Original -- Wonders
Title: Wonders
Part: IV
Series: The Sam and Adrian Saga
Pairing: Adrian/Sam
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,123
Warnings: some vaguely PG-13-ish language
Summary: In which college-aged Sam meets a college-aged Adrian and falls madly in love.
Author's Note: Sam and Adrian went to my school and took their astronomy class in the same classroom mine was in. True story.
WONDERS
Life ended and began when Sam Tanner, who was nineteen years old and already jaded, who stood at a terribly imposing five-foot-five-and-a-half, whose stark black hair was so insuppressible as to give the impression of another inch, sat down for the first time to an astronomy lecture.
Someone had recommended the class to Sam, a hotheaded, bloody-minded Journalism major with breadth requirements to fulfill, because the professor made even the toughest concepts worth the work. Purportedly, anyway. Sam had long since learned not to trust everything he heard.
He wished later that he could remember who it had been that had said those things. The class had been a bitch and a half, as it turned out, but he owed its proponent everything.
Trying not to look interested, he cast his gaze over the lecture hall, trolling for promising faces to hook his attention. Empty chairs, sorority girls conspiring, Asian kids bent over something, more vacant seats, a girl with bright red hair, a boy with eight billion piercings and a few tattoos to boot, then-
In retrospect, he hated that his breath caught in his throat. It was so Harlequin.
The respiratory system-arresting individual was a slim boy with narrow shoulders; with hair like chocolate touched with copper, long enough to merit a ponytail at the base of his neck; with a tall face tipped with a slightly pointed chin; with a grin like a revelation and a nose like a portraitist’s dream; and with dark, almond-shaped eyes gently tilted.
That was it. That was all it took-him, there, with those eyes, laughing at something the perforated coloring book next to him had said. Sam was in love, madly, deeply, and irretrievably. Game over.
He tried to pay attention to the very adequate professor wandering the front portion of the room and waving his arms more in two hours than most people did in their lives, but it was impossible. Syllabus this, midterm that-there was a demigod sitting in the second row. The marvel was twirling his pen and tapping it absently on the open page of his notebook.
Sam’s discussion section for this class was scheduled half an hour after lecture let out. He spent the interim sitting in front of one of the campus restaurants, students milling and flowing around him as he stared numbly at his folded hands and begged every higher power he could think of to put that boy in the same section. He hadn’t prayed since deciding at fifteen to reject his parents’ Protestantism in a dual effort to defy them and define himself, and he was terrified that his license for talking to God had expired.
He was the first one in the classroom, and he tossed himself down in a desk off to the side, weighted by the sour sinking feeling in his gut-the feeling that it was all over before it had even started. That graces and miracles were for other people, for people who deserved them.
Through hooded eyes he watched them troop in-the giggling girls and the shifty-eyed geeks, the frat boys and the skaters and the punks and the ingénues. Sections tended to be like that, samplings of the social hierarchy, running the gamut of the cliques and then cramming a few choice bars from the spectrum into a small, windowless room to see who came out alive.
It was bullshit, but, then, college was.
The problem was that Sam Tanner didn’t fit into any of those categories. He couldn’t shrug on a shirt and inhabit an identity with it wholesale, and he didn’t have much of a hand-me-down heritage to fall back on. He incorporated a little bit of all of the different denominations, so he didn’t belong to any of them. He was stranded.
It was about at that moment, as he wallowed in his vague and persistent misery, that he heard the laugh he’d memorized the very first time he’d heard it-light, airy, sweet, like the park in the spring, the blossoms disengaged by the breeze spiraling downwards to alight on the grass.
The boy with the almond eyes strolled in, his backpack slung carelessly over his shoulder, and folded himself into a chair just three seats away. All the moisture in Sam’s throat evaporated, only to reappear on his palms.
The tattooed kid was again the source of the mirth, and he smirked around a lip ring and flopped down on the perfect boy’s other side.
Sam glanced towards the blackboard and discovered that the TA was a slightly nervous-looking girl with her dark hair pulled back (the perfect boy did it better) and her lesson plan out. She played with her watch, consulted it, compared its counsel with that of the wall clock, and then cleared her throat.
“Hey, everybody,” she said. “I’m Sharia, and I hope you’re looking for Discussion 102 of Astronomy 10, because that’s what we’re going to be doing.” She sneaked a look at her notes again. “So I know it’s stupid, and you’re all sick and tired of it, but if you could all go around and say your name, and your class level, and something you want to do by the end of this year-like, one of your goals-that’d be cool. We’re going to be spending kind of a lot of time together, and study groups are never a bad idea.”
Sam begged to differ, but now didn’t seem like the time to mention it.
“Cool. So let’s start over here.”
Rather, now seemed like the time to twist his hands in his lap and wait for the perfect boy’s turn to speak, learning the curve of a dark eyebrow and a smooth jaw, following it up to an ear partially veiled by loose hairs. Getting caught would have been humiliating beyond any hope of survival, but the risk was worth it.
A few people introduced themselves, and Sam got a very fuzzy idea of some names and faces, gleaned largely out of the corner of his eye. It was the tattooed kid’s turn.
“My name’s Mark Kessley,” he announced, “and I’m a junior, and this year, I want to get this one done.” He raised his left arm, which was devoid of any ink illustrations-unlike his right, which was blanketed in the things.
Sharia raised an eyebrow. It was a neat trick. “A noble goal,” she remarked, and Sam decided that he liked her.
There wasn’t time to dwell on it, however, because the wind-chime laugh sounded again, and his heart was slamming like a piston in the prison of his ribs. The perfect boy was about to get a name.
“I’m Adrian Leyman,” he said. Sam turned it over, whispered it in his head, listened to it resonate off the walls of his skull, ran his fingers along its contours. Perfect. No surprise. “I’m a junior, too.” Mythic. Monumental. “And this year…” Almond eyes flicked up to the water stains adorning the panels of the ceiling; a smile toyed with his lips. “…I want to find my soul-mate.”
It sounded beautiful, amazing, inspiring, epic… even though Sam didn’t believe in soul-mates. He wanted to. But he didn’t.
A small explosion in his brain and a series of silent expletives ushered in the knowledge that everyone was staring at him, waiting for him to recite his bullshit answer so that they could finish with the bullshit introductions and move on to the bullshit homework portion of the bullshit program.
If there was one thing Sam could do, it was cook up some bullshit on little or no notice. It was just words, after all.
“I’m Sam Tanner,” he told them, “I’m a sophomore, and I’d like to get better at guitar.”
Assembling words was easy; believing them was not.
Adrian-Adrian-smiled amiably, and Sam’s internal organs twisted like ribbons around a maypole.
Things were said; rules were laid out; lecture was recapped. Sam heard about twenty percent of it.
Actually, twenty percent was probably generous.
He packed his things slowly at the hour and trooped out of the classroom last, trying to get another glimpse of Adrian. There was a flash of chocolate hair and a dazzling grin, a fragmented echo of the laugh, and then he disappeared down the stairwell.
Sam spent the rest of the day alternately fantasizing and attempting to figure out just what had gone on during class. It was a productive afternoon.
Thursday, he went back to astronomy.
Assiduously he tried not to look at the second row as he crossed the threshold and moved for the stairs. He was determined to keep it together. To keep it under wraps and under control. Not to give the slightest indication-
He stole a glance.
Just before he tore his eyes away, Adrian turned his head, and their gazes met.
Sam’s brain made a sound like pfft, which he assumed meant it was giving out on him. Ah, well. It had only been a matter of time.
Adrian grinned and waved him over.
His brain reassembled itself and abruptly shuddered back into action, apparently tapping into the deep part of him aware that this was the sort of opportunity you had to snatch right out of the air. He reestablished that there was, indeed, life in his feet, after which he convinced them to conquer the stairs and then carry him dangerously, desperately, drastically close to the object of his worship.
“Have a seat,” Adrian offered cheerfully, motioning to the empty place to his right. Sam filled it, feeling as though the cells in his skin were vibrating, as though every ounce of blood in his body was trying to flow closer to those amazing eyes, to do proper reverence to them. His pulse was beating so hard in his temple that he probably had a huge, ugly vein bulging out at the spot.
If Adrian noticed any bizarre circulatory system malfunctions, he didn’t comment. “Sam, right?” When Sam managed a nod, he grinned again, the grin that turned the joints of your knees into pudding. “I’m Adrian, and this is my cousin, Mark.”
As Mark made some sort of welcoming gesture with a hand complete with lettering across the knuckles, Sam decided that “I know” would have been extremely creepy and settled with a more neutral “Yeah.”
He was also slightly distracted by the staggering relief derived from the revelation that Mark was not Adrian’s boyfriend.
Adrian, as it was, crossed one long leg over the other, a slender finger straightening his pen. “So what rocks your world, Sam?” he inquired.
You. Right off its axis.
That would also have been highly creepy.
“Music,” he answered. “And… writing and stuff.”
“Are you majoring in English?” Adrian prompted.
“Journalism,” Sam corrected, feeling like a snob.
“Awesome,” Adrian decided. He grinned, touching two fingers to his chest. “Math.” He jerked a thumb at Mark. “Setting off metal detectors.”
Mark snorted around his nose-ring. “It only happened once, man.”
“No, once at the airport, once at Six Flags, then when we went back to the airport-”
Mark threw his hands up. “Okay, fine! A couple times!”
Adrian tossed a triumphant little smile in Sam’s direction. Shared it. Sam felt divine by association.
“Are you doing anything after class, Sam the Journalism Major?” Adrian asked then.
Apparently, wonders never did cease.
Shit, he had to say something brilliant and hilarious.
“Other than nursing my overstuffed brain,” he noted dryly, “not really, no.”
Adrian laughed the laugh, and Sam’s toes tingled. He knew he was grinning like an idiot, but he couldn’t stop.
“You should have lunch with us,” Adrian added, seemingly quite unaware of the import of his words. “We always go lie around on the lawn in front of the library.”
“Sure,” Sam said immediately, unthinkingly, because Adrian Leyman made thinking feel terribly quaint.
It was only after the longest two-hour class of his life, only after a hefty serving of inattention, and only when he was standing on the perky emerald grass looking at Adrian and Mark sprawled out heedlessly, that Sam realized what in the name of God, Jesus, and a few good martyrs he was doing.
He sat down. He had resolved to go hungry rather than reveal to the world-that was, Adrian-his prospective lunch, which, being a cinnamon-raisin bagel slathered in enough cream cheese to fill a sink (and, as if that wasn’t enough, a juice box to drink), suddenly seemed like the most extravagant display of juvenile foolishness since his Transformers collection. He was perfectly willing to starve for his dignity.
Then Adrian took out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
As if Sam needed to love him even more.
[III: Tipsy] [V: Stars]
Part: IV
Series: The Sam and Adrian Saga
Pairing: Adrian/Sam
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,123
Warnings: some vaguely PG-13-ish language
Summary: In which college-aged Sam meets a college-aged Adrian and falls madly in love.
Author's Note: Sam and Adrian went to my school and took their astronomy class in the same classroom mine was in. True story.
WONDERS
Life ended and began when Sam Tanner, who was nineteen years old and already jaded, who stood at a terribly imposing five-foot-five-and-a-half, whose stark black hair was so insuppressible as to give the impression of another inch, sat down for the first time to an astronomy lecture.
Someone had recommended the class to Sam, a hotheaded, bloody-minded Journalism major with breadth requirements to fulfill, because the professor made even the toughest concepts worth the work. Purportedly, anyway. Sam had long since learned not to trust everything he heard.
He wished later that he could remember who it had been that had said those things. The class had been a bitch and a half, as it turned out, but he owed its proponent everything.
Trying not to look interested, he cast his gaze over the lecture hall, trolling for promising faces to hook his attention. Empty chairs, sorority girls conspiring, Asian kids bent over something, more vacant seats, a girl with bright red hair, a boy with eight billion piercings and a few tattoos to boot, then-
In retrospect, he hated that his breath caught in his throat. It was so Harlequin.
The respiratory system-arresting individual was a slim boy with narrow shoulders; with hair like chocolate touched with copper, long enough to merit a ponytail at the base of his neck; with a tall face tipped with a slightly pointed chin; with a grin like a revelation and a nose like a portraitist’s dream; and with dark, almond-shaped eyes gently tilted.
That was it. That was all it took-him, there, with those eyes, laughing at something the perforated coloring book next to him had said. Sam was in love, madly, deeply, and irretrievably. Game over.
He tried to pay attention to the very adequate professor wandering the front portion of the room and waving his arms more in two hours than most people did in their lives, but it was impossible. Syllabus this, midterm that-there was a demigod sitting in the second row. The marvel was twirling his pen and tapping it absently on the open page of his notebook.
Sam’s discussion section for this class was scheduled half an hour after lecture let out. He spent the interim sitting in front of one of the campus restaurants, students milling and flowing around him as he stared numbly at his folded hands and begged every higher power he could think of to put that boy in the same section. He hadn’t prayed since deciding at fifteen to reject his parents’ Protestantism in a dual effort to defy them and define himself, and he was terrified that his license for talking to God had expired.
He was the first one in the classroom, and he tossed himself down in a desk off to the side, weighted by the sour sinking feeling in his gut-the feeling that it was all over before it had even started. That graces and miracles were for other people, for people who deserved them.
Through hooded eyes he watched them troop in-the giggling girls and the shifty-eyed geeks, the frat boys and the skaters and the punks and the ingénues. Sections tended to be like that, samplings of the social hierarchy, running the gamut of the cliques and then cramming a few choice bars from the spectrum into a small, windowless room to see who came out alive.
It was bullshit, but, then, college was.
The problem was that Sam Tanner didn’t fit into any of those categories. He couldn’t shrug on a shirt and inhabit an identity with it wholesale, and he didn’t have much of a hand-me-down heritage to fall back on. He incorporated a little bit of all of the different denominations, so he didn’t belong to any of them. He was stranded.
It was about at that moment, as he wallowed in his vague and persistent misery, that he heard the laugh he’d memorized the very first time he’d heard it-light, airy, sweet, like the park in the spring, the blossoms disengaged by the breeze spiraling downwards to alight on the grass.
The boy with the almond eyes strolled in, his backpack slung carelessly over his shoulder, and folded himself into a chair just three seats away. All the moisture in Sam’s throat evaporated, only to reappear on his palms.
The tattooed kid was again the source of the mirth, and he smirked around a lip ring and flopped down on the perfect boy’s other side.
Sam glanced towards the blackboard and discovered that the TA was a slightly nervous-looking girl with her dark hair pulled back (the perfect boy did it better) and her lesson plan out. She played with her watch, consulted it, compared its counsel with that of the wall clock, and then cleared her throat.
“Hey, everybody,” she said. “I’m Sharia, and I hope you’re looking for Discussion 102 of Astronomy 10, because that’s what we’re going to be doing.” She sneaked a look at her notes again. “So I know it’s stupid, and you’re all sick and tired of it, but if you could all go around and say your name, and your class level, and something you want to do by the end of this year-like, one of your goals-that’d be cool. We’re going to be spending kind of a lot of time together, and study groups are never a bad idea.”
Sam begged to differ, but now didn’t seem like the time to mention it.
“Cool. So let’s start over here.”
Rather, now seemed like the time to twist his hands in his lap and wait for the perfect boy’s turn to speak, learning the curve of a dark eyebrow and a smooth jaw, following it up to an ear partially veiled by loose hairs. Getting caught would have been humiliating beyond any hope of survival, but the risk was worth it.
A few people introduced themselves, and Sam got a very fuzzy idea of some names and faces, gleaned largely out of the corner of his eye. It was the tattooed kid’s turn.
“My name’s Mark Kessley,” he announced, “and I’m a junior, and this year, I want to get this one done.” He raised his left arm, which was devoid of any ink illustrations-unlike his right, which was blanketed in the things.
Sharia raised an eyebrow. It was a neat trick. “A noble goal,” she remarked, and Sam decided that he liked her.
There wasn’t time to dwell on it, however, because the wind-chime laugh sounded again, and his heart was slamming like a piston in the prison of his ribs. The perfect boy was about to get a name.
“I’m Adrian Leyman,” he said. Sam turned it over, whispered it in his head, listened to it resonate off the walls of his skull, ran his fingers along its contours. Perfect. No surprise. “I’m a junior, too.” Mythic. Monumental. “And this year…” Almond eyes flicked up to the water stains adorning the panels of the ceiling; a smile toyed with his lips. “…I want to find my soul-mate.”
It sounded beautiful, amazing, inspiring, epic… even though Sam didn’t believe in soul-mates. He wanted to. But he didn’t.
A small explosion in his brain and a series of silent expletives ushered in the knowledge that everyone was staring at him, waiting for him to recite his bullshit answer so that they could finish with the bullshit introductions and move on to the bullshit homework portion of the bullshit program.
If there was one thing Sam could do, it was cook up some bullshit on little or no notice. It was just words, after all.
“I’m Sam Tanner,” he told them, “I’m a sophomore, and I’d like to get better at guitar.”
Assembling words was easy; believing them was not.
Adrian-Adrian-smiled amiably, and Sam’s internal organs twisted like ribbons around a maypole.
Things were said; rules were laid out; lecture was recapped. Sam heard about twenty percent of it.
Actually, twenty percent was probably generous.
He packed his things slowly at the hour and trooped out of the classroom last, trying to get another glimpse of Adrian. There was a flash of chocolate hair and a dazzling grin, a fragmented echo of the laugh, and then he disappeared down the stairwell.
Sam spent the rest of the day alternately fantasizing and attempting to figure out just what had gone on during class. It was a productive afternoon.
Thursday, he went back to astronomy.
Assiduously he tried not to look at the second row as he crossed the threshold and moved for the stairs. He was determined to keep it together. To keep it under wraps and under control. Not to give the slightest indication-
He stole a glance.
Just before he tore his eyes away, Adrian turned his head, and their gazes met.
Sam’s brain made a sound like pfft, which he assumed meant it was giving out on him. Ah, well. It had only been a matter of time.
Adrian grinned and waved him over.
His brain reassembled itself and abruptly shuddered back into action, apparently tapping into the deep part of him aware that this was the sort of opportunity you had to snatch right out of the air. He reestablished that there was, indeed, life in his feet, after which he convinced them to conquer the stairs and then carry him dangerously, desperately, drastically close to the object of his worship.
“Have a seat,” Adrian offered cheerfully, motioning to the empty place to his right. Sam filled it, feeling as though the cells in his skin were vibrating, as though every ounce of blood in his body was trying to flow closer to those amazing eyes, to do proper reverence to them. His pulse was beating so hard in his temple that he probably had a huge, ugly vein bulging out at the spot.
If Adrian noticed any bizarre circulatory system malfunctions, he didn’t comment. “Sam, right?” When Sam managed a nod, he grinned again, the grin that turned the joints of your knees into pudding. “I’m Adrian, and this is my cousin, Mark.”
As Mark made some sort of welcoming gesture with a hand complete with lettering across the knuckles, Sam decided that “I know” would have been extremely creepy and settled with a more neutral “Yeah.”
He was also slightly distracted by the staggering relief derived from the revelation that Mark was not Adrian’s boyfriend.
Adrian, as it was, crossed one long leg over the other, a slender finger straightening his pen. “So what rocks your world, Sam?” he inquired.
You. Right off its axis.
That would also have been highly creepy.
“Music,” he answered. “And… writing and stuff.”
“Are you majoring in English?” Adrian prompted.
“Journalism,” Sam corrected, feeling like a snob.
“Awesome,” Adrian decided. He grinned, touching two fingers to his chest. “Math.” He jerked a thumb at Mark. “Setting off metal detectors.”
Mark snorted around his nose-ring. “It only happened once, man.”
“No, once at the airport, once at Six Flags, then when we went back to the airport-”
Mark threw his hands up. “Okay, fine! A couple times!”
Adrian tossed a triumphant little smile in Sam’s direction. Shared it. Sam felt divine by association.
“Are you doing anything after class, Sam the Journalism Major?” Adrian asked then.
Apparently, wonders never did cease.
Shit, he had to say something brilliant and hilarious.
“Other than nursing my overstuffed brain,” he noted dryly, “not really, no.”
Adrian laughed the laugh, and Sam’s toes tingled. He knew he was grinning like an idiot, but he couldn’t stop.
“You should have lunch with us,” Adrian added, seemingly quite unaware of the import of his words. “We always go lie around on the lawn in front of the library.”
“Sure,” Sam said immediately, unthinkingly, because Adrian Leyman made thinking feel terribly quaint.
It was only after the longest two-hour class of his life, only after a hefty serving of inattention, and only when he was standing on the perky emerald grass looking at Adrian and Mark sprawled out heedlessly, that Sam realized what in the name of God, Jesus, and a few good martyrs he was doing.
He sat down. He had resolved to go hungry rather than reveal to the world-that was, Adrian-his prospective lunch, which, being a cinnamon-raisin bagel slathered in enough cream cheese to fill a sink (and, as if that wasn’t enough, a juice box to drink), suddenly seemed like the most extravagant display of juvenile foolishness since his Transformers collection. He was perfectly willing to starve for his dignity.
Then Adrian took out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
As if Sam needed to love him even more.
[III: Tipsy] [V: Stars]