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“Stop saying you’re going to kill yourself unless you actually mean it.”
Lance huffs from his spot lying on his bed, staring down at the Canvas home page for Classical Lit 101. “I do, though. Professor Sanda is going to make me end it all, so genuinely. This is the third book she’s assigned where I have a week to read it and it’s like, the most massive piece of literature you could think of.”
Pidge spins in her chair where she sits at Lance’s meticulously organized desk, tawny bangs pinned back and rounded glasses slipping down her nose. “You did this to yourself. You have all your English credits, taking classical lit is your fault.”
“I needed an elective credit,” Lance whines, clicking on the newest assignment, “It was either classical lit or studio art, and I am only sometimes good with my hands.”
She sighs through her nose. “One, gross, and two, I didn’t even know that you knew how to read. Illiterate people don’t take classical lit classes.”
“I am not illiterate!” Lance frowns and throws a pen at her that was sitting on the bedspread next to him. “It’s because I’m Cuban, isn’t it? I’m an immigrant so I’m automatically illiterate?”
“Shut the fuck up, you’re so not funny,” Pidge catches the pen and tosses it back at him, snickering when it hits him in the head, “What do you have to read now? If it’s War and Peace or something, that’s just animal cruelty.”
Lance squints, too stubborn to grab his reading glasses while Pidge is in the room lest he get flamed until he was burnt to a crisp. “...Little Women.”
“Little Women was fucking spectacular,” Pidge comments, spinning back around to face her own laptop and the mountains of papers holding court right next to it, “Are you dissing Little Women?”
“I am not dissing Little Women,” Lance heaves out through his teeth, “I just don’t want to read it over the course of a week.”
Pidge checks her watch, “The library is still open. If you go right now, you can get started and be done with three chapters before class tomorrow.”
He raises his eyebrows at her back, laptop closing with a quiet click. “I don’t read that fast, dude. I’m better off SparkNotes-ing it.”
“Sanda is like a bloodhound, she can sniff out SparkNotes from a mile away.” She waves a hand at him dismissively. “Bye. If Seven Devils is open while you’re out, can you pick me up a…medium pride?”
“Freeloader.” Lance huffs but pockets his wallet and hooks his keys onto his belt loop.
“You love me!” Pidge chirps, turning her head to smile deviously at him and then go right back to coding, hunched over her keyboard.
“Jury’s still out.” He steps into his shoes, pristine and creaseless Nike Dunks in cacao, and opens the heavy wooden door into the empty hallway of his dorm building. “Back in fifteen. Lock the door behind me.”
She hums in response, tuning out anything and everything that isn’t the string of letters and numbers right in front of her. Lance shakes his head fondly and closes the door behind him, sliding his key into the lock and turning until it clicks.
He hopes the library is still open like she said. Professor Sanda will know if he googles a single thing about Little Women, and he would rather skip the lecture and the public shaming.
—
Lance stares at the teenage girl sitting behind the desk, her blonde hair up in two buns that have ponytails hanging off of them—suspiciously like Sailor Moon. Her name tag says her name is Romelle and she’s majoring in horticulture. Right now, though, she’s majoring in ruining Lance’s night. “Little Women is required reading for Classical Lit 101, the library is like, required to have enough copies.”
She shrugs, popping her gum. “You didn’t know that Sanda changes the required reading for that course every year? The library stopped keeping up when every book she assigned was written by Tolstoy.”
“Okay, well, still,” he argues, leaning on the counter and putting on the best pleading face that he possibly could, “It’s Little Women. You’ve got to have more than one copy of that, it’s an American classic.”
“We have…one copy.” Romelle says, delivering the news like it’s Tuesday’s weather instead of Lance’s death sentence. She sounds almost bored as she says it, like multiple students have come in looking for this book and been told the same thing.
He feels his eyes bug and twitch. “In the entire library, you have one copy of Little Women?”
“Yup.”
“Can I at least know who has it checked out?” Lance sighs through his nose, defeated.
She shrugs, turning to her brick of a computer and typing something in. “A guy named Keith.”
“Who?” He’s never heard of a single person going to Altea State University named Keith.
Romelle looks around the library and points delicately at someone behind Lance. “That guy, right there. Oh, look at that. He’s reading it.”
Lance’s head whips around, curls flying into his eyes. He shoves them back and focuses on the figure sitting in a worn-looking leather chair, holding a thick paperback and consistently pushing a piece of deep black bangs out of his eyes. The man’s hair is pinned up, but with what, Lance can’t tell. He’s unfairly beautiful.
It upsets him.
The thought is barely solid in his mind before Lance is storming over to the sitting area, fueled by misplaced rage. “Hey! Bastard boy!”
Said “bastard boy” glances up at Lance, wordlessly tucking a folded piece of paper in between the pages and setting the book down on his thigh. The man has deep, soulful looking eyes that glint purple when he turns a certain way, and a thin, jagged scar running from the right side of his nose over his jaw. His expression is disinterested, but doesn’t betray any irritation. “Definitely not my name.”
“Don’t care.” Lance crosses his arms over his burnt orange shirt. “Are you taking Classical Lit one-oh-one?”
“N…o?” He says, blinking rapidly.
Great. Joyous. Lance heaves a breath through his teeth, running a hand through his hair. “Then why in god’s name would you be reading Little Women? Of all the fucking books you could read, why the one Sanda assigned for required reading?”
“Well, I’m not in Sanda’s class, so I wouldn’t know she assigned it, genius.” Keith’s mouth twitches in amusement, and it only serves to make Lance a little angrier.
His teeth sink into his tongue to stop him from truly ripping this guy into shreds, sucking in a breath. “Okay. Well. That’s–great for you, but look, man. I cannot spark notes this book, and I really , really need the copy that you are holding, In your own two hands.”
Keith’s nose crinkles, eyebrows pinching. “Really unfortunate, considering this book is checked out to me.”
“Yes, I know that,” Lance seethes, anger already starting to get the better of him, “But–”
“But?” Keith prompts, shifting a little.
Are his eyes glazing over ?
“ But , I would really appreciate it if you would help a bro out and loan me the book you have loaned out right now so Sanda doesn’t cut my head off!”
Lance can feel the very beginning of frustrated tears sitting in the back of his throat, and he’s so tired, but Keith just looks him up and down, analyzing every stray curl and wrinkle in his jeans, and says, “I’m not done with it. It’s yours when I return it to the library.”
“You’re–fucking joking.” Lance hisses out, and Keith just shrugs.
“Not particularly.”
Whatever. Survive and adapt. “Fine. Sure. Go fuck yourself.”
He turns on his heel and storms off into the deepest depths of the library, grumbling all the way. Deep down, he knows it’s irrational to walk up to some random guy and demand the book he’d checked out, but rationality and classical literature don’t match up well with Lance.
“Stupid long haired bastard, with his stupid looking eyes, reading fucking classical literature,” Lance bitches to himself quietly as he stalks through the shelves.
The universe hasn’t had enough of torturing it’s favorite plaything, because this life is unfair and unjust to Lance in its entirety, and when his feet stop, he’s staring at one of the classical literature shelves, right at the spot where Little Women is supposed to be.
He frowns, staring angrily in the dim light at the books. Dust swirls in his nose and he sneezes, rubbing it with the heel of his palm. “Might as well pick something else up. Sanda had some extra credit assignment, didn’t she?”
Lance fishes his phone from his pocket and she had assigned an extra credit reading. There was a packet attached that he had to fill out, but he’d still be getting credit for it. The “B ” sitting in his grades right now was pissing him off anyways. He slides his phone into his back pocket and begins to rifle through the shelves.
Austin and Wilde glide by underneath his fingertips, dust on their spines from sitting so long on the shelves, and Lance ends up in another aisle before he finds the one he’s looking for.
A black and red clothbound edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes sits alone on the bottom shelf, standing straight up despite having nothing on either side to hold it up. He picks it up and begins to leaf through it just to make sure the pages are all there—a habit he picked up after Pidge loaned him her copy of Sea of Monsters and five whole chapters were missing— when a pristine white envelope slips from between two pages and hits the carpeted ground.
“What the hell?” Lance shuts the book and sets it down on the shelf, picking up the letter delicately.
It’s a quality piece of paper, not a shitty Hallmark card. He flips it over and sees in thick, black cursive, ‘ K Kogane ’ scrawled onto the front. Lance chews on his lip, debating whether to slide his thumb beneath the fold and seeing what’s inside, but that feels too personal, even for someone like Lance who thrives on gossip and talks more shit in two languages than the entire country of Brazil.
He stares at it for a minute, tracing the curves of the letters with his eyes. “No. I shouldn’t…I definitely could.”
After going back and forth like that for a minute, Lance eventually tucks the letter into his back pocket and takes the book with him back to the front desk, where Romelle checks the book out to him looking no less bored than she did when she walked in. He spares one more glance at Keith, who’s gone back to his book with his feet tucked up into the crack of the armchair, seeming to be completely unbothered by the life he’d just ruined, and then Lance ducks out of the library onto the dark, empty campus.
His watch says it’s nine-thirty, so Seven Devils should be open. Altea State University’s on-campus independent coffee shop, with seven drinks named after the seven deadly sins, and their seasonal drinks named after the seven heavenly virtues. Quite a cool joint, actually.
Lance picks up his feet and starts to jog across campus to make it to the brightly lit haven of coffee beans and low tables before they close.
–
“Pidge podge, open the door!” Lance calls from outside his dorm room, a drink in both hands, a book tucked underneath the crook of his elbow, and a letter burning through his pocket.
Even with his foot kicking at the wood, Pidge doesn’t come to his aid and open the door. He huffs and tries kicking at the door again, looking frantically at both ends of the hall in case someone leaves their room and sees him abusing his door while holding every object on the planet.
Lance stands outside for ten more minutes until he caves and maneuvers one of their drinks into the free crook of his arm to fish for his keys, and only then does Pidge decide to unlock the door and swing it open, peering up at him.
From what he can see behind her, the lights inside his dorm are off and her laptop is shut on his desk. Her squirrelish face pokes through the crack between the door and the doorframe, glasses abandoned. “Oh, good, it was open. I was just kind-of guessing, my watch died four hours ago.”
“You just…assumed both the library and Seven Devils would be open?” Lance’s eyebrows pinch.
“Absolutely. Medium pride, right?” His door swings open all the way and Pidge shuffles back off into the darkness, leaving Lance to fumble for the lightswitch.
He rolls his eyes, hitting the plastic switch with his elbow and setting her drink onto an empty corner of his desk. “Yeah, pride with extra cinnamon and an extra shot.”
“You’re my favorite wife!” Pidge cheers as she picks up the plum-colored cup and takes a heavy sip.
Lance sets his own drink, a large “gluttony,” or a sweet iced green tea, on his nightstand and yanks the letter out of his pocket.”You’ll never guess what I found at the library.”
“Bitches?”
“Shut up. No, I found this weird letter tucked into a copy of Sherlock Holmes.”
“I thought you were supposed to read Little Women,” Pidge sits down in Lance’s chair, cupping her drink in both hands, “Did Sanda change the assignment fifteen minutes after she made it?”
He sits down on his bed, dropping the book onto the undone covers that betray Pidge’s nap, and holds the letter reverently in both hands. “Worse. I get there and this little bastard has checked out the only copy, and he’s not even taking classical lit one oh one, so why is he reading Little Women, so I go up to him and ask for the book because–”
“Wait, pause,” Pidge chimes in, “You go up to someone you have never spoken to and ask him for the book he checked out under his name?”
Lance does pause, pressing a fist to his mouth. “...Yes?”
She groans, shaking her head and turning to her closed laptop. “I can’t believe I know you and hang out with you. You’re criminal.”
“What was criminal is him saying that, and I quote, ‘I could go fuck myself because it was his book.’”
“He did not say that.”
“He did not,” Lance sighs, leaning over and taking a sip of his drink through the rapidly dissolving paper straw, “He said that I could have it when he returned it to the library.”
“See, that is a perfectly reasonable answer! I would have said the exact same thing.”
He snorts into his drink, “No you would not have, you little liar, you would have told him to kill himself.”
Pidge shrugs, her silence telling.
“Anyways,” Lance tosses the letter onto his desk, “Sanda also assigned an extra credit reading and I thought okay, if I can’t do Little Women I’ll do the extra credit, so I go and hunt down the copy of Sherlock Holmes and when I open it, that drops out of it.”
She picks it up and turns to face him, fiddling with it, then slides her thumb under the seal and tears the paper.
“Dude!” Lance exclaims. “I wasn’t just gonna..open it!”
“Should’ve known that I was.”
Pidge slides the letter out of the envelope, fishing around behind her for her glasses and setting them onto her nose, unfolding it. Lance watches in abject horror, watching her pupils ping pong back and forth on the words until she looks up. “Whoever wrote this letter was not having a very good time.”
“What’s it say?” He leans forward in interest, picking up his drink and sipping it.
“Well, it starts by saying that if you aren’t the guy that wrote this letter you should kill yourself, this is for his eyes only, and then it’s this whole sobfest about how he felt reading Sherlock Holmes and some kind of story about losing his dad, I think, I didn’t read every word. Signed, K Kogane.”
“...Huh.” Lance nods passively, thinking it over and turning the words on his tongue. “Do you know anyone named K Kogane that goes here?”
“Not especially,” she shrugs, throwing the letter back to him, “I know you, and Hunk, and Professor Shirogane, and that’s it.”
“Well, I’ll just have to find him and tell him that if he leaves letters like this in public library books, someone is going to read them and realize he’s spilling his guts and then 51-50 him.”
“That’s the whole reason that he didn’t leave his whole name, dorkus,” Pidge snorts, “Do you have any critical thinking skills? At all?”
Lance frowns, “You’re so far behind on that project right now and you’re talking shit about having no thinking skills? I remember you bought a house made out of glass recently.”
“Shut the fuck up, man, Iverson takes joy out of making his students want to kill themselves, it’s like he sits down at night and rubs his grubby little fingers together while laughing about how he can make his students miserable next.” Pidge huffs out a sigh, pushing her glasses up.
He sets his drink down and picks up the book he abandoned on the bedspread, shifting so he’s propped up on his pillows, “That’s why I’m not majoring in computer sciences. I’d take Professor Sanda over Iverson any day of the week. He subbed in for one of my calc classes and I think the sheer joy he got from watching us all go wide-eyed from the homework was enough to keep him fed for a week.”
“Or every teacher here at ASU except Professor Shirogane is a part of some weird cult where the requirement is to make your students miserable and the closer they get to killing themselves the higher up in the ranks you go.”
Lance shakes his head, opening up the book to the very first page and then skipping ahead what feels like half the book to the actual first page. “What about Professor Alfor, the guy that teaches the whole creative writing block? The worst thing he did to me was say, hey man, maybe your children’s story about lion robots beating space nazis shouldn’t be a children’s story.”
“I thought it was a good idea.” Pidge shrugs. “Yeah, he’s not a part of the cult. But the rest of them are.”
“Definitely.” Lance agrees. “Now shut up and code, I have to read about a coke addict who becomes the nosiest bitch on the planet.”
“He’s just like you!”
—
For a while, Lance doesn’t figure out who K. Kogane is.
He does the extra credit for Sherlock Holmes in three days, and when he stops into the library two weeks later looking for the newest required reading, Mansfield Park, Romelle looks almost gleeful when she says, “Sorry, checked out.”
Checked out to Keith .
Lance doesn’t stomp up to Keith this time, opting to run his hands through his hair and shuffle off into the stacks to find something else to read while he waits for Mansfield Park to be returned.
It still baffled him that in their huge library, they only had one, maybe two copies of each classic. He found a copy of Dazai’s No Longer Human instead, and another pristine white envelope fell out of its pages, addressed to K. Kogane.
Both the letter and the book were beautiful reads. The letter was less personal and more how the book made K. Kogane, whoever they were, feel.
Mansfield Park was returned two days later and he got the assignment done three days late, which for Lance, king procrastinator, was a record. Pidge, Hunk, and him celebrated by spiking drinks from Seven Devils in Lance’s dorm and dancing until they puked.
It’s like Keith knows Professor Sanda’s required reading list before Lance does and somehow manages to check out the book he needs the hour he comes in to get it. But he finds that the books he ends up reading instead aren’t half bad, either.
Not all of them have letters from K. Kogane to himself, but the ones that do have a special place in his heart. Some he resealed and tucked back into the books when he was finished with them, others he kept, like the one he found in Salt to the Sea that was written in a haste by the way the ink was smudged and it was scrawled onto the back of a Barnes and Nobles receipt.
Without even speaking to K. Kogane, who he’s begun to refer to as just Kogane, Lance feels like he knows more about this one person than he knew about anyone else, Veronica included. Their mental health struggles and joys were cemented in his mind, and every so often Lance scribbled out small replies to their hurts that he tucked into the envelopes before he slid them into the book and returned it.
Today, he’s gonna get the jump on Keith. As the last assigned reading of the semester, Professor Sanda had assigned The Book Thief, which was not a classic but something she believed would be deemed as one in the near future, so it was fine to include it.
He had asked for the assignment early , something Pidge threw a Bible at him for because apparently he’d been possessed by something demonic. God forbid he get a head start on an assignment.
Lance stopped by the library early the next morning, bundled in a thick coat to combat the December chill with a coffee in hand. Romelle was sitting behind her desk like she always was, the girl never left that spot to put books back on the shelves until Allura, her girlfriend and co-worker, put them away the next morning.
“What do you need this time?” Romelle asks politely as she boots up the ancient computer and Lance sets his coffee down on the counter.
He pulls his sleeve down, looking at what he’d written the afternoon prior. “The Book Thief?”
“That is…not a classic.” She comments as she types it into the system.
Technically, Lance could just go look for the book himself, but after several failed attempts where Keith had the book in his hands, asking Romelle to look for it directly was his best bet.
“No, it is not,” Lance agrees, “But Sanda said that it could be, so we have to read it. Go figure.”
Romelle hums as she waits for the search to load. “You’ve been blessed today. We have a copy and it’s available.”
“Where?” Lance demands.
“Uh…historical fiction, shelf four.”
“Thanks!”
Lance speeds off into the shelves, ignoring Romelle’s shout that they’re in a library, coffee forgotten. He finds the section and shelf in record time, holding the paperback book in his hands like an ancient relic. A smug smile paints itself on his face as he strolls back to the front counter, knowing that if Keith came in looking for the book, it would be sitting in Lance’s craft hands as he took notes on it and read it for as long as he damn wanted.
He checks the book out, still grinning, and goes so far as to sit in the chair Keith usually inhabits, setting his coffee on the carpeted floor and cracking the book open.
Usually unable to settle down and read, Lance tucks into The Book Thief and doesn’t resurface for a few hours until he hears Keith’s crackling fireplace of a voice.
“I have a return.”
“It doesn’t have another letter in it this time, does it?” Romelle asks, and Lance raises his head ever so slightly to listen in on the conversation. She sounds a little exasperated.
“Not this time.” Keith says with a small laugh.
“Good.”
Letter. Leaving letters in books, books in this library, Lance’s mind starts connecting the dots at breakneck speed while their conversation continues. He’s tuned out for a while until he hears Keith grumble, “That’s literally impossible.”
Romelle’s bored-sounding voice replies, “Apparently not. It’s already been checked out.”
As unobvious as possible, Lance stares at the pages of his book but doesn’t read, listening to the conversation.
“I have the entire required readin’ list, it was just assigned today, there’s no way anyone could have checked it out from here when there are four other libraries on campus and they all have fifteen copies of it,” Keith argues, “Check again.”
“I don’t have a refresh button. It’s been checked out.” It’s almost like she takes joy from upsetting this poor guy.
“Well, who has it, then?” Keith sounds mighty impatient, and Lance has to hold himself back from jumping up and waving the book around.
“Oh, uh…that guy. Over there. The one that hasn’t taken off his coat ?” Romelle hisses the last part, clearly directed towards Lance who is unfortunately getting the last drips of slush onto the armchair.
Lance sets the book down on his lap primly, shrugs off the coat and drops it on the floor, then returns to looking blankly at the book.
“Who– you !” Keith says, and Lance hears footsteps come up in front of him.
“Who, me?” Lance says daintily, sliding a bookmark into the book he hasn’t been reading for the last five minutes and looking up.
Keith’s big, soulful eyes are wide and his mouth is pinched in an angry frown. “How did you get a hold of it before me? You don’t check out the required readin’ until the night it’s due!”
“I– what ? I’m sorry, who the fuck are you? Why do you know that?”
“Keith Kogane, nice to meet you, yada yada, now why the hell did you check that out the day it was assigned?” Keith sticks a hand out for Lance to shake, movements jilted with his frustration.
“Keith—Kogane— you !” Lance shoots up out of his chair, grabbing his hand and shaking it aggressively. “You’ve been pouring your fucking heart out in letters I keep finding in books!”
“Why would you open ‘em?” They’re still aggressively shaking hands. “Do you just make a habit of opening other people’s mail?”
“There was a letter ! In my book! What am I supposed to do, not open it?”
“ Yes !” Keith shouts, and Romelle looks over with a glare.
They apologize sheepishly and go back to arguing in hushed tones.
“Well, what if it was someone’s suicide note? What then, huh?”
“I don’t think someone’s gonna leave their suicide note in a letter addressed to themselves tucked in a library book,” Keith argues, finally dropping Lance’s hand and crossing his arms over his chest, “You didn’t answer my question.”
Lance hadn’t taken the time to take stock of Keith, really, having only ever seen him hunched over a book. He’s short, maybe five nine, with long and thick black hair that rivals the night sky. Right now he’s in a burnt orange t-shirt that says “I am no Jedi” in white text and dark blue jeans.
“I only checked it out early because you have a sixth sense for the required reading Sanda assigns and check them out before me every time without fail.” He tucks his hands into his pockets.
Keith sinks a tooth into his bottom lip, chewing on it in thought before responding, “Because you came up to me and started yellin’ at me about Little Women and I wanted to keep pissin’ you off!”
“Well maybe if you hadn’t—wait, huh?” Lance blinks twice, shocked out of his aggression and feeling like icy water has been poured on his head.
A sigh slips out of Keith’s mouth. “Ah, shit. Yeah. I figured, if you got so pissy from just one time, if it kept happening, you’d keep comin’ up to me.”
Lance is unable to keep standing up. He basically collapses into the armchair, and Keith takes the one across from him, leaning forwards with his elbows braced on his knees and hands clasped. “ Why ?”
“Christ, split this green earth open and swallow me whole,” Keith mutters, signing the cross over himself and continuing, “I thought you were so beautiful when you were upset. Ya got this look, yaknow? Eyes like the desert at night.”
This is what being damned to hell feels like. Fire is licking at his feet and Lance is being dragged in chains, but it’s physically impossible to do anything but sit in this armchair and stare at Keith with his mouth slightly ajar. “But–you—I have literally never spoken to you before except to tell you to go fuck yourself.”
“Amongst other things,” Keith agrees with a sigh, dragging a hand over his face, “You can just—forget that I told you that.”
“No, no,” Lance is startled into moving, surging forwards and knocking the book onto the ground, “You can’t just say that and then expect me to forget about the most poetic way someone’s ever called me beautiful, you freak. You know I’ve read your letters.”
“Uhuh.” Keith says apprehensively.
“Then you know that I know that your dad died when you were a kid and you were orphaned and life got really, really rough for you in freshman year,” Lance sucks in a breath and swallows, “I know more about you than any soul on this campus except your brother.”
“Alright..?”
Lance stops, blinking his eyes out of focus. “I had a point. Swear I had one. Anyways, we already have..something in common. You’ve read every book that I’ve been assigned for Sanda’s class.”
“Reread,” Keith corrects. “Read ‘em all.”
“So you’ve been ruining my life for no reason –goddamn it. Regardless, we’ve read a lot of the same books. That’s a place to start.”
“I’m pretty sure it starts with you telling me to go fuck myself over Little Women.”
“No it doesn’t,” Lance argues, “It starts here.”
He sticks out a hand, calmer and smoother this time. “I’m Lance Mcclain. Getting my bachelors in engineering with a minor in history.”
Keith blinks those beautiful eyes and takes the offered hand. “Keith Kogane. Bachelors in writing with a minor in English literature.”
“So is that why you’re a beautiful writer?” Lance comments after they’ve shaken hands.
“I’d say mediocre.” Keith snorts. “It’s all just me flopping down onto a nice couch and wailing woe is me but in different words and buried in metaphor.”
Lance shakes his head. “If your breakdowns look like that, I’d hate to show you what mine look like.”
In lieu of an answer, Keith offers a fond smile and kicks back in his chair, setting his foot on his knee. “Say, you wanna go get tea sometime and talk about Little Women?”
“The book I told you to go fuck yourself over,” Lance says, he cannot believe what he is hearing right now, “you want to get a drink and talk about?”
“I bet you can talk for hours and hours about the relationship between Jo and Laurie.” Keith asserts with an assured, syrupy smile.
“Look, she only thought she was in love with him because she had been looking for it her whole life and basically gaslit herself—oh, fuck you.”
“Is five tomorrow okay with you?”
Lance frowns. “Yeah. Seven Devils?”
Keith’s eyebrows pinch in confusion. “Where?”
“You’ve never been to Seven Devils?” Lance jumps out of his chair, grabbing Keith by the wrist and pulling him up towards the door, piling up all of his items.
“No, I don’t think I have–slow down, Lance,” Keith says as he’s pulled helplessly past Romelle, who shakes her head with a teasing smile and goes back to looking at her phone.
“Absolutely not, you’ve never been to heaven on earth. It’s this coffee shop tucked right between the English buildings, they’ve only got seven drinks and they’re named after the seven deadly sins, and if they have a holiday special they’re named after the seven heavenly virtues…”
As Lance is dragging him along, Keith is looking at him with a dopey, fond smile and soft, gooey eyes.
–
“Pidglet, you better become unbusy right now, I have so much to tell you.”
“If I fail this class I’m telling Iverson it’s on you.”
“Do you know someone named Keith Kogane?”
“Keith…oh, yeah, Keith. Yeah, I know him, we took English together. Great writer, too. From what I remember.”
“You knew him this whole fucking time ?”