"Thousand words"

Written By: ExecutiveShrimp

Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing, it belongs to Bandai, Sotsu and associated parties. Written for pleasure not profit.

Rating: NC 17

Warnings: AU, angst, fluff, Lemon, OOC

Pairings: 2x1

Summary: Duo and Heero have to share a dorm room in college and they become best friends. When they discover that neither has time for, nor interest in a girlfriend, they explore a friends with benefits relationship. But sex never remains uncomplicated.

" Thousand words"

Three

Damn it.

I hated it when Heero was right.

How did he even do that? How did he fathom predictions of future events from the mathematical algorithm to which his brain function always seemed to be limited? He knows you too well, I accused myself, pausing briefly to find deeper meaning to that. But I was not really a "deep" kind of guy, I got told so every week in Philosophy. He knows you so well, my train of thought sped up again, that he has you down to a formula of constants and variables and he does the math - that makes as little sense to me as all math does - in his head. I imagined there being some sort of poof, like those old-fashioned magic shows and then there it was. There it just was: this model of me.

He did not use to be able to do this, he was as comfortably clueless of my life and its proceedings as he was uncomfortably disinterested in it. In the confines of our living arrangement he became too familiar with my behavior over the past few years as our friendship evolved. Heero is an observer, that I could tell from the start. He doesn't interact much, he observed and he mapped out everything in his head. That is why, when I first started approaching him with more amicable intentions, he startled me with a near intimate knowledge of my being. Whereas I relied on hearsay that only provided me with one of his two majors.

He knew me. He knew the real me. Paradoxically, it was both unsettling and reassuring. Unsettling to know that there is someone who knows me better than I know myself. Reassuring, as apparently, one could know all about me and still care for me.

Regardless of either of those feelings, I still hated it when he was right. He could just be so damn smug about it! I was already dreading the smugness.

"Do you need help?" the kind, delicate voice to my left inquired.

I stopped the unconscious tapping of my pen on my notebook which must have been irritating the shit out of the people surrounding us. I looked up from my squiggly notes, almost surprised, even though I couldn't have possibly forgotten she was sitting right next to me. That warm, small hand of hers, resting innocently on my thigh was difficult to ignore as testosterone had immediately sent my body into high alert. I stared at her wordlessly long enough to make her eyebrow go up, then I remembered: words! "No, I'm fine," I stammered in a decidedly un-smooth way.

"You know," she stated, purposefully leaning in, putting more weight on that hand, "for someone who asked me tutor him, you certainly don't request much tutoring..."

I didn't know why or how but she managed to make her tone shamelessly suggestive. "It's just the chapter," I lied, "it's not as difficult as the previous one." If it had been Heero's eyes I was staring into, I would have seen them narrowing before he called me out on it. "Bullshit," he would say and then he would explain the equation for me again. I couldn't tell her the truth. I couldn't tell her that I always turned to Heero for help with math and that I never intended to change that, even though I replied to her offer on the bulletin board to tutor math for the Architecture majors in the library - one on one.

Recruiting her help had just been an excuse, one that made Heero chuckle when I confessed to him. He was the one who told me the library was a great place to meet up with girls, so of course I had to punch him for laughing at me.

I knew her by name and by face. Meaning when I saw her name on that pamphlet on the bulletin board two weeks ago, I remembered her attractive face from some lectures we had shared over the past course and it seemed as good a chance as any to turn my love life into something a little more sleazy, but at the same time, a little less risky.

Her reply to my email had come quick, even though the pamphlet said a reaction might take a few days. When we met at the agreed time, at the entry of the library, she had looked even more amazing than I remembered. Purposefully. She wore more make-up than I remember her wearing on previous occasions, she had her hair loose and flowing - even though she usually wore it up in a high ponytail - and her skirt had been so short I contemplated if it would even still qualify as a skirt, as opposed to an oversized, denim belt.

When she had walked through those doors, flipping her hair and smiling with her red lips as she spotted me, I was pretty confidant I had done a good job and even inwardly praised myself. Just write that up to: boys will be boys. And boys will be horny.

In anticipation of my success I had told Heero that morning to make himself scarce and leave the private study room in the back to me. That is where I guided her to and I even pulled out her chair as we went to sit down. She complimented me on being such a gentleman and I just thought: if you knew of the un-gentlemanly thoughts I was having right now...

None of those thoughts became a reality. Nothing happened, not of the sort anyway. She answered my math-related questions and sometimes retorted with a personal question as her face sported a sexy smirk. During the two hours of tutoring she touched me a lot, on my arm and on my shoulder and at one point she even took hold of my braid as it was the subject of one of her questions. As time crept by, I started to become distracted, drifting off in my mind and wondering what it was Heero did to turn this flirtatious behavior into outrageous sexual activity atop our textbooks. Of course those thoughts were utterly disruptive to my potential sexual prowess as from then on I was haunted by visions and started to worry if the very chair I sat in had been christened by Heero.

She was not deterred by my lack of focus. To regain my attention, she briefly turned up the heat, turning her body in a way that made her prominent breasts brush against my exposed arm. It didn't get any dirtier than that but at least it eased the awkward thoughts of my best friend.

I was about to end the session by telling her I did not need her tot tutor me again - after all, I didn't need her, Heero was my tutor - but she beat me with words of her own.

"Do you want to go out tonight?"

"Sure." There was literally no thought-process that preceded that response. Even if there had been, I doubted I would have seen the signs Heero pointed out to me in hindsight.

Damn he is good.

Damn it.

We went out that night, to a club she suggested and I had never been to. Her dress covered her up more than the skirt had, but it had been so tight it left nothing to the imagination. As in, the whole time we were outside, walking to and from her car, I could not stop thinking: She is obviously cold. In the club we gyrated our hips together, as that substituted dancing and the only form of motion that was observed in the other patrons. When we left she invited me over to her dorm room. Slightly drunk, I did manage to ask about her roommate. With a grin she informed me she had asked her to have a sleepover at a friend's dorm.

"Oh." Was my deeply profound response. Well, who had the clarity of mind to quote Shakespeare in a moment like that anyway? Besides, romance was not what I was after and I thought that had been pretty clear to her as well.

The sex was good. Satisfying. Though nothing spectacular and of course we could not escape those awkward moments when one of us would bump something into the top bunk as we struggled to find a pleasurable position on the lower bunk. She was loud and high-pitched, a little annoying but not enough so to bother me. Once she buried her hands in my hair but her fingers got tangled and when she pulled away she roughly pulled some hairs out, which had caused me to pause. But I got right back on that horse - oh god, she must never know I ever compared her to a horse - and finished us both off nicely. Just... satisfying... Good enough.

Upon my arrival back at my room, Heero turned out not to be awake to witness my gloat, but I was determined to have him face the full brunt of it the next day over lunch.

Of course by lunch, the gloat was all his.

Damn him.

"Told you so." Was the very first thing he said to me, though he had strategically waited for me to hand him his sandwich before he said anything.

Maxxie, as of then, was my girlfriend. Apparently. It said so on Facebook the next morning and that was the modern equivalent of it being written in stone. "Had an amazing night with Duo Maxwell. He is such a gentleman by day, but in the moonlight such a sexy beast!" Followed by a smiley-face that I had to explain to Heero.

The skirts returned to an appropriate length and I couldn't tell anymore with nothing but a single glance if she was cold or not. There was little physical satisfaction involved in the relationship, only her constant teasing, alleviated on no more than one occasion when I - completely embarrassed - accepted a hand-job from her which felt like the physical examination the coach had all his varsity players undergo regularly. Seriously. Other than that, she expressed desire to "hold off", seeing as we had done it on our first date - apparently that had been a date - and she didn't want to come off as slutty.

So two weeks later I was sitting with her in the library as she still tutored me and was still my girlfriend.

I had suggested moving our tutor sessions out into the open space of the library as opposed to the private study rooms, which was my attempt to create distance; the build-up to letting her down easy. I should have broken up with her sooner, as soon as I realized her idea of what had happened that night differed greatly from mine. But I couldn't do it. I felt sad for her and I felt that I, at least, owed her the time to see if she was the exception, the one that could make me feel, could make me love. Then, as the days went by, she told me how she had always liked me from afar but never quite dared to approach me because of my intense relationship with Hilde. She said she was grateful we had been given a chance anyway and my heart ached as she expressed her insecurity about sleeping with me "on the first date". That just made it even harder to break up with her, even as I became extensively aware of the fact that she was not "the one" and that my relationship with her was never supposed to be more than that one night.

Again I wondered how Heero handled himself in these situations. Surely this must have overcome him too at some point?

I looked at her, at her pretty face. The only flaw I could discover was that her front teeth were slightly crooked. Actually, it looked quite adorable, I recognized. Still, I felt nothing.

"You've been so distracted," she said sympathetically, moving her hand from my thigh to my cheek, caressing me softly.

"It's nothing."

"You can talk to me."

"I really don't want to," I blurted.

Her hand disappeared. "What is that supposed to mean?" She demanded to know.

"It's nothing. Let's just study for now and talk later, okay? We're still on for coffee after this, right?"

She lowered her gaze back to the textbook. "Right."

I sat up straight when I noticed a familiar, tense figure walking by. "Heero!" I called out, turning in my seat and waving my hand so he could spot me.

He approached us with his hands tightly gripping the strap of his heavy shoulder bag. He didn't say anything. He didn't even look at Maxxie.

"What are you doing here so late?"

My girlfriend was visibly displeased as I showed more interest in Heero than in her. She focused her upset gaze on the pages of her notebook but she didn't seem to be reading. With the long fingernail of her index finger she worked on poking a hole through the paper, in the corner.

Yikes. See, that's what I meant, relationship trouble. For some reason it was always lurking and I couldn't seem to escape it.

"I needed more workspace," Heero replied. He was never very talkative in the presence of others.

Oh yeah, he wasn't the only observant one.

Maxxie suddenly turned around in her seat, her ponytail whipping around her face, and she offered Heero an intensively bright smile.

Heero frowned at her and even slightly reeled his head back, surprised to have her looking at him as she had made it no secret these past two weeks that she did not appreciate his presence very much during our "alone time".

"Heero, do want to go get coffee with us later? Duo and I are going to the coffee house after this, you should come with us," Maxxie suggested.

"I'm busy," was Heero's quick and dry report. "Besides, you should probably be alone with your boyfriend." He looked at me meaningfully.

"Right." She turned back in her seat.

"Bye. Good luck." He was not referring to the math. I had told him I would take her out for coffee and then break the news to her that it was over.

Once Heero had walked away I turned to Maxxie, her anger clear, but confusing. "Something wrong?"

"You're going to break up with me, aren't you?" she asked out of the blue, refusing to look me in the eyes.

"Why would you say that?" I questioned, just because it seemed so cruel to flat out tell her that was true.

"Because it's what you do!"

Her loud voice attracted the curious attention of the people surrounding us, making me very self-aware and uncomfortable.

"It's what you do with all your girlfriends! You take them to the exact same coffee house and you dump them! The only one you have been able to stand longer than two weeks is Hilde!" She chuckled bitterly, her hands moving to gather her belongings into her bag and added: "And Heero!"

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" I was suddenly offended, to an inexplicable degree.

"Oh please, you two are like this- this thing! You're Siamese twins connected at the hip, only- not! I can only wonder who is the bad influence on whom."

"Young lady," the evening supervisor started as he approached us with his slow, humorous waddle, "you have to quiet down, people are trying to study."

"He's a prick!" she informed him at the top of her lungs.

He gave me a look but I didn't take it to heart. After all, what the fuck does he know?

"If he's such a prick then let's just go outside and get you some fresh air," he tried calmly and guided her with a hand on her shoulder.

She shook off his hand and stormed away, shouting: "Leave me alone! All men are pricks!"

The obese supervisor turned and put his hands on his broad hips. "You should learn to respect women, young man."

I rolled my eyes. "Thanks, doctor Phil." I turned away and rubbed my temples. That did not go as planned, I thought; usually I was better at the letting-her-off-easy-break-up than that. I supposed it was inevitable for my reputation to precede me. She was right, it didn't take a quiet genius like Heero to see that after a maximum of two weeks I would give up. I guessed I also hadn't been very subtle, suggesting that we should go to that coffee house. I only ever went to that coffee house to break up with girls, a strategic move I knew now I should have changed up occasionally. I frowned to myself as I packed my books into my bags. I invited her to the coffee house that morning when she sat down next to me in the auditorium. She had known all day that I was going to break up with her? Maybe she had hoped she could have changed my mind, she had been quiet during the lecture, but particularly kind and clingy for the duration of the day. Damn, I am a prick, I concluded, suddenly aware of the other students in the library still looking at me.

With my head bowed, heavy with the guilt I always felt after ending it with a girl, I walked away. Instead of heading to the exit, I fled to the nearest sanctuary, the secluded study room in the back. I paused in front of the window, looking at Heero as he leaned over the table, studying diagrams with an intense, focused glare. I shook my head, wondering, how can he be so good at the one night stand thing? He is so... Heero.

"Hey, bro," I greeted, closing the door behind me.

"Hey... dog," he answered awkwardly with an increasing frown.

"It's over between me and Maxxie. She beat me to it." I threw my bag onto the table and heavily sagged down into the seat across from Heero.

"So I heard," was his absentminded retort.

"Yeah, she was kind of loud. Apparently she had known since this morning that I was breaking up with her tonight."

"Well," he started, his eyes still intently focused on the papers, "you are not a difficult guy to read. Throw lazy routines into the mix and you are as predictable as..." His pause dragged on uncomfortably long and then suddenly there was a sigh and he lowered himself back into his seat, his eyes squeezed shut, his fingers rubbing his temples. "I'm too tired to come up with witty comparisons."

I chuckled. "Do you want some coffee?"

He looked at me mischievously, the beginnings of a grin twitching in the left corner of his mouth. "Why? Are you going to break up with me?"

I laughed abruptly. "Not too tired for sarcasm, I see."

He stretched his arms out and leaned his head back, his eyes closed. "Hm. Never."

I sighed, changing the subject back to the morose. "I feel sorry for Maxxie. She is a really nice girl. I should like her, you know? I should have liked many of the girls I dated, but I didn't, not like that anyway. There must be something wrong with me."

I was hoping Heero would assure me that there was nothing wrong with me, but as we had previously established, he was never too tired for sarcasm, so his reaction was a low, agreeable: "Must be."

"Thank you, best friend." Sarcasm was a two-way street. I got up and moved to a chair closer to his, leaning in and asking softly as if it was a secret - maybe it was: "Seriously dude, how do you do it?"

"Manage to stay friends with you? It is a strenuous maintenance of patience and strategically tuning you out," he answered matter-of-factly. By then he had turned the majority of his attention back to his work devoting only the bare minimum of cognitive effort to me. Of course most of that effort was put to good use in terms of the sarcasm. Always the sarcasm.

"No. Manage to have... relations with women that start when they pull your pants down and end when you put your pants up." My reluctance and hesitation to put this question into words drew his attention back to me.

"Relations?"

I knew he was just being thickheaded for the sake of annoying me. I had trained him too well. "Sex," I clarified.

His dark blue eyes peered at me. "You're a romantic," he accused. "You know, first I thought it just happened to you; the relationships. Because you're popular, attractive and from a wealthy family of course. But now I'm starting to think that you might actually be doing something to... invite them in."

"You think I'm attractive?" I wondered out loud with a playful tilt of my head.

He seemed taken aback by this, but only momentarily. His face seemed a little redder than it had been, but it could have just been my eyes fooling me. "Of everything I said, that is all you heard?"

"No." I spat back, then added with a soft, mumbling voice: "I heard everything before that too. Just tell me what it is you do!" I demanded to know. "I've been trying to several weeks now and don't have a single one-night-stand to show for it, instead I have Paulie, Catrice and now Maxxie, three more ex-girlfriends who glare at me in the hallways and whisper vicious things about me behind my back. Literally behind my back!"

"Why don't you just keep doing what you were doing? What is wrong with that? You got laid, didn't you?" he crudely asked. Heero wasn't particularly sensitive.

"I don't want to lead someone on. That's not fair. There should be a mutual understanding that it is just about the sex. Otherwise she will end up getting hurt and that is not what I'm after. I'm not that much of a prick." I groaned and leaned back in my seat, supporting my heavy head with my hands cupping the back of my sore neck. "And I don't want a relationship. I'm just not interested right now. I'm tired, I'm done!" I closed my eyes and took a deep breath when it registered how venomous my voice had become. When I opened them, I noticed the heartfelt look in Heero's eyes as he looked at me.

"Hilde screwed you up bad," he commented sympathetically.

"Yeah." After a few short moments spent it thought, I asked him bluntly with a concerned frown: "Does it make me a bad person? To just want to have sex?"

With a sarcastic snort he looked away. "If it does than I'm going to hell."

My frown just deepened. "That doesn't really answer my question."

He looked at me again. "You're not a bad person," he stressed. "You never could be, you never will be." He added dryly: "You're just a guy, with needs. Girls have needs too."

"Well, I wouldn't know it. When girls pull down your pants, they throw it away and get down to business. When girls pull down my pants, they start searching the pockets for an engagement ring."

Heero laughed, a pleasant, deep, honest rumble.

"I don't think it's funny. I don't think it's funny getting called a prick right in the middle of the University Library." In between the words, chuckles escaped my lips regardless and I playfully punched him - strong enough to nearly knock him off his chair - as he couldn't stop laughing.

"You shouldn't be offended," he said softly, his fingers toying with the corner of one of his diagrams, "you should be complimented. They want more than sex from you, they want you. All of you. That's a pretty big compliment if you ask me."

With a cocky grin I asked him: "Are you jealous?" The moment the words left my mouth, I regretted them, as I realized I may have been horribly insensitive.

He eased my mind when he chuckled and looked at me with sparkling eyes, no offense taken. "Yeah right! And have another "Relena" happen? No thanks."

I nodded, reminded that I am not the only screwed up guy in the room when it came to relationships. We both had a pretty unforgettable past experience that would understandably taint everything in the future. It was just easy to forget because he was always so calm about it, he didn't even seem to hate Relena, he was no more impatient and curt with her than with anybody else. Anybody other than me. Perhaps that is why Relena still had it in her head that she stood a chance. Well, he may be the better man for it, but I sure as hell was going to make it clear to Hilde that she stood no chance with me. Why should I spare her feelings when she had completely disregarded mine?

"Duo?" Heero's voice called through the thick fog of thoughts clouding up my mind.

"Yeah? Sorry, train of thoughts. Train wreck, actually." I hesitated momentarily before I looked at him seriously and confessed: "You know what I think though? I don't think I should feel complimented, because I don't think they want all of me. Not at all in fact. They see a branch in a very impressive family tree, a tree that grows dollar bills instead of leaves."

Heero looked at me for a while, kindly, empathetically, it was a rare but much appreciated look on him. It suited him too. He didn't offer me any advice or solace, instead he asked: "Do you want to get that coffee?"

I frowned and then gestured to his papers spread out over the table as I asked: "Weren't you going to study?"

To answer my question he neatly started gathering his work and putting it back into several folders and binders. "Too tired anyway," he elaborated, although it was no secret to me that he sacrificed his studying for my benefit. "Come on, let's get out of here."

In the cool night air we walked the short distance to the coffee house that was open until midnight for all the hardworking students. There was only a handful of people present, all familiar faces from the university. They nursed large cups of coffee as their dulls eyes stared into textbooks, notes or laptop screens.

"Hi," I said to gain the attention of the girl behind the counter, "can I have a large latte macchiato and a large black coffee?"

We waited for them to prepare our hot, caffeinated drinks and after paying we retreated to a table in a quiet corner away from our apparently brain-dead fellow students. I pushed the black coffee across the table towards him and wrapped my hands around the latte, waiting for it to cool to a temperature that wasn't going to scald my tongue.

"I don't usually come here," Heero pointed out.

"Me neither." I took a first, experimental sip and hissed after the hot liquid had burned it's way down my throat. "The coffee corner on campus has the best coffee. I only come here to break up with girls."

"Why here?"

"I don't know. Neutral ground I guess and you have some privacy but it's still in a public place, making it less likely for them to make a scene. And you can order the girl a slice of comfort. Their coffee may be mediocre but they sell excellent brownies."

"So you do know," he concluded.

I chuckled, embarrassed. "Yeah, guess I have given it more thought than I realized."

"Obviously."

Feeling a little attacked, I shot back to him: "Yeah and how did you masterfully go about breaking hearts?"

He delayed his answer with a slow sip of his black coffee. With challenging eyes he looked up at me. "I've never had a girlfriend, so I have never had to break up with someone."

My surprise must have been painfully evident on my face, explaining his sudden frown, like maybe he suddenly, unexpectedly, regretted telling me. I was quick to apologize for my unbridled reaction, but I was also quick to add, still embarrassingly astounded: "Really?"

He shrugged, it didn't appear to bother him much, but my opinion of it seemed to matter to him.

"How come I never knew this?"

Heero shrugged again. "It's not really a big deal."

I just blinked at him, hoping to be able to stare a more elaborate explanation out of him. To my surprise, I got exactly what I wanted.

"Girls have just never been interested in me like that, except Relena, go figure. And I was also never really interested. It just never happened. I'm not exactly socially gifted, of which you are well aware."

"Hell yeah I'm aware of that. I just always figured some other socially inept girl in Japan had shown interest."

Heero chuckled bitterly. "No, especially not back then. I was even worse then. I was way worse before I came here. Before I met you."

"I know," I agreed, "I met you before you met me. I mean-" I frowned at the illogic of my own statement. "I met you before knowing me had an effect on you."

"Yeah... You have your ways." He smirked.

"Dude, this is great!" I suddenly exclaimed, drawing brief, curious stares from the other present students.

Heero was as startled in response to my outburst as they were. "Excuse me?"

"Why didn't you just say so sooner? We can exchange knowledge, man! I can teach you how to date and you can teach me how to have one-night-stands, you know? Master-student, student-master." I was eager because it eased my own humiliation at having to turn to him for help, but most importantly, I was genuinely interested in helping him. It had always worried me that I was the only one he had, the only one he could talk to. Well, aside from his one friend on the swim team, but if possible, that guy was even less talkative than Heero was.

Heero sighed and shook his head. "Duo, no."

"No?"

"No. I don't want to date. I do my very best not to attract such attention..."

At my stare, with one of my eyebrows cocked, he amended: "Alright, I just don't change my natural, anti-social behavior for the sake of flying under the radar. I'm too busy, I have too many responsibilities and I have too much to lose if I lose focus. Besides, I don't have anything to teach you in return anyway, because there is nothing that I particularly do to facilitate those one-night-stands." He admitted dryly.

"You don't? But from our conversation a couple of weeks ago, I figured you were like this stud..."

"I never said such a thing."

"I know, I just thought..."

"I'm amused and strangely flattered that you would think so. But for you to think so is ill-informed. As I said, I can't even talk a girl into have dinner with me, let alone talk her into pulling down my pants and getting down to business, to use your eloquent phrasing." He smiled when he looked up at me, most likely because I had a comically confused look on my face. "This seems to come as a surprise," he astutely observed.

I shook my head, aware of how incredibly stupid I made myself appear. "I'm just wondering how it works then."

"Oh. The girls approach me, not vice versa," he explained matter-of-factly and took a sip of the coffee that must have gone cold in the meantime.

"They approach you? For sex, just sex?" I dumbly asked to clarify.

"Yes."

"So they use you?" I wasn't trying to be offensive or painfully blunt, I just had a hard time grasping the concept as I had always imaged things to work in the other direction, with the male as the aggressor. After all, if I had learned one thing from romantic comedies and past relationships, girls are usually the one to want more and not ashamed to enable the "more", sometimes forcefully so.

"They don't use me any more than I use them. It's a mutual understanding to satisfy a mutual need." Heero was characteristically rational about it.

"So, girls just come up to you and ask for sex?"

He glared at me, clearly displeased with how long this conversation was dragging out. "No, they come up to me and start flirting, aggressively. They initiate contact and I go along with it."

"Why you?" I blurted and bit my lip as soon as my words registered.

Heero cocked an eyebrow at me. "Thanks."

"No, that's not what I mean," I tried to reassure him, my face going red as the conversation became increasingly awkward and strangely intimate. "Jesus, I don't know what I mean. I guess... Everyone can tell that you're hot, but you are always so secluded, no girl other than that psycho bitch has ever shown interest in you. No offense."

He shrugged, not appearing offended in the least.

"It's just so weird to hear that horny girls throughout the university have been... tapping that," I finished with a frown.

"It doesn't happen very often. Once a month at most."

"But why you?" I wondered again. "I'm not saying you don't deserve the attention, but why would they pick you specifically? Maybe you have spiced up pheromones..."

Heero rolled his eyes at me. "Oh God."

I laughed, mostly out of nervousness at this very strange conversation during which I kept being overwhelmed by flashes of images of Heero and a faceless girl in the study room where we have lunch each day. "Dude, you have to admit though, you must have some serious sexual mojo!" Humor was my way of trying to alleviate the atmosphere. However, the onslaught of intrusive images continued and those few times I couldn't prevent my mental eye from looking at them, it was disturbing to be confronted with just how well I could envision his face. The expression was off, obviously, I had thankfully been spared witnessing my best friend in the throws of passion, but the amount of detail was astounding and added to my embarrassment. We have been spending way too much time together, I concluded.

Heero had a different theory on why he was a popular "resource" for a selection of the girls. It seemed like he had given it quite some thought. Not surprising of course, he wouldn't be Heero if he wouldn't search for underlying patterns, sketching a veritable blueprint for human behavior. Damn genius boy. He said: "I think it's because I'm anti-social. They know I won't tell anyone and they know I won't come back for more. Anonymity and control. Also no risk of falling for me."

"Why's that?"

Heero smirked at me. "Because I'm an asshole of course."

I chuckled. "Of course," I agreed, but added with a kinder tone: "You have your moments though." I sighed. I studied his features but I couldn't extract much, if any, information from them. I voiced my thoughts: "It doesn't bother you at all?"

"No."

I turned the cup of coffee round and round with my fingers, no longer interested in the liquid that had run cold. "Well, then that's what I want, a mutual understanding that it's just about the sex, no complications." I nodded at my own conclusion. "I don't want to trick some poor girl into thinking I'm interested in more. Take Maxxie for example, what was I supposed to do? I would have completely humiliated her if I had told everyone the morning after that it was just a physical, in-the-moment kind of thing. How do I avoid that?"

"I told you, I don't know."

"Maybe you could just, you know, spread the word?" I suggested with a devilish grin.

"It won't work. Every girl in our university is implicitly in love with you, or at least fool themselves into thinking so, or enticingly flattered if you would give them a chance. They would try to hold on to that, hope to be the girl that makes you happy, hope to be the girl that all the other girls are jealous of."

"Won't the chance to have sex with me be enough?"

Heero gave me a look that made words unnecessary.

"Don't feed the ego if you can't handle it," I quipped. "You were the one to say every girl is implicitly in love with me. With the exclusion of that psycho bitch of course."

"If you want," he replied dryly, "I could put in a good word for you."

Laughter briefly ruptured out of me. "I'll pass."

"Hey guys," a young girl in brown uniform interrupted us, "we're about to close, I have to ask you to leave."

"Sure," I said as Heero and I rose from our seats and headed towards the door, dumping our cups in the trash bin along the way. The door fell shut behind us and in the distant church bells chimed twelve times before the dead quiet of the night resumed. I only heard our footsteps in the gravel as we followed the path across the campus, back to our dorm building.

"Maybe I should just give up sex altogether." My voice was startling, inappropriately loud to the backdrop of the crunching beneath our feet.

"Maybe." Heero sounded unconvinced that I would be able to manage abstinence, rightfully so. I had never been long without a girlfriend, I had also never been forced to go without sex for an extended period of time. I liked sex. Any guy would concur. Any girl would too probably. I didn't know why it had to be so complicated.

"Or," I exclaimed more enthusiastically, "I should just find girls who don't go to this university. We should hit the off campus clubs, I'm pretty sure Nash will know some good ones. You could be my wingman!"

"I will do no such thing." Heero replied curtly.

"Why not?"

"I don't go to clubs."

"Is it because of the dancing? Are you insecure about the dancing?" Even in the darkness of the poorly lit path I could feel the intensity of his glare.

"My dancing is fine."

"Heero, crossing your arms in front of your chest and leaning your back against the bar is not dancing."

He stopped dead in his tracks and promptly folded his arms across his chest. "Oh yeah?" He challenged.

I smirked at him. "Heero, it's nothing to be embarrassed about."

"Trust me, it's not my dancing that causes me embarrassment. It's yours." He snapped.

"I happen to be a very good dancer."

"Which poor, moronic, blind man ever tricked you into thinking that this is good dancing." He proceeded with what I presumed to be a demonstration of my dance moves, although greatly exaggerated for sure. Heero wildly flailed his arms around whilst bobbing his head up and down and shifting his weight from one foot to the other completely out of the rhythm of his other movement.

Instead of continuing the defense of my abilities on the dance floor, I let out a hearty laugh.

"It looks even worse in strobe lighting," he tried with a straight face, but then let out a breathless chuckle of his own.

"I cannot believe you just did that," I commented, bemused, as we continued down the path, our hands in our pockets and our heads ducked between our shoulders as the chill of the night really started to set in and seep through our limited layers of clothing. "I so hope you were in full view of a security camera."

"I wasn't," he assured me.

I didn't hesitate to believe him.

When we entered our dorm building we hit a wall of rumbling laughter, thick smoke of joints and cigarettes and the unmistakable smell and sound of someone throwing up in one of the two bathrooms.

"The architect and the engineer!" several guys shouted in unison.

I walked into the large dining room where a large group of senior students had gathered around the elongated table, each one held a set of cards in one hand and either a cigarette or a bottle of beer in the other. Heaped into a pile approximately in the center of the table were crumpled up bills, strewn coins, packs of cigarettes and what looked like someone's paper.

"Look's like I missed out on a lot of fun," I commented insincerely, although they couldn't tell. I wasn't really into the whole get-shit-faced thing that a lot of students spend most of their time in college doing. I always thought it had to do with growing up too fast. These guys were released of parental supervision the moment they stepped through the gates as freshmen and went crazy in the absence of control. My life had been different, I had been completely fending for myself since I outgrew nannies at the age of ten, according to my parents.

"You sure did," Nash commented, a wicked grin on his face. He looked at the others and they started laughing.

"Is that someone's research paper?" I nodded at the bundled papers with a complicated title on the front page.

The laughter momentarily became even louder and I didn't get my answer till Nash caught his breath. "It's Norwood's," he barely managed.

I scrunched up my face. Jack Norwood was one of the decidedly less popular students in school who had the misfortune of being housed in our dorm building, which nearly exclusively consisted of jocks, most of whom utter assholes. "I thought you would never let him play."

"Well, he insisted," Nash explained and then another fit of laughter overcame him before turning into a furious coughing fit. Nothing a sip of beer couldn't resolve.

"Where is he now?"

"In the bathroom," one of the other's said, "puking his guts out!"

More laughter, amidst of which one of the guys from building C informed me his poor hand had forced him to fold, losing his research paper which was due in less than a week.

I sighed. "Come on guys."

"Hey, we didn't force him to bet his paper. Besides, if he is such a genius, he'll be able to write a new one in time," some asshole from the other end of the table argued.

"You're going to give it back to him," I insisted.

"We will," Nash assured me, still laughing though, "we just wanted to make him squirm."

"I think he has squirmed enough." Heero practically growled. He pushed past me and leaned over the table, grabbing the paper.

The whole group groaned in disappointment and called after Heero as he walked off in the direction of the bathroom.

"Your girlfriend is no fun," one of them said.

I ignored him. I used to get mad and defensive when they called him that, it was offensive to us both, but my heated reactions of the past had only fuelled the mockery, which I had learned to see as harmless. I leaned over Nash, looking him in the eye. He was obviously drunk, but I inquired seriously anyway: "Is this your idea of making this year memorable? You want to look back, twenty years from now, and start a conversation with: Remember when we made Norwood puke his guts out?"

"Yeah..." was his delayed answer with a crooked grin.

Without saying anything further I walked off and left them to their demented idea of fun, following Heero. I stood in the doorway, nauseated by the smell that was the result of too much experimental drinking and a nervous stomach. Norwood had just flushed the toilet. Sitting on his knees in front of the bowl he looked up at Heero in amazement and gratitude as he accepted the thick stack of papers held out to him.

"T-thanks, man."

Heero didn't say anything in response, as was in his nature. He promptly turned around and walked away.

"Are you okay?" I asked Norwood.

He dumbly nodded.

Assured that he was fine and would be left alone, I went upstairs. I walked in on Heero ripping his clothes off his body, he was obviously angry. I narrowly avoided an elbow as he stripped out of his shirt.

I leaned my shoulder against the frame of the top bunk and watched him struggle with the buttons of his jeans as he simultaneously tried to toe off his shoes. "Should I concoct an alibi for you, in case I wake up tomorrow and discover you have killed all of them?" I wondered sarcastically.

"I just can't wait for this damn year to be over," he grumbled as he finally sat down to properly untie and take off his shoes.

My chest instantly felt sore at the thought.

"What?" he snapped.

"Nothing."

"Then what's with the look?"

"This is not a look, this is my face," I stated, even though there had definitely been a look.

He glared at me. "I may suck at reading other people, but you know damn well I know that look of yours. Spit it out."

I shrugged, hesitant to reveal the reason behind "the look" because I didn't want to come across as overly emotional. Of course, things were very easily and very quickly considered to be over emotional by Heero, there was almost no avoiding it. "I'm just not as eager as you are for this final year to end," I said with a weak voice, wondering if he would even understand what I meant by that.

He didn't. "Why?" he questioned, followed by a huff, "You hate school. Besides, you would finally be rid of Hilde."

His point was just, but not the point I was trying to make. I stated more bluntly, my voice inadvertently betraying my frustration at his lack of empathy: "Hilde is not the only one I would never see again."

It finally seemed to dawn on him what I had been hinting at. He neatly put away his beat up sneakers and commented matter-of-factly: "We could still see each other."

With his back turned towards me I was especially clueless regarding his true feelings on the matter. I turned my gaze away, out of decency as he started pulling his jeans down to change into a pair of sweatpants and a simple T-shirt. I looked out the window, into the darkness of the night and focused on a single street lamp in the distance. In the corner of my eye, I noted his movements were sharp, impatient and frustrated. I didn't know why, Heero oftentimes still managed to be a mystery to me.

"You could come visit me in Japan," he continued, turning to face me after pulling his shirt over his head. He absentmindedly worked to push his arms through the short sleeves. "You could certainly afford to."

His passive aggressive comment stung, as Heero had always been the one person to not think of me as the rich kid. "My parents are rich, not me," I corrected him.

"Right. I'm sorry." He didn't sound particularly sincere. He leaned back against the closet door, his arms crossed in front of his chest, his gaze stubborn, otherwise unreadable, and turned away from me.

"Or you could stay here. Get a job in the States," I carefully suggested, even as I should have known better.

As expected, Heero was quick to shoot down my idea. "You know I have to go back. I have to take care of my grandmother."

"Your grandmother is in a home, she already has plenty of people to take care of her." I was being insensitive and very selfish, but his indifference about likely never seeing each other again after graduation caused me a dull, throbbing pain. I had a lot of friends, or at least, if asked, a lot of guys I knew from classes or basketball practice, would claim to be my friend, a lot of girls would too. However, if someone would ask me, the answer would be simple. I liked those other guys just fine, I could laugh with them and hang out with them, but I had only one true friend. One friend who didn't like me just because I was rich, popular or captain of the basketball team, but rather, liked me in spite of those things. Liked me for everything else, the things that actually made me, me. Needless to say, this one friend was Heero.

It was the same for Heero. I was his one friend, literally. I guessed, based on this, I just expected him to value my company more.

Heero bit back venomously, he was never one to cower after a strike. "Excuse me for having a family that I need to look after, that I am responsible for. Not everyone is blessed with the kind of freedom you have."

"You know that this is not the kind of freedom that makes me feel blessed," I reminded him.

Heero exhaled and ran his hands through his messy hair. "I'm sorry," he breathed, this time sincerely. "Don't listen to me, I'm saying all the wrong things; things I don't mean. Nash and his friends just get on my nerves like that. I don't see why you like him. You should hate him, you should hate him for the same reason you hate Hilde. Because Nash fucks with people's lives too, all for his own benefit. Norwood could have gotten into serious trouble if they would have taken his paper, he could have been kicked out of the honors program. His academic work is everything to him, his entire life depends on it and Nash and those guys toy with that for their own amusement." He lay down onto his mattress, on top of the sheets, his hands behind his head and his legs crossed at the ankle. Every tendon in his body stood out as he fought the urge to go downstairs and kick their asses, which I knew he was more than capable of.

I wasn't sure if I understood why this got him upset to such an extent. He wasn't friends with Norwood, Heero wasn't a dick to him as most of the others were, but he never even spoke a damn word to the guy. Yet the matter seemed to affect him personally, when normally, Heero isn't affected easily. "Why is this getting to you?" I inquired softly.

"Norwood is me, okay?" He blurted and he averted his angry stares to the wall. "I'm Norwood. This education is everything to me. My grandmother, the only person in the world who ever loved me, depends on me getting a good job out of this. It scares me to know that there is this jackass, sleeping just down the hall, who can ruin everything for the sake of a few laughs." He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and breathed deeply through his nose.

"Nash is not going to ruin this for you." I assured him. I was overwhelmed by his raw honesty and also, somehow, flattered that he would share this fear with me. Heero had been under an incredible amount of stress, I never even knew exactly how much until now. "Nash is not a bad guy. Underneath all the crap, I think he might actually be a good guy."

"There's a lot of crap."

I nodded, in full agreement. "No doubt. I've hated guys like Nash all my life, but now we are in our final year, about to be done with school and classes, going out into the real world and I need to be able to believe that even they reach a certain kind of maturity and respectability. And you know what, I actually like him... Not all the time, but... most of the time."

"Why would you hate them to begin with? You are practically one of them."

I leaned forward, into the shadow of the top bunk, bringing my face closer to his to confront him with my mysterious smirk. "You don't know everything about me, Yuy."

"Get the fuck out of my personal space," he growled and reached out a hand.

I felt his hand against the top of my head, fingers burying into my hair and he forcefully pushed me back, not letting go until I was a full arm's length away. When I looked at him he stuck his tongue out. It seemed his bad mood had been temporary and it had come to pass. I actually think Heero should get angry more often, he certainly has plenty to be angry about.

Dressed in shorts and a comfortable shirt I turned off the lights and groped my way through the dark, back to the ladder that led up to my victorious top bunk. I climbed into bed, grumbling as I could hear roars of laughter coming all the way from the dining room.

"You know I would if I could, right?" Heero asked.

"Hm?"

"I would stay, if I could," he clarified, "but my grandmother needs me back home. That is why I agreed to come here in the first place, so I could get a good education and take care of her."

I took a deep breath, it was shaky and I didn't like that, but I couldn't deny it. "I know man. I'm sorry about before. I was being unreasonable. It's just," I hesitated, but after a short pause I managed to let go of my ego and confess to him once more, just to make sure it got through his thick skull: "I'm really going to miss you."

"Yeah..." he breathed quietly.

We both seemed to lose ourselves in thoughts, mostly undisturbed by the laughter and the shouting coming from down stairs.

Heero snorted several minutes into the silence between us. "You know this is why they call me your girlfriend, right?"

I laughed abruptly. "Yeah. You know what they call the girls I date?"

From his silence I deduced he didn't.

I answered, biting back laughter: "My dirty mistresses." I smiled from ear to ear when I heard Heero's low, deep chuckles. "Please be my wingman," I shamelessly begged, "I really need the dirty mistresses."

"Do it yourself," he replied stubbornly.

"You don't go to a club by yourself, you need back-up. Girls travel in packs you know."

He yawned loudly and responded with deep, tired voice: "Ask Nash. Ask Obie."

I rolled over to the edge of the bed and peered down at him. In the dim light I could see his eyes were closed, but they flared open as he must have felt my stare.

"Yes, dear?"

"Nash is not a wingman, he is total kamikaze and Obie just got back from Vegas, remember? From eloping, as in: getting married?"

He stubbornly closed his eyes. "I'm not doing it," he muttered.

I could have sworn I saw a pout, but maybe the moonlight played tricks on me. "Do you honestly think you stand a chance at refusing me?"

One eye cracked open to glare at me and even that one, diminished by darkness, would be intimidating to anyone - anyone but me. I've been barked at enough to know that this "dog don' bite". Not me at least. I just stared back at him.

"Oh God!" he groaned, he reaching both hands up to rub his eyes.

"Please? Please, Heero, please! You know I can make your life miserable if you say no and you know that I will."

"Why not give your other potential solution a try first?" he suggested.

"And what would that be?"

"Giving up on sex altogether."

"That wasn't an idea so much as a brain fart," I dead-panned.

"If you try it and you really can't keep it in your damn pants, I'll... be your wingman," he relented.

"How long would I have to try?"

Heero opened his eyes again to once again submit me to the brunt force of his glare, not fully aware - or in denial of - the fact that I was immune to it. "It's almost one o'clock, I have class at eight, meaning I have to start my morning run at six thirty. Why are we still talking as opposed to sleeping?"

I flashed him a grin.

"You are insufferable." His brows furrowed deeply as his tired mind tried to think, tried to come up with rules for the ultimatum he had given me. "What's the longest you have gone without sex."

"Fourteen years," was my hasty reply.

"I meant recently, not since birth- wait... You lost your virginity at fourteen?"

"Stella Grey," I mused absentmindedly, "she was... the most developed girl in our class."

"This is so wrong..." Heero groaned.

"Gave a whole new meaning to "play date"-" I continued, knowing it would annoy him and I would get some fun out of it.

"Please stop talking!" He interrupted me. "Just answer my question."

I dragged out a "hm" as long as my breath lasted as I gave his question serious consideration. "Three weeks I think."

"Three weeks? So what, in this final year you would have had to recycle girlfriends?"

"Says the guy who bones a girl every month in the freaking library restroom," I shot back.

"Fine. Four weeks. Try it for four weeks and if you go stir crazy by then, I'll be your damn wingman."

"Four weeks?" I nearly rolled out of bed and that would have been a very painful landing.

"Four weeks," he confirmed and then rolled onto his side, facing the wall.

"Fine. I'll try celibacy for four weeks, to show you how desperately I need you to be my wingman," I agreed, fully confidant that I would find a way, long before those four weeks were over, to get Heero to go clubbing with me. He had no idea what he had just gotten himself into, but he was about to find out. I had my distinct ways of making him recognize the superiority of my plans, which boil down to a simple but effective strategy of annoying the living daylights out of him.

I was aware that I had plenty of semi-friends to call on, Nash and Obie weren't my only choices, but really, there was no choice at all for me to make if I was being completely honest with myself. I wouldn't feel comfortable with anybody other than Heero with me. What's the point of having a wingman when he makes you uncomfortable and unconfident? Besides, if the hunt would be a total bust, at least I knew for sure that with Heero, I would still have a good time.

"Whatever," he mumbled in response, already half asleep.

I rolled onto my back and settled into a comfortable position, but I knew I would not find sleep quickly. Not because the other guys were still being obnoxiously loud downstairs, but because I was already thinking diabolical game plans. Heero was just too much damn fun.

~ * ~

Chapter 4

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