in the pillow. You can feel the heat of your own cheeks through the cotton. You peek one eye out over the top of it at Tara, sly and small and a little smug despite yourself.

“Don’t tell Simone any of it.”

Tara is, briefly, the quietest she has been all afternoon. Then she slowly mouths the word finished at the ceiling like it is the most fascinating word in the language.

“Oh my god.” It comes out awed. “You finished. As in—plural. As in—” Her eyes snap back to your face, narrowing. “Babe. How many—”

“Tara.”

“How. Many.”

You hug the pillow tighter to your chest. You consider lying. You consider, briefly, climbing out the window. You consider, even more briefly, telling her the truth in full.

You compromise.

You hold up two fingers behind the line of the pillow. Tara screams into her own hands.

“I’m going to die,” she hisses through her fingers. “I’m going to die in this room. You killed me. Zayne Li killed me. I want it on my gravestone.”

“You promised you’d drop it.”

“I lied. I lied to you. I’m a liar. Two—” She cuts herself off, both hands still pressed to her face, eyes squeezed shut like she’s trying to physically contain the next sentence. She fails. “Was it good?? Don’t answer. I know it was good. Your face is answering for you. Quiet Zayne. Two. Oh, I have to lie down.”

“You are lying down.” you roll your eyes, smiling softly.

“I have to lie down harder.”

She flops dramatically fully flat onto your duvet, one forearm flung across her eyes. You laugh into your pillow, properly this time, the embarrassed kind that has actual relief in it, because some small tight thing you’ve been carrying around in your chest for two weeks has, in saying even that much out loud, loosened a notch.

After a moment, Tara peeks one eye out from under her arm. “…Just one more question.”

“No.”

“Just one.”

“No, Tara.”

“Fine!” She closes her eyes again. There’s a brief pause, and then, in the softest, most innocent voice she has ever used in her life, she lets the words leave, “…Is he good with his hands?”

You hit her with the pillow. She is wheezing before it even lands.

(credits for the Art go to Raoni - @/raonnni on X)

.ᐟ✧ translations or reposts of my work on tumblr, ao3, or other sites ARE NOT permitted. please do not ask. do not reuse my blogpost headers, dividers, or layouts. these are original designs of my own. thank you!

taglist: @princesspeachi3, @feral-espresso-boba , @syluslittlecrows, @asiaticapple, @youkoden, @w0ndert1nk, @deadlyskepticalnightmare, @2affectionate4z, @daisybbyxx, @kokoa21, @aiycnlyme, @maescorners, @embetie, @fiyoripim, @gardenialily, @not-oikawa, @jadeloverxd, @remnantsofgildedcages, @aelinv0gue, @darien-hamilton23, @clennel, @blackhearteyes999, @aliceinthemadness, @cathedralofaudra, @darebearinlads, @amerti, @seris-the-amious, @fallen-herondales, @calebs-apple

🔗 - comment to be added to the taglist

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Queen Of Linkon City