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atlafan · 4 years

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Lock the Door

a/n: college!Harry one shot because why the f not??????? I’ve wanted to write a good college!Harry au for aw while, and I’m happy with this. 11K of friends to lovers. (not proofread)

Warnings: Smut.

It was junior year of college, Y/N and her friends were thrilled to finally be out of the dorms. Even though they were still living on campus, they were in a student apartment, and incredibly thankful. Now instead of sharing a bathroom with hundreds of other people, there would only be four of them. The only thing was Y/N’s parents weren’t thrilled about the people she was rooming with.

There was her best friend, Liv, who her parents actually really liked. It was the other two roommates that made them feel uneasy. See, Liv really wanted to live with her boyfriend Chris, but they didn’t want to exactly live by themselves, and the student apartments for just two people were really expensive. They’d been dating since second semester their freshman year so it wasn’t weird that they wanted to be in closer proximity. Y/N also thought Chris was an amazing person. He and Liv never made her feel like a third wheel, it was an ideal situation. The three would have been fine to live together, but the university had certain policies in place. One guy was not allowed to live with two girls, they needed another guy. That’s when the topic of Harry came up.

“I know he’s not your favorite of my friends, but the other people he was supposed to live with are going off campus, which he can’t afford to do.”

“It’s not that he’s not my favorite, I just don’t know him that well.” Y/N shrugged. “If that’s the case, I think Liv and I should share a room…”

“Yeah, that works. Chris and I don’t wanna be on top of each other all the time, we’re just sick of going across campus all the time.” Liv says. “So, you’d really be okay with Harry living with us? You’ve said before you don’t really care for his lifestyle…”

“He’s just not the first person I would hang out with, but if it means we get this apartment, then I’m cool with it. We’ll get to know each other better if we live together, right?”

When Y/N broke the news to her parents they got into a big fight with her about it, but she assured them that a lot of other students did what she and her friends were doing. Living with boys really wasn’t that big of a deal. If anything it would give her practice for when she someday actually got a boyfriend that she would eventually move in with.

The four of them got coffee together the morning they had to have the housing application in. Harry didn’t say much, clearly not a morning person, but he seemed alright with the situation. He and Chris were good enough friends, and he was also excited to not be in a dorm next year.

“I just have one request.” Y/N says. “A lot of the apartments usually have one room that’s bigger than the other, from what I’ve noticed. I’d like for Liv and I to have the bigger room. Chris, I’ve seen your dorm, you literally have like nothing in there. Liv and I have a ton clothes and other things that we’ll space for…”

Chris and Harry look at each other and shrug.

“Alright, that’s not problem.” Chris says. “We should make a group text so over the summer we can see who’s bringing what. We need to figure out dishes and other kitchen shit.”

“And we’ll still need a mini fridge for extra shit, one of my friends was tellin’ me there’s not much room in the apartment fridges. I can bring the one I have.”

“I have a microwave.” Y/N says. “Happy to bring that too.”

“We’ll also need a chore chart.” Liv says. “Just because Y/N and I will be the women of the house does not mean we’ll be the maids. I am not going to be on my hands and knees cleaning the bathroom all the time. We should also pool in money for toilet paper and stuff like that.”

“Good idea, babe.” Chris kisses her cheek and Harry rolls his eyes.

That was is right there, the attitude that turned Y/N’s stomach. She thought Chris and Liv were a really cute couple, their affection didn’t bother her at all, but Harry seemed overly annoyed. All it was, was a peck on the cheek.

You all wished each other a good summer when the time came. The four of you group texted off and on best you could to make sure there was little miscommunication about who was to bring what. Since Harry was an international student, he would be moving in a week before everyone else. Y/N was actually happy about this because he would be there to help her move in. She’d be coming up the night before move in to get a good parking spot, and then her parents would come the next day with the rest of her things.

For the first time, she texted Harry outside the group chat when she arrived at her apartment. He opened the door for her only wearing a pair of shorts. Her eyes grew wide, and he notices.

“Sorry, it’s hotter than satin’s asshole in here, I hope you brought a fan for yourself.” He rubs the back of his neck, and you laugh.

“I did. That’s the worst thing, no A/C in these old apartment. At least it’s only hot like this for a couple of weeks, right?” He hums his response as she walks in. “To be honest I was expecting a mess…but it looks good in here.”

“Not much to make a mess with.” He shrugs. “I rearranged some of the furniture in the living area so it was less tight next to the kitchen. Got the TV set up too.”

“I can see that, it looks nice.” You smile.

“So…do you like need some help with your shit?”

“That would be great, actually. The microwave is pretty heavy.”

“Thank god you brought it with you. I’ve been dying for some popcorn.”

“Great, you can stink it right up.”

“Relax, I was kidding.” He rolls his eyes. “Take a joke, Y/N.”

Her mouth falls open as he walks out to her car. He opens the trunk and hoists the microwave out while she grabs her luggage bags that were full of clothes.

“I can bring that up for you. It’s an up and up, so Chris and I are on that level, and you and Liv will be up top. That was the bigger room just like you requested.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that.”

Harry helps get everything else inside while Y/N goes to get a prime parking spot. Harry felt sort of awkward just standing around while she unpacked certain things for the kitchen.

“Jesus, it really is hot in here, I need to go change.” She wipes some sweat from her forehead.

Y/N goes up to her room and opens the two small windows, and turns her fan on to try to get the air to move. She comes down a few minutes later in just a sports bra and a pair of shorts.

“This is sort of awkward, but you help me with my bed? I’m having a tough time getting it up a little higher…”

“Not awkward…at…all.” When he looks at her he sees how little clothing she’s wearing.

“If you get to be shirtless then I get to dress like this.” She says, putting her hands on her hips.

“I didn’t say anything.” He smirks. “Besides, I’m sure we’ll be seein’ each other in a lot less as the year goes on.”

She shakes her head and follows him up. Harry’s able to get the bet up a few pegs so Y/N can slide the small dresser underneath it, creating more floor space.

“That’s perfect! My parents are bringing those plastic pins you can stack as like a makeshift dresser that fits in the closet tomorrow. Hmmm.”

“What?”

“Well, usually my mom helps me make the bed. It’s just so long, it’s hard to get a good grasp on the sheet.”

“I can help if you want.”

“You’ve done enough.”

“It’s fine, I don’t mind.” He smiles. “After this though would you wanna get out for a bit? I feel like it’s cooler outside. We could go downtown for a slice.”

“Oh, I like that idea a lot. Pizza is a must right now.”

Harry helps you get her sheets on her bed, and she tell him she’ll fix the rest later. Y/N knew she wouldn’t need a lot of extra blankets tonight. She throws on a shirt and so does he, and out the door they go. They walk down town the local pizza place, and grab a booth after getting their slices.

“Nice and cool in here, huh?” He says.

“So much better.” She giggles. “Where are your other friends living?”

“They’re over on Russell Street. It’s kinda nice, I’ll have a place to go party, and then have a quiet place to come back to afterwards. Think it all worked out for the best.”

“Can you remind me again what your major is? I know Chris is Sports Management…”

“I’m an Art major…” He says quietly. “And yes, I know it’s going to be hard for me out there once I graduate.”

“Woah, I didn’t say anything.” She puts her hands up in defense. “I think that’s cool actually. What do you do? Paint? Sculpt? Draw?”

“Mix of all three actually. Basically if I can get my hands dirty, I will.” He smirks. “I just wanted to get a degree in something I liked doin’, but I do have a minor in graphic design just in case I need somethin’ to fall back on.”

“Oh, is that how you and Chris met? That’s his minor too.”

“Mhm.” He takes a bite of his pizza. “We had a couple of classes together and got paired on some projects, hit it off right away.”

“That’s great.”

“How did you and Liv meet?”

“We roomed together second semester freshmen year. Our other roommates both dropped out so we got paired randomly. She’s the best, I got really lucky. She was already dating Chris when we met.”

“The three of you seem close.”

“He’s really nice, always included me. They never made me feel like a third wheel which was nice. I mean, I have other friends, don’t get me wrong. I found things to do when they needed their alone time.”

“And you ever find any alone time?”

“That’s an awfully personal question, don’t you think?” She scoffs.

“Thought we were gettin’ to know each other a bit here…sorry.”

“It’s okay…um…I mean, there are guys I’ve been alone with…” Y/N clears her throat. “I use Tinder like every other college student, you know?” He hums his response and finishes up his slice. He leans back and sits with his arm strong across the back of the booth. “What about you?”

“Eh, I like to meet people in person, at like a party or somethin’.” He thinks for a moment, and leans on the table to be a bit closer so no one else around could really hear. “You’re pretty, Y/N, why do you use Tinder?” She blushes. “I mean, surely you could just meet someone out.”

“I…well, I don’t really go to big parties, mostly kickbacks.” He nods and finishes up his bottle of soda.

“You ready?”

“Mhm.”

They both walk back to the apartment, and he keys in. She goes upstairs to keep unpacking and to tidy up. She was trying to hang up some curtains, but she fell back from trying to reach to high. Harry hears the thud and rushes right up. He had a nicer short sleeve shirt on now, and a nicer pair of shorts.

“Are you okay?!”

“Yeah.” You laugh. “Just lost my balance. Do you think you could help me hang these up quick?”

“Sure.”

The curtains get hung and they look great with the twinkling lights Y/N strung up.

“Liv and I love these lights.” She looks at him. “You like nice.”

“Matt’s havin’ a party…do you wanan come?”

“God, with the amount of time I’d need to get ready you’d be late.” You laugh.

“I wasn’t plannin’ to leave for another hour, plenty of time to freshen up.”

“Sure, I could come out for a bit, thanks.”

He leaves her to get ready. She puts her hair up in a cute, messy bun, and touches up some makeup. Y/N finds a cute pair of shirts and a crop top to throw on and down the stairs she goes. Harry was pouring two shots of raspberry vodka into two small glasses.

“Here.” He smiles. “Wait, you drink, right?”

“Yes.” You giggle. “I can’t wait to turn twenty-one. Just a few more months.”

“Same here, February actually.”

“No way! Me too. When’s yours?”

“The first, yours?”

“The fourth.”

“Wow, that’s crazy.” They clink their glasses and off to the party they go.

Y/N drank way too much last night, and she knew her parents would be able to tell. They were there bright and early with the rest of her things. They also put Harry to work.

“You have a lot of shit, you know that?” He says, setting another box down.

“I’m well aware.”

Eventually Liv and Chris show up and it’s hugs all around. Y/N and Liv get a minute alone in their room, finally.

“So how was last night with just you and Harry?”

“It was good! We went out for pizza, he helped me a bunch with my things, and he took me to a party. I’m glad we had the time to get to know each other a little bit.”

“Me too. He can be kind of shy from what Chris tells me.”

“Apparently he’s an art major.”

“I wonder if he’ll hang any of his things up.”

“You know, he’s been in our room a ton already, but I didn’t think to go into his.”

“Well, let’s check it out.” They both go down and into the boy’s room.

Both sides were organized, but they could tell whose side was whose. Harry had his art supplies all over his desk, and had boxes of paint and brushes under his bed. He had a couple of things up as well.

“Looks good in here guys.” Liv says.

Y/N and Liv end up going out for lunch with Y/N’s parents, and then they go on a trip to the grocery store to pick up what they think they need.

“Alright honey, I guess we’ll see you at Thanksgiving, if not sooner.” Y/N’s mother says, giving her a hug.

“Please, be careful.” Her dad says.

“I’ll be fine. Let me know when you get back home. Thanks for everything, love you both!” She sighs as she closes the door. “Finally.”

Y/N and Liv go up to their room and continue decorating it to their liking while Harry and Chris get their gaming consoles hooked up to the TV in the living area.

“So…you got to know Y/N a little last night?”

“Yeah, she’s pretty cool so far. I was kinda worried, I didn’t think she liked me every much.”

“She just didn’t know you, that’s all. What did you guys do?”

“I helped her with her things, we grabbed a slice of pizza, and then I took her to Matt’s for a party. I think there were like three different guys that tried to take her home, but she turned them all down.” He shrugs.

“And what did you do?”

“She didn’t have a key yet, so I made sure she got back here, and then I slipped out an hour or so later to hook up with this girl that gave me her number at the party.”

“Well, thanks for getting her back here at least.” Chris chuckles.

“I’m not a fuckin’ asshole.” He nudges him playfully. “She did have fun at the party, I’ll probably bring her out again. You all can come any time. I feel like that place is gonna be my second home.”

Y/N and Live come down with all the things they like to keep in the bathroom and the boys look scared. For a student apartment it was a decent size bathroom, with a good size tub-shower. Liv opens the cabinets under the sink, and you hand her two boxes of pads and tampons.

“Yup, definitely livin’ with women.” Harry smirks and crosses his arms.

“If feminine products are going to bother you-“ Liv starts, but he cuts her off.

“Got a mum and a sister back home, periods don’t scare me. Was just simply makin’ an observation.”

“Good.” She grabs a small trashcan puts a bag in it. Y/N hands her the lid. “Listen to me very carefully, this is just for Y/N and I. There’s another small can for community use, but this is for her and I’s…”

“Say no more.” Chris says. “Just keep it under the sink and we won’t touch it.”

“I also would like some courtesy with shaving.” Y/N says. “I really don’t wanna see pubes around the toilet.” She crosses her arms. “If you make a mess, you clean it up.”

“I feel like the two of you think we’re savages.” Harry laughs. “I’ve been in a girl’s bathroom before, and I have to say, I think girls are way more disgusting.”

“Why were you in a girl’s bathroom?” Liv asks.

“I was asked to join someone in the shower.” Harry says bluntly. “And it didn’t last long because we both walked in and saw a fuckin’ bloody tampon on the floor. So we went to the men’s bathroom and it was spotless. And while we’re on the topic, you both have long hair, so if you don’t wanna see pubes around the toilet, I don’t wanna see hair in the drain.”

“Deal.” Y/N says. “Let’s move on to the kitchen, shall we?” The four walk out to the kitchen area. “If you make a mess in the microwave, you clean it immediately, don’t leave it for someone else.”

“If someone’s name is on something in the fridge, don’t eat it.” Chris says. “However, I would like to see us cooking together. Like if someone makes pasta, someone else could throw in a meat or veggie.”

“That’s a good idea.” Liv says. “If you make a mess in the fridge clean it up. Check expiration dates. Oh! Trash is a big thing. We all need to take turns with that. If you see it getting full, just take it out, don’t leave it for someone else.”

After spending over an hour on a chore chart and going over more house rules, the four feel satisfied.

A few weeks into the semester, and Y/N noticed that Harry wasn’t home a lot. He was either down at the art studio, or at his friend’s apartment. She also noticed he didn’t sleep there much on the weekends, but it worked out well for Chris and Liv so they could have the room alone when they needed. Y/N never saw Harry bring a girl home with him, and she was sort of relieved.

Living with two guys wasn’t as awkward as Y/N and Liv thought it might be. Everyone was really chill, and it was nice to cook together. It was like being in a little family.

One morning Harry woke up late for class, but desperately needed to shower. Y/N happened to be in there. Everyone usually showered at the same time, but Harry was in a rush and annoyed. Liv and Chris had already left for class. Harry was standing the hall, just in a towel, waiting for you to finish. When he hears the water turn off, he sighs with relief. When she didn’t come out right away, he groans.

“The fuck is she doin’ in there.” He knocks on the door. “Y/N?! I’m runnin’ late, and I need to shower!”

She opens the door immediately and they both freeze. Her eyes fall to the towel that was hanging low on his waist, and then up to him. Her towel wasn’t exactly as secure as it could be either. Her hair was just brushed out and dripping wet down her chest.

“I’m so sorry, why didn’t you knock sooner? I, uh, just let me grab my blow dryer…” She snatches it and scoots by him.

“I’ll be quick if you need to get back in there…”

“Thanks.”

Harry takes his very quick, and semi-cold shower, and gets ready for class. He had ab out ten minutes to spare. Y/N comes down the stairs, and slips into the bathroom to grab some spare tampons, and bumps into Harry on her way out, causing her to drop them.

“Shit sorry, I’m fuckin’ up your entire routine this mornin’.” He bends down to pick up what he caused her to drop and blushes when he sees that they’re tampons. He grabs them anyways and hands them to her.

“It’s okay, really.” She takes them and sticks them in her bag. “Um…well, have a good day Harry.”

“You too.”

“Y/N?” Harry knocks on her bedroom door late one night. She climbs out of bed and goes down the few steps to open it.

“Is everything okay, Harry?”

“Yeah, I think Liv and Chris fell asleep…and I really don’t wanna sleep on the couch, nor do I wanna go in there in case they decide to get busy again.” He huffs. He looked exhausted, he was at the studio all evening and just wanted to sleep.

“Oh! Well…okay, I could sleep in her bed if you wanna sleep in mine?”

He follows her up the stairs.

“I’ll just sleep in hers, we’re all close enough now. She doesn’t really have a leg to stand on to say much about it.” He yawns and takes his shirt off.

“Okay.” He watches as she uses the small step stool to get back into her bed. He waits until she’s scrolling on her phone to take his pants off, and he climbs into Liv’s bed. “I’m gonna turn the light off now.”

“Alright.”

“Goodnight, Harry.”

“Goodnight, Y/N.”

Similar nights to those kept happening, and Harry was starting to get aggravated, so he called for a roommate meeting to discuss it.

“I’m sick of not bein’ able to sleep in my own bed. I know I’m not here a lot, but when I am, I’d like to be able to just go to my room and go to sleep.”

“You’re right, Harry. I’m sorry.” Liv says, sort of embarrassed.

“I think you two should just share a room. It’s clear that’s what you want anyways.”

“But what about Y/N?” Liv looks at her.

“I feel like Harry’s been my roommate anyways.” She shrugs. “We share every other room with guys, guess I wouldn’t mind rooming with one either.”

“What if your parents find out?” Chris asks.

“It’s not like we’re gonna push the bed together and sleep next to each other like you both are probably gonna do. He’ll have his side, and I’ll have mine. I think it makes the most sense too.”

That afternoon everyone helps move things around. Liv gets situated with Chris while Harry gets his things the way he likes.

“You know secretly, I’m happy they didn’t ask for the bigger room. It’s way nicer up here.” Harry says, sitting down on his new bed. “You sure you’re okay with this? I don’t wanna take away your privacy…”

“I’ll just change in the bathroom more.” She shrugs. “Or, I mean, just look the other way if I happen to need to change quick up here and I’ll give you the same courtesy.”

“I know I’m not here a lot on the weekends, but for the times I am, I mean, uh, like do you ever bring anyone back here with you? If you could just text me a warning or somethin’ or put somethin’ on the door.”

“I don’t…I haven’t, um, it’s been a dry start to the semester.” She blushes. “I had my period, and then I’ve started to get busy with my classes…I’ve gone out a few times, but there’s also no one I’ve really wanted to hook up with. Don’t worry, if the occasion happens I’ll give you a heads up.”

“Cool.”

“Is that what you’re out doing on the weekends? Hooking up?”

“Sometimes…mostly I just end up sleepin’ at Matt’s. They have a futon for me there for when I get too drunk to walk all the way back here. You should come out to another party, he’s havin’ people over tonight if you wanna come. Let the lovebirds down there have a little privacy.”

“Good idea, yeah, that sounds like fun.” She gets up and goes into her closet to pick out a casual dress. “Is your friend Matt single?” She asks without looking at him.

“Uh, yeah. Why?”

“I don’t know…I think he’s cute, and he was really nice to me last time I was there. Gave me a bunch to drink.”

“Well, that’s just common courtesy when you bring a girl to a party. Get her all liquored up.” Harry smirks.

“Mhm.” She rolls her eyes at him, and grabs a blue dress from her closet and her jean jacket. “Do you think he’d be into me?”

“What’s not to be into?”

“Oh stop it.”

“M’serious! You’re really nice, and you’re cute. He’d go for you.”

“Thanks, Harry.”

Harry walks Y/N to the party after pregaming a bit at their place.

“Harry!” Matt says as he walks in. “And you brought Y/N again, hey.”

“Hi.” They smile at each other.

“We’re just setting a game of flip cup up in the kitchen, you guys wanna play?”

“Sure!” Y/N says brightly.

The night was a lot of fun. Harry found himself talking to some girl who was clearly trying to get him to go home with her, but in the pit of his stomach he wanted to make sure you got home okay.

“Let me just find my friend and make sure she’s all set, okay?” He say, leaning into the girl and she nods.

Harry searches for you. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen Matt in a while either. He walks into the kitchen and stops short when he sees Y/N sitting up on the counter with her legs wrapped around Matt’s waist, and his tongue down her throat. He wants to say something, but he opts to just text her that he’s left with someone.

“She’s all set, let’s go.” He takes the girl by her hand and leads her out of the house.

She tells him where she lives and that her roommate was gone for the weekend so they wouldn’t be disturbed. She was a good shag, Harry was having fun, but just as he coming an image of Y/N’s legs wrapped around his own waist, instead of Matt’s popped into his head.

“Shit.” He groans and looks down at the girl underneath him. She smiles up at him and he smiles back.

He pulls out and throws the condom away. She frowns when he starts to get dressed.

“You don’t have to leave…”

“I know, usually I would spend the night, but…uh…I.” He sighs and looks at her. “Listen, I don’t really have a good excuse, I just wanna go sleep in my own bed, I’m sorry.” He leans in and kisses her forehead. “I had a lot of fun though.” He gives her a reassuring smile. “You have my number?”

“Yeah.”

“Text me anytime.” He winks, and leaves her there.

When Harry gets back to his empty room, he’s not entirely sure what it is about it that’s bothering him. Eventually he’s able to fall asleep, but he’s woken up a few hours later by the sounds of Y/N coming up the few steps to their room. She was carrying her shoes to not make much noise. She gently opens her dresser drawer to grab a large t-shirt and shorts. He looks away while she changes, not that he could really see her anyways with how dark the room was. He hears her get into bed, and the satisfied sigh she makes turns his stomach.

The light creeping in from the curtains punched Harry in the face. He sits up and see Y/N on her side facing him, scrolling on her phone. She looks up at him when she sees he’s awake.

“Morning.” She says quietly.

“Hey.” He stretches and gets up. Even though they’d been sharing a room for a while, she would never get used to seeing him in just a pair of boxers. “M’takin’ a shower.”

“Okay.” He stops short before going down the stairs.

“What time did you get home last night?”

“Um…like 3AM I think. I was surprised to see your shoes downstairs. I’m glad I caught them or I would’ve flipped the light on and barreled up here.” She laughs. “I thought you went home with someone.”

“I did.”

“Oh.”

“Didn’t feel like spendin’ the night.” She hums her response. “Did you hook up with Matt?”

“Yeah.” You blush. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah, why the fuck would I care?” He crosses his arms.

“I don’t know…I mean I figured you knew what my intention was since I asked you if he was single, but if you don’t want me hooking up with your friends, I don’t have to again.”

“So if I really had a problem with it, you wouldn’t fuck him again?”

“If you had a valid reason, sure. I mean…it was a nice hook up, but not the best I ever had. It’s not like I need to have his dick again.” Harry had never really hard Y/N talk like that before, it surprised him. “Oh god, don’t tell him I said that…”

“What wasn’t good about it?”

“I…what?”

“Well, if it wasn’t the best you ever had, what wasn’t good about it? Come on, you can tell me?” He leans back against the wall.

“I didn’t get off.” She says bluntly.

“Oh.”

“And I had to fake it so we could be done.” Her cheeks grew redder.

“You sounded pretty satisfied when you got back…”

“I sighed with relief because I was exhausted and was finally in my comfy bed.”

“So you faked it.”

“Mhm.”

“Why not just tell him he was doin’ it wrong.”

“He was so drunk, Harry, I don’t think it would’ve made a difference. He passed out after, and I slipped out the door.”

“Wait, you walked back by yourself?” He frowns.

“Yeah.”

“If that happens again, just call me, okay? I don’t like that.”

“But you were with someone.”

“So? I’m always there for my friends, come on Y/N. What if somethin’ bad happened?”

“Okay, okay, I won’t walk alone again.”

“Good.”

“Go shower so I can shower, will you?”

“We could just save water and shower together.” He jokes, and she whips her pillow at him. “Oi!” He picks it up and whips it back at her, making her laugh.

Harry came home with paint all over his hands, and was scrubbing them profusely when Y/N came in through the door.

“Thank god it’s Friday, I’m beat.” You sigh and flop onto the couch.

“Me too, I think I’m gonna stay in tonight.”

“Oh?” She was shocked.

“Mhm.” He sits down next to her. “Might play some video games or somethin’. What about you, do you have plans?”

“As of right now, no. But who knows, my friends my text and say something’s happening.” She shrugs.

“We could hang out if you wanted.”

“What would you wanna do?”

“We could watch a movie.”

“Sure! That sounds nice actually. We should see if Liv and Chris wanna join. I feel like we never all hang out.”

Harry was annoyed, but not visibly. He really hated hanging out with couples.

That night the four get cozy on the couch for a movie. Chris made everyone drinks, and Y/N popped some popcorn. The girls sit in the middle of the couch while the boys take the end seats. Not that that mattered, because eventually Chris pulled Liv into his lap, and they got comfortable together. The wine Y/N had been drinking was making her sleepy, and her head dropped onto Harry’s shoulder, not that he minded.

She wakes up to the feeling of being carried up to their room.

“Harry?” He sets her down on her bed.

“Yeh fell asleep.” He smooths her hair away from her face. “Brought yeh up.”

“Do you…never mind.”

“What?��

“I don’t know…it’s stupid, never mind.”

“Y/N, would you just tell me what you want?”

“Well…sometimes I get a little jealous that Chris and Liv can just cuddle, and I didn’t know if you’d wanna have a platonic cuddle with me for a bit.”

“A platonic cuddle?”

“Yeah, but only if you want.”

“What does that entail exactly?”

“Well, you could lay next to me and I could just rest my head on your chest. No spooning unless I’m the big spoon.”

“Why’s that?” He chuckles. “Not that I don’t like being the little spoon.”

“I wouldn’t wanna give you a boner if I was little spoon.”

“Ah, right, because I have zero zelf control.”

“Do you wanna cuddle or not?”

“Yeah, alright.”

He climbs onto her bed and lays flat on his back so she can rest her head on his chest, just like she wanted. He puts an arm around her and rests his hand on her shoulder. What Y/N didn’t know was that Harry had gotten a booty call text, and was supposed to be out the door, but this was something that Harry just couldn’t say no to, so he texts the girl and apologizes, and tells her he’ll be over another time. He feels her nuzzle into his chest further. Harry realizes he very much likes the attention he’s getting from wine-drunk Y/N.

They both asleep like that, cuddled together on Y/N’s bed. Her eyes fluttered open, at first she was confused when she saw Harry, but then she remembered she asked him to cuddle with her. She didn’t remember getting so comfy she had fallen asleep. Both of his arms were around her, and she had a leg over one of his. His lips were parted and light snores were coming from him. Y/N desperately needed to pee, but she also didn’t want to disturb him. She notices his phone lighting up with texts, and her curiosity got the better of her. After all, it could’ve been an emergency.

Lindsay – Matt’s Party: are you serious? 12:04AM

Lindsay – Matt’s Party: you’re rly not coming over? 12:07AM

Lindsay – Matt’s Party: this is the 3rd time you’ve done this, H. I’m done. 12:15AM

Y/N sets his phone back down, and looks back up at him with a raised eyebrow.

He blew off some girl for me? She thinks to herself. He could’ve gone…maybe he didn’t really like her that much.

Harry’s eyebrows furrow and his eyes slowly open. He has the same slight confusion Y/N did, but then he relaxes when he remembers he voluntarily slept next to her.

“Hey.” He mumbles in a sleepy voice, one she had gotten quite used to and liked a lot.

“Hi.” The air suddenly felt awkward. “I need to pee.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t wanna wake you up.”

“Okay.”

“So, I’ll just…”

She sits up slightly, and ends up straddling him to try to climb over him. Her head suddenly started hurting and she almost fell off. Harry grabs her by her hips to steady her.

“You’re like really clumsy.” He says to her.

“I’m aware.” She looks down at his hands. “I still need to pee, can you let go of me.”

His cheeks heat up and he lets go of her so she can continue trying to get off her bed. Harry was still tired, and he could easily go slip into his bed, but he liked Y/N’s bed, for whatever reason. So he rolls onto his side and checks his phone.

“Fuck.” He says when he sees the texts from Lindsay. He thinks to text her back and apologize, but he didn’t want to lead her on anymore because odds are he’d stand her up again. ]

Y/N comes back up a few minutes later, feeling much better after having used the toilet and brushed her teeth. She chuckles when she sees Harry still on her bed.

“What are you doing?”

“M’not awake enough to move yet.” He mumbles as she grabs some clothes from her dresser.

“Well, I have some homework I need to get done, so I’m gonna shower and then go to the library.”

“I’ll be at the studio most of the day, and then I’ll probably go to Matt’s tonight…”

“Okay.”

He watches her go back down the stairs and he sits up. The two had gotten into the habit of giving each other a play by play of their plans. Harry figured it was just common courtesy as a roommate, but maybe it was a little bit more. It was like they were an old married couple who slept on two different beds. Harry changes into some new clothes quick and goes downstairs. Chris was eating some breakfast as he grabs a Gatorade from the fridge.

“Mornin’, mate.” Harry says, taking a sip of his drink.

“Morning, thought you went out last night?”

“Nope, I stayed in with Y/N instead.” He shrugs. “I feel kinda bad, the girl was pissed…but I think it was for the best.”

Things were a tad awkward between Harry and Matt since Y/N slept with Matt and never really followed up.

“Did she ever say anything to you?”

“No.” Harry lies. “You hook up with girls all the time, why are you hung up on her?”

“I don’t know, she was a good fuck, I’d like to hit it again.” Harry rolls his eyes as bites down on his cup. “You haven’t brought her here since.”

“She hasn’t seemed interested.” Harry shrugs and turns to see Lindsay talking to her friends. They make eye contact and she flips him off. “Jesus.” He walks over to her. “Can we talk?”

“Why? Because you suddenly have the time?” She huffs.

“Please?”

“Fine.” They step aside from her friends.

“You know, you act like I didn’t even tell you I couldn’t come over…”

“One second you’re saying see you ten, and the next you’re saying not tonight. So what happened? Get a better offer?”

Yes.

“No, it wasn’t that…my roommate needed me…”

“Right, the girl you conveniently share a room with.” She crosses her arms.

“It’s only like that because our friends are dating.”

“What did she need from you then, Harry? Your dick?”

“No!” He groans. “It’s not like that with us, we’re just friends.”

“So then what did she need?”

“She got a little wine drunk, and she seemed like she needed me to stay, so I did. She didn’t know I had other plans when she asked me to hang out a little longer…” Not a total lie, not a total truth. “I really did wanna see you.” He puts his hand on her shoulder.

“I hate how crazy you boys make me, I swear. It’s not like you’re the only person I’m hooking up with…”

“Yeah, same goes for me.”

“I just thought we had a regular thing going, and that was like the third time you blew me off. If you don’t wanna-“ Harry cuts her off by kissing her.

“Let’s get outta here.”

She nods and takes his hand. They walk back to her place, and start to get busy. He was just about to go down on her when his phone rings. He pops his head up to grab it.

“You can’t be serious.”

“It could be an emergency.” He sits up and squints to see it’s Y/N. “Hello?” He starts fingering Lindsay while he’s on the phone with her.

“Harry?” She slurs.

“What’s up?” He rubs Lindsay’s clit and her head rolls back into the pillow.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but.” She hiccups. “Liv and Chris left, or maybe I just can’t find them, anyways, I wanna go home, and you told me to-“

“Where are you?”

“On Russell actually…uhhhhh, 19D I think.”

“Okay, I can be there in like ten minutes, can you hang tight?”

“Mhm. I’ll sit out on the steps for you.”

“Okay.” He hangs up and tosses his phone. “What?”

“You’re a nutbag.”

“Do you want me to fuck you or not? Yeh get me for ten minutes, how do you want it?”

Y/N was sitting on the front steps of the house she was at, waiting for Harry. She was slightly cold from the crisp fall air.

Harry: be there soon :) 1:30AM

She sighs with relief when she gets his text. She sees him walking up the drive and stands up and walks towards him.

“I’m so sorry if I ruined your night.” She stumbles as she walks over to him.

“You didn’t, I’m glad you called.” He hooks his arm around her waist to steady her.

“You smell like perfume.”

“I just hooked with someone, sorry.”

“You what?!” She starts laughing.

“I was in the middle of it when you called, actually.” He starts laughing. “She wasn’t too happy, but I made up for it. Although I deleted her number after I left, it was sort of a parting gift.”

“Sometimes I forget you can be just like every other guy.” She scoffs.

“Hey, I told her it was the last time before I left. She said it was probably for the best anyways.”

“Oh, well as long as she knows.”

“I thought you didn’t really go to parties like this often.”

“I don’t…but Chris got invited out so he brought me and Liv with him, and we all drank a lot. I don’t know how I lost them. I texted them both and told them you were coming for me.” She looks down at the heels on her feet. “I have to take these off, they hurt.”

“It’s too cold to walk barefoot. Lemme give you a piggyback ride.”

“Really?!”

“Sure.” He shrugs.

Y/N gets on his back, and he carries her the rest of the way home. When he gets her inside they see Chris and Liv on the couch.

“There you two are?!” Y/N yells as Harry sets her down. “Where the fuck did you two go?”

“Liv got sick at the party, so I brought her home, we’re so sorry Y/N.” Chris says standing up.

“Yeah, Y/N…this is the first time in over an hour I haven’t had my head in the toilet. Chris cleaned it up so it’s all good.”

“Well I’m sorry you got sick.” She starts unbuttoning her pants and scurries to the bathroom. “I have to pee so bad!”

“Thanks for getting her.” Chris rubs the back of his neck.

“It was no problem. I told her I didn’t want her walkin’ alone and to call me if she was in a place where that might happen.”

Y/N comes out of the bathroom and looks at everyone.

“Feel like I’m gonna pass out so I’m going to bed.”

“I’m gonna take a quick shower, I’ll be up soon.”

“Okay.”

“You two sound like us.” Liv jokes.

“M’just bein’ courteous.” Harry points out and goes to take his shower. He didn’t wanna smell like Lindsay anymore.

When he gets upstairs, only in his towel, he see Y/N sitting up in bed wearing just a large t-shirt and panties. Harry walks by her quick and hope to god his face isn’t red.

“Harry?”

“Yeah?” He turns to look at her.

“Would you come cuddle again?”

“Course. Now turn around so I can change.”

She playfully covers her eyes and he shakes his head as slides his boxers on.

“This is all I’m wearin’, hope that’s okay.”

“S’fine with me.” She yawns, and he turns off the light.

“Scootch over.” Instead she just rolls onto her side, facing the wall. “Thought you said no spooning.”

“Thought you said you had self-control.”

“I do…” He looks down and sees the t-shirt was now bunched around her hips and he could see the lovely curve of her ass in her cheeky panties. “Just don’t wiggle against me like a brat.”

“I’m never a brat.”

“Mhm.” He mumbles sarcastically as he settles in. He slips a leg between hers, and wraps an arm around her stomach. She adjust against him, just to get comfier, and they both settle.

“Goodnight, Harry.” She yawns.

“Night.” He liked the smell of her perfume much better.

“What the hell happened up here?” Liv cackles the next morning, well, more like afternoon, it was already noon. Harry and Y/N wake up and groan. Harry was still spooning her.

“Liv…no offense, but this isn’t your room anymore.” Y/N groans as she rubs the sleep from her eyes.

“I just came up to grab my sweatshirt that I let you borrow a couple days ago, but I can see I walked in on something. How long has this been going on for?”

“How long has what been goin’ on for? We’re just sleepin’.”

“Harry you don’t have any clothes on!”

“Not true! I’m wearin’ boxers.”

“What’s wrong with your bed?”

“I asked him to sleep with me, just sleep, well cuddle really.” Y/N speaks up. “It’s platonic.”

“Yeah, not all of us have a boyfriend to go to sleep with every night, Liv.”

“Well, pardon me.” She scoffs and grabs her sweatshirt. “You know it wouldn’t be a big deal if you two hooked up. I think it would make sense, and-“

“Goodbye, Liv, have a nice lunch with Chris’ parents.” Y/N says. “Hope you’re feeling better.”

“Much…and I’ll tell them you say hi.”

��Thanks.”

They watch as she goes back down the stairs, and then look at each other.

“Wanna grab brunch downtown?” Harry asks.

“God, that sounds amazing. Just let me jump in the shower quick?”

“Go for it.”

Harry waits for her to leave before getting out of bed. He removes the blanket and looks down at his morning wood. He was sort of glad Liv woke them up so Y/N didn’t have time to notice it poking her. Or maybe she did and just didn’t say anything or care. Either way he wasn’t going to say anything.

He gets dressed quick and waits for her in the living area. Once she’s ready they walk downtown to the diner, and get a booth for two. They both order coffee and water.

“Wanna split some hashbrowns?” She asks, looking at the menu. “I might get a veggie omelet.”

“Yeah, we could do that. That sounds good too, I think I’ll get the same.” He chuckles.

They both give their orders to the waitress.

“I hope Liv didn’t bother you, you can sleep in my bed any time you want. I kinda like having your wait on me.” She blushes.

“You mean your three weighted blankets aren’t enough for you?” He laughs.

“I do not have three…I have two, and no, they’re not.” She crosses her arms. “I don’t really think it’s that weird.”

“It’s only happened twice too…” He takes a sip of his coffee. “Your bed is way comfier than mine, so I think I’ll be taking you up on that more often than not.”

“Works for me.” She smiles. “I’m really glad we’ve gotten so close, Harry.” She puts her hand over his and it gives him goosebumps. “You’re like my best guy friend.” A punch right to his gut.

“I’m glad we’ve gotten closer too.”

It didn’t happen every night, but Harry and Y/N had gotten into a habit of cuddling and falling asleep together pretty often. There was just something soothing about it for the both of them.

“What the fuck happened up here?” Harry says coming home late from the studio one Thursday night.

“I’m so sorry, I have like two midterms tomorrow and I’m trying to study for both of them and I’m freaking out!”

Y/N had papers and books all over the place. Her laptop was open and she had music playing.

“How long have you been studying for?”

“Hours.” She groans.

“Well, maybe you need a break.”

“I can’t take a break! What if I don’t…what are you doing?!”

He was in the middle of taking his clothes off.

“Hi, I’m Harry, and I tend to get paint all over me, so it required me to change quite frequently. What’s your name?”

“Your sarcasm isn’t helpful. You’re supposed to tell me to turn around.” She pouts.

“Y/N.” He sighs. “You’ve seen me in next to nothing, and to be honest, I don’t really care if you look.”

“You don’t?”

“No.” He throws on a fresh shirt and some sweatpants. He sits down on the floor in front of her. “Look all you want.” He shrugs and picks up her flashcards.

“What are you doing?”

“M’gonna help you study.”

“You don’t have to. I’m sure there are better things you could be doing with your Thursday night.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, don’t you have some girl you need to go fuck?” Harry’s jaw drops. “I’m so sorry, that sounded meaner than it was supposed to. I didn’t mean-“

“But you still said it.” He shakes his head at her. “Is that what you think of me? Some guy that just fucks a ton of girls.”

“Well, to be fair, you do fuck a lot of girls, Harry.”

“A lot of guys do.” He huffs, and then he smirks at you. “You know what your problem is?”

“What’s my problem?”

“You don’t get fucked enough, no scratch that, you don’t get off enough. That’s why you’re so stressed. You get A’s all the time, you know this shit. You’re just tense because you can’t get there, and you share a room with a dude so it’s not like you’re gettin’ yourself there, unless you’re doin’ it in the shower.”

“Would you listen to yourself?” She laughs. “Can you please quiz me?”

“Thought I had better things to do?” He grins.

“Harry.” She sighs.

“Okay, okay.” He squints at the flashcard. “What is Andre Bazin’s main film theory?”

“Realism.”

“Correct, see, you know this.”

“That’s an easy one!”

“I still think you’re just wound up.”

“Would you like to do something about it?” She scoffs.

“I would, actually.” He puts the cards down.

“What? I was kidding, Harry.”

“Well…I’m not.” He sighs.

“You…wait, I’m very confused.”

“To be blunt, I’d like to have sex with you.” Her eyes grow wide and her cheeks flush. “But…I don’t wanna do anything that might ruin-“

“Go down and lock our door.” He’s stunned.

“Wait, really?”

“Do it before I change my mind.” She whispers.

Harry stands up and quietly goes down to lock their door. When he comes back up he sees Y/N bent over cleaning everything up off the floor. She puts everything on her desk, and turns her twinkling lights on. Then she turns the main light off, creating more of an atmosphere.

“You really wanna do this?” Harry asks.

“You’re like the hottest guy I’ve ever met, of course I want to…I just didn’t think you wanted to. You treat me like your little sister or something sometimes.”

“I…wouldn’t call the way we sleep the way I would sleep next to my sister.”

“You really do like grind right into me.”

“So you have noticed that.”

“Of course I have…I just figured it was something all guys did in the morning so I never said anything.”

“You’re on the pill?” He asks, stepping closing to her.

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to use a condom?”

“Yes.”

He nods and goes into his desk drawer to grab a couple, he sets them down.

“Let’s do it on my bed, it’ll make less noise, yours will rock too much since it’s up higher.” She nods and goes over to his bed and sits down. He sits down next to her. “You’re positive?”

“Yes.”

He caresses her cheek.

“You’re shaking.” He says softly.

“I’m nervous.”

“Why? S’just me.”

“That’s exactly why I’m nervous. You’ve always made me nervous, Harry. I’ve just been good at hiding it.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Because we have a really good, chill thing going here. And I like being your friend.”

“This doesn’t have to ruin anything…” He cups both of her cheeks with his hands. “Let me make you feel good, Y/N.”

“Okay.”

He pulls her in and crashes her lips to his. Her eyes flutter closed as he swipes his tongue across her bottom lip, and she opens up for him. He tasted just like the mint gum he chewed constantly. She was making out with the guy every girl wanted. Y/N knew about Harry’s reputation, but she also knew a different side of him. She knew the side of him that liked his head scratched to help him fall asleep, and the way he really did just want a banana and nothing more for breakfast, and the way his hands always smelled like paint no matter how many times he scrubbed them.

He pulls back from her to get some air, or so she things, but his lips connect with her jaw and then to just under her earlobe. She gasps when she feels him suck on her skin, but she loves it. She wasn’t sure what to do with herself, so she just grips at his shoulders, while his hands roam down to her hips.

In a swift motion, he sits back on the bed, and pulls her onto his lap so she’s straddling him. She rolls her hips down on his while they’re lips find each other again. He groans against her bites down on her bottom lip. He hands tug at the hem of her shirt.

“Can I take this off?” He says, panting.

“Yes.”

He lifts it up over her head, revealing a sports bra that was really pushing her boobs up. He pulls her close and kisses on the tops of her breasts while she continues to grind down on him. She was starting to feel how hard he was and it was making her wet.

“Just take it off.” She says.

He nods and lifts the bra off her. He moves to take his own shirt off as well before cupping her breasts in his large hands. He tweaks her nipples, making her head roll back.

“I’ve wanted to see you like this for a long time, Y/N.” He says as he wraps his lips around her, sucking one of her breasts into his mouth, and letting it go with a pop.

“You have?” She gasps as he does the same thing to other one.

“You have no idea.”

He pulls her close so they’re chests are flush and they go back to kissing. His hands slide down to the globes of her ass and he gives her a good squeeze. He shifts them to lay her down, and she wraps her legs around his waist, just like how he’s wanted for a while. He kisses down her neck, chest, stomach, and then hooks his fingers into her leggings.

“You’re sure?”

“Please, just get them off. Get my underwear off, just take everything off of me.”

He smirks and does everything she says. She was full exposed to him and it was a glorious sight to see. Every curve, every dip, every mark on her was beautiful. He kisses her left knee and works his way to her inner thigh. He looks up at her one more time and he gives him an approving nod. She grips the blankets when she feels his tongue on her. Her hips buck up towards him, but he uses his arm to press down on her waist. He gives her a few slow licks at first, and then flicks his tongue back and forth on her clit. She moans softly, and then grits her teeth when he sucks on her. Her hands fly to his hair when she feels a finger slip inside. He looks up at her again and she just nods yes.

His mouth works her clit while he pumps in and out of her, knuckles deep, curling his fingers up. She gasps and groans, desperately trying to stay quiet so Liv and Chris don’t hear anything. Y/N’s legs were shaking around Harry, and he loved it. Her back was arching, he could tell she was close from the way she clenching around his fingers.

“Oh, shit!” She gasps and claps a hand over her mouth.

Harry waits for her to finish riding for him to pull his fingers out. She watches as he sucks them into his mouth, and hers falls open. She blinks tears away.

“Are you crying?” He runs a thumb under one of her eyes.

“I just…um…that was intense is all.”

“Do you wanna keep going?”

“Yes.” She props herself up on her elbows. “Do you want me to, uh, return the favor?”

“Maybe another time.” He stands up and pulls his joggers down. “I really just wanna fuck you, if that’s alright.”

“Mhm.” She smiles. Wow, we haven’t even finished yet and he’s already talking about another time. She thinks to herself.

She watches as Harry slowly takes his boxers off. Her eyes grow wide when she see it. It was big, and thick. Suddenly her mouth felt dry. He grabs a condom from his desk and rolls it on with ease. He gets back on the bed, between her legs.

“Y/N?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes, Harry, I want you.”

He smiles and kisses her quick. He looks down so he can line himself up with her dripping center. He slowly presses his tip in, and she can already feel him stretching her out. He accidentally slides in a little fast, though.

“Holy shit!” She moans loudly, and he presses his hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wild looking up at him.

“I know, okay, I know, but if you wanna do this you need to stay fucking quiet. I don’t want them to hear. Can you do that f’me, Y/N?” She nods her head yes, and he takes his hand away. “I didn’t mean to just shove it in like that, m’sorry.”

“S’okay, it felt good.” She giggles. He looks down between them.

“S’really snug…you’re so tight.” His words make her clench around him. “Can I move?”

“Please.”

Harry pulls out slightly and thrusts back in, and eventually he found a pace that suited the both of them. He buries his head in the crook of her neck, and hooks his arm under one of her legs, while her other leg was wrapped around his waist. Her nails were digging into his back, and it all just felt so fucking good. Her face was hidden in her shoulder to keep her moans and cries muffled.

“Takin’ it so well, Y/N.” He peppers kisses to her sweaty forehead. He drops her leg and uses both of his arms to prop himself up so he could really give it to her. The bed was shaking, but it wasn’t making much noise. “How’s it feel?”

“So good, so fucking good.”

“Yeah? Like havin’ me in you like this?”

“Yes!” She gasps as he hits her g-spot. “Oh my god.” She says shocked and then looks up at him. “Do…do that again.” He gives her another thrust right on the spot and her eyes roll into the back of her head.

“You’ve never come vaginally before, have you?” He grins.

“No.”

“Oh, baby…hold on tight.”

She grips his shoulders while he hits the spot over and over. Her teeth were clenched, trying so very hard not to make much noise, but when he hits it just right again, she lets go and cries out. Harry crashes his mouth to hers to swallow it best he can. She was writhing beneath him, having never had orgasm so strong before. Harry can’t last much longer after that, and spills into the condom. He collapses on top of her for a moment or two, just trying to catch his breath. He slowly pulls out of her and she winces.

“Sorry.” He whispers. “You…might be a little sore.”

“A little?” She scoffs. “I can’t believe you fit that whole thing inside of me.” She sits up and grabs her shirt. When she stands her legs feel like jello.

“Where are you goin’?”

“I have to pee, you went down on me, I’m not gonna risk getting a UTI. Just get into my bed, I’ll be back in a second.” He smiles and nods. He was happy she wanted to cuddle.

It stung when she went to the bathroom like she figured it would. She was thankful Liv and Chris didn’t seem to be awake. She fills a glass of water and brings it up with her. She takes a sip and hands it to Harry as she climbs into bed. He takes generous sip and hands it back to her to finish. He puts it on her desk when she’s done. They both sink down and she lays her head on his chest.

“How do you feel?” He asks, breaking the silence.

“Good, how do you feel?”

“Good…didn’t realize there was that much tension between us.” He chuckles.

“Harry, I don’t wanna be one of those girls, but what’s supposed to happen next…”

“We’re gonna cuddle and go to sleep like we usually do. Then tomorrow you’re gonna ace your midterms.”

“And after that?” She looks up at him, and he looks down at her.

“I think I only wanna be a one woman kinda guy…” She smiles up at him. “Would you wanna try going out on a date?”

“There’s a free skate happening down at the ice arena on Saturday night…any interest?”

“No interest in doin’ anything tomorrow?”

“Someone’s a bit eager.” She smirks.

“Alright, ice skating actually sounds good for Saturday. I have a couple of midterms tomorrow too that are gonna take a lot outa me.”

“How about pizza and a movie tomorrow night then?”

“Oh, I like the sound of that.” He kisses her hair line. “What should we do about Chris and Liv?”

“Let’s see how a couple of dates go before we tell them anything.”

“Good idea, although, I’m sure they probably heard you.”

“I wasn’t that loud, and it wasn’t my fault if I was.” She swats at his chest.

“True.” He looks over at his bed. “This could work really well. Use my bed for the fucking, and then we have your nice comfy bed for sleepin’.”

“Yeah, and then there’s no gross wet spot to worry about.” She giggles, and he bursts out laughing.

“I didn’t hurt you or anything did?”

“No, not at all. It felt really good the whole time, I promise. It hurt when I went to the bathroom though.”

“M’sorry.” He sighs. “You were so tight, I didn’t really know how to be any gentler than I was.”

“It’s okay, really. You took really good care of me. I feel way more relaxed now. I think you were right about me just needing to de-stress before my exams.”

The two end up falling asleep, and it’s a miracle Y/N hears her alarm go off the next morning. Harry knew Chris and Liv would be gone already since they both have 8AM’s, so he gets up with Y/N to take a shower. They didn’t do anything sexual, but it certainly was an intimate shower. She thought about him all day, everything from last night replaying over and over in her mind. It was a wonder she could concentrate during her exams.

She orders the pizza when she gets in later and sets up the movie. She bumps into Liv after freshening up upstairs.

“Hey, haven’t see you all day. How’d your midterms go?” Liv asks, about to take a slice of pizza.

“That’s not for you!” Y/N yelps. “And they went fine, Harry, uh, helped me study last night.”

“Oh, good! And who’s it for?”

“It’s, um, for Harry, as a thank you for him staying in to help me last night.”

“Um, okay?”

“Sorry…in fact, I’m gonna go put it on his bed so no one touches it. What are you and Chris doing tonight?”

“We were gonna go to Charlotte’s place. Do you wanna come?”

“Nah, I’m exhausted, I’m gonna stay in, but thanks.”

Y/N: I’m bringing the pizza up to our room, I think we should watch the movie up here too…

Harry: are chris and liv home??

Y/N: for now, but I think they’re going out. I just don’t want them snooping

Harry: good call…I’ll be home soon btw, just finished one of my graphic design exams

Y/N: Yay!

Harry gets in, and goes right upstairs. He locks the door behind him. Y/N was sitting on his bed with her laptop and the box of pizza.

“Hey.” You smile.

“Hi.” He smiles back. “That still warm?”

“Mhm.”

“Think it’ll stay that way?” He asks, taking his shirt off.

“I guess we’ll find out.” She sets it on his desk, along with her laptop.

“Been thinkin’ about you all day.” He says, leaning down to kiss her. She lays back on the bed so he can get on top of her.

“Really?” He hums his response as he kisses on her neck. “I thought about you too.” He yanks her shirt up over her breasts and kisses on them. “Harry, I really wanna do this again, but I’m…too sore…” She sighs and he sits up. “But…maybe now I could return the favor.”

“Yeh wanna suck me off, baby?”

“Mhm.”

After one hell of a blowjob, Harry and Y/N cuddle up and crack open the pizza that was waiting to be eaten, and they start their movie.

“How do you think your exams went?” He asks.

“Good, I think I did really well. What about yours?”

“Piece of cake.” He scoffs. “Graphic design is so easy, I don’t know why Chris complains about it all the time.”

“He’s just not as creative as you are. I wish you’d hang more of your paintings up…”

“Really? I have some down at the studio I could bring home.”

“Please! I’d love it, and I’m not just saying that, I think you’re genuinely talented.”

“Thanks.” He kisses her temple.

“I have to say, I was nervous having a guy I barley know as a roommate this year, but it’s worked out way better than I ever could’ve imagined.” They both giggle.

“Mm, I’m sure your parents will be thrilled when they found out their fears came true.”

“God, I can’t even think about that.” She takes a bite of pizza. “I was gonna ask you to come home for Thanksgiving before all this happened, but now maybe that wouldn’t be such a great idea.”

“You were?” He gives her a thoughtful smile.

“Yeah…I didn’t know what you normally did.”

“I usually stay here and eat shitty food at the dining hall. I’d come home with you.”

“You would?”

“Sure.” He shrugs. “We’re tryin’ somethin’ new between us, but at the core we’re still friends right?”

“Yeah.”

“So then I’d love to come home with you for Thanksgiving either way, and I think it’s very nice of you to think of me.” He takes a bite of pizza. “Plus, then I can see if your family likes me at all.”

“Good point.” She puts the pizza box on the desk and nestles in closer to him. She looks up at him and puckers her lips. He happily gives her a kiss. “I like you, Harry.”

“I like you too.”

#harry styles #harry styles fic #harry styles imagine #harry styles one shot #harry styles x reader #harry styles x y/n #harry styles y/n #harry styles fluff #harry styles fluff fic #harry styles smut fic #harry styles smut #college!Harry #uni!Harry

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alarawriting · 4 years

Text

52 Project #27: The Pale Bro

Five friends drove up the mountain into the forest, where the vacation cabin waited for them. It was their senior year of college, so it wouldn’t be long before they’d be graduating and going their separate ways, and who knew when they’d all be able to hang out together again? So they’d decided that this year, instead of going on spring break someplace where there were a ton of other people, they’d spend break together in a cabin in the woods, because there was no possible way that that could go wrong.

They were just five totally ordinary college guys. Steve, a white dude with brown hair who loved video games and playing guitar; Trevor, a black dude with short hair who was on track to graduate magna cum laude and had already been accepted at a top medical school; Harrison, an outgoing, short, red-haired white dude who played soccer, but not, like, at career athlete level or anything; Evan, an Asian dude who kept his hair in a long ponytail, and whose family owned the cabin, who was planning on taking a year off after graduation to backpack around Asia and had sold it to his parents as an exploration of his heritage; and the Pale Bro, a twelve-foot tall dude with paper-white skin whose fingernails were like long razor blades and who was completely covered with eyes and mouths, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cut-off shorts that would have been nearly pants on any other guy, and a pair of Vans on his feet. Just five ordinary young fellows, like anyone you might know.

Steve was driving the minivan, kinda wishing it was his dad’s SUV because of the effort of getting a minivan up the slope, but his dad’s SUV was in a different state and besides, it wouldn’t have had room for the Pale Bro. The minivan was the kind where you could put down the back row of seats to expand the cargo capacity, and the Pale Bro had laid out a thick sleeping-bag style blanket on top of their suitcases and was laying on them now, curled sideways because there was no dimension where he could stretch out in the van. Must be rough for him, Steve imagined, always having to bend down or curl up to fit into buildings and vehicles with his bros. He never complained about it, though. He was a great friend.

“How much farther is this place?” Harrison asked. “I gotta piss like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’ve been unfortunately next to you at the urinals,” Trevor said. “I’d believe it.”

Steve checked the GPS. “Shit. The GPS has just decided to get the vapors because it’s up too high. It’s telling me I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. Like, look at this.” He showed the screen to Evan. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. It isn’t even drawing the road.”

“Don’t worry about it, I can guide you in from here,” Evan said. “Just stay on the road another 20 minutes or so.”

With a voice that rumbled like the sound of tectonic plates grinding together and the hiss of static from the birth of the universe behind it, the Pale Bro conveyed that there had better be some fucking food at the cabin, because he was starving.

“You and me both, buddy,” Trevor said.

“We all just got Burger King like, two hours ago,” Steve complained.

“Yeah, well, me and Pale are tall dudes. We need more food than you.” Trevor smirked.

“There should be food, I had a grocery delivery scheduled for earlier today and one of my parents’ employees was supposed to swing by the place, pick it up and put it in the fridge.”

“There’s a fridge at this cabin?” Harrison asked.

Evan looked at him. “Yeah, dumbass, you think I’d have suggested coming here if there was no fridge? There’s running water, too. It even gets hot if you run it long enough.”

“Well, excuse me for not being so rich I can afford to go to a cabin in the woods, ever, before now.”

“What else has it got?” Trevor asked.

“Well, there’s three bedrooms, one of which has a king-sized bed and the other two have bunk beds. I figure, Pale Bro gets the big bed and we break up into two’s and do the roommate thing. There’s a sofa bed too, in case someone really can’t stand having a roommate. We don’t have a washer or dryer, but if you only brought one pair of underpants and it’s getting really rank, we’ve got detergent and a clothesline so you can wash them in the sink. There’s a dishwasher.”

“I would have put in a washer and dryer before I put in a dishwasher, personally,” Steve said.

“Yeah, well, my mom had a different opinion. Anyway, it’s camping in the woods. It’s not supposed to be just like if we were at home.”

“I call top bunk!” Harrison said.

“There’s two top bunks. Both rooms have bunk beds.”

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice like a Gregorian chant of nightmares that he wanted to know if there was a bathroom in the master bedroom, because that shit would be sweet.

“Naah, man, sorry,” Evan said. “But there is one of those really deep claw-foot bathtubs that you like.”

Like the rumbling of an oncoming avalanche, the Pale Bro opined that that was excellent.

***

“I don’t believe this shit.”

They had just disembarked, the Pale Bro in the rear bringing his own suitcase and the beer cooler, which was the size of a mini-fridge, and everyone else dragging their suitcases in… except for Evan, who had gone directly to the kitchen without bringing in his own stuff yet. He came stomping out. “Joe never showed up, the bastard! I’m totally having my dad fire his ass.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked.

“I mean that food order never showed up. So we have canned food, and boxed food, but we don’t have anything perishable. No bread, no lunchmeat, no eggs, no bacon, no orange juice, none of that shit.” He sighed. “I’m gonna have to drive down into town myself to get food, and we just got here.”

“Hey, man, I can still drive the car,” Steve said. “You just need to tell me where to go.”

“Steve, you’ve been driving for 6 hours, you’re probably wiped. I can drive,” Trevor said. “It’s the least I could do with Evan buying our food.”

“Yeah, but you bought the beer, man,” Evan said. “So maybe Harrison needs to drive.”

“Uh, hey, before anyone drives anywhere, maybe you should call and find out if your parents even know where that Joe guy who never showed up is, and if he’s all right?” Harrison called from outside.

“Why?”

“Just… everyone come take a look at this!”

Everyone went outside and congregated around Harrison’s find, which was a roughly humanoid, but clawed, tread that was at least three times the size of a normal footprint. Experimentally the Pale Bro put his own massive foot into the tread. Harrison whistled. The footprint was about 25% bigger than the Pale Bro’s.

“Dude. What is that? Is that a bear?” Harrison asked.

Trevor shook his head. “Those are sneaker treads, Har. Bears don’t wear sneakers.”

In a voice that was the perfect auditory personification of the Zalgo font, the Pale Bro suggested that it looked like one of his cousins was back on its bullshit again.

“Goddamn,” Evan said. “That’s a big fellow.”

“I think maybe if we go into town we should all go,” Steve said.

“We’ve just been driving all this time, though,” Evan said. “I wanted to relax, crack a cold one, put on some MP3s. We don’t get Internet worth shit out here but I’ve got a huge music library on the stereo’s hard drive.”

The Pale Bro opined that before anyone drove anywhere, maybe he had better find his cousin and make it clear that if his cousin touched any of his friends he would shove its head so far up its ass it would be blinking shit out of its 27 eyes for a month.

“That… sounds reasonable,” Trevor said. “Since we don’t know what happened to Joe. We can hunker down here and wait for you to get back.”

“I’m pretty sure I got instant just add water pancake mix,” Evan said. “And my mom stocked this place with crappy dehydrated chicken pieces like the kind doomsday preppers buy. I could make a shitty chicken soup, we’ve got bouillon and noodles. Oh, and there’s a few cans of chili. Canned stuff is shit but I could maybe perk it up with some spices, some extra beans… put some rice in the cooker, I bet my mom left rice here, she buys like 100 pound bags of rice.”

Like the sound of Jupiter hovering in orbit above, rotating ponderously, the Pale Bro agreed that some canned chili with extra spices sounded pretty good considering how fucking hungry he was, and as soon as he found his asshole cousin he’d be back to eat with the rest of his bros. He also reminded them to save him some beer.

“Dude!” Steve laughed. “We’ve got three keggers’ worth in that cooler! There will be plenty of beer for you.”

Evan called his parents as the Pale Bro left the house, and reported back, somewhat gray-faced. “They said Joe never called in to say he got to the house. He reported picking up the groceries, he was headed up here, and then nada.”

“Oh, well, then, you work on the chili,” Trevor said, “and me and the rest of the guys are gonna lock up all the windows and doors and put someone on watch for when the Pale Bro gets back. You don’t have any guns up here, by any chance, do you?”

“Nope, my parents aren’t really hunters,” Evan said.

“Well, I’ve seen your kitchen at home, I know what kind of equipment your mom likes to stock. We’ll have plenty of sharp knives, I’m betting.”

“Yeah.”

And so as Evan attempted to turn six cans of canned chili into something his bros would find edible, and the Pale Bro stalked through the forest on the mountaintop looking for his asshole cousin, the other three made sure everything was locked up, that the car keys were secure, and that there were wicked cooking knives within easy reach, but not line of sight from the outside, of every door. Just like ordinary bros do, every day.

***

The Pale Bro stalked through the woods. Now, you’d think that being twelve feet tall and having a foot easily the size of a car tire’s diameter would make it hard to walk through a thickly wooded forest with plenty of underbrush, but the Bro’s long, skinny arms and legs could easily step over bushes and shrubs, and could pivot in directions that didn’t seem to quite exist within three-dimensional space. So he had very little difficulty making his way through the dense forest.

In the beginning, he was tracking the large treads that may or may not have been left by his asshole cousin, but the trail disappeared as it crossed a small creek. In a tone that sounded like the anthropomorphic personification of the trumpets of Jericho, the Pale Bro groaned, recognizing that he’d lost the trail and would have to search for it.

And so he went up the creek, and down the creek, and out from the creek, and up the trees around the creek, looking for any sign of his cousin… until he heard, in the distance, human voices.

Human female voices.

He stumbled through the woods, suddenly much clumsier than he’d been, following the sound of girls, until he half-fell out of the treeline and ended up in a clearing around another cabin, like Evan’s but bigger. The sounds were coming from around the corner of the cabin. The Pale Bro slid forward, long long legs making long long strides through the yard around the cabin, until a hot tub with a wooden deck came into view. The hot tub was on, and populated by five smokin’ hot girls.

There was a fair-skinned blonde girl, in a skimpy blue bikini that showed off all her curves, whose wavy hair floated angel-like around her head, improbably given that she was in a hot tub. There was a short, delicate black girl with hair in very wet braids and a soft, beautiful face, wearing a candy pink bikini. There was an Indian girl with long hair and an athletic build, with a red bindi mark on her forehead and a pale turquoise one-piece bathing suit with a little skirt, sitting on the deck and kicking her feet slowly in the water. A red-haired white girl with tan Mediterranean skin, tight curls, and a bright white bikini that stood out against her tan, had turned away from the tub and was looking directly at the Pale Bro, a slight smile on her face. The fifth girl was green and scaly, with webbed hands and golden eyes with nictating membranes; she didn’t have hair, but she had betta-like, beautifully colored fins on her head that looked hair-like.

All of them were absolutely gorgeous.

The blonde girl shrieked and ducked into the tub; the black girl bounced and climbed out of the tub, a big grin on her face. “Hi there, stranger!” she yelled from the rail around the deck. “Why don’t you come over and have a beer with us?”

The Pale Bro admitted in a tone like the creaking of an ancient rusted machine at the base of an abandoned windmill that that sounded awesome.

The green girl rolled her eyes. The Indian girl gave the black girl a questioning look. “Are you sure, Kayla?”

“Come on, Nandi,” the red-haired girl said. “I think he’s cute.”

The blonde girl came back up. “Are you inviting him over?” she asked, sounding horrified. “What if he’s a psycho killer?”

“Oh, right,” the green girl said. “He’s pale and tall and has eyes all over his body so he must be a psycho killer. Racist much?”

“No! He’s just a strange dude, that’s all! You have to watch out for strange dudes!”

The Pale Bro explained in the voice of a broken subwoofer booming at outdoor concert sound levels underwater that he didn’t really want to scare any of the girls and he’d go if they didn’t want him here.

The green girl leaned her elbows on the edge of the hot tub. “Forget Ashlee, she’s just paranoid.”

“You didn’t want him coming over either, Y’lehna,” Nandi said quietly.

“I just knew that if Kayla invited him over, we’re gonna lose Rhiannon for the rest of the night,” Y’lehna muttered.

The red-haired girl, presumably Rhiannon, was smiling broadly at the Pale Bro now. “Hey there,” she said. “We’ve got hard cider and hard lemonade, Bud, Corona and a couple of local microbrews. What’s your pleasure?”

In a voice that was actually surprisingly normal-sounding for once, the Pale Bro said he’d have whatever Rhiannon was having, which turned out to be hard cider.

He clambered up onto the hot tub deck, pulled off his sneakers, and soaked his feet in the hot tub, which barely came up to his knees.

“So what are you doing around here? You don’t live near here, do you?” Kayla asked.

And so the Pale Bro explained that he and his bros had decided to spend their last spring break of college together, in a cabin in the woods, because once graduation came they might never see each other again, and certainly even if they made excuses to get together on occasion, they’d see each other a lot less.

“That’s so sweet!” Kayla said.

“We’re juniors,” Rhiannon said. “Except Ashlee, she’s a sophomore, and Y’lehna’s technically a senior but she’s planning on doing a fifth year. But we decided to hang out here because Ashlee’s parents just put in a hot tub.”

“Hot tub!” Kayla sang out, and slid back into the tub. She was maybe just a little bit drunk.

As it turned out, they all went to the same university, and Y’lehna and the Pale Bro chatted for a bit about sports. “I tried out for the swim team,” Y’lehna said, “but when they found out I had gills, they disqualified me because apparently part of the point of the sport is that you are only allowed to breathe gaseous oxygen?”

The Pale Bro commiserated, as he hadn’t even tried trying out for the basketball team like he had once dreamed of, realizing that they would never allow someone who was taller than the hoop to play.

***

“I don’t know, though,” Ashlee, who had warmed up to the Pale Bro once another hard lemonade was in her hand, said. She was lying in a deck chair rather than in the tub. “Normally I love this place, and the tub’s great, but something just feels really creepy today.”

“You’ve been on edge since we got here,” Nandi – whose full name turned out to be Nandini, but she insisted that the Pale Bro should use her nickname – agreed.

The Pale Bro was thus reminded that his bros were expecting him to track down what might be a killer who may or may not have murdered Joe, the guy who was supposed to bring in the groceries, and also that he was very hungry and the hard cider wasn’t doing him any favors on an empty stomach. He pulled his feet out of the tub and confessed, in a voice like the grinding of the gears of the machinery that runs the universe, that his bros had sent him out to find a monster – he didn’t mention that the monster was probably his cousin – who might have killed someone, and also that dinner was waiting for him back at the cabin.

“Oh, you should bring them over!” Kayla said cheerfully.

“Are they all like you?” Rhiannon asked in a tone that might be considered “sultry” by anyone not as oblivious as the Pale Bro.

The Pale Bro shook his head and admitted that his bros were all much shorter than he was.

Rhiannon put a hand on his arm. “Well, that’s too bad, but I guess one handsome, tall fellow in a group is all I can expect, right?”

The Pale Bro looked at Rhiannon’s hand like it was an inexplicable glob that might be ice cream and possibly should be washed off, but equally possibly should be licked up.

Y’lehna said, “Why don’t you bring them over? They might be cute.”

“Yeah,” Nandi said, “we can’t all fit in the hot tub at once, but didn’t you say you had four friends back at your cabin?”

“That makes five,” Ashlee said, “and there’s five of us!”

“Also,” Nandi said, “we’ve still got, like, five pizzas in the house.”

This made the decision for the Pale Bro. He took the girls up on their offer of a couple of slices of pizza – they were cold, but he didn’t mind – and then headed back to the cabin to let his bros know about the girls’ offer.

***

The Pale Bro knocked on the window of the cabin, which apparently gave everyone inside heart attacks, even though he’d just meant to warn them to open the door for him. “Jesus, Pale,” Evan complained. “There’s a door.”

Within a few minutes – and after dropping his hard cider bottle in the recycling bin, because Evan’s family were big on recycling and the Pale Bro wanted to be polite – he had explained the situation to his bros.

“Let me get this straight,” Evan said. “You didn’t find any sign of Joe, you didn’t find your cousin or any other kind of monster or killer, and you want us to leave and go hiking through the woods to go hang out at a cabin full of strangers?”

When Evan phrased it that way, the Pale Bro admitted that it didn’t sound like a great idea, but on the other hand, there were five incredibly hot girls, plus a hot tub, plus pizza.

“Now let’s talk about this,” Trevor said. “Has anyone considered that if there’s really a psycho killer or a monster loose in the woods, those five girls might be in a lot more danger than we are? Maybe we should go over there to help protect them.”

“Yeah! And we could bring some of our beers, and Evan’s chili and rice—” Harrison suggested.

“Fuck no, I’m not making anybody else have to eat this chili,” Evan said. “It’s shit. It’s just the best I could do with the supplies I’ve got.” He sighed. “Too bad I can’t bring my tunes.”

“We need to be careful about locking everything up,” Steve said. “We really don’t want to come home tomorrow morning and find the psycho killer waiting for us here.”

“Or a gaggle of rabid raccoons,” Evan said. “That’s a thing around here.”

“Did any of you guys bring condoms?” Harrison asked. “Because I didn’t think we’d be seeing any action this weekend, so I didn’t bring any…”

Trevor chuckled. “We haven’t even met these girls, Har. Aren’t you jumping the gun a little?”

“Hey, I like to be prepared.”

“I’ve got a handful in my wallet, but I don’t think I’ve got five of them,” Steve said.

The Pale Bro pointed out with laughter like the rolling of thunder in a distant cavern that probably none of Steve’s condoms would fit him anyhow, so it would be fine.

“You don’t have to eat that chili, man,” Evan said, observing that the Pale Bro had dumped half a rice cooker’s worth of rice onto a plate and then all the rest of the chili that the other bros hadn’t eaten on top of that, and was currently chowing down. “It’s shit. I admit it. And you said you had some pizza.”

The Pale Bro declared that he was too hungry to care what it tasted like, that two slices of pizza weren’t nearly enough, and besides, it tasted fine to him.

So the five bros armed themselves with the sharp knives from Evan’s mom’s kitchen just in case they ran into a psycho killer along the way, locked all the doors and windows to the cabin and the doors to the car, and the Pale Bro carried the beer cooler as he led the way back to the house with the five hot girls.

***

It wasn’t particularly easy for the Pale Bro to retrace his steps through the woods; it’d been just short of sunset when he’d found the girls, and now it was full dark. His myriad eyes could see well in the dark, of course, but his bros couldn’t, so he had to watch out for them, and they were also a lot less flexible, and tall, than he was. Also, he hadn’t been toting a beer cooler the last time he came through here.

It didn’t help that his bros were very jumpy, freaking every time a night bird called or a twig broke loudly. The Pale Bro got it, he did – there might be a psycho killer in the woods, or a monster, or his cousin who was also a monster, and they couldn’t see as well as he could, or defend themselves. But this was just ridiculous. In a voice that was an auditory personification of the concept of dread, he suggested that they stop being such big pussies and concentrate on not tripping before they accidentally stabbed each other trying to brandish knives at random bushes.

“Yo, man, we can’t all be twelve feet tall,” Harrison said, sounding pissed but also still really anxious.

In a voice that was best described by some kind of metaphor implying a deep and scary sound that hopefully hasn’t been used already in this story, the Pale Bro offered to give Harrison a piggyback ride.

Trevor said, “Not in the middle of trees, man, you’d brain him. Walk right into a tree branch and knock him off.”

“Yeah, I gotta turn that down,” Harrison said.

“You smell that?” Steve said. “Smells like someone’s firing up a grill somewhere. I can smell the charcoal.”

“Did the girls have a grill?” Trevor asked.

The Pale Bro admitted that to the best of his knowledge, they did not, but on the other hand they had Hawaiian pizza. This, of course, triggered the old argument, where Steve and Harrison insisted that pineapple did not belong on pizza, and Evan and the Pale Bro insisted that pineapple on pizza was quite valid. The argument continued, with Trevor’s exhortations to show some common sense and save the argument until they were not walking through a dark forest that might contain a psycho killer going unheeded, until Steve accidentally fell in the creek because he couldn’t see it, and in the process lost one of Evan’s mom’s good cooking knives.

However, the Pale Bro mused, this was a potentially good sign because he’d found the girls while walking alongside the creek. So the bros walked alongside the creek, Steve muttering that these girls had better be hot after all this, until they heard the sound of female human voices, exactly like the Pale Bro had had before.

They entered the clearing, observed the very large cabin, Evan making comments like “I bet it’s a bitch to keep clean, ten to one that thing’s not sanitary” because he was jealous that the cabin was bigger than his family’s, and then around the corner to observe the very hot girls, who were all still very hot even though some of them had pizza sauce smeared around their lips.

“Well, hell-o, ladies!” Harrison said, trying to be suave and cool, and failing miserably.

The Pale Bro wondered, in the voice like the echoes of a rockslide in a canyon, if there was any of the pineapple pizza left, because unfortunately he was still hungry. He gestured at his very large body somewhat self-deprecatingly.

“Hi, guys!” Kayla, who was obviously the group’s ambassador to guests, said, with possibly more bubbliness in her voice than was currently in the hot tub. “I’m Kayla, and this is Nandini, and over there in the blue bikini is Ashlee, whose cabin this is – I mean, really it’s her family’s cabin—”

“I get it,” Evan said. “My family’s got a cabin too, that’s where we’ve been hanging. We just got in today. My name’s Evan.”

“Cool!” Kayla said. “That’s Y’lehna in the lawn chair with the wine cooler, and Rhiannon went to the bathroom but I’m sure—”

“I’m back!” Rhiannon announced. Trevor’s eyes widened and then turned heart-shaped. Metaphorically.

“And I’m Trevor. Hello, ladies,” he said, sounding much cooler when he said it than Harrison had.

“I’m Harrison, and this is Steve, and he’s kinda shy!” Harrison punctuated this by shoving his kinda shy friend forward.

“Uh, hi,” Steve said. “I kind of fell in the creek on my way here?”

Kayla’s eyes went wide. “Oh, wow! Hey, Ashlee, do you mind if I bring him inside and show him the shower?”

“Long as he takes his shoes off,” Ashlee said, coming to the deck railing. Steve saw her angelic hair, beautiful skin, and ample charms shown off by the rather small bikini, and fell in love.

“Oh, definitely. I’ll definitely do that. I – yeah. Thanks a lot for letting me use the shower, I’m all covered in mud. Which you can see. Because you’re standing there, looking at me covered in mud.”

Kayla laughed. “Oh, yeah, let’s get you cleaned up!” She took Steve’s hand with surprising alacrity and lack of reluctance, given that he was covered in mud.

Evan said, “The guy who was supposed to bring over the groceries never showed, and I made some chili and rice out of canned stuff for my friends, but it was kinda shitty. Pale asked if there was any more of the pineapple pizza? I could definitely go for a slice if you’re offering.”

Ashlee lit up. “Oh! Sure! I can take you in to get some pizza!”

Rhiannon had by then walked over to the Pale Bro, and put her hand on his arm again. “You know, I could definitely go for some more pizza myself,” she purred.

Meanwhile, Harrison was trying to chat up Y’lehna, and also strip to his boxers so he could get in the hot tub, without looking like he was doing it in a creepy way. “So, where’re you from?”

“Massachusetts,” Y’lehna said, lying back in the lawn chair and wistfully gazing at Trevor, who had followed Rhiannon, the Pale Bro, and Ashlee in for pizza. “A little town called Innsmouth, on the coast. Little more than half an hour north of Boston.” Y’lehna had legs, but they were covered with scales and her feet were large and webbed.

“Cool. I’m from New Jersey, but, you know, like the south end. Not the part that’s all gritty like Newark and Jersey City.” Harrison slid into the hot tub. “Oh, man, this is nice. You wanna get back in?”

“After I finish my wine cooler, maybe. Ashlee doesn’t like it when we eat or drink in the tub.”

Evan was the first to come back from the pizza hunt, carrying a beer and two slices and had actually had swimming trunks at the cabin – they hadn’t planned on going swimming on this trip, but Evan kept some clothes here all the time, and he’d already changed into them and then put his clothes on over. He stripped to his bathing suit and then went and got into the hot tub near Nandini. “Hey.”

Nandini barely noticed; she was too busy looking at Harrison. Evan had to say it again to get her attention. She turned and looked at him. “Oh, you can’t eat those in the tub. Or drink the beer.”

“What if I sit back from the tub and just soak my feet, until I’m done with the food?”

Nandini shrugged. “I guess that’d be okay, but you’d have to ask Ashlee. Can I ask you something?”

Evan beamed. “Sure! Whatever you want!”

She nodded her head toward Harrison. “Does your friend have a girlfriend?”

Evan’s first reaction was dismay – Nandini seemed to not even notice him as a man, and was just making eyes at Harrison, who was obviously captivated by Y’lehna. Then he narrowed his eyes and decided to make problems on purpose. “Oh, sorry, Harrison is gay.” Actually, Steve was bi and the rest of them were straight – Evan thought, anyway, unsure about the Pale Bro and if he even had a sexuality, but he did seem to like to look at girls.

Nandini sighed. “Aren’t they always.”

Ashlee was the next to come back. She sat next to Evan. “You know, if you want to get into the hot tub and still eat your food, I normally have a rule about that but I could let it go this time. Just as long as you keep the actual food and drink out of the hot tub so it doesn’t make everything gross.” She smiled at Evan.

Evan smiled at her, because it was always good to smile at your host, and it was also always good to smile at a pretty girl, and Ashlee was both. “Thanks,” he said, not planning to take her up on it because what if he dropped the pizza?, and then turned back to Nandini. “What’re you majoring in?”

“Ugh, I hate having to explain it to people,” Nandini said. “It’s… complicated. It’s a discipline that’s part economic theory, part psychology, part sociology and part anthropology. Basically, I’m majoring in the question of why do people do dumb things when they’d be better off doing smart ones, and how that impacts our understanding of economics.”

“That sounds really interesting,” said Evan, who had quit his business major because he was bored out of his mind by economics. “I’m doing Asia studies. Yeah, it’s a cliché.” He’d gone into Asia studies after he quit his business major because it was the only thing he thought his parents would let him get by with if he refused to study business. Some kind of “Mom, Dad, I really want to get in touch with our heritage and understand the culture of my grandparents” bullshit. Also, statistically you were more likely to find a girl who considers Asian guys hot in Asia studies than any other major, he suspected.

“That’s pretty cool!” Ashlee said. “Which part of Asia is your family from? China, Korea…?”

“China, originally,” Evan, whose real name was Haoran, but who’d been going by Evan since second grade, said. His pizza finished, he slid down into the tub and turned back to Nandini. “So, we came over here to warn you – and maybe help you fight if it comes to it – but we’re worried there might be a killer or something in the woods?”

“Omigod, really?” Ashlee asked, eyes wide with terror.

“Why do you think that?” Nandini asked, seeming completely calm.

“Well, my parents had an employee, Joe, buy food for my cabin. He was supposed to drop it off… but he never showed up, and he never called my parents, and he’s not answering his cell. Meanwhile, we saw this absolutely huge tread in the dirt, and the Pale Bro thinks it might be his cousin.”

“Yeah, he told us all that,” Nandini said. “Except for the part about it maybe being his cousin.”

“So, a monster?” Y’lehna asks. “Because there’s a difference between a psycho killer, who’s human, and a monster, who isn’t. You don’t know what the monster’s capable of, but when you see them, you know they’re a monster.”

“Yeah, but just because they look like a monster doesn’t mean anything about what they’re like!” Harrison said. “The Pale Bro looks like a monster, but he’s a really great guy!”

“I’m guessing his cousin sucks, though,” Y’lehna said.

“Well, we don’t know his cousin,” Harrison said, somewhat diplomatically.

“Do you really think there’s a killer?” Ashlee asked, getting into the hot tub right next to Evan – and inconveniently, between him and Nandini. “But you’ll protect us, right?”

“Uh, some of us can protect ourselves…” Nandini said.

Evan got back out of the tub so he could see Nandini more clearly without Ashlee in the way. “Absolutely. I’m not trying to say that we’re offering our protection because, you know, we’re guys and you’re girls and we think we’re tougher than you. That’s not it at all; I bet most of you could kick my ass.” He did not actually think this; Evan was in pretty good shape, since he was preparing to backpack all over Asia next year if he got the chance, and also, he bicycled a lot. It was pretty clear to him, though, that Nandini was invested in thinking of herself as someone who could protect herself, and who knew? Maybe she was a martial arts master or a crack shot. “But we figure, there’s safety in numbers. Plus, if it is the Pale Bro’s cousin, he can get it to back the hell off.”

“Good point,” Nandini said.

At this point there was a glass-shattering, horrible screech, and then something, some unknown creature moving so fast it was a blur, leapt out of the hot tub and charged directly at Evan, Nandini and Ashlee. All three of them screamed, as it slashed bright pain across Evan’s legs, right above his knees.

And then Ashlee started cracking up, as the horrible assailant stopped at the edge of the deck and began washing itself vigorously. “Phenyl, you dumbass. I know you like to sleep on the tub when we have it covered, but couldn’t you see we have it open and it’s full of water?”

Evan’s heart was still pounding, but now that he could see the creature that had slashed gashes into his thighs, he took deep breaths to calm himself down. “That’s your cat?”

“Yeah, her name is Phenylephrine and she’s a dumbass. She catches rats, though. One time she chased off a raccoon who’d gotten into the trash.” Ashlee attempted to pick her cat up, but the almost-entirely-black-except-for-white-bib cat jumped down off the deck, apparently not sufficiently recovered from her ordeal to tolerate interacting with humans. Evan decided not to ask why the cat was named after a decongestant.

“So what are you majoring in?” Harrison asked Y’lehna, trying to come across as casual. “I’m doing liberal arts, you know? Just a little of everything.”

“Shakespearean literature,” Y’lehna said.

“Oh, wow! You know about the theory that he didn’t write his own plays, right?”

Y’lehna rolled her eyes. “Of course I do. It’s bullshit.”

And as she explained all the reasons why she thought the theory was bullshit, Harrison listened to her raptly with imaginary hearts in his eyes.

***

Steve was deeply grateful to Kayla for taking him in to find Ashlee’s shower. The cabin had wooden floors, thankfully, so the gunk still dripping off his body could be easily cleaned. It made sense – it was a cabin in the woods, after all – but Steve had some vague idea of what rich people houses were like from visiting Evan, and carpet played a big role in his mental image of a rich person abode.

He was less impressed with the towel Kayla found him, after he came out of the shower. It was very… brief. Bigger than a hand towel, but not by much, it covered the territory it was required to cover and not very much else.

“I hate to ask, but does Ashlee have any brothers or other family members who might be around my size? This towel is kinda…”

Kayla laughed. “I think you look cute in it, but yeah, I can see why you’d want something bigger!” She stuck her head in the kitchen, where Ashlee was serving pizza to Evan, Rhiannon, Trevor, and the Pale Bro. “Hey, Ashlee! Does Hunter have any swimming trunks or t-shirts here?”

“You can check. He usually uses the middle bedroom.”

Steve called out, “I can have them cleaned and returned tomorrow, I just… my clothes are all muddy… I don’t want to impose, but this towel’s kind of tiny…”

“No problem, I don’t even care if you keep Hunter’s stuff. It would serve him right for being a douche,” Ashlee said.

Kayla checked, and came back with a NASCAR t-shirt and a pair of swimming trunks with grotesquely grinning emojis all over it. “Sorry, I hope it fits! It’s all he had!”

“No problem, NASCAR’s cool,” Steve said. The sum total of his knowledge about NASCAR was that it had something to do with cars, probably, and that guys who drank warm crappy beer and drove pickup trucks liked it, and that was all. But if Ashlee’s family was into it, maybe it was worth checking out.

He and Kayla walked into the kitchen, now that he was vaguely decent. “OMG I am so sorry,” Ashlee said. “That shirt is awful. Is that really the only one Hunter had?”

Steve shrugged, understanding more about Ashlee’s relationship to her brother’s interests. “It’s not like I’m into NASCAR or anything, but beggars can’t be choosers, right?”

The Pale Bro chose this moment to inform everyone in a voice that echoed like a portent of doom that there was no more beer in Ashlee’s fridge, and this was a problem, because he and his bros had brought beer for 5 people for three days, but now they had ten people, so what if they ran out?

Steve privately thought it was good that the Pale Bro wasn’t majoring in anything that needed math. Ten people would burn through the beer for five people at twice the rate, but twice the rate of three days would be a day and a half, more than enough time to go get more beer, unless the psycho killer or monster slashed their tires or something.

Kayla spoke up. “I’ve got more in the trunk of my car, but I parked kind of crappy.”

“Well, no matter how crappy the parking job was, more beer’s always a good thing,” Trevor said.

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice that was like the crackling of atoms fusing together in the unfathomable heat of the sun that he’d be happy to go get them out of Kayla’s car.

“Uh… no, I think Steve should do it,” Kayla said. “Because he’s shorter, and it’s a really crappy parking job. Trust me, you will bonk your head on trees about six times just trying to reach my car.”

“Did you park it in the woods?” Trevor asked.

“Um, sorta… I was kinda excited about getting here and waving to my friends and I accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake and I ended up in the woods… yeah.” She looked up at Steve forlornly. “I’m such an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot,” Steve said, because it was always a good idea to tell a pretty girl who said she was an idiot that in fact she was not.

In a voice like the echoes of a NASCAR race going on over one’s head because one was in a sewer system under the track, the Pale Bro offered to help Kayla get her car out of the woods, if it was stuck there.

“That’s really sweet of you,” Rhiannon purred. “Probably better to do it in daylight, though. There’s a cliff drop near there, and you don’t want to accidentally slip over the edge.”

“Or worse, drop the car,” Steve said, and laughed. Kayla laughed with him.

The Pale Bro expressed to Kayla that if there was a cliff face near there, then he was very glad that she hadn’t accidentally driven off the edge, because that would have been bad.

“Yeah,” Kayla said, “but it all worked out so no harm done, right? Unless, like, I punctured the gas tank with a tree branch or something. That would definitely be bad.”

Steve, Trevor, Rhiannon and the Pale Bro all agreed that that would definitely be the case.

***

After Steve and Kayla had left to go to Kayla’s car to get more beer, Rhiannon asked the Pale Bro what his major was.

“I’m pre-med,” Trevor inserted, not actually having been asked.

“Mm, nice. I’m trying to become a physicist, myself. What about you?” She repeated the question in the Pale Bro’s direction.

In a voice that was muffled and full of pizza, the Pale Bro conveyed that he hadn’t heard the question, sorry.

“I just wanted to know what your major was,” she said.

The Pale Bro confessed that he was majoring in gender studies, having decided that hotel management was not really a good career path for him.

“Oh, really!” Rhiannon brightened. “You don’t see a lot of guys majoring in gender studies! You must be very secure in your masculinity.” She said this as someone who seemed very secure in the Pale Bro’s masculinity, herself, as she pressed against him.

The Pale Bro mumbled in a voice that really didn’t sound all that different from anyone else’s mumbling that he just didn’t like how society treated women, and added that his mother raised him to respect and look up to women. He confided that she had torn apart giant megafauna with her bare claws and fed them to her brood of spawn while insisting on table manners, and that he couldn’t imagine any job more difficult than being the primary caretaker of children. Children, he admitted, scared him.

“Oh, yes, the little rugrats can totally bring the chaos,” Rhiannon laughed.

The Pale Bro clarified that actually chaos was perfectly fine by him and the natural state of all things that the universe must someday return to; it was their high-pitched screechy voices that really bothered him.

“I never knew that,” Trevor said. “Weird, what you learn about people. Rhiannon,which kind of physics are you concentrating on? Like, space, or quantum, or what?”

“Haven’t really narrowed it down like that, it’s going to depend on what grad school accepts me and which programs I can get into,” Rhiannon said. To the Pale Bro she said, “Hey, do you want to go for a walk? It’s really nice out.”

“It is, but there might be some kind of killer or monster in the woods,” Trevor reminded her. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to go wandering off by yourself?”

She rolled her eyes and gestured at the Pale Bro. “I’m pretty sure that Pale here would be able to protect me if anything came up,” she said.

The Pale Bro confessed in a voice that echoed like the infrasound rumble of the collapse of a concrete building, but an embarrassed and regretful tone, that actually he wanted to wait right here, because he wanted more beer and also his feet hurt.

“Well, why don’t we go back to the hot tub and let you soak your feet for a bit?” Rhiannon asked.

“That sounds like a great idea,” Trevor said. “We’ve got our own beer cooler out there, remember? You brought it over.”

This was true, the Pale Bro admitted, but he couldn’t eat or drink in the hot tub, and he wanted another slice of Hawaiian pizza if there was any.

“Oh, but you’re a big fellow,” Rhiannon said. “You could totally sit back from the hot tub and dangle your feet in it while you’re eating, and you wouldn’t be close enough to the tub to bother Ashlee.”

In that case, the Pale Bro conveyed in a voice like the rumbling of a train full of dead bodies, he was all for the hot tub, because that shit sounded great.

***

The group joined back up around the hot tub, all except for Kayla and Steve, who were still in the woods, ostensibly getting beer out of Kayla’s car. Ashlee had brought out chips and pretzels, which, she said, were not to be eaten within five feet of the hot tub. This meant that the Pale Bro could soak his feet while he snacked, as promised, but no one else could actually eat near the tub.

“Come on, that’s not fair,” Y’lehna, who was considerably more drunk than she had been earlier in the evening and probably really needed to fill her stomach with chips and pretzels, complained. “I’ve been good all night but now I’m starving, and you know my skin needs to be moisturized.”

“I keep offering to let you try some of my Oil of Olay,” Ashlee mumbled.

“If I wanted to cover myself in something oily, I’d use fish oil, it’s traditional around my hometown,” Y’lehna said sharply. “I wanna be in water. Like, H20.” She looked up at Trevor, pleadingly. “Do you think I’m asking too much? I don’t think I’m asking too much.”

“I think you should definitely eat something,” Trevor said.

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask,” offered Harrison eagerly.

“But I don’t want to get any food in the hot tub,” Ashlee whined. “It’d be gross, and we’d have to drain it and clean it…”

“Well, I want to be in the water and I want goddamn pretzels, is that too much? Is that really too much?” Y’lehna yelled, making Ashlee quail.

At that point they all heard the sound of clanging and shattering, and Kayla and Steve screaming like they were being murdered.

Ashlee shrieked in terrified response. The Pale Bro, Trevor and Nandini were all off the deck and running toward the sound in a second, followed by Rhiannon, Evan and Harrison. Y’lehna took the opportunity to grab an entire dish of pretzels, drop herself into the tub, and stand at the edge of the tub, facing the concrete around the tub and stuffing her face. “I can be responsible,” she muttered. “I can not get pretzels in the tub. I don’t have to eat underwater. I don’t even want to. Pretzels aren’t like fish. They get soggy.”

No one was there to hear her, though, because they had all gone into the woods.

The Pale Bro had only gotten in a few feet when Steve yelled, “Don’t come any closer, guys!”

“Are you being murdered?” Trevor asked, loudly.

“We will totally fuck them up if someone is trying to kill you!” Harrison said, clenching his fists.

“No, guys, it’s good… it’s all good.”

“It’s not good at all!” Kayla wailed. “I spent so much money on that beer!”

The Pale Bro heard the word ‘beer’ and conveyed that if something was going on with the beer he absolutely needed to know, right now.

“We dropped it!”

“We dropped it off a goddamn cliff,” Steve moaned. “Kayla had this whole big cooler—”

“It was so expensive! So much beer!”

“And we were carrying it together, and then I tripped on a tree root, and slipped, and Kayla tried to grab me… and we dropped the beer.”

“Off the cliff!” Kayla couldn’t have sounded more heartbroken if she were a young lady during the Vietnam War being told that her betrothed, who had been her childhood sweetheart since she was three years old, had had a completely sober four-way with two Vietnamese twins and their pet goat, and then had been killed by the Viet Cong while he was still cavorting with the goat.

In a voice that sounded like the auditory representation of hair raising combined with the scream of nails on a chalkboard, the Pale Bro expressed that he couldn’t believe this and Steve had been such a fuckup.

Steve, actually kind of intimidated, raised his hands. “I know, man, I’m sorry! We didn’t mean to!”

The Pale Bro then lectured the two of them about how if he’d been allowed to help in the first place, he wouldn’t have accidentally dropped the beer off the cliff and right now they would all be knocking back some sweet brews, but instead they insisted they could handle it and now all that beer had been tragically lost, cut down in the prime of its life, its yeasty lifeblood spilling out across the rocks and stones below where none could drink it except maybe some squirrels who would get themselves totally fucked up.

“Come on, man, it’s just beer,” Evan said. “We can get more.”

“Not if there’s a killer out there!” Kayla wailed. “We won’t be able to leave to go get beer until morning! What if the killer slashes our tires?”

The Pale Bro conveyed that if that happened, it was fucking on because no psycho killer, monster, or cousin was going to get between him and more beer.

Trevor, trying to be the voice of reason, said, “Folks, we’ve got a lot of beer in our cooler and we’ve barely touched it. There’s no use crying over spilled… beer.”

“Yes, there is! It’s very cryable!” Kayla declared, starting to cry.

“God, you’re drunk,” Nandini muttered. “Maybe you shouldn’t be hitting any more of the beer anyway.”

“Come on,” Steve said, putting his arm around Kayla. “It’s gonna be all right. Don’t cry. Trevor’s right, we’ve got a lot in our cooler.”

Kayla turned toward him and cried against his chest, as he hugged her with one arm and awkwardly patted her head with the other.

“Wow,” Nandini said. “You’re really into this guy, aren’t you?”

Steve turned red, which they could all see by now because they’d made their way out of the woods and back into the outside lights of the cabin. “Uh, I don’t think so, I’m just trying to comfort her…”

“You’re a white guy touching her hair and she’s putting up with it,” Nandini said. “Kayla’s been known to punch white people who touch her hair.”

“That was that bitch Madison and it was one time!” Kayla cried.

Steve removed his hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, I just…”

“No! I like it when you touch my hair! I don’t like it when bitches like Madison touch my hair after they’ve just said some racist bullshit, but you’re being so sweet! You can officially touch my hair,” Kayla said, and then started sobbing again, hugging Steve tightly.

The Pale Bro audibly sighed, in a voice like a dude who’s just seen one of his best friends score a date with a chick he was really into and he can’t even be mad because it wasn’t like he got anywhere with her himself or even admitted to anyone how cute he thought she was.

***

The group returned to find that Harrison had wandered back to the hot tub as soon as it was clear that no one was being killed except maybe a large number of innocent bottles of beer, and was sitting outside the hot tub but right by Y’lehna, who was in the hot tub eating chips.

Nandini said, severely, “Y’lehna! Ashlee told you not to do that!”

“Ashlee can tell me herself,” Y’lehna said with chips in her mouth.

“I’ve been watching,” Harrison said brightly. “None of the crumbs have fallen in the water! It’s all good!”

Trevor snorted. “Well, of course you think so, Har,” he said. “You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?”

Nandini frowned, and then scowled, and glared at Evan. “Wait, you told me he was gay!”

“You said what?” Harrison was shocked.

Evan held up his hands. “Sorry, Har. But…” He looked over at Nandini. “I thought that if I told you that he only likes really unusual girls, you’d feel hurt because it would sound like I was telling you you were basic or something, and that’s totally wrong. You’re gorgeous and you could probably get any guy you wanted, except Harrison, because you don’t have scales or feathers or six eyes or something.”

“Well, you could have said that,” Nandini said.

Kayla said, “I get it. Rhiannon’s like that, too.”

“To be fair,” Harrison said, “I am bi.” This was information Evan had not known. “I just haven’t yet met any weird dudes who aren’t related to Pale here, and it’s just way too weird to date one of your bro’s actual brothers or something.”

“Does anyone know where Ashlee went?” Steve asked.

Everyone looked around. There was no Ashlee.

“Could she be in the bathroom, maybe?” Nandini asked.

“Don’t think so,” Y’lehna said. “She ran off while you guys were running to the woods. I wasn’t gonna get in the hot tub and eat pretzels if she was still here!”

“Uh, yeah,” Rhiannon said. “That’s a little long to be in the bathroom.”

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice that was exhaustedly done with this bullshit that he could look for her.

“Nah, man, I’ll do it,” Trevor said. “I know your feet are hurting, and I’m the next biggest guy after you.”

“I could go with you,” Steve said.

Trevor shook his head. “Steve… that is a cute girl who is very, very drunk,” he said, pointing at Kayla. “I don’t know her tolerance, but I’m pretty sure that if she isn’t at puke bucket level now, she will be soon. You need to stay with her and make sure she’s okay.”

“Yeah, good point,” Steve said.

Nandini turned back to Evan as Trevor walked away. “I can’t believe you lied to me, though. I mean, I know Rhiannon. I could have accepted ‘he’s only into weird-looking chicks’—”

“Thanks, Nandi, that’s sweet,” Y’lehna said.

“You know what I mean,” Nandini said, waving her hand dismissively.

“Look, I’m gonna come clean with you,” Evan said. “I really thought you were great. You’re hot, you’re smart – I’m not dumb, but when you talked about your major, I realized you could run rings around me – and you stay calm in a crisis, and I really respect that. But you asked me if Har had a girlfriend, and I just – I’m sorry. It was like you didn’t even notice I’m a dude, and that made me feel bad. So I did something shitty, and I gotta apologize to both you and Harrison.”

“I mean, no problem on my end,” Harrison said. “It’s all good, bro.”

“Damn,” Nandini said, running her hand through her hair. “I didn’t even think about what that sounded like when I asked you. I’m sorry, Evan, what I said to you was a shitty thing too. I mean, I still think what you did was worse because you were lying, but I understand why you did it.”

“Hey, I know you didn’t mean to hurt my feelings.”

“Evan’s right, though,” Harrison said. “I mean, not about me being gay, I like girls just fine, but…” He shrugged. “Girls that look like normal human beings, even beautiful human beings, it just doesn’t click. Y’lehna here’s really different-looking, and that is so hot.” He turned to Y’lehna. “You know you’re super-hot, right?”

“Yes,” Y’lehna said, “but boys like you don’t usually agree. So that’s nice.”

“I guess I can forgive you,” Nandi said to Evan. “But you’d better not lie to me again.”

“I am pretty sure you could kick my ass if I did, so I won’t. I like my ass un-kicked.”

“Your ass is okay,” Nandini said. “I’ve seen better asses, but yours is all right.”

Rhiannon had offered to give the Pale Bro a foot rub, since his feet hurt. A guy as big as he was suffered from foot pain frequently, so he’d agreed, while apologizing in a voice like a church organ in a cave for his toenails. Some might say his toenails were worth apologizing for, as they were about four inches long and razor sharp.

But Rhiannon disagreed. “Your toenails are great. Look how white they are! I never see guys without all kinds of grody fungus turning their toenails yellow. And I bet you’re amazing at climbing trees with them.”

The Pale Bro allowed that this was true, and that climbing in general was one of his talents.

Steve, meanwhile, wasn’t exactly sure what he ought to be doing with Kayla, who was now lying on her back, her head in his lap, rambling about stars and how far away they were. When she’d asked for another beer, he’d gotten her cold water instead and reminded her that water was important to avoid hangovers. She’d finished most of the water – the rest had spilled – and now she seemed to be close to falling asleep in his lap.

“You’re really into stars, huh?” he asked. “You an astronomy major?”

“Oh no!” Kayla laughed. “Math! I’d tell you all about it but I’m waaaaaay too drunk. I just reeeeally like stars!”

“That’s cool,” Steve said. “I’m a comp sci major myself.”

“Are you gonna build an AI that wants to take over the world and enslave humanity?” Kayla asked.

“Hey, I’d be happy if I could build an AI that can identify rocks as not sheep,” Steve laughed.

***

Trevor had very quickly guessed where Ashlee might be.

Ashlee was nervous and reacted badly to things that startled or scared her. Ashlee was also at her own house – well, cabin. So odds were, Ashlee had gone into the cabin to calm down.

The cabin wasn’t very big, and Ashlee wasn’t in any of the rooms in an obvious place. So Trevor started checking the not-obvious places, like a closet in a room that looked girly enough that it might be her room. He knocked on the door.

She shrieked, inside the closet, but he said, “Ashlee, calm down! It’s me, Trevor. Can I check on you to make sure you’re okay?”

“Uh… okay,” she said, and Trevor opened the door. Ashlee was sitting in a lighted closet, on the floor, completely covered to her shoulders with stuffed animals.

“Wow. Are you okay?” He squatted down. Being a big black man, Trevor had learned many strategies for making himself look less threatening. Not towering over somebody was one of them.

“Not… really?” Ashlee said.

“I know you were scared with all that noise. Hell, I was too. But it turned out to be nothing. Steve and Kayla accidentally dropped some beer over the cliff.”

“It’s not that,” she whispered. “It’s just… it’s too much. Too many people.”

“Yeah?” He sat on the floor crisscross applesauce, making himself even lower and more relaxed-looking. “You want us to go?”

“No! I mean, this was supposed to be a weekend with just my friends, and then you guys show up, but you’re nice guys! I like you guys! But it’s just so many people, I started to wig out.” She lifts an arm out of the sea of stuffed animals. “So I do this thing when there’s too many people and I start to freak… I find a tiny place and I fill it with soft things and I lay in them until my tachycardia goes away.”

“Tachycardia?”

“Oh, um, that means fast heart beat. Sorry. I just always call it that because it sounds scarier than fast heartbeat and it really is scarier so I want people to know it’s a problem.”

“I know what it means, I’m a pre-med. I just wondered—”

“Oh wow! I’m in pre-med, too!” Ashlee sat up , some of the stuffed animals falling off her. “I guess we’re not in any classes together because you’re a senior and I’m a sophomore, but did you have Lessing for Organic Chemistry?”

“You’re doing orgo in sophomore year?” Trevor whistled. “That’s fast.”

“Yeah, I, um, my high school had like this program where good students could do science classes at a nearby college, for college credit, in senior year, so I took chemistry then, and bio last year and also the math I needed, so I get to do orgo this year.”

“I hated orgo. It’s just memorize a bunch of prefixes and suffixes and string them together. Couldn’t we find a better way to describe methylethylpropylene than that?”

She laughed. “Is that even a real thing?”

“I don’t know, but it’s pretty ridiculous that I can put together a string of prefixes and make something that sounds like a chemical even if it doesn’t exist.” He shook his head sadly. “And yeah, I had Lessing. She’s tough. She giving your brain a real workout?”

“Yeah. It’s a challenge. Everyone always told me, ‘Ashlee, you can’t just coast along getting straight As without ever studying. Ashlee, when you go to college it’ll be a lot harder. Ashlee, you need to learn how to study or you’ll fail in college.’ Well… I haven’t failed yet, but… it might be close.” She sighed. “I’m sorry. I must sound so stuck up with my humblebrag. ‘Oh, it’s so hard to be a gifted student who gets straight As!’ But it really is hard. Because if it was too easy for you in school you don’t learn how to handle it when it gets too hard, and I’m just, like, totally stressed.”

“I feel you. My mom made me study, and I was like, ‘momma, I do not need to read the book and highlight all the important parts and then write them in an outline and then read over the outline! I got it the first time I read the book!’ And that was what she said. ‘You take shortcuts now because everything’s easy, you’ll be in a world of hurt when things get hard.’ And hell, I ended up in a world of hurt in orgo anyway.” They both laughed.

“Anyway, your friends are worried about you and I don’t want people to think we both got bumped off by a psycho killer, so I figure, there’s three options here. I leave and tell everyone you’re okay, and I leave you the hell alone; I leave and tell everyone you’re okay, and then I come back and we keep talking; or you and I both leave together and we both tell everyone you’re okay, and then we get to eat some chips, if Y’lehna and Harrison didn’t get them all already.”

“She’s in the hot tub eating chips, isn’t she.” It was not a question.

“Yeah, sad but true. At least she’s leaning over the side so the crumbs get on the concrete and they don’t fall in the tub.”

Ashlee sighed. “I guess I better get back out there. But I do still want to talk and stuff. And I wanna check up on Phenylephrine so maybe you can help me find her.”

“Phenylephrine?”

“My cat. The cat before her was Sudafed so when she died and I got a new kitten I named her Phenylephrine.”

“I get the joke there, but why was the first cat named Sudafed?”

“My mom was allergic to cats and she said if we get a cat we might as well name it Sudafed because she’d be taking so much of it, and then we did get a cat, so she did name her Sudafed.”

“Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten a cat if she was that allergic?”

“Oh, no, my mom loves cats. She just says wiseass things sometimes. Anyway, Phenyl lives here at the cabin and the cleaning service makes sure she gets fed. They call her the head of Mousekeeping Services.”

Trevor laughed.

***

Outside, it turned out there was no need to turn out a search party for Phenylephrine, as for some entirely inexplicable reason it turned out she liked chips, and also Harrison’s lap, where he was feeding her chips. She didn’t actually eat the chips, she just licked them.

The party was starting to flag just a bit; Evan suggested putting on some music, but the internet wasn’t good enough here for Ashlee’s Spotify playlist and she didn’t have MP3s on a hard drive like Evan did. Evan was regretting not putting a bunch of MP3s on a flash drive and bringing them with him. Nandini had a CD in her car – the girls had all come up here in their own cars, except for Y’lehna who couldn’t drive – but it was hit songs from Bollywood musicals and no one here knew any of them, and she was self-conscious about whether anyone would even like them.

And then, as they discussed what to do about tunes, a shadow fell across them, blocking the moon for a moment.

They all looked up, even the Pale Bro. A shambling monstrosity, 20 feet tall and brick red, with sprouting tentacles where its face should be and eyes on the tentacles, and Edward-Scissorhands-length blades for fingernails, loomed over them.

Several of the group screamed. The Pale Bro got to his feet.

“D̶̫̊̚Ũ̸̟̝͍̘̮͒Ḍ̸͋̽̀E̷̛̝̹̗͈̊͌̍,̷̨̖̲̺̤̝͂̈́̎͘ ̴̛̱͚͗Y̶̧͔͉̙͋͊̊͋͘Ô̸̢̥̙͙U̴͖͍̳̭͗̊̌͘͘͜R̷̫̜̘̀ ̶̼̘̠̾̐̈́̒̚Ṃ̴̡̡̦̮̖̿͗̊͋͝Ȯ̴͛ͅM̴̺̱͕̳̀ ̷̱͔̄̃̎́I̸̙͐̍͑͐S̶͉͉̲͋̊͒̽̄͜ ̵̤̙̬̫̒͋́͛P̷̧̧̧̰͔̦͠Î̴̢̜͒̅͘S̷̛̝̤͂́̍̐S̴̭͉͆̋̿É̴̢̺̲̫̝͋́̋̚̚D̴̥͈̠̋̅̅̀͝͝ ̴̡̡̖̬̓A̵͈͚̣͂̆̔̍̂̕T̷̡͙̠̙̫̎̈̄͝ͅ ̴͔͗̀̋͗̏Y̴̤͇̪͕͇͎͆̌̀̊̈́Ơ̸̡̢̙̭͇͕̒̐̕̕U̸̡̩̠̚.̸̣̖̼̫́͛̄,” the entity boomed.

In a sound like the rushing of lava through underground caverns just before a volcano was about to blow, the Pale Bro demanded to know if the entity had eaten any people lately.

“S̴̙̱͕̀H̴̭͐̈́͠I̷̘̟͉̝͊͐̄̋̀̑Ṱ̷̢̫̮͓̲̐̑͗̈́̀,̵͓̥͖͈̾́̏̇͘ ̵̣̳͍̿Ń̵̟̦̰͖̺͜O̸͉̓̈̊͛̔̕.̷̣̜̗̩̈́ ̸͖̋̓̀̀͝͝Í̶̘̗͓̱̗̬̀̈́'̴̗̯͈͈̥͎̎̇M̷̹̻͉̼͑̎̓̐̏̀ ̴͚̻͚̱̇̿͛̏͒͠O̴̩̪̣̯̤͙̐̐̚̚Ņ̶͇̘̤̗͗͗̑͛̏̇͜ ̸̡͎̔̽͛A̷̢̘̪͎̗͊͐̌͝͠ ̸̤̺͉̫̖̫̀̓̑̕̕D̴̡̜̤̻̉Ĩ̸̡̯͉͔́̓̂͘͝Ę̶̨̫͇̬̳̉̽͑̈̊͐T̸̥̝̹̑̾.̷̢̟̻̭̲̿ ̴̧̣͌̆̃̕ͅÏ̷̟̰̫̰̹̽̐̐F̶͖̂̉̌ ̵͔͚̊̐Y̸͔̆Ö̴̞̦͕̘̀̒̀͘Ṳ̶̪̝͙̎̿͘ ̵̥̀̏͗E̵̦̣̲͍͉̥̊V̶̑͒̏ͅȨ̷͚̪̲̎͜ͅR̵͎͖̀̓̈́͑͠ ̷̣̀̀̓͋C̸̲̗͎̞͔̭͌̈́̕͘Ã̶̝͉̮͉͉̓̄͒̈́͜͝M̵̙̮͎̹̌E̷̥̪̎̓͗́͝ ̷͎͓̙̺͔̗͂̑̕H̶̢̍͗́͋͊O̴̗̎̽̆M̴̮̭̮͐̑́̚Ë̶̩̦̹̞́͂̈́̆ ̴̩̻̈́͘Y̴̨͍̣̩͈̎̅͘͘O̵̠͉͒̐̈̕͝U̶̪̝̳̺͑͆̇'̸̖̋D̶̗̉̓̿͐̓ ̸͉̍̀͠K̷̥̞̼̍͛́̇͗͝N̵̡̹̠͚̥̰̋̈́̌̈́͘O̸̻̠͍̲͋̉Ẁ̸̞͎̺̀͆̌̀ ̴̛͔̙͗͗̉͠T̸̨̓̀̎H̶̡̱̘͈̹͐̔͗͂͘A̷̠̠͉͎̫̰̿̄T̴̡̰͍̦͕̉̌,” it said, rolling tentacles clockwise around its face in an approximation of an eye roll.

If that was the case, the Pale Bro shot back, explain why this entity’s footprint was found right outside his bro’s cabin, and a man was missing.

“Į̴̙͈̻̓͗͜ͅ ̷̙̑̔͛͝W̷̺̯̲͗͝Ã̸̹͕̊S̷̹̲͆̏ͅ ̵̝̈́̒͗̓̍L̸͖̺̊͛Ǫ̶̗̥̼͍̥̒̒̌̊O̸͙̊̎̋̏̕Ķ̴͚̫̤̈̔́̅͑͝Į̵͑̍Ṉ̸̨͌͂́Ǵ̵̭̥̹̮̞̏͂ͅ ̷͚͙̹̋F̸̧͕͉͓̊̾͊O̵̲̙͓͛̌̄̏̕̚R̴̬͚̠͉̬̘̽̀̌́͊ ̴͎̀̏̐͋Y̴͈̘̮͌͋̍̃̍̈́Ơ̷̞͉̝͙̻̒U̵̦̭͈̻̪̽͂͗̚,̴̳̐ ̸̢̠̙͕̰̐̅D̸̟̫̋͑̅̈́̄͜͝ͅŰ̵̡̜̤̺̿̍̃̈́M̵̼̜̳̊͊̋̈ͅB̷̧͖̲̮̤̜͋̐͑̔Ȁ̶̼̪̟̼̱̐̔̋̀͘S̷̨̳͂S̶̨̡͈̈́̐͂̿͜͠,” the entity said. “A̷͕̎͆Ṷ̴̢̣͙͐Ņ̷͓͔͕̙̟͛̿́̐͝T̶̠̹̜͇͐̾̊̂̚ ̸͔̐͋̓̓͐͝€̶͉̦̍̊̅₯̷̟̙̗̱̤̈́̋̌͂͌̚ῥ̷̠̩̇ῗ̶̦͎͚̃͊̾ᾗ̴̤̞̰͕͓̈́͜Ỷ̸͔̫͙̦͐ẞ̶̦͕̱́͂͑́͊̈́ ̵͉͍͉̼̐͑̈́͋͝S̷̢͇̽͗͛͊̏E̸͉̲̓̉̎̈N̸̤̾Ț̷̻̍́̍ ̴͓̱͉͍̝̄̐̀͜ M̷̹͖͝E̸̘̖͓̍͋͜ ̶̢̲̘͋ T̴̠̘̲̼̍̈́̄̏̃͝ͅǪ̷̨̡̤͕͎͠ ̴̬͑͊ T̵͚̫̆̏͘E̴͚̗̯̠̊͗͌̕̚ͅL̴̫̺̫̀̄̽̃̕L̶̡͚̫̬̈́͑̇ ̴̲͙̼̖̘̺̈͊̓̂͠ Y̸̰̳̰̑Ơ̵̢̼̯͕̌Ų̶̜̜͚͇̕ͅ ̶̟͎̫͌ Y̴͔̱̼̅̋̄̀͜O̴͕̰̰̎̄U̶͓̜̼̝͑̃͂͘͝ ̸̨͎̀͊Ṅ̵̢͙̙̹̀Ë̸̖E̵̢̪̪͛̒̈D̷͍͖̀̈̏͊͋̚ ̶̦̙̫̺͓̉͂͠T̸̙̮̬͚̚Ó̷̖̘̩̘̝̌̄ ̸͇͍͋͒̃̑Ṽ̸͉̞͔̘̱̃͑̌I̷͙͛͑͝S̸̢̗̬̞͂̽I̵̺̿̾͗̀̓̅T̷̢͈̺̹̀̇͊͐̊̍ͅ,̵̭̔ ̷̹̥̺̟̣͋̄͜Ş̵̺̱̃Ḩ̴̙͙̼͙͉̔̎̍̐́̃I̷͔͚͂̇̑͂͜T̷̲̱͔̬̓͠H̶̝̝͌̏͐Ę̴̨̰̙̤͖̎A̸͔͠ͅḐ̴̻͚͔̯̏́͐͘.̵͚͎̪͖̼̻̇̉.”

The Pale Bro replied, in a voice like the whining of an engine underneath the whapping sound of helicopter rotors, that he was on vacation with his bros and he was not here to visit his mom and she could just deal.

“A̶̱̘̬̪̝̓͌͊͐̚R̸͙͌̉̆̆̇̔ͅE̵̡̱̙̯̮̅͗ ̴͈͒̐Y̶̮̤̽̄O̴̢͓̙̝̮͉̾̆̈́̔̚͝Ų̸͚̗͓̞͎̀͝ ̶̡̬͚̄̆͌͋̉̆F̷̙͊͋U̷̿͊̊̽͌̚ͅC̴͙̦̼͕̈́̊̒K̴̬̘͆̀̑͒̐I̸̅́̈͒̅͠ͅŅ̴̪͍̭͂̈G̴̗̥͎͌̔̽̑̈́ ̸̻̰͆̈̕Ȟ̶̱̜̎̕Ī̴͎̝̖̼̤̱̏̐G̵͚͙̊͆̃̍̅ͅͅḦ̸̡̾̄̕?̵͉̫̠̉̈́̓ ̸̡͕̔͐Y̵̨͒͊̈̕O̴̮͓̼̽̓͝Ú̶̝̺͜ ̴̛̪̚ͅͅC̸̣̆͛̿̓̂Á̸͇͈̦͐͗̇͝N̸̞̭̲̻͖̦̽̈́̈'̶̪̪̐͐̈́T̸͔̘͌̄ ̴̨̪͙̫̩̐́S̶̩̋̃A̷̡̨͙͉͕͑́̔̓̌͜͠Y̸̯̝͕̋͗̄̾ ̵̲̜̥̥͆͊̾̑̊͜͝ͅT̴̟̭̼̲̐̄H̶͚̦̯̱̐̔͝Ą̴̥̤̅̃̄̂̾T̵̞̜̱̍̈́̔̕͜ͅ ̶̤͇͐Ṱ̷̃̾̚Ȏ̷͇͈͓̰͇͓ ̶͓̘̟̉̄̀͌̽ͅẎ̸̢̠̿Ỏ̸̧̢̹̹̀̓U̶̢̬͚̞̘͂́̃̆̽̔Ṛ̵̬̱̯̟̀͐̓̎̃͠ ̵̨̮̏̑̐̐M̷̽͜͝O̴̪̙͙͕̥̕͘M̵̨͉̫̭̩̔͑̈́̈̈͝!” the entity exclaimed.

“This is your cousin, bro?” Evan asked diplomatically.

In a voice like the moaning of the wind through a forest of dead things and disappointments, the Pale Bro admitted that this asshole was indeed his cousin, and was carrying a message from the Bro’s mom that he needed to come visit her, because somehow she’d found out that he was vacationing in the area.

“Well, why don’t you just tell him that you will go to visit your mom, in a few days, right before we head out? It is rude to be right near her house and not go visit her, but on the other hand you’re on vacation to spend time with us, so just do it at the end,” Evan suggested.

The Pale Bro expressed that if he absolutely had to visit his mom, that was probably the best way to handle it, and could his cousin kindly fuck off now.

“Ö̵̡̩͙̠̮͌̓̍K̶͈̬̳̰̺͂̋̂́̕Ạ̸̢̬̪̠̠̽͝Ÿ̴͓̰̰̻͔́̏͒̌͆,̶̮̉͒͒̿̏ ̵̦̺̠͓̩̲̍͆̉B̸͕̽͆Ư̵̟̔̈́̌̏͒Ţ̵̳̞̙̣̪̏̂ ̶͈̲̃͐̈́͋͛Y̴̝͍͌̈̍Ơ̶̙̝̱̘̈́̉́̊͒Ū̷͎̦ ̸͚̓B̷͕̥͊͗̿̒͝Ë̴͕͖̪͇̃́T̶͉̓̾̌̃̀͘T̵̨̟̠̩͚̜͂̎̚̕͝Ḙ̴͈̳̮͗̆͋̐́̈́R̶̡̛̪̮͖͓͙̍̈́͌́ ̸̧̘̻̞̣̈́͆͑̄͜N̷͎̦̬͊͌̆̌̕O̵̧̫̾́̾͜T̵͔̉́ ̸͔̒̀̐͆̌F̵̣͉̖̺̱̚ͅÒ̸̯̜̼̖̋̑͘͜R̶̲̦̱̭̱̙̆̈G̵͓̘̞͎̑̅E̴̲̓̿T̴̝̝̑͌̏̊̄̕ ̴̧̡̮̮͓͓̐͒T̸̡̛̖͈͒̕Ḥ̸̬̭͙̪̲̈́͌̈́̚͠͝Ì̸̡͎̝̎̈́̾͂̕S̷̠̻̣̈́̓͘̚ ̶̧̤̀̈́Ţ̴̧̛̫̫̑͗̓͌̉ͅÏ̵̧̘̰̆ͅM̶̮̤̎̉͜E̶̘̬̟͓̜͔̓̕̕̕,̶̗̈ ̶̖͇̞̀̾͑̓͜͠D̷̡̢̧̹̖͙͛̂̒̏̏I̵̛͍̘̜̲̥̓̏̅͐͂̋͝P̴̧̢̡̱͖̣͔̰̦̊̀Ṡ̸̳̺̓̓̕H̷̰̭̣͂͗Ị̶̢̧̜͇̅̎̓̈̉̂̃̐̕͜͜ͅT̶̰̰̋͐.̵͍̜̠̰͊͝ ̷̝͔̼̞͘ͅI̶̩͍̘͎̺̓'̷͕̟̗̣̳̻̀͂͠L̵̹̣̃͗̇͆L̴̢̛̩̤͖̬̆̚ ̸̲̬̲̈́͛͑̌B̴̘̹́́̈͝E̵͓͐̋͒͐̏̎ ̵͇̹̂͒Ẇ̵̨͎̣̝͔͘ͅA̷̻̗̫̍͑̈́̇̐T̸̥̱̘̲̳̋C̶̪̀H̵̢̏͜Ì̸̡̨͙̜̠̲͘N̸͖̹̦̿͊́͛̈́͝G̵̡̨̘̼̀̑̅̎.̷̍̑̆.” The giant creature lumbered off, back into the woods.

“Your family sounds like mine,” Evan said, commiserating.

“Mine, too,” Nandini said. “If I was within 50 miles of my mom while I was on vacation and I didn’t stop by to see her, I’d never hear the end of it.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met your mom,” Steve said.

The Pale Bro suggested that that was just as well.

***

Kayla was napping on Steve, whose legs were starting to go numb but he didn’t want to risk waking her up. Trevor and Ashlee were talking animatedly about terrible professors and classes that were absolute bullshit but required for the pre-med track. Nandini, having forgiven Evan for lying to her about Harrison, had agreed to go on a date or two with him once they all got back to school, and see where things went. Also, she’d helped him recover his mom’s good knives, which they’d all dropped in the dirt when they got here so the girls wouldn’t be scared of them. Rhiannon continued to hit on the Pale Bro, who either didn’t notice, or was so flustered by a girl paying attention to him that he pretended not to notice. Y’lehna, somewhat overheated by spending too long in the tub and not drinking enough water, had a headache, and Harrison was tending her by getting her glasses of water with ice from Ashlee’s freezer.

Everything was going pretty well, and a lot of fun, except for Steve and his numb legs, when a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a bloody knife came out of the woods.

Everyone except Trevor and the Pale Bro screamed. The Pale Bro growled, less like a dog and more like the sound of the devil’s car engine, down in Hell, when the devil is revving it because he’s just challenged the Archangel Michael to a race in a demonic replica of NASCAR. Trevor took note of where Evan and Nandini had put all of Evan’s mom’s kitchen knives, and yelled, “Can we help you?”, preparing to grab a knife from the pile and go knife-fight the dude, just in case the Pale Bro was too drunk to simply lift the fellow up and toss him off the cliff that had already claimed Kayla’s case of beer.

“I hope so!” the man yelled back. “I’m in the middle of cutting up steaks for the grill, and I realize, I don’t have any potatoes! I was gonna do the potatoes on low and slow so they’d be nice and soft inside, but turns out, all my potatoes rotted and I haven’t got any, and it’d take like forty-five minutes to drive into town. And now it’s too late for baked potatoes, but I haven’t got any kind of starch, so I was wondering if you guys have any French fries?”

Trevor blinked.

“Uh, why are you wearing a ski mask?” Nandini asked.

“Oh, this!” The man pulled off the mask. “Haha, almost forgot I had this on! I’m anemic, so my face gets cold. I wear ski masks around to keep warm, but I forgot how that would look to somebody else. Wow, that was dumb of me.”

The man was a good bit older than any of them, maybe late 20’s or early 30’s. He was a white dude with a tan complexion, like Rhiannon’s, but it was a little grayish and unhealthy looking in the bright lights around the hot tub, which could be due to the anemia. His black hair was wavy and longish, parted on the side and going down to his shoulders, framing his face, and he had a mustache and beard. “My name’s Jason,” he said. “My girlfriend and I just moved back in to the cabin – we live here in the spring and summer months because my girl can’t handle the summer sun, she needs some shade – and I brought the steaks with me to celebrate, but I thought I had potatoes. I forgot, potatoes don’t survive being stored for four months.”

“Whew.” Evan shook his head. “That’s nasty, man. I hope you were able to get the smell out of wherever you were storing them.”

“It might take a few more good scrubs,” Jason acknowledged, grinning. “Hey, do you guys mind if I put the ski mask back on? I know what it looks like, but my face is really cold.”

“Go ahead,” Trevor said.

“Yeah, we don’t mind,” Nandini said. “If you turn out to be a serial killer, it’s not like you’re not a serial killer when the mask is off.”

Jason laughed again. “Well, I can eat a whole box of cereal in one sitting, so I guess you could call me a cereal killer.” Many of the college students groaned at the pun.

“You and your girlfriend, do you have kids?” Harrison asked. “Because that was dad-joke worthy.”

“Haha! Nah, no kids yet, dunno if that’s in the cards ever to be frank. Angella’s not much of a kid person.” He pronounced the name On-zhellah rather than An-jellah, like it was French or something.

“I don’t think I have any fries,” Ashlee said. “Or anything, really. When I’m here at the cabin I mostly drive down into town and get takeout. I mean, I’ve got bacon and eggs and bread for toast, and I could make you a PB&J or a lunch meat sandwich, but no real food.”

“That’s better than what I’ve got,” Evan muttered, and then, more loudly, “You got any tomatoes or peppers? I could chop them up and fry you some Spanish rice; I’d just have to go back to my cabin to get rice and spices.”

“Hey, man, that’d be awesome,” Jason said. “Yeah, I’ve got tomatoes and peppers. We’ve got a lot of steak and I don’t think even Angella’s appetite for bloody meat will put a dent in it, so if you guys wanted to come over and get some steak…”

The Pale Bro said in a voice like the moon had crashed but was still orbiting, scraping itself along the Earth’s crust as it went, that steak sounded sweet and he wouldn’t mind having some steak.

“Bro, you are just, like, an eating machine,” Harrison said. “But yeah, wouldn’t mind a steak.”

“I prefer seafood,” Y’lehna said, “but I don’t dislike steak.”

“Guys, Kayla’s asleep and I can’t leave her alone here,” Steve pointed out.

“I’ll stay here with Kayla,” Ashlee suggested. “You can go get steak.”

“I don’t feel great leaving you guys by yourselves, though, you sure you don’t want me to stay?”

At this point, Kayla lifted her head and asked blearily, “What’s happening?”, which solved the issue of who would stay with her; when steak was explained to her she cheerfully agreed that steak would be nice, and everyone else agreed that Kayla had had enough to drink that, assuming she didn’t puke it up, putting more food in her stomach might be a good idea.

Trevor and a couple of knives went with Evan back to Evan’s cabin to get the rice; the Pale Bro went with the rest of them to Jason’s cabin, both to make sure nothing happened to any of his friends, and because steak sounded awesome. Since Evan’s family had been coming here for vacations since he was a kid, he knew the area well enough to know how to get to Jason’s house once Jason gave him the address.

***

Jason’s cabin was about the same size as Evan’s, and it did not have a hot tub, but it did have a barbeque grill. Not one of those tiny little portable things that run on charcoal, either. This was a large fancy propane-powered grill of the kind that could practically be used in an industrial kitchen.

“Honey! I brought guests! And they brought beer! And their friend is gonna make us some Spanish rice!” he called.

A woman came out of the cabin, looking so goth she might as well have invented it. She had incredibly pale white skin, without even the undertone of red most healthy human beings have; she wasn’t quite as pale as the Pale Bro, but it was close. Long black hair slunk down her back like she was cosplaying Morticia Adams. She was wearing hip-hugging black jeans and a long-sleeved black blouse, and a chain around her neck with an Egyptian ankh on it, and her lips were blood-red.

Then she opened her mouth, and it became immediately apparent that she had fangs.

“How do you do,” she said in a vaguely quasi-European accent. “I’m called Angella Darque, with a q. And you are?”

The college students introduced themselves, Nandini wearing a very skeptical pair of eyebrows the entire time. After introductions were done, she asked, “Is your last name really Darque?”

Angella looked taken aback. Jason said, “It’s really Duncan, actually, but she’s getting together the legal paperwork to get it changed because she hates her dad. Deadbeat, never paid child support, you know the type.”

“Oh, Jason, I had no idea today was ‘let’s tell total strangers all about my girlfriend’s private history’ day. Is that what we’re celebrating?”

“Sorry.”

“His lips are so loose,” she confessed to the students. “Sometimes I just want to… sew them shut.”

“Isn’t she hilarious?” Jason laughed. “We met at a support group for people with anemia, five years ago, and we’ve been together since.”

“Um,” Ashlee, obviously very nervous, said. “Uh, we brought some beer if you want. And also wine coolers. Would you like a wine cooler?”

“No, I never drink… wine,” Angella said. And then, “Do you have anything like a Jaeger?”

“Evan’s got vodka back at the cabin,” Steve volunteered.

“Does your cell phone work up here? Maybe you could call him,” Jason said. “Or I could, if he’s got a landline.”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to put anyone out,” Angella said. “I have 151 here, and that’s quite fine. Would any of you like some?”

“Yeah, slip it on me!” Kayla cheered, somewhat mangling her idiom.

Nandini and Y’lehna said at the same time, “No.” And then Y’lehna clarified. “I’m a little drunk, but she’s, like, totally plastered. We can’t even let her have a beer at this point. Soda’s cool, though.”

The Pale Bro conveyed in a voice like a million marbles suddenly gaining sentience and stampeding for a cliff to fling themselves over like lemmings, except that lemmings don’t really do that, that he would appreciate a rum and Coke.

Angella went back in the house to make the Pale Bro a rum and Coke with dangerously-high-proof rum. Harrison, Steve, and the girls looked at each other. Finally Rhiannon said, “I thought maybe I saw… your girlfriend has fangs? What’s up with that?”

“Pretty cool, huh?” Jason said cheerfully. “Now you guys need to let me know, should I use the rosemary garlic marinade, the pineapple ginger, or the Brazilian steakhouse?”

“Why not mix it up?” Harrison asked. “You got a lot of steak there, you could do ‘em all!”

“I don’t think pineapple ginger would go well with steak,” Ashlee said uncertainly. “Doesn’t that sound like more of a pork thing?”

“Or fish,” Y’lehna said. “Oh, but wait! Nandini, can you even eat pork?”

“I can eat anything,” Nandini said irritably, “but my family’s Hindi, not Muslim. I’m supposed to stay away from beef, not pork. But some traditions I don’t even believe in is not going to stop me from eating a nice steak.”

“I could add pork medallions, if you thought it was a good idea,” Jason said.

“Nah, man, you’ve got a lot of meat here,” Harrison said. “It looks great! Maybe if you had like a swordfish or tuna steak for Y’lehna, but if you don’t, no worries.”

“I got a salmon.”

“Pineapple ginger might go really well with salmon,” Y’lehna suggested.

Meanwhile Angella had brought the Pale Bro his rum and Coke, and they were currently discussing literary trends in fiction aimed at college-educated women.

***

Evan and Trevor returned with rice, spices, dried vegetables, and coincidentally, a can of pineapple chunks. Jason ended up preparing the salmon with the pineapple chunks after defrosting it in his microwave, and Evan made the Spanish rice he’d promised, and no one actually questioned why someone had started grilling steaks at midnight.

The salmon was done first, and Y’lehna and Nandini, who was feeling just a little bit guilty over her earlier decision to eat beef, got most of it. Angella got the first steak that came up, when it was barely warmed, still dripping blood. Then the rest of them, as the rest of the steaks were all done around the same time, along with the rice.

At some point, Evan suggested that everyone return to his cabin, because he had video games and music and nice speakers; Jason and Angella turned the offer down, Angella saying, “The night is young, and has yet to yield all its delights”, which was really corny and pretentious, but given the look she gave Jason when she said it, none of the guys questioned why he was staying at his own cabin tonight instead of going with them. Ashlee also insisted on staying at her own cabin; after a whole night of having ten people at her house, she was kind of burned out on people, and needed to get some sleep. And everyone agreed that Kayla should stay at Ashlee’s cabin; she was still cheerful and fun, but she was still pretty plastered. Because of the potential threat of a killer, Steve volunteered to stay with the girls; he knew Evan’s landline number, so he could call in reinforcements if necessary. Everyone else trooped back along the road, many carrying tinfoil-covered plates of steak and spicy rice, back to Evan’s cabin.

There was blood dripped onto the driveway.

The Pale Bro noticed it before anyone else, with his multiple sensitive eyes. His arm went out to block Evan from going any further, and in a voice like the rumble of an entire river’s worth of water pouring from a broken dam, he warned everyone of the blood and suggested he should go first.

Evan put up his hands. “No problem, man,” he said. “You take point.”

“I’m right behind you,” Trevor, holding one of the knives in front of him, said.

“Okay, I’ll bring up the rear,” Nandini said. “Harrison, Y’Lehna, Rhiannon, Evan, you go between us.”

Harrison looked at Nandini, who was taller than him, and then at the others. Evan was maybe the same height as Nandini, maybe very slightly taller… or very slightly shorter. It was too dark for Harrison to accurately judge.

He, too, put up his hands. “Works for me,” he said.

Evan looked back at Nandini. “I feel like I should be back with you,” he said. “If Pale’s got Trevor as backup…”

The Pale Bro pointed out, in a tone that conveyed deep irritation, that he didn’t need backup because if it was a human killer he’d make short work of them and if it was a monster, only he had a chance, and anyway it was probably not a monster because his cousin had claimed to be on a diet and the only reason they’d thought it was a monster in the first place was his cousin’s footprint. He then walked forward resolutely.

The door to the cabin was hanging open. The Pale Bro ducked his head way down, which he was pretty much used to doing any time he was going through a door, and pushed through, followed by Trevor. They’d left all the lights on, with the shutters closed, so that the light leaking around the edges of the shutters would make someone think they were home, and also because the lights were LED bulbs so seriously, that was probably like only thirty cents worth of electricity wasted. In that light, they saw blood all over the floor.

All of the group looked at each other uneasily. Ever since the Pale Bro had found the girls and the hot tub, no one had really been acting as if there genuinely was a potential killer out there; they’d given lip service to the idea, they’d certainly gotten scared enough every time something bizarre happened – and a lot of bizarre things had happened – but they hadn’t really treated it as a serious risk. Now it seemed possible that someone had been murdered in Evan’s cabin, or had been stabbed somewhere else and staggered into Evan’s cabin, despite the fact that all the locks had been locked.

The Pale Bro went forward into the kitchen, following the blood trail – and stopped in confusion. This caused everyone else to stop short, without being able to see into the kitchen because the Bro was blocking the doorway.

“Come on, bro, what’s going on?” Evan asked.

The Pale Bro slid sideways out of the way in a fashion that didn’t quite look like a real way anything could possibly move, and Evan pushed forward to be right behind Trevor, both of them crammed into the doorway.

A middle-aged white dude wearing a baseball cap advertising Evan’s parents’ company was at the sink, his front covered in blood. He had turned to face all of them, his hands clean but his sleeves completely saturated with something’s death juices.

“Joe?” Evan said disbelievingly.

“Evan!” Joe said. “I’m so sorry about the mess, man, and the hour, I know you’re pissed and I don’t blame you, I’d be pissed too, I know I’m really late—”

“Joe. Why are you covered in blood? What happened?”

“The meat defrosted,” Joe said. “I was driving around this mountain trying to find the cabin for so long, the meat defrosted, and when I pulled it out of my trunk, the bag caught on something and ripped and all the blood from the meat defrosting was all over me. I’m so sorry.”

“Why are you—” Evan glanced at a fancy cuckoo clock on the wall that actually ran on batteries, not solely on clockwork. “—getting in at two fucking am when you were supposed to be here before six?”

“I have been driving around this mountain since four in the afternoon,” Joe said. “My GPS stopped working halfway up the mountain, and I swear I tried to follow your mom’s directions, I swear, but I couldn’t find Long Leaf Lane no matter how hard I looked, and I went back down and asked at the gas station but none of them lived on the mountain, so I bought a paper map but it didn’t help at all because Long Leaf Lane wasn’t even on it—”

“It’s a private drive, I don’t even know if they put those on maps,” Evan said.

“Evan, if this is your guy with the food and he’s not dying of stab wounds, I’m going to use your bathroom,” Nandini said. “Where is it?”

“There’s two, one upstairs with a claw-foot tub and one down on this floor, go back out of the kitchen and it’s the door on the east side of the living room,” Evan said.

“Great, using the downstairs one,” Nandini said, and ducked back out of the doorway.

“Are you okay?” Rhiannon asked Joe.

“I’ve been driving for ten hours. Last six of which I couldn’t find my way back down the mountain either, and I didn’t have any food and the only water was the ice that used to be in my Sprite that melted—”

“Come on, man,” Evan said, sighing. “Yeah, the GPS situation really sucks around here. I wouldn’t wanna try to find Long Leaf Lane if I hadn’t been coming here every summer for, like, ten years. Let’s get you upstairs and get you cleaned up.” He looked over at Harrison and the Pale Bro. “Guys, you know more or less where the stuff in the kitchen goes, right? Can you put the food away?”

“The ice cream melted,” Joe moaned. “I’m so sorry…”

“No, come on. Let’s get you a shower and a change of clothes. I’ll borrow something of Steve’s while you’re in the shower, he’s about your size.”

“I think I know,” Harrison said. “We put the meat in the freezer?”

Rhiannon and Evan said, “No!” at the same time, and Rhiannon added, “You’ve got to put it in the fridge. You can’t freeze most things twice, they get freezer burned.”

“Huh,” Harrison said, looking over the sheer quantity of meat that Joe had been trying to carry in a paper shopping bag with handles. “I guess we’re gonna go back to Jason and Angella’s at least one night this week, ‘cause this is way more meat than we can eat before it goes bad.”

The Pale Bro, who had just picked up the bag of melted ice cream and slurped the whole thing down like it was a milkshake, said, in the voice of a creature whose mouth was entirely full of melted ice cream, something very much like “Watch me.”

“Lemme go throw this shit out,” Harrison said of the paper shopping bag, whose bottom had almost disintegrated from holding way too much au jus for even a strong, well-made paper shopping bag to handle, and which smelled like a murder had been done, or at least that someone had lost an arm and was bleeding out.

Evan took Joe upstairs to the bathroom to wash himself, broke into Steve’s suitcase and took a random t-shirt and pair of shorts, and advised him that he could stay overnight, sleep on the couch, and have some eggs and bacon in the morning, now that he had brought the eggs and bacon.

And then they all heard Harrison screaming.

Evan got down the stairs approximately as fast as Nandini came racing from the bathroom, but Rhiannon, Y’lehna and the Pale Bro were out the door faster, having been closer.

Harrison was on the ground. The trash can had been dumped over. It was mostly cleaning products used by the team that cleaned the cabin between uses, but there were some banana peels and candy wrappers – and now, a bloody shopping bag – in the pile of trash.

Standing over the pile of trash, looking kind of pissed, was a black bear.

In the voice of a guy who has finally, finally gotten the chance to use his strength and size to protect his friends after like what seemed like twenty-seven false scares tonight, the Pale Bro said something that could possibly be understood to be “Fucking finally,” and charged at the bear.

The bear had a lot of mass, even more than the Pale Bro, who was a very, very skinny dude, but the Pale Bro was around twice as tall as the bear, had much longer claws, and was doing something weird to the space around the bear, making lensing effects that distorted all the angles of the trees and branches behind the trash can. The bear flailed a bit, and then the Pale Bro lifted it and held it straight out from his body, where its much smaller paws couldn’t hope to reach. It snarled and kicked and scratched, but the Pale Bro relentlessly carried it into the woods, where they both disappeared.

“Well.” Evan said. “Who wants to help me clean up this trash?”

“’Want’ is a strong word,” Harrison said, but he helped, and Nandini and Rhiannon pitched in. Y’lehna would have helped, but she had to run back into the cabin to run cold water over her arms and legs.

The Pale Bro returned minutes later, without a scratch on him. “Where’d you put the bear, dude?” Harrison asked.

The Bro conveyed that he could possibly have gone out to the cliff that ran alongside the road – the same cliff that, in a different location, had claimed the life of an entire case of beer – and by the way, did any of them know that bears bounce? Because he hadn’t.

“Dude, you didn’t have to kill it,” Evan complained.

“Yes, he did! It was gonna kill me! I don’t want it coming back for revenge!” Harrison gabbled out.

The Pale Bro declared that he hadn’t killed it. Before anyone could feel either relief or fear over that, he added that his mom lived down that way someplace and she would probably kill it, because eldritch spawn eat a lot and he had a lot of brothers and sisters.

***

And so the first night of their vacation ended, with the Pale Bro staying up all night playing video games with Trevor, who’d returned to the cabin with Steve once they’d both been informed that there was no psycho killer and Joe was actually fine, he’d just gotten really lost. Evan, Harrison and Steve went to bed like normal people, or rather, like normal people who are young men in college, around four am, after walking Rhiannon, Nandini and Y’lehna back to their cabin like gentlemen, because psycho killer or no, the woods were dark and any number of things could happen. In other words, it was a perfectly normal night on vacation, just like any group of friends in college might have.

As for anything that might have happened the next day, or any of the other days of their vacation… that’s a story for another time.

#52 project #spooky 5 #comedy #horror #except not really

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loadcute108 · 3 years

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You’ve seen it before, couples who have quit their desk jobs and sold all their belongings to live on the road exploring the world in a van. Who hasn’t day dreamed about that at their job?

The Top Creative Van Conversions. How many of you have dreamt of converting your own van into a mobile home? There are so many rad inspiration sites and blogs out there with some amazing van conversions – from vintage VWs to top notch Sprinters. Change 3D to 3D video file. Aiseesoft 3D converter can work perfectly to convert video between 3D files. If you want to enjoy a higher resolution 1080p HD, then you may need to consider changing your Top and Bottom (TaB) 3D video in 720p into Side by Side (SbS) video file in 1080p. The FreeBSD Project. FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.A large community has continually developed it for more than thirty years. Free Video to MP3 Converter extracts audio tracks from video clips and converts them to MP3, AAC, WAV, and many other audio formats for ringtones, notifications, and tunes.

With the ever-increasing cost of living and presence of screens in all facets of our lives, many people are finding ways to escape all those problems by living off the grid. When looking to live life exploring nature, turning a van into a rolling apartment is becoming an attractive option.

So you want to live to the van life. Where do you start?

All you really need is something that's comfortable to drive and has a lot of room for all your belongings.

Depending on your budget, you can either buy an old van and build it out or buy something fully built and hit the road. What are your options?

Full Sized Van

Types: Dodge Ram Van, Ford Econoline, Chevy Express/Astro

Pros: Can be had for cheap, plentiful, large and roomy, parts are abundant, many low mileage examples

Cons: Poor gas mileage, handles like a hollowed out loaf of bread, dated styling

These old full-sized vans come in all shapes and sizes. Expect to find these between $2k and $20k. You’ll find them in various states of wear, coming from their previous lives of airport shuttle or neglected conversion vans.

Cargo Van

Types: Mercedes Benz Sprinter, Ram Promaster, Ford Transit, Nissan NV

Pros: High roof models allow you to stand in the back, flat floors, you can probably turn this into a rolling apartment, no windows = privacy

Cons: Expensive, high mileage, no windows = people may assume you are some kind of criminal

A cargo van is the ideal platform for the van life. These can range from $1k to the high $20ks. Their flat floors, tall roofs and lack of rear windows make these a blank canvas with endless possibilities. Some van life builds feature a dining table, kitchen counter and sink, shower and a raised sleeping area.

Camper Van

Types: VW Vanagon, Converted Mercedes Benz Sprinter or Metris

Pros: Built for van life, available 4x4, aftermarket support, Volkswagen cult following

Cons: Expensive, parts for older models may be hard to come by, Volkswagen reliability

New or old, these vans can break the bank. Early '90s VW Vanagon Westfalia Syncros typically go for $20k to 30k. For as much as $90k, companies such as Sportsmobile offer these with a pop top camper, kitchen and sleeping area with four-wheel drive and solid front and rear axles, creating an apartment that you can rock crawl.

What You'll Need

Aside from making sure your maintenance is up to date, a camper van doesn’t need much to be ready for life on the road. If you’re not planning to venture too far off the paved road, you can do without a lift or armor.

You’ll be spending a lot of time inside the van, so focus your attention to creature comforts you may need every day. Unfortunately, your space is limited. What essentials will you need?

Food Storage: Stove, Fridge, Sink

This can range from a simple camp setup to building a whole mini kitchen with a pullout sink, fridge and such. Depending on climate and how long you will need to store your food, you may not need a fridge, and an ice chest can suffice.

Electrical: Dual Battery, Solar, Power Inverter

Off the grid doesn’t mean you have to go without electricity. When traveling, you want to make sure you have enough to power not only the van, but also everything you use when you're parked. A power inverter is a great upgrade because it allows you to use items that have a household three-prong plug.

A dual battery setup keeps you from being stranded by supplying backup to your main battery while providing power to all your accessories.

Creature Comforts: Bedding, Curtains

If the seats don’t fold down flat, you may need to build a sleeping platform. Typically made from wood, a sleeping platform creates a flat sleeping surface. The open space under the sleeping platform is perfect for tucking away all your other belongings.

Where To Sleep

If you’re out of the city, most BLM land is free to sleep in overnight. In the city, you’ll want to blend in with your surroundings. Find well-lit areas with where other cars park overnight, such as a the parking lots of Wal-Marts, hotels and 24-hour stores and well-lit street parking. These places are typically safe enough to park in overnight.

You may or may not need any of these items. The best way to find out what you need without over-spending is to get out there and find out what you need and can live without as you go.

Photos courtesy of Sportsmobile, Recon Vehicles and Volkswagen

Want to know what it's actually like to live on the road? We tried it out!

When it comes to DIY campervan conversions there is no better vehicle than a minivan for a camper. Once you get past the fact that it’s a minivan you’ll quickly see it’s the best DIY camper for just about every type of camping trip or even long-term living. Here is our design for the best Minivan Camper and we have road tested it for more than 30,000 miles and 150+ nights over two multi-month trips and lots of weekends.

We converted a 2006 Honda Odessy minivan into a campervan with a full-sized mattress, 7 under bed storage drawers, nicely equipped kitchen, cooler, and power charging station. We pulled off this conversion in about three days and under $350.

Take a tour of our Minivan Camper Conversion

This video gives you a quick look inside of our minivan along with some sweet music. The video doesn’t go into depth on the actual build, but all of that is described below and one of these days we should make another video on more about the minivan to campervan conversion process.

Picking a minivan for your Minivan to campervan conversion

We choose a minivan for our project because they are much more fuel efficient than full-size vans and would give us the most amount of space for the money. We bought our 2006 Honda Oddessy for $6500 with just over 100,000 miles.

Things to look for in a minivan camper:

Good mechanical condition – check service records and have it inspected before starting a long trip.

Room for a full sized bed (or close) – which is 54 inches, ours was about 51-52″ between the narrowest point but we used a flexible mattress which fit nicely.

Consider a good condition minivan around 100,000 miles – After a minivan passes 100,000 miles the price drops to a very affordable level.

How to convert a minivan into the best campervan ever

We are going to take you step by step on how to make your minivan into the best campervan possible. Since everyone might be working with a different van the dimensions of your camper will be different. So, instead of giving exact measurements I used, I will give suggestions on how much room between different parts of the build I would leave, and things like that instead of my exact blueprints.

Tools Required for this campervan conversion

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Drill with Phillips screwdriver & a 1/8′ drill bit

Tape Measurer

Circular Saw or Table Saw or just a hand saw if that’s what you have

Level

Other general hand tools would be helpful but are not required

Supplies Required for this campervan conversion

From Building Supply Store:

2 – sheets of 4′ x 8′ plywood for the top of the bed platform and kitchen storage unit

10 – 2″x 2″ pine studs

1 – Box of screws to build the bed frame and kitchen cabinet frame

1 – Roll of reflective windshield shade material custom cut to fit the front window

1 – Roll of standard duct tape

From Amazon, we found the best prices on Amazon and it’s delivered right to your home:

1 – Full-size premium Futon mattress $169, we love this mattress it’s honestly better than hotel beds and comparable to our bed at home

7 – Sterlite tubs to go under the bed frame

2 – Sterlite storage crates $6.25

1 – Coleman cooler $58

1 – Compact folding table $43

2 – Outdoor folding chairs

Step 1. Remove the Minivan 2nd and 3rd-row seats

We started our conversion by removing all of the back seats of the van. We will be traveling as just two people so more seats while isn’t necessary. Honestly, a minivan camper is probably best for 2 people at most, if you are planning a trip with more people a bigger van might be a better option.

If you have a van with a third-row seat that folds flat, still consider removing it and using that pocket for additional storage. We used this space to add about a 12″ deep by the width of the van of extra storage space. I was tempted to leave it in there and make building the minivan camper easier, but the extra room was great.

Step 2. Building a platform frame for the bed

We rented a campervan for our trip to New Zealand and it had storage under the bed which was great but in their design, you had to lift the mattress up to access to storage. We wanted quick easy access to the storage and to have it divided and also cheap and easy to make.

We used 2″x 2″ pine studs to make the supports for the frame and a piece of cheap OSB roofing plywood for the top of the platform. We built the platform to raise the bed and frame high enough to slide bins in that we bought.

Start just behind the front seats to put your first bed platform frame member. Double check to make sure to make it high enough for your storage bins to fit underneath including any part of the frame. After the first one is the get a level and set the height of the back frame member.

The reason I did this is that the floor of our van was all kinds of different heights. The floor was higher and lower in many places so to get the bed level I would suggest setting the front frame support and then the back with a level, and the build each of the rest to fit your van floor.

Step 3. Adding under-bed storage

We built out platform tall enough for a bunch of plastic bins to slide under. Using plastic bins didn’t require building and tracks or complicated systems, just slide them in and go. We have used 7-inch tall bins since we did the camper conversion a few years ago, but next trip we are planning on raising the platform for more storage. Always, always build in as much storage as you possibly can, it will make trips in your campervan much more enjoyable.

Step 4. Build a ‘Kitchen’ Storage Cabinet

Here is where you can get as crazy as you want, but we wanted to keep it simple. Our kitchen is primarily for storage and we cook and clean everything on a small fold-out table. When we are camping we find we end up cooking on this table or a campsite picnic table and doing washup here as well. So we didn’t want to add a sink because it adds a lot of costs and they never really work that well.

A 12v refrigerator cooler would be great if you are on the move a lot, but if you are going to stay put for days at a time a normal quality cooler is probably better.

Step 5. DIY Camper Window Shades

As funny as this sounds widow shades can make or break your camper build. Our first design of window shades we a total disaster and we were constantly fixing them. Our van has side curtain airbags in the back around most of the windows so we couldn’t screw in and mount anything to hold sliding fabric shades. So, we tried to attach brackets to the windows themselves. Note nothing expoy-ed, sticky velcro-ed, or anything suction to windows in a campervan will ever be permanent.

Optional – Blackout shades for a DIY Campervan

Last summer we drove to Alaska during the solstice and we knew we needed to get some sleep during the 24 hours of sun so we build blackout shades for our minivan camper. We did this cheap and easy, of course. We bought black poster board from Walmart and then with the windows open we held the poster board inside the van and traced out the shape of the window best we could. We cut them out using an Exacto knife.

This got the blackout shades close, but then we took 2″ wide (standard size) duct tape a taped the perimeter with pieces of the tape laying half of the width on the board and half hanging over. then did the same on the other side sticking both sticky sides of the tape together. This made up for any errors we made while tracing and created a flexible edge to really seal out all of the light. These worked out really well, we were even able to sleep in the middle of the day for a nap when we started out late taking photos or slept in bright parking lots – these are great for stealth camping for both privacy and blocking out the light.

Step 6. Basic 120 Volt Charging Station (wall/house power outlets)

All minivans should have several 12v power outlets or cigarette adapters and with a low-cost power inverter $29.99 you can charge or power most household things. This takes a lot of power and should really only be used while driving or the van is turned on.

Last step. Put the mattress into the minivan camper

We put our mattress in right after building the platform and it constantly got dirty and sometimes damaged as we finished the campervan conversion. After you finish the bed platform make sure the mattress fits, but then leave it out of the van until the very end, it will keep it a lot nicer as you finish building your campervan.

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Additional pieces of kit to consider

Portable Jump Station – If you plan to be in some remote areas it’s best to be prepared. You might forget to turn off a light or cold temperatures at night can make a weak battery not start. With this unit, you can jump-start your camper without having to use another car. We bought this portable jump station with an air compressor for $45.

Things that worked and didn’t in our minivan camper

Stuff that worked:

The Bed – Our bed was actually super comfortable, I would rather sleep on this mattress than a bunch of hotels I’ve stayed in. We measured the inside of the wheel wells and they were about 2-3″ too narrow for a ‘real’ full-size mattress, so we were pretty confident that a premium futon mattress would squeeze into the space and it did. A spring mattress might have but it would have been a tighter fit. Plus the mattress was only $123 shipped right to our door.

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The Kitchen – It works well mostly for storage, the cooking we do is usually on our fold up table or on a picnic table.

Stuff that didn’t work:

Suction cups to hold anything on the windows long term, with heat they fall

Command strip hangers on the window, when it gets over 100° they fall off

Cast Iron pots and pans, unless you are cooking over a fire a lot, they are too hard to clean and keep from rusting when you can’t wash them right away (or maybe we just got bad quality ones)

Our first window shades – Our biggest problems we the window shades, we are seriously thinking about having the windows heavily tinted in the back to help with this and give us more privacy. We wanted to keep the van as close to normal condition because we wanted to resell it after our big road trip, which for the most part worked.

The stuff we wished we had:

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Portable battery operated fan for hot nights.

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The van has been busy so far, she has brought us on a three month US road trip, a 6-week road trip to Alaska, and many other short trips around the country.

If you have built a DIY campervan share your story in the comments, or if you have any questions about building your own minivan camper ask us below.

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