Notes: a Valentine's gift for a tumblr exchange, based mostly on my own various blunders as a first-year in university. Unfortunately said blunders have not yet landed me a boyfriend but I'm trying.
Title from Swinging London by the Magnetic Fields

Rey loves the reading room for a few simple reasons. First off, the stained glass windows and musty book smell provide an almost magical ambiance that makes every day spent there a little thrilling. Secondly, it's only open until 6 PM during the week, so it helps her remember to go home and eat dinner instead of just staying up studying forever. Thirdly, and most importantly, it's a silent room- silent. Even whispering is punished. It's practically orgastic for a stressed engineering-and-computer science double-major to have real, genuine, calming silence.

Except for today, that is, when her body seems determined to betray her by hiccuping, loudly, every minute or two.

She would have left if she hadn't desperately needed to study for an upcoming midterm, and, well, there isn't exactly anything she can do about it other than cover her mouth with the sleeve of her hoodie and try to be quiet. The worst part isn't even that she's being disruptive, because she really isn't. The worst part is that the only one who seems to notice is the guy sitting across from her.

The tragically hot guy who always sits across from her, who always has socks with cute, weird prints on them, who twists his feet in this really endearing way when he sits down, who she's never met or even talked to but still managed to develop a tiny crush on.

Who startles and glowers every time she hiccups.

Basically Rey is ready to die in every possible way.

After about half an hour he finally leans across the table and hisses, "Can you stop that?"

"I can't control it!" she snaps back, embarrassed. He scowls and looks pointedly back at his book, and she goes back to her laptop.

A few minutes of hiccuping later, he sighs loudly and she glares at him. He glares back until she whispers, "If you have a problem, you can move," and points aggressively at a table on the other side of the room.

"Do you not have a bottle of water or something you can-"

"If you can't be quiet," says the librarian ominously, looming over them, "you can excuse yourselves from the room."

Both students shrink under his glare. It's not a suggestion. Chastened, they pack their things as quickly as they can and hurry out. Rey takes a second to glare at cute-socks, cute-feet, cute-face jerk before padding hurriedly down the stairs in her sock-feet to the carpet where they're required to leave their shoes, in order to protect the old building's antique floors. As she stands on one foot, tugging on her boot, she overbalances and tips sideways, but before she can start flailing to regain her balance, someone catches her around the shoulders and sets her to rights. She looks up at him, and it's the guy, so he immediately lets go of her as if she's caught fire, coughs awkwardly, and kneels to tie his own boots. She doesn't hold the door for him on her way out.

Finn, her best friend-slash-forever roommate, works in the coffee shop across the street from the library, and she tries not to slam the door as she storms in. "Finn I'm going to commit murder," she announces when she gets to the counter.

"Caramel mocha, then?" he asks pleasantly, tapping at the register. She nods and digs her wallet out of her pocket, turning to glance at the door when the entry bell rings. It's him again, and she narrows her eyes and is about to snarl something about him following her when Poe, Finn's coworker and hopeless crush, calls out to him.

"Look who crawled out of the stacks for once!" Rey's not surprised Poe's friends with him, Poe's friends with everyone, she's pretty sure it's impossible to have met Poe and not immediately become his friend, but it does kind of surprise her that Library Asshole has any friends. He seems to keep the same constant study-hours she does, which don't leave much room for socialization, and her few interactions with him have been perfunctory and somewhat awkward, so he clearly doesn't have the advantage of her sunny personality to make up for his lack of free time.

Library Jerk looks between her and Poe, waves awkwardly to the latter, and then turns around and leaves.

Rey rolls her eyes and Poe's immediately taken Finn's place at the counter. "What did you do to Ben?" he asks urgently, an unreadable glint in his eye.

"Oh, is that his name?" Rey responds coolly. "He didn't tell it to me before he got us both kicked out of the library."

"He's the one you're gonna kill?" Finn asks, fiddling with the espresso machine as Rey passes a five across the counter to Poe.

"Aw, Rey, leave him alone, Ben's harmless, he's just really weird," says Poe as he counts out her change.

"How do you know him? I'm, like, ninety percent sure he lives in that library. He's there whenever I am."

"Oh, we're roommates, I've known him basically since he was born." It clicks in Rey's head then- Poe talks about his weird, pale, misanthropic roommate-slash-childhood best friend Ben occasionally, usually with the air of exasperated fondness one applies to the old and incredibly surly cat one's grandmother has owned since time immemorial. Neither she nor Finn has ever actually met him, though, which makes sense given the whole 'antisocial library gremlin' aspect he seems to embody.

Finn passes the coffee across the counter to Rey and says, "Well, you can't kill him now, Poe probably can't pay the rent on his own."

Poe shrugs. "Eh, his parents love me, they'd probably fund his half of the apartment if he died."

Rey rolls her eyes and takes a sip of the coffee. "Everyone loves you, Poe, if you can get money out of it you should be doing that already. This is divine, by the way, Finn."

"That would be dishonest!" gasps Poe, mock-offended. "Of course it's divine, Finn made it, and Finn is an angel." Poe pinches Finn's cheek, and the younger man rolls his eyes and tries to hide his blush, failing. Rey gives him a sly look over the rim of her cup.

"Anyway, I'm going back to the apartment to try and finish studying for this midterm, I'll see you tonight. Poe, feel free to tell your roommate I'm very cross with him and he'd best watch his back. Bye!" Rey blows a kiss to Finn as she leaves, and Poe pretends to snatch it out of the air and smack it to his own cheek, and she's giggling as she makes her way down the street towards her apartment.

Rey's not sure what Poe said to him, if anything, but the next time she's at the library, two days later, she takes her usual seat and flashes Ben a polite smile- she can admit, after the fact, that she wasn't blameless either, and she's over it, anyway. His ears turn bright red and he practically hides behind his book, grimacing. She has to bite back a smile, because it's honestly kind of adorable. He doesn't look at her again the rest of the night, and he leaves about ten minutes before the library closes.

She strolls into the coffee shop on her way out of the library and props her elbows on the counter. Poe lights up when he sees her. "Rey!" he crows, sweeping over and propping himself on the other side of the counter in a mirror image.

"I've got a beast of a midterm tomorrow, wish me luck."

"You don't need it," says Poe with a dismissive wave. "You'll be fine. But good luck anyway."

Finn places the drink he was making on the counter and calls out the order, then joins them both at the counter. "Poe invited us to his Valentine's party," he says. "Well, he invited me, and he told me to bring you, so that means you're going." Rey makes a face and opens her mouth to protest but Finn cuts her off. "When was the last time you hung out with someone who wasn't me? Thought so. You're going to the party."

"I don't need you to look after my social life," she huffs.

"Yes you do," Finn replies, messing up her hair. "Anyway, we're going, it'll be fun, if you're really miserable we'll find you a cat to hang out with so you can avoid everyone."

"Ugh, fine, I'll go to the party," she says dramatically, sighing like it's a great burden. Finn rolls his eyes- Rey's as much of a social butterfly as he and Poe are, she just tends to get overwhelmed and exhausted around too many people. "Anyway, I'm going to go home and be a lump for the rest of the night to rest up for my midterm, I'll see you later. Bye, Poe!"

"Bye, Rey!" he calls after her, blowing her a kiss. She catches it in the air and puts it in her pocket.

Rey stumbles into the coffee shop after her afternoon midterm the next day looking shell-shocked and miserable. She stands listlessly at the counter for a long moment before Finn grimaces and asks, "That bad?" To which she nods, looking as if she's about to burst into tears.

"I hate engineering. I need coffee. Make it so sweet my teeth fall out and I have to become a hermit on a mountain to fit my new toothless aesthetic." She starts to dig out her wallet and Poe appears, seemingly out of nowhere, and slaps a twenty down on the counter in front of Finn.

"One incredibly sweet coffee for one incredibly sweet girl, courtesy of my extremely awkward and apologetic roommate." Poe winks at her as he slides away to make the drink. "He feels really bad for the other day but is too… Ben to actually, you know, speak to you in order to buy you apology coffee." He scrawls on the cup before handing it over to her with a flourish.

"'Ben is very very sorry he got you kicked out of the library,'" she reads, "frowny-face. Aww, thank you Ben-by-proxy, that's very sweet of you." She sips it and groans appreciatively. They're not allowed to have drinks in the library so she hangs out at the coffee shop chatting with Finn and Poe until she finishes her drink and then makes her way across the street to the library.

She takes her usual seat and scribbles a note on the margin of her paper- thank you for the coffee, that was very sweet of you- and slides it across the table. He blushes to the tips of his ears and waves his hand dismissively, scratching out a response. Don't worry about it, he writes, according to Poe you were 'very cross with me' so it's the least I could do. She grins at him and he manages a smile back, his ears still red.

After a half hour of struggling with one of her logic problems, she scrawls another note in the margin and turns the notebook to show him: Are you going to be at Poe's Valentine party? He spends a strangely long time studying the page, frowns, turns to a new page, and starts writing furiously.

You did 3a wrong- the symbol indicates the opposite of not-P and P-or-Q, but you interpreted it as P and P-and-Q, so all your answers are off. He spends half the page explaining the question in patient, nearly illegible detail, and then at the bottom- Yes, I'll be at Poe's party, since I live there, but I won't be happy about it.

She gapes at his answer for a long moment, then tears out another page to write You understand deductive logic? He looks like he's biting back a smile as he responds, I'm a fourth-year philosophy major, I should hope I understand the intro subjects by now. She responds with an enthusiastic, bubble letter HELP! surrounded by frowny faces, and he has to bite his hand to keep from laughing.

The note-passing system works well, for a while, till she gets to one particularly complicated question, and then he frowns at the paper, frowns at her, checks to see if the librarian is in earshot, and leans over the table to start explaining it to her in a low whisper. She tries, valiantly, to ignore how nice he smells and focus all of her attention on the question, but even she can feel her cheeks getting warm. After a moment it clicks, suddenly, and she gasps in understanding, jerking her head up and hitting him square on the forehead. He falls back into his seat with a clatter and a yelp and she immediately leans across the table and tries to hiss apologies as quietly as she can while he tries to simultaneously wave her away and shush her, and they both go silent when they feel the librarian appear next to them, like a demon from the air, ominous and disapproving. He doesn't even have to say anything, and they're both offering him sheepish smiles and gathering their things, trying to ignore all the eyes on them.

She knocks her shoulder into his as they're walking down the hall. "I guess I owe you a coffee now, huh?"

He ducks his head, grinning. "You don't have to."

"Oh, I insist," she replies loftily. "Isn't that how this works? Whoever got the other kicked out buys the coffee."

"Fair deal." He reaches out an arm to help her balance while she pulls on her boots and she smiles her thanks, trying not to react to the way his ears redden in response.

When they walk into the coffee shop, Finn and Poe both call out to them, an excited "Rey!" from Finn and a confused "Ben?" from Poe.

Rey slaps her wallet down on the counter and leans across to fix Finn's crooked collar. "I need something very sweet for me and whatever he likes." She gestures at Ben, and Poe bites back a grin, saluting her. She turns to Ben and says, "Now that we're here where we can talk, would you explain the rest of the problem to me?" His mouth opens and closes for a second, before he shrugs and nods. There's a clatter behind the counter and Rey turns in time to see Finn and Poe looking quickly away from each other, schooling their expressions with limited success.

For the next hour or so Ben walks her through the problems on the assignment, and he's a good teacher- patient and understanding, without ever just giving her the answer. It doesn't hurt that he's also snarky and amicable now that they're past most of the awkward shyness. Whenever a joke falls flat he makes this dramatic grimace and that gets her to giggle without fail. The whole time they're there studying, Finn and Poe are whispering frantically back and forth to each other in between customers, and Rey chooses to ignore it in favor of paying attention to her work and the cute boy sitting next to her.

When Rey checks her watch and decides to head home, Poe appears at her shoulder as if from thin air and gives his roommate a pointed look as he says, "Ben, you should go home too and do the thing that I told you to do. With the kitchen. You know." Ben stares at him, lost, and Poe intensifies his look and says. "You can walk Rey, since her apartment is on the way anyways."

Ben shrugs and looks to Rey, who also shrugs her approval, and then tries to ignore the delighted look that passes between Finn and Poe.

And that's how the habit forms- most days they'll stay in the library like usual, passing notes and being very careful not to make too much noise, then hanging out at the coffee shop afterwards until Finn and Poe finish their shifts and they all four walk home together. Rey learns a lot about Ben in the two weeks between the first time they met and Poe's Valentine's party, like how the socks he always wears with weird prints on them are from his dad (he always gets a weird, shadowed cast over his face when he talks about his dad, like it's a sore subject but he's trying to pretend it isn't) and the mottled, lumpy scarf he wears all the time was made by his mother. He and Poe grew up together, and they'd both been steadfastly determined to join the Air Force together when they graduated high school, because everyone in Ben's family had always been pilots, it was what the Skywalkers and Solos did, but Ben's mom talked them both out of it and they decided to become aeronautics engineers instead. (Ben ended up switching his major about a million times his first year before deciding on philosophy and English literature- "The two least employable fields in the universe," he joked, "my dream is to be perpetually homeless.") He's still weird and antisocial, strangely irritable at seemingly random times, but he's always embarrassed and apologetic about it, so Rey doesn't mind.

She doesn't like to talk about her past much, mainly because it's depressing to hear about the poor little orphan girl who spent her whole life refusing to be placed out for fostering or adoption and running away from every home they tried to put her in because she believed so steadfastly that her family was coming for her. She doesn't tell that story, to anyone, ever. Only Finn knows, really, because he was there for it. But she talks to Ben about the future, about her dreams of building rockets and airplanes, about all the limitless possibilities of the universe and science. Rey knows she tends to ramble when she really gets going about a topic, especially something she's passionate about, but Ben never seems bored, instead looking almost entranced when she gets into talking about the feasibility of certain sci-fi elements like laser guns and teleportation.

And then it's Valentine's and Rey finds herself worrying more than she logically should over what to wear- it's just Poe, and Finn, it's no big deal, she could show up in jeans and a t-shirt and they probably wouldn't even notice.

Except, says the little voice in the back of her head, Ben's going to be there too. So she gnaws on her bottom lip and surveys her closet again, finding it lacking. Finally, she gives up, falling back onto the bed, and shouts for Finn, who saunters in in fitted jeans and a button-down, looking just the right mix of hot and casual, and she pouts at him, spiteful that he has such an easy time being hot and she's so helpless. He rolls his eyes at her and grabs a dress off the hanger and tosses it onto her face, a knee-length, gauzy, draped beige number she'd forgotten she owned. Shoes come next- nude flats, always the right choice- and then a pair of tights. He tosses a flippant "Thank me after you've banged him" over his shoulder as he leaves her to change.

"You're the best and I love you!" she calls after her friend, sitting up to tug on the tights. By the time she's ready, they're leaving ten minutes later than they'd intended, which puts them at fifteen minutes late to the party, which Finn declares the perfect amount of time to be deemed fashionably late, but without seeming apathetic.

Rey doesn't have a lot of experience with alcohol, so her limits are kind of an abstract concept to her, so it genuinely seems like a reasonable thing to play Kings with Finn and Ben and Poe and Poe's friend Jessika and some other people whose names Rey can't remember. She might have been a little drunk when they started, but by the time the game officially ends, she's absolutely wasted. Like, embarrassingly wasted.

And, it turns out, she's a cuddly drunk.

That second bit only becomes obvious after Ben disappears to his bedroom, declaring himself done with social interaction for the month. Rey pouts dramatically after him, but he doesn't see, so after she fails to find Finn, or Poe, or Poe's enormously fat orange tabby-cat, BB-8, she decides to go hang out with Ben, ignoring his protest when she flings the door open then flops down onto his bed, pressing her face into his chest.

"My god you are so drunk," he says, somewhere between amused and exasperated, abandoning the book he was reading on the nightstand.

"We're friends," she slurs, "right? I think we're friends. You're nice to me. I'm nice to you. I like hanging out with you, and not just cause I like your face and it's cute when you blush and do that thing with your feet." She tries to emulate the thing, crossing her own feet over themselves. "I feel like we're friends."

He takes a moment to reply and she lifts her head to see him looking vaguely shell-shocked, his ears bright red. "Yeah," he managed, finally. "We're friends."

"Good," she sighs, settling back down against his chest and curling herself against him. "I'm glad we're friends. That's step three."

"Step three of what?" he asks, amused, his arm coming up around her shoulder.

She starts to tick off on her fingers. "Step one, get you to notice I exist. Step two, get you to talk to me. Step three, become friends. Step four, ask you out in a really cute and memorable way. Step five, everything else. Boom. Five-step plan for success."

His face splits into a wide grin and she can't help the soft sigh that escapes her. He's so pretty when he smiles. "Does this count as step four, then?" he asks, gesturing vaguely to her.

Rey rolls her eyes. "No, this isn't step anything. This is me taking advantage of the fact that I'm drunk and brave. None of the steps can happen while I'm drunk, I might forget." He laughs at that, a low, soft sound that she can feel more than hear with her cheek still pressed against his chest.

"Well you'd better sober up and get on step four," he says, and she nods emphatically, wrapping one arm around his waist and squeezing. He's warm and solid under her and it's not long before she falls asleep on top of him.

It's another week before she can get up the guts to go back to the library and face him. It takes her almost a full day to get past the lingering embarrassment of bursting into his room and snuggling with him, then telling him a five-step plan she made up on the spot about how to ask him out. It's not her lowest point, but it has her groaning and hiding her face every time her thoughts stray anywhere near it.

Finn, for his part, is relentless with his teasing, and his photos of Ben and Rey curled up together, fast asleep and, objectively, adorable. He can't stop rubbing it in her face that she may have slept with her crush, but he got laid, so who's the real winner? She smacks him every time he does, and he probably has a permanent bruise on his shoulder, but he deserves it, so she doesn't feel bad. Poe's on her case, too, every time she's in the coffee shop, dropping hints about how charming she and Ben are and how he's just smitten and how he's been despondent since she's been avoiding him, and she just snarks back with remarks about how he needs to spend less time with a thesaurus and more time with his new boyfriend, which always sets him and Finn to making moony-eyes at each other and gets them to stop bothering her. She'll face Ben when she's ready- and by that she means when she can stop turning red and wanting to die at the memory of the night.

Finally she steels her nerves and marches into the library one afternoon like she's going to battle. He lights up when he sees her, breaking into that same broad, knee-liquefying grin from Valentine's, and she has to sit down or she thinks she might fall over. The first thing she does is pass over a note she'd written and tossed out and re-written a dozen times over the course of the day. The final draft says I'm sorry about Valentine's, that was weird and I was drunk and I'm very very embarrassed about it, and I'm sorry about avoiding you, I was very very embarrassed.

He doesn't hesitate to write back, It's fine- it was nice. A little weird, but I'm the one in the glass house, so…. It was nice. He passes it to her, looks thoughtful, then takes it back and scrawls something else before standing and making his way towards the stairs that lead to the upper stacks. There's a book I want to show you, I think it'll help you with your logic class, follow me, he's written, and it seems weird, but she follows him anyway. Between two of the back corner shelves, she finds him looking nervous and not even glancing at the books, and, god, it's so transparent and cliche and she thinks she needs to sit down because it's cute, too, and beats all the plans she had for step four.

She grins up at him and she's about to say something when he interrupts her with a low, nervous, "Can I kiss you?"

Rey responds by going up on her toes and pressing her lips to his, and he melts almost immediately into her, his arms coming around her waist in an embrace that's both eager and cautious, like he's thrilled it's happening and worried he still might mess it up. The kiss is sweet and chaste, and then he scrapes his teeth over her lower lip and she shivers, biting back a moan, and it's not chaste anymore.

It's the first time she's ever gotten kicked out of a library for making out in the stacks, but somehow she doesn't think it'll be the last.

They're making their way outside, giddy and blushing and holding hands like teenagers, and he knocks his shoulder against hers and says, "So whose fault was it this time?"

She hums thoughtfully. "I'll take the blame if you let me buy you coffee."

"Well, yeah, that's how it works," he says, and she smacks him lightly on the chest.

"I meant like a date, you donut," she says, but she can't manage a scowl around the wide smile still dominating her face.

There are snowflakes caught in his eyelashes and they glimmer almost magically in the streetlight as he leans over to kiss her again, murmuring against her lips, "I thought you'd never ask."