Chapter Text
The Friday that Carmilla Karnstein moves into your dorm room, and subsequently into your life, begins the same way as any other seemingly innocuous Friday.
LaFontaine comes hammering on your door at 9AM for your weekly breakfast date at the on-campus Starbucks next to the Lustig Theatre. You have a sociology lecture from 11AM to 12:30PM. Kirsch joins you and Danny for lunch and they spend the majority of it bickering like children about sports. Or possibly birds. Dude, Cardinals and nah bro, Ravens could mean either. You’re in your 2PM English Lit class when Perry texts you to inform you that the university has finally gotten around to assigning you a new roommate.
Betty, your party girl roommate throughout freshman year, decided over summer that she wanted to transfer to Princeton — something about turning over a new leaf and discovering a newfound love for biomedical sciences — and due to the laziness and general ineptitude of Student Services, you’ve spent the first week of your sophomore year roommate-free.
Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. You enjoy spending time with other people as much as any other slightly socially awkward twenty year old, but you also appreciate having a room to yourself. No one to witness you dropping cookie crumbs all over yourself, no one to tell you that one more episode maybe isn’t the great idea you think it is at three in the morning, no one to take ages in the bathroom right when you need to use it.
You glance up at your professor to make sure she isn’t paying attention, and quickly type out a reply to Perry, asking about your mystery new roommate. She replies a few minutes later, and all she’s been told is that your roommate is female, a transfer from the University of Paris — who transfers a week into the fall semester? — and that she’ll be arriving sometime later in the evening. Perry asks you to make sure you’re around for when the roommate gets here, not out at some party, and you muffle a laugh.
(The no-party is not going to be a problem; you were honestly concerned you were going to die the morning after a particularly wild Summer Society party the last day of Freshers' week. It’s been a week and you still feel queasy anytime anyone so much as mentions the word shots.)
Shoving your phone back into your pocket, you look out the window, and groan under your breath when you realise it’s pouring with rain. You don’t have an umbrella, your jacket doesn’t have a hood, and your dorm building is all the way on the other side of campus, so of course, once your class ends you get completely drenched hurrying back to your room.
Throwing your bag onto your bed once you push open the door to Room 307, you make a beeline for the bathroom to shower, shivering from the cold while you wait for the water to heat up. Once you’re done with your shower you reluctantly start clearing up the bathroom cabinet so that two of the four shelves are free for your as-yet-unnamed roommate to use. Automatically, you stroll back into your room in just a towel, before it occurs to you that you might not be able to do that anymore. What if your new roommate is uncomfortable with partial nudity? What if they're a total perv who'll stare at you like a creep anytime you're wearing less than six layers? Dammit, you were just getting used to having a room all to yourself.
A few hours later, you’re curled up in bed with your laptop, when the door bangs open loudly behind you. Pausing Doctor Who, you look up and the first thing you see is leather and plaid as your new roommate — at least you hope it’s her, and not some deranged serial killer in search of their next victim — storms towards the free bed without even acknowledging you.
“Um, hello?” You say, wondering if she’s even noticed you. Danny has pointed out that you’re kind of miniature. Several times. Like, if you were any more miniature then people would need a microscope to see you.
“Hey,” she replies, throwing her bag onto the spare bed and beginning to rummage through it, still not bothering to turn around to look at you. In addition to the leather pants and the red plaid shirt, you can now add ‘dark hair’ to the extensive list of things you know about your roommate-slash-possible-murderer. “You’re Laura, right?”
You nod, slightly distracted by staring at her ass — her leather pants clad ass — when she bends over the bed to place a book down on the headboard, before you realise what a creep you’re being, and also that she can’t see you nodding. “Yeah,” you stutter, clearing your throat before continuing. “Laura Hollis. Um, I’m assuming you’re my new roommate?”
“Yep,” she says, shoving her bag onto the floor so she can turn around and sit down on the bed, facing you. Your first thought is that she’s hot. Your second thought is that she’s really hot. Her skin is pale, her eyes are dark, and her lips are pulled into an oddly attractive smirk. You swallow when you notice the red plaid shirt isn’t buttoned, and the black top she has on underneath it is extremely low cut. You’re pretty sure she notices the split second you spend staring at her chest if the way her smirk widens is any indication. You definitely do not notice the way she licks her lips before speaking again. “I’m Carmilla.”
“Nice to meet you,” you squeak.
You’re kind of glad you’re buried almost completely under your blanket — which you notice with a sigh is possibly your nerdiest one, the bright yellow one covered in Hufflepuff insignias — so the flush that spreads across your body when Carmilla practically purrs, “Likewise, sweetheart,” and blatantly rakes her gaze across you is mostly hidden.
“Well,” Carmilla continues when you don’t say anything, clapping her hands together. “As exciting as these introductions have been, I have places to be.” You raise an eyebrow as she stands up from the bed. She literally just arrived at Silas, where could she possibly need to be? “See you around, cutie,” she smirks, winks at you, then breezes out the door without another word, slamming it shut behind her.
You blink in confusion. Sweetheart? Cutie? You’re not entirely sure what you were actually expecting as your new roommate, but it definitely wasn’t Carmilla.
/
Two weeks later, any initial physical attraction you had to Carmilla has vanished completely, because she is without a doubt, the most profoundly obnoxious person you have ever had the displeasure of meeting.
You don’t hate her or anything quite that extreme (yet). You just really don’t like her. At all. Which is slightly unfortunate given you share a room with her.
For starters, she’s incredibly rude. All the time. She pokes fun at just about everything on your side of the room: your very soft and very cosy Hufflepuff blanket, your gift from your dad Tardis mug, your limited edition Buffy and Doctor Who DVD collections, your yellow pillow, which frequently makes its way ‘mysteriously’ over to her bed. You’re also subjected to at least fifty short jokes per day, despite the fact Carmilla is only about an inch or two taller than you.
The initial cordial introductions must have been some kind of fluke, since she complains, ignores you, or flat out leaves the room whenever you make an effort at polite conversation, and she rolls her eyes so much you’re surprised she hasn’t pulled a muscle yet. In fact, the only time she isn’t mocking or insulting you is when she’s asleep.
For some bizarre reason, aside from the first day you met her, she refuses to call you by your actual name. Instead, it’s an endless stream of stupid nicknames: cupcake and cutie seem to be her favourites, but sweetheart, buttercup, and princess all make frequent appearances. She regularly uses up all the hot water, clogs the shower drain with her hair, and drips water all over the floor when she comes out of the shower (after using your shampoo) and never bothers to clean it up. Despite the fact there’s a perfectly good half-wardrobe for her to use, most of her clothes usually end up strewn all over the floor, and you’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve tripped over a discarded pair of ripped black jeans or an almost see through black top. She helps herself to your cookies, your chocolate, your takeout leftovers, your hot chocolate, all without asking.
She has no regard for your privacy at all. You accidentally leave your laptop switched on one day before rushing off to class, and when you get back to a thankfully Carmilla-free room and immediately go to log onto Tumblr, you discover that not only are you still logged in, but someone has also taken the liberty of following at least twenty hardcore porn blogs. With a growing feeling of dread, you check Twitter, where the same ‘mystery’ person has tweeted no idea what’s happening in this english class cause all i can think about is my gargantuan lit ta bending me over a table from your account, and then Facebook, where you apparently now like a charming group called the society for anal sex fiends. Kirsch has commented ??? underneath it.
You are not a violent person, but Carmilla seems to bring out the worst in you, and you can’t help but idly wonder what the likelihood of getting kicked out of university would be if you murdered her. You’ve watched a lot of CSI, you could totally make it look like an accident. Or just hide the body somewhere no one would find it. Like the bottom of the lake.
(As it turns out, you don’t need to murder her, or even do anything to get revenge, because one of Carmilla’s ‘study buddies’ gets offended when Carmilla doesn’t bother to call her back, and proceeds to spread a rumour around campus that Carmilla has chlamydia.)
And then there’s the study buddies; the seemingly endless rotating stream of girls that Carmilla appears to have at her every beck and call. Quite how someone as big a douchebag as Carmilla manages to convince so many girls to sleep with her is beyond you. It’s almost impressive. Almost.
The first time it happens — a week after she moves in; clearly she moves fast — Carmilla at least hangs a sock (one of yours, of course) on the doorknob, and you just roll your eyes and leave to do your studying at Danny’s instead. Actual studying, that is. Not Carmilla’s version of studying. Which judging from the low noises emanating from behind your closed door isn’t all that educational. At least not for anything on the Silas syllabus. However after that first time, since she’s apparently only capable of doing one civil deed per decade, she stops bothering, and you lose count of the number of times you walk in on her in various stages of undress on top of some girl.
Whenever you’re in the room and Carmilla has a ‘guest’ over, she at least has the decency to never do anything too x-rated with them, and ninety per cent of the time all that happens is a lot of quiet whispering from Carmilla and a lot of high pitched giggling from the other girl. You’re beginning to feel like Carmilla with the amount of times you roll your eyes; there’s no way whatever she’s saying can be that funny. And although they always stay fully clothed, Carmilla seems to have no problem with pinning various girls down on her bed and kissing them, even though you’re sitting five feet away on the other bed, until they drag her out of the room to do who knows what.
Well. You know exactly what they drag Carmilla off to do, but you desperately try not to think about it. Something that Carmilla makes exceptionally difficult to do whenever she comes back hours later and her hair is a mess, or her shirt isn’t buttoned fully, and she never makes any effort to hide any hickeys she gets.
Not that you ever wonder what it would be like if you were the one with Carmilla. At all.
Nope. Never.
Anyway.
You would take it personally, but you discover that she’s equally unpleasant to just about everyone else. Danny stopped by your room a few days after Carmilla first moved in, and in less than ten minutes had been subjected to Clifford, human stop sign, Jolly Red Giant, and overgrown fire hydrant. She alternates between Groot and Lurch when referring to Kirsch. She nicknames LaFontaine and Perry the Ginger Twins, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, or Thing One and Thing Two. If she wasn’t such a colossal jerk all the time, you might almost find her sarcasm funny. Maybe.
You conclude that she only has one real friend — study buddies notwithstanding — a dark-haired boy called Will, who you vaguely recognise as one of the Zetas that’s also friends with Kirsch. He shows up to your dorm a few times, smirks even more than Carmilla, which you didn’t think was possible, and he and Carmilla converse almost exclusively via mocking insults. But there’s always slightly less snark when she talks to him than when she’s directing her sarcastic comments towards you or Danny or LaFontaine or Perry.
/
A few days into October you’re busy with your English Lit paper due in at the end of the week, when Carmilla comes back into the room, grunting a hey buttercup in your direction. You give her a cursory glare before going back to Kipling, but your gaze snaps right back to her in horror when your brain catches up and you register the red splatters all over her arms. “Is that blood?”
Carmilla slings her bag onto her bed, turning around to survey you with a bored expression. “What?”
You point at her hands, slightly terrified. There’s bear spray courtesy of your extremely overprotective father stashed under your bed, but you’re not entirely sure you could get to it in time if Carmilla decides to finally act on the psychopathic tendencies you wouldn’t be surprised if she had and lunges at your neck with a knife. “Because I know I joked about you being a potential murderer, but if you actually are then—"
“It’s paint, you idiot,” Carmilla snaps, rolling her eyes. Sounds just like something a serial killer would say. “I’m an art major,” she huffs in explanation when you continue to stare at her.
“Oh.” Well that makes more sense than your theory. What kind of useless murderer wouldn’t bother to wash half a pint of blood off themselves after finishing up with a victim? You look back over at Carmilla, who’s now sifting through the pile of (probably dirty) clothes you picked up off the floor earlier and threw into a heap on her bed. “You know we’ve been roommates for a month now and that’s the first time you’ve told me anything about yourself?”
“Tragedy,” Carmilla deadpans, picking up an extremely sheer looking red shirt, and walking into the bathroom. She doesn’t bother to close the door, and the sound of running water reaches you a few seconds later.
“I’m majoring in journalism,” you say brightly in an attempt to get her to keep talking, your Kipling essay forgotten for the moment. “Minoring in sociology.”
“Fascinating,” Carmilla’s bored voice floats out of the bathroom. “Journalism, I never would’ve guessed that one,” she pauses, and you wait a few seconds to hear what sarcastic remark she follows that up with. “What with the ten billion intrusive questions about myself that you’ve harassed me with since I moved in, and your endless rants about feminism.”
You huff. “Well, we live together, and are going to be living together for the next nine months, and we know nothing about each other—“
“Like I said, truly a tragedy,” she pipes up, and you don’t even need to see her to know she’s got that stupid annoying smirk plastered on her stupid annoying face.
“Don’t you think we should at least try to get to know each other? Even if it’s just basic facts like knowing each other’s majors?” You finish, ignoring her interruption.
Carmilla comes out of the bathroom, her arms now paint-free and having changed into the red shirt. It’s almost completely see-through, her black lace — not that you notice that little detail, of course — bra clearly visible through the fabric. You try not to stare. At least not too obviously.
“Hmm, let me think about that for a second, cupcake,” Carmilla puts a hand on her chin, dramatically looking up to the ceiling and putting on an expression that you assume is supposed to be her ‘thinking face.’ She mostly just looks constipated. “No.”
“Carmilla,” you pout, wondering if that’ll work.
“Ugh, fine,” Carmilla sounds like she’d rather dig her own eyeballs out with an ice cream scoop than continue talking to you, so you think that fine might be a little sarcastic. “Since I’m feeling so generous, and I have a feeling you’re going to badger me about this for ages, I’ll be gracious enough to give you a Laura Hollis exclusive.” You muffle a snort behind your hand; gracious is not a word you would ever apply to Carmilla. She sits down on her bed and spreads her arms out dramatically. “Ask away, Lois Lane.”
You move your papers off your lap, turning to face her straight on. “How old are you?”
“Twenty.” Her enthusiasm hasn’t lasted very long; she’s already stopped looking at you in favour of examining her nails with a bored expression.
“Where are you from?"
“Here.”
“Here?” You just assumed she was French, what with her transferring from Paris and all, and that she just didn’t have that much of an accent.
“Yes, here. Austria.” She looks up from her nails and regards you with an unimpressed look. “Isn’t this supposed to be a two-way system? Shouldn’t I get to know all these exciting facts about you?”
You’re pretty sure this is the longest she’s gone without being rude to you. And she’s actually asking you a question about yourself. You briefly wonder if the paint she was covered in was toxic, and has started to melt her brain or something.
“Uh okay. Well, I’m originally from Canada, but I moved to Rotterdam with my Dad when I was nine and—“
“Oh wait," she interrupts. "I just remembered that I don’t care.” That puts a halt to your toxic paint theory; she’s still as Carmilla as she usually is. “And as delightful as this game of twenty questions is, I’m late to meet Will.”
You watch her stand up, stuff her phone and some money into her pocket, before turning to the little mirror on her headboard. She’s busy touching up her mascara when you’re struck with another question you want to know the answer to. “Why’d you leave Paris?”
Carmilla snorts, not bothering to turn round to look you, but you don’t miss the way her shoulders tense slightly. “Don’t think we’re quite there yet, sorry cupcake.”
“Not even after all this roommate bonding?” The slightly flirtatious inflection to roommate bonding is completely unintentional, and your gaze snaps over to her, internally bracing yourself for some lewd comment about a more fun way we can bond, sweetheart.
Instead, she just grumbles something under her breath quietly, and in the mirror’s reflection you catch sight of her rolling her eyes. “Oh you know, the same tragic backstory every closed-off, damaged girl has; Daddy left, Mommy drinks, love of my life broke my heart, the usual. Thought getting away from Paris would help.” You blink, because okay that is a lot, and she laughs. “I’m kidding.”
Oh.
“So you’re not gonna tell me the real reason?” You feel like kind of an ass for not letting it drop — after all, there clearly is a reason that Carmilla doesn’t want to talk about, and if the situations were reversed and Carmilla pried into why you left Canada you wouldn’t be too pleased with her — but Carmilla’s an ass all the time anyway, and it’s in your journalistic nature to be nosey. She hasn’t outright told you to fuck off and keep your inquisitive little beak out of my life (yet) so you only feel bad about it for a few seconds.
“Well I don’t want to reveal everything just yet,” Carmilla says, twirling round from the mirror to smirk at you. You’re not sure if she realises the double entendre of her words — you’ve seen her half naked several times after she strolls out of the shower wearing nothing except a tiny towel — but then she winks at you, and of course she deliberately worded it like that. “Wouldn’t want you to get bored of me so soon.”
You open your mouth, gape like a goldfish for a few seconds, and then close it again, because you have no clue what to say in reply. Not that you need to come up with one; Carmilla chooses that moment to pick up one of the many leather jackets she seems to own and saunters out of the room without bothering to say goodbye.
That is a fairly new and unexpected development that’s started to occur the past few days, Carmilla possibly maybe sort of flirting with you. You’re not entirely sure what to think of it, and you can’t decide if you like it or not. On one hand, if she’s flirting with you she’s usually not outright insulting you, which is preferable. But on the other hand, it’s Carmilla flirting with you.
Carmilla might be annoyingly good-looking — on a purely shallow level, you can admit that; you’re only human after all — but how attractive she happens to be is completely irrelevant because she’s still Carmilla. Rude, messy, lazy, apathetic, cookie-thieving Carmilla.
You distract yourself from thinking about how much you don’t actually mind her flirting with you by throwing yourself back into your Kipling essay.
(It’s the first civil conversation the two of you have shared since Carmilla moved it, so naturally, you come back to the room after your classes the next day to discover Carmilla dozing off on her bed, your yellow pillow under her head, her muddy boots on your side of the room and a nearly empty packet of your cookies lying next to her on the bed. You yell at her, she flips you off, calls you half-pint, and deliberately eats the one remaining cookie as slowly as she can while staring right at you, just to piss you off.)
/
Sometime mid-October, one of your Wednesday afternoon sociology lectures gets cancelled last minute, and Danny had already texted earlier to cancel your weekly pie date, citing a mountain of papers to finish grading, so you go back to your room, hoping that Carmilla isn’t around.
Pushing the door open, you’re greeted with a high-pitched giggle that most definitely did not come from Carmilla, and you groan under your breath. Not only is Carmilla very much present, she also has company. One of the ones that giggle, apparently.
You take another few steps into the room, pausing to kick a bright blue bra out of your way, before stopping in your tracks, staring in horror at the sight of Carmilla and a half-naked redheaded girl on your bed.
“Carmilla!” You snap after a few seconds of speechless glaring. The two girls jump in surprise, clearly too caught up in each other to have noticed a third presence in the room. Carmilla blinks around in apparent confusion, glancing down at the bed she’s on, before looking back up to where you’re seething quietly in the middle of the room. “What the hell are you doing?”
She looks sheepish for about two seconds, before plastering on her usual smug-slash-bored expression. “Well, I would’ve thought that was kinda obvious even to you, cutie.”
Only Carmilla would call you cutie while she has a different, topless girl on top of her.
“You’re on my bed,” you point out angrily.
Carmilla huffs, nudging the redhead off of her, before standing up from the bed. You wince when the redhead immediately grabs at your yellow pillow to hide her naked chest behind. You feel like you need to profusely apologise to it for the trauma it was just subjected to, and you just washed your sheets yesterday.
Turning your glare back to Carmilla, you almost wish she had just stayed on your bed, because now that she’s standing in front of you, you realise that her rumpled shirt is completely unbuttoned, the black lace of her bra a stark contrast to the pale skin of her chest. She’s wearing those stupid tiny black shorts as well, the ones that leave an obscene amount of skin on display. Skin that you don’t remember looking quite so smooth or inviting before. Not that you’ve noticed or anything. And you definitely haven’t paid any attention to how tightly they cling to her ass. And you certainly don’t let your eyes linger on her hipbones, shown off from how low down the shorts are. Carmilla makes precisely zero effort to cover herself up, and you’re fairly positive the reason she doesn’t bother is because she knows you’re staring.
There’s a fading hickey on her lower stomach, peeking out from the hem of her shorts, and you blink quickly, shaking your head to try and get rid of the image of you being the one to put that hickey there that pops into your mind uninvited. When you drag your gaze back up to Carmilla’s face, her head is cocked to the side and she’s smiling like she knows exactly what you’re thinking.
“Carmilla, you’re on my bed,” you repeat before Carmilla can open her mouth and say something stupid and clichéd and borderline flirtatious such as like what you see, cutie? “I mean, I know you seem to get some kind of sick thrill out of pissing me off as much as humanly possible, but this is a new low, even for you.”
“Annabelle and I were just—“
“It’s Annalise,” the girl on your bed pipes up, looking offended.
Carmilla actually rolls her eyes. Unbelievable. “Whatever. She was just leaving.”
“I was?” You and Carmilla both stare silently at her and she shrinks back slightly. “Right, yeah, I was just leaving. Um,” she pauses, her gaze flickering between you and the bra you kicked across the floor earlier. “Could you, um…”
You turn around to let her put her clothes back on without an audience. Carmilla doesn’t bother.
Once Annalise leaves the room with a disgruntled see you later Carmilla, you immediately round on your irritating roommate.
“Look, you know I don’t care if you bring girls back here, and I also don’t care if you insist on sleeping your way through the entire female population of this university before Christmas—“
“Do I detect a hint of judgment in your voice?”
“Even though that’s probably not a very good idea because eventually all your broken hearted booty calls are going to band together in an angry mob and come after you with pitchforks and torches and signs that say Carmilla, you said you would call—“
“Because I’m feeling a little judged here, you know.”
“But is it really so difficult to keep your extra curricular activities confined to your own bed?”
Carmilla looks like she absorbed about ten percent of that rant. Maybe a little less.
“Look cupcake, it was an honest mistake—“
“Oh, a mistake, of course it was. You both just accidentally tripped and landed on my bed.”
Carmilla ignores you. “I wasn’t really paying a whole lot of attention to where I was going. If you must know, I was more focused on getting that damn chastity belt of a bra off, I mean Jesus Christ who even—“
“Carmilla, I swear to God.”
“And it’s not like Anna-Beth knew which bed was mine, she just happened to push me onto the wrong one. Like I said, it was an accident.”
“And you didn’t think to, oh I don’t know, move when you realised you weren’t on the right one?” You grit out from between clenched teeth, trying to resist the urge to strangle Carmilla with her stupid leather pants.
“Well, I was pretty distracted. Didn’t actually notice we were on your bed until your annoying voice came crashing over me like a freezing cold shower. Thanks for that, by the way.” She tilts her head to the side to smile sardonically at you, and you notice a bright red hickey starting to bloom on her collarbone. She still hasn’t bothered to button her shirt back up, and Jesus Christ Laura stop leering at her.
“You know, you keep saying that you don't care if I bring girls back here, but even when I'm on my own bed I can tell you get pissy about it. What, are you jealous or something?” Carmilla asks, dragging a hand through her messy hair to push it out of her eyes and dear God, how is someone that is so incredibly obnoxious still so incredibly attractive?
“Jealous?” You squeak. “Of your harem of study buddies? Why the hell would I be jealous of any of them? I mean you didn’t even remember this one’s name! You treat them all like crap, and yet for some bizarre reason, they keep coming back.”
Carmilla gets a very pleased look on her face that makes you think you may have said something exceptionally stupid. She smirks, and finally starts buttoning up her shirt. Slowly. “I actually meant jealous of me, since out of the two of us I’m the one that actually gets laid regularly. But hey, if your mind immediately jumped to thinking I meant you were jealous of the girls I fuck...“ She gives you a one shouldered shrug, that obnoxious smirk still plastered on her face.
She finishes covering herself up, reaching for the jacket thrown onto her bed while you stand in stunned silence.
“Anyway,” she says smugly just as she starts to head in the direction of the door, where Annalise is probably still lurking in the corridor waiting for her. Not that you care. “You’re not stupid, I’m sure you can figure out why they keep coming back.”
She brushes past you, close enough that you can smell her perfume, and before you can bite back a reply of you’re disgusting or it’s clearly not your winning personality at her, her hand comes up and she deliberately trails her fingertips slowly over your bare shoulder. You can’t stop the shiver that shoots down your spine at her touch, and Carmilla chuckles under her breath, leaning in far too close to whisper see you later cutie into your ear, before disappearing out the door.
You can feel the ghost of her touch lingering uncomfortably on your skin for hours after.
/
It’s taken you almost an entire month of incessant badgering, but Danny has finally given in and agreed to watch Orphan Black with you. She’s curled up beside you on your bed, your laptop balanced halfway between you, and you’re pretty sure she’s paying zero attention to the heavy flirting happening onscreen between Cosima and Delphine.
Her phone buzzes for the sixth time in ten minutes, and she surreptitiously looks at it, the screen tilted slightly away from you. You sneak a few glances at her, and notice her lips are pressed together tightly in an attempt to hide a smile. It's a move reminiscent of when your high school girlfriend would send you cute texts while you were somewhere with your Dad, and you tried keeping a blank expression so as not to alert him to anything.
“Who are you texting?” You ask casually. If Danny is texting a mystery crush, which seems fairly likely when you take into account the lack of attention being paid to Orphan Black, the half-hidden smiles and that one muffled giggle sometime around episode three, you doubt she’s going to tell you about whoever they are when there’s a third unwanted presence in the room. Even if she is ignoring you on the other bed.
Actually, you think Carmilla might be asleep. She hasn’t made a peep since she rolled out of bed earlier in her tiny (very tiny) shorts and tank top masquerading as pyjamas, except to mutter, "Morning cupcake, morning Xena," in your direction. Generally the only time she isn’t mocking you, and especially Danny, is when she’s unconscious. You glance over at her and sure enough, her eyes are closed and the book she’d immersed herself in after showering and retreating back to her side of the room is lying abandoned next to her. Waking up at noon and then not bothering to go to her only class of the day must be so exhausting for her.
“Kirsch,” Danny eventually replies after tapping out a reply on her phone, before stuffing it back into her pocket and focusing her attention back on the screen. Okay, clearly not a secret crush then. Probably just idiotic sports puns littered with dude and bro that would fly straight over your head. “He has a paper on Shakespeare due in tomorrow and he’s having some trouble with it.”
You raise an eyebrow. You like Shakespeare as much as the next English student but you didn’t realise Hamlet could be so amusing. The episode playing on your laptop finishes, the credits starting to roll, and Danny picks up your laptop to move it off her lap. “And as exciting, and slightly confusing, as this show is, I have a Summer Society meeting to prepare for in twenty minutes. Can we continue watching this on Friday? After class?”
“Yeah, no problem.” Danny ditching you for the Summer Society (or possibly Kirsch) is probably a good thing; six episodes in a row can’t be good for your eyes.
Danny dashes out of the room in a tall blur of red hair, after kissing you on the cheek and tossing a catch you later Hollis over her shoulder, leaving you alone with a sleeping Carmilla.
“What’s with the bunched-up face, sweetheart? Worried about your sasquatch of a girlfriend leaving you for someone less microscopic?”
Or, with an apparently awake Carmilla. An awake Carmilla who appears to have been quietly eavesdropping for the past several minutes, and who has apparently completely misread your relationship with Danny.
You push your laptop off to the side, clambering off the bed and heading towards the kitchen, ignoring most of Carmilla’s sentence. “Danny’s not my girlfriend, Carmilla. We’re just friends.”
“Really? Oh excellent,” Carmilla says, and you nearly trip over your own feet in shock. “I was worried we were going to have to work out some kind of sock on the door schedule. Our room gets enough traffic as it is, and I don’t like sharing.”
“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” you shoot back. Surprisingly, after the Annalise incident Carmilla had actually had most of her rendezvouses with various members of her fan club elsewhere, and your room has been strangely study-buddy-free recently.
There’s a few moments of silence broken only by the pop of the can of grape soda being opened, before Carmilla pipes up. “I like Orphan Black. You know, if you want to keep watching.”
Hearing what is obviously an invitation to watch TV with her makes you nearly trip over your own feet again. Or that's maybe the fault of the lacy red thong on the floor. You glare at the back of her head suspiciously, debating the merits of watching Orphan Black with your irritating roommate, before turning back to the fridge and taking out another can of soda. Carmilla’s so rarely in the ‘hot’ part of her general hot-and-cold attitude that you may as well take advantage of it while you can.
“Budge over. I’m probably going to have traumatic flashbacks at the image of you sitting on my bed.”
“Not usually the reaction I get when I’m in a girl’s bed but—“
“Carmilla, shut up.”
/
It’s pouring with rain when you leave the library after a Monday evening study session with LaFontaine and Perry, and inevitably, you’ve forgotten a jacket again.
Carmilla’s hogging the shower when you get back to your room, and you take a moment to revel in how much you’re going to enjoying teasing her when you hear her belting out Taylor Swift over the sound of the running water.
Your amusement at your grumpy roommate knowing all the words to Blank Space dissipates at a very quick pace when you notice the packet of cookies on your desk. Specifically, the empty packet of cookies. You’re pretty sure it wasn’t even open when you left for class that morning. With a sigh, you drop your bag onto your bed and peel off your damp cardigan, throwing it into your laundry basket with a squelch. Carmilla finishes singing, and a few seconds later you hear the water turn off. You can faintly hear her humming We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together as you make your way over to the kitchen, and you want to punch something — such as Carmilla herself — when you discover all your hot chocolate has suspiciously vanished. You turn to your right and there’s three empty mugs sitting on Carmilla’s headboard. Of course there is.
The bathroom door opens behind you, and you turn around to glare at her. She’s only wearing a tiny towel — you nearly fall over from shock when you realise it’s actually her own one — and you promptly forget what you were going to yell at her when all you can focus on is inch after inch of wet skin. Then you take note of the light blue towel — your towel — that she’s using to dry her hair, and the amount of steam rolling out of the bathroom behind her is a clear indication that she’s probably used up all the hot water again.
“Carmilla,” you snap, and she stops humming and looks up at you in surprise, clearly not having heard you come in, before her usual annoying smug expression is back on her face.
“Hey cutie,” she says, leering openly at you, and you’re slightly caught off guard by her heated gaze until you realise you’re still drenched from the rain, and your top is clinging extremely tightly to you.
You huff, and cross your arms over your chest. She just grins wider, and you want to wipe that stupid smile off her stupid face. You ignore the fact that punching it off her is just as enjoyable sounding an idea as kissing it off her. She shakes her hair out, little droplets of water flying everywhere, letting it tumble in wet waves down her shoulders, and you deliberately look away from her, slightly worried what you’ll do if you keep blatantly checking her out. Your gaze lands on the empty food packets.
“I told you to stop eating all my cookies.”
“I got hungry.”
“And the hot chocolate?”
“I got thirsty.”
“Seriously, how old are you?” You snap. “Buy your own damn cookies and hot chocolate.”
She snickers like a five year old, and you roll your eyes, throwing the empty boxes into the bin. It’ll be another twenty minutes or so before there’s enough hot water for you to shower, so you open the fridge and poke around, looking for the box of takeout leftovers from last night. There’s no sign of it, and that’s when you notice the empty box in the bin, underneath a receipt from a store you vaguely recognise as a lingerie store in the city. Great, more underwear you’re going to find thrown on the floor. More underwear that you’re definitely not going to be picturing Carmilla wearing.
You close your eyes and start counting to ten silently in your head in an effort to stave off your anger. You get to three before you snap.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” You growl, slamming the fridge door and stomping over to Carmilla. “Really, what possesses you to do stuff like this, to use my shampoo and my towel—“ you snatch the fluffy towel out of her hands angrily, before taking a few steps backwards and gesturing down at the bin, “—and to eat all my food without asking? Do you do it deliberately to piss me off, because if you do, it’s working!”
Carmilla rolls her eyes. “Calm down cutie, like I said, I was hungry. I’ll buy you more if it bothers you that much.”
“I don’t want you to have to buy me replacement food, I want you to stop eating mine in the first place!” You huff, and lean back against the wardrobe. How Carmilla can go from being relatively pleasant company while binge watching Orphan Black one day, to being an obnoxious food-thieving douche the next, you have no idea. All you wanted to do was come back from the library, shower, inhale your body weight in Chinese food, and catch up on Parks And Recreation, but instead your annoying asshole of a roommate had to get in the way of that.
Carmilla turns to face away from you, picking up a purple plaid shirt from her bed and inspecting it carefully. “If I don’t have to buy you replacement food does that mean I don't have to buy you replacement shampoo, cause that bottle of mango smelling stuff is nearly finished.”
The anger and urge to throttle her with the towel rises back up like a flood.
“Carmilla, I swear to God, I have tried to be civil about all of this, but if you don’t stop acting like such an insufferable child—"
Whatever lame threat you were about to throw at Carmilla dies in your throat when the towel falls off her body and drops to the floor with a wet thud. She’s wearing underwear — if you can really call the scrap of see-through lace underwear — but nothing else, and you completely forget how to speak when all you can focus on are the drops of water falling off the her hair and trailing slowly down her bare back.
If an image of you on your knees in front of Carmilla, tongue trailing over the rivulets of water travelling down her body, jumps into your head, you don’t acknowledge it.
“My my, alert the media cupcake, there is a way to get you to shut the hell up,” Carmilla says gleefully, glancing over her shoulder and grinning at the probably dumbfounded look on your face.
By now, you’re used to the sight of post-shower Carmilla parading around in just a towel, but all the previous times she’s gone back into the bathroom to get changed, so this is…new. You swallow, still failing at trying to form words, because Carmilla is almost completely naked and right there and God she might be an insufferable dick most of the time, but she’s so unbelievably attractive.
She slips a bra on, snapping the clasp closed at the back, and then she tugs on a pair of leather pants. Those do not help with your attempts to stop leering at Carmilla like a thirteen year old boy. The purple shirt goes on next, and she turns round to face you while she buttons it up, and you can’t stop your gaze from dropping to stare at her stomach and chest before they’re covered up by the fabric.
She leaves the top few buttons undone — deliberately, you’re sure — and you can just see the swell of her chest behind the fabric.
“You never—“ you pause, trying to clear your head from the haze all of Carmilla’s bare skin put you in. “You never answered my question.”
“And what question was that, princess?” She asks, taking a step towards you.
“Why do you keep stealing all my food?” Your voice is shaky as you back away from her. Your back hits the kitchen counter, and you realise this may have been a bad idea, because once she rounds her headboard and is standing at the threshold of the kitchen, Carmilla essentially has you trapped.
She prowls forward like a predator stalking its prey. Her eyes are boring into yours, and the eye contact is making you mildly uncomfortable, but it’s also sending a thrill of heat through your body. She takes a final step forward until she’s right in front of you, staring at you with an unreadable expression on her face. You’re still holding the towel in a death grip, but when you feel her leather-clad thighs brushing against the backs of your hands, you tighten your fingers anyway to try and prevent yourself from letting the towel fall to the floor and touching Carmilla instead.
“Because it pisses you off. And I like riling you up,” she says, her voice low in a way that makes what she’s saying sound ten times dirtier than it actually is. You can feel your heart thumping against your ribs, and there’s a tug somewhere low in your stomach at her voice. “I wanted to see how far I could push you until you snapped.”
You lick your lips without thinking, and you don’t know if you’re imagining her gaze flickering down to your mouth or not. You’re having trouble thinking clearly when she’s this close to you, so close all you can smell is her perfume (and your shampoo) and you can feel the heat radiating off her body.
She bites her bottom lip, and you break your eye contact with her dark eyes to stare at her lip caught between her teeth. All you can think about is how much you’d prefer it to be your bottom lip she’s biting, nibbling and sucking on it while she kisses you senseless.
“Why?”
“You’re really cute when you’re angry,” she murmurs almost immediately, and this time you’re definitely not imagining the way she’s staring at your lips. “I mean, you’re cute all the time, but…”
It’s certainly not the first time Carmilla’s flirted with you, but it’s definitely the most direct she’s ever been. Your anger at her is fading frighteningly fast, being replaced by a sensation that you’re mostly unfamiliar with feeling in regards to Carmilla, which you eventually identify as lust, and you don’t think you’ve ever been so flustered in your life. Carmilla being so close to you is not helping.
You want to push her away, get out from being trapped between her and the kitchen counter and put some space between you so you can think clearly. You want to pull her closer, grab hold of the collar of that stupidly attractive plaid shirt and drag her down and kiss her until she’s gasping your name into your mouth.
You idly ponder, on a scale of one to ten how stupid it would actually be to lean forward and kiss her. Her lips look so soft, and you wonder what she’d taste like. You swallow, trying to wet your extremely dry throat. You cannot kiss your roommate. That is an immensely idiotic thing to do, and yet, it’s all you want to do. You want to kiss Carmilla. Or have her kiss you. You don’t really care who kisses who, so long as there’s kissing going on, preferably sometime soon.
Carmilla slowly reaches her hand up towards your face, pausing ever so slightly before she touches you, as if she’s waiting for you to slap her hand away and bolt out of the door. You don’t. You just keep staring into her eyes as she tucks a lock of your still-damp hair behind your ear. She trails her fingertips over the line of your jaw, and then down your throat, and every inch of your skin feels like it’s on fire.
You know you could escape if you wanted to. For all her obnoxious tendencies, you highly doubt Carmilla would physically stop you from moving away if you tried to get past her. But you’re frozen in place from her heated stare and the feather light brush of her fingers against your skin. The touch makes your head spin, and you’re pretty sure you’ve forgotten how to breathe.
“Carmilla, what are you doing?” You exhale quietly, and why are you still talking when you could be kissing her? She’s staring at your lips again, and if she kisses you — which you’re half certain she’s about to — you’re not going to stop her.
Her fingers brush over your pulse point, and your eyes flicker down to her lips when the side of her mouth lifts up in a half smile. Presumably she can feel the erratic pace of your racing pulse. You can certainly feel it, and your heartbeat, drumming away beneath your skin.
“You’re shivering,” Carmilla murmurs, her finger tracing along your collarbone and her eyes following the movement. “You should go shower. Don’t want you to get sick after getting caught in the rain, do we?”
You’re about to open your mouth to say God knows what — probably invite her into the shower with you — when abruptly, she pulls away from you, and the hypnotic trance you’ve been in since she backed you into the counter is broken. You blink, sucking in a deep breath, and by the time you’ve gotten your bearings again, you’re staring at Carmilla’s retreating back as she wanders out of the door, leaving you alone in the room.
Your jaw drops slightly. What the holy hell was that?
/
Danny comes over one evening, a few days after The Kitchen Incident That You Spend Absolutely Zero Time Thinking And/Or Talking About, while Carmilla’s out somewhere — probably harassing Will or ‘studying’ — immediately taking up residence on your entire bed and dropping a giant stack of papers next to her.
“Never become a TA,” she tells you, looking with a pained expression at the huge pile of papers. “I have to have all of these graded for eight tomorrow morning, and I have ninety pages of Keats and eighty pages of Whitman to read for my own class. Also due tomorrow morning.”
“So why are you just starting it now? I swear you mentioned that Keats reading like three days ago,” you reply, hauling yourself up from the desk and heading towards the kitchen to make two mugs of hot chocolate. Miraculously, Carmilla hasn’t finished the current packet yet. There’s no regular milk left, but you don’t feel an ounce of guilt at using Carmilla’s soy milk. Danny’s oddly quiet behind you, and when you turn to look at her, she’s flushed the same colour as her hair, and she’s refusing to look at you. “Danny?”
“I was planning on starting them this afternoon, but then Kirsch showed up, and uh... Well, he’s been insistent on teaching me how to play lacrosse ever since I mentioned to him that I had no idea what it was.”
“Okay…” You say slowly. You’re not entirely sure why she’s gone so red, or why she said it like she was admitting some deep dark secret. Danny and Kirsch are friends. Albeit friends who squabble like siblings almost one hundred per cent of the time, but friends nonetheless. The fact that she ditched her English reading to let Kirsch teach her lacrosse isn’t that outrageous an idea.
You forget all about it when Danny launches into a story about her latest track team practice, and an hour or so into your study session, you’ve gotten a fair bit of reading done. And by that, you mean you both spent twenty minutes deliberating what kind of pizza to order, and now you’re doodling in the margin of your sheet of paper and ranting about Carmilla, while Danny’s making paper airplanes out of her notebook pages and sending them flying over to Carmilla’s bed, and ranting about Kirsch.
You’re in the middle of a long monologue about how Carmilla’s latest thing to annoy you with is refusing to scrape her hair out of the shower drain — “Seriously, it looks like there’s some kind of small furry mammal living in the plughole, it’s disgusting.” — when Danny interrupts with, “I think she has a thing for you.”
“What?” You cough and splutter, nearly choking on your mouthful of pizza. “Carmilla? Have you lost your mind? You think Carmilla likes me?”
“Well, yeah,” Danny replies, not even bothering to look up from the notes she’s reading where she’s still sprawled on your bed, as if that isn’t the most ridiculous sentence ever uttered in the history of mankind.
“Care to explain your reasoning behind that insane theory?” You ask, spinning your chair away from your desk, because this study session clearly needs a break. An official break. Maybe too much Keats has taken a toll on Danny’s brain.
“She stares at you sometimes. She probably thinks no one’s watching, but she’s about as subtle as a fire alarm.”
“Okay, well, that’s…kind of to be expected,” you say. It’s really not; you’ve seen some of the girls Carmilla’s been with and a lot of them are practically supermodels compared to you. You decide not to tell Danny that if Carmilla does stare at you outside of openly shameless leering whenever you come out of the shower, you really don’t mind. It’s kind of an ego boost. “Carmilla stares at anything with boobs and a pulse, so that doesn’t count.”
Danny puts the notes down and heaves herself up onto her elbow. “No, I don’t mean she stares at you like she wants to jump you,” she pauses, and her eyebrows furrow. “Well, actually, yeah she does, which is incredibly uncomfortable to witness, but what I meant was sometimes I catch her staring at you with this like, dreamy faraway expression. I don’t really know how to describe it, but it doesn’t look like she’s daydreaming about doing you, and she only ever looks at you like that when you’re not looking at her.”
“I think you’re seeing things,” you laugh nervously, tapping her glasses where she’d set them down on your desk earlier. Dreamy is not an expression you can picture on Carmilla’s face. “Maybe you should go get your prescription checked.”
You haven’t mentioned anything to Danny about the weird almost kiss from a few days ago, or admitted to her that you may or may not be ludicrously attracted to Carmilla, and you decide to continue to keep that to yourself, since that’s only going to add fuel to the fire of Danny’s suspicions.
“Okay, well what about the fact that she hates me?" You open your mouth to object and Danny cuts you off. "Yes, I know she hates everyone, but think about it, she really hates me. And there’s no real reason for her to dislike me this much, we don’t have any classes or anything together, and we’ve exchanged like two words that aren’t mocking nicknames with each other the entire month and a half she’s been here.”
“So?”
“So, half the campus thinks you and I are dating anyway, and you said she called me your girlfriend. Maybe she’s jealous of our nonexistent relationship.”
Danny shrugs like it’s bulletproof logic, and you can’t help but laugh. “Okay, so, let me get this straight. You think Carmilla, my apathetic asshole roommate only hates you because she’s secretly jealous of you, because she thinks you and I are dating even though I told her we weren't, and she wants to be the one dating me.”
Danny’s quiet for a few seconds, looking thoughtful, before she says, “Okay, when you put it like that, yeah it sounds ridiculous.”
“Yeah,” you agree with a laugh, turning back to your papers and trying to fight the flush you can feel rising on your face. ”Just a bit.”
But even as Danny drops the subject, going back to complaining about Kirsch — “I swear to God if he says the word brotastic one more time, I’m going to shove his damn lacrosse stick up his ass. Sideways.” — that little irritating seed she’s planted begins to flourish.
You’re still trying not to think about it — and failing badly — when Carmilla comes back an hour later. She sneers at Danny, smirks at you, and says, “Didn’t realise you were letting strays in now, cutie. Shouldn’t I have been consulted about this?
Danny sighs, saying that is her cue to leave. She mouths the word cutie over her shoulder at you on her way out the door, grinning pointedly. You roll your eyes and wave her off, ignoring the weird look Carmilla gives you.
There is no way in Hell or Hogwarts that Carmilla has a thing for you. Sure, she flirts with you a lot, but she flirts with anything that moves, men included, even though you’re fairly positive she’s only exclusively into women. So it’s not like it means anything. And okay, yes, you do catch her staring at you a lot, but it’s never with the kind of wishful longing that Danny had described, it’s always blatant leering whenever you come out of the shower in just a towel, or obvious staring at your ass whenever there’s a Zeta or Summer Society party and you swap your jeans and button ups for a dress. And as you pointed out to Danny, Carmilla stares at anything female, so.
Anyway, even if the unthinkable happened and Carmilla is attracted to you, it doesn’t mean anything, because it wouldn’t be reciprocated. Sure, you can't dispute that Carmilla’s hot, but her terrible personality completely ruins any kind of real attraction you could ever have to her.
It’s just harmless flirting. And nothing bad has ever come from that. Hell, Kirsch and Danny both flirt with you all the time and it’s not like anything would ever come of that.
So there’s nothing wrong with letting a little harmless flirting continue, right?