What, like it's hard? | Dean Di Laurentis
summary: Dean Dilaurentis has been the only person in your class who comes close to your grade. You've been pretending not to notice him for three months. Then a professor pairs you together for a semester project, and suddenly you have no choice but to sit very close to him in a library for five weeks and figure out what to do about that.
notes: hii i'm back!! i really hope you guys enjoy this one as much as i enjoyed writing it. this came to mind because i'm obsessed with legally blonde the musical thanks to the show, and then obviously i had to rewatch the movie immediately. i read the dean book years ago so i genuinely didn't remember the plot, so for all intents and purposes let's just agree that he went to law school and moved on. also first time writing smut, so i think it's kind of mid, but i did my best 😭 also the legal cases i mention might not be entirely accurate since i am not a lawyer, but i do feel very comfortable using legal jargon in everyday life. thank you so much for reading and please let me know what you think 🤍
warnings: swearing, kind of academic rivals to lovers, library shenanigans, one very unhappy night librarian, legally blonde references (many), dean is a menace, reader is a menace back, sexual tension with footnotes, and SMUT (making out, oral f!receiving, unprotected piv, light dirty talk, "good girl", dean calls you baby and honey a lot) 18+ only please, mdni.
word count: 11.8k
For the past four years, you had spent countless moments thinking about these final months of college.
Truthfully, college had always felt like a dream, a dream that for a long time had seemed impossible and far away, so when the acceptance letter arrived all those years ago, you had been ecstatic in the disbelieving way of someone who had wanted something so long they had stopped being sure they deserved it. What nobody told you was that dreams came with deadlines, sleepless nights, and enough stress to make your eye twitch on a random afternoon for no particular reason.
The dream of becoming a lawyer had started when you were young. It hadn't started glamorously, no single defining moment, no courtroom drama that changed everything. Although you really did have a knack for binge-watching shows like How to Get Away with Murder and Suits. But the real want had started with the slow, accumulating understanding that the world was not fair, and that fairness was something you had to build rather than wait for, and that the people who built it tended to know the rules better than everyone else. You had decided, young and furious, that you were going to know the rules.
Now, years later, it finally felt within reach.
Last summer you had taken the LSAT. When the score came back — 176 — you had screamed so loudly your roommate came running from the other room convinced something had happened. Something had happened. Everything had happened. Applying to Harvard had been a no-brainer after that, the natural conclusion of four years of work that had never once felt like anything other than work. To say it had all been a dream would be a lie. You had earned every grade, every internship, every recommendation letter. Every achievement had come attached to long nights and sacrificed weekends and more cups of coffee than you were prepared to account for.
Still, every now and then, you allowed yourself a moment to appreciate how far you had come.
Then you remembered the Harvard interview scheduled in just a few weeks, and the knot in your stomach returned immediately. It lived there, that knot had been living there for months, through the application and the waiting and the acceptance, through every good thing that should have dissolved it and didn't. You had stopped expecting it to go away. You had just learned to work around it.
What if you stumbled over your words? What if they asked something you couldn't answer? What if four years of work came down to one bad afternoon?
Which was exactly why Professor Whitaker's announcement nearly made you lose your mind.
The second she wrote Semester Project across the whiteboard, a collective groan spread through the lecture hall. Over the next month, students would work in pairs to complete a research project on the evolution of constitutional rights in the United States , a project worth a significant portion of the final grade.
At any other point in your college career, that would have been merely annoying.
Right now it felt catastrophic.
You could not afford for your GPA to slip. Not when Harvard was finally within reach. Not when everything you had worked for was balanced on the edge of these last few months. And that meant you absolutely could not get stuck with a partner who didn't care like a jock who only cared about a sport, someone who would contribute three bullet points to a shared document at the eleventh hour and disappear for six weeks while your entire future quietly collapsed.
The thought alone made you grimace.
So as Professor Whitaker reached for her roster and began assigning partners, you found yourself doing something you almost never did.
Praying.
"The class will be sorted according to performance on the most recent exam," Professor Whitaker announced, scanning the room over her glasses. "That way the workload stays balanced and the pairing is fair for everyone."
A few students groaned.
You sat a little straighter.
Actually, that wasn't terrible. At least now there was a reasonable chance your partner wouldn't be dead weight. You had carried enough dead weight in your academic career to last a lifetime and you were done with it.
Professor Whitaker called your name first. You looked up from your notebook on instinct, even though she already knew exactly where you were. You hated change. You liked knowing where everything was. You liked routines, systems, the quiet reliability of things being where you left them.
More importantly, you liked being good at things.
Which was why hearing that your partner would be someone on your level was oddly comforting. Most of your life had been spent balancing on a very thin line between confidence and crippling self-doubt. On good days, you knew you were intelligent. On bad days, you were convinced everyone else was smarter and better than you. The trick was not letting either version get too loud.
Professor Whitaker glanced down at her roster.
The next five seconds would remain engraved in your frontal lobe for at least thirty years.
"Dean DiLaurentis."
Silence.
Jesus H. Christ.
Your head snapped up. Not because you needed to find him. You already knew exactly where he was sitting. You always knew where he was sitting, a fact you had never examined too closely and were not going to start examining now.
Middle of the sixth row. Today he was wearing a green cardigan over a white t-shirt, looking far too comfortable for someone who had just become the source of your newest academic crisis. He was mid-conversation with Beau Maxwell when his name was called, laughing at something, completely unaware that your entire carefully managed semester had just been handed to him without his consent or yours.
Dean turned around.
Then he smiled.
That smile. The one that belonged on toothpaste advertisements and nowhere else, the smile of someone who had never once in his life worried about whether he was welcome somewhere. It was the kind of smile that assumed the answer before the question had been asked, and it had always, privately, made you want to argue with it.
His eyes found yours immediately.
The realization landed half a second later, oh, you're my partner, and his grin widened, and then, because apparently the universe had a sense of humor that you had never personally found funny:
He winked.
He actually winked.
You stared back at him with the expression of someone who had just been personally wronged by the laws of probability.
You knew Dean. Not personally, god forbid. But you knew of him, the way everyone knew of him. Hockey player. Trust fund. Chronic flirt. The kind of person who walked into a room and somehow became the room. Loud and charming and surrounded by people at all times, the social gravity of someone who had never once had to earn a seat at the table.
Meanwhile, you considered making eye contact with strangers a form of cardio.
This could not be right. There had to be a mistake. How could Dean DiLaurentis possibly have a grade comparable to yours?
You spent your Friday nights in the library. You color-coded your notes by subject, by date, by relevance. You had cried over constitutional law, like actual tears, in the bathroom of the third floor study room, alone at eleven pm because that was what it cost and you had paid it without complaint.
Dean spent his weekends at hockey games and parties.
The math simply wasn't mathing.
Unless.
Oh.
Oh, god.
He was sleeping with the TA.
That had to be it. Everything suddenly made horrifying, perfect sense. The TA was a graduate student from somewhere in the Midwest who had spoken to you exactly three times all semester, and every single interaction had felt like she was being held at gunpoint. If Dean was somehow managing to maintain a functional relationship with her —
Honestly? He deserved the extra credit for that alone.
Three months earlier, it had started.
Professor Whitaker had a specific way of running discussion that you had privately categorized as controlled chaos. She threw a question into the room and stepped back and let whoever was going to talk, talk, with the quiet authority of someone who already knew what she thought and was waiting to see if anyone else did. The lecture hall always felt different during these sessions. Bigger somehow, the overhead lights slightly too bright, the charged quality of a room full of people deciding whether to say the thing they were thinking.
You almost always said the thing you were thinking.
Today the question was about Shelley v. Kraemer.
You had opinions about Shelley v. Kraemer.
"The court got it right," you said, when Whitaker's gaze landed on you. "State enforcement of a racially restrictive covenant is state action. The fourteenth amendment doesn't care that the covenant itself was private — the moment a court steps in to enforce it, the state is complicit. You can't separate the two."
Whitaker nodded — the small, noncommittal nod that meant continue or let someone else.
"I'd push back on that a little."
You turned.
Dean had his pen between two fingers, not quite raised, the posture of someone making a point rather than asking permission. He was looking at Whitaker, not at you, which was somehow more irritating than if he had been looking at you directly. Like the argument was with the room rather than with you specifically. Like you were incidental.
"The ruling is right," he said, "but the reasoning has a ceiling. If state enforcement equals state action, you've created a framework that depends entirely on whether someone decides to litigate. The protection isn't structural, it's reactive. It only exists if someone can afford to fight for it."
The room was quiet for a moment.
You became aware, distantly, that your jaw had tightened.
"That's not a flaw in the ruling," you said. "That's a flaw in the system the ruling exists inside of."
"Sure." Dean looked at you then, for the first time. His eyes were steady, interested in a way that wasn't performative. "But you're writing a decision, not a philosophy paper. The decision has to function in the system it's handed to."
"So your position is that the court should have ruled differently because the system might not implement it correctly."
"My position is that a protection that requires money and access to activate isn't really a protection." He said it evenly, without heat. "I thought that would be something you'd agree with."
The last sentence landed differently than the rest.
Not unkind. Not pointed exactly. Just specific, in a way that implied he had thought about what you would and wouldn't agree with, which was a thing he should not have been thinking about. Which meant he had been paying attention quietly and consistently.
Whitaker moved on.
You looked back at your notes and wrote nothing for the remainder of class. Outside the lecture hall windows the sky was the flat white of a November afternoon, and you sat with the particular discomfort of someone who had just been surprised by a person they had already decided to understand.
That was when it had started. Which meant that three months later, sitting in the lecture hall watching him smile at you like you were a problem he was looking forward to solving, you did not have the excuse of not knowing better.
The lecture hall emptied in a slow, shuffling wave that you had no patience for.
You were already packing your bag when you heard him.
"So." Dean dropped into the empty seat beside yours with the casual confidence of someone who had never once been unwelcome anywhere. He turned to face you, one arm resting on the back of the chair, bringing with him the faint smell of something clean, something woody, or the cold outside air. "Partners."
"Observant," you said, without looking up from your notebook.
He made a small sound, not quite a laugh, not quite not one. You could feel him watching you with that specific brand of unhurried attention that probably worked on most people and was currently working on you in ways you were categorically refusing to acknowledge.
"We should exchange numbers," he said. "Figure out when we can meet."
"I have time Thursday afternoon." You zipped your bag closed. "After three."
"Thursday I've got practice until five." He pulled out his phone, apparently unbothered. "What about evenings?"
"Tuesdays and Thursdays I tutor until nine." You finally looked at him. "Weekends I pick up extra sessions when I can."
Something shifted in his expression, brief, almost imperceptible. Not pity. Something more like recalibration, the specific adjustment of someone updating a model they had been working from.
You watched him process it and kept your face completely neutral, the way you always did when people did the math on your schedule and realized there was no give in it, no free afternoon that existed just for the sake of existing. You didn't need him to feel bad about it. You just needed him to understand that his time was not the only time being managed here.
"Okay," Dean said, and to his credit, he didn't make it weird. "Wednesday? I'm free after two."
"I have a session at two."
"After three, then."
You considered this. "Three. Library. Third floor."
"Done." He held out his hand for your phone with the easy expectation of someone who had never once been told no and somehow, inexplicably, made that feel more like charm than arrogance.
You looked at his hand for exactly one beat longer than necessary.
Then you unlocked your phone and placed it in his palm, your fingers brushing his warm hand briefly.
"Don't put anything weird in my contacts," you said.
Dean smiled and typed with the focused, two-thumbed efficiency of someone taking the instruction very seriously.
He handed it back.
You looked down.
Dean DiLaurentis 🏒 (ur partner deal with it)
You stared at it for a long moment.
"Truly," you said, "a legal mind."
He laughed then , a real one, surprised out of him, and stood to leave, shouldering his bag. He paused at the end of the row and looked back at you with the expression of someone who was about to say something and had decided against it.
"Wednesday, then."
"Wednesday," you confirmed, already looking back at your notes.
You did not watch him go.
You listened to his footsteps until you couldn't anymore and then looked back at your notebook and found the page completely blank.
By the time Wednesday rolled around, you had done the mental gymnastics of calculating exactly how much this project was going to cost you. Not much, you had decided. You were already at maximum stress capacity between the Harvard interview and the end of semester closing in, so there was simply no room left for anything Dean DiLaurentis-related to take up residence.
This was the conclusion you had reached.
You woke up early anyway, restless, and got ready with the focused efficiency of someone who was absolutely not anxious about a study session. In the kitchen, Elisa was at the stove, hair still in a braid from the night before, doing something that smelled like butter and brown sugar.
"Morning, sugar plum." She turned and pointed her spatula in your direction. "Do you want to have breakfast with me?"
Elisa was the easiest person you had ever lived with, which was not something you said lightly. You had moved into her house sophomore year knowing no one and she had made you feel like you had been there the whole time. Wednesdays were her day off no classes, no obligations, and she spent them cooking elaborate things and playing at domesticity in a way that you found deeply comforting. She called them the Tradwife Wednesdays, in a joking manner.
"I can't, I have a class I can't miss." You grabbed your bag from the hook by the door. "Sorry."
"That's okay." She stirred something. "Are you coming back for lunch? I'm trying a new caesar salad recipe I found on TikTok. Caesar 2.0."
"I can't do lunch either. I have a study session at noon."
"Bring your partner. We can all have caesar salad 2.0."
"My partner is —" you paused, already regretting what you were about to say — "Dean DiLaurentis."
Elisa put down the spatula.
"Shut up."
"I'm not going to —"
"No way. You hate him."
"I don't hate him."
"Despise, then."
"Not even that." You pulled on your jacket. "I don't care about him at all. He just exists in the same world as me."
"Sure," Elisa said, in the tone she used when she was humoring you. She picked up the spatula again. "Ask him if he remembers our little trip in the Mystery Machine."
"Goodbye, Elisa."
"Caesar salad is on the table if you change your —"
You closed the door.
session one
He was already there when you arrived.
That was the first thing that threw you off, small and inconvenient, the kind of detail that shouldn't matter and did anyway. Dean DiLaurentis, sitting at the table you had specifically chosen because it was tucked into the back corner of the third floor, away from foot traffic and group study noise and every possible social distraction. You had chosen it because it was your table, the one you came to when you needed to actually work, claimed over three years of afternoons and late nights. The carpet near the window had a worn patch from your chair. You knew which overhead light buzzed slightly and had learned to tune it out.
He was sitting in your chair.
He had a coffee on each side of the table.
Two coffees.
You stopped.
"I didn't know your order," he said, not looking up. "So I got you black. You seem like a black coffee person."
You were a black coffee person.
You sat down without commenting on it and pulled out your laptop.
"I started an outline," Dean said. "Sent it to your email."
You opened it without responding. It was actually structured. Clean headers, logical progression. You stared at it for a moment longer than you intended, turning it over, looking for the flaw. There wasn't one.
"You cited Marbury v. Madison in the intro," you said.
"It's foundational."
"It's also the first thing every professor expects to see. It makes us look like we opened the textbook once and called it a day."
He looked up then. "So where would you put it?"
"Section three. After we've established the framework."
Dean looked at the outline. Then back at you. "...Yeah, okay."
You pulled it up on your own screen and started restructuring. He watched for a second, then turned back to his own laptop without making it a thing, and something about that: the absence of wounded ego, the lack of argument, the simple yeah, okay, was quietly unexpected.
You worked in silence for a while. A real silence, the functional kind, punctuated only by typing and the occasional ambient noise of the floor around you, someone whispering two tables over, the elevator arriving and departing, the hush of a library in the afternoon when the day outside has gone grey.
At some point he shifted in his seat and his foot knocked against yours under the table. He pulled it back immediately, said a distracted sorry without looking up, and kept typing.
You looked back at your screen.
Ten minutes later it happened again his foot finding yours under the table, settling against it with the absent, unthinking quality of someone who wasn't paying attention to their own body. This time he didn't notice. Or didn't move. You couldn't tell which.
You didn't move either.
You looked at your screen and read the same sentence four times and told yourself it was nothing, the table was small, it meant nothing at all.
His ankle was warm against yours for the rest of the session.
An hour passed, and then another. The coffee went cold. The light through the window shifted from afternoon grey to early evening grey, and you were deep enough in the due process section that you had stopped noticing either.
"Take a break," Dean said, without looking up.
"I don't need a break."
"You've reread that page four times."
You looked up. He was still looking at his notes, which meant he had been paying attention to you without appearing to pay attention to you, which was somehow worse than if he had just been watching you openly.
You closed the case study.
"Fine," you said. "Break."
Dean leaned back in his chair all the way back, with the easy, unhurried comfort of someone who had never had to fight for a seat at any table he wanted to sit at. You had noticed that about him early, the specific posture of someone for whom things had always been available, every room an environment that had been pre-adjusted to suit him. It was the kind of thing that was difficult not to notice when you had spent your entire life doing the opposite.
"You know," you said, mostly because the silence was starting to feel companionable in a way you weren't ready for, "you hooked up with a friend of mine once."
Dean looked up. Something shifted in his expression mild interest, maybe the faintest trace of wariness. "Oh really."
"Daphne."
A pause. He turned the name over, and you watched the moment he didn't find it.
"I don't remember," he said.
"She was dressed as Daphne for Halloween. You were, surprisingly, dressed as Fred."
Something cleared in his expression. "Halloween two years ago?"
"That would be the one."
He considered this with the equanimity of someone who had made peace with a certain kind of personal history. "Can I ask why you're bringing this up?"
"No particular reason." You picked up your cold coffee. "Can you even remember her name?"
"I just said I couldn't."
"Right." You set the coffee back down. "Well. For the record."
Dean looked at you for a moment with the expression you were already starting to recognize the one that meant he was deciding whether to say the thing he was thinking. He usually said it.
"You know," he said, "you hooked up with a friend of mine too."
You kept your expression very neutral. "Did I."
"Garrett."
"We made out at a party freshman year," you said, with the patience of someone correcting a factual error. "Did he tell you we hooked up?"
"He didn't say anything." Dean's mouth curved slightly. "I saw you two leaving and made an assumption."
"A wrong one."
"Clearly." He tilted his head. "So. Has Daphne said anything? About her experience."
You considered the question with the gravity it deserved.
"She tried to tell me," you said. "I didn't want to hear it."
"So she didn't give a great review."
"Ravishing," you said pleasantly. "It almost made me want to sleep with you too." You paused. "But then I remembered I have something called self-respect."
Dean laughed a real one, sudden and unguarded. It was, you noted with some irritation, a genuinely good laugh. Warm and surprised, the laugh of someone who had not seen it coming and was delighted by that fact. The kind of laugh that made you want to have caused it again.
"That's funny," he said.
"I know."
He was still smiling when he looked back down at his notes. You looked back at your case study. The library settled back into its particular silence the low buzz of the overhead light, the distant elevator, thirty people pretending they weren't exhausted but something had shifted in the quality of it. Imperceptibly, the way temperature changes in a room before anyone acknowledges it's warmer.
You didn't say anything about it.
Neither did he.
Twenty minutes later he slid his notes across the table, pointing out something you had missed without making it feel like a correction. You leaned in to look without thinking about leaning in and then you were close, closer than you had been all session, his shoulder warm against yours, and you could see the slight curl of his handwriting on the page and the way his finger traced the line he was pointing to, and you became aware very suddenly of his hands. How big they were. How deliberate.
You had not thought about his hands before. Or you had thought about them in passing and moved on. But up close, right now, pointing at a citation on a page they were careful and unhurried, the kind that did things with attention.
You looked at the citation.
"You're right," you said. "Good catch."
He glanced at you sideways, briefly, with that expression.
You both looked back at the page.
Neither of you moved away.
It was near the end of the session when it happened. You were flagging sources, half your attention on the screen, the room around you reduced to the low hum of concentration, when Dean said, mostly to himself, still reading:
"You always sit in the same seat."
You glanced up. "What?"
He seemed to catch himself, just barely, a slight tensing around his jaw. "In Whitaker's class. Third row, right side, second from the aisle. Every lecture."
The air shifted in a way that was difficult to name. Outside the library window the sky had gone fully dark, the glass reflecting the room back at you, two people at a table, closer than they had been three hours ago, the space between them negotiated down to nothing without either of them signing off on it.
"I like consistency," you said, after a beat.
"Yeah." He looked back at his screen. Something in his jaw had gone slightly careful. "I know."
I know.
Two words. Completely neutral on the surface and yet carrying the specific weight of something that had not been meant to be said out loud. Not an admission exactly. More like a door opened a half-inch before he caught it and eased it shut , slowly enough that you both knew it had moved.
You looked at him for a moment.
He did not look back up.
"We should finish the first amendment section," you said.
"Yeah," Dean said. "Probably."
You both looked at your screens.
Neither of you said anything else about it.
You packed up at eight-fifteen, twenty minutes later than planned. The third floor was empty by then, the overhead lights on their late setting. You walked to the elevator in a silence that had become, somewhere in the last six hours, a different kind of silence entirely, not neutral, not loaded, just inhabited.
In the elevator he stood beside you with his shoulder against yours, the same way it had been at the table, and neither of you shifted. The floor numbers climbed down. You looked straight ahead.
His ankle had been warm against yours for three hours and you had not moved away once.
You filed that under the place where you kept everything you weren't ready to examine yet.
session two
The second study session had started with considerably less hostility than the first, which you were choosing not to read into.
It was late afternoon again, the library emptying out around you as people made the reasonable decision to leave, and you and Dean had been working for three hours straight with the focused efficiency of two people who were both too competitive to be the first to suggest stopping. The case briefs were spread across the table in a system that was half yours and half his and somehow, irritatingly, better than either would have been alone. Your color-coded tabs and his margin notes. Your precision and his instinct for where an argument wanted to go.
You had noticed that yesterday too. Filed it away.
What you had not filed away or had tried to and failed was the moment an hour into the session when he had reached across you to grab a case brief from your side of the table without asking, and his arm had crossed in front of you close enough that you felt the warmth of it before it was gone. He hadn't noticed. He had grabbed the brief and gone back to his side of the table and kept reading, completely unaware.
You had read the same paragraph for twelve minutes after that.
"Okay," Dean said, dropping his pen and leaning back. "Break."
"We just had a break."
"That was an hour ago."
You looked at the time. It had been an hour and twenty minutes, which meant you had lost track of time, which meant you had been absorbed enough in the work — in the conversation around the work, the back and forth of it, the way he argued a point and actually listened when you argued back — that the time had disappeared without asking permission.
You put your pen down.
"Fine," you said. "Break."
Dean stretched his arms above his head with the unselfconscious ease of someone completely comfortable in his own body, the cardigan riding up slightly, a sliver of skin at his waist, the line of his shoulders, the way his head fell back for a moment, which you observed in a purely detached and analytical capacity and then looked at the ceiling.
"So," he said. "Harvard Law."
"What about it."
"That's the goal?"
"That's the goal," you confirmed.
He nodded slowly, with an expression that was hard to read. Then, in a voice of complete casual confidence: "What, like it's hard?"
You turned to look at him.
He was already smiling.
"That's the second time today," you said, "that you have made a Legally Blonde reference."
"Is it?"
"You quoted it earlier when I said the admissions rate was three percent."
"I don't remember that."
"Dean."
"It's a great film."
You looked at him for a moment. "Is it your favorite movie?"
"Top two," he said, without hesitation. "Just after Top Gun."
You stared at him. Dean DiLaurentis. Hockey player, pre-law, top of the class, sitting in the library surrounded by case briefs, whose top two films were Legally Blonde and Top Gun.
"God," you said.
He laughed. "What?"
"Nothing." You picked up your pen. "It explains a lot actually."
"Does it."
"The confidence," you said, gesturing vaguely at him. "The hair. The complete inability to walk into a room without knowing exactly how you're going to be received." You paused. "You've watched both of those films a concerning number of times, haven't you."
Dean pointed at you. "Elle Woods and Pete Mitchell are two of the most —"
"Please don't finish that sentence."
"— compelling character studies in the history of American cinema."
You laughed and put your head down on the table.
His laugh was warm and close and you could feel it more than hear it, and when you looked up he was leaning on his elbow facing you — close, comfortable in the way he had gotten over the past two sessions, close enough that you could see the specific color of his eyes in the library light, and the way they crinkled at the corners when he was actually amused rather than performing it. The late afternoon light was doing something completely unreasonable to his face — the angles of it, the warmth of it, and you looked back at your notes with the focused energy of someone making a deliberate choice.
"Back to work," you said.
"Back to work," he agreed.
But he was still smiling when he turned back to his notes, and you were very carefully not smiling, and the library was quiet around you in that way it had been yesterday, warmer than it should have been, the silence between you easier than it had any right to be.
Top two, you thought, against your will. Just after Top Gun.
God help you.
You made it another forty minutes before it went sideways.
It started, as these things often did, over something small.
Dean wanted to include a law review article you thought was analytically weak. You had said so. He had disagreed. It had escalated with the particular efficiency of two people who were very good at arguing and had been carefully not arguing for weeks, the pressure of it finding the first available exit.
"It's not a weak source," Dean said, for the second time. "You just don't like the conclusion."
"I don't like the conclusion because the methodology doesn't support it. There's a difference."
"You've said that. You haven't explained it."
"I sent you three paragraphs —"
"You sent me three paragraphs about why you were right," he said. "That's not the same thing."
You looked up from your laptop. He was looking back at you with the expression that meant he was done being patient, and something about that, the specific quality of it, the fact that he was allowed to be done being patient when you had been managing your frustration for weeks —
"You know what, it doesn't matter," you said. "Include it. It's fine."
"Don't do that."
"Do what."
"Shut down and say it's fine when it's not fine." He closed his laptop halfway. "If you have a problem with the source, say it."
"I have a problem with a lot of things," you said, and it came out with an edge you hadn't entirely intended. "I have a problem with the fact that I have no idea how much of this grade I'm actually carrying."
The air in the room changed entirely. The low buzz of the overhead light was suddenly very audible.
Dean went very still. "What does that mean."
It means I've been doing this alone my whole life and I don't know how to stop assuming I'm about to have to do it again. That was what it meant. That was not what came out.
"It means," you said, and your voice was measured in the way it got when you were saying something you couldn't take back, "that I don't actually know how you scored high enough on that exam to get paired with me."
Silence.
Dean looked at you. Something moved behind his eyes, not hurt exactly. The thing that came just before.
"Say what you mean," he said quietly.
And because you were frustrated and tired and the Harvard interview was in two weeks and you had been holding this assumption for long enough that it had started to feel like fact —
"I thought maybe you were sleeping with the TA."
The silence that followed was a different kind entirely. Heavy and still, the kind that has a shape.
Dean sat back. He looked at you for a long moment with an expression you had never seen on him before — not the easy charm, not the careful attention, not the almost-smile. Something stripped of all of that, all the way down.
"I got a ninety-four on that exam," he said. "I got a ninety-four because I studied for it. I study for all of them." A pause. Each word placed with precision. "I know you think I'm here because of my last name or my hockey stats or whoever you've decided I'm sleeping with. I know that's easier than just —" he stopped. Exhaled slowly. "I've been doing the work. I've been here every session. I don't know what else you want from me."
You opened your mouth.
"And the TA," he said, " she has a girlfriend. So."
He opened his laptop again. The sound of it was very loud in the quiet room.
You looked at your screen. The cursor blinked in the document you had been sharing for two weeks, both your names in the top corner. You were acutely, uncomfortably aware of the specific kind of wrong you had just been.
Not about the source.
About him.
"Dean —"
"First amendment section," he said. Not cold. Not cruel. Just done. "Let's just finish."
You looked at him for a moment.
"Yeah," you said quietly. "Okay."
The Legally Blonde conversation felt like it had happened in a different library entirely.
Top two, he had said, and laughed, and looked at you like you were something worth looking at.
You stared at the cursor and said nothing else.
Neither did he.
session three
The third session was on a Tuesday.
You knew because Tuesdays you tutored until nine, which meant you had come straight from the library's second floor where you had spent an hour and a half walking a freshman through the commerce clause, and you were tired in the specific way of someone who had been performing competence for other people all day and had very little left over for themselves.
You had also been thinking about what you said for five days straight.
Not continuously. Like something that sits in the back of your mind and surfaces at inconvenient moments — in the shower, between tutoring sessions, at two in the morning when you should have been sleeping and instead were staring at the ceiling cataloguing every assumption you had ever made about Dean DiLaurentis and finding most of them wanting. I thought maybe you were sleeping with the TA. The words had a particular quality in retrospect, the quality of something that could not be unsaid, that existed now in the permanent record of things he knew about you.
You pushed open the door to the third floor reading room and told yourself you were fine.
Dean was already there.
Of course he was. He was always already there, with his laptop open and his notes spread out in the handwriting you had become, against your will, familiar with, slightly left-leaning, inconsistent spacing, somehow completely legible. He looked up when you came in. The room smelled like old paper and the particular warmth of a space that had been occupied for a while, and the overhead light buzzed its familiar note.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," you said back.
You sat down. Not beside him, you took the chair across the table, the one you had started in, back when the table felt like a neutral territory that required a border. You pulled out your laptop and opened the shared document and did not look at him.
He did not comment on the seating arrangement.
That was somehow worse than if he had.
You worked. The session had the functional efficiency of two people who were both too professional to let personal things affect the work, which meant the work was fine and everything around it was not. He passed you sources without commentary. You flagged edits without explanation. The back and forth that had become almost conversational — the small arguments, the digressions, the way he said okay when you made a point he couldn't refute — was gone.
The overhead light buzzed. Someone turned a page three tables over.
Around the forty-minute mark he said, "the due process section needs another source."
"I know," you said. "I'm looking."
"I found one this morning. Sent it to your email."
"I haven't checked yet."
"It's good."
"Okay."
Silence.
You checked your email. The source was good. You added it to the document without saying so and heard, very faintly, the sound of him exhaling.
An hour passed like that.
You had just pulled up a new case brief when Dean leaned back in his chair and said, to no one in particular, "I don't actually care about the TA."
You looked up.
He was looking at the ceiling, not at you, with the expression of someone who had decided to say a thing and was committed to the delivery. "I just want you to know that. In case it was still sitting there."
Outside the library window, the campus was dark and wet with recent rain, the paths lit amber under the streetlights.
"It was sitting there," you admitted.
"Yeah." He brought his gaze down to his notes. "I figured."
"Dean —"
"You don't have to." He said it simply, without edge. "I'm fine. I just didn't want it to be weird for the rest of the semester."
"It's already a little weird," you said.
"I know."
Another silence — but this one had more air in it, the quality of a silence that had been cleared rather than accumulated.
"I'm going to apologize properly," you said. "I just haven't figured out how yet."
Dean was quiet for a moment. Then, very carefully, not quite a smile: "Does it involve food."
You said nothing.
"It does," he said. "Okay."
"Back to work," you said.
"Back to work."
You heard her before you saw her.
The click of heels on library floor that had nothing to do with studying, moving with the purposeful energy of someone who had a destination and knew exactly what they wanted when they got there. You didn't look up. You were in the middle of a paragraph and you had a system and you were not going to lose your place.
The heels stopped at your table.
"Hey." Not directed at you. You turned a page. "I've been looking for you."
"Hey." Dean's voice, easy and careful. "Didn't know you were on campus today."
"I wasn't. Now I am." A pause with a specific texture. "Come outside for like five minutes."
"I can't right now, we're working."
We. You noted the word and kept reading.
"Five minutes," she said again. "It's not a big deal."
"I know it's not. I just can't right now."
You turned another page. The paragraph was about tort law and you had read the same sentence three times and retained nothing.
"Dean —"
"Seriously." His voice was still easy but there was something underneath it now, something with weight. "I'll text you later, okay?"
A silence. The kind that meant she was deciding something.
"Who even is she?" The question was directed at you. You looked up for the first time, because that was directed at you, and you had opinions about being spoken about in the third person by someone standing four feet away.
The girl was pretty in the specific, polished way of someone who had never had to try very hard at it. She was looking at you with an expression that was more curious than hostile, which somehow made it worse.
"His project partner," you said pleasantly. "We have a deadline."
"It's literally five minutes —"
"We're aware of how long five minutes is," you said, in the tone you had been practicing for courtrooms. "He said he'll text you. The reading room is a shared space and we're trying to work, so." You smiled. "Thank you."
The girl looked at you. Looked at Dean. Looked back at you with an expression that had shifted into something more speculative, something that said she understood more than you had intended to reveal.
Then she left.
The heels clicked back across the library floor and faded, and the room settled back into its particular silence, and you looked back at your notes with the focused energy of someone who had not just done what they had just done.
From across the table, nothing.
You turned a page.
More nothing.
You looked up.
Dean was looking at his notes with the carefully neutral expression of someone using every available resource not to smile.
"What," you said.
"Nothing."
"Say whatever you're going to say."
"I'm not going to say anything."
"Dean."
"I'm just —" He pressed his mouth closed. The not-smile was winning. "Thank you for your help."
"I didn't do it for you," you said immediately. "She was interrupting. It was annoying."
"Completely understandable."
"I would have done the same for anyone."
"Of course."
"It had nothing to do with —" You stopped. "We have three more pages to get through."
"We do," Dean agreed, in the voice of someone being very, very agreeable.
You looked back at your notes.
I would have done the same for anyone.
You were a pre-law student. You were supposed to be good at arguments.
That one had convinced neither of you.
You packed up at nine-fifteen, later than planned, and Dean walked out with you the way he had started doing without either of you deciding he would.
"She's no one," Dean said, when the elevator arrived. Not defensive. Just offered.
You stepped inside. "You don't have to explain yourself to me."
"I know." The doors closed. "I wanted to anyway."
You looked at the floor number climbing. He looked straight ahead. The elevator was small and you were standing close , his arm against yours, the cedar smell of him in the enclosed space, and something about the cleared air of the session, the I'm going to apologize properly, the we he had said without thinking, settled between you like something that had decided to stay.
The doors opened.
"Wednesday," you said.
"Wednesday," he confirmed.
You walked out into the night and did not look back.
You were going to need a very good cake.
session four
It was week four of the project, and Dean had gone back to sitting beside you, in the most inconspicuous way possible.
It had been gradual and deniable at every individual step. First the chair had been angled slightly toward yours. Then it had migrated. Now your thighs brushed every time either of you shifted, and you were acutely, unhelpfully aware of the warmth of his forearm against yours, the cedar-and-cold-air smell of him that you had catalogued in the first session and had been trying unsuccessfully to un-catalogue since.
Things had been a little strange since the fight.
The fight you had caused. With assumptions you had made. About a TA who, it turned out, had a girlfriend.
You had settled, eventually, on cake — specifically the lemon cake Elisa had made that morning, wrapped in foil and sitting on the table between your laptops like a small citrus-scented olive branch, which Dean had looked at when you arrived and had not yet commented on.
You had not told him it was Elisa's. You were not going to examine why.
"So," you started.
Dean looked up from his laptop.
"I would like to apologize."
He held your gaze for a moment. Something in his expression shifted — careful, like he was deciding how much to give you. "It's okay."
"It really isn't, Dean." You turned to face him, which was a tactical error because it meant you were now very close to him, close enough that you could see the dark blue of his eyes in the library light, and the soft fabric of the cardigan where your knee was almost touching his. "I made assumptions. I think the worst of people sometimes and I let it get ahead of me. You've been doing the work. I knew that and I said it anyway. That wasn't fair."
Dean looked at you for a long moment.
"It's truly okay," he said quiet and uncomplicated, completely without performance. "I get it. I know what it looks like from the outside."
"That doesn't make it okay."
"No," he said. "But it makes it understandable."
You looked at him. He looked back at you. The study room was very quiet, the overhead light doing its particular low buzz, the air carrying old paper and coffee and the warm-wool smell of his cardigan.
"The cake is Elisa's," you said, because you needed to say something. "My roommate. She made it this morning and I brought it."
Dean's mouth curved. "You brought me a peace offering."
"I brought us a snack."
"A lemon cake wrapped in foil."
"We've been here three hours."
"That," he said, "is the most you thing I've ever heard." He reached over and broke off a piece without ceremony, and you watched his hands doing it those careful, deliberate and huge hands of his, and felt something tighten somewhere that you immediately filed under irrelevant.
"Good?" you asked.
"Really good." He looked at you with the quiet expression, the one that sat closer to the surface. "Tell Elisa thank you."
"Tell her yourself," you said, and then realized what that implied, and looked back at your laptop.
Dean didn't say anything.
But he didn't look away.
You worked. The tension in the room had changed quality, no longer the awkward residue of an unresolved argument, something else now, something that had been building for four weeks and was running out of places to go. You were aware of him the way you had been aware of him since that first session, the warmth of his arm against yours, the sound of his breathing in the quiet room, the way he tucked the pen behind his ear when he was reading something carefully.
You were looking at your screen. You were not reading anything on it.
He shifted beside you. His knee pressed against yours under the table, not accidentally, not with the absent quality of the foot under the table in session one, but deliberately, with the specific patience of someone making a point without words.
You looked at your screen.
His knee stayed where it was.
Fine, you thought. Fine.
You did not move away.
Another twenty minutes passed like that, both of you working, neither of you acknowledging the point of contact, the room very warm and very quiet. And then Dean reached over, not for a case brief this time, his hand finding yours on the table, covering it, not grabbing, just resting there. Still. Like a question asked very quietly.
You looked down at his hand on yours.
You looked up at him.
He was already looking at you and he didn't say anything, didn't push, just held your gaze with the patience of someone who had been waiting for a while and had decided to stop waiting quietly.
You turned your hand over under his.
Something shifted in his face. Not the smile, something more careful than that, something that meant more.
Then his hand came up slowly, fingers brushing your jaw, turning your face toward his unhurried, giving you every opportunity to move.
You didn't move.
His eyes met yours — a question, patient and certain — and you answered it by closing your eyes and leaning in, and then his mouth was on yours.
You had kissed people before.
This was categorically different.
It started soft and then didn't stay that way. His hand slid into your hair and yours found the front of his cardigan — soft wool under your fingers, the solid warmth of him underneath — and when his tongue met yours you made a sound you were going to spend considerable time not thinking about.
The kiss was unhurried. Calculated in the best possible way. Dean kissed you like he had all the time in the world, and when air became a necessary concern he pulled back smiling, pressed a soft peck to your lips, and began a slow trail of kisses along your jaw and down your neck.
His mouth was warm on your neck, lips dragging slow enough to make your breath catch, and his hand slid down your thigh with a deliberate patience that made it very clear he was in no hurry whatsoever.
You pulled his hair and got a low, rough sound against your skin in return, and then his hand found your waist and pulled, dragging you onto his lap until you were straddling him and there was no distance left to negotiate.
You could feel exactly what four weeks of thighs brushing and careful silences had done to him.
Dean — you heard yourself saying. Dean, Dean —
Your hands had found their way under his shirt, palms flat against his stomach, and when you dragged your nails lightly down his skin he smiled against your mouth and rolled his hips up into yours with a slow, pointed pressure that dissolved whatever thought you'd been forming completely.
A loud, deliberate cough came from the doorway.
Mrs. Miller, the night librarian, stood in the entrance with the expression of a woman who had seen too much and was being paid nowhere near enough.
You scrambled back. Dean straightened. A beat of absolute silence.
"We're leaving," you said, with as much dignity as the situation permitted. "We're so sorry, Mrs. Miller."
Mrs. Miller said nothing. She held the door open with the energy of someone who had made peace with humanity's worst impulses but did not have to enjoy them.
You gathered your things in record time. Dean had the audacity to look almost completely composed, which was deeply unfair given the state of his hair, which was your fault. You looked away.
Outside in the hallway you made it three steps before he said:
"So."
"Don't."
"I was just going to —"
"I know what you were going to say."
A pause. Then, with great personal restraint: "Okay."
You made it to the elevator before you looked at him. He was already looking at you.
"The cake was really good," he said.
"Shut up, Dean."
He laughed. The elevator doors closed. You stood in the small lit space of it with your shoulders touching and said nothing else the whole way down.
You were both smiling though.
session five
The fifth session was on a Wednesday.
You had been avoiding him since the awkward encounter with Mrs. Miller.
Not obviously, you were too disciplined for obvious. You had shown up to every class, done every piece of work, responded to every text within a reasonable time. You had simply pulled back the parts of yourself that had started, over four weeks of thighs brushing and functional silences and one extremely ill-advised study room incident, to lean toward him without permission.
You were good at pulling back. You had been doing it your whole life.
The third floor smelled like old paper and the warmth of a space occupied all day, the radiator ticking in the corner, the last of the evening light grey through the windows. Dean was already at the table. He looked up when you came in. You sat across from him, the original position, the border re-established, and he looked at it and then looked at his laptop and said nothing.
You worked.
The project was almost finished. This was the last session, a conclusion, a bibliography built jointly over five weeks, your color-coded tabs and his margin notes. It was good work. You were going to get an A on this project.
You were also going to have no reason to sit in this library with Dean DiLaurentis after next week.
You were not examining that.
"We need to talk about the conclusion," Dean said, around the hour mark.
"I know. I drafted something last night, it's in the doc."
He found it. Read it. Was quiet for long enough that you looked up.
"It's good," he said.
"I know."
Another silence. He wasn't reading anymore.
"Are you going to keep doing this," he said, "or."
"Doing what."
"You know what."
"Dean —"
"Because I can." Simply, without heat. "If that's what you want, I can pretend that kiss didn't happen and we finish the project and that's it. I'm not going to make it weird." A pause. "Weirder."
You said nothing. Outside the window the campus was dark and wet, the paths amber-lit below.
"But I'd like to know," he said, "so I can stop waiting for you to tell me."
The library was very quiet. The radiator ticked. The overhead light buzzed.
"It's not that simple," you said finally.
"Okay." He waited.
"I have the Harvard interview in four days. I have a GPA I cannot let slip. I cannot afford to be distracted by —" you stopped.
"By me," he said.
"By anything."
He was quiet. "That's fair."
"And you don't —" you stopped. Started over. "You don't do this. Whatever this would be. I've heard enough to know that's not something you do. Rollercoaster ride or something like that."
Dean looked at you then. Fully, the way he didn't always let himself — all the way, no management.
"What have you heard," he said.
"Dean."
"No. Specifically."
You met his gaze. "That you don't do relationships. That it's always casual. That you're consistent about that."
He held your gaze.
"That was true," he said. "For a long time that was true."
"And now?"
He looked at you like the answer was obvious and he was simply waiting for you to arrive at it, with the patience of someone who had been waiting for a while.
You looked back at your laptop. Your chest felt tight. You had spent five weeks building a careful wall and he had just put his hand flat against it and pushed, gently, without drama, without raising his voice.
The same way he had put his hand over yours on the table.
Just resting there. Like a question asked very quietly.
"Four more pages," you said.
Dean was quiet for a beat.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
You both looked at your screens.
You finished the project.
Professor Whitaker announced the grades on a Thursday morning.
You were in your seat when she read them out.
A plus.
You looked up. Dean was already looking at you from the sixth row, and the smile on his face was the quiet one, the one you had catalogued in week two and had been trying not to think about since. It crossed the room and landed somewhere specific.
You gathered your things after class with the focused efficiency of someone with somewhere to be, and you almost made it to the door.
"Hey." He fell into step beside you in the hallway, easy and unhurried, bringing with him the cedar smell. "A plus."
"A plus," you confirmed.
"Told you the Marbury placement was better in section three."
"That was my idea."
"I agreed with it enthusiastically."
"You said yeah, okay and went back to your laptop."
"Enthusiastically," he repeated.
You stopped walking. The hallway moved around you, students flowing past, and Dean stopped too, and you were standing in the middle of it looking at him.
You had done it. You had actually done it. Four years of work and one extremely stressful semester and a project partner you had spent the first two weeks convinced was going to ruin everything, and you had gotten an A plus and the Harvard interview was tomorrow.
The knot in your stomach, which had lived there so long you had stopped noticing it, was gone.
Dean was looking at you with an expression that had gone soft in a way you weren't ready for.
You hugged him.
You weren't sure you had decided to. Your arms were around him and his were around you a half second later, one hand flat between your shoulder blades, and he was warm and solid and smelled so good, and you stayed there for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.
The hallway moved around you. Neither of you moved.
When you pulled back he was still looking at you.
"Good luck tomorrow," he said quietly. "You don't need it. But good luck."
You nodded. Looked at him for one more second.
Then you walked away.
You made it to the end of the hallway before you thought —
oh.
oh no.
And kept walking anyway.
the wednesday after
The Wednesday after the interview, you were in the kitchen with Elisa when the doorbell rang.
Elisa looked at you. You looked at Elisa.
"Are you expecting someone?" she asked.
"No."
"Should I get it?"
"I'll get it," you said, in the tone of someone who had a feeling.
You opened the door.
Dean DiLaurentis was standing on your porch in a green cardigan — of course he was, he owned approximately nine of them — holding grocery store flowers and a DVD copy of Legally Blonde.
You stared at him.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
"I heard the interview went well."
"How did you hear that."
"Beau knows your roommate apparently."
You were going to have words with Elisa. "It went well," you confirmed.
"Good." He held out the flowers. The stems were slightly damp from the cold outside. "These are for you."
You took them. "And the DVD."
"Also for you."
"Dean." You looked at him. "I don't own a DVD player."
Something flickered in his expression, that almost-smile. "I know."
"So this is."
"A reason to invite me in," he said simply. "So we can watch it on your laptop. If you want."
"My laptop also doesn't have a DVD player."
He made a gesture as if to throw the DVD across the lawn, which made you laugh despite yourself.
You looked at him standing on your porch and thought about five weeks of sessions, the foot under the table, the arm reaching across you, the knee pressed deliberately against yours, the hand resting over yours on the table, quiet as a question.
"You drove here," you said, "with a DVD."
"I did."
"That's extremely old fashioned. You might as well stand under my window with a boombox playing George Michael."
"If that's what you want."
"Most people would have just texted."
"I'm not most people," he said, simply, without needing anyone to confirm it.
You stepped back from the door.
"Elisa made caesar salad," you said. "She's been waiting for an excuse to feed someone new."
Dean stepped inside. The warmth of the house closed around him.
"I love caesar salad," he said.
"I know you do," you said, closing the door. "It's very you. That and like, Steak Tartare."
"What's wrong with Steak Tartare?"
Elisa lasted forty-five minutes before she announced she was going to her boyfriend's and picked up her keys with the energy of someone who had orchestrated something and was not going to pretend otherwise. You did not look at Dean when she left. You heard the door close and the house settle into quiet and then it was just the two of you on the couch with the TV on and Elle Woods on the screen, his arm warm along the back of the cushion behind you, close enough that you could feel the heat of it without it quite touching.
You had made it approximately eleven minutes into the film.
"I got in," you said, to the screen.
Dean went still.
"The interview —" you stopped. The room was very quiet. The lamp on the side table cast everything amber, warmer than the library had ever been. "They called this morning. I got in."
A beat of silence.
"Harvard," he said.
"Harvard," you confirmed.
Another beat, long enough that you turned to look at him. He was already looking at you.
"I knew you would," he said.
And then he kissed you.
It felt like something he had been waiting to do since the door opened, like Elisa leaving had simply removed the last obstacle between the moment and itself. His lips were on yours immediately, and Dean tasted like mint, and you found yourself wondering distantly if he had come here prepared for this, if this was always how tonight was supposed to end.
He didn't kiss like a careful person. His tongue was thorough and consuming and somewhere in the back of your mind you remembered that cliché about tongues fighting for dominance, that was what Dean was doing, except you found you had absolutely no desire to fight him for it. You would give him whatever he wanted.
Your hands found his shoulders. His found your waist, your thighs, and then settled, decisively, with intent, on your ass. An ass man, you noted, which tracked completely. He pulled you closer and you went willingly, swinging one leg over his knees until you were straddling him. He groaned in satisfaction, his hands pulling you flush against him, his hips rising to meet yours.
Air became a problem. You pulled back, opening your eyes, and found Dean with his eyes still closed, already searching for your mouth again. You gave him a small peck, then made a slow path of kisses from his mouth to his ear to his neck.
On his neck you bit him, lightly, experimentally, and the response was immediate. His hand came down on your ass in a sharp reflexive slap that startled a breathless laugh out of you. Through your skirt and his jeans you could feel exactly how much he was enjoying this, and you rolled your hips deliberately. The sound that came out of him made you stop entirely.
God. You wanted to hear that sound on repeat for the foreseeable future.
He seemed to resurface from wherever he had gone, and then he was standing, actually standing, with you in his arms, your legs wrapping automatically around his back.
"So," he started, eyes dropping to your mouth in a way that was frankly unfair. "Where's your bedroom?"
"Up the stairs, first door on the left," you answered against his neck, punctuating it with another bite.
"Stop teasing me or I'll drop you."
As a direct response you attempted to suck a mark into his neck. He fake-stumbled dramatically on the first step, which made you shriek and then immediately muffle it, and he laughed, low and warm and entirely too pleased with himself.
"I told you," he said.
You made it to your bedroom, and you silently praised the rare burst of energy that had led you to tidy it the night before. He dropped you onto the bed and you propped yourself up on your elbows and watched him pull off his cardigan and then the white shirt underneath.
You let out a slow whistle.
Hockey had been very, very good to him.
"Has anyone ever told you you're kind of annoying?" he said, dropping to his knees at the foot of the bed and pushing your legs open. His eyes went to your underwear. Something in his expression softened. "Cute underwear."
"Only this blond guy I'm sort of into," you said, focusing very hard on something other than what was about to happen. "And I wasn't planning on sleeping with anyone today, hence the polka dot Snoopy panties."
"No, I genuinely think they're cute," he said, and pressed a kiss to your clothed center that made your breath catch. "But they do have to go."
He hooked his fingers in the waistband and pulled them down, and then — you watched, incredulous — tucked them into the back pocket of his jeans.
"Absolutely not —"
"Focus," he said.
"You're so wet," Dean murmured, his gaze on you in a way that made you feel simultaneously embarrassed and triumphant. He kissed the inside of your knee, your inner thigh, everywhere except where you needed him. "All from just kissing?"
"Stop teasing," you whined.
"Not so funny anymore, is it."
"Please, Dean —"
"Please?" He looked up at you, and the expression on his face was criminal. "So you're telling me I spent weeks and months putting up with you being rude to me, when I could have had you this polite just by bending you over a table?"
The image that produced made you moan before you could stop yourself.
"You have no idea how long I've wanted to do this," he said, voice low. "To taste you."
His tongue pressed flat against your center and you moaned so loudly you were immediately grateful Elisa had left. He explored you with single-minded thoroughness, his tongue parting you, learning you, the sounds filling the room obscenely, the wet heat of his mouth and your increasingly frantic responses.
When his mouth found your clit your hands flew to his hair, pulling, trying to bring him impossibly closer.
"You taste so fucking sweet," Dean said against you.
"Fuck — Dean —"
The feeling built and crested and his hand came down across your stomach to hold your hips in place as they jerked. Your thighs trembled. He felt the way you clenched around nothing and knew.
"Be a good girl and come for me."
The orgasm hit like a wave breaking — sudden and total.
"Dean — oh my god —"
He worked you through it, his tongue slowing gradually until he finally pulled back. When he stood you were completely wrecked, sprawled across the bed, unable to form a sentence, staring up at him. His chin was wet. He looked insufferably composed.
He removed his jeans and helped you out of your dress, then came down over you on the bed, his weight settling between your thighs. He kissed you slowly, his hands cradling your jaw with a tenderness that was almost absurd given what had just happened, sweet and careful and at complete odds with the rest of the evening.
You felt him against your thigh.
Oh. He was — yes.
"Breathe, honey."
It was annoying how well he could tell when you'd stopped.
Your hips rolled up against him instinctively, looking for him.
"I need you inside me, Dean —"
"So demanding," he said, cutting you off with a kiss. His hand slid down between you, pressing the length of him against your folds, and the sound you made was not dignified in the slightest. He tapped the head of his cock against you and you dug your nails into his back.
"Please — Dean — please, please —"
He finally gave you what you were asking for, positioning himself at your entrance. The thick head breached you slowly, stretching you out, and you tried to pull him deeper faster.
"Oh fuck —" you moaned as he bottomed out.
"God damn," he breathed. "You're so tight."
His hips pulled back and snapped forward and then he was properly fucking you, hard, deep, everything you had imagined during different library sessions. His mouth found your collarbone, your chest, and then he took one nipple between his lips and you arched off the bed.
"You really do have the most absurd —" he said against your skin.
"Do not finish that sentence —"
"— tits. I could spend all day here."
Your walls tightened around him as the second orgasm built.
"I'm gonna come —" you breathed.
"I know."
He moved back up to your mouth, kissing you as you fell apart, and at the last moment he pulled out, the warmth of him spilling across your stomach. He stood and disappeared into the bathroom, returning with a cloth to clean you up. He discarded it somewhere, then lay down beside you and pulled you against his chest without ceremony, your legs tangling together.
The room was quiet. The lamp was still on. Outside the window the November street was dark and still.
"So," you said finally, staring at the ceiling. "You really are an overachiever."
"Shut up, (Y/N)," Dean said, and kissed you.
You stayed like that for a while, his heartbeat under your cheek, the lamp casting everything amber, the particular quiet of a house when everyone who needed to leave has left.
You had spent four years not allowing yourself anything that wasn't useful. Not a detour, not a distraction, not a single afternoon that didn't have a purpose.
Dean DiLaurentis, you thought, had been the worst possible use of your time.
You pulled his arm tighter around you.
Worth it.
