Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Friday that Carmilla Karnstein moves into your dorm room, and subsequently into your life, begins the same way as any other seemingly innocuous Friday.

LaFontaine comes hammering on your door at 9AM for your weekly breakfast date at the on-campus Starbucks next to the Lustig Theatre. You have a sociology lecture from 11AM to 12:30PM. Kirsch joins you and Danny for lunch and they spend the majority of it bickering like children about sports. Or possibly birds. Dude, Cardinals and nah bro, Ravens could mean either. You’re in your 2PM English Lit class when Perry texts you to inform you that the university has finally gotten around to assigning you a new roommate.

Betty, your party girl roommate throughout freshman year, decided over summer that she wanted to transfer to Princeton — something about turning over a new leaf and discovering a newfound love for biomedical sciences — and due to the laziness and general ineptitude of Student Services, you’ve spent the first week of your sophomore year roommate-free.

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. You enjoy spending time with other people as much as any other slightly socially awkward twenty year old, but you also appreciate having a room to yourself. No one to witness you dropping cookie crumbs all over yourself, no one to tell you that one more episode maybe isn’t the great idea you think it is at three in the morning, no one to take ages in the bathroom right when you need to use it.

You glance up at your professor to make sure she isn’t paying attention, and quickly type out a reply to Perry, asking about your mystery new roommate. She replies a few minutes later, and all she’s been told is that your roommate is female, a transfer from the University of Paris — who transfers a week into the fall semester? — and that she’ll be arriving sometime later in the evening. Perry asks you to make sure you’re around for when the roommate gets here, not out at some party, and you muffle a laugh.

(The no-party is not going to be a problem; you were honestly concerned you were going to die the morning after a particularly wild Summer Society party the last day of Freshers' week. It’s been a week and you still feel queasy anytime anyone so much as mentions the word shots.)

Shoving your phone back into your pocket, you look out the window, and groan under your breath when you realise it’s pouring with rain. You don’t have an umbrella, your jacket doesn’t have a hood, and your dorm building is all the way on the other side of campus, so of course, once your class ends you get completely drenched hurrying back to your room.

Throwing your bag onto your bed once you push open the door to Room 307, you make a beeline for the bathroom to shower, shivering from the cold while you wait for the water to heat up. Once you’re done with your shower you reluctantly start clearing up the bathroom cabinet so that two of the four shelves are free for your as-yet-unnamed roommate to use. Automatically, you stroll back into your room in just a towel, before it occurs to you that you might not be able to do that anymore. What if your new roommate is uncomfortable with partial nudity? What if they're a total perv who'll stare at you like a creep anytime you're wearing less than six layers? Dammit, you were just getting used to having a room all to yourself.

A few hours later, you’re curled up in bed with your laptop, when the door bangs open loudly behind you. Pausing Doctor Who, you look up and the first thing you see is leather and plaid as your new roommate — at least you hope it’s her, and not some deranged serial killer in search of their next victim — storms towards the free bed without even acknowledging you.

“Um, hello?” You say, wondering if she’s even noticed you. Danny has pointed out that you’re kind of miniature. Several times. Like, if you were any more miniature then people would need a microscope to see you.

“Hey,” she replies, throwing her bag onto the spare bed and beginning to rummage through it, still not bothering to turn around to look at you. In addition to the leather pants and the red plaid shirt, you can now add ‘dark hair’ to the extensive list of things you know about your roommate-slash-possible-murderer. “You’re Laura, right?”

You nod, slightly distracted by staring at her ass — her leather pants clad ass — when she bends over the bed to place a book down on the headboard, before you realise what a creep you’re being, and also that she can’t see you nodding. “Yeah,” you stutter, clearing your throat before continuing. “Laura Hollis. Um, I’m assuming you’re my new roommate?”

“Yep,” she says, shoving her bag onto the floor so she can turn around and sit down on the bed, facing you. Your first thought is that she’s hot. Your second thought is that she’s really hot. Her skin is pale, her eyes are dark, and her lips are pulled into an oddly attractive smirk. You swallow when you notice the red plaid shirt isn’t buttoned, and the black top she has on underneath it is extremely low cut. You’re pretty sure she notices the split second you spend staring at her chest if the way her smirk widens is any indication. You definitely do not notice the way she licks her lips before speaking again. “I’m Carmilla.”

“Nice to meet you,” you squeak.

You’re kind of glad you’re buried almost completely under your blanket — which you notice with a sigh is possibly your nerdiest one, the bright yellow one covered in Hufflepuff insignias — so the flush that spreads across your body when Carmilla practically purrs, “Likewise, sweetheart,” and blatantly rakes her gaze across you is mostly hidden.

“Well,” Carmilla continues when you don’t say anything, clapping her hands together. “As exciting as these introductions have been, I have places to be.” You raise an eyebrow as she stands up from the bed. She literally just arrived at Silas, where could she possibly need to be? “See you around, cutie,” she smirks, winks at you, then breezes out the door without another word, slamming it shut behind her.

You blink in confusion. Sweetheart? Cutie? You’re not entirely sure what you were actually expecting as your new roommate, but it definitely wasn’t Carmilla.

/

Two weeks later, any initial physical attraction you had to Carmilla has vanished completely, because she is without a doubt, the most profoundly obnoxious person you have ever had the displeasure of meeting.

You don’t hate her or anything quite that extreme (yet). You just really don’t like her. At all. Which is slightly unfortunate given you share a room with her.

For starters, she’s incredibly rude. All the time. She pokes fun at just about everything on your side of the room: your very soft and very cosy Hufflepuff blanket, your gift from your dad Tardis mug, your limited edition Buffy and Doctor Who DVD collections, your yellow pillow, which frequently makes its way ‘mysteriously’ over to her bed. You’re also subjected to at least fifty short jokes per day, despite the fact Carmilla is only about an inch or two taller than you.

The initial cordial introductions must have been some kind of fluke, since she complains, ignores you, or flat out leaves the room whenever you make an effort at polite conversation, and she rolls her eyes so much you’re surprised she hasn’t pulled a muscle yet. In fact, the only time she isn’t mocking or insulting you is when she’s asleep.

For some bizarre reason, aside from the first day you met her, she refuses to call you by your actual name. Instead, it’s an endless stream of stupid nicknames: cupcake and cutie seem to be her favourites, but sweetheart, buttercup, and princess all make frequent appearances. She regularly uses up all the hot water, clogs the shower drain with her hair, and drips water all over the floor when she comes out of the shower (after using your shampoo) and never bothers to clean it up. Despite the fact there’s a perfectly good half-wardrobe for her to use, most of her clothes usually end up strewn all over the floor, and you’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve tripped over a discarded pair of ripped black jeans or an almost see through black top. She helps herself to your cookies, your chocolate, your takeout leftovers, your hot chocolate, all without asking.

She has no regard for your privacy at all. You accidentally leave your laptop switched on one day before rushing off to class, and when you get back to a thankfully Carmilla-free room and immediately go to log onto Tumblr, you discover that not only are you still logged in, but someone has also taken the liberty of following at least twenty hardcore porn blogs. With a growing feeling of dread, you check Twitter, where the same ‘mystery’ person has tweeted no idea what’s happening in this english class cause all i can think about is my gargantuan lit ta bending me over a table from your account, and then Facebook, where you apparently now like a charming group called the society for anal sex fiends. Kirsch has commented ??? underneath it.

You are not a violent person, but Carmilla seems to bring out the worst in you, and you can’t help but idly wonder what the likelihood of getting kicked out of university would be if you murdered her. You’ve watched a lot of CSI, you could totally make it look like an accident. Or just hide the body somewhere no one would find it. Like the bottom of the lake.

(As it turns out, you don’t need to murder her, or even do anything to get revenge, because one of Carmilla’s ‘study buddies’ gets offended when Carmilla doesn’t bother to call her back, and proceeds to spread a rumour around campus that Carmilla has chlamydia.)

And then there’s the study buddies; the seemingly endless rotating stream of girls that Carmilla appears to have at her every beck and call. Quite how someone as big a douchebag as Carmilla manages to convince so many girls to sleep with her is beyond you. It’s almost impressive. Almost.

The first time it happens — a week after she moves in; clearly she moves fast — Carmilla at least hangs a sock (one of yours, of course) on the doorknob, and you just roll your eyes and leave to do your studying at Danny’s instead. Actual studying, that is. Not Carmilla’s version of studying. Which judging from the low noises emanating from behind your closed door isn’t all that educational. At least not for anything on the Silas syllabus. However after that first time, since she’s apparently only capable of doing one civil deed per decade, she stops bothering, and you lose count of the number of times you walk in on her in various stages of undress on top of some girl.

Whenever you’re in the room and Carmilla has a ‘guest’ over, she at least has the decency to never do anything too x-rated with them, and ninety per cent of the time all that happens is a lot of quiet whispering from Carmilla and a lot of high pitched giggling from the other girl. You’re beginning to feel like Carmilla with the amount of times you roll your eyes; there’s no way whatever she’s saying can be that funny. And although they always stay fully clothed, Carmilla seems to have no problem with pinning various girls down on her bed and kissing them, even though you’re sitting five feet away on the other bed, until they drag her out of the room to do who knows what.

Well. You know exactly what they drag Carmilla off to do, but you desperately try not to think about it. Something that Carmilla makes exceptionally difficult to do whenever she comes back hours later and her hair is a mess, or her shirt isn’t buttoned fully, and she never makes any effort to hide any hickeys she gets.

Not that you ever wonder what it would be like if you were the one with Carmilla. At all.

Nope. Never.

Anyway.

You would take it personally, but you discover that she’s equally unpleasant to just about everyone else. Danny stopped by your room a few days after Carmilla first moved in, and in less than ten minutes had been subjected to Clifford, human stop sign, Jolly Red Giant, and overgrown fire hydrant. She alternates between Groot and Lurch when referring to Kirsch. She nicknames LaFontaine and Perry the Ginger Twins, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, or Thing One and Thing Two. If she wasn’t such a colossal jerk all the time, you might almost find her sarcasm funny. Maybe.

You conclude that she only has one real friend — study buddies notwithstanding — a dark-haired boy called Will, who you vaguely recognise as one of the Zetas that’s also friends with Kirsch. He shows up to your dorm a few times, smirks even more than Carmilla, which you didn’t think was possible, and he and Carmilla converse almost exclusively via mocking insults. But there’s always slightly less snark when she talks to him than when she’s directing her sarcastic comments towards you or Danny or LaFontaine or Perry.

/

A few days into October you’re busy with your English Lit paper due in at the end of the week, when Carmilla comes back into the room, grunting a hey buttercup in your direction. You give her a cursory glare before going back to Kipling, but your gaze snaps right back to her in horror when your brain catches up and you register the red splatters all over her arms. “Is that blood?”

Carmilla slings her bag onto her bed, turning around to survey you with a bored expression. “What?”

You point at her hands, slightly terrified. There’s bear spray courtesy of your extremely overprotective father stashed under your bed, but you’re not entirely sure you could get to it in time if Carmilla decides to finally act on the psychopathic tendencies you wouldn’t be surprised if she had and lunges at your neck with a knife. “Because I know I joked about you being a potential murderer, but if you actually are then—"

“It’s paint, you idiot,” Carmilla snaps, rolling her eyes. Sounds just like something a serial killer would say. “I’m an art major,” she huffs in explanation when you continue to stare at her.

“Oh.” Well that makes more sense than your theory. What kind of useless murderer wouldn’t bother to wash half a pint of blood off themselves after finishing up with a victim? You look back over at Carmilla, who’s now sifting through the pile of (probably dirty) clothes you picked up off the floor earlier and threw into a heap on her bed. “You know we’ve been roommates for a month now and that’s the first time you’ve told me anything about yourself?”

“Tragedy,” Carmilla deadpans, picking up an extremely sheer looking red shirt, and walking into the bathroom. She doesn’t bother to close the door, and the sound of running water reaches you a few seconds later.

“I’m majoring in journalism,” you say brightly in an attempt to get her to keep talking, your Kipling essay forgotten for the moment. “Minoring in sociology.”

“Fascinating,” Carmilla’s bored voice floats out of the bathroom. “Journalism, I never would’ve guessed that one,” she pauses, and you wait a few seconds to hear what sarcastic remark she follows that up with. “What with the ten billion intrusive questions about myself that you’ve harassed me with since I moved in, and your endless rants about feminism.”

You huff. “Well, we live together, and are going to be living together for the next nine months, and we know nothing about each other—“

“Like I said, truly a tragedy,” she pipes up, and you don’t even need to see her to know she’s got that stupid annoying smirk plastered on her stupid annoying face.

“Don’t you think we should at least try to get to know each other? Even if it’s just basic facts like knowing each other’s majors?” You finish, ignoring her interruption.

Carmilla comes out of the bathroom, her arms now paint-free and having changed into the red shirt. It’s almost completely see-through, her black lace — not that you notice that little detail, of course — bra clearly visible through the fabric. You try not to stare. At least not too obviously.

“Hmm, let me think about that for a second, cupcake,” Carmilla puts a hand on her chin, dramatically looking up to the ceiling and putting on an expression that you assume is supposed to be her ‘thinking face.’ She mostly just looks constipated. “No.”

“Carmilla,” you pout, wondering if that’ll work.

“Ugh, fine,” Carmilla sounds like she’d rather dig her own eyeballs out with an ice cream scoop than continue talking to you, so you think that fine might be a little sarcastic. “Since I’m feeling so generous, and I have a feeling you’re going to badger me about this for ages, I’ll be gracious enough to give you a Laura Hollis exclusive.” You muffle a snort behind your hand; gracious is not a word you would ever apply to Carmilla. She sits down on her bed and spreads her arms out dramatically. “Ask away, Lois Lane.”

You move your papers off your lap, turning to face her straight on. “How old are you?”

“Twenty.” Her enthusiasm hasn’t lasted very long; she’s already stopped looking at you in favour of examining her nails with a bored expression.

“Where are you from?"

“Here.”

“Here?” You just assumed she was French, what with her transferring from Paris and all, and that she just didn’t have that much of an accent.

“Yes, here. Austria.” She looks up from her nails and regards you with an unimpressed look. “Isn’t this supposed to be a two-way system? Shouldn’t I get to know all these exciting facts about you?”

You’re pretty sure this is the longest she’s gone without being rude to you. And she’s actually asking you a question about yourself. You briefly wonder if the paint she was covered in was toxic, and has started to melt her brain or something.

“Uh okay. Well, I’m originally from Canada, but I moved to Rotterdam with my Dad when I was nine and—“

“Oh wait," she interrupts. "I just remembered that I don’t care.” That puts a halt to your toxic paint theory; she’s still as Carmilla as she usually is. “And as delightful as this game of twenty questions is, I’m late to meet Will.”

You watch her stand up, stuff her phone and some money into her pocket, before turning to the little mirror on her headboard. She’s busy touching up her mascara when you’re struck with another question you want to know the answer to. “Why’d you leave Paris?”

Carmilla snorts, not bothering to turn round to look you, but you don’t miss the way her shoulders tense slightly. “Don’t think we’re quite there yet, sorry cupcake.”

“Not even after all this roommate bonding?” The slightly flirtatious inflection to roommate bonding is completely unintentional, and your gaze snaps over to her, internally bracing yourself for some lewd comment about a more fun way we can bond, sweetheart.

Instead, she just grumbles something under her breath quietly, and in the mirror’s reflection you catch sight of her rolling her eyes. “Oh you know, the same tragic backstory every closed-off, damaged girl has; Daddy left, Mommy drinks, love of my life broke my heart, the usual. Thought getting away from Paris would help.” You blink, because okay that is a lot, and she laughs. “I’m kidding.”

Oh.

“So you’re not gonna tell me the real reason?” You feel like kind of an ass for not letting it drop — after all, there clearly is a reason that Carmilla doesn’t want to talk about, and if the situations were reversed and Carmilla pried into why you left Canada you wouldn’t be too pleased with her — but Carmilla’s an ass all the time anyway, and it’s in your journalistic nature to be nosey. She hasn’t outright told you to fuck off and keep your inquisitive little beak out of my life (yet) so you only feel bad about it for a few seconds.

“Well I don’t want to reveal everything just yet,” Carmilla says, twirling round from the mirror to smirk at you. You’re not sure if she realises the double entendre of her words — you’ve seen her half naked several times after she strolls out of the shower wearing nothing except a tiny towel — but then she winks at you, and of course she deliberately worded it like that. “Wouldn’t want you to get bored of me so soon.”

You open your mouth, gape like a goldfish for a few seconds, and then close it again, because you have no clue what to say in reply. Not that you need to come up with one; Carmilla chooses that moment to pick up one of the many leather jackets she seems to own and saunters out of the room without bothering to say goodbye.

That is a fairly new and unexpected development that’s started to occur the past few days, Carmilla possibly maybe sort of flirting with you. You’re not entirely sure what to think of it, and you can’t decide if you like it or not. On one hand, if she’s flirting with you she’s usually not outright insulting you, which is preferable. But on the other hand, it’s Carmilla flirting with you.

Carmilla might be annoyingly good-looking — on a purely shallow level, you can admit that; you’re only human after all — but how attractive she happens to be is completely irrelevant because she’s still Carmilla. Rude, messy, lazy, apathetic, cookie-thieving Carmilla.

You distract yourself from thinking about how much you don’t actually mind her flirting with you by throwing yourself back into your Kipling essay.

(It’s the first civil conversation the two of you have shared since Carmilla moved it, so naturally, you come back to the room after your classes the next day to discover Carmilla dozing off on her bed, your yellow pillow under her head, her muddy boots on your side of the room and a nearly empty packet of your cookies lying next to her on the bed. You yell at her, she flips you off, calls you half-pint, and deliberately eats the one remaining cookie as slowly as she can while staring right at you, just to piss you off.)

/

Sometime mid-October, one of your Wednesday afternoon sociology lectures gets cancelled last minute, and Danny had already texted earlier to cancel your weekly pie date, citing a mountain of papers to finish grading, so you go back to your room, hoping that Carmilla isn’t around.

Pushing the door open, you’re greeted with a high-pitched giggle that most definitely did not come from Carmilla, and you groan under your breath. Not only is Carmilla very much present, she also has company. One of the ones that giggle, apparently.

You take another few steps into the room, pausing to kick a bright blue bra out of your way, before stopping in your tracks, staring in horror at the sight of Carmilla and a half-naked redheaded girl on your bed.

“Carmilla!” You snap after a few seconds of speechless glaring. The two girls jump in surprise, clearly too caught up in each other to have noticed a third presence in the room. Carmilla blinks around in apparent confusion, glancing down at the bed she’s on, before looking back up to where you’re seething quietly in the middle of the room. “What the hell are you doing?”

She looks sheepish for about two seconds, before plastering on her usual smug-slash-bored expression. “Well, I would’ve thought that was kinda obvious even to you, cutie.”

Only Carmilla would call you cutie while she has a different, topless girl on top of her.

“You’re on my bed,” you point out angrily.

Carmilla huffs, nudging the redhead off of her, before standing up from the bed. You wince when the redhead immediately grabs at your yellow pillow to hide her naked chest behind. You feel like you need to profusely apologise to it for the trauma it was just subjected to, and you just washed your sheets yesterday.

Turning your glare back to Carmilla, you almost wish she had just stayed on your bed, because now that she’s standing in front of you, you realise that her rumpled shirt is completely unbuttoned, the black lace of her bra a stark contrast to the pale skin of her chest. She’s wearing those stupid tiny black shorts as well, the ones that leave an obscene amount of skin on display. Skin that you don’t remember looking quite so smooth or inviting before. Not that you’ve noticed or anything. And you definitely haven’t paid any attention to how tightly they cling to her ass. And you certainly don’t let your eyes linger on her hipbones, shown off from how low down the shorts are. Carmilla makes precisely zero effort to cover herself up, and you’re fairly positive the reason she doesn’t bother is because she knows you’re staring.

There’s a fading hickey on her lower stomach, peeking out from the hem of her shorts, and you blink quickly, shaking your head to try and get rid of the image of you being the one to put that hickey there that pops into your mind uninvited. When you drag your gaze back up to Carmilla’s face, her head is cocked to the side and she’s smiling like she knows exactly what you’re thinking.

“Carmilla, you’re on my bed,” you repeat before Carmilla can open her mouth and say something stupid and clichéd and borderline flirtatious such as like what you see, cutie?  “I mean, I know you seem to get some kind of sick thrill out of pissing me off as much as humanly possible, but this is a new low, even for you.”

“Annabelle and I were just—“

“It’s Annalise,” the girl on your bed pipes up, looking offended.

Carmilla actually rolls her eyes. Unbelievable. “Whatever. She was just leaving.”

“I was?” You and Carmilla both stare silently at her and she shrinks back slightly. “Right, yeah, I was just leaving. Um,” she pauses, her gaze flickering between you and the bra you kicked across the floor earlier. “Could you, um…”

You turn around to let her put her clothes back on without an audience. Carmilla doesn’t bother.

Once Annalise leaves the room with a disgruntled see you later Carmilla, you immediately round on your irritating roommate.

“Look, you know I don’t care if you bring girls back here, and I also don’t care if you insist on sleeping your way through the entire female population of this university before Christmas—“

“Do I detect a hint of judgment in your voice?”

“Even though that’s probably not a very good idea because eventually all your broken hearted booty calls are going to band together in an angry mob and come after you with pitchforks and torches and signs that say Carmilla, you said you would call—“

“Because I’m feeling a little judged here, you know.”

“But is it really so difficult to keep your extra curricular activities confined to your own bed?”

Carmilla looks like she absorbed about ten percent of that rant. Maybe a little less.

“Look cupcake, it was an honest mistake—“

“Oh, a mistake, of course it was. You both just accidentally tripped and landed on my bed.”

Carmilla ignores you. “I wasn’t really paying a whole lot of attention to where I was going. If you must know, I was more focused on getting that damn chastity belt of a bra off, I mean Jesus Christ who even—“

“Carmilla, I swear to God.”

“And it’s not like Anna-Beth knew which bed was mine, she just happened to push me onto the wrong one. Like I said, it was an accident.”

“And you didn’t think to, oh I don’t know, move when you realised you weren’t on the right one?” You grit out from between clenched teeth, trying to resist the urge to strangle Carmilla with her stupid leather pants.

“Well, I was pretty distracted. Didn’t actually notice we were on your bed until your annoying voice came crashing over me like a freezing cold shower. Thanks for that, by the way.” She tilts her head to the side to smile sardonically at you, and you notice a bright red hickey starting to bloom on her collarbone. She still hasn’t bothered to button her shirt back up, and Jesus Christ Laura stop leering at her.

“You know, you keep saying that you don't care if I bring girls back here, but even when I'm on my own bed I can tell you get pissy about it. What, are you jealous or something?” Carmilla asks, dragging a hand through her messy hair to push it out of her eyes and dear God, how is someone that is so incredibly obnoxious still so incredibly attractive?

“Jealous?” You squeak. “Of your harem of study buddies? Why the hell would I be jealous of any of them? I mean you didn’t even remember this one’s name! You treat them all like crap, and yet for some bizarre reason, they keep coming back.”

Carmilla gets a very pleased look on her face that makes you think you may have said something exceptionally stupid. She smirks, and finally starts buttoning up her shirt. Slowly. “I actually meant jealous of me, since out of the two of us I’m the one that actually gets laid regularly. But hey, if your mind immediately jumped to thinking I meant you were jealous of the girls I fuck...“ She gives you a one shouldered shrug, that obnoxious smirk still plastered on her face.

She finishes covering herself up, reaching for the jacket thrown onto her bed while you stand in stunned silence.

“Anyway,” she says smugly just as she starts to head in the direction of the door, where Annalise is probably still lurking in the corridor waiting for her. Not that you care. “You’re not stupid, I’m sure you can figure out why they keep coming back.”

She brushes past you, close enough that you can smell her perfume, and before you can bite back a reply of you’re disgusting or it’s clearly not your winning personality at her, her hand comes up and she deliberately trails her fingertips slowly over your bare shoulder. You can’t stop the shiver that shoots down your spine at her touch, and Carmilla chuckles under her breath, leaning in far too close to whisper see you later cutie into your ear, before disappearing out the door.

You can feel the ghost of her touch lingering uncomfortably on your skin for hours after.

/

It’s taken you almost an entire month of incessant badgering, but Danny has finally given in and agreed to watch Orphan Black with you. She’s curled up beside you on your bed, your laptop balanced halfway between you, and you’re pretty sure she’s paying zero attention to the heavy flirting happening onscreen between Cosima and Delphine.

Her phone buzzes for the sixth time in ten minutes, and she surreptitiously looks at it, the screen tilted slightly away from you. You sneak a few glances at her, and notice her lips are pressed together tightly in an attempt to hide a smile. It's a move reminiscent of when your high school girlfriend would send you cute texts while you were somewhere with your Dad, and you tried keeping a blank expression so as not to alert him to anything.

“Who are you texting?” You ask casually. If Danny is texting a mystery crush, which seems fairly likely when you take into account the lack of attention being paid to Orphan Black, the half-hidden smiles and that one muffled giggle sometime around episode three, you doubt she’s going to tell you about whoever they are when there’s a third unwanted presence in the room. Even if she is ignoring you on the other bed.

Actually, you think Carmilla might be asleep. She hasn’t made a peep since she rolled out of bed earlier in her tiny (very tiny) shorts and tank top masquerading as pyjamas, except to mutter, "Morning cupcake, morning Xena," in your direction. Generally the only time she isn’t mocking you, and especially Danny, is when she’s unconscious. You glance over at her and sure enough, her eyes are closed and the book she’d immersed herself in after showering and retreating back to her side of the room is lying abandoned next to her. Waking up at noon and then not bothering to go to her only class of the day must be so exhausting for her.

“Kirsch,” Danny eventually replies after tapping out a reply on her phone, before stuffing it back into her pocket and focusing her attention back on the screen. Okay, clearly not a secret crush then. Probably just idiotic sports puns littered with dude and bro that would fly straight over your head. “He has a paper on Shakespeare due in tomorrow and he’s having some trouble with it.”

You raise an eyebrow. You like Shakespeare as much as the next English student but you didn’t realise Hamlet could be so amusing. The episode playing on your laptop finishes, the credits starting to roll, and Danny picks up your laptop to move it off her lap. “And as exciting, and slightly confusing, as this show is, I have a Summer Society meeting to prepare for in twenty minutes. Can we continue watching this on Friday? After class?”

“Yeah, no problem.” Danny ditching you for the Summer Society (or possibly Kirsch) is probably a good thing; six episodes in a row can’t be good for your eyes.

Danny dashes out of the room in a tall blur of red hair, after kissing you on the cheek and tossing a catch you later Hollis over her shoulder, leaving you alone with a sleeping Carmilla.

“What’s with the bunched-up face, sweetheart? Worried about your sasquatch of a girlfriend leaving you for someone less microscopic?”

Or, with an apparently awake Carmilla. An awake Carmilla who appears to have been quietly eavesdropping for the past several minutes, and who has apparently completely misread your relationship with Danny.

You push your laptop off to the side, clambering off the bed and heading towards the kitchen, ignoring most of Carmilla’s sentence. “Danny’s not my girlfriend, Carmilla. We’re just friends.”

“Really? Oh excellent,” Carmilla says, and you nearly trip over your own feet in shock. “I was worried we were going to have to work out some kind of sock on the door schedule. Our room gets enough traffic as it is, and I don’t like sharing.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” you shoot back. Surprisingly, after the Annalise incident Carmilla had actually had most of her rendezvouses with various members of her fan club elsewhere, and your room has been strangely study-buddy-free recently.

There’s a few moments of silence broken only by the pop of the can of grape soda being opened, before Carmilla pipes up. “I like Orphan Black. You know, if you want to keep watching.”

Hearing what is obviously an invitation to watch TV with her makes you nearly trip over your own feet again. Or that's maybe the fault of the lacy red thong on the floor. You glare at the back of her head suspiciously, debating the merits of watching Orphan Black with your irritating roommate, before turning back to the fridge and taking out another can of soda. Carmilla’s so rarely in the ‘hot’ part of her general hot-and-cold attitude that you may as well take advantage of it while you can.

“Budge over. I’m probably going to have traumatic flashbacks at the image of you sitting on my bed.”

“Not usually the reaction I get when I’m in a girl’s bed but—“

“Carmilla, shut up.”

/

It’s pouring with rain when you leave the library after a Monday evening study session with LaFontaine and Perry, and inevitably, you’ve forgotten a jacket again.

Carmilla’s hogging the shower when you get back to your room, and you take a moment to revel in how much you’re going to enjoying teasing her when you hear her belting out Taylor Swift over the sound of the running water.

Your amusement at your grumpy roommate knowing all the words to Blank Space dissipates at a very quick pace when you notice the packet of cookies on your desk. Specifically, the empty packet of cookies. You’re pretty sure it wasn’t even open when you left for class that morning. With a sigh, you drop your bag onto your bed and peel off your damp cardigan, throwing it into your laundry basket with a squelch. Carmilla finishes singing, and a few seconds later you hear the water turn off. You can faintly hear her humming We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together as you make your way over to the kitchen, and you want to punch something — such as Carmilla herself — when you discover all your hot chocolate has suspiciously vanished. You turn to your right and there’s three empty mugs sitting on Carmilla’s headboard. Of course there is.

The bathroom door opens behind you, and you turn around to glare at her. She’s only wearing a tiny towel — you nearly fall over from shock when you realise it’s actually her own one — and you promptly forget what you were going to yell at her when all you can focus on is inch after inch of wet skin. Then you take note of the light blue towel — your towel — that she’s using to dry her hair, and the amount of steam rolling out of the bathroom behind her is a clear indication that she’s probably used up all the hot water again.

“Carmilla,” you snap, and she stops humming and looks up at you in surprise, clearly not having heard you come in, before her usual annoying smug expression is back on her face.

“Hey cutie,” she says, leering openly at you, and you’re slightly caught off guard by her heated gaze until you realise you’re still drenched from the rain, and your top is clinging extremely tightly to you.

You huff, and cross your arms over your chest. She just grins wider, and you want to wipe that stupid smile off her stupid face. You ignore the fact that punching it off her is just as enjoyable sounding an idea as kissing it off her. She shakes her hair out, little droplets of water flying everywhere, letting it tumble in wet waves down her shoulders, and you deliberately look away from her, slightly worried what you’ll do if you keep blatantly checking her out. Your gaze lands on the empty food packets.

“I told you to stop eating all my cookies.”

“I got hungry.”

“And the hot chocolate?”

“I got thirsty.”

“Seriously, how old are you?” You snap. “Buy your own damn cookies and hot chocolate.”

She snickers like a five year old, and you roll your eyes, throwing the empty boxes into the bin. It’ll be another twenty minutes or so before there’s enough hot water for you to shower, so you open the fridge and poke around, looking for the box of takeout leftovers from last night. There’s no sign of it, and that’s when you notice the empty box in the bin, underneath a receipt from a store you vaguely recognise as a lingerie store in the city. Great, more underwear you’re going to find thrown on the floor. More underwear that you’re definitely not going to be picturing Carmilla wearing.

You close your eyes and start counting to ten silently in your head in an effort to stave off your anger. You get to three before you snap.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” You growl, slamming the fridge door and stomping over to Carmilla. “Really, what possesses you to do stuff like this, to use my shampoo and my towel—“ you snatch the fluffy towel out of her hands angrily, before taking a few steps backwards and gesturing down at the bin, “—and to eat all my food without asking? Do you do it deliberately to piss me off, because if you do, it’s working!”

Carmilla rolls her eyes. “Calm down cutie, like I said, I was hungry. I’ll buy you more if it bothers you that much.”

“I don’t want you to have to buy me replacement food, I want you to stop eating mine in the first place!” You huff, and lean back against the wardrobe. How Carmilla can go from being relatively pleasant company while binge watching Orphan Black one day, to being an obnoxious food-thieving douche the next, you have no idea. All you wanted to do was come back from the library, shower, inhale your body weight in Chinese food, and catch up on Parks And Recreation, but instead your annoying asshole of a roommate had to get in the way of that.

Carmilla turns to face away from you, picking up a purple plaid shirt from her bed and inspecting it carefully. “If I don’t have to buy you replacement food does that mean I don't have to buy you replacement shampoo, cause that bottle of mango smelling stuff is nearly finished.”

The anger and urge to throttle her with the towel rises back up like a flood.

“Carmilla, I swear to God, I have tried to be civil about all of this, but if you don’t stop acting like such an insufferable child—"

Whatever lame threat you were about to throw at Carmilla dies in your throat when the towel falls off her body and drops to the floor with a wet thud. She’s wearing underwear — if you can really call the scrap of see-through lace underwear — but nothing else, and you completely forget how to speak when all you can focus on are the drops of water falling off the her hair and trailing slowly down her bare back.

If an image of you on your knees in front of Carmilla, tongue trailing over the rivulets of water travelling down her body, jumps into your head, you don’t acknowledge it.

“My my, alert the media cupcake, there is a way to get you to shut the hell up,” Carmilla says gleefully, glancing over her shoulder and grinning at the probably dumbfounded look on your face.

By now, you’re used to the sight of post-shower Carmilla parading around in just a towel, but all the previous times she’s gone back into the bathroom to get changed, so this is…new. You swallow, still failing at trying to form words, because Carmilla is almost completely naked and right there and God she might be an insufferable dick most of the time, but she’s so unbelievably attractive.

She slips a bra on, snapping the clasp closed at the back, and then she tugs on a pair of leather pants. Those do not help with your attempts to stop leering at Carmilla like a thirteen year old boy. The purple shirt goes on next, and she turns round to face you while she buttons it up, and you can’t stop your gaze from dropping to stare at her stomach and chest before they’re covered up by the fabric.

She leaves the top few buttons undone — deliberately, you’re sure — and you can just see the swell of her chest behind the fabric.

“You never—“ you pause, trying to clear your head from the haze all of Carmilla’s bare skin put you in. “You never answered my question.”

“And what question was that, princess?” She asks, taking a step towards you.

“Why do you keep stealing all my food?” Your voice is shaky as you back away from her. Your back hits the kitchen counter, and you realise this may have been a bad idea, because once she rounds her headboard and is standing at the threshold of the kitchen, Carmilla essentially has you trapped.

She prowls forward like a predator stalking its prey. Her eyes are boring into yours, and the eye contact is making you mildly uncomfortable, but it’s also sending a thrill of heat through your body. She takes a final step forward until she’s right in front of you, staring at you with an unreadable expression on her face. You’re still holding the towel in a death grip, but when you feel her leather-clad thighs brushing against the backs of your hands, you tighten your fingers anyway to try and prevent yourself from letting the towel fall to the floor and touching Carmilla instead.

“Because it pisses you off. And I like riling you up,” she says, her voice low in a way that makes what she’s saying sound ten times dirtier than it actually is. You can feel your heart thumping against your ribs, and there’s a tug somewhere low in your stomach at her voice. “I wanted to see how far I could push you until you snapped.”

You lick your lips without thinking, and you don’t know if you’re imagining her gaze flickering down to your mouth or not. You’re having trouble thinking clearly when she’s this close to you, so close all you can smell is her perfume (and your shampoo) and you can feel the heat radiating off her body.

She bites her bottom lip, and you break your eye contact with her dark eyes to stare at her lip caught between her teeth. All you can think about is how much you’d prefer it to be your bottom lip she’s biting, nibbling and sucking on it while she kisses you senseless.

“Why?”

“You’re really cute when you’re angry,” she murmurs almost immediately, and this time you’re definitely not imagining the way she’s staring at your lips. “I mean, you’re cute all the time, but…”

It’s certainly not the first time Carmilla’s flirted with you, but it’s definitely the most direct she’s ever been. Your anger at her is fading frighteningly fast, being replaced by a sensation that you’re mostly unfamiliar with feeling in regards to Carmilla, which you eventually identify as lust, and you don’t think you’ve ever been so flustered in your life. Carmilla being so close to you is not helping.

You want to push her away, get out from being trapped between her and the kitchen counter and put some space between you so you can think clearly. You want to pull her closer, grab hold of the collar of that stupidly attractive plaid shirt and drag her down and kiss her until she’s gasping your name into your mouth.

You idly ponder, on a scale of one to ten how stupid it would actually be to lean forward and kiss her. Her lips look so soft, and you wonder what she’d taste like. You swallow, trying to wet your extremely dry throat. You cannot kiss your roommate. That is an immensely idiotic thing to do, and yet, it’s all you want to do. You want to kiss Carmilla. Or have her kiss you. You don’t really care who kisses who, so long as there’s kissing going on, preferably sometime soon.

Carmilla slowly reaches her hand up towards your face, pausing ever so slightly before she touches you, as if she’s waiting for you to slap her hand away and bolt out of the door. You don’t. You just keep staring into her eyes as she tucks a lock of your still-damp hair behind your ear. She trails her fingertips over the line of your jaw, and then down your throat, and every inch of your skin feels like it’s on fire.

You know you could escape if you wanted to. For all her obnoxious tendencies, you highly doubt Carmilla would physically stop you from moving away if you tried to get past her. But you’re frozen in place from her heated stare and the feather light brush of her fingers against your skin. The touch makes your head spin, and you’re pretty sure you’ve forgotten how to breathe.

“Carmilla, what are you doing?” You exhale quietly, and why are you still talking when you could be kissing her? She’s staring at your lips again, and if she kisses you — which you’re half certain she’s about to — you’re not going to stop her.

Her fingers brush over your pulse point, and your eyes flicker down to her lips when the side of her mouth lifts up in a half smile. Presumably she can feel the erratic pace of your racing pulse. You can certainly feel it, and your heartbeat, drumming away beneath your skin.

“You’re shivering,” Carmilla murmurs, her finger tracing along your collarbone and her eyes following the movement. “You should go shower. Don’t want you to get sick after getting caught in the rain, do we?”

You’re about to open your mouth to say God knows what — probably invite her into the shower with you — when abruptly, she pulls away from you, and the hypnotic trance you’ve been in since she backed you into the counter is broken. You blink, sucking in a deep breath, and by the time you’ve gotten your bearings again, you’re staring at Carmilla’s retreating back as she wanders out of the door, leaving you alone in the room.

Your jaw drops slightly. What the holy hell was that?

/

Danny comes over one evening, a few days after The Kitchen Incident That You Spend Absolutely Zero Time Thinking And/Or Talking About, while Carmilla’s out somewhere — probably harassing Will or ‘studying’ — immediately taking up residence on your entire bed and dropping a giant stack of papers next to her.

“Never become a TA,” she tells you, looking with a pained expression at the huge pile of papers. “I have to have all of these graded for eight tomorrow morning, and I have ninety pages of Keats and eighty pages of Whitman to read for my own class. Also due tomorrow morning.”

“So why are you just starting it now? I swear you mentioned that Keats reading like three days ago,” you reply, hauling yourself up from the desk and heading towards the kitchen to make two mugs of hot chocolate. Miraculously, Carmilla hasn’t finished the current packet yet. There’s no regular milk left, but you don’t feel an ounce of guilt at using Carmilla’s soy milk. Danny’s oddly quiet behind you, and when you turn to look at her, she’s flushed the same colour as her hair, and she’s refusing to look at you. “Danny?”

“I was planning on starting them this afternoon, but then Kirsch showed up, and uh... Well, he’s been insistent on teaching me how to play lacrosse ever since I mentioned to him that I had no idea what it was.”

“Okay…” You say slowly. You’re not entirely sure why she’s gone so red, or why she said it like she was admitting some deep dark secret. Danny and Kirsch are friends. Albeit friends who squabble like siblings almost one hundred per cent of the time, but friends nonetheless. The fact that she ditched her English reading to let Kirsch teach her lacrosse isn’t that outrageous an idea.

You forget all about it when Danny launches into a story about her latest track team practice, and an hour or so into your study session, you’ve gotten a fair bit of reading done. And by that, you mean you both spent twenty minutes deliberating what kind of pizza to order, and now you’re doodling in the margin of your sheet of paper and ranting about Carmilla, while Danny’s making paper airplanes out of her notebook pages and sending them flying over to Carmilla’s bed, and ranting about Kirsch.

You’re in the middle of a long monologue about how Carmilla’s latest thing to annoy you with is refusing to scrape her hair out of the shower drain — “Seriously, it looks like there’s some kind of small furry mammal living in the plughole, it’s disgusting.” — when Danny interrupts with, “I think she has a thing for you.”

“What?” You cough and splutter, nearly choking on your mouthful of pizza. “Carmilla? Have you lost your mind? You think Carmilla likes me?”

“Well, yeah,” Danny replies, not even bothering to look up from the notes she’s reading where she’s still sprawled on your bed, as if that isn’t the most ridiculous sentence ever uttered in the history of mankind.

“Care to explain your reasoning behind that insane theory?” You ask, spinning your chair away from your desk, because this study session clearly needs a break. An official break. Maybe too much Keats has taken a toll on Danny’s brain.

“She stares at you sometimes. She probably thinks no one’s watching, but she’s about as subtle as a fire alarm.”

“Okay, well, that’s…kind of to be expected,” you say. It’s really not; you’ve seen some of the girls Carmilla’s been with and a lot of them are practically supermodels compared to you. You decide not to tell Danny that if Carmilla does stare at you outside of openly shameless leering whenever you come out of the shower, you really don’t mind. It’s kind of an ego boost. “Carmilla stares at anything with boobs and a pulse, so that doesn’t count.”

Danny puts the notes down and heaves herself up onto her elbow. “No, I don’t mean she stares at you like she wants to jump you,” she pauses, and her eyebrows furrow. “Well, actually, yeah she does, which is incredibly uncomfortable to witness, but what I meant was sometimes I catch her staring at you with this like, dreamy faraway expression. I don’t really know how to describe it, but it doesn’t look like she’s daydreaming about doing you, and she only ever looks at you like that when you’re not looking at her.”

“I think you’re seeing things,” you laugh nervously, tapping her glasses where she’d set them down on your desk earlier. Dreamy is not an expression you can picture on Carmilla’s face. “Maybe you should go get your prescription checked.”

You haven’t mentioned anything to Danny about the weird almost kiss from a few days ago, or admitted to her that you may or may not be ludicrously attracted to Carmilla, and you decide to continue to keep that to yourself, since that’s only going to add fuel to the fire of Danny’s suspicions.

“Okay, well what about the fact that she hates me?" You open your mouth to object and Danny cuts you off. "Yes, I know she hates everyone, but think about it, she really hates me. And there’s no real reason for her to dislike me this much, we don’t have any classes or anything together, and we’ve exchanged like two words that aren’t mocking nicknames with each other the entire month and a half she’s been here.”

“So?”

“So, half the campus thinks you and I are dating anyway, and you said she called me your girlfriend. Maybe she’s jealous of our nonexistent relationship.”

Danny shrugs like it’s bulletproof logic, and you can’t help but laugh. “Okay, so, let me get this straight. You think Carmilla, my apathetic asshole roommate only hates you because she’s secretly jealous of you, because she thinks you and I are dating even though I told her we weren't, and she wants to be the one dating me.”

Danny’s quiet for a few seconds, looking thoughtful, before she says, “Okay, when you put it like that, yeah it sounds ridiculous.”

“Yeah,” you agree with a laugh, turning back to your papers and trying to fight the flush you can feel rising on your face. ”Just a bit.”

But even as Danny drops the subject, going back to complaining about Kirsch — “I swear to God if he says the word brotastic one more time, I’m going to shove his damn lacrosse stick up his ass. Sideways.” — that little irritating seed she’s planted begins to flourish.

You’re still trying not to think about it — and failing badly — when Carmilla comes back an hour later. She sneers at Danny, smirks at you, and says, “Didn’t realise you were letting strays in now, cutie. Shouldn’t I have been consulted about this? 

Danny sighs, saying that is her cue to leave. She mouths the word cutie over her shoulder at you on her way out the door, grinning pointedly. You roll your eyes and wave her off, ignoring the weird look Carmilla gives you.

There is no way in Hell or Hogwarts that Carmilla has a thing for you. Sure, she flirts with you a lot, but she flirts with anything that moves, men included, even though you’re fairly positive she’s only exclusively into women. So it’s not like it means anything. And okay, yes, you do catch her staring at you a lot, but it’s never with the kind of wishful longing that Danny had described, it’s always blatant leering whenever you come out of the shower in just a towel, or obvious staring at your ass whenever there’s a Zeta or Summer Society party and you swap your jeans and button ups for a dress. And as you pointed out to Danny, Carmilla stares at anything female, so.

Anyway, even if the unthinkable happened and Carmilla is attracted to you, it doesn’t mean anything, because it wouldn’t be reciprocated. Sure, you can't dispute that Carmilla’s hot, but her terrible personality completely ruins any kind of real attraction you could ever have to her.

It’s just harmless flirting. And nothing bad has ever come from that. Hell, Kirsch and Danny both flirt with you all the time and it’s not like anything would ever come of that.

So there’s nothing wrong with letting a little harmless flirting continue, right?

Chapter Text

The first real argument with Carmilla happens a few days before Halloween.

(In retrospect you probably should’ve expected it, considering she had been oddly nice — for Carmilla — over the weekend, agreeing to watch Buffy with you with only minimal mockery, and only stealing one single packet of cookies. And because Carmilla apparently feels the need to even out her douchebag equilibrium after the rare occasions where she isn’t a total jerk, she’s always a bigger asshole than usual for the next day or two to make up for it.)

After your journalism class finishes around one, you go for lunch with Danny. Kirsch comes bouncing up to your table halfway through a particularly heated game of Fuck Marry Kill starring the Silas faculty, a bored looking Will following him, to invite you both to the Halloween party the Zetas are throwing on Friday.

“Attendance is mandatory,” Will tells you with a creepily Carmilla-esque grin, before they disappear off to bother someone else.

You come back to the dorm room to find Carmilla sprawled on her bed, leaning against the wall with one of her legs hanging off the edge, the other bent at the knee so she can prop a sketchbook against her leg. There are a few stray smears of paint on her hands again, purple and yellow this time, her head is tilted to the side as she focuses on whatever she’s drawing, and she’s wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses. You do your best to squash the little part of you that thinks she looks incredibly cute in them.

“I didn’t know you wore glasses,” you say in lieu of a hello, watching in amusement as she blinks in confusion, like she’d forgotten she was wearing them, and pulls them off her face.

“Only sometimes,” she mutters, shooting you a grumpy look while reaching over to place the glasses on her headboard.

“Don’t you normally have class right now?” You ask, placing your takeaway cup of hot chocolate down on your headboard and flopping onto your bed. You know nothing about Carmilla’s timetable, but she’s usually out of the room for the duration of Tuesday afternoons, so you just assumed she had class.

Carmilla shrugs. “Didn’t feel like going.”

She doesn’t offer anything else, and somehow you get the feeling she won’t appreciate being reprimanded for skipping class, so instead you open your laptop, intending to start an essay plan for your latest paper before you go to Danny’s later for the monthly Summer Society movie night.

A little while later, the silence is broken by your phone buzzing, and you pull it out of your pocket, two unread texts flashing up at you.

Danny: hey loser, can you bring some popcorn with you later cause someone (kirsch) has eaten all of mine

Kirsch: if danny told u i ate all the popcorn she’s lying to cover up the fact that she did cause she’s a pig

You ponder your next question for all of five seconds, before throwing caution to the wind, shifting your laptop to the side and turning to face your roommate.

“Carmilla?” You ask, before you lose your nerve. She’s still focused on her drawing, but she grunts to let you know she’s listening, and the lack of eye contact makes it slightly easier to ask. “Do you, uh, have any plans tonight?”

“Nothing yet, no.”

“Well, there’s this big movie night at the Summer Society house this evening, and um…well, if you aren’t busy, maybe you’d like to come with me?”

There’s one long glorious moment when Carmilla glances up at you without her usual apathetic sneer on her face, and you think that maybe you’re finally making a dent in the ten foot thick walls she surrounds herself with, before she ruins it by huffing out a sarcastic laugh. “No offence cutie,” she starts, indicating whatever she’s about to say is probably going to be wildly offensive. “But I can think of much better ways to spend my evening than with your overgrown girlfriend—“ You point out that Danny isn’t your girlfriend (again) but Carmilla ignores you (again). “—that brainless tree of a Zeta that follows her around like a giant puppy, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

You resist the urge to throw something at her. There’s no need for her to be so rude all of the time. Would it have been so difficult to just say no thanks?

“Just curious,” you ask, trying not to let too much of the irritation you can feel leak into your voice. “Do you ever get tired of being such a colossal jerk all the time?”

"Not particularly. Do you ever get tired of being such a colossal nuisance all the time?"

“Why do you always do this?” You sigh, and Carmilla looks back up from her sketchbook with a disinterested expression. “I mean, despite what you seem to want people to think, I know you’re not actually a complete jackass all the time. One minute you’re actually being nice…or at least your version of nice, and we’re watching Orphan Black together like we could almost be friends, and then the next you’re back to being a callous jerk that steals all my food and insults anyone who so much as breathes near you.”

“Hate to break it to you sweetheart but we’re not friends, so save the lecture for someone who actually cares,” Carmilla states, twirling her pencil in between her fingers, and somehow even that feels like part of her mocking you.

This is usually the point in your arguments where you back down, let Carmilla get the last snippy comment in before leaving the room and allowing her to simmer back down to her usual level of grumpy, but you’re sick of the constant back-and-forth between Carmilla being uncharacteristically cordial and Carmilla being a class A douche, so this time your mile-wide stubborn streak refuses to let you back down.

“I know that, but—“

“But what?” She interrupts, cocking her head to the side and giving you a withering look. “Did you think that eventually we would be friends? That if you were persistent enough that I’d stop being a dick, and open up and tell you all about myself? That we’d have nice little movie date nights with the ginger twins and dumb and dumber?”

Her condescending sneer and accompanying overdramatic eye roll makes your irritation reach the boiling point, bubbling over until you’re angrily snapping, “What the hell is wrong with you?” Carmilla shuts her sketchbook with a sigh and places it to the side, before leaning back on her hands and arching an eyebrow at you. “Are you really so incapable of feeling normal human emotions for even one extended period of time?”

Something flashes across Carmilla’s face, too quickly for you to process, and it’s gone as soon as you notice it. She laughs, bitterly and derisively. “Oh, of course, two months of forced cohabitation and Lois Lane thinks she has me all figured out,” she snaps, standing up from the bed and folding her arms across her chest to glare at you. “You don’t know anything about me princess, don’t act like you do.”

You’ve learned by now that princess is her go-to nickname for when she’s really mocking you. Sweetheart and cutie and cupcake might be repetitive and annoying, but at least they’re never delivered with any real malice.

“Well thank God for that, because what I do know about you doesn’t exactly paint you in a good light,” you retort angrily, standing up so you’re face to face. “You know for a while, I thought this whole persona of yours was just an act to keep people at a distance for whatever reason, and that deep down you do actually have the capacity to care about people. But now I’m pretty convinced that no, this is just who you are, and the only person you really care about is yourself.”

“Sorry cutie,” she sneers mockingly at you, not sounding sorry in the least. “Can’t change who I am.”

“What the hell happened to you to turn you into such a cruel, selfish, uncaring asshole?”

You regret it as soon as you say it. The something flashes across Carmilla’s face again, longer this time, and as well as the general irritation you’re used to seeing, you realise she actually looks hurt. She manages to cover it up quickly though, eyes narrowing as her usual impassive expression slides back into place like a mask. Her voice is cold when she speaks. “Because obviously something had to have happened for me to turn out like this, right?”

“I didn’t mean it like—“

“Yes you did,” Carmilla spits bitterly. “Don’t try and take it back just because you’ve realised you’ve actually hit a nerve.” Her mouth clamps shut abruptly, jaw clenching in an indication that maybe she didn’t mean to let that slip out. Either that or she’s resisting the urge to actually deck you in the face.

“I just—“

“You know, I have been here nearly two months, and in this entire time I have heard you talk non-stop about your Dad and your cousins and your grandparents, but not once have you mentioned your mother.” Your stomach drops. “And not once have I pried and asked about her. So please—“ her voice drips with sarcasm. “—if it’s not too much to ask from your prissy little holier-than-thou self, could you possibly extend the same courtesy to me, and stop bugging me about every single minute detail of my life.”

The room falls silent as Carmilla stops talking, and continues to glare coldly at you. You swallow, trying to get rid of the lump in your throat before speaking. “Carmilla, I’m sorry—“

“Save it,” she cuts you off, turning around and sweeping her collection of pencils into her bag along with her sketchbook. “I don’t want your apologies. Or your pity.”

She doesn’t give you a chance to reply, picking up her bag and a jacket, throwing you a final cold glare before storming out of the room and slamming the door behind her.

/

Two innuendo and argument free days later, you’re busy procrastinating your latest English paper by scrolling aimlessly through Tumblr, and ignoring both Carmilla’s presence on the other side of the room and the tension-filled silence between you. You’ve barely exchanged two words with Carmilla since Monday, and this is actually the first time since then that you've both been in the room at the same time for more than five minutes, so you’re pretty convinced you’re hearing things when Carmilla asks, out of nowhere, “Are you going to the Zetas’ Halloween party tomorrow night?"

Looking up from your laptop in surprise, you glance across the room at where Carmilla’s sitting on her bed, still engrossed in whatever she’s doing on her laptop and giving no indication that she actually spoke to you. You certainly didn’t expect Carmilla to be the one to initiate conversation, so you’re too caught up in wondering if you’ve gone insane and just imagined it that Carmilla has to repeat herself, her eyes flicking up from her laptop to meet your gaze.

“Um, yes I am,” you say, looking at her suspiciously. The Zetas’ annual Halloween party is superheroes and supervillains themed this year, so you doubt Carmilla would make an appearance at something she would probably deign the nerdiest social gathering of losers outside of comic con, but you ask anyway. “Are you?”

Carmilla snorts in reply, not bothering to look up from where she’s typing away at her laptop. This might be the first time you’ve actually witnessed her doing schoolwork. Unless she’s actually composing some form of mass-email-sext entitled first come, first served to her fan club, which, ew.

“Why are you asking?”

“Just making polite conversation, sweetheart.”

You raise your eyebrow. Carmilla and polite conversation is an even more unlikely pairing than Danny and Kirsch. “Okay, now I definitely know you’re up to something.”

“I am not up to something,” Carmilla huffs. “I was just asking.”

“Polite conversation isn’t really your forte, Carmilla,” you point out.

Carmilla stays quiet for a few long moments, tapping a few keys on her laptop before shifting to face you. “As much as I hate to admit this, you might’ve had a point,” she grumbles, refusing to look at you. You stay silent, waiting for her to elaborate. “I know we didn’t exactly get off to a good start—“ Carmilla smiles slightly when you snort. Understatement. “—but as much fun as annoying you is, if I end up pissing you off to the point where you transfer to a different school or something, they could replace you with someone even worse.”

You’re not entirely sure whether that’s a compliment or not.

”Plus the permanent kicked puppy expression you’ve been wearing since Monday has been getting on my nerves, so. I’m not saying we’re friends or anything, but you know…” Carmilla trails off, looking up at you for the first time with a tentative half smile tugging at her lips. “I guess it wouldn’t entirely awful if we actually managed to get along.”

It dawns on you that this might be Carmilla’s roundabout, slightly rude way of offering an olive branch, and you stare at her in stunned silence. Maybe someone’s drugged her. Maybe someone’s drugged you. Maybe aliens have abducted her and replaced her with her normal twin from an alternate dimension. Extra terrestrial life forms kidnapping and cloning your annoying roommate is probably a more logical explanation than Carmilla being so uncharacteristically…nice.

“Okay,” you say slowly, mostly because you’re too stunned to say anything else. “That would— I’d like that.”

(Not that you’ll ever admit it, but the past three days have seemed oddly lacking without the opportunity to yell at Carmilla for being her usual unclean and aggravating self, or having her turn everything you say into some inappropriate sexual comment.)

Carmilla returns the smile you give her, and you’re pretty sure you catch the beginnings of a pink flush on her face before she ducks her head to focus on her laptop.

“Uh, Carmilla?” She glances back up at the sound of her name, and she definitely looks a little redder than normal. Carmilla embarrassed is…kind of adorable. “About Monday…”

She cuts you off with a wave of her hand. “Can we just forget it happened? I had a shitty day, and I took it out on you and…I shouldn’t have.” She pauses, and then, like it physically pains her, says, “I’m sorry, okay?”

You’re pretty sure that hurling the most offensive things at each other before refusing to talk for three full days warrants some kind of talking about it afterwards, but for the sake of not starting another argument, you let it go.

“So am I,” you reply, and Carmilla looks confused. “I said some pretty horrible things to you as well, so I’m sorry too.”

She smiles again, nodding her head as acceptance of your apology before she goes back to her laptop. You both lapse into a comfortable silence, broken only by the sound of Carmilla’s typing, until your phone buzzes loudly with a text from Danny, asking (demanding) you come over to save her from being bored completely to death by all the papers she has to mark.

You don’t know what makes you pause in the doorway after having already said goodbye, but you choose not to think about it too much. “Carmilla?”

“Hmm?”

“Um, I know you probably have plans somewhere with your study buddy of the week, and the Zetas aren’t exactly your scene, but uh…“ And wow, three days without talking to her and you’ve already forgotten how intense her direct stares can be. “You know if you did happen to come to the party tomorrow and we just happened to run into each other…“ You start to trail off nervously when a pleased smile starts to creep across Carmilla’s face.

“Are you inviting me to go to the party with you?”

You blurt out, “No,” immediately, and Carmilla pouts.

“Ouch.” She has a mock look of hurt on her face as she places a hand dramatically over her heart.

“Well, maybe, kind of. Not with me,” you stutter. You really need to leave before you can embarrass yourself further. “I’m just saying, if you were there, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.”

“I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” she deadpans, but she’s actually smiling, which isn’t a sight you see very often. “I’ll think about it, cupcake.”

/

On Halloween, the Zetas’ party doesn’t officially start until 8PM, so after your last class of the day finishes, you have a couple hours before you have to go to Danny’s to get ready, so you make your way back to your room to waste some time reading and Tumblr-ing.

Carmilla comes breezing into the room after about an hour of pleasant silence, throwing a hey cutie in your direction — you refuse to acknowledge the fact that you sort of missed Carmilla’s dumb nicknames in the three day silence — and depositing her bag onto her bed, before she starts clattering around in the kitchen.

You ignore her humming and general racket making while you concentrate on your laptop, failing to notice her padding across the room towards your bed instead of her own, until the sound of her placing something down on your headboard behind you breaks your concentration. When you turn around to investigate the noise, you catch sight of your Tardis mug sitting innocently next to your copy of The Scarlet Letter, and before you can stop yourself, you blurt out, “What is that?”

“A potato salad,” Carmilla deadpans as she flops ungracefully onto her bed after setting down her own mug, and you practically hear the eye roll. “What does it look it?”

You take a suspicious sniff of the hot chocolate filled mug. “Is there arsenic in here?”

“Where the hell would I get arsenic from?”

“Antifreeze?”

“Jesus Christ I am never doing anything nice for you ever again.”

“Cyanide?”

“Oh my God, it isn’t poisoned,” Carmilla huffs, slouching further down on the bed and hiding her face resolutely behind the book she picks up, refusing to look at you. “I was making some for myself and accidentally used your regular milk instead of my soy milk.” You choose not to point out that the normal milk comes in a green carton and her soy milk comes in a light blue carton. Not exactly difficult to get them mixed up.

“Um, thank you,” you say, taking a sip of the hot chocolate and deciding that even if it is poisoned, it’ll be a good way to go since for some incredibly annoying reason, it tastes better than whenever you make it.

“You’re welcome,” Carmilla grumbles. “Don’t get used to it. I was feeling spontaneous. Spirit of Halloween and all that.”

The hot chocolate stealing still bothers you, but if she starts making some for you whenever she helps herself without asking, you could probably learn to live with it.

Half an hour and one extremely good cup of hot chocolate later, your phone buzzes with a text from Danny, saying you’re free to come over to start getting ready whenever. Carmilla’s apparently far too engrossed in her book to pay you any attention as you switch off your laptop and start collecting everything you need, only looking up when you haul your costume out from where it’s stashed under your bed, and stuffing it into your bag.

“You’re leaving already?” She asks, glancing up and down at your outfit of the button up and jeans you’ve been wearing all day. “Isn’t the point of Halloween parties that you’re supposed to dress up in some ridiculous outfit that displays at least seventy percent skin or more? What are you going as, yourself?”

“I’m getting ready at Danny’s, then meeting LaF and Perry there,” you explain, gesturing at your costume-filled bag. “And I’m going as Captain America.”

“I thought you were Canadian.”

You try not to laugh. “He’s— never mind.”

“Have fun,” Carmilla says as you start towards the door, shooting you a rare genuine smile that serves as an irritating reminder of how pretty she is.

You pause in the doorway, turning round to look at her. “Uh, I’ll maybe see you later then?”

Carmilla smiles, in a way that looks suspiciously like she’s busy plotting something nefarious. “Maybe.”

/

It took hours of Internet trawling before you managed to find a female costume in your size, that didn’t cost a small fortune, and wasn’t, for lack of a better term, incredibly slutty. Your endless Googling came to fruition when you happened upon a website for a costume store based in deepest Macedonia, that had seemed a little shady at first, but they didn’t drain your bank account and they sent the costume on time, so. The shield is a little big, but thankfully not too heavy when you manage to strap it onto your back, and it leaves your stomach bare, but Krav Maga was good for more than just punching potential stalkers in the throat, so you can deal with that.

At least three different girls dressed as varying versions of Harley Quinn try to hit on Danny, dressed as Poison Ivy, on the walk across campus to the Zetas’, and since Danny took so long with her hair and makeup, the party is already in full swing by the time you arrive at the Zeta frat house. The typical ‘party’ smell of booze and sweat hits you as soon as you follow Danny inside, and the Zetas don’t appear to be enforcing their superheroes and supervillains only, bro!! (unless you’re a hottie) rule, since a girl dressed like Daenerys Targaryen stumbles past you almost immediately.

“Hey,” Danny says, voice rising over the loud music. “I told Kirsch I’d come find him when we got here, but LaF is over there—“ you follow the direction that Danny’s pointing in, and see LaFontaine loitering next to the stairs on their own. “—I’ll come find you after I’ve got Kirsch, okay?”

You nod, Danny scampers off and you start weaving your way through the crowd towards LaFontaine, who’s dressed, as far as you can tell, as a mad scientist. It was their costume last year as well, and you’re not sure if they actually own any other costumes.

“I thought this was supposed to be a superhero party,” you point out when you reach them, eyeing up their purple shirt and white lab coat.

LaFontaine turns towards you, dramatically raises their hand that’s not holding a red plastic cup, and without a word clicks their fingers. You raise an eyebrow, wondering if they’re drunk already, and then your mouth falls open in shock as their skin starts to glow green.

“I’m The Incredible LaFontaine!” They announce happily, mock bowing when you give them a round of applause.

“How did you manage to do that?” You ask in amazement as their skin fades back to a normal colour. “Or do I even want to know?”

“I don’t experiment and tell,” they grin. That probably means you don’t want to know.

“Where’s Perry?” You ask, looking around for the other redhead. Maybe she’s cleaning something.

“Getting drinks with Carmilla.”

“Carmilla?” You splutter in disbelief. Okay yes, you might’ve asked Carmilla to come to the party but you didn’t think she’d actually bother to show up. “As in my roommate Carmilla?”

LaFontaine looks at you in confusion. “There’s more than one of them at this school?”

Ignoring LaFontaine, you look over towards the big table doubling as the bar that takes up an entire side of the room, and spot Perry, dressed as a witch, complete with a little toy broom, chattering at top speed about something. Carmilla’s standing next to her, and she’s smiling. And not her usual obnoxious smug smirk that makes her look exceptionally punchable, but an actual smile. It’s very odd.

“Since when are those two friends?”

“Per and Carmilla? They have a few classes together. Something art related I think.” LaFontaine follows your gaze towards the pair at the drink tables. Their eyebrows furrow in confusion at the sight of Carmilla shoving Perry’s shoulder playfully, before laughing at the equally confused expression you’re sure is on your face. “I wouldn’t waste your time trying to figure out how that friendship actually works, I already tried and got nowhere.”

You can’t really see what Carmilla’s dressed as, your view being blocked thanks to a strawberry and a banana aggressively grinding in the middle of the dance floor, so you’re subjected to five long minutes of half-listening to LaFontaine prattle on about something while running through various options in your mind of what does someone like Carmilla Karnstein dress up as for Halloween?

You find out when LaFontaine stops talking in favour of gazing behind you with the particular lovestruck expression that indicates Perry is somewhere in the vicinity. You turn around and catch sight of her making her way across the room with Carmilla in tow, and your brain promptly short circuits.

Carmilla looks— well, simply put, she looks like the star of schoolgirl porno; sinfully short skirt that only just covers her ass, those annoying knee socks that you’ve begrudgingly accepted you’re wildly attracted to, and a white shirt buttoned the bare minimum amount to cover her chest. You feel your mouth fall open in shock (and maybe a tiny bit of lust) when you take notice of the damn tie around her neck. She's ridiculously attractive anyway, but it's downright unfair how good she looks like this. Someone accidentally nudges you as they make their way past you, breaking you out of your Carmilla-trance, and you close your mouth before you actually start drooling.

As she gets closer you realise the green tie is actually a Slytherin tie and oh, she’s dressed as a Hogwarts student. Which is right about the time that you get suspicious, because you’re fairly positive Carmilla’s never even seen Harry Potter.

Carmilla and Perry reach you and LaFontaine, and Carmilla immediately hands you one of the two red cups she's holding. "Happy Halloween, cupcake."

She runs an appraising eye over your costume, gaze lingering on your bare stomach for much longer than necessary, and you take a large gulp of the drink to try and combat the flush you can feel creeping up your neck towards your face.

“What do you think?” She says with a barely concealed smirk, gesturing at her outfit. You’re glad the obvious question of like what you see? goes unsaid. You’re not entirely sure what you would’ve replied to that. Probably oh my God wow since that’s about the extent of your vocabulary right now. It's kind of difficult to remember how to do things such as breathe or talk normally when she's standing so close and looking like that.

“Uh, I think it’s probably a violation of every dress code at Hogwarts.” Carmilla’s grin widens, apparently taking that as a compliment. You kind of mean it as one. “I mean you’re not necessarily a Slytherin just because you’re mean, I could actually see you in Ravenclaw as well, but you look, uh...”

Carmilla shrugs. “I didn’t put that much thought into it, this was the only one the store had left,” she laughs, thankfully interrupting you before you can say something stupid like you look really hot and I kinda want to kiss you.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” you say before you can stop yourself.

“Yeah, me too.” Carmilla smiles at you from behind her cup, before glancing at something over your shoulder and rolling her eyes. “But unfortunately your tall friends are lumbering over here, so that is my cue to leave,” she continues in a disdain-laced voice. You kind of want to tell her to stay, but Danny and Carmilla aren’t exactly on the best of terms even when sober, and the party might go downhill a bit if one of them pisses off the other to the point of attempted murder. You must not hide the disappointment on your face as well as you’d hoped if the smirk on her face is any indication. “I’ll come find you later though,” she says, loud enough to be heard over the music.

You wonder if you’re imagining the flirtatious inflection to her voice. Probably not. You almost wish you still weren’t speaking to each other, since if she’s ignoring you, it means she’s not flirting with you and therefore can’t turn you into this embarrassingly flustered mess.

Carmilla brushes past you when she wanders off, and you catch a whiff of her perfume. You’re not sure if it’s that or the alcohol in your cup that’s making your head spin.

/

The next time you catch sight of Carmilla is when you’re watching Danny destroy Kirsch at beer pong, much to his — and the Zeta portion of the onlookers — dismay.

Will — who you think is dressed as Link from the Legend of Zelda — gives up on being Kirsch’s personal cheerleader, and moves to stand next to you instead, grumbling under his breath about how un-brotastic Kirsch is being. Now that he’s moved, you catch sight of Carmilla across the room, talking to (and probably flirting with) a blonde girl dressed as a blue Angry Bird.

At some point, she appears to have acquired Perry’s witch hat, and somehow a pointy hat perched on her head at a stupid jaunty angle does nothing to detract from how much you want her.

Briefly, you think that maybe you just need to take a leaf out of Carmilla’s book and sleep with someone, anyone, just to get this insane idea that you want to kiss Carmilla out of your head. After all, it’s completely plausible that you only think you’re attracted to Carmilla because you spend lots of time in such close quarters with her. Anyone could feel like this. It’s a completely rational thought.

Unfortunately, the twist of mild jealousy in your stomach as you watch the Angry Bird trail a hand over Carmilla’s arm makes you realise that no, you really do want to kiss Carmilla, and it’s highly unlikely a one night stand you’ll have to spend the rest of your academic career avoiding is going to help.

You’ve kissed girls before, slept with your long term high school girlfriend a handful of times (an overprotective father has nothing on raging teenage hormones) before the post-graduation breakup, and there was that singular one night stand in all its trashy glory with a girl whose name you can’t even remember during the week Danny came to visit you in Rotterdam over the summer, so it’s not like you’re a stranger to being attracted to someone. It’s just never been quite this...overwhelming before. And of course the person you inexplicably feel so much want for has to be Carmilla.

You’re not dumb; sleeping with your roommate is an exceptionally idiotic idea, one made even worse by the fact that the particular roommate in question is incredibly annoying. Also incredibly hot, but that’s completely irrelevant. And also now walking straight towards you, Angry Bird nowhere in sight.

“Hey poptart,” she says once she’s elbowed Will out of the way to slide into the recently vacated space next to you. Her face is slightly flushed and her expression is more dopey smile than sardonic smirk, so she clearly isn’t one hundred percent sober. “You having fun?”

You look towards where Danny has landed yet another ping pong ball into the last cup on Kirsch’s side, a collective cheer goes up from the audience of Summer Society girls, and Kirsch looks like he’s about to cry. “Absolutely. Are you?" You glance behind her to make sure the Angry Bird isn’t actually lurking behind her. “And where’s your friend?”

"Eh,” Carmilla shrugs. "You’re better company.”

Things get a little blurry after LaFontaine shows up again, a disapproving Perry behind them, with a large tray of brightly coloured shots. Will drags everyone into a game of Cards Against Humanity — which Perry wins, to everyone’s surprise — before Kirsch insists on borrowing your shield, and the two of them disappear off into the depths of the frat house. You take a brief second to mourn it, since you doubt you’ll ever see it again, before wandering outside with Danny to get some air, where she spends fifteen minutes fretting about how, “These two really hot people keep hitting on me and I can’t decide which one to sleep with, should I flip a coin or just take both of them home?”

You’re sitting on one of the sofas, finishing a glass of water under Perry’s watchful stare, when Carmilla reappears, handing you a red cup of...something.

“What’s this?” You ask cautiously, taking a suspicious sniff of it. Carmilla plops down onto the sofa next to you after shooing Perry away with a snarked I’ve got her, June Cleaver, no need to worry. The cup is full of a slightly off-clear liquid, a lot of crushed ice, with a slice of lime perched on top.

“A peace offering. And a premature apology for the state I left the bathroom in.”

You groan Carmilla’s name disapprovingly, throwing in an annoyed glare for good measure. Carmilla just chuckles and takes a drink from her own cup. You decide that Carmilla, irritating and obnoxious as she is, is unlikely to roofie you and therefore it’s probably a safe drink.

“It’s a margarita,” she says, just as you take a wary sip of it and clearly, by ‘margarita’ Carmilla means just straight tequila. “Unsurprisingly, the Zeta frat house kitchen didn’t have any margarita glasses, so I improvised.”

Of course Carmilla wouldn’t lower herself to the cheap beer provided in abundance by the Zetas.

“Fancy-ish cocktails from a red solo cup, I feel like I’m getting the full college experience now.”

“Doesn’t the full college experience usually include lesbian experimenting with your roommate?” Carmilla comments, and you promptly choke on some ice. “And on that note,” she continues like that was a completely normal thing to say. “Want to dance?”

“Is that a good idea?” You say before you can stop yourself.

“Oh, come on,” Carmilla says, her cheerful and innocent voice a stark contrast to the predatory way she’s grinning at you. “What’s a little friendly dance between roommates?”

/

Turns out, there is nothing even remotely friendly about dancing with Carmilla.

To her credit, she keeps her hands to herself for the first few songs, and then the aural aphrodisiac that is Partition comes on, and she starts to inch closer. Her eyes look darker than usual, and she’s biting her bottom lip in a way that makes you want to do something reckless and incredibly stupid, so to escape the way she’s staring at you like you’re edible, you turn around to face away from her. Which in retrospect was probably not the best idea, because Carmilla doesn’t let it deter her. Instead she just sidles up behind you, her front brushing against your back.

Her hands land on your waist, pausing for a second like she’s expecting you to swat her hands away. When you don’t, she pulls you backwards until you’re completely pressed against her. Despite all the flirting, actual physical contact with her is not something you’re used to, and you have to bite back a whimper at the feeling of her entire body against yours and her warm hands on your bare skin.

“You okay there sweetheart?” You don’t need to open your eyes to know she’ll be smirking, and you blame the alcohol when you nod, leaning back against her.

Carmilla sets a slow tempo with her hips, rolling them against you gently in a way that just grazes the line of just-friends-type dancing, and as Partition fades into a similarly bass-heavy song that you don’t recognise, you lose track of time, oblivious to everything except for the press of Carmilla’s body against yours.

Eventually, Carmilla’s hips rock into you slightly harder, and you fail miserably at stifling a whimper. Carmilla’s smug chuckle sounds into your ear over the music, and your competitive side immediately flares up. Two can play at this game.

You roll your hips back into her and she squeaks — squeaks — in surprise, before apparently taking it as encouragement, and two seconds later her hands are roaming all over your body.

Ending up at the Zetas party while Carmilla basically gropes you in the middle of the dance floor isn’t exactly how you envisioned your night going when you woke up in the morning, but you can’t really bring yourself to care. Sure, it might be a little awkward in the morning — hey so we kinda spent a lot of time basically dry humping on the dance floor last night didn’t we — but it’s Halloween, and it’s like an unwritten law of college that everyone has to have at least one supremely awkward moment with their roommate.

The fingers of Carmilla’s right hand splay out across your stomach in an oddly possessive gesture that you hate yourself for not hating, holding you against her while her hips push against you under the guise of dancing. Her left hand comes up to brush your hair back off your shoulder and neck, sweeping it around to the side so she can lean forward to whisper into your ear.

“You know you actually manage to make nerd culture look appealing, cutie, I’m impressed.” You hope the loud volume of the music hides the sound of your breath hitching at the dual feeling of her lips brushing the shell of your ear and her fingers moving down your back to trace over the overheated skin left bare by your costume.

“You like it?”

“Mm, it looks pretty good on you,” she murmurs, the hand that’s on your back sliding around to settle on your waist. Your skin feels like it’s on fire where her hands are touching you, and you try not to squirm when her mouth brushes against your ear again. “But I think it’d look better on the floor of our room.”

“That’s the line you’re going with?” You laugh in an attempt to shake off how annoyingly well her terrible pick up line is working. The image that pops into your head of her costume on the floor next to yours while you’re both…occupied, isn’t exactly an unappealing one. “Is that really the best you’ve got? I figured you would’ve been able to come up with something more creative than that.”

“You’d be surprised how well they work,” Carmilla purrs, her breath ghosting against your neck just below your ear, and you completely understand how they could work. Carmilla could probably recite the damn phonebook and it would work, as long as she kept talking in that voice.

“So bad pick up lines actually work on some girls?”

“Mm, you tell me,” she whispers, her lips barely brushing against your neck, like she’s seeing how much she can get away with.

You're not sure you want to find out how much you'll let her get away with. Her hips grind against you harder, you bite your lip again to stop a groan from coming out, and you idly wonder if you should put a stop to this before it goes too far.

It’s not really the dancing itself you’re worried about per say; you've danced closely with friends plenty of times already. For instance, that one Summer Society party where too much tequila made you think it was a fantastic idea to drunkenly grind with Danny two days after you met her.

But your particular dance partner makes it a little different. For one, Danny and Kirsch and all your other friends you've danced closely with never looked at you like they're imagining you naked in their bed. They also never blatantly stared at your mouth like they want to kiss you. And they never let their fingers trail quite so suggestively over your waist.

The current song starts to end, fading into a new one, and you’ve never been so glad to hear Fall Out Boy in your life, because they’re not exactly the kind of music you can grind against your annoyingly attractive roommate to. Apparently sharing the sentiment, Carmilla trails her fingers down your arm before lacing them with yours, twirling you back around like you’re damn waltz partners to face her.

Without thinking about it, you loop your arms around her neck, and her hands land back on your waist, pulling you in and wow, Carmilla is...very close now. Your stomach twists hotly when her gaze dips briefly to stare at your mouth. It’s kind of hard to remember why kissing Carmilla is a bad idea when she’s inches from your face and fixing you with most seduction laced bedroom eyes you’ve ever seen.

Okay, no, focus Hollis.

Why is kissing her a bad idea? One, Carmilla is an ass. Two, you have no romantic feelings towards her. Three, sleeping with your roommate is a big no.

You promptly forget all three of these very good reasons when Carmilla blinks, shakes her head as if to snap herself out of something, and then starts leaning in towards you. For two terrifying seconds you think she’s actually going to kiss you, before you realise her mouth is hovering by your ear so she can be heard over the loud music. “I’m going to get another drink. You want one?”

You can’t stop the shiver that goes through your body when her lips brush against your ear, and when Carmilla pulls back, there’s an oddly satisfied expression on her face.

More alcohol is not going to help with the whole don’t pounce on your roommate even though you really want to thing, and you’re not sure what will come out of your mouth if you try to speak, so you just shake your head mutely in response.

/

Having untangled yourself from the throng of sweaty bodies on the dance floor, you’re leaning against the wall and debating the ethics of permanently borrowing one of the large plastic cauldrons full of candy that everyone seems to be ignoring in favour of all the alcohol when Carmilla returns.

“You want to get out of here?” She rolls her eyes at the look you give her. “Relax, cupcake, I didn’t mean it like that. Get your head out the gutter.”

Coming from her.

“I just meant that the ginger duo left like an hour ago, probably because the science one had to physically restrain the neurotic one from spritzing a bottle of Mr Clean at everyone, I spotted Clifford following someone upstairs earlier, which usually only means one thing, Zeta Goliath is asleep in the bathroom with a sombrero on his head, and Will ditched me ages ago to go home with some guy dressed as Jaime Lannister.” She looks thoughtful for a second. “Or possibly Cersei. I’m still not entirely sure.”

That isn’t really an image you ever needed in your head.

“So,” Carmilla continues, holding up an unopened bottle of wine that she has acquired from somewhere. Who even brings wine to a Zeta party? “Want to steal some of their booze, head back to the room and stay up till six watching shitty horror movies?”

You glance around the rest of the room, at the heaving mass of humanity in the middle of the room and at the questionable activities taking place on the sofas, and Carmilla’s suggestion is extremely inviting. Without thinking about it, you reach forward and take her free hand, dragging her over to one of the tables and picking up one of the cauldrons of candy, before lifting your still-linked hands to gesture towards the exit. “Lead the way.”

/

As soon as you step outside into the cold air, Carmilla lets go of your hand in favour of wrapping her arm around your shoulders and tugging you close. She leans across you to place the bottle of wine in the cauldron — “Oh nice, making me carry everything.” — and you figure this is just what Carmilla is like drunk — less bitchy and more handsy — because she stays pressed against your side the entire walk back to the dorm building.

(You tell yourself the only reason you don't wriggle out of her embrace is because it's cold. You're cold, and Carmilla's wearing even less than you, so she must be really cold. When you wrap your free hand around her waist, you're just being a concerned roommate and making sure she doesn't catch hypothermia or pneumonia.)

“Tell me something, Carmilla,” you huff just as you reach the dorm building. It’s deserted, everyone either still out consuming vast quantities of alcohol at a party, harassing strangers for candy as payment for terrible jokes, or passed out somewhere questionable. “How does it feel knowing you’re living life with such an incredibly wrong opinion?”

“Isn’t the point of an opinion supposed to be everyone is entitled to their own one?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think yours is stupid.”

“You wound me so.” Carmilla dramatically places a hand over her heart. “But it’s not my fault that Reeses are vastly superior.”

“They are not.”

It’s slightly disconcerting to be able to argue with Carmilla about Reeses versus Twix and know it’s not going to devolve into an actual argument for once.

“Maybe you’ve just never had a Reeses the right way,” she says, nearly sending you both toppling to the ground when she reaches across you for the cauldron of chocolates.

“What does that even mean?” You ask, pointedly ignoring the way your traitorous body heats up in reaction to Carmilla’s brief invasion of your personal space.

Carmilla pops the chocolate into her mouth after throwing the wrapping into the nearest trash can — at least littering can’t be added to her endless list of bad habits — and looks at you like the answer should be obvious. “They taste better when they’re stolen.”

“Is that why you keep stealing all my cookies?”

Carmilla snorts, her arm tightening around your shoulders as she steers you away from the elevators and towards the stairs. “I already told you why I steal your cookies; you’re cute when you’re angry.”

You shift slightly underneath the weight of her arm around your shoulders. Has she always felt this warm pressed up against you?

Carmilla relieves the cauldron of several more chocolates as you make your way up to the third floor, but whatever inane (and incorrect) crap she’s spouting about Reeses being superior goes flying straight over your head, since every time she leans across you to get to the cauldron, her body presses even harder against you. And there’s only so much you can concentrate on with Carmilla’s barely covered chest brushing yours each time she reaches for another chocolate. Would it have killed her to do up a few more buttons on her damn shirt?

By the time you reach the hall your room is located on, you’re giving serious consideration to jumping in the shower and turning the water as cold as it will go when you’re broken out of your musing by the smell of peanut butter, and you register there’s a Reeses being waved under your nose.

“I’m going to change your mind about this eventually,” Carmilla says, an evil glint in her eye that means you probably shouldn’t trust her. “Open up.”

“Seriously? What are you, five?”

Carmilla nudges your closed lips with the chocolate in reply, repeating the motion insistently until you give in, opening your mouth and letting her place a Reeses on your tongue. She watches with an expectant look as you chew and swallow the (inferior) chocolate.

“Mm, unfortunately even being force fed Reeses hasn’t convinced me, maybe you should try another tactic.”

Carmilla doesn’t say anything, and when you turn your head to continue your gloating, her gaze is fixed on your mouth, her bottom lip pulled between her teeth. The smug Twix are still totally superior dies in your throat and your breath hitches audibly at the heated look in her eyes. Her hand slowly comes up towards your face, and after a second’s pause, her fingertips are resting on your cheek and her thumb is dragging along your bottom lip.

“You uh, had some chocolate,” Carmilla murmurs in explanation, still staring at your mouth.

“Right,” you say for absolutely no reason. Carmilla really is very close. Close enough that you’re once again reminded of the tension that keeps sparking between you, the annoyingly persistent and inexplicable pull you can’t help but feel towards her that is getting increasingly harder to ignore.

It’s quite alarming how quickly your head has turned hazy from a combination of the alcohol and Carmilla’s close proximity. But mostly Carmilla, you note, and you don’t bother to hide the way you stare at her mouth when she licks her lips and inches closer to you.

(Liquid courage, you tell yourself when you reach up and take hold of the collar of her shirt, your fingers brushing her neck.)

The hand cupping your face moves to slide into your hair, angling your head ever so slightly to the side, and before your brain catches up and tells your body that this is maybe not the best idea, you’re leaning in to meet her halfway.

Carmilla tastes like chocolate and tequila when you kiss her, mouth warm and pliant against yours.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you note that Reeses do taste slightly better when they’re on Carmilla’s mouth, although this isn’t quite what you meant by try another tactic.

Carmilla breaks the kiss only long enough to take a ragged breath before she’s kissing you again, coaxing your lips apart and licking into your mouth, her body surging forward to pin you against the wall beside your door. Her hands fall from your shoulders to the small of your back, tracing patterns against your bare skin and pulling you in until you’re pressed against her, each bump of your hips hitting you like a bolt of lightning. You get lost in kissing her, nibbling and sucking at her bottom lip until she’s whimpering quietly into your mouth, and she retaliates with stroking her tongue against yours until you go weak-kneed and have to cling onto her in order to stay upright.

Your plans at tangling your fingers in her hair and pulling her head back so you can plant kisses down her throat like you’ve wanted to for ages get stalled when you realise one hand is still occupied with the inconvenient cauldron full of chocolate and wine.

(Carmilla might be an excellent kisser but she’s not quite excellent enough for you to abandon two months worth of free chocolate.)

“Wait—” you mumble, tearing your mouth away from hers. She pulls back instantly, staring at you in trepidation like she’s waiting for you to slap her or run away. The sight of Carmilla’s kiss-bruised mouth and half-lidded eyes sends another jolt of arousal through you, and you needed to be on the other side of the door, away from any prying eyes like, yesterday. “We should—”

Instead of bothering to finish the sentence, you fumble with one of the pouches on your costume’s belt, eventually locating your key and quickly opening the door. You drag Carmilla in after you by her tie, and she stumbles after you willingly. Carmilla shuts the door behind her while you dump the cauldron on the top of your headboard.

There’s a brief pause where you just stare wordlessly each other, before you’re both moving back towards each other, her hands landing on your waist to pull you closer and your hands reaching up to slip into her hair to yank her in for another kiss. She spins you around to push you against the door, and you’re pretty sure nothing in the world has ever felt better than being pinned between the door and Carmilla’s body.

There’s no way you’ve had enough alcohol to be completely drunk, so the heated tingling spreading throughout your entire body obviously has a lot less to do with intoxication and a lot more to do with your annoyingly hot roommate. The annoyingly hot roommate that’s currently kissing you senseless, and God why didn’t you do this sooner?

There’s a voice in the back of your head piping up about what a dumb idea this is, but you can barely think straight with Carmilla’s body pressed against yours, her tongue brushing against yours, her hands sliding up and down your back before settling on your hips.

“Wait, wait, hold on—“ Carmilla tries to speak, pulling back slightly, and you groan, trying to pull her mouth back to yours. If you’re too busy kissing her then you don’t have to actually think about the ramifications of kissing her. “How much have you had to drink?”

You pull back, surprised that she bothered to ask. Even in the low light of your room you can see Carmilla’s pupils are blown wide and she’s breathing heavily. You lick your lips before speaking, Carmilla’s eyes dropping down to stare at your mouth. “Not enough to class this as you taking advantage of me, if that’s what you’re worried about,” you say, slightly shocked at how low your voice has gotten. “You’re not making me do anything I don’t want to do. Are you?”

“Am I what?” Carmilla asks, apparently too preoccupied with staring hungrily at your mouth to pay attention to the conversation.

“Drunk.”

“Nope,” Carmilla replies, her thumbs tracing distracting circles across the ridges of your hipbones. “You’re not making me do anything I haven’t wanted to do for a while now.”

“Good. Glad we have that sorted out. Now shut up and kiss me.”

Carmilla grins, “Yes ma’am,” and then her mouth is on yours again, kissing you and kissing you and kissing you until your head is spinning. When you eventually pull back to take a much needed breath, she tugs on your hair to tip your head back so she can press hot, open mouthed kisses down your throat. She sucks on your racing pulse point, and your hands fly to the back of her head to keep her in place when her teeth scrape across the sensitive skin. There’s probably going to be a mark, but then Carmilla’s pushing a thigh between your legs, and the only thing you can focus on is grinding down against her in an attempt to alleviate some of the tension that’s been steadily building in your stomach.

The path of slow kisses down your neck stops when Carmilla reaches the neckline of your costume, and she only tears her mouth away long enough to slip her fingers under the hem of your top to pull it over your head. The fabric has barely hit the floor before she’s ducking her head to drag her lips across your collarbone. Her hands come up to palm at your chest over your bra, squeezing gently until your laboured breathing and low whimpers are deviating into a long moan.

Carmilla pulls back with a smug grin at the noise. “Try not to alert the entire campus as to what we’re up to in here,” she quips, before sinking to her knees and promptly starting work on your belt buckle. Carmilla on her knees in front of you, an image that you will never admit makes an all too frequent appearance in your fantasies, is actually a reality now, and you’re genuinely surprised you don’t come on the spot.

She trails her lips across your hipbones and lower stomach, just above the band of your underwear, while her hands slowly peel your pants down your legs, pausing briefly to shamelessly grope at your ass.

“Who knew you looked so good in leather, cutie?” She murmurs, dusting kisses across the top of your thighs while she helps you step out of the pants. “Pretty difficult restraining myself from jumping you the second I saw you.”

“Now you know how I feel,” you groan. Carmilla chuckles, leaning back in to kiss you once she stands back up.

The wood of the door is cold against your almost-naked body, and it’s around this point that it really hits you that you’re about to have sex with your roommate. You’re about to have sex with your roommate. Oh dear God, you’re about to have sex with Carmilla.

This is a terrible idea.

Carmilla bites at your earlobe and whispers into your ear, in explicit detail, how much she wants to fuck you.

This is a great idea.

You press forward against her until she moves, stumbling backwards towards your bed, and your hands drift around to her front to start divesting her of her clothes. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you?” You growl, tugging at the green tie harshly to indicate what this is referring to, quickly undoing the knot and dropping it onto the floor next to you.

“What, deliberately dress up as something out of your dirtiest nerdy little fantasies?” Carmilla asks, all faux-innocence. “That doesn’t sound like something I’d do.”

You choose not to deign that with a reply. Instead, you lean back in to kiss her while your hands busy themselves with unbuttoning her shirt. It quickly joins the tie on the floor and you push Carmilla back onto the bed, her hands on your waist pulling you with her.

Carmilla squirms underneath you as you move your mouth down to her neck, kissing and biting at her skin while your hands slip under her back to get to the clasp of her bra, undoing it and sliding the straps down her arms before throwing it off the side of the bed. Her hands tangle in your hair, fingers tightening when you pause your descent to her chest to suck and nip at her collarbone until you’re sure there’ll be a bruise tomorrow.

Peppering kisses across the soft swell of her breasts, Carmilla moans quietly when your mouth closes over her nipple. You alternate between flicking with your tongue and gentle sucking with your mouth until her breath is coming in constant breathy gasps. Her nails dig into your shoulder almost to the point of pain when your hand comes up to her other breast, rolling and pinching the nipple between your fingers, each whimpered noise she makes adding to the ache you can feel building up between your legs.

Her hips jerk up when you shift on top of her to push your thigh between hers, shamelessly rubbing herself against you while her head tips back against the pillow and a ragged whimper of oh God comes from somewhere above you. You hold back a moan when you realise how soaked she is, even through her underwear. The feeling of Carmilla wet and hot against you is like a damn catalyst for how much you want to have her falling apart, so, ignoring her protests, you tear your mouth away from her chest and sit up. Carmilla watches with dark hungry eyes as you hook your fingers into the waistband of her skirt, dragging it down her legs along with her underwear, tossing them onto the floor after.

The knee socks promptly follow, and then she’s completely naked. You pause for a second to take in the sight of Carmilla below you, raking your gaze over her body and getting slightly distracted staring at the little red marks on her chest and neck, courtesy of your mouth.

“You just gonna stare all night, or are you actually going to do something?” Carmilla asks, the affectionate snark slightly lessened by the raggedness of her voice, before she reaches up to pull you back down into a messy kiss.

Settling down between her spread thighs, you sink your teeth into her bottom lip, swallowing her moans by kissing her deeply, sliding your tongue against hers until her hips are rolling up in a desperate need for friction.

Propping yourself up on your left elbow, you drag your other hand slowly down her body, thumb brushing over a nipple and nails tracing lightly across her stomach, and you shudder at the filthy moan that tumbles from Carmilla’s mouth when you slide your fingers through the wet heat between her legs. Her nails rake down your back and she groans against your mouth when your fingers press against her clit, tracing light circles around it.

Carmilla’s head falls back against the pillow, her back arching and a wordless noise of pleasure falling from her mouth when you push a finger into her. A few shallow thrusts, and then you add a second finger, setting a steady rhythm that her hips frantically move to meet. She’s wet and warm around you, whimpering breathily with each thrust of your fingers, and she swears, a high pitched whine of fuck that sends another spark of arousal through you when you swipe your thumb across her clit.

Her hands claw at your back, pulling you impossibly closer when you push your fingers in deeper, quickening the pace and curling them roughly until Carmilla’s a panting mess underneath you. Lifting your head away from the patch of her neck you’re busy kissing, you take in the sight of her; dark hair fanned out against the bright yellow of your pillow, eyes shut in pleasure and mouth half open as a constant stream of moans and curse words echoes around the room.

The desire to feel her tightening around your fingers and hear her moan as she goes over the edge surges through you with renewed fervour.

“Come on,” you murmur into her ear, kissing your way down her neck to suck another bruise into the base of her throat. You keep going, dragging long hot kisses down her body before you hook one of her legs over your shoulder and drop your head down to slide your tongue against her clit.

Her hands slip back into your hair, nails digging into your scalp as she clings onto you, keeping your head still while she ruts her hips up. You keep up the relentless rhythm, lapping and sucking at her clit and thrusting your fingers inside her, curling them until she’s clamping down around you and coming with an incoherent moan, her thighs shaking either side of your head.

You keep your tongue moving against her clit until she pushes your head away with a whimper. Slipping your fingers out of her, you suck them into your mouth and lick the taste of her off, before kissing your way back up her body until you’re hovering over her.

Her eyes are still closed as she sucks in ragged breath after ragged breath, head tossed back against the pillow and chest heaving. You shiver when it sinks in that you did that to her. You have this effect on her. Your ego balloons at the realisation and you can feel the smug, Carmilla-like smile creeping onto your face.

You’re slightly curious as to what the appropriate thing is to say after having sex with your roommate with whom you have a hate-dislike relationship. Carmilla blinks open her eyes, looking up at you through heavy lids, before she huffs a laugh. “Who knew your mouth was good for something other than just non-stop talking?”

Charming.

“Is that really a polite thing to say to someone who just made you come that hard?”

“Probably not. But here—” She pushes against your shoulders, rolling you over until your positions are reversed, Carmilla’s hips snug between your legs and a feral grin on her face. “Let me make it up to you.”

She cuts off your squeak with a kiss, sinking her teeth into your bottom lip before sliding her tongue into your mouth, while her hands are busy unclasping your bra and pulling your underwear off. In the back of your mind, you know you’re probably going to regret this tomorrow morning once the haze of lust and alcohol has faded, but with Carmilla’s hands palming your bare chest and her tongue in your mouth, it’s difficult to focus on anything else.

She drags her mouth over your body, nibbling at the sensitive skin of your hammering pulse, wrapping her lips around your nipples and flicking her tongue against them, sucking marks onto your hipbones, and by the time she’s settled between your legs, pressing kisses to the insides of your thighs, your head is foggy with arousal, and you’re aching to be touched.

The strangled noise that rips its way out of your throat at the first stroke of her tongue is almost embarrassing, and Carmilla’s arm snakes across your waist, holding you still while she fucks you, first with her mouth, insistent drags of her tongue over your clit, and then with her fingers, pushing into you and curling until you see stars, and it isn’t long before you’re tumbling over the edge, loud guttural moans falling from your mouth.

You collapse bonelessly against the bed, trying to catch your breath, and it briefly crosses your mind that you now completely understand how and why Carmilla’s endless entourage of study buddies never seems to deplete.

Carmilla kisses her way back up towards your mouth, before she’s leaning over you with that arrogant smirk plastered on her stupid face that you’ve only just now decided to acknowledge makes you want to kiss her, if only to wipe the smug look off her face.

So you do.

You tangle your fingers in her hair, pulling her down and kissing her again and again, until she’s grabbing one of your hands from off her chest and pulling it down to where she wants.

It’s getting close to daybreak by the time you’ve finally worn each other out. Carmilla drags herself up from between your legs after orgasm number...four? five? and collapses next to you on the mattress, the only sound in the room that of your dual heavy breathing. Carmilla’s eyes are already closed when you turn to look at her, and you’re too exhausted to protest her sleeping in your bed, so you just pull the blanket up to cover you both, turning onto your side to fall asleep facing her.

Just as you’re drifting off, you vaguely register an arm sliding around your waist, pulling you forward until you’re pressed up against Carmilla’s warm body, your head tucked into the crook of her neck and the smell of sex and her perfume invading all your senses.

But you doubt Carmilla’s the cuddly type, so it could just be your half-asleep brain playing tricks on you.

Chapter Text

Your first thought upon waking up on the first day of November is that Carmilla is an ass, who as per usual forgot — or more likely just didn’t bother — to close the damn curtains after her nightly brooding whilst looking at the stars, because it’s way too bright in the room. You try to roll over to bury your face in your pillow, block out the rays of sunlight that so rudely woke you up, and go back to sleep for another hour or five, an attempt that’s thwarted by a weight across your chest. There’s about three seconds of blissful confusion, before you blearily blink your eyes open and see Carmilla’s sleeping face inches from yours, and the immediate thought that flies through your head is oh shit.

(You don’t really swear all that much, but oh crap just doesn’t have enough impact.)

After oh shit, everything else comes flooding back at once; the party, Carmilla’s stupid tie, the dancing-slash-grinding, Reeses vs. Twix, the kissing, clothing being torn off, and oh God you slept with Carmilla.

It’s kind of difficult to try and deny to yourself that it happened thanks to the obvious indicators of Carmilla being naked in your bed, you also being naked in your bed, the clothing strewn haphazardly all over the floor, and the way your entire damn body aches in the best way. Wait, no. In the worst way. Goddammit. You squeeze your eyes shut again, trying desperately not to think about how good it felt kissing her, touching her, having her touch you, because this is so not the time.

As if on cue, Carmilla shifts slightly in her sleep, an unwanted reminder that she is still very much present and very much naked next to you. She’s sprawled out on her front, one of her arms thrown over your torso. Your naked torso. At some point the blanket got shoved down to your waist, revealing the smattering of bruises all over your chest and stomach, courtesy of her mouth, and you can see faint red lines across Carmilla’s shoulders that can only have come from your nails dragging across her skin.

Oh God.

You very slowly move so you’re sitting up against the pillows, pointedly ignoring the way her arm tightens slightly around you when you do so. Maybe you’re dreaming. Maybe last night was all one very long, very detailed sex dream, and you’re actually still asleep, alone, in your bed. You remember something about people not being able to read in dreams, so when you slowly turn your head towards your headboard to be greeted by an unfortunately perfectly spelled The Scarlet Letter printed onto the spine of your book rather than just a collection of jumbled letters, you realise that you are very much awake.

Okay, so. Not a dream. Oh dear God, you slept with Carmilla. With Carmilla.

You will yourself to stay calm, even through the constant stream of oh my God what do I do what do I do what the hell do I do going through your head loud enough that it’s probably in danger of waking up the other occupant of your bed.

Your pre-existing experience with one night stands isn’t exactly helpful; the other girl left before you even woke up, so you hadn’t had to suffer through the awkward trying to politely ask her to leave. And anyway, it’s not like Carmilla is a complete stranger that you can make excuses to and rudely kick out of the room considering she’s your damn roommate.

And isn’t that like, the first rule of college? Don’t sleep with your roommate, no matter how distractingly attractive she may be.

Maybe you could leave while she’s still asleep. Escape without waking her up, do the walk of shame from your own room, and then camp out in Danny’s room until graduation so you never have to face Carmilla ever again. And if you happen to run into her, you can just feign amnesia and pretend you don’t recall a single thing. Possibly even pretend you have no idea who she is.

Stellar plan, Hollis.

Normally, Carmilla sleeps like the dead. But of course, the second you start shifting around, trying to remove her arm from its current position so you can sit up completely without disturbing her, she starts to stir.

Of course.

You yank the blanket up to cover your chest while you sit up and lean back against the wall, watching Carmilla blink her eyes open sleepily and wrinkle her nose, presumably due to the aftereffects of the copious amount of alcohol she ingested the previous night. Or maybe because it's so damn early; 9AM is generally Carmilla's bedtime on weekends.

It’s a brief moment of respite from your internal panicking when you notice that not even Silas’ resident sex pest is immune to looking like crap when she’s hungover. A small part of you notes how cute she looks confused and half-asleep with mussed hair, but it’s overwhelmed by the bigger part of you that realises she’s confused and half-asleep and also naked and her hair is only mussed because you had sex with her last night.

Carmilla looks at you drowsily, mumbles good morning in a voice still scratchy from sleep, before letting her head fall back onto the pillow and closing her eyes.

Good morning? Good morning?!

“Good morning?” You squeak, gaping at Carmilla’s complete lack of reaction to the fact that you’re both naked in the same bed, having spent the entire night having sex. Carmilla mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like shut up and let me sleep and you poke at her shoulder. “Carmilla, do not go back to sleep!”

Carmilla reaches out with an arm, grabs your yellow pillow and pulls it over her head, whether to try and block out the sunlight or your voice that’s steadily climbing in pitch you don’t know, before grumbling, “If you’re going to freak out and have an existential crisis, please do it quietly cause it is way too fucking early for me to put up with how high pitched your voice gets when you’re annoyed.”

How she manages to string together so many words and muster up that much snark when she's been awake less than ten seconds is beyond you.

“Carmilla!” You hiss, kicking her under the blanket.

“What?” Her annoyed voice comes out slightly muffled from under the pillow.

“You’re in my bed!”

“Nothing gets past you, does it Lauronica Mars?”

“And we’re naked!”

“I can see why you’re majoring in journalism.”

“We had sex!” You snap, emphasising each syllable in the hopes that Carmilla will finally realise the gravity of the situation. You yank the pillow away from her, pulling it into your lap and ignoring her disgruntled protests.

She glares at you. “Yes, I remember. Vividly.” The glare morphs into a smirk frighteningly fast. “In fact, it’s unlikely I’ll be forgetting anytime soon how loudly you screamed when—”

“Carmilla!” You smack the back of her head with the pillow and she has the audacity to laugh.

“Oh my God,” you groan, dropping the pillow between you and dropping your head back against the wall. Carmilla immediately latches onto and snuggles into the pillow. Your pillow. Your pillow, which is now going to smell like her. Oh God, your entire damn bed is going to smell like her now, and somehow you get the feeling that even washing your sheets eight thousand times isn’t going to succeed at getting it out of your head.

“Oh God,” you sigh, mostly to yourself, and drag your hands over your face. “What the hell happened last night?”

Carmilla apparently doesn’t realise the question is rhetorical. “I don’t really think I need to explain it to you, I mean there’s no way you were a virgin and—”

You liberate the pillow from her again and wallop her in her smug face with it — the offended oof she lets out is extremely satisfying — before burying your face into it, trying to figure out how the hell you let this happen.

Honestly you wouldn’t put it past Carmilla to just roll onto her other side and go back to sleep, but instead there’s some unimpressed sounding grumbling, and the bed squeaks as she moves around, before she huffs, “Jesus cupcake, this was just sex. Calm down before you blow a blood vessel and I have to call an ambulance. Or Perry and her first aid crate.”

You lift your head to see that she’s propped herself up on her elbow, staring at you with her eyebrows raised. Thankfully, she’s also had the decency to tug the blanket up to cover her chest. Just the knowledge of the fact she’s naked underneath is giving your brain stupid ideas, such as repeating last night is a fantastic idea, so you’re not entirely sure how you’ll fare if you actually see anything.

“Well excuse me for rightfully freaking out at the fact that we slept together!” You retort, resisting the urge to attack Carmilla with the pillow for the third time when she rolls her eyes. “Look, I get that you do this all the time, so this is nothing out of the ordinary for you, but it is for me. I’m not— I don’t do things like this.”

Carmilla grumbles what sounds suspiciously like I’d never have guessed under her breath, but you let it go; this conversation is going to be unpleasant enough without Carmilla getting offended by you getting (rightfully) offended at her douchiness.

“If this bothers you so much then we can just forget about it. Pretend it never happened,” Carmilla says, unnecessarily running a hand through her messy hair to push it off her face.

“You say that like it’s so easy.”

“It is.” She shrugs, and you try to not notice how the motion causes the blanket to slip a few inches down her chest. “Compartmentalising is very easy once you get used to it.”

“Well not all of us have had a lot of practice doing it,” you snap. It comes out harsher than intended and Carmilla sighs heavily.

You don’t actually mean to lash out and place all of the blame on Carmilla. It’s kind of just your first instinct to do so, even though you know nothing that happened was her fault. You can’t blame alcohol for it, because while yes, neither of you were entirely sober, neither of you were drunk enough to not know what you were doing. And while Carmilla might’ve put her flirting into overdrive, you can’t even blame her for being the one to initiate the first kiss because you're pretty sure that was you. There were plenty opportunities for you to put a stop to it. You just didn’t take them.

“Fine, continue to freak out. See if I care,” Carmilla huffs, rolling her eyes. “But just so you know, this—” A vague hand gesture between you and the bed. “—is not that big a deal.”

“Not that big a deal?” You squeak. “Carmilla, we slept together!”

“Yeah, and I was actually kind of hoping that it might make you a little less uptight than normal, but clearly I gave you too much credit."

Well, that was unnecessary.

Whatever retort you were about to fire back with dies in your throat when she abruptly sits up, the blanket pooling around her waist as she makes no effort to cover herself up. You can’t help but stare speechlessly for a few indecent seconds, letting your eyes trail over the expanse of pale skin while she yawns, lifting her arms above her head and stretching, before she shoves the blanket fully off her, swings her legs over the side of the bed and stands up.

Nothing you haven’t seen before, cutie, a voice that sounds exactly like Carmilla singsongs in your head. You ignore it.

You avert your eyes to stare resolutely at the ceiling, willing your face to cool down — and really, the flush you can feel creeping up your neck in response to her nakedness is ridiculous considering what went on the previous night — while Carmilla migrates to her side of the room and tugs some underwear on.

“Okay, I realise that your idea of a long-term relationship is sleeping with the same girl more than once so—”

“You’re doing that incredibly annoying thing again, princess,” Carmilla interrupts, throwing a glare over her shoulder while she pulls some jeans on. “Acting like you know the first thing about me.”

“So your opinion might be a little skewed,” you continue, ignoring the interruption. “But shouldn’t we at least talk about this?”

Not that you particularly want to sit down with Carmilla and have a nice conversation about what this means for your cohabitation-relationship, if anything you want to do the exact opposite, but you’re pretty sure the fact that you slept together means that some kind of discussion should occur.

“Nothing to talk about.” A bra, tank top and socks all go on, and Carmilla quickly drags a comb through her messy hair. You don’t think you’ve ever seen her move this fast in all the time you’ve known her. “You’ve made it pretty clear that you regret it, so it’s obviously not going to happen again.”

Considering how eager she seems to be to get out of the room and away from you, you’re fairly positive you’re imagining the slight tone of disappointment edging into her voice.

“But that doesn’t—”

“Seriously, just forget about it.” She turns to face you, sitting down on her bed to put some shoes on, but she still refuses to look at you. “It was just a one time thing, cause we were drunk. No point wasting our breath talking about it.”

Briefly, you note that it almost seems like she’s talking more to herself than to you, but you dismiss that thought immediately. Considering the number of girls she goes through per week that she promptly forgets about the day after, it’s not like she’s the one that needs convincing to forget about it.

She stands up, grabs one of her many jackets from the pile of clothes dumped at the end of her bed, and the door slams shut as she storms out without another word.

/

You do everything you can to avoid Carmilla over the weekend. Which is maybe a little extreme, but Carmilla appears to be avoiding you as well, so.

(Briefly, you think about requesting a roommate transfer, but if the avoidance tactics aren’t overreacting, that certainly would be.)

Saturday, after spending ages in the shower trying to wash the shame off of yourself, and then spending a solid thirty minutes trying to cover up the hickey Carmilla so kindly left on your neck, you spend most of the day with Danny and you make sure to be asleep before Carmilla comes back from doing whatever it is she does at such late hours.

Sunday, you leave to meet LaFontaine for breakfast before Carmilla wakes up, and you ‘accidentally’ fall asleep at Danny’s after going shopping with Kirsch in the afternoon, and Monday you have classes all day which keeps you out of your room. However, you can’t really stay away forever, and inevitably, Carmilla’s in the room reading when you come back on Monday evening.

The door creaks as you push it open, loudly announcing your arrival, and Carmilla glances up from where she’s sprawled on her bed, offering you a small smile in greeting. Tentatively, you offer one in return, before breaking the eye contact and turning away from her to deposit your bag onto your bed.

Before, you could see that she was incredibly attractive. Purely objectively of course. Sure, you occasionally caught yourself wondering what it’d be like to kiss her, but as long as she wasn’t backing you into any kitchen units, you could ignore it. But now? You’ve barely been in the room ten seconds but you already know that now it’s a hundred times worse.

(And is it really necessary for her to have her legs spread quite so widely when all she’s doing is lying on her bed reading?)

You get as far as picking up your Tardis mug to make some hot chocolate and walking across the room to the kitchen in blissful silence, before Carmilla breaks it by asking how your day was in a completely neutral voice, as if the last two conversations you shared haven’t been fraught with dirty talk and then fraught with panicked freaking out.

“Uh, it was fine,” you say as evenly as possible, opening the fridge to get some milk. “I got an A on my psychology paper so that’s, you know, fun.”

“As much fun as you’ve been having avoiding me like the plague?”

So much for her apparent neutrality.

“I have not been avoiding you.”

Carmilla snorts. “This is the first time in three days that I’ve seen you, and you look like you’re going to flee the room for another three if I make any sudden movements.”

“I’ve been...busy,” you splutter unconvincingly.

Another snort clues you in to the fact that Carmilla doesn’t buy that for a second, but thankfully, she doesn’t press the issue. The room falls silent except for the low hum of the microwave as it heats up the milk and the pages of Carmilla’s book rustling as she turns them, and when you make your way back to your bed to curl up with hot chocolate and a book, a subtle glance across the room tells you that Carmilla’s immersed in her own book, paying you no attention.

The way you see it, there’s four ways this could turn out.

Option one: the one night of unbridled passion has made both you and Carmilla realise how incredibly in love with each other you are, and you immediately jump into a married-couple relationship like some kind of R rated fairytale. Option two: the one night stand is turned into a multiple night stand, and you keep sleeping together with absolutely no kind of romantic entanglement. Option three: remain purely platonic sort-of-friends with Carmilla, with a little bit of unavoidable sexual tension since you now know exactly what she looks and sounds like in the throes of passion. And option four: you move out, possibly transfer to another university somewhere in the southern hemisphere, never talk to Carmilla again and spend the rest of your life praying you never ever see her again.

Option one is ridiculous since you only barely tolerate each other, option two slightly less ridiculous but still never going to happen, and option four is unrealistic, since you’re certainly not going to call up your Dad to inform him you’ve transferred to the University of Auckland just because you were an idiot and slept with your roommate. Which leaves option three as the most viable one. You’re not a fan of the sexual tension part of that option, but you’re pretty sure that’s kind of non-negotiable.

“I can hear you thinking,” Carmilla eventually says, breaking the silence and your attempted concentration. “And it doesn’t a genius to figure out what you’re fretting over.”

“I thought you said there was nothing to talk about?” You retort, resolutely keeping your eyes on the book pages even though you haven’t retained a single word since you sat down and opened it, instead far too preoccupied with trying not to think about how it would only take Carmilla two or three steps to cross the room and climb onto the bed to pin you down and kiss you.

“Don’t you think that you’re maybe overreacting just a little bit?” Carmilla asks bluntly, and when you turn your head to glare at her, possibly lunge at her to slap some duct tape over her mouth so she never brings that night up ever again, she’s sitting up and staring straight at you, her book abandoned face down beside her on the bed.

“Actually I’d say I have the normal levels of reacting. If anything you’re under-reacting,” you huff. Carmilla doesn’t look impressed. “I don’t know how you can be so blasé about this, about the fact that we—”

“Slept together? Yeah, we did. And has the world ended? No, it hasn’t. And I take it you haven’t fallen in love with me after one night of sex?” You snort. “Exactly. So you really don’t need to be so freaked over something that happens all the time.”

“Oh, you sleep with all your roommates, do you?”

“Okay, maybe not roommates,” Carmilla concedes. “But, two consenting adults who just happened to have a temporary lapse in judgement. Happens all the time, especially in college. So yeah, things might be a little awkward for a while, but it was just sex. It’s not like it meant anything, so we can just forget it ever happened.”

Something twists unpleasantly in your stomach at it’s not like it meant anything, but you just chalk it up to the fact that essentially being called a mistake, even by Carmilla, isn’t exactly uplifting.

You were definitely getting somewhere with establishing a friendship with her — even if it was at a glacial pace — before you went and ruined everything by sleeping with her, and while this may be a minor bump in the road, maybe you will be able to put it behind you. Carmilla seems convinced that it’s easy enough to forget about, and well, she has more experience with such matters than you do, so maybe she’s right.

“Yeah. Yeah, okay,” you say. “You’re right, it was...stupid and— and we were drunk and it shouldn’t have happened, so we can just forget about it and things can go back to normal.”

“So we’re good?"

You slowly nod in reply, and Carmilla offers a quick smile before settling back on her bed with her book, seemingly satisfied that that’s the end of any and all discussions.

Hell, maybe Carmilla only wanted to sleep with you because you (pretended to) ignore her flirting all the time. Maybe now that she has succeeded in getting into your pants, she’ll lose interest in flirting with you, and will return to just being a (very, very platonic) nuisance of a roommate.

A title she lives up to when, on her way out the door to meet Will later, she mentions that she took the liberty of finishing off your current pack of cookies while you were absent.

And the tube of Pringles you had stashed away for a Netflix day.

What an asshole.

/

Somehow, the two of you manage to fall back into your normal pre-Halloween routine. Sort of. A slightly more awkward and tense version of your normal routine, with significantly less blatant sexual innuendos — apparently Carmilla does have an ounce or two of compassion in her three-sizes-too-small heart — and snarky comments.

It’s easier to forget about Halloween when you’re not in the same room as her, so you’ve spent most of the week studying at the library or Starbucks rather than your dorm, or hanging out with Danny or Kirsch, but even then you sometimes space out and all you can think about is having Carmilla underneath you. You’ve already been told off in three separate classes for not paying attention, Danny’s definitely noticed you acting weird, and even Kirsch has asked you once or twice if you’re okay. You make up some lame excuse about a difficult paper for your psychology class when Danny tries to interrogate you after you accidentally miss an entire conversation during lunch because you’re too busy daydreaming about Carmilla, and thankfully the pair of them seem to buy it.

But when you are in the same room as Carmilla, it’s still difficult to talk normally to her. Not that you ever really talked normally with her in the first place, it was more snippy comments and the occasional yelling match, but at least you could catch sight of her hands turning the pages of her book without remembering how her fingers felt inside you, or you could be standing in the kitchen and see the top of her head peeking over her headboard and not instantly recall seeing the top of her head bobbing between your legs.

It had seemed like such a fantastic idea that night; maybe, just maybe, if you had her just once you could finally get her out of your system and you could stop getting distracted by her all the time.

Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t worked, and the worst part is that you’re pretty sure it’s made you want her even more now.

A week after Halloween, there’s a party at the Summer Society house for someone’s birthday. Obviously, Danny is invited, and by association so are you. You don’t really know the girl whose birthday it is, SJ or some other collection of initials, and you don’t really want to go to another party ever again after Halloween, but Danny does her best puppy dog impression, pouting until you relent with a grumbled, “Fine. But I’m not drinking.”

On the plus side, it’s incredibly unlikely Carmilla would ever go within fifty feet of this particular party, since the campus-wide rumour of Carmilla having chlamydia originated from a Summer Society member, so at least you won’t have to deal with her.

Or so you think.

You’re standing talking to LaFontaine and Perry at the edge of the makeshift dance floor, Danny having gone to get more drinks — your ‘no drinking’ policy went out the window about five minutes into the party when LaFontaine brought candyfloss-flavoured shots over — when you catch sight of Carmilla.

Of course.

One night, you just wanted one Carmilla-free night where you didn’t have to think about your pesky roommate, where you could just get drunk, make a fool of yourself dancing, and then spend Sunday afternoon complaining about your hangover to Danny while you tag and untag each other in the worst of the party photos, but apparently that’s too much to ask for, because Carmilla — wearing a corset and those stupid leather pants — is standing on the other side of the room, red cup in hand and talking to a blonde girl you don’t recognise.

You turn back to LaFontaine and Perry, faking an interest in their conversation and studiously ignoring the unwelcome presence hovering just across the room, until Perry drags LaFontaine off into the depths of the crowded dance floor. Danny still hasn’t reappeared, and you can’t stop yourself from glancing over towards where you last saw Carmilla.

Her current blonde company has wandered off — probably scared off by Carmilla’s charming personality, you think snidely — and she glances up just as your eyes land on her, spotting you through the crowd before you can tear your gaze away and pretend you haven’t noticed her. Her mouth curves into that annoyingly attractive smirk that you still can’t decide if you want to slap or kiss off her annoyingly attractive face, and she waves at you. You try not to stare at her fingers and instead pray to every God you can think of that she just ignores you and finds someone else to bother. So naturally, she drains her red cup, places it on the mantlepiece behind her, and comes sauntering over towards you.

“Hey buttercup,” she greets, sliding up beside you and leaning against the wall.

“What are you doing here?” You blurt out, slightly rudely, and Carmilla raises her eyebrows.

“It’s nice to see you too.”

There’s no real malice to her snarky comeback, and you vaguely recall from Halloween that alcohol makes Carmilla a mark less scathing than usual. Also fifty times more flirty than usual, but that is decidedly not relevant right now.

“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s not that I don’t want to see you, it’s just—” You trail off, and Carmilla’s eyebrows raise even higher. “A Summer Society party is kinda the last place I expected to see you on a Friday night.”

“I’m friends with the birthday girl.”

“Oh. Uh, and by friends do you mean…” You leave the question open-ended, raising your eyebrows in suggestion. You’re not sure if you actually want to know the answer.

“We’re in the same philosophy class.” Carmilla clarifies, clearly trying to suppress a smirk. “I’ve never slept with her.”

You try to ignore the unnecessary emphasis that Carmilla puts on the word her. As in, she isn’t the person here that Carmilla has slept with.

“Right. Okay, that’s uh— cool.” Carmilla’s lips turn up into a small half-smile. At least one of you finds your awkward stammering amusing. You clear your throat. “Uh, so you having fun so far?”

“Eh,” she shrugs, sounding bored. “Not the worst Summer Society party I’ve ever been to, considering most of them make me want to jab something sharp in my eye.” The Carmilla-equivalent of a dazzling five star review.

It’s not until she falls silent, not bothering to ask how you are in return — how rude — that you realise just how little space there is between you. Carmilla’s had to inch forward in order to be heard over the loud music, and now she’s close enough that you’d barely need to take a step forward to be within kissing distance.

Which is not something you should be thinking about a platonic friend.

And the urge to kiss her that shoots through you the second your eyes dart down to her dark red lips is definitely not platonic. Neither is the way your hands itch to reach out and touch her; there's an inch or two of very inviting pale skin exposed between the bottom of her corset and the waistline of her pants, and it’s really not helping with the thoughts that keep popping up. Thoughts featuring you, Carmilla and a lot less clothing.

No. That is not happening again. If sleeping with her once was a bad idea, then sleeping with her twice is downright idiotic, regardless of how good she looks.

Carmilla briefly glances at your lips, and you fold your arms across your chest before they do something stupid like reach out and sink your fingers into her hair to yank her into a kiss.

The irritatingly familiar urge to pull Carmilla close and kiss her until she’s forgotten her own name that is suddenly assaulting you is solely the fault of the stupid corset, you decide. Carmilla parading around your room in those tiny shorts, see through shirts, even just in a towel, you can handle. But something about the corset and the leather pants make her look extra fuckable — probably the fact that you can remember exactly what she looks like underneath — and you should probably make an excuse and get away from her before you do something stupid.

“Hey, sorry about the wait.” The proverbial cold shower that is Danny’s voice breaks your staring match with Carmilla’s chest as she pops up beside you, handing you a red cup. “There was a queue for the drinks table, then I couldn’t find any lemonade and— oh. Hi Carmilla,” Danny says, her voice going tight when she notices the third party.

Carmilla raises her eyebrows, glancing between the pair of you like she’s half-expecting Danny to lunge at her and try to strangle her for daring to corrupt her innocent little best friend.

Obviously, you didn’t tell Danny a thing, but if Carmilla automatically assumes that you did, it makes you wonder if she’s told anyone. Perry hasn’t given you any disapproving looks at any point this week, you saw Will in the library on Wednesday and he didn’t follow up his cheerful hello with some wildly tasteless comment about you and Carmilla, and with the exception of yourself, you’re not aware of her being on regular speaking terms with anyone else, so you figure she hasn’t mentioned it to anyone.

“Clifford,” Carmilla replies dryly, somehow managing to look down her nose at someone almost a foot taller than her. There’s a slightly awkward silence which drags on for a few uncomfortable seconds until Carmilla forces a smile and says, “Well, this has been nice, but I just realised I would rather be anywhere but here right now, so goodbye.”

She sneers at Danny, smirks at you, before barging between you both and strolling towards the kitchen.

“God, she is so insufferable,” Danny huffs, glaring at Carmilla’s retreating back. “How the hell do you put up with her?”

You’re watching her leave as well, but unlike Danny, you’re much more interested in how her pants cling to her ass like a second skin. You clear your throat, trying not to think about how much you’d enjoy taking them off her. “I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”

/

It takes thirty minutes of dancing, two more candyfloss shots, and another cup of…whatever alcoholic concoction Danny brought you — it tastes like it’s fifty percent sugar and fifty percent alcohol — before you think to yourself that maybe sleeping with Carmilla again wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. And yes, maybe you’re a little drunk, but douchey as she is, Carmilla’s hot and she was mind-blowingly good in bed, so maybe it isn’t such a bad idea if you end up doing it again.

Okay, no, you’re definitely a little drunk, since there is no sober world in which the words Carmilla Karnstein and isn’t such a bad idea should logically go together in a sentence where the subject matter is sex, so you head into the kitchen, away from where Carmilla’s busy flirting her way around the room and looking wildly attractive whilst doing so, to get something non-alcoholic to try to clear your head.

/

Kirsch is one of those people who is just perpetually cheerful, so you notice almost as soon as you flop down next to him on one of the sofas that he seems a little dejected.

“Hey, are you alright?” You ask, nudging him once there's a lull in the conversation happening around you. “You’ve only called me little nerd hottie like, once in the past twenty minutes.”

Which you appreciate of course, but it’s a little odd not hearing it eighteen times in one conversation.

Kirsch glances around as if to make sure no one’s paying attention to either of you, before he says, “If I tell you something, you’ll keep it to yourself right? Bro to bro?”

“Of course.”

“There’s this girl.” Oh. “That I’m friends with, and we’ve been friends for a while, except I’m kinda starting to be into her as more than just a friend." Oh. "And we, uh—” Kirsch clears his throat. “I think we sorta almost kissed at that Halloween party last week. Like, we were dancing, and at some point we ended up super close, and she kinda looked like she was about to kiss me. Like you know when people look at your mouth when they want to kiss you?”

You try not to glance towards the other side of the room, where Carmilla's talking to SJ. “I’m familiar with it.”

“Yeah, she kept doing that. And like, I totally wanted to kiss her, but I figured I’d let her make the first move in case I just completely misread everything, but right as I thought she was about to, she kinda got all freaked and ditched me in the middle of the dance floor. Didn’t see her the rest of the night.”

“Have you talked to her since then?”

“Yeah, but she hasn’t brought it up,” Kirsch replies, slumping further into the sofa cushions and taking a sip of his drink. “I dunno bro, maybe I just totally misread everything. That’s more likely to happen than this girl actually being into me.”

If only your love life was as complicated as a simple do they like me do they not, rather than this bizarre, slightly awkward so we fucked once and I kinda want to do it again limbo with your obnoxious roommate.

Well, not your love life as such. Not even your like life. There really needs to be a better term for situations such as these.

Anyway.

“Have you tried telling her that you like her?”

Kirsch shakes his head, and you raise your eyebrows. “Dude, don’t look at me like that. Telling someone you like them when you don’t know if they like you back is terrifying.” He does have a point there. “I mean, I think if she was any other girl, yeah I would just tell her, but we’ve been friends for a pretty long time now, and I don’t want to accidentally make things weird or ruin our friendship if this is just a one way thing,” he continues, picking at the label on his beer bottle. “Besides, I don’t think I’m even her type.” This coming from the guy who you’ve heard proclaim dude, I’m everyone’s type several times. He must really like this girl. “She’d probably never date a Zeta.”

Well, that narrows your suspicions as to the identity of this mystery girl down to about three-quarters of the campus population.

“If her sole reason for not liking you is just because you’re a Zeta, are you sure she’s even worth it?”

“I know she is,” Kirsch mumbles, smiling slightly when you put a comforting hand on his arm. The moment is promptly broken by an inebriated group of people stumbling past the sofa, loudly announcing, “Body shots!” complete with a drunken cheer of “Woo!”

Kirsch perks up almost immediately. Typical.

“Hey, Kirsch,” you say, before he scampers off to follow them. “If this girl has any sense, she’ll see what a great guy you are,” you tell him, nudging him affectionately with your shoulder. “Regardless of the Zeta label.”

“Thanks little nerd hottie,” he grins, laughing when you glare at him. “Thanks Laura.”

/

You’re in the kitchen the next time you see Carmilla. One minute you’re alone by the drinks table, pouring some orange juice into your cup, the next Carmilla has materialised next to you out of nowhere, a little too close for comfort when she’s still dressed like that.

“You know, I take back what I said earlier,” she says without bothering to say hello. “The Summer Society throw a great party.”

You glance sideways at her and realise that, predictably, most of her attention is taken up by the various shirtless girls crowded around the body shots table.

“I’m almost surprised you weren’t first in line the minute someone suggested them,” you snort, trying to locate the bottle of Malibu in the sea of alcohol littering the table.

“Well,” she says after a small pause — and was her voice that close before? — and you can feel her stare burning into the side of your head. “That would’ve depended on who I got to do them off of.”

If that was Carmilla’s attempt at being subtle, then she really needs to work on it.

You turn towards her, opening your mouth for the appropriate response of not a chance in hell, Karnstein or even that was even worse than your Halloween pick-up line, just something resembling a firm no, but the words get caught in your throat when you see the familiar smirk on her face. The one that makes you want to do things of a more-than-friendly nature to her.

She cocks her head to the side, nodding towards the recently vacated table. You know she probably doesn’t even mean it, and is just trying to mess with your head and throw you off balance because she’s Carmilla and that’s what she does. Unfortunately, it’s working very effectively.

You narrow your eyes at her, and the smug look on her face somehow gets even more insufferable. You hesitate for a moment, then for some inexplicable reason that you decide not to think about right now, you abandon your cup of orange juice in favour of picking up a half full bottle of tequila and two shot glasses. Maybe you’re just a bit drunker than you realise. Or maybe you just want the satisfaction of wiping that smug look of prissy little Laura would never do something as scandalous as body shots off her dumb face.

Her eyebrows raise in surprise when you grab her arm with your other hand and drag her over to the corner of the kitchen, slightly further away from the crowd cheering on the two Summer Society girls now occupying the table. There’s no one you know currently in the room and you lost track of Danny and Kirsch at least thirty minutes ago, but still.

“Wow,” Carmilla says, watching you pour out the alcohol into the shot glasses. “Clearly I underestimated you.”

“As someone particularly annoying once said,” you start, licking a spilled drop of tequila off your thumb and enjoying the way Carmilla’s mouth falls open slightly, before pushing the salt shaker into one of her hands and a wedge of lime into the other. “What are some friendly body shots between roommates?”

You feel like that may have been a bit of a foolish thing to say, considering Carmilla is now looking at you like you’re edible. You shift slightly. These are just body shots. It’s tequila, it’s supposed to be drunk like this. This is not going to lead to anything resembling Halloween.

“You know,” Carmilla starts, eyes flicking down to take in your dress. Or maybe she's just staring at your chest. “This would be a lot easier if you were less clothed and more horizontal.”

Well excuse you for not picking out an outfit more conducive to body shots.

“Next time,” you say without thinking, because there is no way in hell you’re stripping down to your underwear at a packed party just so Carmilla can use you as a shot glass. Carmilla’s entire face lights up, and you have a feeling she’s going to hold you to that.

“Next time,” she repeats with a predatory smirk. Her hand comes up to your shoulder, tugging the strap of your dress to the side, and she drags one of the lime slices down your neck and across your collarbone, squeezing slightly to wet your skin with the juice, before sprinkling salt over it.

Placing her hands on the countertop either side of you and effectively trapping you against her, she leans in, dipping her head to the crook of your neck, and you have to bite your lip hard to stifle a moan when you feel her tongue sliding against your neck. She takes her time, slowly tracing her tongue over your throat much longer than necessary to lick all the salt off, and you try desperately to think about anything other than her tongue on other parts of your body. Completely of their own volition, one of your hands moves to settle on her waist while the other comes up to cup the back of her neck, and Carmilla takes it as encouragement to press forward and pin you against the counter with her hips.

Carmilla pulls back after one last swipe of her tongue over your hammering pulse point, before knocking back the tequila shot and biting down on a wedge of lime. She hasn’t bothered putting some space between you, her close proximity making your head spin and your breath catch in your throat, and her eyes never leave yours as she sucks on the lime. You’re pretty sure there’s not supposed to be anything appealing about someone sucking on a slice of fruit, but Carmilla’s making a pretty good case for it.

Carmilla tosses the lime slice into the sink for someone else to clean up later, and her hands slip down to hold your waist as she switches your positions and leans back against the counter, handing you the salt shaker and a fresh slice of lime. “Your turn,” she says, the low rasp of her voice doing terrible, terrible things to your self-control.

You’ve never really seen the appeal of body shots, not until right now. Now that you’re faced with Carmilla, head tilted to the side so you can pour salt on her, seduction eyes out in full force imploring you to drag your tongue along her neck, and a slice of lime held between her teeth, you’re giving serious consideration to dragging her somewhere a little more private to fulfil her wish of less clothed and more horizontal body shots.

(There is a plus to this situation of course; having a piece of fruit shoved in her mouth means she’ll actually be forced to shut up for once.)

Carmilla tips her head back and watches you with dark eyes as you squeeze the lime against her neck and shake the salt out onto her skin. A stray drop of lime juice trickles down her neck, across her collarbone and towards her chest, and you only just manage to resist the urge to lean down and lick it off her. You don't miss the shiver that goes through Carmilla when you drag a finger across the top of her chest to wipe it up before it hits the top of her corset, popping it in your mouth and sucking it clean.

You mimic Carmilla’s movements, trapping her against the counter with your arms and crowding right into her personal space — definitely getting much closer than necessary, but if your presence affects her as much as hers affects you, then hey, you can take pleasure in this small revenge — and you hear the whimper she tries to disguise as a cough, even over the loud music.

Ducking your head down, you run your tongue over her collarbone, slowly licking and sucking your way up her throat to make sure you’ve gotten every last drop of sticky lime juice. Her hands land on your hips again, pulling you closer until the gap between your bodies is eliminated, and you groan quietly against her neck at the feeling of her pressed against you. She’s warm and soft and completely intoxicating, and you can’t help but vividly remember how she felt pressed up against you with no clothing barriers.

Pulling away from her neck once it’s clean of lime juice and salt, you quickly swallow the tequila shot, wincing slightly at the burn of the alcohol, and before you lose your nerve, lean back in to pluck the wedge of lime from her mouth. Your lips only brush against Carmilla’s for a second, but it’s enough to send a jolt of white-hot lust through you and make your entire body feel like a damn live wire.

Dropping the wedge in the empty shot glass, you lick your lips to get rid of the last remnants of lime juice, and Carmilla hones in on it like a shark smelling blood, eyes dropping to stare hungrily at your mouth. You shift slightly under her ravenous stare, acutely aware of how warm her hands feel where they’re still holding your waist.

"So," you murmur lower than intended, in a pointless attempt to dispel some of the tension hanging heavily in the air.

It doesn’t really work. You don’t know why you expected it to, considering you’ve sort of given up on trying to be subtle about how much you want her.

"So,” Carmilla repeats, looking like she's two seconds away from pouncing on you, kitchen full of people or not.

You're close enough that you can see how blown her pupils are while she rakes her gaze indecently down to your chest, and you honestly have no idea how you managed to convince yourself that you'd be able to stay away from her after Halloween.

“It's a shame our nice private dorm is on the other side of campus, huh?" Carmilla quips, in that voice that makes everything she says sound vaguely suggestive.

You kind of hate that that’s all it takes for you to give in, reaching down to grab her wrist, and tugging her out of the kitchen in the direction of the staircase.

/

The door to an empty bathroom on the fourth floor is barely closed and locked behind you before Carmilla is backing you against it. There’s a split second where you just stare at each other, wordlessly affirming that yes, this is happening again, before Carmilla closes the gap between you and presses her lips against yours.

It’s almost embarrassing how good kissing her again feels, and you can’t help but groan quietly into her mouth, lifting your arms to wrap around her shoulders and pull her as close as possible. Carmilla nips at your bottom lip, brushes her tongue into your mouth, and after a few minutes of heated kissing, the hands on your waist start inching up until they reach your chest, palming at you over the fabric of your dress.

You break the kiss and tilt your head back against the door, whimpering at the feeling of Carmilla’s hands on you, and she dips her head to press a line of hot wet kisses along your jaw and down your neck. Your breath hitches and your hips twitch forward in frustration when she sucks on your pulse, scraping her teeth across your skin until you know there will be a mark. Carmilla shudders when you slowly drag your nails down her back and over all the skin left bare by the corset, and you feel more than hear the breathy moan she makes against your throat when you slide your hands down and grab her ass, pulling her forward to grind her hips against you.

Her head lifts from your neck, leaning back in to kiss you heatedly while her hips drive forward and pin you completely against the door, slipping a thigh between your legs and pushing up and against you, and you groan at the friction.

You’re pretty sure you’re going to have to talk about this eventually — sleeping with Carmilla once you can just pass off as a drunken accident; sleeping with her twice, not so much — but right now all you really care about is the insistent press of Carmilla’s lips against yours, and getting her to alleviate the ache building up between your legs. Carmilla chooses that moment to slide her hands under your dress, pushing the material up your thighs and hooking her fingers into your underwear, which promptly sends all rational thought out the window.

After waiting for your (very eager) nod of consent, she tugs them as far down as she can, leaving you to kick them off, before one hand curls around the back of your thigh, encouraging you to lift your leg and wrap it around her waist. Her nails scrape lightly over your skin as she trails her other hand up the inside of your thigh, and you have to break the kiss to moan against her mouth when her fingers slide against your clit.

Your head falls back against the door when her fingers start moving faster, and she drags her lips along your jaw to your ear, nipping at the earlobe and whispering a few explicit comments about how wet you are. Her fingers slip lower, and you gasp out a ragged oh God when she slowly slides the tips of her fingers inside you. Your arms tighten around her, clinging onto her so you don’t topple over, and you arch your back and grind down against her hand, trying to get her fingers in deeper.

“Carmilla,” you whine, past caring if you sound desperate or not. “Fuck, come on, I want you to— fuck.”

Your request gets cut off and your mind goes blissfully blank when Carmilla pushes her fingers all the way into you.

"You know, Halloween notwithstanding, I've never heard you swear before," Carmilla murmurs into your ear, moving her fingers until they hit a particularly sensitive spot and you whimper her name breathlessly. "You should do it more often. It's pretty hot." She slides out of you slowly, before thrusting back in quickly, her palm grinding against your clit until you curse loudly. "Although I guess it's sort of flattering that you only seem to do it when I'm. Doing. This." She punctuates her words with hard deep thrusts and your hands tighten their grip on her hair.

“You’re, oh God, you’re so much more bearable when you’re not talking, please shut up.”

You yank her forward into a kiss, and you feel her smile against your mouth, but does as she’s told, settling into a steady rhythm with her fingers and happily complying with your gasped requests (demands) of harder, more, right there, faster. You bury your face against her neck, trying desperately to muffle the louder moans that threaten to spill out.

Her other hand flits its way across you, squeezing at your chest, stroking along the leg you have wrapped around her, slipping into your hair and tugging your head back so she can litter kisses all over your throat, before her arm slides around your waist, simultaneously helping keeping you upright and also pulling your hips closer so her fingers press in at a different angle, sliding in deeper.

She curls her fingers, brushes her thumb over your clit, and a sound you didn’t think you were capable of making echoes around the bathroom.

“You like that?” She asks like she doesn’t already know, before her mouth latches onto your throat and sucks hard. Another swipe of her thumb against your clit makes you whimper and swear breathlessly, rocking your hips down frantically to meet her fingers, and it only takes a few more perfectly-angled thrusts before you’re coming with a loud moan, shaking and holding onto Carmilla for dear life.

Carmilla peppers kisses along your cheek and neck, her fingers gently bringing you down, and her arm keeps you from sliding to the floor when you slump bonelessly against the door once the world comes back into focus. You watch through hazy eyes as she makes a show of licking her fingers clean one by one, before fixing you with a wolfish smirk that you’re eager to wipe off her face.

“You know your stamina was pretty impressive from what I remember,” Carmilla says, the tremor in her voice betraying just how turned on she is. “Hope that’s not all you got, poptart.”

You don’t bother with a reply, instead you pull her in for a deep kiss, sweeping your tongue into her mouth and then walking her backwards on slightly shaky legs until her back hits the edge of the sink. Carmilla groans when your hands drift down her body and pop open the button on her pants, huffs a quiet oh God when you drop to your knees in front of her, and the way her hands thread into your hair while you trail kisses across her hipbones makes you pretty sure that neither of you are leaving this bathroom anytime soon.

(The worst part, you realise around the time Carmilla’s hips jerk forward and she cries out at the first press of your tongue against her soaking centre, is that you think you might want more than just two nights with her.)

/

You're semi-conscious for all of ten seconds the next morning before you feel someone shifting in the bed behind you. You freeze, before cracking one eye open and realising you're in Danny's room. There's one horrifying moment of oh no did I sleep with Carmilla in my best friend’s bed not cool Hollis not cool before the person behind you mumbles in their sleep and you realise it's just Danny.

You have no idea how long you spent in that bathroom with Carmilla, but eventually, you were both too exhausted to keep going. Carmilla left first, tugging her clothes back on, kissing you on the cheek and disappearing out the door with a good seeing you again, cupcake, and by the time you had sorted out your hair and clothes, trying to make the just-fucked look not so blatantly obvious, she had vanished, apparently not bothering to wait for you, which, okay, rude. The party had just finished winding down, and you vaguely recall bumping into Danny on the stairs, and since you couldn’t be bothered walking across campus to your own building, you just crashed in her room.

So, you have now slept with Carmilla not once, but twice. Once, you could maybe have passed it off as just too much alcohol lowering your inhibitions, but twice? Twice is intentional. Twice generally means something. And wanting to do it a third time definitely means something, something that you don’t want to think about. At least not this early in the morning.

“Oh my God,” Danny groans from behind you, breaking your concentration. “I feel like someone ran over my head with a steamroller.”

On the plus side, being too busy fucking Carmilla means you didn’t have enough time to drink yourself into a hangover like Danny. Small miracles.

You chuckle, sitting up, stretching and yawning, before looking down at the Danny-shaped lump under the blankets. “Good morning sleepyhead.”

“No it isn’t,” Danny grumbles, the top of her head peeking out over the top of the blankets.

“It will be once we go for food. I’m starving, and in desperate need of greasy calories.” Danny grunts what you think is an agreement. “Pancakes?”

It isn’t until you’ve reached the designated post-hangover diner just outside of campus, sat down and ordered a stack of cinnamon pancakes that you realise how oddly quiet Danny’s been on the walk there.

“Hey.” You nudge her under the table with your foot. “Are you okay? You’re weirdly quiet. Hangover that bad that even talking hurts?”

She laughs. “No, I’m feeling better now actually, it’s just—”

She cuts herself off when the waitress reappears with two mugs of coffee, waiting until she’s gone before blurting out, “I kissed someone last night.”

That is what Danny has been ominously silent about? Instead of voicing your initial thoughts — that’s great Danny, I fucked my roommate last night. Again. Yes, the annoying one who steals all my stuff and is a general pain in the ass one hundred percent of the time. That one. And yes, I did say I fucked her again. As in a second time. As in this is something that has happened before — you say, “Oh? Who?”

“Um, just...someone,” Danny says vaguely, staring with great interest at her coffee. Not suspicious at all.

“Okay,” you say slowly, ignoring Danny’s tutting at the large amount of sugar you pour into your coffee. “And why does you kissing someone warrant all this twitchiness?”

Danny stays quiet for a moment. “Because I think I might kinda like this person.”

Oh thank God, something that can take your mind off The Carmilla Thing.

“Like, like like?”

Danny smiles. “Yes Laura, like like like.”

“Do I know her? Him? Them?”

Danny is definitely a lot more social than you, it’s going to take some time before you narrow down who it could possibly be, but noseying into Danny’s love life will be a welcome distraction from thinking about whatever is going on with you and Carmilla.

“Yes, you know him,” she says, holding up a finger when you open your mouth to speak. “And in answer to your next question, no I’m not telling you who it is. Not yet at least, cause I don’t know if this could even turn into a thing, or if he even wants it to be a thing, but when I do know, I promise you will be the first person I tell.”

The waitress reappears again, carrying two large plates of pancakes, and Danny waits until she’s finished dousing hers in half a pint of maple syrup before speaking again.

“Besides, this might not even be a thing for me, this could just be a stupid little fleeting crush that’ll be gone next week.”

“Wait, how long have you even maybe-liked this guy?” You ask through a mouthful of pancake.

“A couple weeks? Since mid-October I think.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” You place a hand over your hand in a dramatic gesture you’ve definitely picked up from Carmilla. “I’m hurt.”

“Hey, this completely blindsided me, okay? Like one day I’d never even thought about him like that, and then the next that’s kinda the only way I could think about him.” Danny shrugs, looking slightly bewildered. “I don’t know what happened, or what changed, or even how to explain it, as I’m sure you’ve realised by this excellent storytelling, but it came out of nowhere and now it’s just...” She trails off, trying and failing to hide her dopey smile behind her coffee mug.

“Aw,” you laugh, ignoring her huffed shut up. “How cute.”

“Besides, you’re one to talk,” Danny says teasingly, reaching across the table and tugging at the collar of your shirt. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that hickey on your neck Hollis.”

You can feel yourself going slightly red as you smack her hand away with a syrupy fork. If The Carmilla Thing is going to be be a recurring thing, you need to buy clothes with bigger collars. Maybe Perry can give you some tips on where to find cheap turtlenecks.

“You want to tell me about that then?” Danny asks, shoving a forkful of pancake into her mouth and somehow managing to look smug even with a smear of maple syrup on her nose.

“Nothing to talk about,” you huff, busying yourself with stuffing your face with more pancakes.

Danny laughs. “That’s what I thought.”

Chapter Text

You’re slightly ashamed that you don’t even last a full twenty four hours after the Summer Society party before sleeping with Carmilla again.

Great restraint, Hollis, a true iron will.

You’re not even entirely sure how it happened. Carmilla didn’t come sauntering back into the room until late Saturday afternoon, and one moment you were complaining about the general level of filth — Carmilla it is your turn to do the dishes and currently the sink looks like it is growing its own ecosystem — then Carmilla was shooting back with a snarky comment — it’s difficult to take you seriously when you’re angry because that cute bunched-up face makes you look like a pissed off toddler — and before you knew it the argument had spiralled into angry heated kissing and clothes being yanked off while you tumbled down onto Carmilla’s bed.

A few minutes after you've both collapsed back on the mattress, out of breath and slightly sweaty, Carmilla heaves herself up from the bed without a word. You prop yourself up onto your elbows and and turn your head to watch her wander over to the closet and start rifling through it. “Going somewhere?” You ask, and immediately cringe internally. You sound like a suspicious girlfriend.

“It’s nearly six,” Carmilla says, turning around to face you, apparently completely nonplussed by the fact she’s still completely naked. “I’m supposed to be meeting Will in ten minutes for a study session.”

You avert your eyes, which is kind of ridiculous considering you’ve been up close and personal with her naked body multiple times now, but it feels a little weird looking at her like that when there isn’t the promise of imminent sex looming over you. It feels different when you’re both stone cold sober in the afternoon as well, rather than slightly inebriated at some dimly lit party late in the evening.

Once Carmilla disappears into the bathroom, you quickly slip out of her bed, tug some sweatpants and a tshirt on, and flop down onto your own bed. Staying in her bed for a post-sex nap while she goes to meet Will feels a little too…intimate.

“So, I was thinking,” Carmilla’s voice floats through from the bathroom over the sound of running water, and you get the distinct feeling that ‘thinking’ is Carmilla-speak for scheming, or diabolically plotting. “We’ve had sex a few times now.”

The fact that Carmilla a) had her head between your legs less than five minutes ago, and b) can’t actually see you, doesn’t stop you from covering your face with your hands and groaning, “Please shut up.”

“And at least two of those times were relatively sober.”

“Carmilla, I swear to God.”

“Oh calm down, drama queen,” Carmilla huffs as she walks out of the bathroom, fully-dressed and with her wild sex-hair tamed down to its normal curls. “All I was gonna say was that I for one am very open to the idea of this—” she gestures towards the sex-rumpled sheets on her bed. “—becoming a regular, intentional thing.”

You blink stupidly at Carmilla in the few seconds it takes for the words to sink in.

“So you want to use me for sex?” You pause. “Actually, what am I saying, of course you do.”

“Oh, don’t act like this wouldn’t be a mutually beneficial arrangement, sweetheart,” Carmilla says with a filthy smirk, turning towards the pile of clothes at the end of her bed and starting to rummage through it. “You’d be using me just as much as I’d be using you.”

You’ve never heard the phrase I’d be using you sound so oddly appealing.

“So like, friends with benefits?” You say slowly, and Carmilla gives you a look that lets you know exactly word she takes offence at. “Okay, roommates with benefits, whatever.”

Carmilla shrugs. “Sure. Whatever you want to call it.”

This is not at all how you thought your day would go when you woke up this morning.

“What would you be getting out of it?” You ask, still a little thrown by the offer. Carmilla has a whole harem of friends to claim benefits on, why would she want to include you in that? And more importantly, why are you considering it?

“You looked in a mirror lately?” Carmilla chuckles. “What do you think I’d be getting out of it?”

You open your mouth to reply, promptly shutting it when you realise you have no clue how to respond to that. It may be one hell of an ego boost, but it still catches you a little off guard that Carmilla appears to be this attracted to you.

Carmilla finally locates the particular leather jacket she’s searching for and pulls it on, before stuffing her phone into her bag, tugging it over her shoulder, and turning to face you.

“I’m not gonna demand an answer right now, obviously. I figure you’re gonna need some time to debate the pros and cons, maybe make a PowerPoint presentation about it.” You roll your eyes at Carmilla’s grin. “But I am of the opinion that it’s definitely something you should consider.”

“You would be,” you grumble under your breath.

Carmilla laughs, before disappearing out the door with a parting comment of see you later, cutie.

(It’s downright embarrassing how little time it takes you to reach a decision about Carmilla’s offer.)

/

Carmilla comes back around 10PM, just as you’re walking out of the bathroom towelling your hair dry after a shower, and you’ve barely gotten a hello out before she thrusts a piece of paper at you.

“Um, what’s this?”

“I got bored listening to Will’s droning, so I made you a list.”

You look down at the piece of paper. Scrawled at the top is the pros and cons of secretly banging your super-hot and excellent-in-bed roommate, underneath that is Pros: sneaking around is hot. Also I’m exceptional in bed. Cons: Clifford would probably sneak in and suffocate me in my sleep if she discovered I spend hours every night defiling her precious innocent little Laura and scribbled at the bottom of the page is PS that means I’d basically be risking my life every time I slept with you. Just something to consider.

“You actually made me a pros and cons list,” you say flatly. Carmilla truly is one of the most irritating people you have ever met.

“Yep,” Carmilla says, toeing her shoes off and dumping her jacket on her bed. “You’re welcome. Took me a whole five minutes.”

“Wow, that long?” You say sarcastically.

Carmilla leans against her headboard and crosses her arms across her chest, silently watching you reread the list as if it holds all the answers to whether or not entering into a no strings attached arrangement with your roommate is a good idea.

"So…” Carmilla breaks the silence, taking a step towards where you’re leaning against the desk. “How about it, buttercup?"

"Shut up for a second, just let me think."

"Well the fact that you didn't flat out tell me to fuck off the second I suggested it, you’re not telling me to fuck off now, and instead you're clearly considering it is pretty telling of what your answer’s gonna be, don't you think?"

You choose to ignore that. You also choose not to inform Carmilla that you had a definitive answer probably less than five minutes after she walked out of the door earlier.

“If this is going to be a thing,” you eventually say, refusing to look at Carmilla and instead staring resolutely at the floor. “I feel like this it’s something we should probably talk about.”

“Not everything requires incessant talking you know,” Carmilla says, and you hear her move slightly closer to you.

“Well it should.”

Carmilla takes another step forward. “Well I like it better when you’re not talking.”

You glance up to see Carmilla raking her eyes up and down your body. After your shower you changed into your pyjamas for a wild Saturday night of watching Doctor Who, and you now feel slightly exposed in just a tank top and plaid pyjama pants, especially with the heated way Carmilla is looking at you. You clear your throat nervously. “Obviously I have zero romantic inclinations towards you, as you are still an awful roommate and person in general.”

“You sure know how to flatter a girl, Hollis,” Carmilla chuckles, closing the remaining gap between you until she’s standing right in front of you.

“But,” you pause, biting at your lower lip nervously. “It shouldn’t come as a shock to you if I were to admit that I happen to be ludicrously attracted to you. Physically. Purely physically.” Carmilla’s mouth curves into a pleased smirk, and you can practically feel the smugness radiating off her in waves. “And clearly you’re attracted to me too, don’t even bother trying to deny it.” Carmilla mutters something that you don’t quite catch, but doesn’t object. “So if this were to become a regular and intentional thing, which, uh, I would also be in favour of—“

“Can you get to the point sometime this decade?”

“Maybe we should set some ground rules.”

“Are you seriously adding terms and conditions to this? Only you could manage to make no strings attached sex sound unappealing.” Your mind goes blank and you fight back a whimper when Carmilla leans forward and places her hands on the desk either side of you, pressing your chests together. Her eyes flicker down to your mouth briefly, and the warmth from her body and the smell of her perfume is making your head hazy. “The only rule is that there’s no emotions involved. So you’re not allowed to fall in love with me, cupcake.”

You break out of your Carmilla-daze long enough to fix her with a mildly affronted glare. “Well you’re not allowed to fall in love with me either.”

“Trust me,” Carmilla snorts. “There is no way that will ever happen.”

You feel like maybe you should be offended at that, but you’re not sure.

“Oh, and I don’t cuddle,” Carmilla adds on, reaching up to tuck a lock of hair behind your ear and smirking at the shiver you fail to disguise. “That’s my other rule.”

“Are we—” Your voice goes embarrassingly high pitched when Carmilla’s fingers skate feather-light down your throat and across your collarbone. It’s ridiculous how easily Carmilla can affect you; she’s barely touching you and already you’re having trouble thinking straight. “Are we allowed to see other people?”

“This isn’t a relationship, cutie,” Carmilla replies, her voice a low whisper as her eyes follow the movement of her fingers tracing across your bare shoulder. “Feel free to fuck whoever else you want.”

Her fingers continue trailing down your arm, leaving goosebumps in their wake, before she slips her arm around your body and splays her palm out on the small of your back. She leans into you, and you bite back a moan at the feeling of her warm body pressed fully against you.

“So there’s definitely no feelings here.” You relinquish your death grip on the desk and slide your arms around Carmilla’s shoulders to try and pull her even closer when she ducks her head to press a kiss to the base of your throat. “And no strings.” Carmilla hums in agreement, peppering soft wet kisses up and down your neck. Both her hands make their way under your top to grip onto your waist, and this time you fail at stifling a low moan. “This doesn’t mean anything, it’s just sex.”

“Exactly,” Carmilla purrs into your ear, nipping gently at the lobe. “Now if you’re done yapping maybe we could get to that part of this arrangement sometime before Christmas?”

You have a retort about patience and an excellent pun about how good things come to those who wait ready, but Carmilla chooses that moment to lean back and yank her shirt over her head, which pretty much renders you speechless. She takes a few seconds to look smug at your blatant leering, before she cups the back of your neck, leans back in and kisses you.

Burying your hands in her hair, you kiss her back eagerly, parting your lips to let her sweep her tongue into your mouth, and whimpering quietly when she grinds her hips into yours.

“You’re still a terrible person,” you mumble against Carmilla’s mouth, because it bears repeating. And because you’re an idiot who apparently doesn’t know when to shut up. “And an even worse roommate.” Carmilla gives up on trying to kiss you, moving down to your neck and sucking on your pulse point until you groan loudly, before she pulls your top over your head and tosses it behind her. “I don’t even know why they call it friends with benefits, or fuck buddies.” The sentence comes out punctuated by breathy gasps when her hands travel up to your chest, squeezing gently and pinching at your nipples. “We’re not even really friends.” Carmilla makes quick work of pulling your pyjama pants down, and you quickly kick them off to the side before she lifts you onto the desk, pushing your thighs apart and moving to stand between them. “Or buddies. We’re— oh my God,” you choke off into a moan when Carmilla’s fingers delve between your legs and push into you with zero warning.

“Laura?” Carmilla says, immediately setting a steady rhythm pumping into you.

“Yes?”

“Shut the hell up.”

/

You keep the pros and cons list — for sentimentality — slipping it between the pages of a Virginia Woolf novel rather than pinning it up on the wall for all to see, or framing it and setting it down on your headboard in between the photo of you and your Dad at the top of the CN Tower and the photo of you and Danny sporting Santa hats and hideously vibrant sweaters from last Christmas.

/

It’s quite incredible actually, how often the two of you end up having sex. You don’t recall yourself being quite so insatiable before, but maybe that’s just Carmilla corrupting you into some kind of like minded sex fiend.

It turns out that sleeping with your roommate isn’t actually that big an adjustment as you’d thought it would be. You still aren’t really friends, and although Carmilla isn’t quite as unbearable a person anymore — it appears that she’s mildly less unpleasant when she’s getting laid regularly. Or more regularly than before — she’s still an awful roommate. She stills leaves her clothes lying around on the floor and her hair in the shower drain, you still yell at her, and she still completely ignores you. She still seems to think the best time to blast her angry existentialist punk rock music at top volume is when you’re trying to study in peace. She still helps herself to all your food without asking, you still tell her not to, and she still does it anyway.

Nothing else really changes. The only thing that’s different is all your arguments eventually end with you tearing each others clothes off and tumbling onto whoever’s bed is closest. And whenever you’re finished and lying catching your breath next to her, you notice that once again your yellow pillow is being held hostage on Carmilla’s bed, which leads to another argument about Carmilla stealing your things, which nine times out of ten, leads to yet another round of (admittedly, mind-blowing) sex.

Obviously, you don’t tell anyone. Not because you would enjoy the idea of being Carmilla’s dirty little secret, or having her as yours — although the thrill of sneaking around does have a certain appeal, as Carmilla’s charming list stated — but because there are just not enough words in the English language for you to explain the logic behind your choice in sex partners.

Hey guys, so you know how my roommate is an annoying, rude, possible kleptomaniac who I have difficulty tolerating for more than ten minutes at a time? Yeah? Well guess who I’m having lots of awesome no strings attached sex with!

Yeah, that probably wouldn’t go over too well. Danny can get a little overprotective sometimes.

And as Carmilla’s list also pointed out, there’s always the chance that Danny will try and maim, possibly murder Carmilla if she finds out about what you’ve been getting up to in your spare time, since the mutual intense dislike your roommate-with-benefits harbours for your best friend is still very much present. If Carmilla is indisposed thanks to being dead, that means no more sex, and as obnoxious as she is, Carmilla is good for some things. Namely, sex.

If Carmilla wasn’t still such an insufferable asshole, you could almost let yourself daydream about this arrangement working out like it does in every movie and fanfiction: girl meets girl, girls fall in love, happily ever after.

(Almost.)

At least you know that things aren’t in danger of getting messy due to someone developing feelings. Carmilla’s actually the perfect candidate for this, since she is the last person on the planet you’d ever fall in love with.

/

The first Hot Chocolate Incident occurs on a Tuesday, just over a week into your arrangement.

Fifteen minutes before you need to leave for your 2PM class, you’re rifling through the bomb site that is the desk trying to find a specific set of notes when Carmilla arrives back from her morning philosophy lecture.

“Hey,” Carmilla says after a thump that you assume is her bag being dumped on the floor. You grunt back a distracted hello, only registering her footsteps coming up behind you when she appears next to you and plonks a takeaway cup bearing Silas’ student run coffee shop’s logo on it down in front of you. “Bought you a present, poptart,” she says, before making a beeline for the fridge. “And before you ask, no it’s not poisoned.”

“Oh my God, will you let that go already,” you grumble, Beowulf notes forgotten as you stare down at the little paper cup like it’s about to grow fangs and try to bite you. “Uh, what is it?” You ask, picking up the cup and turning round to watch Carmilla suspiciously.

“Hot chocolate. Will’s a barista at that campus coffee shop beside the biology building, and their hot chocolate is better than this powdery crap you keep wasting money on,” Carmilla replies, holding up the half-empty box of hot chocolate mix and giving it a disdainful look. You don’t bother pointing out that for powdery crap, Carmilla sure helps herself to plenty of it.

“Um, thanks,” you say, taking a sip. Your eyebrows shoot up in surprise when you register the taste. “Is there cinnamon in here?”

“Yep,” Carmilla says from behind her headboard where she’s poking around in the fridge, before she pops up into view. “You’ve mentioned liking it once or twice so I— what?” She asks, presumably at the look of surprise you know is on your face. “I listen to you occasionally. Rarely, but sometimes.”

Well that’s surprising. Sure, you talk a lot at Carmilla, but you’re never entirely sure if she’s actually listening.

“What prompted this?” You blurt out once you’ve turned back to the desk to continue searching for your elusive notes. “I mean, not that I don’t appreciate this unexpected kind gesture, because I do, just…why?”

Carmilla groans. “Because I felt like it? I was in the cafe, saw the word cinnamon on the menu, it reminded me of you so I bought you some. Not everything has to have some secret deeper meaning or ulterior motive. This is not a thing we need to talk about, please don’t make it one. It’s a drink, not a marriage proposal.”

You nearly choke on your mouthful of hot chocolate.

“However…” Carmilla’s voice has dropped a few octaves, and a second or two later you feel all of her pressed up against your back, pinning you against the desk. “If you want, I’m sure I can think of a few ways you could thank me,” she purrs into your ear, her hands coming to rest on your hips.

“I thought you said it was just a drink,” you say, trying not to let on quite how affected you are by her slowly walking her fingers up your arm while her lips brush against your ear.

“And you’re the one that made a big deal out of it,” Carmilla replies, her fingers trailing along your clavicle and then popping open the top button on your shirt. “I mean, I did stand in that line for a very long time.”

A second button pops open, your retort dying in your throat, and you have to bite back a submissive moan when Carmilla presses her lips to the edge of your jaw. Another button, another dent in your self control.

“Poor you,” you eventually manage to stutter out. “But unfortunately for you, I have to get to class.” Carmilla groans, dropping her forehead onto your shoulder. You finally catch sight of your Beowulf notes hiding under a scarily large book, that judging by the title belongs to Carmilla, and quickly wriggle out of her hold before she can convince you to skip class. "I'll thank you properly later."

“I look forward to it,” she replies, turning to lean against the desk while she watches you hastily button up the three undone buttons on your shirt with a pleased look on her face.

She wiggles her fingers in a waved response to your shaky goodbye Carmilla, and when the bizarre urge to press a fleeting goodbye kiss to her cheek swarms up out of absolutely nowhere, you spin round and race out of the room. So far you haven’t kissed as anything other than a prelude to sex, so something about a simple kiss goodbye before you leave for class feels a little too oddly affectionate.

You file the weird urge to kiss her goodbye, along with Carmilla buying you hot chocolate, away under things I should probably analyse but I’m not sure I want to know the results so I'm just gonna ignore them. Nothing can possibly go wrong there.

And that is how you find yourself outside the creatively named Silas Coffee House two days later, once your Thursday morning lecture’s finished, debating with yourself whether to go in and order an extra cup of hot chocolate, or just go straight back to the dorm and forget you ever took this little detour.

Carmilla usually leaves for her afternoon class just before 1PM, so really, you have about fifty minutes to make this decision, but you’re pretty sure the barista has noticed you hovering like a weirdo outside the coffee shop for the past fifteen minutes, so if you wait much longer he’s probably going to alert campus security.

This is ridiculous. There's literally zero reason for you to to feel this nervous. You’ve had your fingers and your tongue inside her so buying her hot chocolate, after she’s already bought you hot chocolate, is the furthest thing from too forward. She bought you hot chocolate, now you’re buying her hot chocolate. It’s just returning the favour. Repaying the debt. Being a considerate roommate-with-benefits.

“Hey, princess.” A vaguely familiar cheerful voice interrupts your internal stressing, and you whip your head round to see Will trotting up towards you, clad in an obnoxiously bright orange polo shirt emblazoned with the Silas Coffee House’s logo.

“Hi.” All things considered, Will isn’t the worst person to have caught you staring at the coffee shop like a serial killer picking out their next victim.

Will looks between you and the coffee shop with a raised eyebrow. “You coming in or just admiring the architecture?”

He laughs at your indignant huff, and follows you towards the shop. He holds the door open for you and you snidely think that Carmilla could learn a thing or two about manners from him.

Will greets the other barista and lets him know he can go on his break now, and then vanishes into a room behind the counter, reappearing after a few seconds tying a bright blue apron around his waist. The coffee shop is surprisingly empty for a Thursday lunchtime, only about four customers dotted around the room, so there’s no queue for you to hold up, and you take the time to scan the large menu hanging on the wall, trying to see if any of the options listed leap out at you to remind you of Carmilla.

“So,” Will starts once he’s taken up his spot behind the till. “What can I get you?”

“A cinnamon hot chocolate and, um...” Last week’s purchase of a bar of white chocolate disappeared at an alarming rate, even by Carmilla’s greedy standards, so you figure that white hot chocolate is probably a safe bet. “And a white soy milk hot chocolate. Both to go, please.”

Will pauses scribbling the order onto a second paper cup and proceeds to grin at you in a very unsettling way, like he knows something you don’t.

“What?” You ask, crossing your arms defensively.

He holds up the cup, which so far has the words soy and white scrawled onto it. “This wouldn’t happen to be for a certain grump that we both know, would it?”

“Maybe,” you mumble, looking with great interest at the pastry display.

“Buying her hot chocolate are you?” He beams, and you can feel yourself blushing like a schoolgirl with a crush. “Do I need to give you the big brother-slash-best friend talk? Hurt her and I’ll…well I’m not gonna hit a girl, but I’ll do something unpleasant.”

“No," you squeak in horror. "Oh my God no it is nothing like that, and— wait, hold on, brother?”

“Of course she didn’t tell you,” Will scoffs, rolling his eyes, and okay how did you miss the similarities? “She likes to pretend we’re not actually related.”

It all makes so much sense now; they’re equally obnoxious and smarmy, and when Will smirks at the baffled look you know is on your face it’s like seeing Carmilla with shorter hair.

“So there’s nothing going on with you and my sister?” Will prompts again, taking a carton of milk out of the fridge and making a start on the drinks.

“No,” you snap. “Absolutely not.”

It’s not entirely a lie. Generally when people ask that question they mean is there any kind of burgeoning romantic relationship starting to form, which there is definitely zero chance of with you and Carmilla.

“Alright, sorry,” Will says, holding his hands up in surrender. “It’s just, you never know with Carmilla.”

He looks slightly uncomfortable at the thought, and it occurs to you that while you may have front row seats to her twisted foreplay with various study buddies, Will probably gets the explicit gory details relayed to him after, whether he wants to hear about it or not.

"And it hasn't escaped my notice that you appear to be the only person other than yours truly and that redhead with all the turtlenecks that she can tolerate for more than ten minutes at a time," Will adds on, placing the two hot chocolates down on the counter.

"Yeah, well," you huff, snatching up the drinks. "I'm very persuasive."

Will laughs. "I think the words Carm used were annoying tiny persistence, but that's probably synonymous to her."

The conversation thankfully comes to an end when a girl comes barrelling through the door looking in desperate need of caffeine and takes Will’s attention away from you, and you pause to watch him take her order while simultaneously flirting with her.

Clearly womanising is a genetic trait.

Carmilla’s in her default position, sprawled out on her bed and nose stuck in a particularly pretentious looking book, when you burst back into the room. “Why didn’t you tell me Will was your brother?”

“Because it didn’t come up in conversation,” Carmilla replies flatly.

You roll your eyes. “Having an older brother isn’t usually the kind of thing that people need to be prompted to share.”

“Oh my God,” Carmilla huffs, slamming her book down and looking possibly the most offended you’ve ever seen her. “He is only ten minutes older than me!”

You blink stupidly. “Wait, you’re twins?” Would it kill either of them to be straightforward about anything?

“For a budding journalist you can be a little oblivious sometimes cupcake,” Carmilla chuckles, bookmarking her spot in the book and setting it down next to her, before clambering off the bed. “Fraternal twins, yes.”

“Having a twin isn’t usually the kind of thing that people need to be prompted to share either.”

“Well, like I've said already, where would be the fun in revealing everything all at once?” Carmilla huffs, pushing past you into the kitchen.

You’re not a complete idiot; it’s fairly obvious that the frosty sarcasm and transparent evasiveness is just a front because she doesn’t like talking about her family or her past for a reason you aren't privy to, so you push down the urge to interrogate her some more. Sharing one whole fact about herself is probably more than enough for her in one day anyway.

“Okay, well, I’m going to go meet up with Danny, I just dropped by to give you this,” you say, sticking your arm out and proffering the cup of hot chocolate to her. She stares at it like you’re trying to hand her a live bomb for just long enough that it starts to feel awkward, before slowly taking it from you without a word. You ignore the shiver that goes through you at the brush of her fingers against yours. “You know, returning the favour or whatever. Uh, have fun in class, see you later,” you squeak out all in one breath, before turning and speeding out of the room.

Somehow, despite the slightly awkward start, the hot chocolate turns into a regular thing; Tuesdays Carmilla swings by the coffee shop on her way back from class to buy you hot chocolate, and you do the same for her on Thursdays. You’re pretty sure Will treats it as his own personal form of entertainment, which you don’t really understand. But clearly understanding a Karnstein’s sense of humour is not something you’re ever going to excel at.

/

Laura: i’m bored :(

Carmilla: and what would you like me to do about that

Laura: entertain me

Carmilla: aren’t you supposed to be having a study date with the jolly red giant?

You glance up to the other side of your table tucked away in the corner of Starbucks, where Danny is paying zero attention to you and is focusing intently on her laptop. Your phone buzzes again and you look down to see another text waiting for you.

Carmilla: wouldn’t want to hinder your education

You bite your lip to keep from laughing.

Laura: and where were these morals yesterday night hm?

Carmilla: haven’t a clue what you’re referring to

Laura: you didn’t seem to have any qualms about ‘hindering my education’ when you were distracting me from my psych essay

Carmilla: ah yes. now i remember. although i don’t recall hearing you complaining

Carmilla: however i do recall hearing you telling me to ‘not stop’ and to ‘keep going’ and other such things

Laura: i take it back, i don’t need entertaining. you can be quiet now.

Carmilla: you’re very demanding and vocal when you’re getting fucked. i like it.

In retrospect, maybe asking Carmilla to entertain you wasn’t the brightest of ideas.

Laura: oh my god shut up i’m still in public

Carmilla: oh i know. that’s what makes this so fun

What an asshole.

Laura: are you in the dorm room?

Carmilla: art department. had some work to finish off.

Carmilla: there's a table here you'd look lovely bent over

You bite back another laugh. Who said romance was dead?

Laura: you have such a way with words

Carmilla: i try

Carmilla: you know it’s a pity you had class this morning. showering alone wasn't quite the same.

Carmilla: had to get myself off, and it's so much better when you're the one doing it

You watch the little speech bubble pop up as she starts typing again, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what direction she’s steering your conversation.

Carmilla: if you’d like, i could always tell you what you missed out on

She really is so predictable sometimes. You try to keep your face as expressionless as possible, lest Danny notices and asks what you’re grinning like a fool at. Oh nothing Dan, just my roommate sexting me the details of how she wanted to fuck me in the shower this morning. You surreptitiously glance up at Danny, making sure she isn’t paying you any attention while your thumbs hover over your phone screen trying to decide on a reply. Eventually, because Carmilla has apparently stripped you of all morals, you take the bait.

Laura: well personally i’d prefer it if you showed me…but since that can’t happen right now, i guess you’ll just have to tell me what would’ve happened if i'd been there

Laura: you know, just so i know for next time

The little speech bubble pops up again, and you stare at it with baited breath, your essay notes completely forgotten.

Carmilla: i’d push you against the wall and i'd work you up until you're soaked and begging for me to touch you

You nearly drop your phone.

Carmilla: kissing your neck, leaving marks all over you that you pretend not to like, and i’d have my hands all over you, touching all the little sensitive spots i’ve discovered cause all those little noises and whimpers you make that i like so much

Carmilla: that spot on the back of your thigh, the dip of your hipbones, your boobs

You shift slightly in your chair, hoping Danny doesn’t notice the flush you can feel creeping up your neck. Carmilla’s not even in the same damn room as you but you can already feel heat slowly pooling low in your stomach at the vivid picture her words are painting.

Carmilla: especially your boobs

Carmilla: i like your boobs

Laura: so i’ve noticed

Carmilla: :D

Carmilla: then i’d kiss my way down your body, stopping at your chest to suck at your nipples until you pull at my hair trying to push me down to where you want me

Carmilla: you'd be soaking wet by the time i actually get my tongue on you

Carmilla: you always taste so good

Carmilla: i'd use my fingers as well, i'd wait until you begged, just so i can hear that breathless moan of relief you make when i first slide my fingers into you, and then i’d fuck you until your legs are shaking and you’re desperately moaning my name

Carmilla: and you always sound so good too, when you're moaning for me to fuck you harder

Carmilla: i like it when you get a little rough, when you lose control and start pulling on my hair and shamelessly grinding your hips onto my tongue

Laura: oh my god

Carmilla: you’re so easy to turn on cutie

Carmilla: are you wet now? are you imagining me touching you? laying you out over the nearest table and fucking you right there in front of everyone?

Who knew potential exhibitionism could be so enticing?

Laura: oh my god i think i’m going to explode

Carmilla: i’m going to take that as a yes

Laura: how long before you’re finished with your art stuff?

Carmilla: mm not that long i don’t think. don’t have much left to do.

Carmilla: miss me do you?

Laura: you got me

Laura: although now that you mention it, it’d be nice if you got a move on and came back to the dorm considering how much i’d like you to make good on your big talk

Carmilla: i believe you know for a fact that i’m definitely not all talk

Carmilla: you know the art building is like a two minute walk from starbucks

Carmilla: and the classroom i’m in happens to be empty

Carmilla: just to let you know

You look up from your shaky hands holding your phone to your essay notes, which may as well have been written in Greek for all the good they're doing you by this point, and then at Danny who looks like not even a nuclear explosion would break her concentration on her own work. Briefly, you give some thought to wondering when the hell you became such a slave to your own teenage-boy-level hormones, before you start clearing up your notes.

Danny blinks and looks up when you snap your fingers under her nose to get her attention, and she raises an eyebrow in question at your tidying up.

"Pretty sure my brain is gonna melt if I read one more word of this,” you explain, lying through your teeth and slipping the last piece of paper into your bag. “Plus I kinda promised Carmilla I'd watch a movie with her tonight."

Danny’s eyebrows raise even higher. "You're ditching me to go watch a movie with Carmilla?" There's a lot of unnecessary emphasis on watch a movie and Carmilla. "And by watch a movie, you mean..."

You roll your eyes. "I mean an actual movie. She's never seen Harry Potter which is probably illegal in some countries, so it's like, my civic duty to educate her."

Okay, that part isn't a complete lie; Carmilla really hasn't seen them, you're rightfully horrified, and you have demanded she watch them at some point. It's just not necessarily happening right now.

“Right,” Danny says slowly, looking slightly confused. "So you guys are friends now?"

"Uh, kind of. For the most part." You nod. "I mean she's still kind of an ass most of the time, but I think we just got off on the wrong foot.” You pause. “Several times.”

"You're entirely too sweet," Danny scoffs. "Guess that means I was wrong about her having a thing for you." Well you're half right Danny; she certainly has a thing for me naked. "Clearly she's just terrible at basic communication."

"Clearly. Anyway you of all people should know that first impressions usually aren't the correct ones,” you point out. “You and Kirsch couldn’t stand each other at first and now you're pretty much a package deal."

Danny flushes. "Uh. Yeah. Yeah you're right, probably shouldn’t have judged her so harshly right away. I mean, I'm not saying I like the girl now considering how much of a dick she was to you, but maybe I was wrong about her."

You stand up from the table, pulling your jacket on and tugging your bag over your shoulder. “Yeah, turns out that once you get past the leather and the sarcasm, she isn't actually that bad. It just took a while to get there.”

"Well, if anyone could bulldoze their way through mile high walls that people like Carmilla put up, just by sheer power of persistent determination, it'd be you," Danny says cheerfully.

"I'm going to take that as a compliment," you sniff.

You decline Danny’s offer to walk you back to your dorm, and once you exit Starbucks, you start heading towards the Rembrandt Building, firing off a quick text to Carmilla as you go.

Laura: what classroom are you in?

/

After navigating your way through the maze that is the Rembrandt Building, when you arrive at the room Carmilla texted you the number of and poke your head round the door, Carmilla’s busy carrying an extremely heavy looking easel across the room. Her tshirt is sleeveless — presumably that one with the phases of the moon on it that you may or may not sometimes steal to sleep in, partly as revenge for her stealing your shirts and partly because it's so damn soft — and your gaze promptly zeroes in on the muscles flexing in her arms as your greeting dies in your throat. She’s wearing those stupid tiny shorts as well, despite the fact it’s the middle of November, and it’s just unfair how attractive she is.

Slipping into the room, the door squeaks as you close it behind you, announcing your arrival. Carmilla dumps the easel down in the corner and spins around at the noise, smirking when she catches sight of you.

“Hey sunshine,” she says, turning towards the sink and quickly washing the smudges of paint off her hands, before she saunters towards you with a grin. “Good timing. I was just finishing up here.”

She hooks her fingers into the belt loops on your jeans to pull you against her, before wrapping her arms round your waist. She ducks her head to try and kiss you, looking slightly put out when you dodge her mouth. “What?”

“Nothing, it’s just— here?” You say, gesturing around the room. “Seriously?”

Carmilla shrugs, like she isn't suggesting the most idiotic idea on the planet. “You’re the one that came to visit me.”

“Because I thought my physical presence would have more chance of convincing you to go back to the room than my surely sub-par attempts at sexting," you squeak, getting more flustered by the second thanks to Carmilla’s mischievous grin and her hands sitting low on your hips. “I’m not— We cannot have sex in a classroom Carmilla!”

“What, you never had sex in public before?”

“What do you think?” You huff.

“Well in that case, I am honoured to be playing a part in your sexual corruption,” Carmilla grins, not giving you a chance to come up with a proper response before she leans in and kisses you.

She’s insistent, pressing her tongue against the seam of your lips until you give in embarrassingly quickly, parting your lips and kissing her back just as eagerly while tangling your hands in her hair.

This is not a good idea, the rational part of your brain screams at you, even as you detach from Carmilla’s mouth and start planting kisses along her jaw. Classes might have finished for the day but you still spotted quite a few people on your walk through the building, so you're far from the only ones here. Someone could easily catch you, especially with how loud both of you get. And if you did get caught, not only could you end up getting kicked out of university, but there's also the risk of giving your Dad an aneurysm when he discovers exactly why you've been kicked out.

Unfortunately, all these valid concerns are being loudly drowned out by the breathless whimpers Carmilla makes while you attack her throat with kisses.

Her hands roam across your body, slipping under your shirt to drag her nails across your back or groping at your ass, but when they drift towards your jeans and she starts trying to unbutton them, you lift your head away from her neck.

“Uh-uh,” you mumble against her lips, grabbing her wrists and pulling them away from you. “If we’re doing this here, then we’re doing it my way.”

“Oh really?” Carmilla asks with an arched eyebrow, her voice low. “And what exactly does your way entail?”

Instead of answering, you nudge at her shoulders until she’s stumbling backwards, fighting back a satisfied smile at how willingly she goes, and back her into one of the tables that doesn’t have tubes of paint littered all over it.

You push your thigh between her legs just as she opens her mouth, cutting off whatever surely snarky comment she was about to make and turning it into a breathy moan as she immediately grinds down against you. You settle your hands on her ass, gently encouraging the rocking of her hips while you press your mouth against hers again. When Carmilla pulls back from the kiss to catch her breath, you take the opportunity to latch your mouth onto her neck, sucking gently at her pulse, before dragging your lips over her collarbone, sucking and nibbling at her flushed skin. Carmilla arches into you, sighing softly under her breath, and her hands tighten their grip in your hair.

Your fingers drift automatically towards the bottom of her shirt, before you realise that if on the off chance someone does end up catching you, Carmilla probably wouldn't be too thrilled by the idea of a total stranger catching an eyeful, so instead of pulling the shirt off, you slide your hands up her back until your fingers bump against her bra clasp. It comes undone after a second or two of awkward fumbling, and you slip your hands under her bra to palm at her chest, revelling in the throaty moan that echoes around the classroom when you tug at her nipples with your fingers.

Somewhere in the back of your mind you do register that this probably isn’t the time for teasing her and dragging it out, since anyone could walk through the door, but that’s slightly less important to you than drawing out more of the soft noises Carmilla makes when you roll her nipple between your fingers.

You lean back up to press your lips back together hungrily, sucking on her tongue while swiping your thumbs over her nipples in the way that you’ve discovered makes her putty in your hands, and Carmilla moans and pushes her hips forward in a way that just makes you all the more eager to sink your fingers into the wet heat between her legs.

She mumbles something that sounds like fucking finally into the kiss when you unbutton her shorts, tugging them down her thighs just far enough to make room for you to slide your hand into her underwear. You bite your lip and groan quietly at how wet and warm she is against your fingers, quickly finding her clit and setting a steady rhythm of circling against it. Confidence surges through you at the shaky moan Carmilla lets out, so you lean forward, brushing your lips against her ear as you whisper, “You’re so wet, cutie.”

“Smug isn’t a good look on you, princess,” Carmilla grits out from between clenched teeth, subtly rolling her hips down to try and get your fingers inside her.

“Part of you seems to like it,” you grin, wiggling your fingers to drive your point home.

“You’re unbearable,” Carmilla huffs.

You trap her earlobe between your teeth, tugging gently while you slide your fingers lower and just barely push the tips of your fingers into her. “Were you really so desperate to have me touch you that you couldn’t wait until we got back to the dorm room?”

“Oh my fucking— Laura, fucking shit, come on,” Carmilla whines desperately, her nails digging into your shoulder.

(There's a lot of perks to sleeping with Carmilla, but your favourite one is probably the fact she actually says your name now.  Well, moans and gasps it amidst a slew of curse words and pleas to not stop and to go harder or faster, but she actually says the word Laura all the same. Not a single cutie or cupcake in sight.)

You press a kiss to the edge of her jawline. “What’s the magic word?”

“Fuck you.”

Close enough.

Carmilla’s head falls back and she cries out in pleasure when you push your fingers into her, grinding your palm against her clit. She buries her head in your shoulder and clings onto you tightly when you start pumping your fingers into her, her hips moving in a frantic rhythm to try and meet your thrusts.

She drops one of her hands from their place in your hair and reaches behind her to grip onto the edge of the table when one particularly forceful thrust causes her to nearly lose her balance, and you use the new steadiness to drive your fingers into her harder. You press your mouth against the parts of her neck that you can reach, kissing and biting and sucking at all the available skin.

Carmilla lets loose a borderline pornographic moan when you slide a third finger in, one that there’s no way went completely unheard, and you both immediately whip your heads round to stare in trepidation at the door. When several seconds pass and no one comes barging in to investigate the noise, you start moving your fingers again, determined to feel her coming around your fingers before you have to make your shame-faced exit from the building.

Spurred on by her wanton moans and the obscene wet sounds of your fingers moving inside her, you double your efforts, thrusting your fingers deep into her and curling them until she gasps your name loudly. You manage to manoeuvre your hand around in the confined space enough to brush your thumb over her clit, muffling her moans by surging forward to kiss her heatedly. She pants against your mouth, high pitched whines of fuck fuck fuck falling from her mouth when you push your other hand up her shirt and pinch at her nipple.

It’s kind of a huge rush of power and a boost to your ego that Carmilla, who could probably have any girl she wanted with a couple flirtatious comments and some well-timed smirks, is whimpering desperately for you to keep touching her, and arching against you, and tightening around your fingers.

“I’m— fuck, I’m—” is all Carmilla manages to gasp out, but you get the general idea of what she’s trying to tell you, so you keep thrusting roughly into her and you keep rubbing one thumb over her clit and the other thumb over her nipple until she’s clenching tightly around your fingers and coming with a loud unrestrained moan.

You wrap your free arm around her waist to hold her up when she slumps bonelessly against you, and pull your hand out of her shorts, sucking your fingers into your mouth and chuckling at the shaky oh my God that Carmilla exhales.

“Hope you don’t have any plans for the rest of the night, sweetheart,” Carmilla mumbles against your throat once she's gotten her breathing under control, her low voice sending a shiver down your spine. “Cause as soon as we get back to the dorm I’m taking you into the shower and repaying you for this for the next few hours.”

You have absolutely no objections to that.

/

You’re leaving the library on a Monday afternoon when a black piece of paper pinned to the bulletin board catches your attention. Before you can think about it too much, you pick up one of the flyers from the little pile underneath the board, and stop by the coffee shop on your way back to the dorm to pick up a muffin. Carmilla’s generally more agreeable when there’s food or sex involved, and you don’t really have time to let her screw you senseless before you have to go back to class.

She’s dozing off on her bed, a book lying flat on her chest when you get back, and she jolts out of her nap with a grumpy what the frilly hell when you drop the flyer onto her face.

“Hey sleepyhead,” you say, tossing the muffin towards her and holding back a laugh at the affronted look on Carmilla’s face when it bounces off her forehead and drops crumbs everywhere.

“Assaulting me with baked goods is not the most enjoyable way you’ve ever woken me up,” she grumbles, knocking the flyer onto the floor when she sits up and yawns. “Good morning to you too.”

“It’s three in the afternoon.”

Carmilla ignores you, snatches up the muffin, and gives the piece of paper lying on the floor an unimpressed look. “What’s that?”

“Well, pretty much all the time we spend together involves us being naked—”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Carmilla interrupts.

“So I was thinking maybe we could go to that together,” you say nervously, pointing at the little flyer advertising the astronomy show at the planetarium later. “If you’d like. I know you like the stars, and well, when I saw the flyer I thought of you.”

“How sweet,” Carmilla says through a mouthful of muffin. “You do remember this isn’t a relationship though?”

You snort. “Carmilla, you have the emotional maturity of a thirteen year old boy, and the romantic impulses of one too—”

“Ooh, claws are out today aren’t they, cupcake?”

“So trust me, this is not me asking you on a date," you continue. “I didn’t mean together together, I just meant go together as friends. It’s called friends with benefits for a reason, right? Or are you still getting offended at any implication that you can actually stand to be around me for extended periods of time?"

Carmilla hums noncommittally, sucking a crumb off her finger and you’re starting to rethink that going-back-to-class-instead-of-having-sex-with-her decision.

“So?” You prompt, shaking your head to rid it of all images of you and Carmilla in varying compromising positions, picking up the flyer and shoving it under her nose. “Do you want to go or not?”

“Sure,” she shrugs, taking the flyer from you and regarding it with her usual bored expression. The surprise that she’s actually said yes must show on your face, because she snickers when she looks back at you. “You don’t need to look quite so shocked cutie, you’re not the worst company in the world.”

You check the time on your phone, and see that you still have an hour before your next class. Plenty of time to stay and bug Carmilla. “So, what is it with you and the stars anyway?”

“It’s comforting to think how small we are in comparison,” she says, sounding strangely wistful. “All the lives we’ve led, people we’ve been. Nothing to that light.”

You stay silent for a beat, absorbing all of...that, before you deadpan, “You’re feeding me more sarcastic philosophical crap because you don’t want to tell me the real reason, aren’t you?”

“You catch on quick, cutie,” Carmilla laughs, popping the last piece of muffin into her mouth before climbing out of her bed. “Anyway, who says I have a reason? What is there not to like about the stars?” She asks with a uncharacteristically not-sardonic-smile, slipping past you on her way to the bathroom. “Space is fucking cool.”

Space is fucking cool are probably the last words you ever thought you’d hear from Carmilla Karnstein, but clearly there are some things aside from sex and mocking people that she isn’t completely apathetic about. Who knew?

Chapter Text

When you come back from your Wednesday evening pie date with Danny, you don’t immediately notice that something about the room is different.

Carmilla’s sprawled out on her bed, her nose in a battered looking copy of Anna Karenina — and she has the nerve to call you ‘nerdtastic’. Who reads Tolstoy for fun? — and an open packet of cookies next to her. She greets you with a muttered hey cupcake without bothering to look up from her book, and she grumbles at appropriate times as you immediately launch into a story about your day, even though you’re fairly sure she’s not listening to you. Nothing out of the ordinary.

You go into the bathroom to pee and change into some sweatpants and your comfiest sweater in preparation for curling up in front of Netflix and tuning out Carmilla’s (unnecessary) running commentary on Agent Carter. It’s only when you’re washing your hands that you notice that not only are there no toothpaste stains in the sink, but Carmilla’s army of makeup and hair products have actually been put away in the cabinet, rather than having been left in their usual place of scattered around the sink. You blink, wondering if you’re seeing things. You stick your head into the shower and stare for a good ten seconds in mute shock at the hair-free drain.

When you walk back out of the bathroom, it’s only then than you register the lack of clothing strewn around the floor. Admittedly, Carmilla’s version of tidying up appears to be distributing her clothes between either a pile at the end of her bed or draped over the back of the chair, which looks like it’s about to collapse under the weight of several pairs of jeans and leather jackets. But the floor is surprisingly clothes-free nonetheless.

If it weren’t for the actual physical presence of Carmilla lazing around on her bed, having stolen your yellow pillow, you’d be convinced you accidentally walked into the wrong room.

You stare at Carmilla in confusion, wondering if she’s fallen and hit her head. Hard. Maybe Danny slipped something into your slice of pie earlier. Maybe she’s been possessed by some kind of neat freak poltergeist, possibly one of Perry’s dead ancestors. Anything supernatural is more likely that the fact Carmilla has apparently willingly tidied up the room, without prompting.

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Perfect,” Carmilla grunts, stuffing an entire cookie into her mouth. Upon closer inspection you realise it’s your packet of cookies, so maybe Carmilla hasn’t been abducted or cloned or whatever. “Why’d you ask?”

“The floor,” you say, gesturing around the room in bewilderment. “It’s uh… Well normally I have to navigate my way across the room through an alarming amount of leather and lace. Did you clean?”

“I felt inspired by your chore wheel.”

“You set my chore wheel on fire a week after you moved in."

The side of Carmilla’s mouth twitches. “You can’t prove that was me.”

You don’t bother pointing out that no one else would subject your poor innocent chore wheel to such inhumane treatment. Carmilla turns a page in her book, looking annoyingly unruffled about being accused of chore wheel murder, and you turn to face your bed so you can rifle through your bag in search of your phone. You can interrogate her at a later date.

"Anyway,” Carmilla pipes up. “You've been ignoring me the past few days—"

"I had two papers due in today that I kept putting off starting last week because of you."

"—so I had to do something to get your attention,” she continues, ignoring your perfectly reasonable comment as to why you’ve had to blow her off the past couple of days. You hear movement behind you, and the bed squeaking as Carmilla stands up and crosses the short distance between your beds. “And hey, since you’re so impressed by my sudden change in attitude towards cleaning...” Carmilla trails off as she slides up behind you, arms slipping around your waist and her fingers playing with the string at the waistband of your sweatpants. She kisses the edge of your jaw and rests her chin on your shoulder, and you don’t even have to look at her to know she’s brought out her (very effective) seduction eyes. “Maybe you could reward me. I have a few suggestions as to how.”

Somehow, Carmilla cleaning the room because she thinks it’ll get her laid makes a strange amount of sense.

“If I’d known this is what it takes to get you to actually tidy up after yourself, I would’ve started sleeping with you the second you moved in,” you say, before wiggling around in her arms to face her, sliding your hands into her hair and then leaning in to press your lips together.

You sigh into the kiss almost immediately; three days is much too long a dry spell for you to go without having her hands on you. Sidenote, is that bad? That you’ve kind of missed having sex with her? Probably. You shove that thought far, far away, into a dusty, little-used part of your brain where other things you don’t like dwelling on get shoved, and further distract yourself from that thought by popping open the top button on Carmilla’s shirt.

After that first button, clothes quickly get ripped off and thrown onto the (no longer clean) floor at a slightly alarming pace, and less than five minutes later, you’re completely naked, on top of an equally naked Carmilla and exchanging messy kisses while you palm at her chest.

You wedge a thigh between her legs while you move your mouth down to her neck, failing to hold back a groan when she rolls her hips against you and you realise how wet she is. Carmilla lets out a throaty whine, arching up towards you and tilting her head further back so you can continue to assault her throat with kisses. Her nails drag down your back when you scrape your teeth over the base of her throat, sucking hard enough to bruise. Biting is generally more her thing, but her soft moans indicate she has no problem with you getting a little revenge on all the marks she likes to leave on you.

Her hands travel further down, grabbing at your ass to try and pull you closer, and you roll your hips forward accordingly, pressing and pushing your thigh between her legs repeatedly until she’s whimpering breathlessly, her body writhing and squirming beneath you.

“God,” she moans quietly, tugging on your hair roughly and directing your mouth away from her throat and down to her chest.

You obediently wrap your lips around her nipple, sucking softly, swirling and flicking your tongue over it, trapping it between your teeth and tugging just hard enough to coax out the ridiculously hot little whimpers you’re so fond of. Carmilla squirms and whimpers underneath you, canting her hips up to rub herself against your thigh harder, and another flash of heat surges through you at how willingly she responds to your touch. You shower the same amount of attention to her other breast before kissing a path down her stomach, eager to start really making up for the three day dry spell.

“Jesus fuck Laura, come on,” Carmilla groans when you pause to drag your tongue along her hipbone, emphasised with another harsh tug on your hair.

The brief second of pain sends another spike of heat through you, and you muffle your whimper against her skin.

“Patience is a virtue, sweetheart,” you say mockingly, trailing kisses along her inner thighs and deliberately avoiding where she’s trying to nudge your head.

“Do I strike you as the virtuous type?”

Hm, good point.

Carmilla’s head falls back against the pillow with a thump and she moans your name desperately when you switch to press kisses against her other thigh. The noise flicks a switch inside you, and you’re suddenly determined to wipe the ever present smug smirk off her face and reduce her to a begging and incoherent wreck. Before you can do that though, Carmilla's pushes her hips up, trying to get your mouth where she wants it, and an idea starts to form in your brain.

You pull back, ignoring her displeased whine, and sit back on your heels. She glares up at you, but before she can snap some demanding comment at you, you say, "Turn over."

Carmilla raises her eyebrows. "I beg your pardon?"

"You heard me," you reply, nudging her in the thigh. "Turn. Over."

“My my, buttercup,” Carmilla chuckles, her blown out pupils a dead giveaway for how turned on she is, despite the even tone of her voice. “This is unexpected.” She pushes herself up into a sitting position, cups the back of your neck and pulls you in for a filthy kiss that lasts far too short a time. “But definitely not unwelcome,” she adds on, whispered against your mouth.

She shuffles around to face away from you, dropping forward onto all fours and then turning her head to smirk at you over her shoulder. In retrospect this might have backfired a little, because seeing Carmilla like this kind of makes your mind go completely blank.

“I knew the innocent good girl act was just a ruse, but I figured casual sex was as kinky as you were willing to get.”

Quite how Carmilla manages to sound so smug and cocky when she’s on her hands and knees with her ass in the air is beyond you. It’s actually quite impressive.

However, the one time Carmilla can’t dole out sarcastic quips like candy on Halloween is when you’re fucking her; touching her and kissing her and reducing her to a quivering entity of want, so you shuffle up behind her, sliding your hands up from her ass towards her shoulders while you press your thigh between her legs. She whimpers quietly and immediately pushes back to grind herself against your leg. You hesitate a little — dirty talk is definitely more Carmilla’s thing — but before you lose your nerve you lean down until your front is pressed flush against her back, and you whisper in her ear, “We can discuss how kinky I’m willing to get after I’ve fucked you until you’ve forgotten your own name.”

You take pride at the hitch of her breath, then at the shiver that goes through her when you drag the nails of your right hand lightly down her back and across her ass, and then at the loud moan she lets out when you slide your hand between her legs and promptly set to circling your fingertips around her clit.

You brace your free hand on the mattress next to her, and bend to press kisses to the smooth pale expanse of her back, dragging your mouth across her shoulder blades and down her spine, and Carmilla lets out a strangled gasp of fuck when you push your fingers into her.

You managed to hold back a groan at how wet and warm she is around your fingers, but you can’t help but whine quietly when you lean up to be met with the sight of Carmilla pushing her hips back in an attempt to get your fingers in deeper. You press your front against her back again and drop your forehead to rest against her shoulder blade while you start pushing and pulling your fingers in and out of her, using your own hips to help drive into her harder, and her arms give out and she slumps to her elbows with another throaty moan when you curl your fingers and press them against the spot that makes Carmilla scream. You pick up the pace of your fingers when Carmilla asks — borderline begs, which is incredibly hot and definitely something you will have to revisit at a later date — and you pepper more soft kisses up her spine, before sliding your free hand into her hair and tugging until she tilts her head to the side, allowing you to suck another red mark into her throat.

“Jesus Christ, Laura,” Carmilla pants, shifting her weight onto her left elbow and reaching up with her right hand to grasp the back of your head, holding your mouth in place against her neck. You get the hint, and keep kissing and nipping and sucking at her skin while you pump your fingers into her.

“Oh my God,” Carmilla moans when you add a third finger, dropping her head to the pillow and pushing her face into it to muffle her high pitched whimpers of fuck fuck fuck Laura harder don’t stop please don’t stop.

You angle your hand so you can press your thumb against her clit while your fingers work inside her, rolling the pad of your thumb over the sensitive bud in slow, deliberate circles, over and over and over until Carmilla clamps down hard around your fingers as she tumbles over the edge.

Carmilla slumps forward onto her front when you slide your fingers out of her, and you suck your fingers into your mouth to clean them off, before prodding and nudging Carmilla in the side until she rolls over onto her back. You settle on top of her, knees planted either side of her body, and you bite your lip and slowly grind down against her stomach while you wait for her to catch her breath.

Carmilla groans, her hands immediately landing on your ass and encouraging the movements of your hips, before they slide up your back and push you down so she can kiss you. You're more than content to just rut against Carmilla's abs until you come all over her stomach, but Carmilla appears to have different ideas.

“Come here,” she murmurs against your mouth, nipping gently at your bottom lip. You’re confused for all of two seconds — you’re straddling her and pressing your dripping wet centre against her stomach; you can’t really get much closer than that — before Carmilla’s hands move down to the backs of your thighs and she tugs gently. You bite back an embarrassingly loud moan when you realise where Carmilla wants you, letting her pull you up the length of her body until you’re on your knees above her face.

“Well," Carmilla drawls conversationally. "This is a nice view."

She doesn't give you time to be embarrassed about how wet you are before she hooks her arms around your thighs and pulls you down to meet her mouth. You let out a pathetically desperate whimper at the first stroke of her tongue, sliding against you before swirling over your clit. Carmilla moans, the vibrations shooting straight through you, and she tightens her grip on your thighs to pull you down harder.

Her mouth works relentlessly between your legs, licking long, hot stripes through you, pushing her tongue inside you agonisingly slowly, sucking your clit into her mouth and swiping her tongue over it, until your legs are shaking each side of her head and your head is dizzy with arousal.

You drop one hand down to grab onto her hair, holding her head still while you desperately grind down against her face, any remaining shame having temporarily deserted you, while the other hand shoots out to grab onto the headboard and you cling on for dear life, swearing and moaning and begging her not to stop.

The desperate jerks of your hips against her face get more and more erratic as the heat in your lower stomach builds and builds to an almost unbearable level, until it’s bordering too much. Carmilla laps at your clit with agonisingly slow licks until you’re gasping out a ragged Carmilla please, before her lips are closing around your clit and sucking hard until you’re coming against her mouth with a choked half-sob of her name.

When you remember how to breathe again, you shuffle back far enough until you can collapse on top of her in a boneless heap, pushing your face into the crook of her neck while you try to catch your breath.

"Jesus."

Carmilla chuckles, pressing a kiss to the side of your head before she pokes you in the shoulder. “I hope you’re not getting any ideas about cuddling.”

“I don’t think I can move right now,” you mumble sleepily against her neck. “Just give me a few minutes.”

A few minutes pass, and you still don’t bother moving. You know you should get up, or at least roll off of Carmilla, but she’s warm and soft and hasn’t unceremoniously pushed you off of her yet, so instead you just tuck your head tighter against her neck and close your eyes. She'll push you off her when she's reached her cuddling quota for the day, you're sure.

(When you wake up a few hours later, she hasn’t moved except to wrap her arms around you.)

/

Friday afternoon, you take a quick detour back to the dorm room after lunch with LaFontaine to pick up a book for your afternoon English Lit class, and to shove a cookie or seven down your throat. Carmilla’s there when you come trotting into the room, stuffing various bits of art paraphernalia into her bag before she leaves for her own afternoon class. You say hello, quickly locate your textbook amidst the sea of books and papers littering the desk, swipe a few cookies from the current packet before they can be wolfed down by Carmilla, and then say goodbye as you turn to head back out the door.

“Oh buttercup, before you go running off, and before I inevitably forget,” Carmilla pipes up, and you pause in the doorway, turning back to face her. “Ran into Jessica Rabbit earlier.”

It takes you a few seconds to realise she’s referring to Danny. Then you start to worry a little bit, because with Carmilla, ran into could mean she happened to see Danny in the quad, or she literally ran into Danny with a truck or steamroller or something.

“She invited you and I out for drinks tonight with her puppy of a boyfriend. Something about she and I getting off on the wrong foot, but now that you and I are getting along so well—“ Carmilla wiggles her eyebrows ridiculously. “She wants to make an effort for her bestie.” She dramatically places a hand on her chest. “It was very moving, I almost shed a tear.”

That...is not what you were expecting her to say. Points to Danny for at least attempting to extend an olive branch, at least. You doubt Carmilla would've bothered.

“Well first of all, Kirsch isn’t Danny’s boyfriend.”

“Really?”

You had no idea Carmilla paid this much attention to Danny and Kirsch. You weren’t entirely convinced she actually knew Kirsch’s name until a few weeks ago when she slipped up and actually called him his actual name rather than Groot.

”Yes, really. Second, does you telling me this mean you’re going to come along?” You watch Carmilla twirling a paintbrush around her fingers while she ponders the question. Putting Carmilla and Danny in the same room in close proximity to alcohol is probably a recipe for disaster, but you don’t think wanting your best friend and your roommate to get along is too much to ask for. “Cause you don’t have to if you don’t want to, obviously, but it’d be nice if you did.”

“Sure, why not?” Carmilla says, with her usual level of enthusiasm. That is to say, virtually none. “Got nothing better to do tonight.”

“Glad you think so highly of us,” you say dryly, taking out your phone to text Danny and Kirsch before you get to class. "Okay well, we'll meet you outside the Lustig at seven?"

"See you then, cutie."

/

Early December in Austria is, unsurprisingly, cold. Which wouldn’t bother you that much if you were inside a toasty warm building, preferably next to an enormous fireplace that takes up half the room. But instead, you’re outside. In the cold. Waiting for Carmilla. Who, in a turn of events that are about as surprising as Austria being cold in December, is late.

“Dude I’m gonna turn into a brosicle if we stand out here much longer,” Kirsch whines. “Can’t we just meet Carmsexy at the bar?”

“Don’t call her that,” you and Danny both chorus in unison, and Kirsch looks appropriately sheepish.

“She is gonna show up though, right?” Danny adds on dubiously. “I mean, I only insulted her once when I asked if she wanted to come along.”

You open your mouth to say yes because I texted her to tell her I wouldn’t sleep with her for a week if she doesn’t hurry up before shutting it again because Danny and Kirsch do not need to know that. Despite your threat, there is always the possibility that Carmilla forgot. Or changed her mind and just isn’t bothering to come. It’s not like you’re her only source of after hours entertainment.

Eventually, a full twenty minutes after you told her to meet you, Carmilla shows up, sauntering towards you clad in those blasted leather pants and a black lace top that she has got to be cold in, even with a jacket over the top. You appreciate how good she looks regardless of her chances of contracting hypothermia.

“So nice of you to finally grace us with your presence,” Danny sniffs, sounding unimpressed.

“Okay,” Kirsch says loudly, before Carmilla can even open her mouth to fire back some snarky retort. And people call him the dumb one. “Now that Carmse— uh, Carmilla is here, we can get going. Come on, let’s go.” He ushers Danny into walking in the direction of the campus entrance, thankfully averting an inevitable snark-off before it happened. “Happy hour’s still on for another forty minutes, and I like beer as it is, but half-price beer is even better.”

Carmilla looks a little put out at not being allowed to fire back some rude comment to Danny, but dutifully stuffs her hands in her jacket pockets and starts following them. You send up one final prayer to whatever higher power might be paying attention that the night doesn’t descend into a sarcastic yelling match, before walking after them and falling into step next to Carmilla.

“So,” Carmilla starts once Danny and Kirsch are out of earshot. “Not that I care or anything, but there’s really nothing going on between tall and taller?”

For someone who claims to a) not give a shit about Danny, b) not give a shit about Kirsch, and c) be allergic to romance, she’s taking an awful lot of interest in this.

“No, there isn’t.”

“She’s wearing his jacket,” Carmilla says, like that proves anything.

“Oh, she’s wearing his jacket, wow how did I not see this before, Carmilla you’re a genius.” Carmilla doesn’t appear to appreciate the sarcasm if her eye roll is any indication. “I realise that the block of ice sitting in your chest where your heart should be means that you’re probably acclimatised to subzero temperatures—”

"Wow, gloves are off today aren't they, princess?"

“—but it’s freezing.” Your breath puffs out in little white clouds in the cold evening air, as if to prove your point. “Danny was cold, so Kirsch gave her his jacket. He was just being nice. Another foreign concept to you, I’m sure.”

“You’re getting better at this whole insulting thing,” Carmilla says with a grin. “I’m proud.”

You roll your eyes, shifting your gaze from looking at Carmilla to watching Danny and Kirsch walking along in front of you.

Carmilla has no clue what she’s talking about. Okay yes, it is a little coincidental that they both developed crushes on still-unnamed people at the same time, and refused to tell you on whom. But still. Danny and Kirsch. Kirsch and Danny.

They’re so competitive about everything. Kirsch calls her bro and dude all the time; hardly terms of endearment. Most of their conversations seem to consist of arguing — although they both prefer the term 'heated debate' — about anything and everything, sports teams, Marvel vs DC, which episode of Spongebob is the funniest, until Kirsch calls Danny hottie or says something similarly oafish, which sends Danny into a flurry of feminist rage. Kirsch apologises, looks chastised for all of five seconds, before brightening up and launching into another conversation. Rinse and repeat.

Plus you’re like, the neutral middle person in between them. If Danny’s crush was on Kirsch then you don’t see why she wouldn’t tell you it was on him, and the same applies to Kirsch.

“I saw them having lunch in the quad earlier,” Carmilla pipes up again. Ooh, lunch between two friends. How scandalous. “They looked pretty cosy, and Groot was sending some serious hearteyes at the fire hydrant when she wasn’t looking.”

How long did Carmilla spy on them for? You hope she wasn’t plotting the best plan to assassinate them. Actually, now that you're thinking about it, they did interrupt one of your sex sessions last week, which resulted in a half-naked Carmilla being shoved into the bathroom like a secret paramour until you could get rid of them by faking feeling ill. It was right as Carmilla was like, three seconds from coming as well, so you wouldn’t put it past her to be planning on exacting her evil revenge.

“That’s ridiculous okay, Danny’s my best friend,” you say. “If there was something going on with her and Kirsch, she’d tell me about it.”

“Have you told her about you and I?” Carmilla asks with a raised eyebrow.

"Well, no," you say, because it's not like there's any kind of comparison. She's insinuating Danny and Kirsch are hiding a secret relationship; all you and Carmilla are doing is having sex. Frequently. Two opposite ends of the relationship spectrum.

“I rest my case," Carmilla says, looking entirely too pleased with herself. "Maybe she’s been screwing Lurch for weeks and just hasn’t bothered mentioning it to you. Now can we please change the subject because talking about Jolly Red and the beanstalk going at it is making me feel queasy.”

“You’re the one that brought it up,” you point out with a chuckle at the disgusted look on Carmilla’s face.

“I regret it.”

You walk along in companionable silence for another minute or two, before you vocalise a question you’ve been wondering for a while now. “Have you told anyone? You know, about…us?”

“Nope,” Carmilla shakes her head. “You’re still my dirty little secret, cutie.” It lifts a weight off your shoulders you didn’t realise was even there, and you try not to make your sigh of relief too obvious. "Will asked about you cause he’s a nosy asshole, but I lied and told him we were just very platonic roommates. No benefits.“

Thank God. You’re not an expert or anything, but you imagine that it might be a little awkward being friends with Will if he knows that you’re screwing his sister on a regular basis.

“Thank you,” you say, just as you turn a corner and catch sight of the neon sign for the bar at the end of the street.

Carmilla shrugs. “I figured you wouldn't want anyone knowing, so I kept my mouth shut. See?” She nudges you in the side and smiles at you. “I’m not that heartless."

/

Miraculously, the evening isn’t a disaster. There’s a few awkward silences, a lot of glaring and sneering, the occasional insult, but there’s no bloodshed, so you deem it a success.

Kirsch appears to have an ability to just steamroll straight through awkward silences, so whenever Danny and Carmilla start sneaking glares at each other he launches into a new conversation topic: the big post-finals party the Zetas are planning in a couple weeks time, something lacrosse related that only Danny really pays attention to, the new Marvel movie that’s coming out next year, how he just started watching Orphan Black and he can’t decide who his favourite clone is.

(Inevitably, that last one kind of devolves into an argument anyway.)

About an hour into the evening, Danny and Kirsch traipse off to the bar to buy another round of drinks, and you turn to Carmilla with a smug smile. “So, you willing to admit you might almost be having fun yet?”

“I can’t say it’s preferable to what my original intentions for this evening were,” Carmilla replies with a lewd smirk that tells you exactly what her original intentions were, and you’re grateful for the low lighting in the bar that hides the flush you feel spread over your face. “But I suppose it’s not as excruciating as I was expecting.”

That’s probably as nice a comment as you’re going to get out of her. You glance over at the bar and see that Danny and Kirsch are paying the bartender, so while you still have the chance, you place your hand on Carmilla’s thigh. She glances down at it, and then raises her eyebrows. “I know from experience that you don’t have anything against public sex, but fingering me under the table while your two best friends are sitting right opposite us is a little much don’t you think?”

You roll your eyes. “Look, I’m not expecting the three of you to magically become best buds, but it’d be nice if you made a bit more of an effort,” you say, sliding your hand further up her thigh emphatically. “You know." You move your hand a little higher. "Just a little bit.” You move your hand higher still, and momentarily press your fingers between her legs while you smile innocently at her. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

Carmilla stares at you. “You’re bribing me with sex to be nice to your friends? Wow. I’m impressed. Didn’t think you had in you, cutie.”

You smile at her, giving her thigh a squeeze. “I learned from the best.”

Danny and Kirsch reappear, and once they’ve sat down on the other side of the table and drinks have been distributed, Carmilla rests her elbows on the table and leans forward. “So," she starts, and you're pretty sure she's only being half-sarcastic. "Laura’s never actually bothered to tell me, so now’s as good a time as any to ask. How exactly does an oversized golden retriever, the Empire State Building’s crimson body double and Lois Lane’s midget understudy become friends?”

How the hell does she manage to come up with this stuff on the spot?

“D-Bear and I first met at a party Freshers' week last year when we had a bet to see who could fit more tequila in their mouth,” Kirsch says happily, seemingly unperturbed by Carmilla’s nicknames. Then again, he got the least insulting comparison.

“I wish he was joking,” Danny adds, before elbowing Kirsch in the ribs. “And I told you not to call me that, Wilson.”

“Dude, uncalled for,” Kirsch grumbles. ”Anyway, Danny and I kinda couldn’t stand each other at first, cause I thought she was just a bitchy Summer Psycho, and she thought I was just an idiot frat boy—”

“Oh, I still think that,” Danny interjects.

“—and like, Summers and Zetas aren’t supposed to be bros right, but we were both friends with little nerd hottie here, who basically forced us into hanging out, and then it turned out she wasn’t actually that bad. You know, for a Summer.”

“You’re too kind,” Danny comments dryly.

Carmilla opens her mouth, seems to struggle with what the hell to say in response to that, before eventually asking, “Who won the tequila bet?”

“I did,” Danny and Kirsch both say at the same time, before glaring at each other and promptly launching into a squabble.

Carmilla raises her eyebrows, taking a sip of her drink and leaning back against the back of the booth. “You have an odd taste in friends, cutie.”

“You get used to them. Plus they can get stuff off the top shelf for me, which is always helpful.”

Carmilla laughs. “So, your turn.” She gestures towards Danny and Kirsch, still in the middle of another of their 'heated debates'. “How’d you end up third wheeling these two children?”

“Kirsch was in my English Lit class last year, we got paired together for a peer assessment thing for a paper on Lord of The Flies and we kinda just kept meeting up after that, and—”

“And Laura and I met for the first time when she assaulted me with an umbrella,” Danny interrupts, apparently finished with her argument with a now-sulking Kirsch.

“How many times do I have to say I’m sorry about that?” You huff, ignoring Danny’s wide smile.

“You attacked her with an umbrella?” Carmilla asks with a laugh. “I didn’t know physical violence was your thing, buttercup.”

You glare at the trio of amused grins aimed at you. “Couple weeks into freshman year I was leaving Starbucks just as it started to rain and I couldn’t get my damn umbrella to extend. But of course when the stupid thing eventually decided to work, it was just as Danny was walking up the steps to the building.”

“I was just minding my own business on my way to get some coffee, when out of nowhere this rainbow umbrella opens and smacks me in the face,” Danny continues.

“You have a rainbow umbrella?"

Of course that's the part Carmilla focuses on.

“It was a coming out present from my cousin Quinn okay, shut up.” You’ve seen Carmilla’s rainbow socks lying around on the floor, she’s not allowed to judge your umbrella. “I bought Danny coffee as an apology for, you know, hitting a complete stranger in the face, we got to talking, realised we had a lot in common, and now here we are.”

“That’s the most nauseating story I’ve ever heard,” Carmilla deadpans, and you elbow her hard in the side. “Uh, by which I mean...aw, how sweet.”

/

Carmilla’s in the bathroom, Danny’s outside making a quick phone call to someone, Kirsch is at the bar buying another round of drinks, and you’re alone in your little corner booth trying to construct a teepee out of cocktail umbrellas when you catch sight of a vaguely familiar face on the other side of the room.

It takes you a moment to place her — Silas has a strangely large population of redheads — before you recognise her as Annalise, that girl Carmilla was halfway to defiling on your bed.

Idly, you wonder if Carmilla ever ended up sleeping with her after you interrupted them. And if she did, if they’re still hooking up. Carmilla hasn’t brought anyone back to the room since you started your...thing, at least not while you’ve been present, but there’s been the occasional night where she’s been absent until late the following morning, off doing who knows what with God knows who.

Not for the first time, you wonder if Carmilla’s still sleeping with the rest of her fan club members. Probably, since it’s a little ridiculous to think that she’d immediately drop all her cavalcade of study buddies simply because you got added to the list.

Not that you’d care if she was still sleeping around, of course. You’re not in a relationship with her; it’s none of your business what or who she does in her spare time.

You just don’t particularly like thinking about Carmilla being with someone else, that’s all. Not because you’re possessive, or you think you should be the only person Carmilla’s allowed to sleep with, but it’s just...weird, thinking about Carmilla doing the things she does to you, to someone else.

You stop staring like a creep at Annalise when you catch sight of Carmilla coming out of the bathroom. Carmilla smiles at you from across the bar, and you decide to just tack the weird feeling in your stomach at the thought of Carmilla with someone else onto the ever increasing list of Things To Think About In The Distant Future.

Anyway, it’s not like it means anything. Probably nothing to worry about.

/

Saturday morning, it takes five minutes of hammering on Danny’s door before there’s sounds of movement inside. A muffled mmpppphh, a thump, then Danny’s voice is squeaking, “Uh, hold on a second,” three octaves higher than normal.

She opens the door halfway and peers out at you. “Hey Laura, uh, I don’t mean to be rude but this isn’t really a good time, and—“

“You’re not even up? Are you okay?”

Danny stares blankly at you for a few seconds until realisation washes over her face. “Oh shit. Breakfast.”

You raise an eyebrow and take in her dishevelled appearance. Her hair is a tousled mess and she’s wearing a light blue shirt that’s about two sizes too big even on her, the buttons haphazardly done up. You hear something rustling in her room, you catch sight of the blush on Danny’s cheeks and the light bulb goes off. The messy hair, the too big shirt that you now realise is too big because it’s a men’s shirt, the rustling, the fact Danny hasn’t opened the door wide enough to let you see her bed.

“Oh. Oh.” You say, trying to hide a smile at how embarrassed Danny looks. “Um, never mind about breakfast, I’ll just uh—“ you gesture wildly over your shoulder, and begin to walk away when a sleepy and very familiar voice echoes out from the room.

“Danny?”

You gape like a stunned goldfish at Danny’s bright red face for a solid ten seconds, before spluttering out a dumbfounded, “Kirsch?”

“Danny, who’s at the door?” Kirsch’s — definitely Kirsch’s — voice says, and you wonder how the hell you managed to miss this. Danny and Kirsch. Kirsch and Danny. You can hear Carmilla gleefully crowing I told you so, cutie in your head.

“It’s Laura,” Danny replies, glancing over her shoulder briefly, and there’s some muffled cursing followed by a thud as Kirsch presumably scrambles out of the bed. “Can you, uh—” Danny points behind her, face still red. “Give me a few minutes.”

She disappears back into her room, and you lean against the wall to wait for her. You can’t help but eavesdrop, although Kirsch doesn’t exactly make that difficult since he apparently doesn’t know how to whisper.

“Did she seem pissed cause— okay wow, you’re topless. Um, dude, Laura’s like right outside.” Who calls their girlfriend dude?

“Kirsch, this is your shirt.” You can almost hear Danny rolling her eyes.

“You keep it, you look better in it than me,” Kirsch replies, and you can almost hear Carmilla rolling her eyes all the way across campus.

Kirsch smiles and waves sheepishly at you when he appears in the hallway outside Danny’s room. He’s wearing a red sweater that you know for a fact he didn’t have at the bar last night, so clearly it was already in Danny’s room, so clearly these little sleepovers have occurred before, so clearly you and Danny have a lot to catch up on.

Puffing out your chest, you draw yourself up to your full five feet and two inches of imposing intimidation. “Kirsch, you’re one of my closest friends and I like you, but Danny is my best friend, so if you hurt her I’ll set Carmilla on you.” The threatening poke to his chest might have been more effective if you didn't have to reach up quite so high.

He ruffles your hair in reply, says understood, little nerd, before he starts off down the hallway. Making a mental note to ask Carmilla for tips on how to be more menacing than a teddy bear, you barge into Danny’s room and fix her with a pointed glare. “You have a lot of explaining to do.”

/

"Alright,” you announce the second the waitress has bustled off after taking your order of pancakes. “Time for you to start talking. First question: how long has this been going on for, and why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

Danny huffs out a breath while you wait expectantly for her to launch into the story. “Well you know I’ve liked someone for a little while now, and you now know that someone is Kirsch, but we didn’t actually kiss until SJ’s birthday party, when—”

“Wait, that’s who you were freaking out about kissing the day after?”

"Well, yeah,” Danny says like it’s obvious. “It's weird you know, being just friends with someone for so long and then out of nowhere bam a kiss turns it into something more than that."

Yes, you would know.

The waitress comes back with coffee for Danny and orange juice for you, and you allow Danny to have one sip before prompting her to continue.

"Anyway, we actually almost kissed at the Halloween party, but I kinda freaked out and ran off, just cause I didn’t want to ruin our friendship with some drunken kiss that we might end up regretting the morning after,” Danny explains, pouring some sugar into her mug and stirring it. “Then at SJ’s party, at some point during the night we ended up in my room and— stop wiggling your eyebrows at me Hollis, you look like your roommate. We were talking and then there was another almost-kiss moment but instead of running off like an idiot, this time I just went for it.”

You vaguely remember being unable to locate Kirsch or Danny before you ended up doing body shots with Carmilla, and you definitely remember hearing a lot of suspicious sounding giggling coming from behind Danny’s bedroom door when you dragged Carmilla past it on your search for an empty bathroom. You had planned on asking her about it the day after, but had forgotten about it since you were a bit more preoccupied by freaking out over having slept with your roommate for the second time.

“And we decided not to tell you, because if it turned out that this was just a misplaced crush or whatever and we realised a couple weeks in that we were better off as friends, it was probably gonna be awkward enough for just us when we spent time together after. We didn’t want to include you in the potential awkwardness.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” you concede, taking a sip of your orange juice. The waitress reappears a second time with two plates of pancakes, and you wolf down one of them before continuing. “So you two are… Just dating? Officially a couple?”

“As of last night, we are officially a couple,” Danny says, her happy grin contagious and you can't help but smile too.

“Well, I am very happy for you. Now please don’t break up because that will definitely make things awkward.” You pause with a forkful of pancake halfway to your mouth when you realise something. “Oh God. I’m officially the third wheel now.”

“You’re not the third wheel, alright? Whenever the three of us are hanging out we’ll just cut back on couple-y crap, okay? Promise.” Danny pauses, takes a sip of her coffee, and then, like it’s causing her physical pain to admit it, says, “Anyway, turns out Morticia isn’t an awful as I initially thought, so you could always drag her along to our movie nights and stuff from now on if you really feel like you’re third wheeling.”

A movie night with Danny, Kirsch and Carmilla is a very bizarre thing to think about.

“Yeah, maybe," you say, just to placate Danny. "I’ll see if she wants to come to the next one.”

“Speaking of, I feel like I haven’t made fun of your love-slash-sex life, or lack thereof, for a while.” Danny raises her eyebrows in question. "No news to report? I hope you’re not holding out on me, Hollis."

Instead of saying what you think — nope, still just engaging in regular no-strings-attached sex with my roommate, it’s pretty awesome, even if she is still kinda annoying sometimes — you laugh and lie through your teeth. “You really think I could keep it a secret if I was seeing someone? Don’t be an idiot Danny, I tell you everything.”

/

Carmilla’s still sprawled out on your bed asleep when you get back from your interrogation, but slowly blinks her eyes open when you close the door behind you.

“Hey,” she mumbles sleepily, and you try not to think about how cute she sounds and looks when she’s just woken up. Things like that are what couples think about each other. It’s what Danny would think about Kirsch, or what LaFontaine would think about Perry. Not what you would think about Carmilla. “What time is it?”

“One in the afternoon.”

“Was this a five course breakfast or something?”

“Actually it was just a very late breakfast-turned-interrogation,” you reply, and Carmilla looks up in interest. She’s still completely naked, and not bothering to hide her herself under the covers, so you busy yourself with making some hot chocolate so she can’t tempt you into wasting the entire afternoon in bed. “When I got to the cafe Danny wasn’t there yet, so I just assumed she was running late. But when she hadn’t showed after twenty minutes, I went to the Summer Society house to find her and, well, turns out she had an...overnight guest.”

Carmilla snorts. “Just a wild guess; Kirsch?”

“Yep,” you grumble, placing two mugs of milk into the microwave and leaning against the counter while you wait for them to warm up. “And okay fine, you were right, congratulations. Gloat away.”

“Well, hate to say I told you so, but—“ she pauses, looks thoughtful for a second, and then smiles smugly at you. “Actually, no I don’t. I told you so.”

“Apparently they’ve been a thing since SJ’s birthday party.”

“How cute. Love is in the air. And by air, I mean the troposphere.”

You roll your eyes, ignoring Carmilla laughing at her own joke while you add hot chocolate powder to the two mugs, carry them over to the bed, and hand Carmilla the non-Tardis mug.

Carmilla disappears into the bathroom to shower after she’s finished her hot chocolate, and you decline her offer to join her since you have an English Lit paper due in on Monday that isn’t quite finished yet. You’re busy rearranging a few sentences in your conclusion when Carmilla comes out of the bathroom, yawning as she towels her hair dry.

“So, you doing anything today?” You ask in the hopes Carmilla has some exciting plans you can invite yourself along to so you can procrastinate starting your psychology paper that’s due in on Thursday.

Instead of giving you a straight answer, Carmilla throws her wet towel into the laundry basket, comes over to you and picks up your laptop, ignores your affronted hey! while she carries it over to the desk, before she spins around, stalks back towards you with a filthy smirk that immediately shuts you up, clambers onto your bed and immediately straddles you.

“Well I said I’d grab dinner in town with Will tonight, but that’s not for another five hours,” she says, tilting her head to the side and grinning predatorily at you. “So in the meantime, hopefully you.”

Carmilla leans down to kiss you, slowly in the way she does when she’s still not one hundred percent awake, and she tastes like toothpaste and faintly of hot chocolate when you deepen the kiss. You try not to think about how many other girls probably get to have Carmilla like this. It’s just sex, you remind yourself, you’re not allowed to be selfish and want her all to yourself.

“You are insatiable,” you giggle against her mouth when she pulls back for air.

“You said you were going back to Rotterdam for three weeks at Christmas,” she murmurs, moving to trail feather-light kisses along your jaw. “So we should probably start making up for lost time now, don’t you think?”

Suddenly wasting the entire afternoon in bed with Carmilla sounds like an excellent idea.

“I think that's a great plan,” you reply, and pull her in for another kiss.

/

Carmilla’s default personality seems to be ninety percent apathetic and ten percent annoyed, so it’s a little disconcerting to walk into your dorm room after having dinner with Danny to see Carmilla, for lack of a better term, completely freaking out.

“Uh, is everything alright?” You ask. Which is kind of a stupid question, since the large amount of paper strewn haphazardly over Carmilla’s bed and the stress emanating from a panicked-looking Carmilla don’t exactly scream that everything’s alright.

“No it fucking isn’t.” Carmilla drags her hands through her hair frantically, messing it up and kind of making her look like a demented lion, whirling round to stare at you helplessly. “I was just in Starbucks and some fucking idiot collided with me because he wasn’t looking where he was fucking going and he spilled his coffee all over my life drawing portfolio.” And you thought dramatic rants were your speciality. “My life drawing portfolio, which is due in tomorrow, which is now three drawings short. So I have until nine tomorrow morning to produce three brand new drawings and I have no model, apparently no fucking sketch paper cause the goddamn coffee ruined that as well, and—”

“I could do it,” you blurt out before your brain gives your mouth permission to speak. Carmilla pauses ransacking her portfolio and stares unblinkingly at you.

For God's sake Hollis, please think before you speak.

“Like, I could be your model. I know the art building’s still open cause you’ve been there later than this a couple times. And well, it’s an art building, so wild stab in the dark but it might have some paper and anything else you might need.” Carmilla’s still staring at you like you’ve dropped to one knee and whipped out a diamond ring. You clear your throat awkwardly. “You know, if you want. Unless you already have someone else on like, art student speed dial or something, um—“ Your brain finally catches up to the idiotic rambling coming out of your mouth and you abruptly stop talking.

Carmilla blinks at you with an unreadable expression, before she shakes her head, breaking her out of whatever weird daze she was caught in. The corner of her mouth lifts up into a smile. “You realise you’d have to be naked right?”

“Oh, well that definitely poses a problem,” you say with as serious an expression as you can muster. “Cause you’ve never seen me naked, have you?”

Carmilla smiles. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you sit still for more than two minutes at a time.”

“I am perfectly capable of sitting still,” you huff. “Look, if you don’t want my help then that’s fine, just—”

“No, no, I do,” Carmilla interrupts, turning back to her bed to start clearing up the explosion of papers. “I know gratitude isn’t exactly my speciality, but thank you. I’ll even make it up to you. Somehow. I’ll buy you pizza for a month or something.”

Well, you were going to do it for free anyway, but if Carmilla’s offering free food in exchange for sitting still for an hour or two, you’re not going to pass up that offer.

/

“So uh, how exactly does this work?”

You’re in a different room from the last time you were in the Rembrandt Building — which is probably a good thing; means you won’t get distracted by remembering fucking Carmilla against a table — watching Carmilla as she sets up her easel and paper.

You’ve never modelled before, obviously, and you’re starting to feel a little nervous. Which is a bit ridiculous, because it’s only Carmilla and all you really have to do is not move for a while, but still.

“Well first, you get naked. Then you sit on this,” Carmilla says, dragging a small divan over from the corner of the room and pushing it in front of her easel. “I’ll tell you how to pose, and then you just stay still for about thirty minutes while I draw you. We do that three times and then we’re done.”

Carmilla drags over a small table to sit next to her stool behind the easel, and starts arranging her large supply of identical looking pencils and charcoal sticks on it while you start getting undressed.

“Wait.” You pause just as you start to unclasp your bra, and Carmilla glances over her shoulder from where she’s filling a mug up with some water at the sink. ”This is for your final project right?”

“Yeah?”

“So, people are gonna see these…”

Doesn’t Carmilla share a class with Perry? Oh no…

“Don’t worry,” Carmilla smiles, setting the mug down on the table along with some paper towels. “Life drawing isn’t an exact thing. Unless I go overboard on the detail no one is going to look at them and be able to tell it’s you. You know, unless you and Betty Crocker are a lot closer than I first realised.”

Thank God.

You roll your eyes at the second part of Carmilla’s comment and ignore her laughing, while you tug your socks and shoes off. Your jeans and underwear follow and you sit down awkwardly on the divan, trying to resist the urge to cover yourself up.

Carmilla looks at you for a few seconds, her head tilted to the side in thought, before she walks up to you and tells you to recline on your side so you’re facing her. “Bend your knee slightly like this, move your arm here, and— are you okay?” You glance up at her in question. “You’re all tense. Look if you’re not comfortable doing this then I’m not going to—”

“No, it’s fine, honestly. It's just I’ve never really done anything like this before,” you say with a nervous laugh. “So it just feels a little weird.”

“Hey, it’s just me,” Carmilla says with an affectionate smile. She rests her hand on your shoulder after moving some of your hair out of the way and her thumb brushes gently against your neck. “Just relax.”

You pointedly ignore the way your heart skips a beat at the way she’s smiling softly at you, and nod in reply, forcing your body to relax while Carmilla moves your various limbs into position.

“There,” she says, once she’s satisfied with how you’re positioned. “Now try to stay still for the next thirty minutes.”

Thankfully, it isn’t as awkward as you thought it might be.

Sure, it’s a little weird to start with, considering you’re completely naked while Carmilla stares silently at you, but she indulges your pathological inability to shut up for more than five minutes at a time, humming and hawing at the appropriate points in your inane chattering about Agent Carter this and Harry Potter that, so it’s easier to relax after the first ten minutes or so.

Her gaze flicks between you and the easel, her eyebrows furrowed and biting her lower lip in concentration, and out of nowhere, you’re struck by how oddly intimate this is. Which, thinking about it, is a ridiculous thought, because you’ve lost count of how many times you’ve had sex and Carmilla’s seen you naked plenty of times by now. But there’s something different about Carmilla staring at you whilst not touching you that’s just…different. Carmilla’s stare suddenly feels a lot heavier, and you shift slightly under the intensity of it.

“Stay still,” Carmilla says lowly, and her voice doesn’t really help with your attempt at pushing down the flush you can feel spreading across your chest and up your neck. “I’m almost done with this one.”

The second and third drawings Carmilla needs pass in a similar fashion; you fill the silence with conversation about whatever pops into your mind, Carmilla occasionally interrupts to tell you to stop fidgeting when you inevitably squirm under the heat of her gaze, and you try not to fall off the sofa in surprise when Carmilla tells you a little bit about which artists and art movements she likes, without prompting.

Eventually, she places her pencil down, slips off her stool and tells you she’s finished. You stand up and stretch, happy to finally be out of the same position after thirty minutes, and it occurs to you just as you’re tugging your jeans back up your legs that you’ve never actually seen any of Carmilla’s artwork.

Carmilla washes the smudges of black off her hands with one of the paper towels dipped into the mug of water, before detaching the paper from her easel and laying it onto the table behind her, while you pull your jumper over your head and walk up to stand next to her and examine her drawings.

Obviously Carmilla would have to be relatively talented at drawing to be an art major, but you’re still surprised at how good the trio of drawings are. They’re all perfectly proportioned so no part of you looks weirdly wonky or too big or too small, there’s plenty of shading and highlighting to give the drawings some depth, and they’re incredibly detailed for something that only took half an hour. She’s purposely kept your features vague, so you doubt anyone except you and Carmilla will be able to tell it’s actually you. The fact she created these in only thirty minutes apiece is impressive. You probably couldn't draw a stickman this good in the same amount of time.

“Wow,” you murmur. “This is amazing. You’re...really good.”

“Not the first girl I’ve heard that from.” You elbow her gently in the side. “No? Okay, how about...clearly my hands are good for more than just one thing.”

“Just take the compliment,” you say, rolling your eyes and trying not to smile. ”Is it conceited of me to say that they’re stunning?”

Carmilla laughs. “No, definitely not. I’ll take it as a compliment for how exceptionally talented you think I am, rather than you bragging about your looks.” Carmilla picks up the three drawings and places them in her portfolio carefully so they don’t get smudged. “Besides,” she adds on with a smirk. “I had a prettier model than say, the sixty year old dudes I got stuck with my first semester in Paris.”

“That sounds horrifying. My condolences,” you chuckle, turning your head to watch her shudder dramatically, and catch sight of a black smudge just below her left cheekbone.

“You have a—“ you gesture at your own face. “Charcoal or something.”

Carmilla rubs at her cheek, mostly succeeding at spreading the smudge around and making it look like she has a moustache.

“Wait, hold on, you’re just making it worse,” you laugh, grabbing at her wrist and pulling her hand away from her face. “Let me.”

You take one of the unused paper towels, dip it in the water mug, and gently wash the smudge off her cheek. You run your thumb softly across her cheekbone after to soothe the rough texture of the paper towel while you dump it down onto the table next to the other soggy paper towels, and when you glance back up at Carmilla, she’s staring at you with an unreadable expression.

“What?” You say nervously. Why the hell are you nervous? It’s just Carmilla, and she certainly doesn’t make you nervous. Annoyed or turned on, yes, but never nervous. However, she doesn’t give you much more time to dwell on that thought, because she surges forward and kisses you.

You’re caught a little off guard since you weren’t really intending on having sex with her here, but you’re kind of helpless to resist her so you respond after a second or two, wrapping your arms around her neck and kissing her back just as heatedly. Carmilla’s arms slide around your waist to pull you closer while she coaxes your lips apart with her tongue, sucking and biting softly at your bottom lip before brushing her tongue against yours. Automatically, your hands drift to her front and starting unbuttoning her shirt, slipping your hands under the fabric to roam across her warm skin.

She tugs at your hips to shift you around so she has you pressed against the table, and she breaks the kiss in favour of ducking her head to slide her lips along your jaw, and you bite your lip hard to keep yourself from whimpering too loudly. There’s only so many times you can have sex in public before you get caught, and eventually your luck is going to run out, but that doesn’t really register when Carmilla’s mouth is pressing hot kisses down your throat and her fingers are popping open the button on your jeans.

You’re two seconds away from throwing all rational thinking out the window and letting Carmilla shove her hand down your pants when the sound of footsteps echoing loudly in the hallway outside breaks through the daze kissing Carmilla puts you in. You push Carmilla back in a panic, scrambling to redo the button on your jeans and running a hand through your hair to make the we were totally about to have sex look a little less obvious, while Carmilla swears quietly under her breath as she tries to rebutton her shirt as fast as possible. You take another few steps away from Carmilla just to be safe, however you probably still look suspicious as hell when a blonde girl you vaguely recognise, although you can’t remember where from, opens the door and comes walking into the room.

The girl pauses, looking in confusion between you and Carmilla. “Carmilla? What are you doing here? You know students aren’t supposed to be here this late.”

“Elsie uh, hey.” Carmilla clears her throat awkwardly. “I had some stuff to finish before we submit our portfolios tomorrow. Just uh, needed to clean up some of my more sketchier drawings, you know?” She stutters unconvincingly. “Lost track of time, didn’t realise how late it was.”

Elsie. You realise with a strange sinking feeling that you recognise her not just as one of Danny’s Summer Society sisters, but also as one of Carmilla’s more regular 'guests' from the beginning of the semester. God you hope nobody — Carmilla — suggests a threesome.

“I was just keeping her company,” you add when Elsie looks at you suspiciously.

“Right,” Elsie says slowly, looking like she doesn’t believe a word of what either of you just said. Technically you aren’t lying. Carmilla needed to finish some work for tomorrow; you were keeping her company whilst simultaneously helping. All you’ve done is left out a few minor details. “Well the building’s being locked up for the night, so I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Carmilla says brightly. And really, Carmilla being so polite just makes everything look more suspicious. “Just give me five minutes to clean up here and then we’ll be gone.”

Elsie gives both of you another suspicious look, looks down her nose at you, and smirks at Carmilla, before disappearing back out the door.

“Well,” you say once the sound of Elsie’s footsteps fade. “She seemed...friendly.”

Carmilla laughs. “She's my art TA. And we were a lot friendlier at the beginning of the semester.”

“Yes, so I remember,” you sniff, ignoring the twist in your stomach at the thought of Carmilla with anyone else. You open your mouth to add some witty comment about how Carmilla probably has enough sexual energy to fuel half of Styria for a week, but what comes out instead is, “Are you still sleeping with her?”

Carmilla shrugs. “Nope. And since you’re probably debating whether or not to ask if I’m still sleeping with anyone else… I was, at the beginning. But you’re enough of a handful on your own. Besides,” she adds on with a rakish grin. “Why would I need to look elsewhere when I have my very own live-in friend with benefits?”

The biggest female-Lothario you’ve ever met...is only sleeping with you. There’s probably some significance there, but Carmilla’s voice cuts through your musing when she tells you, “Don’t let it go to your head, cutie. You just suck slightly less than everyone else.”

You do your best not to read into that too much.

Chapter Text

It’s a little disconcerting when you first realise how easily Carmilla has wormed her way into your daily routine after just over a month of sleeping with her. It throws you off even more when you realise how little you actually mind having her as part of your daily routine.

It’s not even just sex anymore. Okay yes, a good eighty percent of the time you spend with Carmilla still involves zero clothing and either a bed or the shower — and that one time against the door while she had a hand clamped over your mouth to muffle your moans — and most of the talking you do is of the exceedingly dirty variety, but when finals week descends onto campus she starts accompanying you to the library or the coffee shop for caffeine-and-sugar-fuelled last minute studying.

Which you’re extremely grateful for, because every time you look up from studying in your room to see Carmilla sprawled out on her bed you tend to lose all focus, so it’s a lot easier keeping your hands off her when you’re surrounded by thirty caffeine-deprived college students and Carmilla’s brother. It’s quite impressive how much work you can get done when Carmilla isn’t lounging on her bed eyefucking you.

You’re a little surprised that when you ask Carmilla what her plans for winter break are, she grumbles something about going back to Paris with Will for Christmas. You sort of assumed Carmilla would be staying in the dorms over winter break, since the sparse collection of times Carmilla’s mentioned her family outside of Will make it glaringly obvious she doesn’t get on particularly well with her mother.

(You can’t recall her ever once mentioning her father, but you push down your pathological urge to be nosey and pry. Historically, asking Carmilla about her personal and family life usually ends in a lot of yelling and dramatic storming out of the room, and well, you know better than anyone that if someone never talks about one of their parents, there’s usually a good reason.)

You bump into Will in Starbucks, the day before you’re due to fly back to Rotterdam for winter break, and when you casually bring up the subject of them going back to Paris while you’re walking back across campus to the dorms, Will grimaces.

“Our mom kind of, uh, picked a favourite twin,” Will explains when you raise your eyebrows in question. “It’s a long, long, complicated story that I don’t even know all the details of because talking to Carmilla is sometimes like talking to a brick wall, but ever since our dad died, Mom and Carm haven’t exactly been on the best of terms. Makes family dinners at Casa del Karnstein a little uncomfortable.”

Well. That certainly explains why Carmilla doesn’t like talking about her father.

“Hey,” Will continues, before you can come up with a way to subtly and politely ask about their father, and you realise you’ve already reached the Zeta house. “If you tell her I said this your next drink is gonna be a cyanide macchiato—” Are all Karnsteins this violent? Is it some kind of genetic trait? “—but I’m glad she has you. I shouldn’t be the only one that she trusts."

Winter break in Rotterdam passes in a blur of classic black-and-white Christmas movies, inhaling your body weight in turkey, gingerbread men and Christmas pudding, watching the Doctor Who Christmas Special with your dad, and the entire extended Hollis family consuming slightly alarming amounts of eggnog and belting out off-key Christmas carols for hours on end.

You arrive back on campus a couple days after Carmilla does, and you’ve barely gotten the door shut before you’re being pressed back against it and Carmilla’s kissing you before you can get a word out. Hello Carmilla yes my winter break was lovely thanks how was yours?

Not that you’re complaining about the lack of talking, of course. Three weeks is far too long since she last had her hands on you, especially when she bombarded you with half naked Snapchats for the majority of that time. There’s only so many photos of Carmilla wearing next to nothing, with captions such as wish you were here or thinking of you, and in the more explicit ones, be better if these were your fingers, that you can take.

“Miss me?” You ask smugly when she hauls you over to her bed.

“No,” Carmilla grumbles, shoving you down onto the mattress and clambering on top of you. “But my vagina does gets separation anxiety from your mouth.”

How romantic.

"Sure feels like you missed me," you chuckle as Carmilla nearly rips the zipper of your jeans trying to get it open, but then she’s reminding you to try and keep the noise down, sweetheart and shoving a hand into your unbuttoned pants, which puts an end to any coherent conversation for the foreseeable future.

Later, you’re just beginning to doze off with your head on her chest when she abruptly stirs underneath you, jolting you awake while she scrambles out of bed. “Before I forget,” she says, digging around in her rucksack for something — still completely naked, not that you’re complaining about the view — before she spins round and lobs a bright pink box towards you. “Got you a Christmas present." You turn the box over and realise it's an extremely fancy, and slightly expensive looking, box of macarons. "I know they probably sell them like, everywhere, but the best ones are made in Paris.”

You debated for almost the entire three weeks you were in Rotterdam whether or not to buy Carmilla a Christmas present, and once you eventually decided to, you realised you had no idea what the hell to actually buy her, since Carmilla’s expansive list of interests consists of sex, sarcasm, leather, reading and art. You were considering just buying a pair of fluffy handcuffs and presenting them to her accompanied by your best seductive voice of do whatever you want to me, since you don’t know enough about art to buy her something relating to that and you weren’t going to drop €100 on fancy leather goods for her, when you walked past a bookstore and caught sight of a pristine looking copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It had seemed like the kind of light and cheerful thing Carmilla likes, so you went in and bought it before you could talk yourself out of doing it.

(You ignore the weird fluttering sensation you get in your stomach at the way Carmilla’s face lights up when she rips the wrapping paper off the book.)

/

A few weeks into classes starting back up after winter break, Danny cuts your Sunday afternoon study session short when her phone buzzes several times in quick succession, and the badly-concealed dopey smile on her face tells you exactly who the texts are from and what they allude to.

After she leaves, Will is too busy being swarmed with caffeine-deprived college students to keep you company, so you text Carmilla requesting she comes to join you, throwing in a please, several winky faces and one brazen sexual innuendo to hopefully convince her. Ten minutes later, Carmilla comes stomping into the cafe, looking like she’s only been awake for the five minutes it takes to walk from your dorm room. You check the time on your phone, and come to think of it, you probably did wake her up. It’s only 1PM.

“You better make good on that delightful description of what you want to do to me later, Hollis,” Carmilla huffs in lieu of a greeting, collapsing down into the neighbouring seat dramatically and dumping her bag onto the floor next to her. “This is far too early for me.”

“Is it so bad that I don’t mind your company when I’m doing schoolwork?”

Carmilla stares at you, before her lips curl into a pleased smirk. “You realise this literally makes you one of my study buddies, right?”

Carmilla laughs at your horrified groan, before getting up and sauntering towards the counter to order some coffee. She comes back after a few minutes armed with two drinks and a sandwich that looks far too leafy and green for your taste. Maybe you’ll go and buy a (third) cookie in a while, just to counter being in close proximity to such a healthy looking sandwich.

“What’s this?” You ask when she places one of the mugs down next to you.

“Hazelnut latte. Oh, and—“ she dumps five sachets of sugar onto the table. “I figured you’d want these.”

“You know, you’re going to ruin your reputation as a heartless jerkface if you keep being so nice to me,” you pause, and take note of her choice of drink. “Although the marshmallows and whipped cream you demand to have in your hot chocolate kind of detract from the ooh I’m so mysterious and broody and badass thing anyway.”

Carmilla stares at you. “That shirt is a disgusting shade of yellow, and it makes me want to claw my eyes out with an ice cream scoop.”

Rude. “Ah, that’s the Carmilla I know and dislike.”

You clap a hand over her mouth to cut off her predictable comment of that’s not what you were saying last night when Will sashays up to the table, plonking down in the free chair.

“Ladies,” he greets.

“Urchin,” Carmilla replies once she’s forcibly removed your hand from her mouth. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

“On my break, so I thought I’d come bother you,” Will says cheerfully, and reaches across the table to poke Carmilla in the cheek. “You look like shit.”

“I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night,” Carmilla replies with a lecherous smirk. Will makes a disgusted noise, pulling his hand back like he’s been burned, and you hope your face doesn’t look as red as it feels.

“I really wish you’d learn that I don’t need to know these things,” Will huffs, before turning his attention to you and peering at your laptop. “What are you working on? Something that won’t leave me scarred for life like hearing the details of my sister’s sex life has, I hope.”

“Applying for summer internships at various newspapers,” you reply, slouching back in your seat and turning the laptop screen to show him the slightly complicated looking form for the Amsterdam Herald’s internship application. “So far I’ve submitted applications for one in Rotterdam, two in Amsterdam, one in Paris and one in Hamburg.”

“You never told me you were applying for internships,” Carmilla says around a mouthful of sandwich.

“Well, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about it, but my dad and I talked about it over winter break and he thought it was a good idea,” you explain, and then nudge at her leg with your foot under the table. “Why, you gonna miss me?”

“With every ounce of my being,” Carmilla replies sarcastically.

You glance up just in time to catch Will looking between you and Carmilla suspiciously, before he brightens, pats Carmilla on the head and says, “Aw, such a good friend, aren’t you Carm?“

You try not to react when Carmilla’s hand lands on your thigh under the table while she grins and says, “I’m a great friend.”

/

Over the past decade or so since your mother apparently decided you and your dad weren’t worth sticking around for and promptly disappeared without so much as a goodbye or I love you, you’ve tried lots of coping methods: getting drunk, crying, inhaling your body weight in ice cream, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the date (that one doesn’t usually work), but you’ve discovered the best way of dealing with it is just locking yourself in your room to sob into your pillow on the one day of the year you allow yourself to miss her.

Conveniently, the eleventh anniversary of your mother walking out on you coincides with a day that Carmilla has a full schedule of classes, so you don’t have to put up with her judging you — or worse, pitying you — for curling up under your duvet and wallowing in your self-pity for a solid six hours.

So inevitably, while you’re scrolling through Spotify for some appropriately heartbreaking music to sniffle along to, the door swings open and Carmilla comes in whistling to herself. No no no, dammit. It’s 3PM, she’s supposed to be in some two hour pretentious existentialist philosophy lecture now. Maybe if you stay perfectly still she won’t notice you hiding under your duvet.

“Cupcake?” Dammit. “Are you skipping class?” Carmilla asks, sounding amused. “Who knew there was a bad girl streak under that uptight facade and those prissy little button ups.” She pauses, and you can practically hear the smirk spreading across her face. “Well, I mean I already knew that, but—“

“Ugh, Carmilla shut up,” you groan, shoving your face into the pillow and burrowing further under the duvet, hoping Carmilla will take a hint and go away to bother someone else.

“The hell’s wrong with you?” Your face is still pressed into the pillow but you feel the mattress dip when Carmilla sits down on the edge of the bed.

“Since when do you care?” You huff like a petulant child.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Carmilla grumbles, poking at your shoulder until you emerge from your duvet, hastily wiping at the tear marks on your face. “Of course I care. What’s wrong?”

You heave yourself up until you’re leaning back against the headboard, the duvet still thrown over your legs, and you hug the yellow pillow to your chest tightly. Carmilla slowly reaches out to brush a few stray strands of hair out of your face in a surprisingly tender gesture.

“Cupcake, I’m not your fuck buddy right now, I’m your friend. You can tell me what’s wrong." She smiles encouragingly. "I’ll do my best not to make too many inappropriate comments.”

She nudges you in the side until you’re forced to shuffle over, making room for her to clamber in next to you, and she waits patiently for you to provide an explanation. You don’t want to talk about it. You mostly just want to tell her to fuck off and leave you alone, and then you can take a leaf out of Carmilla’s book and demand you both pretend this never happened tomorrow, but something about the way Carmilla’s arm settles around your shoulders is comforting, and something about her mere presence makes you feel oddly safe, and before your brain even gives your mouth permission to speak, the words come spilling out.

“When I was nine, my mom walked out on my dad and I.” You can feel Carmilla's gaze burning into the side of your head but you keep your gaze trained on your hands sitting idly in your lap. “Eleven years ago today, hence the pity party. She put me to bed the night before, kissed me on the forehead and told me she loved me, and then in the morning she was gone. Poof. Vanish. Never seen again.”

It still hurts thinking about waking up that morning and going through the whirlwind of emotions — confusion, anger, heartbreak — when your dad explained that your mother wasn’t coming back, but now that you’ve started talking you’re not entirely sure how to stop.

“She didn’t even say goodbye,” you murmur, your voice cracking slightly on the word goodbye as you try to hold back tears. “She just left this note, a couple of sentences scribbled on the back of a Walmart receipt telling us how sorry she is but she just can’t do this anymore.” You rub at your eyes again when a few tears threaten to spill out, before you add on bitterly, “Good to know we were at least worth that much.”

Carmilla gently pulls you closer, and you finally give in to the comfort she’s obviously offering, throwing an arm across her stomach and collapsing against her side, resting your forehead against her shoulder and inhaling the familiar scent of her perfume. After you’ve let yourself cry for a few minutes, and Carmilla hasn’t protested you ruining her shirt with your tears, you pull back with a sniffle, wiping at your eyes hastily.

“It uh, kinda messed me up for a while. Somehow convinced myself that it was my fault she left, ended up retreating a little too far into my own head. Stopped talking to my friends, wouldn’t come out of my room, didn’t want to eat anything. But eventually my dad told me that he couldn’t handle losing me as well as my mom, which put things back in perspective. A couple months after she left, my dad brought up the option of moving away from Canada.”

“That’s when you moved to Rotterdam?” Carmilla asks.

“Yep.” You nod your head, idly picking at a loose thread on the yellow pillow. “He got offered a transfer to the main hospital there— he’s a doctor,” you clarify at the confused look on Carmilla’s face. “And we have a lot of family that live there already which was just another plus, so he took the job and we moved across the Atlantic,” you finish with a slightly awkward flourish of your hands.

There’s a few moments of silence, broken only by the sound of your breathing, before you open your mouth again. “I— I keep thinking to myself, this is the year it’ll stop hurting so much and I’ll finally get over it, or at least learn to live with it, because it happened over a decade ago but—“

“Hey,” Carmilla interrupts. “There isn’t a time limit on how long you’re allowed to miss someone. Losing someone you love is awful, doesn’t matter the circumstances. And I know what it’s like to have the person you lose be a parent.”

You’re not entirely sure if the two situations are comparable; your mother left of her own free will, Carmilla’s father didn’t have a choice, but at least you know Carmilla somewhat understands. Danny and Kirsch both know about your mother, and both played the supportive best friends role perfectly when you told them about it last year, but both of their families are still intact, so as sympathetic and comforting as they are, they still don’t completely understand what it feels like.

“Yeah um, Will told me about your dad,” you say, offering a weak empathetic smile when Carmilla glances up at you. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry about your mother,” Carmilla replies. “You didn’t deserve to go through that.”

Her arm tightens around your shoulder comfortingly.

“You know, if you ever want someone who isn’t Will to talk to about...that,” you start carefully, hoping you aren’t overstepping. “I know I tend to talk more than I listen so it might not seem like it, but I’ve been told I’m a pretty good listener.”

Carmilla smiles. “I’ll keep that in mind, cutie."

You return her smile, and on impulse you lean forward and kiss her on the cheek.

“Um, do you want to...“ You trail off meaningfully, placing a hand on her leather-clad thigh. For once you don’t actually want to have sex with her, you’d rather just go to sleep after this exhausting conversation, but you assume she’ll want some kind of compensation for having to listen to you whine.

You feel a little bad about that automatic assumption when Carmilla shakes her head and without a trace of snark says, “No, it’s fine. We can just nap. You look like you need it.”

“Gee, thanks.”

You roll your eyes good-naturedly, letting Carmilla arrange you on the bed so you’re cuddled up to her side with your head on her chest, your arm across her stomach, and her arm wrapped around your shoulder to hug you closer. It’s different, cuddling with Carmilla when you’re not post-sex naked and sweaty. There’s a weird kind of intimacy you’re not used to experiencing with her.

“I thought you didn’t cuddle,” you chuckle, and Carmilla grumbles against the top of your head.

“I don’t. This is a one time thing cutie, don’t get used to it.”

(Carmilla’s phone goes off an hour or so later, and you pretend to be asleep when she grumpily answers, secretly listening to her tell Will that she’s busy studying and can’t come over, before she hangs up, wraps her arms back around you tightly and snuggles closer.)

/

Kirsch’s birthday comes around mid-February, so naturally, there’s a big party at the Zeta house. You buy him some fancy lacrosse jersey that he’s been dropping unsubtle hints about wanting for the past month or so as a present, make him a birthday card covered in an alarming amount of glitter glue and a collection of embarrassing photos of the pair of you, and then bribe Carmilla with sex into coming to the party on the Friday night.

You would still choose staying in with hot chocolate, cookies and Buffy over an alcohol-fuelled party full of bass-heavy music and drunk coeds, but ever since sleeping with Carmilla became a thing, parties have definitely become more fun. Carmilla likes the attention from various girls hitting on her, and you get an immense amount of smug satisfaction out of knowing that you’re the one Carmilla’s going to end up fucking in the bathroom later in the party. You have no doubt that if Carmilla felt like it she’d fuck some other girl anyway, it’s not like ‘no other girls allowed’ was a rule in your no strings attached agreement, and Carmilla did essentially say she was only sleeping with just you simply out of convenience, but still. It’s a nice ego boost to watch half the freshman swim team fawning over Carmilla, and know with ninety nine percent certainty that you’re the one that’s going to get to take those wonderful leather pants off her later.

LaFontaine bounding up beside you breaks you out of your leering across the room at Carmilla and her fan club and wondering what she’s going to do to you later, and they drag you off to do shots. Shots turns into beer pong, which turns into Perry forcing some water down your throat, which turns into Perry being peer pressured by you and LaFontaine into having a singular wine cooler, and after you spend some time making a fool of yourself on the makeshift dance floor with Kirsch, you’re in the kitchen talking to Carmilla when Danny bounces up next to you, flings her arm around your shoulders, and grins at you widely.

You think she might be a little drunk.

“You need to get laid,” she announces loudly with absolutely no preamble.

Yep, definitely drunk.

“What?” You splutter, ignoring Carmilla’s bark of laughter next to you.

“You haven’t dated anyone since whatserface last April,” Danny says like that explains everything. “What was her name again?”

“Her name was April, and we only dated for like two weeks. In March.” Those are two weeks you’d really rather not ever relive.

“Exactly! Two weeks, so you didn’t even sleep with her! And barring that extremely drunk night when I came to visit you last summer and you ditched me five minutes after we got to the bar—“ You resolutely ignore Carmilla’s impressed wow. “You haven’t slept with anyone since like, you were in high school.”

“That’s a long dry spell,” Carmilla comments, and you want to throw the rest of your drink into her face.

“So, because I am such a considerate best friend,” Danny continues after nodding enthusiastically at Carmilla’s interjection. “I have taken it upon myself to personally rescue you from your life of celibacy.”

“I thought you had a boyfriend,” Carmilla asks with a raised eyebrow.

“Okay, maybe not personally,” Danny amends. “But I’m going to be your awesome wingman. Wingwoman. Wingperson, whatever.”

It’s a little surreal discussing your apparently non-existent sex life with your best friend while the girl you’ve been sleeping with very regularly for the past three months is standing right next to you with an amused grin on her face.

Before you can protest against Danny’s pimping you out like a show pony, she’s dragging you away from Carmilla and into the crowd on the dance floor.

You’re not sure if it’s just the extremely shallow part of you speaking, or if it has some deeper meaning that you don’t want to acknowledge, but you can’t help but compare the various girls Danny tries to introduce you to to Carmilla. The first girl Danny nudges towards you is a lot taller than Carmilla. The second girl Danny unsubtly informs of your gayness and your singleness, her eyes aren’t as pretty as Carmilla’s. The third girl that Danny practically throws you towards is wearing leather pants but her ass doesn’t look as good in them as Carmilla’s.

Eventually, Danny gives up and disappears to go find Kirsch, but not before giving you a very enthusiastic and slightly frightening pep talk about how you should apparently grab life by the vagina. Very motivational.

You’re in the kitchen refilling your drink when a blonde girl you vaguely recognise from your biology class in freshman year sidles up next to you. She says hello, you eventually manage to remember that her name is Jamie, and she promptly strikes up a conversation of small talk, how have you been, are you enjoying this party, how are you finding sophomore year and fifteen or so minutes later, you and Jamie have relocated to one of the unoccupied sofas at the edge of the living room to continue talking.

Now, you are well aware that you can be a little oblivious occasionally, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that all of the touching of your arm and your thigh, and all the laughing at your lame jokes, and the twirling her hair around her finger while she glances at your mouth, all mean that Jamie’s flirting with you. Heavily.

Is all of Silas in heat or something? Since Danny vanished and left you to fend for yourself about half an hour ago, Jamie is the third girl that’s caught sight of you, and promptly started hitting on you. You went to dozens of parties in freshman year and failed spectacularly at getting laid at any of them. Where the hell were all of these girls during your year long dry spell?

Jamie shifts slightly closer to you on the sofa while you prattle on about something in your English Lit class, and— and oh God, she’s not even being subtle about staring at your mouth now. It’s the exact same look you’ve seen Carmilla give you a hundred times before, but for whatever reason, the hungry look on Jamie’s face doesn’t send a shiver down your spine the way it does when it’s Carmilla looking at you like she’s two seconds away from pouncing on you.

(It doesn’t mean anything, of course, preferring the idea of sleeping with Carmilla to sleeping with Jamie. You know Carmilla’s good and is unlikely to disappoint you. You have no idea if Jamie is any good or not. It’s just...forward thinking.)

You glance down at the empty cup in your hands, and then you lift your head to ask Jamie if she wants to go and get another drink, but the words die in your throat when you realise Jamie’s face is inches away from yours. She apparently takes your silence as a good thing, because she leans forward and then suddenly she’s kissing you. She tastes mostly like vodka and faintly like raspberries, presumably from her lipgloss, but thankfully she isn’t drunk enough to not register the way you immediately freeze and make absolutely zero attempt to kiss back.

“Uh—” is the first thing out of your mouth when Jamie pulls back questioningly. You have no idea what the hell is wrong with you that your first thought is to immediately start fumbling for an awkward excuse rather than just leaning back in and kissing her until her patience runs out and she drags you back to her dorm room. You and Carmilla are not an exclusive thing, and Jamie’s hot. There’s no reason you shouldn’t want to sleep with her, and yet you keep stuttering. “I’m sorry, it’s just— you know—”

“There’s already someone else?” Jamie supplies.

“What? No, oh God no, there isn’t someone else. At all. Nope. No one at all. Definitely not.” The first no sounded convincing, but it was downhill from there. “I just…you seem great and all, and you’re really pretty but uh...” You quickly scramble for a convincing enough lie that sounds better than I already have a fuck buddy and even though you seem really sweet and she’s kind of a dick I’d still rather sleep with her than anyone else. “You know, I just had a really bad break up recently. So I’m just not really ready for anything new yet, and I don’t want to lead you on.”

“Okay.” Jamie shrugs, and you breathe a sigh of relief that she doesn’t seem too heartbroken. “Worth a try I guess.”

She pats you awkwardly on the thigh, shooting one last semi-hopeful smile at you before standing up and disappearing into the crowd of people.

You lean your head back against the sofa and groan. Who knew you were so irresistible?

You wonder if you should acknowledge the little revelation you just had about only wanting to sleep with Carmilla. A cute — really cute — girl, who probably isn’t a sarcastic asshole the majority of the time, who probably wouldn't make fun of all your nerdy pop culture references and who wouldn't steal all your food, who clearly had an interest in you, possibly even an interest beyond just physical stuff, was just kissing you, and all you could think about is how much you would prefer to be kissing Carmilla.

You stand up to go and find someone you know and who you also know won’t try and flirt their way into your pants when someone comes up behind you and slings an arm around your shoulder. You freeze — oh God what now — until a familiar voice sounds low in your ear.

“Hey ladykiller,” Carmilla chuckles, leaning in close to be heard over the music. “You wanna go fuck in the bathroom? Or do you not have time for me now that you’ve got a whole horde of adoring fans?”

Carmilla’s already started steering you towards the frathouse exit in the two seconds it takes you to reach a decision to just ditch the party. If Kirsch is still sober enough to notice you vanishing before midnight you can just make it up to him by buying him food.

/

“So, I have a question for you,” Carmilla asks while you’re walking down the hallway to your dorm room. You’re only half paying attention to her while you rummage through your bag for your room key, but you nearly trip over your own feet when Carmilla continues with, “How do you feel about strap-ons?”

You nearly give yourself whiplash jerking your head round to stare at her. “Uh,” is all you can muster, and Carmilla just watches you expectantly, as if that was a completely normal thing to say. “They seem...fun?”

Carmilla raises an eyebrow. “You never used one?”

You glare at her in response. She doesn't seem to really be grasping the whole I've only been with two other people in my entire life thing. “No, I haven’t.”

Carmilla steps closer to you, trapping you between the door and her body.

(You idly wonder if Jamie or any of the other girls from the party, or any other girls at all, would be able to make your heart pound this much without even touching you.)

Carmilla’s grin widens. “Would you like to?”

You valiantly attempt to come up with something semi-intelligent to say, and come up completely empty since you’re having a bit trouble thinking clearly, due to both the filthy images now playing across your mind and the way Carmilla’s leaned in to press slow wet kisses to your jaw.

Words, Hollis. Use them you idiot.

“I, uh—”

Good job. Ten out of ten for effort.

“I’ll take that as a yes, then?” Carmilla chuckles lowly into your ear, biting gently at the lobe before pulling back abruptly.

She fishes her own key out of her pocket instead of bothering to wait for you to locate yours, unlocks the door and drags you in after her. She tosses her jacket onto her bed and immediately starts rifling around in one of the drawers on her headboard, and by the time you’ve taken your own jacket off, dumped your bag onto your bed, and turned back around to face her, she’s standing in front of you, a black harness in one hand and a purple dildo in the other.

Dear God.

“You just had one of those lying around?” You blurt out before you can stop yourself, glancing around the room and wondering if there’s a large collection of dildos or vibrators or handcuffs hidden around the room that you’re completely unaware of. “Actually, don’t answer that. I don’t think I want to know how many other depraved sex toys are stashed around this room.”

Carmilla laughs, placing the harness and toy onto her bed behind her, before sliding her arms around your waist and pulling you into a kiss. Her tongue licks into your mouth as she pulls you down onto the mattress, sitting on the edge of the bed while you straddle her lap. After a minute or two of making out while you try not to seem too eager by rocking your hips down into her lap already, her hands come up to start undoing the buttons of your shirt, while she breaks the kiss to move her mouth down to your neck. You open your eyes and your gaze immediately lands on the strap sitting innocently next to you. You wonder how long Carmilla’s been waiting to bring up this particular...subject.

“You get so much enjoyment out of corrupting me like this, don’t you?” You huff out a breathy laugh, tilting your head back to expose more of your throat to Carmilla’s mouth while her hands push your shirt off your shoulders.

“Corrupting is such a strong word,” Carmilla replies, dragging her tongue over your pulse point. “I prefer to think of it as expanding your sexual horizons. Like the considerate fuck buddy I am.”

You snort in response, nudging Carmilla far enough away from you that you can quickly tug her top up and over her head.

“So, uh,” you start, glancing down at the toy again. “Who’s gonna…you know, go first?”

“We can flip a coin for it, if you want.”

“Carmilla—”

“Or is rock, paper, scissors more your thing?”

You roll your eyes. “Look, you’re the one who suggested it, so clearly this is something that’s been on your mind recently.” You’re too busy suddenly thinking about Carmilla thinking about you that you almost miss the snarky interjection of good catch Lois Lane. “So in all your fantasising, were you thinking about f— um, doing me, or was I doing you?”

“You can say the word fuck, cupcake,” Carmilla says with an amused grin. “I’ve heard you say it plenty times before. Although usually a bit more breathless and a little higher pitched.”

“God, you’re annoying,” you grumble. “Fine, who was fucking who in your dirty little daydreams?”

Carmilla’s smile shifts from amused to predatory alarmingly quickly. "Well, let me start by saying that I have quite a few dirty little daydreams—” Somehow you’re not surprised. “—and while several of them feature you riding me or on all fours on the bed or bent over the desk," Carmilla says as candidly as if she’s talking about the weather, and your mind promptly screeches to a halt. “Right now, I really want you to fuck me with it.”

“Wait, you want me to go first?” Not that it isn’t an appealing thought, but you just kind of assumed Carmilla brought it up because she wanted to fuck you like that. Which is also an appealing thought. Now that you think about it, there really doesn’t seem to be any downside to this. Why the hell did it take Carmilla so long to suggest this?

“I can talk you through it if you want,” Carmilla deadpans, breaking you out of your off-track train of thought.

“No need,” you huff hotly, your competitive side flaring up at the glint in Carmilla’s eye. If Carmilla wants to be fucked like this, then you’ll be the best damn fuck she’s ever had. “I’m a very fast learner.”

“I’m counting on it,” Carmilla murmurs in reply, before pulling you back in for another heated kiss.

Clothes are quickly discarded, Carmilla pushes a leg between your thighs and drags her hands down your back to grab at your ass to make you grind against her, while you dip your head to lave your tongue and lips and teeth across Carmilla’s chest, and by the time Carmilla pushes you off to stand next to the bed and practically throws the harness at you, you’re slightly concerned you’re in danger of spontaneously combusting.

Once you’ve managed to get the toy attached snugly to your hips, you tug on the straps one last time just to make sure they’re secure, and then glance up to see Carmilla waiting for you, completely naked and propped up on her elbows with her legs spread lewdly wide, and okay no, now you’re in danger of spontaneously combusting.

You feel a little bit ridiculous wearing it, but that feeling abruptly vanishes the second you catch sight of the look on Carmilla's face; she's staring at you — and by you, you mean the toy bobbing comically around — like an animal about to pounce on their prey.

“You know, it’s oddly flattering that the only time I ever see you this enthusiastic about something is when it involves sex,” you squeak out, slightly higher than normal.

“Well, not a lot of things are worth getting overly excited about in my opinion," Carmilla says, reaching out to grab your wrist and pull you onto the bed to settle between her legs. "But you in nothing but a harness definitely warrants some enthusiasm.”

“You’re too kind," you say dryly, before leaning down to kiss her.

You drag your hand down her body, pausing at her chest to tug at her nipples until she whimpers into the kiss, and then slide further down to between her thighs, pressing your fingers against the wet heat you find there. Carmilla groans against your mouth when you push a finger into her, pumping gently before adding another. You abandon her mouth to kiss across her neck, sucking gently at her pulse point and then kissing a path down to her chest to drag your tongue against her nipples, shuddering at the filthy noise you manage to pull from her when you sink a third finger into her.

Lifting your head back up to kiss her, you keep pushing your fingers into her repeatedly until she’s panting against your mouth, her body writhing and squirming beneath you. Her nails dig into your shoulders almost painfully and her legs wrap tighter around your waist as she cants her hips up to meet your hand, and you’ve slept with her enough times by now to know that that generally means hurry the fuck up and fuck me in Carmilla-speak.

Carmilla’s weak protest when you slide your fingers out of her cuts off into a gasp a second later when you take hold of the strap and press the tip against her. You rub it against her clit a few times, before moving it lower and slowly pushing it into Carmilla, inch by inch until your hips are flush together.

“You okay?” You ask, holding back the urge to just slam into her until she’s moaning your name. You figure it’s probably polite to wait until she’s ready before doing that.

Carmilla nods frantically in response, groans out a demand for you to start moving, before cupping the back of your head and dragging you down into another kiss.

You rock your hips forward experimentally, Carmilla’s breathing hitches audibly, and her nails dig into your skin where her hands are pressed against your lower back. The base of the toy puts pressure on your clit and you can’t help the surprised gasp that comes out; you weren’t really expecting it to feel this good on this end.

You start off slowly, letting Carmilla get used to it and trying to find a rhythm in the movements of your hips, Carmilla’s soft moans of encouragement spurring you on. Carmilla whimpers louder when you move your hips with a little more force, her fingers tangling in your hair when you drop your head to drag your lips across her collarbone. You glance down to between your legs, shuddering from the spike of lust that shoots through you at the sight of the purple silicon, shiny and wet with Carmilla’s arousal as it disappears in and out of her slowly.

“Laura,” Carmilla groans, tugging harshly on your hair until you lift your head up. “I’m not made of glass,” she growls against your mouth, sinking her teeth into your bottom lip and tugging gently. “Come on, I want you to fuck me like you mean it.”

You’re pretty sure you forget how to breathe for a few seconds there, and then Carmilla’s hands grab at your ass and pull you forward meaningfully, so — because you’re also a considerate fuck buddy — you give her what she wants, picking up the pace with your hips and thrusting into her harder, the breathless little moans she’s making slowly driving you insane.

You manage to settle into a steady rhythm of pounding eagerly into Carmilla, pushing in until your hips are flush together, pulling out until only the tip remains inside her, and then slamming back into her. And okay, so maybe you’ve never used one, but if Carmilla’s filthy and unrestrained moans and the way her nails rake up and down your back are any indication, your enthusiasm is definitely making up for your relative inexperience.

You slip one hand down Carmilla’s body, grasping the back of her thigh and yanking it up around your waist, changing the angle that you’re pressing into her. Carmilla gasps and moans and whimpers in time with your thrusts, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth half open in pleasure, and the bedsprings squeak loudly with each movement of your hips.

Your abs are starting to ache from exertion, so you double your efforts, roughly pounding into her while you shift your weight onto your left arm, dragging your other hand down between your writhing, sweat-dampened bodies to slide the pads of your fingers over Carmilla’s clit. Her hips buck up wildly and she cries out at each touch of your fingers, and it only takes a few more thrusts of your hips and a few more grazes against her clit before she comes with a low moan, head tossed back against the pillow, nails digging into your ass and her thighs trembling where they’re wrapped around your waist.

Feeling and hearing and seeing Carmilla coming apart underneath you, coupled with the constant pressure against your clit from the base of the toy, is enough to push you over the edge a few seconds after Carmilla. You collapse on top of Carmilla, still buried to the hilt inside her, your ear pressed to her chest, and you can hear her heart thundering loudly over the sounds of both of you attempting to catch your breath.

“Wow,” Carmilla says after a few minutes. “You weren’t kidding about being a fast learner.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” you murmur, tilting your head so you can press a kiss to Carmilla’s neck. “I think there’s still room for improvement. And since I am of the opinion that actions speak louder than words…” You trail off in favour of pressing your mouth against hers, sucking on her bottom lip until you feel her shiver against you. “Maybe you should demonstrate for me."

Carmilla laughs. "I've always preferred a more hands-on approach to learning," she murmurs against your mouth, her hands already trailing down to start unbuckling the harness straps. "I'd be delighted to demonstrate."

/

As it turns out, you don’t actually have to wait that long before Carmilla opens up about her past. And you don’t even have to really prompt her. Or bribe her with sex.

Around midnight, you’re halfway through a third round of Uno — another diligent study session at Danny’s — and considering just crashing with Danny for the night so you don’t have to walk back to your dorm in the thunderstorm that’s raging outside, when your phone lights up with a text from Carmilla.

Carmilla: where are you?

Laura: at danny’s. why, you miss me? :p

Carmilla: ha, you wish.

Carmilla: can i tempt you into coming back and keeping me company?

Carmilla: noise from the storm will probably cover up how loud you get. no more noise complaints that everyone blames me for. we should take advantage of this you know.

Laura: carmilla i’m not ditching danny because you want to have sex

Carmilla: why not? i think that’s a reasonable request. we’re reasonable people.

Laura: that is not a reasonable request

Laura: also it’s raining outside and i don’t have an umbrella. might just crash here so i don’t get soaked walking back.

You’re expecting some kind of inappropriate comment about your use of the word ‘soaked’ in reply, so you’re a little surprised at the next text Carmilla sends.

Carmilla: ugh, no don’t

Danny gleefully places down a draw four card — the betrayal — while you raise an eyebrow at your phone. Carmilla isn’t exactly the clingy type...

Laura: ….is everything okay?

Carmilla’s next text takes a while to come through, and in that time Danny has hit you with three ‘miss a go’ cards, another draw four card, and now only has one remaining card.

Carmilla: i’m just not the biggest fan of thunderstorms

It probably took a lot for her to admit that, so after a minute of two debating with yourself if Carmilla’s just trying to trick you into coming back or if she’s genuinely scared of thunderstorms, you begrudgingly start making your excuses to Danny so you can escape back to your dorm room. And avoid a few more crushing defeats at Uno.

The dorm room is almost pitch black when you finally get back after basically swimming across campus, the only light coming from Carmilla’s pumpkin shaped nightlight glowing dimly in the corner of the room. There’s a Carmilla-shaped lump under the covers on her bed that moves at the noise of the door opening and closing, and Carmilla’s head peeks out over the top of the blanket.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” you grumble back, picking up your pyjamas and disappearing into the bathroom to get changed.

You come back out of the bathroom having gotten changed into your pyjamas, brushed your teeth and towelling your hair dry, and you’re just pulling back the duvet on your own bed when Carmilla pipes up. “Um, Laura?” You turn round and you can just make out that she’s shuffled over to leave room for you on the other side of her bed. “Can you…” She trails off, and you don’t think you’ve ever heard her sound so uncertain of herself before. You feel like kind of an ass now for being so reluctant to come back if she hates thunderstorms so much she's willing to cuddle.

You climb into the bed next to her, snuggling down underneath her duvet and resting your head on your yellow pillow. Of course. One of these days you’ll win the custody battle for this thing. 

“Thank you for coming back,” Carmilla murmurs quietly, and you turn your head to look at her. You can’t really see much in the darkness of the room, but she looks strangely small curled up underneath her duvet. You’re overcome with the sudden urge to wrap your arms around her and pull her into a hug.

You push it down — Carmilla would probably try to smother you with a pillow if you did that without asking — and instead ask, “Are you okay?”

There’s a loud boom of thunder from outside and Carmilla visibly tenses. “Just peachy.”

“Very convincing.”

“I’m fine, buttercup,” Carmilla growls through clenched teeth, rolling over to face away from you. “Nothing I can’t handle. Go to sleep.”

“Carmilla—”

“It’s just easier to ignore when there’s someone else in the room,” Carmilla snaps. “It’s not something we need to talk about.”

“Please don’t punch me.” It’s all the warning you give her before wrapping your arm around her and pressing against her back. She stiffens again, despite the lack of thunderclaps, before slowly relaxing back into you. With the exception of after you told her about your mom, you still don’t cuddle anytime other than after sex so this still feels way too intimate for you to be completely comfortable.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” you start tentatively. You don’t want to push Carmilla that much, but there’s usually a story behind things like this, and well, she did basically demand you came back here. You like to think you deserve at least a little bit of explanation. “I know it’s not really any of my business—“

“Somehow I doubt that’s going to stop you.”

“But talking about it might help.”

“What is there to talk about? I don’t like thunderstorms, big deal.”

“Carmilla, you’re shaking,” you point out, and she immediately freezes as if she’s trying to physically stop herself from making any kind of movement. “This doesn’t seem like something as simple as just not liking thunderstorms.”

There’s a silence broken only by the rain outside long enough for you to wonder if Carmilla’s drifted off to sleep before she groans like she's just resigned herself to doing something unpleasant, before she mumbles, “Will told you our dad died right? I’m guessing he never told you exactly how.”

“No, he didn’t.” You hope you aren’t somehow overstepping when you add on, “All he said was that he thinks it put a strain on your relationship with your mother.”

Carmilla snorts. “Understatement of the century. Our relationship is a little more than just strained; my father’s dead and my mother blames me for it.”

You’re not entirely sure what you were expecting but it definitely wasn’t that. Carmilla’s mother blames Carmilla? While you flounder for what the hell to say in response to that, Carmilla takes your silence as a prompt to continue.

“He died when I was eleven,” Carmilla starts, sounding like she’s trying to keep her voice as level as possible. “I’d been at a friend’s for the evening when my dad came to pick me up at about nine to take me home. There was a storm that night, a big one, and it didn’t really get that bad until the evening, but it had been raining almost the entire day and there were already flood warnings for some of the roads, so we ended up having to take an alternative route home. The last thing I remember is coming up to this junction in the road, and then the next thing I know, I’m waking up in the hospital.”

Carmilla pauses, taking a deep breath before she continues.

“We collided with another car. The other driver survived as well, said that he didn’t see my dad’s car until it was too late and that it was probably the same for my dad. Didn’t realise there was another car there until it hit us. They put my dad and I in separate ambulances to get to the hospital, I assume because my injuries weren’t as severe — the worst I had was a broken arm. But my dad, he um—” Carmilla pauses to clear her throat, and you tighten your arm around her waist when she sniffles quietly. ”He died on the way there.”

For once in your life you’re kind of at a complete loss for what to say. I’m sorry just doesn’t seem like it’s enough.

“Obviously my mother never outright said that she blamed me, but she didn’t have to. I could see it in the way she looked at me.”

“Carmilla, it’s not your fault,” you say softly.

“I know,” Carmilla sighs. “I know that there’s no way I could’ve known what would happen, and I know it wasn’t my fault, but that didn’t stop me from feeling guilty about it for years. If my dad hadn’t been driving me around that night, he’d still be alive.”

The unemotional and disaffected tone of voice Carmilla's clearly been working hard to keep up cracks on the last word of her sentence. She sniffles again, and you feel her lift one arm up to wipe at her face.

“Anyway, my mom worked as a professor at the University of Graz, and then a couple months after Will and I’s thirteenth birthday, she told us that she’d applied for a transfer to the University of Paris, and that it had been accepted. So that’s when we moved to Paris. And I thought that maybe, if she was given a fresh start and enough time, my mother would stop hating me for getting her husband killed.”

Your heart aches at the vulnerability in Carmilla’s voice.

“But nothing ever changed,” Carmilla says sadly, her voice thick with emotion. “She had good days, where she actually seemed to care about me, but more often than not were bad days. She never hurt me hurt me, or anything, she was just...distant. Like nothing I ever did was good enough for her. The worst it got was a couple times she’d lock me in a closet when I pissed her off too much. Which believe it or not fifteen year old Carmilla had a tendency to do.”

Carmilla forces a chuckle, but you can hear the underlying hurt underneath the sarcasm.

“Is that why you don’t like— uh, I don’t want to assume anything but um, I’ve never seen you go near the elevator, and I've noticed you sleep better when the room isn’t pitch dark." You pause, glancing down at the orange glow at the bottom of the bed. "And you have a nightlight.”

“I’m not a big fan of small spaces or the dark, no," Carmilla replies. “When she eventually let me out, I’d go and hide away on our roof. Occasionally I got nightmares, so I’d go up there at night as well, and—"

"Look at the stars,” you finish for her. Carmilla glances at you over her shoulder in surprise, and even in the darkness you can see the tear tracks down Carmilla's face.

"Yeah, exactly," she says, smiling softly before returning to her previous position of facing away from you. “And then any remaining hope I had that my mother and I could ever rebuild our relationship was destroyed when I met Elle.” Carmilla pauses to sniffle again. “I was sixteen when I first met her, she was a couple years older than me, and something about her was just...magnetic. So just over two months after our initial meeting, I asked her on a date and she said yes.”

You didn't want to be presumptuous or anything, but you had often wondered if Carmilla's dislike of relationships was due to an particularly painful break-up. You get the feeling you might have been correct in your assumptions.

“My mother didn’t really approve of Elle and I. It wasn’t even the girl aspect of it, surprisingly enough my mother didn't seem to have any issues about my sexuality when I came out to her. She just didn’t like Elle in particular. I never figured out exactly what my mother’s problem with her was, but I think it was because Elle was the one that really introduced me to art.”

“Your mother doesn’t like you being an art student?”

“Oh God no,” Carmilla laughs. “She wanted me to get some form of sensible business degree.” She raises her voice a couple of octaves, presumably in imitation of her mother. “None of this art nonsense Carmilla. You would make a great lawyer or doctor if you just applied yourself Carmilla. Why don’t you switch majors to something sensible like William’s doing, Carmilla.”

“What happened with Elle?” You ask, veering the conversation away from her mother.

Carmilla’s quiet for a few long moments. “In retrospect, I think I knew deep down that at some point she just fell out of love with me, but I was in denial about it at the time, and I pretended that everything was fine between us. October of my freshman year of university, she calls me up and tells me we need to talk. She’d been offered a job in New York, and she was going to take it. I did everything I could to try and convince her to stay, or to somehow give long-distance a try, but in the end she left, and we were over.”

“I didn’t really handle the break-up that well. I pushed everyone away, and uh, I kinda drank a lot. You know, I was young and stupid, was convinced Elle was the love of my life, and then she just up and left me with hardly any warning,” Carmilla explains, her voice quiet. “Eventually, Will managed to pull me out of the hole I dug for myself. He was the only one I hadn’t pushed away and alienated at this point, and he was terrified I was going to end up doing something to hurt myself. He told me he was transferring here for sophomore year, something about it having a better suited course or whatever, and he asked me to come with him. He told me he didn’t want to leave me alone in Paris with my mother, and somehow, whatever he said managed to get through to me. So I agreed, applied for a last minute transfer, got away from my mother and everything that reminded me of Elle and moved back to Austria with Will.”

Without thinking, you move your hand up from where it’s resting against her forearm to cover the back of her hand. When she doesn’t immediately bat your hand away, you squeeze gently instead of voicing any surely subpar comments — I’m sorry, that sucks, your mom’s an asshole, Elle doesn’t deserve you — and she snuggles further back against you.

Suddenly Carmilla’s frosty exterior, large amount of snark and sarcasm, and lack of interest in making friends with anyone makes so much sense. Being a dick is the oldest defence mechanism in the world; if you don’t let someone get close, they can’t hurt you. You used it often enough after your mom left, so you’re not entirely sure how you didn’t figure it out earlier.

“Do you still love her?” You don’t know what makes you blurt it out, but now that the words are out there you can't exactly take them back. You’re not entirely sure you want to hear her answer.

Carmilla’s silent for a few moments, before she shrugs and says, “Does it matter? She's an entire ocean away."

(Later, after Carmilla’s finally fallen asleep, you try not to fixate on the fact that Carmilla never denied still being in love with Elle.)

/

“Do you think friends with benefits ever works out?”

Natalie, your library…acquaintance — you’re never gonna be able to use the word buddy normally ever again — looks at you across the table in confusion. “What does this have to do with the assignment?”

“Nothing. It was just on my mind.”

Natalie stares at you in confusion. "What do you mean by works out?"

"Like, do you think it could ever stay just sex, without any kind of romantic feelings getting involved?"

“I guess in some cases it could,” Natalie says, still looking slightly bewildered at your abrupt change in conversation. “But from what I’ve gathered from film and television, feelings usually do get involved and things end one of two ways: both people fall in love with each other and live happily ever after, or only one person falls in love and they break it off.” Natalie shrugs. “Rom-com stereotypes exist for a reason.”

Your phone buzzes in your pocket, inevitably another dirty text from Carmilla; she’s been sending them periodically all day, each one progressively filthier than the last, in an attempt to lure you back to the room, and it's only so long before your self control snaps and you ditch Natalie to escape back to the dorm.

The word crush is so ridiculously high school, but you don’t know how else to describe it. Carmilla’s still too much of an ass most of the time for you to genuinely like her like her, but there’s definitely…something. Something annoyingly and overwhelmingly present every time Carmilla brings you hot chocolate, or huffs and grumbles but doesn’t actually stop you from cuddling against her afterwards, or when you wake up in the morning to her arms wrapped around you tightly and her face buried in the back of your neck. Something that makes your heart beat just that little bit faster whenever Carmilla smiles at you without her usual ten layers of snark, and that makes you smile like a dopey lovesick moron in a bad rom-com whenever you spot her doing something mundane like the way she tilts her head to the side when she’s sketching, or the way she mutters to herself and rolls her eyes when one of the characters in whatever book she’s reading does something dumb.

You rationalise that it’s because you’re actually friends now — it’s called friends with benefits for a reason, right? — and it’s just the sex amplifying everything, making it seem like this is more than it actually is. If you took sex out of your current relationship with Carmilla, she’d revert straight back to the obnoxious asshole of an unwanted roommate you had to put up with at the beginning of the year. That’s all it is.

You know that this is just sex for her. (And for you, obviously. Just sex, nothing else. Definitely.) But with each time she falls asleep in your bed, each time she brings you back hot chocolate on Tuesdays, each time she emerges from between your legs with a massive unguarded grin on her face, the lines get just that little bit blurrier, and it’s getting harder and harder to remember that this doesn’t mean anything.

Chapter Text

“What do you mean you can’t go anymore?”

“The phrase I can’t go anymore doesn’t exactly leave much open to interpretation, Laura,” Danny points out with a raised eyebrow. “My parents are visiting that weekend, and this is like the only time they’re both free until June. And I would say just bring Kirsch with you instead, but I think my parents will be a little suspicious if this the exact same weekend their daughter’s boyfriend just happens to be out of the country.”

“Tell your parents they have crappy timing,” you groan. “Kirsch was my backup if you ended up not being able to come with me, and now neither of you can go. And anyone else I might actually feel bad inflicting the insanity that is my entire extended family upon them.”

“Remind me again why you can’t just go on your own?” Danny asks, glancing at you over her shoulder from where she’s busy marking papers at her desk. “It’s your cousin’s wedding, you’ll be surrounded by the entire Hollis clan anyway.”

“Exactly,” you grumble, flopping back onto Danny’s bed dramatically. “The entire Hollis clan is bearable for about fifteen minutes, and then they start to grate on every single one of my nerves.”

Danny snorts. “Wow, don’t hold back.”

“I mean obviously I love my family, but God they’re just so boring. Not to mention nosey. I guarantee if I don’t have someone with me to act as a buffer, they will be on me like a pack of rabid wolves with a nonstop stream of so are you seeing anyone Laura have you thought about plans for after graduation Laura why don’t you have a girlfriend yet Laura.”

“Sounds graphic.”

“It is,” you huff. “And I don’t think my dad would approve if I just spent the entire reception at the bar. At least if there’s someone with me, it’s more acceptable to spend the entire evening getting drunk while avoiding my annoying relatives that are so distant they’re basically strangers.”

There’s also the added disadvantage that you have no relatives around your age, so you have the delightful choice of making conversation with your ten year old cousins, or your various aunts and uncles and grandparents who still have a tendency to talk to you like you’re still a child, and there’s always that one annoying person who just has to bring up your mom and how hard it must have been for you and how they feel so sorry for you. There’s a reason you chose to attend university in a country a two hour flight away.

“Why don’t you ask Carmilla?”

You heave yourself up onto your elbows to stare at the back of Danny’s head in confusion. “Carmilla?”

“Yes, Carmilla,” Danny repeats. “You know, that rude pompous roommate of yours? An inch or so taller than you, wears a lot of black to reflect her soul, makes resting bitch face an art form.”

“Why would I ask Carmilla?”

“Well, why not?” Danny shrugs nonchalantly, placing a finished paper onto the top of the pile next to her before turning round in her chair to look at you. “You guys are actually friends now for some bizarre reason that I still don’t quite understand, her natural radiating charm is sure to ward off any nosey family members, and she can be the one to put up with the suspicious are you secretly dating my daughter looks that I always get from your dad.”

You shift uncomfortably. ‘You’ and ‘Carmilla’ and ‘dating’ are not words that ever need to be in the same sentence together. Especially considering this little crush of yours that has gotten alarmingly out of hand quite rapidly. And as enticing as the thought of an entire weekend away with Carmilla is, bringing your roommate-with-benefits, who you have unfortunately developed some kind of ridiculous and probably unrequited crush on, as your platonic-plus-one to a family gathering doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would put a stop to your inconvenient feelings.

Ever since you realised said inconvenient feelings towards Carmilla might have shifted past just friendly, you’ve considered putting a stop to the sex before you do something stupid like really start crushing on her. Which, now that you’ve finally made your way past Carmilla’s mile high walls and fifty layers of protective snark, you realise is frighteningly possible. Or maybe that’s just Carmilla’s highly effective seduction eyes clouding your judgement. Who knows.

That would be the smart option, to cut things off now before you — or either of you — end up getting in too deep. But each time the words are on the tip of your tongue, her fingers brush against your waist, or she looks at you in that way that makes your resolve to end things completely dissolve and evaporate into nothingness, and you completely forget all about telling her you can’t do this anymore in lieu of kissing her and letting her drag you onto her bed.

“Laura?” Danny asks, her voice derailing your train of thought. “Well?”

“Uh. Yeah,” you mumble, wondering if you’re about to make a colossal mistake. “Yeah I’ll ask her. I mean what’s the worst that could happen?”

/

You eventually manage to track Carmilla down at Starbucks, where she’s busy finishing a philosophy paper that you’re pretty sure she put off doing last night in favour of doing you. You join the small queue leading up the counter, buy her a chocolate donut to help sway her into agreement, and then join her at her table tucked away in the corner.

“We’re friends, right?” You start off without bothering to say hello, placing the plate with the donut down and nudging it into her line of sight.

“I’m not an expert but I’m pretty sure friends don’t spend hours fucking each other every night,” Carmilla deadpans without so much as a glance towards you or the donut.

“Carmilla,” you hiss, frantically glancing around the room to make sure no one overheard that delightful comment.

“Okay fine,” she grumbles, finally looking up from her laptop to regard you with an unimpressed expression. “Yes, we are friends. Now stop making me say that word because I get a wave of nausea every time I have to confirm it.”

And Carmilla calls you overdramatic.

“Okay, that’s good.” Carmilla raises an eyebrow. “Because friends do favours for each other right?”

“Sexual favours?” Carmilla asks with a grin, and you contemplate shoving the donut into her face to wipe that dumb grin off her face. “You walked right into that one cupcake,” she laughs, and you resolutely ignore the giant warning sign that is the butterflies you get in your stomach at the smile on her face. “Okay I’m listening. What do you want?”

Here goes nothing.

“My cousin Quinn is getting married next weekend, and Danny was supposed to be my plus-one but she can’t come anymore because her parents are visiting the same weekend and she can't blow them off and well I kind of need a plus-one because Hollis family gatherings can get a little tedious so I’d really appreciate the company and well since we’re friends I was kind of hoping that maybe you would want to come with me?”

Carmilla blinks at you. “It’s truly impressive that you managed to get all that out in one breath.”

“Thank you.”

Carmilla glances at the donut. “Is that a bribe?”

“Absolutely.”

Carmilla rolls her eyes, but picks up the donut and takes a bite of it anyway. “Where’s this wedding taking place?”

“Amsterdam. So we’d leave on the Friday afternoon, get there in the evening and I’ll introduce you to my dad and Quinn and we can go for dinner or something, the actual wedding is on the Saturday, and then we’d leave the Sunday afternoon,” you say, watching Carmilla chew on the donut thoughtfully. “It’s kind of super last minute I know, but it’s a free trip to Amsterdam.” You lower your voice and lean a couple inches closer to Carmilla. “And a hotel with a bed twice the size of these tiny ones the university provides. And a room with much thicker walls than the dorm.”

The way Carmilla stares at your mouth and the smirk slowly spreading across her face are basically non-verbal confirmations that you’ve convinced her. “Well I suppose I can think of worse ways to spend a weekend.”

Victory. “So is that a yes?”

Carmilla licks a smudge of chocolate icing off her finger much more slowly than necessary, and you ignore the little voice of reason at the back of your head yelling that you’ve crossed a line. “You had me at the donut.”

/

For some reason you had it in your head that Carmilla would be one of those high-maintenance nightmarish travel companions that complains about everything from the airplane cuisine options to the loud fellow passengers — “I’m a fucking delight, cupcake” is her offended response when you mention it to her; an unreliable narrator, in your opinion — but the actual getting to Amsterdam goes surprisingly well. The taxi to take you to the airport shows up on time, neither of you forget your passports or boarding passes, your flight is on time and hasn’t been delayed, you get to watch in amusement at the put out look on Carmilla’s face while she gets patted down after setting the metal detector in security off, and you even have time to go and buy some overpriced snacks at one of the shops before you’re due to board.

(Although Carmilla does wolf down half your tube of Pringles when you’re too busy looking for your departure gate.)

Once you’re on the plane, Carmilla demands the window seat, and after her annoyingly-effective puppy dog eyes make you relent and switch seats with her, she promptly falls asleep before the plane even reaches the runway, and doesn’t wake up until the plane touches down at Amsterdam two hours later. You suppose an asleep Carmilla is better than a bored Carmilla who would annoy you for two hours as her personal form of entertainment or try to convince you to join the mile high club.

It isn’t until you’re off the plane — Carmilla annoyingly fresh faced and chipper after her impromptu nap curled up like a pretzel in a tiny airplane seat — and collected your suitcases from baggage claim that you start to get a bit nervous at the prospect of introducing Carmilla to your dad. It’s not like it’s any different from introducing Danny or Kirsch to your dad, it’s not like Carmilla’s a girlfriend or anything, it’s just… It’s Carmilla. Rude, brash, difficult Carmilla. It’ll be a miracle if you get through the weekend without having to apologise profusely on her behalf.

You don’t even realise you’ve stopped walking towards the exit to the arrivals lounge until Carmilla calls your name, and you look up to see her staring at you questioningly. “You just going to stand there all day? Cause I’d really like to get to the hotel sometime this century so I can wash all this airplane off of me.”

With a sigh, you grab hold of her wrist and pull her over towards the wall and out of the way of the people still milling around waiting for their luggage that’s probably on a plane to Adelaide rather than Amsterdam if it hasn’t shown up by now.

“Okay, so. Maybe we should set some ground rules.”

Carmilla rolls her eyes. “Oh for the love of—”

Ignoring her protests, you hold out your hand and start to count off on your fingers. “First of all, no talking about my boobs, my fingers, my ass, or my tongue, and no making any kind of references to our...extra-curricular activities.”

“Because I frequently discuss the benefits of our friendship with complete strangers, don’t I?” Carmilla asks flatly.

“Second of all, no feeling me up in public.”

“I’ll try to control myself,” Carmilla remarks dryly.

“And thirdly, I can tell you right now that we will not be sneaking off during the wedding reception to have sex somewhere.”

“You say that now, cutie...” Carmilla replies with a cocky smirk.

“I’m serious Carm,” you grumble. “I am literally begging you to act like a somewhat normal human being, just for a few days.”

“Ooh, you’re begging are you?” Carmilla’s smirk widens.

You groan, throwing your hands up in despair. “You’re unbelievable—”

“Relax,” Carmilla laughs, throwing an arm around your shoulders and propelling you towards the exit. You ignore how much her touch calms you down. “I’ll behave. Promise.”

Your dad texted before you got on the plane that he’d come to pick you up from the airport, and almost the second you walk through the door into the arrivals lounge you’re being swept up in one of his signature bear hugs.

“Ugh, Dad,” you laugh, muffled slightly where your face is pressed tightly against his chest. “Put me down.”

“It’s nice to see you too pumpkin,” your dad replies cheerfully once he’s finally set you back on your feet, ruffling your hair before glancing behind you. “And uh, Danny, you’ve…shrunk.”

You groan quietly when you realise you completely forgot to mention to your Dad that you were bringing someone else and not Danny. Sorry Dad, was too busy screwing my roommate senseless to let you know that she’d be coming with me instead of Danny. You then groan a second time because your dad is not as funny as he likes to think sometimes.

Ignoring the urge to take her hand instead, you reach out to grab a slightly uncomfortable looking Carmilla’s upper arm, tugging her forward to stand next to you. You don’t miss the way your dad’s gaze drops to stare suspiciously at the way your hand involuntarily lingers on Carmilla’s arm, clearly wondering if you’ve brought along a friend or a “friend”, but you choose to ignore it. “Dad, this is Carmilla—”

“Carmilla as in the roommate from hell I got eight irate calls per day about at the beginning of the school year?” He interrupts.

You flush bright red and Carmilla turns to you with a look of mock hurt.

“Dad I told you this already, Carm and I just had a rocky start,” you mumble. “We’re friends now.”

Your dad hmms, gives Carmilla a suspicious once-over and glances between the pair of you for a few seconds, before he apparently comes to the conclusion that Carmilla is harmless. There’s a brief moment of terror where you think he might try to hug Carmilla, but instead he cheerfully sticks his hand out and says, “Well it’s nice to officially meet you, Carmilla.”

Carmilla plasters on a convincing I’m not fucking your daughter face and smiles at your dad, shaking his proffered hand. “You too Mr Hollis.”

“Sherman,” your dad immediately says, nudging you out of the way so he can pick up yours and Carmilla’s suitcases. “None of this Mr Hollis nonsense. Call me Sherman.”

“Nice to meet you, Sherman,” Carmilla replies politely, and you try not to laugh. You should really have videoed this. Actual video proof that Carmilla is capable of being polite. Danny’s never going to believe you if you don’t have some hard evidence.

Your dad beams at the pair of you, before he gestures towards the exit sign and says, “Shall we?”

“That went well,” you mutter quietly to Carmilla as your dad launches into a monologue about how many airplane related disasters have occurred within an actual airport. “No bloodshed yet. I consider that a win.”

“Why do you sound so surprised?” Carmilla asks. “I am charming.”

The drive to the hotel consists of your dad bombarding you with questions about your classes and your friends, and you happily relaying him the heavily edited, party-and-sex-free, G-rated version of university life since you last saw him at Christmas. Carmilla, mercifully, manages to restrain herself from saying anything wildly inappropriate, and is surprisingly polite in the few answers your dad’s persistence manages to drag out of her, so by the time your dad pulls up to the hotel, an enormous fancy looking building somewhere in the outskirts of Amsterdam, the majority of your Carmilla-related nerves have settled.

You check in to the hotel, and after inspecting the room for any potential safety hazards and confirming dinner plans with the rest of the Hollis clan later, your dad disappears to give you and Carmilla some privacy to get settled in.

Somehow, you manage to resist Carmilla trying to lure you into the shower with her, and she grumpily relents when you point out being late for dinner, which is what will happen if you get distracted by each other in the shower, is not going to win her any points with the rest of your family. She continues her tradition of singing Taylor Swift at the top of her lungs while she uses all the complementary shower accessories, then leaves a wet towel on the floor for you to stand on while still wearing socks once she eventually vacates the bathroom.

By the time you’ve finished in the shower, you come out to see that Carmilla has moved the bedside table out of the way and has shoved the two beds together to make one big one. She’s sitting on it, scrolling through her phone, wearing her leather pants and an oversized grey jumper. She looks unfairly good in it, probably because it’s a bit oversized and shows off her collarbones which you’re very fond of kissing and leaving marks on, and isn’t her usual style of see-through lace that’s so tight it looks painted on. The sleeves are a bit too long for her and the whole visual makes her look exceptionally cuddly and huggable.

You just manage to resist the urge to blurt out something moronic like you look cute or I think we can squeeze in some cuddling before dinner, and instead quickly get changed before dragging Carmilla out of the room. Your dad is already waiting by the entrance to the restaurant when you arrive, and he waves you over once he catches sight of you.

“So are we the last ones to get here?”

“Zac and his girlfriend, Morgan, your uncle Isaac and aunt Angela are here and they'll be joining us shortly, Christopher’s arriving tomorrow morning since he couldn’t get today off work, and Quinn—”

“Laura!” You turn around just in time to see a blur of blonde hair zooming towards you before Quinn sweeps you up in a vice-like hug so tight you’re pretty sure you hear a few of your bones groan in protest. “It’s so good to see you!”

“Oof, you too,” you manage to squeak out, dramatically huffing in a breath when Quinn finally lets go of you. “This is my friend Carmilla.”

“Carmilla, hi.” Quinn offers Carmilla a blindingly bright smile that looks like it's caught Carmilla off guard a bit. “I’ve heard about you.”

“All terrible things, I’m sure.”

“Laura referred to you as Lucifer in leather pants once.”

“That’s a complete lie. I am a delight.”

You snort, ignoring Carmilla’s smug smile and turning back to Quinn. “So you excited for tomorrow then?”

“Absolutely!” Quinn beams at you, and promptly launches into a monologue. “We’ve been planning it for months so I expect it to be nothing short of perfect. Harry’s brother’s band is playing for us, the seating chart has been meticulously planned out to make sure grandma and grandpa are nowhere near that rude cousin of Harry’s so there’s no chance of another incident like the Hollis Christmas of 2011, the caterers have assured me that not a single mushroom has been used in any of the food…”

/

By the time you’ve finished washing, shampooing, conditioning, shaving, and wrapped yourself up in an extremely fluffy towel and exited the bathroom on the morning of the wedding, Carmilla’s already changed into her dress and is doing her makeup in front of the mirror. You take a few seconds to gawk at her — quite how you managed to bag literally the hottest woman you have ever laid eyes on as your sex friend, you have no idea — before rummaging through your suitcase for your own outfit.

Carmilla gives you a weird look when you head back into the bathroom to get changed into your dress — you ignore her; the thank you for coming with me and not being too much of an asshole black see through lingerie you put on underneath your dress might lose the element of surprise if Carmilla sees them before she rips your dress off once you’re back after the wedding — and when you finally squeeze into your dress and come out the bathroom, Carmilla’s busy fussing with her hair and blasting it with hairspray until it looks appropriately tousled.

Your dad knocks on the door, yelling good morning hurry up we’re going to be late while you run around looking for your shoes. While Carmilla’s still tending to her hair.

“You look great, let’s go,” you huff at Carmilla, still playing with her hair, while you try and yank your jacket on while simultaneously putting on your shoes. “If we’re late Quinn will murder me, most likely slowly and painfully, and I’d like to be alive later so you and I can take advantage of this nice large fluffy mattress.”

“We could’ve taken advantage of it last night if someone wasn’t too tired and fell asleep while I was brushing my teeth,” Carmilla remarks snidely, dragging her hand through her hair a final time before picking up her bag and heading towards the door.

You glare at her retreating back for a few seconds, before following her and your dad out of the room and into the elevator.

You spend a good majority of the wedding ceremony forcing yourself to pay attention to Quinn and Harry instead of staring at Carmilla, and ignoring the way your hand itches to close the small distance to lace your fingers with her’s, where her hand is sitting idly on her thigh. They say their vows, Quinn looking downright angelic in her dress and Harry looking quite spiffy in his tux, and you clap and cheer along with the rest of the guests when they have their first kiss as husband and wife, and you make a mental note to tease Carmilla later when you spy her discreetly dabbing at her eyes with a tissue when she thinks you aren’t paying attention.

The reception is held at a fancy country club just outside of the city, and there's a complementary glass of champagne being thrust into your hand almost the second you walk through the door. The waiter leads you and Carmilla and your dad over to your assigned table in the main hall, decorated with several extravagant vases of flowers and an ice bucket containing a bottle of rose wine that you can’t pronounce the name of and a bottle of champagne that’s probably expensive enough to put a downpayment on a midtown Manhattan apartment.

“Wow,” Carmilla says, picking up the champagne and looking at the label. “You Hollises don’t half-ass anything do you?”

The rest of your table is filled up by your grandparents, two of Harry's cousins you'd only met the day before at dinner, Zac and Morgan, and Zac's girlfriend Allison.

After three courses of some of the best food you've ever had, accompanied by more champagne, your uncle Isaac gives his father-of-the-bride speech about commitment and togetherness and how love conquers all, and then Harry’s brother Christopher lists almost every embarrassing moment of Harry’s life in his best man speech.

“I remember the first day Harry met Quinn," Christopher says, the laughter quieting down when it's apparent he's about to get to the serious part of his speech. "For those of you who don’t know, they met way back in college, when Harry and I were roommates, and Harry and Quinn were in the same organic chem class. And as much as they like to act all disgusting and romantic and cute now, it wasn’t actually love at first sight for them, it was actually a lot closer to hate at first sight.”

There’s a smattering of laughter around the room, Harry and Quinn exchange a sickeningly lovestruck look, and you get a weird feeling in your stomach.

“Harry came back to the dorm after that class, and complained for about a good solid hour about his annoying and prissy class-assigned lab partner. Now if you’d told me that day that Harry and this Quinn girl would end up getting married in several years time, I would’ve laughed in your face and asked for some of whatever you were smoking. And now, anyone who spends more than a minute with these two can see how in love they are, and can see just how well they fit together.”

Quinn blushes, and ducks her head to hide in Harry’s shoulder. You bite your lip to keep from laughing when Carmilla mutters gross under her breath.

“The point is, it’s surprising, how quickly you can start to see someone differently. How, with a little time, things that used to annoy you about someone become little quirks you can’t help but fall in love with. That you can meet your special someone under the most unexpected of circumstances. That the person you’re going to end up spending your life with could be right in front of you, and you don’t even know it yet. All you have to do is just be brave enough to take a chance on them. So, to quote the star of Harry’s favourite movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the best thing to hold onto in life is each other. To Harry and Quinn.”

You probably shouldn’t have had that third glass of champagne. You can feel it messing with your head, and that weird feeling in your stomach that feels strangely like butterflies multiples tenfold. You just tack it on to your ever-increasing list of things to think about at another time.

After the tables are cleared, the band starts into My Funny Valentine for Quinn and Harry’s first dance, and you can’t help but smile, knowing that it’s one of Carmilla’s favourite songs. For someone who wears so much leather and eyeliner, she has a remarkably large soft spot for slow jazz music.

“You know,” you lean in closer to Carmilla to whisper, and the scent of her perfume makes your head spin a little. Or maybe it’s just the champagne. Who knows. “You can admit you’re enjoying yourself.”

Carmilla just grumbles noncommittally, but you see the smile she tries to hide by lifting her glass up to her mouth.

“Come on, admit it. I’ll keep my mouth shut so you don’t ruin your reputation.”

“Fine,” she huffs quietly, ignoring the way you're grinning at her. “I’m having an average time.”

“Close enough.”

/

Zac’s girlfriend is one of those cultured and pretentious people who are into philosophy as a hobby, so naturally her and Carmilla have gotten along like a house on fire, and have been chatting animatedly about Camus for the past twenty minutes. You’re waiting behind some distant relative you vaguely recognise to get two more slices of cake for yourself and Carmilla, when Quinn appears beside you.

Over her shoulder, you catch sight of Carmilla. She’s gesturing enthusiastically at something Zac’s girlfriend is saying, but after a few seconds glances towards you and meets your gaze. She smiles at you over the rim of her champagne glass, and you swear your heart skips a beat, before starting to thump erratically against your ribs.

Quinn interrupts your staring match by nudging you in the side. “Hello? Earth to Laura?”

“Sorry, what?”

“I was asking how you and Carmilla met.”

“Oh, she’s my roommate.”

“Hm,” Quinn responds. You do your best not to overanalyse a simple hm. “So uh, are you and Carmilla...you know.” She trails off into a series of vague hand gestures and you try not to flush.

“Quinn, just because I’m a lesbian doesn’t mean I have a huge sappy crush on every girl I’m friends with.”

“I know that,” Quinn squawks indignantly. “I just meant— I don’t know. You guys seem pretty close.”

“We’re just friends.” It isn’t technically a lie, but for whatever reason that you don’t want to think about, calling Carmilla just a friend doesn’t feel right. “Pals. Comrades. Platonic buddies.”

Shut up Laura .

Thankfully someone calling Quinn’s name saves you from embarrassing yourself further and running out of appropriate synonyms for the word friend. She pats you on the arm, and turns to walk away, but stops at the last second and turns back to face you.

“Look, maybe I’m wrong and I’m just seeing things through my haze of newlywed bliss, but you don’t really look at her like she’s just a friend.” Something catches in your throat, and you just stare at Quinn like a deer caught in the headlights. “And neither does she.”

She disappears off into the crowd of people, and when you look back in Carmilla’s direction, she’s showing your dad something on her phone, both of them laughing at what is probably an unflattering photo of you that Carmilla sneakily took when you weren’t looking.

And your heart still hasn’t slowed down.

Well. That is complicated.

/

After a riotous performance of Shut Up And Dance, the band moves onto the slow romantic ballad portion of their set, and the majority of the dance floor is taken up by couples slow dancing and looking lovingly into each other's eyes.

“You want to dance?” You snort at Carmilla’s unexpected question, forkful of cake halfway to your mouth, and she looks insulted. “What?”

“You know how to slow dance?” You ask, honestly more surprised that Carmilla willingly wants to dance than at the fact she actually asked at all.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Dancing just doesn’t seem like your kind of thing.”

“I also know how to waltz,” Carmilla says, wiggling her eyebrows ridiculously.

“Is that a euphemism for some weird sex position I’ve never heard of?”

“Oh my God, not everything is about sex,” Carmilla huffs.

"Not everything is about sex?" You stick out your hand. "Hi, I don't think we've met. I'm Laura."

"You're an idiot," Carmilla huffs, batting your hand away. "Do you want to dance or not, asshole."

"Oh well when you phrase it like that, how could anyone resist such a charming offer?"

You stand up, offering your hand out to Carmilla. she glares at it for a few seconds, before grumbling to herself while she stands and slips her hand into yours.

Using a bit more pointy elbow force than necessary, Carmilla pulls you into a little gap on the dance floor, slipping her arms round your waist and tugging you closer so you can wrap your arms round her shoulders, while the band starts into a faintly jazzy song you vaguely recognise.

“You know, you asking if I wanted to dance is what got us into this whole thing in the first place. The Halloween party,” you clarify, when Carmilla looks confused. “That was the first time we hooked up. You asked if I wanted to dance.”

Carmilla grins impishly. “I like to think you would’ve succumbed to my charms eventually. The dancing was just—”

“You playing dirty?”

“It worked didn’t it?” Carmilla replies with a smug smile.

“Has anyone told you recently how annoying you are?” You grumble. “Because if not, allow me to remind you: you’re annoying.”

“That’s no way to speak to the best dance partner you will ever have.”

Carmilla pushes you away slightly, which you take as your cue to dramatically spin around, and no sooner has she pulled you back in is she theatrically lowering you into a dip, and you can't help but laugh. “Alright Fred Astaire, I get the point, you know how to dance.”

“The rest of your family are all so nice and polite, how did you turn out like this?”

“My rude roommate rubbed off of me,” you retort, continuing to talk when Carmilla opens her mouth to respond with an inappropriate comment. “And nice and polite aren’t really words that come to mind when I think about my family. More so words like overbearing and too much.”

“They love you,” Carmilla responds, breaking eye contact to look somewhere over your shoulder. “Not everybody is that lucky.”

It’s such a nonchalant comment but it still catches you off-guard and sobers you a bit.

“Sorry," you wince. "I uh- I didn’t mean-”

“It’s fine,” Carmilla says, shrugging slightly.

“Thank you, by the way,” you say, changing the subject abruptly. “For agreeing to come with me. I know this isn’t your first choice of how you’d like to have spent your one of your last free weekends before finals—”

“True.”

“And you’d probably rather be locked in the dorm room with a book or me naked—”

“Also true.”

“But I’m glad you’re here. Thank you.”

“Yes well, you’re my friend and you asked. And sometimes I feel like being nice. Only occasionally though, so don’t go getting any ideas.” Carmilla leans in closer so her lips brush against your ear, and you try not to whimper when her voice lowers to whisper. “The only ideas you should be getting are how to properly thank me later on once we’re all alone in our nice big hotel room with our nice big bed.”

“I think that’s the first time you’ve willingly called me your friend without any kind of prompting or bribing,” you laugh nervously, trying to hide how flustered Carmilla can make you with a single comment and ignoring the flush you can feel rising on your face.

Carmilla laughs, and then you both fall into a comfortable silence while the song changes, and you try your best not to trip over your own feet when you recognise the song. There’s probably a rule, maybe some kind of clause in the Friends With Benefits For Dummies handbook, about slow dancing with your no strings attached fuck buddy to a song about how you can’t help falling in love with someone, but Carmilla hasn't objected, jerked back and out of your arms and stomped off towards the bar the second the song changed, so you don’t hesitate in tightening your arms around her and resting your cheek on her shoulder.

Carmilla’s arms tighten minutely around your waist, drawing you in closer to press fully against her front while she hums quietly along to the song, while you both sway slowly along to the song, and you hope that Carmilla can't feel how quickly your heart is beating.

/

It’s close to one am by the time you make it back to the hotel, having gotten a taxi back with Carmilla, your dad, Zac and Allison, all five of you slightly inebriated. Your dad’s room and Zac and Allison's room are both on the floor below yours, so once the elevator dings the arrival at the fourth floor, he pulls both you and a surprised Carmilla into a hug, before saying goodnight and trotting down the hall after Zac and Allison. The elevator doors have barely slid shut before Carmilla’s arms winds around your waist from behind, her front presses into your back and she nuzzles into your neck with no regard for the security camera in the corner of the elevator pointing straight at you.

“Carm,” you laugh, trying to wriggle out of her embrace. “You managed to go the whole evening without groping me or making any inappropriate comments-”

“Not an easy task, I can assure you,” Carmilla murmurs, nipping at your earlobe.

“Well I think you can wait an extra minute or two until we’re in the privacy of our own room.”

Carmilla groans like you’ve asked her to do the impossible, but thankfully refrains from shoving her hand up your dress or groping at your chest or something equally scandalous.

“Anyway, I have a surprise for you,” you tell her with a smug smile as the elevator dings again at the doors slide open, remembering how it was of the utmost importance that you got changed in the bathroom earlier that morning.

Carmilla’s face lights up with mischievous glee at the word surprise , and you take her hand before you can think better of it and tug her out of the elevator and down the hall.

By the time you reach your room, your skin is prickling with anticipation, and the seconds the door swings shut behind you Carmilla’s backing you into it, pulling you into a heated kiss and keeping you pinned against the door.

Her hands land on your waist while your arms lift around her shoulders and your hands tangle in her hair, tilting your head slightly so you can kiss her deeper. Her hips stutter forward slightly when you brush your tongue against her bottom lip, and whimpers quietly into the kiss when you nibble at it. She pulls back from the kiss, and you take a few moments to feel smug about how quickly you can reduce Carmilla — Carmilla, of all people — to a breathless, flushed mess.

"Turn around," she murmurs, and you stop yourself from making some lewd comment when you see the look in her eyes. Her pupils are blown wide already, her heated gaze raking hungrily over you, but there's something else hiding under all that lust. Something deeper and more significant, that you've caught sight of once or twice the most recent times you've had sex with her, but the look in her eyes gone too quickly for you to decipher it.

You turn around obediently, inhaling sharply when she brushes your hair off your shoulder and presses a soft kiss to the back of your neck. Taking hold of the zipper of your dress, she drags it down your back achingly slowly, her mouth following and pressing feather-light kisses to each inch of skin that gets revealed. Your dress falls to the floor with a soft thump, and you turn back round while Carmilla stands back up, and her mouth promptly drops open at the sight of the black lace barely covering your body.

"Wow," is all she says, which is about the reaction you were going for.

"Consider it a thank you present for agreeing to come here," you say with a grin, winding your arms around her neck and pulling her in for a quick kiss.

“If this is how you're going to start thanking me for being nice, I'll do anything you want.”

You laugh, before kissing her again, and start walking her backwards towards the bed, both of you shedding the rest of your clothes — minus your lingerie since you have a feeling Carmilla is going to enjoy taking them off herself — as you go.

Carmilla is gloriously naked in no time, and you don't hesitate to let your hands roam across all her bare skin suddenly on display. The backs of her knees hit the edge of the bed and you both tumble down onto it. Carmilla kisses you deeply, and then flips you over onto your back, trapping you against the mattress with her arms. Her tongue sliding against yours and her hands running over your bare overheated skin are driving you insane with want, and she shudders and moans quietly when your drag your nails lightly down her back. You feel like you're drowning in her, you can hardly breathe.

She pulls back to catch her breath, and without thinking about it you reach up to brush her bangs out of her eyes with one hand, other hand gently tracing her cheek. She's gazing down at you with the most wonderstruck expression, and something about the way she’s smiling down at you makes your heart thump in an unsteady and unfamiliar way.

"You're so beautiful," you murmur without thinking, and Carmilla's breath hitches.

You're worried it was the wrong thing to say and that Carmilla might get up and leave the room, but instead she leans down and kisses you softly. Her tongue strokes languidly against yours before she sucks on your bottom lip and then tugs on it slightly with her teeth, and things go from slow to heated pretty quickly.

Carmilla spends ages kissing down your body, laving at your nipples with her tongue over your bra, before undoing the clasp of the bra and slowly pulling the straps down your arms, peppering your skin with kisses as she goes, and then swirls her tongue over your bare nipples, scraping her teeth over them every now and then. She drifts further down, sucking bruises into your stomach and kissing across your hipbones until your breath is coming in ragged gasps, and by the time she eventually settles between your legs you honestly think you’re about to combust, possibly die, if she doesn’t touch you in the next few seconds.

Automatically, your hands drift down to thread into her hair, brushing it off her face and tugging involuntarily with each swipe of her tongue or nip of her teeth against your skin, and she glances up at you just as you look down.

You’ve had sex with her countless times by now, but something about the way she’s looking at you and the moonlight illuminating her face is making this time feel different.

(It feels as though it matters.)

You’re steered away from going down that uncomfortable path when Carmilla’s tongue finally slides across you and destroys any semblance of rational thought. A loud moan falls from your mouth as her tongue begins to work against you rhythmically, dragging through the abundant wetness, pushing inside ever so slightly, lightly flicking against your clit, all slowly at first and then gradually quickening in speed to pull more unrestrained guttural moans from you.

Before you can register it her hand slides down from your hip and she slowly presses a single finger into you, followed quickly by a second. Your right hand flails around, aiming for Carmilla’s head so you can cling onto her hair, but instead it gets caught by Carmilla’s free hand reaching up to grab your hand. She links your fingers together and rests your joined hands against your stomach, helping to keep your hips still.

You’re already too far gone to read too much into it, even if you know logically Carmilla isn’t exactly the hand holding type. Each swipe of her tongue and each curl of her fingers send sparks of white hot pleasure coursing through you, building you higher and higher until you can barely breathe.

The feeling of her mouth sucking at your clit is enough to send you over the edge, thighs quivering and back arching up against the mattress, your eyes squeezed shut and your head tossed back against the pillows while you moan out her name.

It’s exactly the same as any of the other countless times Carmilla’s made you come. Except that it’s not. Your stomach feels all fluttery, and your heart is racing a mile a minute from the way Carmilla’s still looking at you, like you hung the stars in the sky.

You push that thought as far out of your head as you can, because this is the worst possible time to be thinking about things like that, and once you've recovered enough, you tug Carmilla up from between your legs and yank her down into a bruising kiss, swallowing her surprised gasp.

Carmilla moves to straddle your lap when you sit up, and your hands automatically go to her ass, grabbing and squeezing and encouraging her to grind her hips down against you. She groans loudly into the kiss when her clit connects with your thigh, and you can’t help but whimper when you realise just how wet she is already. Her hands slip into your hair, tugging slightly, and you get the message pretty quickly. Ducking your head, your lips close around her nipple, and she gasps and arches her back, her fingers tightening in your hair.

You could easily spend hours just lavishing attention on Carmilla's breasts and nothing else, but Carmilla is a bit more impatient than that. She reaches behind her and takes hold of one of your hands, and pulls it off her ass and down to between her legs with a mumbled I want you inside me, and the plea sends a pulse of white hot heat through your body to throb between your legs.

She’s so wet and hot against your fingers, and you only tease her for a few seconds before sinking two fingers into her.

Through the haze of lust it dawns on your that you probably shouldn’t want this quite this much. It’s one thing to enjoy the sex with Carmilla and be a courteous friend-with-benefits and make sure she comes each time, but it’s another thing entirely to be paying full attention to the varying expressions of pleasure flicking across Carmilla’s face instead of watching your fingers sliding in and out of her. It’s another thing entirely to not have the usual stream of dirty talk about how good Carmilla feels and how hot she is, and instead just watch her as she whimpers and moans and squirms in your lap. It’s another thing entirely to feel like nothing exists outside of Carmilla rocking her hips down to meet your fingers and her tightening slightly around you when you curl your fingers just right.

You try to distract yourself from these intrusive thoughts by focusing on the way Carmilla moans loudly when you slide a third finger into her. Carmilla’s arms wind around your shoulders, her forehead resting against yours as she gasps and pants against your mouth in time with the movements of your fingers inside her. Your other arm wraps around her, palm splaying out over her lower back and encouraging her to roll her hips down to meet your thrusts.

Carmilla gasps your name like a prayer, her hands tightening in your hair when you angle your hand to brush your thumb against her clit.

“God— fuck, right there Laura,” Carmilla groans when you apparently hit a particularly sensitive spot, burying her face into your shoulder, her entire body shuddering.

“That’s it, Carm,” you murmur into her ear, nibbling on her earlobe. “I want to feel you come for me.”

Her hips jerk wildly a few more times, before she goes rigid for a few seconds, and then comes with a loud moan, her entire body shuddering and shaking against you.

When she comes down from her high, you slowly slide your fingers out of her, and she slides off your lap to sprawl out on her back next to you, flushed chest rising and falling quickly as she tries to catch her breath while basking in the afterglow.

Pulling the blanket up to cover both of you, you roll over to face away from her — looking at her feels like too much right now, and it terrifies you that you think you know why — and a second later you feel her front pressing against your back. Her arm wraps around your waist and she presses a soft kiss to the back of your neck.

“Goodnight cupcake,” she mumbles into your hair, snuggling closer.

“Goodnight Carm.”

You fall asleep trying not to think of how right it feels to be in her arms.

/

You wake up the following morning still tangled up with Carmilla.

The sheets and her body pressed up against yours have created a nice cocoon of body heat that you don’t want to leave, and as much as you want to just close your eyes and let her soft and steady familiar breathing lull you back to sleep, unfortunately you really need to pee.

You sit up slowly so as not to wake Carmilla, and reach out your arm out to sleepily locate your phone to see the time. It’s 6:51am, plenty of time to snuggle back up to Carmilla and sleep for a bit longer.

You yawn and drag a hand through your hair to push it off your face, before glancing down to look at Carmilla next to you. You moving has caused her to shift, rolling over to sprawl out on her back over the rest of the bed, mumbling something quietly in her sleep as she goes. Her mouth is slightly open and her eyelashes flutter softly against her cheek. Her dark hair is a stark contrast against the white pillows and the early morning sunlight filtering through the curtains casts light across her bare chest slowly rising and falling as she breathes.

Something lurches inside your chest at the sight and- oh.

Oh.

So this is what love feels like.