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She just barely catches it out of the corner of her eye: a flash of yellow hoodie, coming down the hallway in her direction. Not today, Rey thinks, spinning on her heel in a full 180 turn. Not fucking today.
She ducks into the bathroom at the end of the hall, shutting the stall door behind her and thunking her head against the cool metal. Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she pulls it out, lips tugging into a small smile when she sees Finn’s name pop up.
wya?? saved us seats
coming, she types back. She starts to unlock the stall door when she hears it. Humming. Fuck. It drifts into the bathroom, quiet and cheerful, and settles into the stall next to her with a click. She takes it as her cue, slipping out as silently as she can, fingers crossed at her side in a silent plea. She stops at the sink to wash her hands, and that’s when it happens. The automatic faucet doesn’t turn on when she puts her hands under it. She tries again, cupping them under the spout. Nothing. Again, and water sprays out in a sudden torrent, spurting like a sprinkler onto the floor and all over her front. It’s everywhere, getting in her eyes, and by the time she blinks them clear a small figure has appeared next to her, sudden enough to make her stumble back.
“Didn’t mean to scare you. Here,” the girl says, handing her a bundle of paper towels. She takes them reluctantly, drying her face and the sink counter.
“Thanks,” she says uneasily.
“No worries. Dyou need a spare shirt? I have a-“
“No! Thank you, though,” she blurts, trying to keep her words to a minimum. They’ve never spoken before, and she doesn’t even want to think about what’s going to happen now that they have. Fire? Car crash?
“No problem,” the girl says, fidgeting. “I’m Rose, by the way.”
Rey mumbles something about being late and slips off, making it to class just before Professor Kanata finishes taking attendance. Finn raises an eyebrow at her soaked shirt, but she shakes her head. Lunch, she mouths, and he nods, settling in for the lecture.
-
Friends, Rey thinks, are supposed to support you. Listen to your problems, give advice, and be a shoulder to lean on.
Finn and Poe, she’s decided, are terrible friends.
“Her?” Finn asks for what has to be the fiftieth time, looking across the dining hall at the bane of Rey’s existence. The girl (Rose, like the flower, her brain whispers) has taken off her hoodie to reveal a pair of overalls. The red shirt underneath is too big, threatening to slip off one of her shoulders, and Rey looks away quickly.
“I know her,” Poe says, gesturing in her direction with his sandwich. “Rose Tico. Engineering major, ecology club vice president. Pretty sweet when you get to know her. Mean left hook, though.”
“I’m not even going to ask how you know that.”
“I have my ways,” he says, waggling his eyebrows ridiculously, and Finn bumps him with his shoulder before turning his attention back to Rey.
“She’s cute,” he says, pointedly casual, and she narrows her eyes.
“Have you been listening? She’s a curse!” she cries, jabbing a fry at him.
“One bad experience doesn’t m-“
“It hasn’t been one bad experience! This is the eighth time! I’ve locked my keys in my car, fallen into a trash can, dropped my chicken tenders-“
“A tragedy,” Poe intones gravely.
“-and now this! If she keeps it up I’ll be dead by the end of the semester!”
Finn sighs. He and Poe look at each other, communicating silently in that way they have that makes her want to simultaneously strangle and bear hug them, and then look back at her. “Have you considered that maybe the universe is trying to tell you something?”
“Yes! That’s exactly-“
“Like that you need to ask her out?”
“Wh-“
“Rey,” Poe says, leaning across the table to grab her hand. “You’re allowed to have crushes, y’know. It’s okay.”
“I know,” she says, weirdly defensive, “but I don’t.”
“Remember when you kept trying to get me to ask out Poe and I kept chickening out?”
“Yes? What’s that got t-“
“That’s actually, physically you right now in this moment.”
“We can solve it the same way you did,” Poe threatens, eyes sparkling, and Finn barks out a laugh.
“I could kill both of you,” she says, not without love.
“Yeah, but who would you hang out with afterwards?” Finn asks, holding a curly fry aloft like an off-brand Socrates, and she shoves food into her mouth so she doesn’t have to answer.
-
The universe is definitely trying to tell her something, alright. By the end of the week she’s skinned both her knees tripping up the stairs, broken a beaker in her chem lab, and almost gotten hit by a scooter.
She trudges into her dorm, soaking wet, because of course her umbrella had broken, and of course Rose Tico was right there to offer hers, and of course she’d mumbled an excuse and walked off in the rain instead, because being wet was one thing, but being struck by curse lightning was entirely another, and it just wasn’t worth the risk.
She slings her bag down, kicks her shoes off, and plops down on the floor in the lotus position. She slows her breaths, inhaling deeply, and mentally reaches out.
What the fuck? she asks the universe, eyes closed.
An image of Rose floats into her mind. She’s sitting in the lecture hall, watching the professor with bright eyes. Her blue t-shirt is pulling out of where it’s tucked into her jeans just enough that Rey can see a sliver of her skin. Her hair comes out of her bun in inky tendrils, falling to frame her face, and Rey’s throat feels tight all of a sudden. She shakes her head minutely, trying to push the thought away.
Another image. Rose, again, yellow hoodie cloaking her like a bright cloud, holding a wad of napkins out to her like a lifeline. Her hands are small and rough when they brush against Rey’s. Working hands, she thinks, like mine.
Rose, again, tiny smile almost unnaturally bright in the grey drizzle outside, holding out her umbrella. She thinks about accepting it, holding it over both of them as they walk, shoulders bumping. Poe’s voice echoes in her head. You’re allowed to have crushes, y’know.
She opens her eyes, heart thudding in her chest. She’s still damp from the rain, t-shirt sticking to her back uncomfortably, and now her face is wet too, tears coming before she can even fully register them.
College is... well, it’s hard. After so long on her own, being around so many people is overwhelming. She comes on too strong, she knows, brash and overexcited, but she still hasn’t quite figured out how to temper herself into something more manageable. She’s starting to wonder if she even has to. Finn and Poe had accepted her immediately, admitted her into their strange little family without a second thought. Scraps, she thinks, and smiles in spite of herself. She’s found her people, people who seem to care about her just as much as she cares about them, people who won’t leave. It’s worth the struggle, worth everything.
She scrubs at her face with her sleeves, drying her eyes. She has a good thing going, finally, but she’s still adjusting. She refuses to be cold, to be hard, but it doesn’t mean the impulse isn’t there, swimming along the edge of her consciousness with Unkar’s gruff voice and a fading image of a man who might’ve been her father, once. Relationships are tricky. People are tricky. She’s found hers. Why risk it again? she thinks. I’ve got all the people I need. She pointedly does not think about the undercurrent there, the stream of I couldn’t take it if somebody left again and nobody would even be interested in you anyway, let alone her and you’re nothing, nothing, just scrap. Fuck the universe, she decides later, standing under the warm spray of the shower and pretending like she’s not hiding. It can’t make me do anything.
-
It can, however, make things a hell of a lot harder. “I would just like to clarify that I did not plan this,” Poe whispers, and Rey looks up from her sandwich to see Rose making her way through the crowded dining hall and over to their table.
“Hi,” she says, giving a little wave. “Is Finn sitting here?”
“Yeah, he’s grabbing pizza. You wanna sit down?” Poe asks, pulling out the seat right next to Rey with a huge grin and pointedly ignoring her look.
She shrugs and sits, knee knocking briefly against Rey’s when she plops into the chair. She smells like metal and something Rey can’t quite identify, a zap of electricity, and Rey is just about to make an excuse to leave when Finn comes back.
“Hey, Rose,” he says, sitting down. “Did you wanna talk about the sociology project?”
She nods. “I thought of a really good cause we could look at.”
Rose seems passionate about whatever it is the project is on, voice rising and falling emphatically as she talks, and Rey tries to tune it out. She looks down at her plate like it’s the most interesting thing in the world, picking at her food and trying not to notice the way Rose’s ponytail flicks when she shakes her head.
Poe kicks her under the table after a while and she jerks her head up to find Rose looking at her expectantly. “Sorry, what?” she blurts, cheeks heating instantly.
“I said I don’t think I caught your name.”
“Oh. Rey. Like the sun, you know, rays, but with an e. R-e-y, Rey. Me.”
“Rey like the sun,” she repeats, little smile twisting her lips. Rey watches her mouth form the shape of it, hears her name roll off her tongue like it was meant to be there, and something in her melts. “Well, see you around, Rey!”
As soon as she turns her back, Rey puts her head down on the table, cringing.
She feels something warm against her arm and looks up to see Finn poking her with a breadstick. “You okay?”
She groans in response.
“I always thought that whole ‘useless lesbian’ thing was a joke,” he says earnestly, and Poe snorts. Terrible friends.
-
It’s getting pathetic at this point, really. Rose keeps coming to lunch even after she and Finn finish their project, balancing out the little square table with her presence. She should be used to it by now, but it’s only gotten worse because, unfortunately, Rose isn’t just adorable. She’s smart, alarmingly so, and blunt in a way that’s just on the border between cutting and real, but also sweet and kind and so, so passionate. She and Poe get into heated debates about nothing, gesturing wildly at each other with various finger foods, and Rey is sure she’s going to rupture something from laughing so hard.
She hasn’t has any incidents at lunch yet. It seems like a neutral zone, almost, a hallowed ground free from curse magic. She still manages to somehow maim herself when she sees Rose between classes, including one memorable incident on a moped, but it’s not quiet as awkward as before. “You’re an absolute hot mess and I honestly don’t know how you haven’t died yet,” Rose tells her one day, helping her pick up the contents of her entire backpack, and Rey’s traitor brain shortcircuits on the word hot. She’s quieter than usual at lunch, trying not to stare at the holes in Rose’s jeans and wonder if the skin there runs hot too.
She’s absolutely sick of it. It’s a crush. She’s admitted it and accepted it for the most part, resigned to it like it’s a fact of life. The sky is blue, space is vast, everyone is a little in love with Rose Tico. But she’d like to be able to function, at least, to be able to eat lunch without Finn giving her pointed looks over the table when he catches her staring.
She walks into the dining hall on Thursday with a plan. Rose, she’s decided, is no longer Rose, Rose like the flower, Rose with the calloused hands and pretty eyes and a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of Boeing parts. She’s just like Finn and Poe. She’s a bro, a part of their weird little family. Rey can talk to her just like she can everyone else.
The problems is, of course, that Rose isn’t really everybody else, and when Rey offhandedly mentions going to the gym later, Rose flashes a smile that knocks her out of commission for the rest of the day. “Is that where you get those?” she teases, glancing pointedly at Rey’s bicep, and her circuitry malfunctions.
Poe gives her a sympathetic pat on the back when Rose goes to get a fork. “It must be hard to be so oblivious, buddy. I feel for you.”
“What dyou mean?”
“Did you seriously not notice her drooling over you?” Finn asks incredulously from across the table, but Rose is back before she can respond.
“I got you more barbecue,” she says, nudging the little sauce boat in Rey’s direction, and Finn looks at her like it’s a smoking gun.
consider this my formal apology for being so annoying w poe before, he texts her later. i understand ur pain now.
i just don’t know what to do, she sends back.
what the hero always does!! get the girl!!
She sighs, looking at the little plant on her windowsill. She’d brought it with her from Jakku, a silent reminder of the wasteland she’d called home. It’s a scrawny thing, scraggly and pokey even for a cactus, but there’s a little red bud blooming ever so slowly, poking its way out in the air-conditioned respite from the baking desert sun. Get the girl, she thinks, mulling it over. Yeah, okay.
-
“I’m so proud of you,” Poe says, clapping her on the shoulder, and she smiles. It’s Mario Kart night, the three of them crushed onto Poe’s tiny couch, and she feels loose and comfortable in a way she hasn’t felt in weeks.
“It’s not that big a deal. I just had to get over myself.”
“Don’t say it like that,” Finn admonishes lightly. “It’s not easy. You deserve to be proud.”
“I guess,” she says, focusing on the game to fend off the sudden wetness in her eyes. “You know that I wouldn’t have been able to get here without either of you, yeah? It means a lot, to have you both. You’re my family, really.”
There’s a brief pause. Finn puts his controller down and Poe turns towards her and suddenly she’s enveloped in warmth, crushed between the two of them in a tight hug.
“You’re our family too, pal,” Poe says warmly. “Nothing you can do about it.”
“Family doesn’t hit family with red shells!” Finn shouts later, button mashing and nudging her to try to knock her off the track. She laughs, nudging him back, and Poe nearly upends their bowl of Doritos when he speeds past both of them and lands in first place, whooping loud enough that the guy in the apartment next door bangs on the wall.
-
“Family?” she repeats, sliding the little pastry dish across the table. “Not really. Not, like, blood family anyway. What about you?”
“My sister, Paige,” Rose says, hand reaching up absentmindedly to toy with the chain of her necklace.
“Is that from her?” Rey asks, pointing at it, and Rose grins.
“Yeah,” she says, pulling it out and leaning forward across the little café table to show her.
The crescent flashes warmly in her palm, metal glinting. It’s gorgeous, intricate etchings gleaming in the light, but Rey is more aware of how close their faces are, of how Rose is sharing something special with her.
“It’s beautiful,” she says, leaning back and hoping she’s not too red.
“Thank you,” Rose chirps, tucking it back into her shirt and sitting back with a little smile. “So where did you say you grew up?”
“Jakku.”
“Never heard of it,” she says, eyes sparkling, and Rey shrugs, picking at her croissant.
“Not surprised, it’s in the middle of nowhere.”
“Did you like it?”
“It’s complicated,” Rey says, and before she realizes it she’s talking about her home, how it was barren and ugly but also warm and open and how everyone there was just a little bit terrible but how flowers still grew in the cracks of the ground like no one had told them they couldn’t, how she would get up on weekends and look out at the horizon and feel small in the worst and best way.
“Sorry,” she says after a while, remembering herself. You need to tone it down, someone had told her once, nose upturned, and she’d tried, but her enthusiasm had never quite gotten the memo. “I’m rambling.”
“No, I like it,” Rose says. “Listening to you, I mean. You didn’t talk much, before. From being alone so much, maybe?”
“We didn’t-“ have pretty girls in the desert, she almost says, but she catches herself at the last second. “-have much to talk about, at first. Normally I can’t shut up.”
They walk back toward campus from the little coffee shop, talking about nothing much. Rey soaks up little facts about Rose like a sponge, filing them away in her brain like beloved memories. By the time they make it back she’s learned that Rose‘a favorite color is orange, that she can’t ride a bike, and that she was captain of the robotics team in high school.
“They didn’t like it much,” she says, eyes flashing in a way that makes Rey’s legs wobbly. “A little Asian girl being in charge. But we won the state championships, so.” She shrugs, rueful smile twisting her lips as they come to a stop in front of the technology building. “Anyway, thanks for lunch. It was nice to get to know you a little better without the guys.”
“Yeah,” Rey mumbles, distracted. Do it. No time like the present.
“Maybe we could go again sometime?”
Mission go. She takes a deep breath. “Actually,” she says, trying to force a casualness she doesn’t feel, “I was wondering if maybe you’d like to go on a date?”
Rose blinks at her, huffing a little laugh. “Is that- Are you joking?”
Joking. Her mouth drops open. She can’t even imagine me seriously thinking she’d go for me, Rey thinks, and something in her chest crumbles. She forces a laugh, but it sounds hollow even to her. “Yeah. Joking. I’ll see you at lunch, then,” she says, turning quickly so that Rose can’t see the way her face burns. She’s barely even started walking when she trips over her own feet, jerking towards the ground.
Rose catches her by her arm, small hand gripping her sleeve tightly. “Jesus, hot mess express,” she says, righting her. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Shame makes a pit in her stomach and she’s sure it’s all over her face, painfully obvious, so she keeps her head turned. You can still be friends if you don’t fuck this up, maybe. “I’m okay, really, you can-“ And then there’s a small hand turning her cheek, a body pressed against hers, and Rose is kissing her, lips chapped but so, so warm and Rey makes a muffled noise of surprise that makes her pull back.
“I thought this was a date, idiot,” she says, hand warm against Rey’s face. “And I was trying to ask you out on another. I’m sorry.”
“You did?” Her brain is completely blank, too busy rebooting to come up with a better response.
“You made up some bullshit excuse about Finn and Poe having class to be alone with me and then took me to a special little place instead of the cafeteria where we eat literally every other day. That sounds like a date to me.”
“Wait, did you know I was into you?”
She smiles, letting out a genuine laugh, and really it’s getting unfair. Rey can only take so much in one day. “I’m not completely oblivious, unlike some people. But I know that you’ve had a hard time and I didn’t want to spring anything on you.”
“You kn-“
“Not specifics,” she says quickly. “No one told me anything private or anything. But Finn mentioned you being kind of new to relationships during his shovel talk, a-“
“Shovel talk?”
“Yeah, he gave it to me like two weeks after I started eating lunch with you guys. Poe too.” She drops her bag to the ground and rifles around in it, making a little triumphant noise when she finally finds a pen.
“I’m gonna be late to class,” she says, standing back up. “But we can talk more, if you want.” She grabs Rey’s hand, scribbling on it and pressing a quick kiss to her knuckles before dropping it and disappearing inside the building.
Rose, her hand says, with a heart and a phone number.
She walks straight back to the dorm, not even attempting class. All of her remaining brain cells are gone, devoted entirely to the way Rose’s lips felt, how she had to get on her tiptoes to reach her face, how she smiled before she walked away. Besides, she’d look nuts sitting in lecture with a giant grin on her face.
-
They talk. Rey texts her when her class ends and she comes over, brightening the drab little single room with her presence. She fawns over the cactus and they sit on the floor and hash things out. Rey learns about Rose’s love languages and her past relationships and how she thinks her parents are the best love story ever told. She tells her, too, talks as openly as she can about how how little she knows, about how she wants to try, about how sometimes she loves people and things and even ideas so much that it feels like her heart will pop with it. She doesn’t say that Rose is becoming one of those things, already, figuring that there will be time for that talk later.
They also don’t talk. Rose climbs into her lap and Rey learns the curve of her jaw, the dip of her collarbones, the shape of her lips. Rose is soft in ways that she isn’t herself, and Rey marvels at it as they fumble their way onto the bed, wondering at the gentle slope of her breasts, the slight dip of her waist. When her hands dip cautiously under the fabric of Rose’s shirt she bats them away and yanks it off herself.
“I’m not gonna break,” she says, eyes sparkling, and she doesn’t. When Rey nips at the soft skin of her stomach, impulsive, she makes a little breathy noise that just eggs her further down. Before she knows it she’s pulling Rose’s leggings off and sucking red marks into her inner thighs, marring the smooth tan there, and Rose keens.
“You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want,” she says, and Rey has to suppress a bubble of laughter.
Trust me, she thinks, remembering lectures going unheard in favor of noticing the stretch of Rose’s back, the axis of her hips, the way her nose scrunches up when she takes notes. This is nothing I don’t want to do.
She hadn’t known exactly what she was wanting so desperately, then, hadn’t been able to put a name to the strange ache in her stomach and the twitch in her hands, but now that it’s right in front of her it’s painfully clear.
“Can I?” she asks, pulling at the waistband of Rose’s little boxer briefs.
There’s a huffed laugh, and Rose props herself up on her elbows to peer down at her. “If that’s what you want, yeah, I’m definitely not going to stop you.”
She pulls them off, shimmying them down Rose’s legs with an awkward little laugh, and then pauses, hit with a sudden bolt of feeling so strong it feels like something has lodged into her chest.
Oh, something in her says, stretching out like a cat in the sun. Yes. This is what we were meant to be doing.
And maybe it’s that, the sudden feeling of rightness, of arriving, or maybe it’s the easy smile on Rose’s face, but she’s not worried about messing up. Impulse has gotten her this far and she lets it carry her, uninhibited. She explores, searching with her fingers for the places that make Rose’s hips jerk. Once she’s gotten her bearings she dips her head down, pressing a brief kiss to Rose’s knee before mapping out the same spots with her tongue. She’s not really sure what she’s doing, exactly, but Rose doesn’t seem to be complaining so she keeps at it, licking into the hot core of her, and then Rose’s hands are in her hair and she’s grinding down into her mouth and oh oh oh could she get used to this.
She has no idea how long it goes on, completely subsumed by the galaxy that is Rose, but at some point there’s a palm pressing against her forehead and she pulls back.
“Okay?” she asks, and Rose laughs, real and deep and beautiful, and pulls her up for a kiss. Rey lets her, marveling at how well they fit together, at all the parts of them that slot into place like the parts of some grand machine. Rose moves out from under her and scoots down, kissing down her stomach with more smile than lips, and an unseen mechanism clicks into place in her heart.
“I have a crush on you,” Rey tells her seriously, exuberantly, and Rose’s answering snort is muffled in her thigh. Scraps, she thinks, giddy, noting all the places where they meld together and how none of them scare her anymore. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be.
-
It’s so good she almost forgets to give Finn shit for meddling.
“That’s for giving a random stranger a dad talk on my behalf,” she says after the third consecutive red shell, and he throws a pillow at her.
”Random stranger? Is that what they’re calling wives now?” Poe asks, and she chucks her conveniently gifted pillow at him.
Rose appears from the kitchen with a bowl of popcorn, settling in next to Rey. “You guys are violent.”
”Welcome to the family,” Poe says, sticking his leg out to try to kick Finn’s controller, and Rose smiles like it’s a good thing.
That night, with Rose curled around her, Rey sends a silent thanks to the universe. Just in case.