It isn't the sharp chill of pavement against her bare skin that first rouses her from the bleariness of sleep. Nor is it the insistent whisper of night wind through her hair. She stirs, and mumbles something - a thought she can't quite grasp, a word she can't quite find - and tries to turn over.

But whatever - whoever - is nudging her in the ribs refuses to give up.

"Lisa."

She keens a little at her name, stretches and cracks open an eye. But it hurts too much to leave it open, and she closes it again to shut out the piercing darkness of a midwinter's night.

"Lisa," her name comes again, wrapped in the throaty rumble of a voice she thinks she knows, that she's heard above the noisy babble of a lecture hall, that has called to her from across a football field, that has flatly informed her that she was a moron for not getting the answer in the five minutes he'd given her to work out a problem.

"Mmmm," she protests, flinging out an arm to stave off the next nudge. "Leavemealone."

"Can't," is the curt response, as she feels his hand trace a surprisingly gentle path across her forehead, as she senses him lean closer to breathe her in. "You," he continues, as he slips his arms under her back and gathers her into him, "are remarkably unconscious and remarkably drunk. And an easy target for any frat boy who walks by with a hard-on and a case of beer in his system."

"Like you?" she replies lazily, tartly - she is always tart with him - as she tucks herself against the solid warmth of his body and loops her arms around his neck. "Mmmm," she hums against his chest. "WhereamI?"

"Passed out in the first quad," he replies, as he slowly gets to his feet. She giggles as the world sways away, as he takes a couple of steps to regain his balance.

"Where are your friends?" he asks her, not ungently, "I presume you still call them that, even after they abandoned you to the wolves tonight."

She's almost asleep again, rocked against his chest and cradled in his arms, the way she remembers her father once swooped her off the ground on a red-gold autumn morning and twirled her around, once, twice, before he called her my darling for the last time.

"They wanted," she slurs sleepily, grabbing a handful of his t-shirt and burrowing further into his chest, "to go to another bar. I said... I said I wanted..." She yawns, eyes still closed, head still pleasantly fuzzy with just a hint of tightness around the edges.

"You unholy wench," he interrupts, and she knows without even having to look up that a smile is threatening to creep across his face. "You're lucky I came by when I did. Lying sprawled out like that in the middle of the quad - you wanted someone to take advantage of you, didn't you? "

"Nuh-uh," she mumbles as intelligently as she can, "notsomeone. Notjustanyone."

By this point, he has traced their way through the brick-lined campus paths to her dorm, and he rests their combined weight against the heavy metal door. "Almost home, Lise," he mutters into her hair as he fumbles a little, hops to regain his balance, and successfully gets them through the door.

"My hero," she says, not without a hint of pride, tightening her hold on his neck and nodding so that he can feel it.

"How much did you drink?" he asks as he climbs the steps two at a time, his long legs making short work of the flights of stairs. It's a smooth ride, she thinks idly as the haze in her mind lifts a little, and one she won't mind taking a few more times in her life.

"Not enough," she shoots back, "I'm still having this conversation, aren't I?"

He laughs then, easily, and she wonders why the sound goes straight to her gut and pools there, warmth and starlight and chocolate at once, and she decides it's because he laughs so rarely.

Finally, he is outside her door, and she lifts her head off his chest enough to crack both eyes open. She slams them shut against the dim light of the corridor - "Bright," she just manages to avoid whining - and he huffs a quick apology as he digs into her jeans pocket for her key.

"You should have come with us," she says, trying to keep the hint of reproach from her voice, as he artfully twists the key into the lock, wrenches the knob, and stumbles into the room with her. He somehow manages to flip the light on, so he can pick his way through the jumbled mess of clothes and books she's strewn across the floor while preparing for finals.

"Not my scene," he says immediately, moving over to her bed and sitting down on it, still holding her in his arms, and she could swear that, for just a second, he presses his lips against her hairline. A shiver entirely unrelated to the alcohol still whispering its way through her veins goes down her spine.

"I know," she sighs, and suddenly all she wants is to kiss that knowledge into the lines sketched across his face, into the shadows at the crook of his neck, into the veins that thread themselves across the back of his hands.

She's not sure if he holds her just that little bit tighter; she likes to think he did, but soon - too soon - he's shifting her off his lap and onto the bed, pulling the sheets right and the blanket tightly over her.

"You need to sleep it off," he tells her quietly, "and you know to drink more liquids than your bladder can hold in the morning to flush the alcohol out."

She nods, blinks her eyes open to meet his, and again, as always, finds that there isn't enough oxygen left in her lungs for her to describe how impossibly blue they are.

But, as he starts to get to his feet, she has enough sense, or insanity, or whatever it is, to say, reaching out to him and grabbing his sleeve, "Stay."

He sighs a little at that, and she likes the way his thumb is circling her cheekbone and following the line of her hair, like it's committing her to memory, like he's learning her by heart. She doesn't want him to remind her of her decision, she doesn't want him to point out how she had told him it was for the best, she doesn't want anything that makes sense in the light of day.

But he does. Or at least, he knows she will want all those things, in the morning.

That's why, she supposes to herself as she almost drifts into the darkness of night again, she made the offer at all.

Already, she can feel the sleep creeping back over her senses, as her bed and her blanket and the warmth of him, still lingering in her bones, work their magic.

She's never sure after the fact if he leaned over and whispered happy birthday into her ear, in the same throaty rumble of a voice that had whispered ragged promises she wasn't sure she could believe, that one night amidst the tangle of her sheets when she had allowed herself to fall into the weight and scent and sheer power of him and for a brief, crazy moment, things made sense.

What she's sure of is that he presses a too-quick kiss against her forehead - it's the last thing she remembers before the searing light of day streams into her room and chases the dreams away.