Work Text:
Eddy Tressler checks their appearance over in the mirror one more time and adjusts one of the straps of their binder just slightly before finally settling on the look they’d chosen for the night.
They’re not dressed very differently from their usual style, just more polished. They always put work into their appearance, so not much actually has to change for the occasion.
They switch their small radio off, the soft sounds of R&B that filled the room quieting. All the music that played on it was a little tinny, but Eddy was still saving up for a proper record player.
They pull on the green jacket they'd chosen to match their shoes and grab their bag, rifling through it to make sure everything was there. Phone, keys, wallet– perfect.
Eddy had been looking forward to tonight all week. They wanted it to go well.
The walk over to Jazmine’s building is nice. Campus is calm, the soft chatter of friends talking is periodically interrupted by raucous laughter, and the thumps of feet on the sidewalk, combined with the crickets beginning their chirping for the night, creates a sound that reverberates through Eddy’s head pleasantly.
They hum a tune that’s been stuck in their head for the last week, something they’d been working on with Pete, and allow themself to soak in this feeling.
They arrive in front of Jazmine’s door after about ten minutes, right on time. They take a deep breath, and try to remind themself that it’ll be no different than normal (it’ll be completely different from normal).
They knock on her door and hear something shuffle inside the room. It’s followed by a muffled voice calling for “one minute!”, and about half of that passes before the door opens and Jazmine is beaming at them.
Something in their chest stirs.
She looks them over quickly and her smile grows. Eddy takes the opportunity to do the same and can’t help but feel a little starstruck.
Her short hair has a cloth headband placed in it, small buttons sewed into the side, probably one of her projects. Her thick glasses are perched on her nose, the temples studded with little jewels and charms that she’d excitedly told them about finding for cheap in a shop a while back.
Her off-shoulder top was worn, and slightly oversized, a staple of her style, paired with jeans that she had to roll at the end to keep from tripping over.
“Hey,” Eddy says weakly, and waves a little. They immediately feel like a cornball for it. A little less so when she waves back.
“Hey Eddy. You look nice,” She glances at the ground, and has to push her glasses up to keep them from slipping off. “I like the shoes!”
Eddy looks down at their feet as if they hadn’t spent no less than an hour staring at their small collection trying to figure out which she would like more. Something in their chest swells with pride at the fact that they’d chosen correctly.
“Thanks,” They duck their head a little. “I like your glasses.
A little behind her, they notice a fuzzy yellow duck stuffed animal on her dresser. They’ve been inside her room a few times and never seen it before. She follows their line of sight before glancing back at them.
“That’s Daisy,” she supplies. “Like the duck. I wasn’t a very creative child. ” The last part is clearly a joke and Eddy huffs a laugh in return.
She fumbles with her keys as she steps out of the doorway.
“Thank you! I finally got around to decorating them last Saturday. Art lent me the glue for it–“ She pauses. “Shit, I forgot my bag. Gimme one second.”
The walk to the restaurant is nice. Maine’s a little cooler than what Eddy’s used to back home, so the jacket had been a good choice.
Jazmine has this way of walking where it’s almost like she can’t wait to take her next step. Her pants are swishing and the shiny little pendant she’s wearing around her neck glints and dances in the glow from the streetlight.
The pendant was a penny on a thin silver chain that she’d nervously told Eddy was for good luck a couple months back when they’d first been getting to know each other.
Jazmine hadn’t really looked at them while she explained it, her eyes had flitted around with an anxious sort of embarrassment, and for the first time in the entire time Eddy had known her she’d clammed up a little.
They’d go on to learn that she gets like that sometimes, usually when something personal comes up. She’d stop making eye contact and get fidgety before she changed the subject.
She'd been getting a little better with it lately, it was just one of her habits they’d come to notice in the time Eddy had been her friend, like how she’d never split a street pole and took care to avoid any cracks in the sidewalk whenever possible.
Asking Jazmine out had felt really, really hard and then really, really easy. They’d met through mutual friends. Every friend group at Walker University was entwined in a weird way that had taken Eddy some time to get used to.
They’d always gone to bigger schools before college, the type where you didn’t see the same person much in the same week if you didn’t share a class. It had been a bit jarring to go from that to a place where everyone knew each other somehow.
After they’d been introduced, they clicked real fast. Talking came easy to Jazmine in a way that it usually didn’t for Eddy, and they admired it. She had no problem filling silence, and they had no problem listening to her fill it.
Early into the friendship, Eddy learned Jazmine could talk about anything and make it sound interesting. She talked a lot about people.
Not quite unkindly (ordinarily), but analytical. She was friends with Harkness, who is incredibly overbearing for someone so chipper, so she usually had some type of gossip she learned from him. Eddy liked hearing her tell her stories and she liked having someone to talk about it with. A win-win situation.
She also talked a fair amount about herself. Her classes, her hobbies, her projects, but one of Eddy’s favorite topics was her job. She worked at, in her own words, a “shitty second-hand shop downtown that doesn’t pay nearly enough”, but she always came back with great stories.
At the start of their walk, before they’d fallen into their peaceful silence, she told Eddy one about a customer she’d had earlier in the day:
“The motherfucker skips the entire line just to ask where the coats were! There was an entire three aisles of them, maybe five feet to the left, and he literally interrupts me counting what had to have been, like, twenty-three dollars in change to ask where they are!” Jazmine had paused to take a breath.
“Mind you, Cathy literally wasn’t doing anything important either– he chose to come bother me! And I was so fucking nice about it too! I told him it was right over there–” she flails her hands in a clearly irritated gesture vaguely to the left. “And, yeah, I was a little mad about it, because I’m knee-deep in quarters ‘cause it’s all the sweet elderly woman who came in before him had, but he has the nerve to tell me I should watch my tone! Can you fucking believe that?”
And whenever Eddy chimes in with something of their own, Jazmine is always rapt. It made them feel seen in a way that they’ve never felt with anyone else. When they had to pause to find their words, she never rushed or patronized them.
At most, Eddy would get a soft “Take your time” that, in the later days of their friendship, would make them lose their train of thought for a completely different reason.
She was attentive without being overbearing. They’d offhandedly mentioned a song they thought she’d enjoy, and the next morning they'd woken to a seven-minute voice note sent at 4:00 AM about everything she liked about it.
Eddy’s quiet contemplation is interrupted when they arrive at the diner. It looks cozy, and they’ve never been, but Jazmine spoke very highly of it. As they walk in, Eddy is more than a little surprised when the hostess greets Jazmine by name.
“My sister used to work here,” she explains when Eddy looks at her quizzically as they sit. “I was in here to bother her at least twice a week.”
“She doesn’t anymore?” They want to kick themself. Of course she doesn’t work here anymore, that’s why she said “used to”.
If Jazmine minds the question, it doesn’t show. “Nah, she moved to North Carolina when she finished school. Maine was too cold, but she didn’t want to go back home. Somehow she ended up there.”
They nod. “D’you miss her?”
She pauses a little bit, looks away, reaches to fiddle with the chain of her necklace before answering. “I miss the discount her working here got me. I did the math once, and they were getting a hundred dollars out of me a month. With the discount. I complained to Ray about it once, and he went on a rant about capitalist pigs.”
The last sentence is clearly said as an afterthought, and Eddy can’t help the snort that slips out. She startles for a second from across the table before they both dissolve into laughter.
Dinner goes well. Jazmine asks about their day, and Eddy pushes down their initial reflex to follow the normal small talk script and answers honestly.
“Kinda shitty.” Which, true. They’d woken up so late they missed one class and they were late to another by a good fifteen minutes.
Thankfully, this professor wasn’t the type to lock the door on late students, but he’d made a not-so-vague comment on arriving to class in a timely manner that was clearly intended for Eddy.
Jazmine listens to all of this with an irritation on Eddy’s behalf that is clearly fueled by bias, and by the time they get to how the rest of the day had gone they feel slightly better about it.
The rest of the day had passed somewhat uneventfully; someone had bumped into them in the dining hall and spilled tea on one of their favorite hoodies, which sucked, but it hadn’t stained too bad. The last few hours had just been spent trying to prepare for tonight.
The food in the diner was good; most of the selections were seafood adjacent. All of them, actually. But the prices had been surprisingly generous considering the portion sizes.
The two of them spent the rest of their time alternating between talking and commenting on the 2000’s music videos that were playing on the T.V.s propped in the ceiling corners.
The walk back is Eddy’s favorite part, though. The crickets are singing a bit louder than they had been two hours ago, and cars are sparse. The autumn leaves on the ground make for a backdrop reminiscent of a movie. If Eddy strained their ears just slightly, they could hear the soft hum from the streetlights.
Jazmine stays closer than she had on the walk over, and shyly offers her hand for them to link together, grasping lightly when Eddy takes it. Any nervous energy from earlier had vanished, leaving the two of them with the same fondness that most of their relationship had been built on— just fuzzier tonight.
A few minutes pass before Jazmine abruptly says “I have to take you skating sometime,” and she drops this casually, as if she hasn’t just sent Eddy’s heart into overdrive at the fact that she wants to do this again.
Eddy tries and fails to come up with something smooth and seemingly effortless to respond with. All they manage to muster up is a “Yeah?” Their voice cracks and they immediately want to kick themself about it.
Jazmine is kind enough to ignore how lame their response is. “Yeah, there’s Melody Roller Rink about a half hour away. You been before?”
“I can’t say I have,” Eddy responds, glancing at her with thinly veiled anticipation creeping into their tone.
“Well, I guess I’ll have to be the one to change that..” Her sentence trails off at the end hesitantly, though her tone is coated with cautious optimism.
“I’d like that.” Eddy replies, attempting to keep the eagerness out of their voice. They fail if the way Jazmine’s lips twitch upward is anything to go by.
“Yeah?” She asks, parroting Eddy’s words from earlier.
“Yeah.” The reply is simple. But it’s enough.
The rest of their walk is all too short. Eddy takes care to walk her to her door and they stand there for a few seconds with a mutual perplexity on how to end this.
Their hands part and Eddy mourns the loss. Jazmine’s hand in theirs had begun to feel right. Before they can lose their nerve they start talking.
“I really like you.” It’s blunt, and it’s honest, and it very clearly catches Jazmine off-guard.
She’s quiet for a moment, searches their face for something and is pleased by whatever it is she finds. “I really like you too.”
She has to lean down a little to meet Eddy’s height, and there’s a bit of shared apprehension stemming from the understanding that there’s no way to go back to exactly the way things were before this before Eddy closes the little bit of distance left between them.
It’s less a kiss and more a press of lips in all honesty– they’re both too nervous for it to really count, but it’s nice nonetheless. It ends fast.
They pull away for a few seconds before leaning back in, and this time it goes better. Eddy’s eyes flutter closed and they tentatively rest a hand on the small of her back. Jazmine relaxes into it, her hand finding the back of their neck.
They eventually have to pull away to breathe, but neither of them makes any move to say goodnight.
Eddy doesn’t know how long they stay outside of her door, breathing each other’s air, before a car alarm sounds in the distance breaking the little bubble they’d created for themselves. Jazmine’s the first to step back, pushing her glasses up her nose, and sighing dramatically. It earns the laugh from Eddy it was intended to.
“I should probably go in,” She murmurs, reluctance coloring her voice. “Goodnight, Eddy. I had a lot of fun.”
Eddy lets out an exaggerated sigh of their own, and the giggle they’re rewarded with sets off little fireworks in their brain. “Me too. Goodnight, Jazmine.” A beat passes. “Text me?”
It’s a question that doesn’t need to be asked. She nods, fiddles with her keys, the smile on her face still there, just softer.
“Yeah. Of course.” She seems to weigh something in her mind for a second, before leaning in one more time and placing a chaste kiss on their cheek.
Sure enough, in the morning, Eddy wakes up (on-time today), and after switching their radio on, they check their phone. They have two unread messages from six this morning. She’s always up so early.
lmk when you want to try skating :)
hope you got back safe <3
Eddy smiles, types out that Saturday is good for them if it works for her, and knows she won’t answer for at least an hour because she turns her phone off during classes. They set their phone back down on their nightstand, let out a breath that gives way to a laugh and get up to start the rest of their day.