Fleur de Louve month Day 3: College AU
Prompt: Passing Notes - Borrowed Sweater - 1.4k words
Mature students Bucky and Sarah
It’s a little nerve wracking to go back to college at age thirty-five. The lecture hall is filled to the brim with eighteen year olds, bright eyed and bushy tailed, each with an expensive laptop and a thousand coloured pens and mugs of fancy coffee laid neatly out before them. Sarah has never been one to get anxious in social situations - she’s always made friends easily - but she’s not exactly sure how to interact with people half her age.
Maybe this was a mistake.
No. She is doing this for her family, her children, to give them a better shot in life than what she had growing up. She’s gonna be the first Wilson to graduate, and even if her parents are dead and won’t be able to see her walk the stage in four years’ time, she knows they’ll be watching. Sam - god bless him - is finally out of the air force, willing and able to look after the kids while she’s in class, and the combined money from her late husband’s life insurance and selling the family boat is enough to pay the bills until she gets her degree, and hopefully a better job.
Her first college class is Art History 1, an elective credit, but she plans on tackling it with the same single-minded determination as the rest of her courses. If all goes well, three years from now she’ll have a business degree and some kind of employment prospects, and until then she’s going to bust her ass to prove herself.
She scans the room for a moment, searching for another mature student. Finding nobody, she squeezes herself into the back corner with a couple of seats between her and the next group of eager students, lays out her composition notebook and two pens, and waits for the professor to arrive.
“Do you mind if I sit here?”
Sarah looks up to find the source of the voice - it’s a man, perhaps her age, brunette with piercing blue eyes and a shy smile. He looks a little unkempt, a few days’ of stubble growth on his chin and a messenger bag clutched loosely in his hand, but he seems kind enough.
“Go ahead,” Sarah says, and he drops into the seat on her left side. It’s not until he’s started pulling out his own notebook and pencil that she realizes he’s missing an arm, and that his baggy hoodie says <i>US ARMY</i> across the front.
“You served?” she asks quietly.
He blinks owlishly at her for a moment. “How’d you figure?” he teases. “It’s the haircut, right? I knew I shoulda let it grow out.”
Sarah chuckles despite herself. “My brother was in the air force,” she says. “Just got out.”
The man nods solemnly. “Hope he’s doing alright,” he says.
At the front of the room, the professor finally breezes in and starts introducing himself. Sarah sneaks glances at the man sitting beside her occasionally, and somewhere between the lecture on plagiarism and reviewing the syllabus, she stops looking away.
The class ends, and the man breezes out of the room so fast he almost drops his pencil.
She doesn’t see him in any of her other classes. He’s probably in a different major than her anyway. Still, she finds herself looking forward to her next class with him, even if that’s a little juvenile.
The next time she sees him is in the next art history lecture, Thursday night. He’s wearing the same sweater, but looks moderately better than the last time she saw him. His face is shaved, freshly so, revealing a sharp jawline and a cleft chin that she can’t seem to take her eyes off.
He’s cute.
“Hey,” he says, “mind if I sit with you again?”
“Go for it,” she tells him with a soft smile.
“Thanks,” he says as he drops into the seat beside her. A moment later, the professor strides in and gets right to work.
Again, Sarah watches him out of the corner of her eye during the class. He holds his pencil awkwardly in his right hand, scrawling notes in quick block letters that would be nearly illegible if she weren’t well-versed in reading childrens’ writing.
Halfway through the lecture, he drops a piece of paper on her desk.
I’M BUCKY
She fights the urge to snort. This is childish, right? Passing notes in class. Something she might’ve done in high school, or hell, even grade school.
I’m Sarah, she writes, and passes the paper back.
WHAT MAJOR ARE YOU IN?
Business, you?
ARTS ADMINISTRATION
She studies his face again and he smiles at her, crooked and youthful. It’s a good look on him, and she decides she wants to see it more often.
The lecture ends, and Sarah heads to her truck. It’s just starting to get chilly, the leaves slowly turning from green to yellow, and she pulls her cardigan a little closer around her arms. The parking lot is empty except for a beaten up pickup at the other end of it, and she finds herself glancing over her shoulder frequently to check if she’s being followed.
Once she’s in her truck, she takes a deep breath of relief and jams her keys into the ignition.
It doesn’t start.
“Fuck,” Sarah curses. “Fuck! Shit! Goddamn it-”
A knock on her window has her jumping out of her skin, hitting her head on the ceiling of her truck as she fights to get her heartbeat back under control.
It’s Bucky.
“Car won’t start?” he asks. “Sorry. I heard you yelling from the other end of the lot.” He gestures towards the only other car there.
“Jesus,” she says. “You scared me.”
“Sorry,” he says. “I walk quietly. Hard habit to break.” There’s that crooked grin again, and some of the tension drops from Sarah’s shoulders.
“The battery died,” she says by way of explanation, gesturing vaguely to her dashboard. “It’s a piece of junk.”
Bucky shrugs. “I’ll pull my car around and give you a boost,” he says. “Just one second, yeah?”
“Sure,” she says. “Thanks.”
Through her open window, the breeze makes her shiver. Bucky cocks his head to the side, and before she can protest, he slips his sweater off and hands it to her wordlessly. The left sleeve is tucked neatly inside, not pinned, so she flips it back right-side-out and slips the sweater over her head. It’s warm, soft fleece lining the inside, and she fights the urge to snuggle deeper into it.
“Thanks,” she says again.
“No problem,” he says. Without his sweater, he’s only wearing a black t-shirt, showing off muscles she hadn’t realized he was hiding until just now.
Damn.
As he walks to his car at the other end of the lot, Sarah takes a sneaky sniff of the sweater. It smells clean, like his laundry detergent, with just a hint of his deodorant. Plain, unscented, like military habits are hard to break. Hell, Sam barely uses more than just bar soap and unscented lotion still.
A moment later, his truck is pulled up in front of hers and he’s fishing around in his back seat. He brandishes a jumper cable, victorious, and gestures for her to pop the hood of her car. Despite working one-handed, he’s incredibly efficient when he connects the cables, and within moments her truck comes back to life, rattling like it’s on its deathbed.
To be fair, her truck has been on its deathbed for probably three years now.
“You’re a lifesaver,” she says. When she starts to take off his hoodie, he stops her.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says.
“I won’t see you again until next Tuesday,” Sarah protests. “You got another sweater to wear until then?”
“It looks better on you,” he says, and if the words were coming from anyone else she’d roll her eyes at the obvious flirtation.
Instead, she smiles coquettishly at him and nods. “I’ll see you in class,” she says, feeling approximately twenty years younger than her actual age.
It’s not a bad feeling, actually. It’s been so long since she’s been properly flirted with like this, innocent and adorable and without inferior motives, that she doesn’t mind the attention at all.
“I’ll see you in class,” he parrots, and drives away.
Later, when she looks back on this moment, she’ll smile and hold her husband a little closer. She didn’t yet know that they’d fall in love in Art History 1, that he’d propose to her at her graduation, that they’d get married at the museum he ends up working at, that she’d finally open the restaurant of her dreams.
She didn’t know it’d all begin with a borrowed sweater and passing notes in class like teenagers.
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