Vanilla

Thirty Four

A/N: Hi Beans :') I skipped last week's update because I wasn't feeling too well generally. It's been a tough couple of weeks leading up to this and I haven't been able to spend some time with myself for some good introspection, which was what writing Flight School was for me--time to look inside myself. I think the nature of writing romance is that I've always looked from in from the outside, which is ironic because all my romance genres are written in first person and Flight School is written in third. 

What Leroy and Vanilla have is what I've always wanted to have and this is what I've come to realize. Not because I just like their dynamics, but because for Vanilla, he feels most human when he is with Leroy. Otherwise, he's just a book to many other people. And the reason for that is love. Love is what makes me feel human and I haven't had that in a very long time. 

Enjoy the long chapter.

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[Vanilla]

My first instinct had been to check the booth number indicated at the corner of the striped awning in a hopeless attempt to prove my wandering eyes wrong, frantically searching under the tables of crockery and then the gas and the grill for a sign of some prank of poor taste, but even the aluminium bars holding up the stall appeared bare and untouched so much so that I'd begun to question my sanity and entertain the possibility of this being part of an unwarranted dream.

It was dark out and there was barely a streak of sunlight over the horizon at five, leaving the rest of the plaza ghostly quiet except for the occasional gust of wind. Being the first to arrive meant the absence of an immediate consultant and, surveying every nearby stall and booth, I came to the conclusion that everyone else had decided to ignore the school's scheduling of ingredient delivery for an hour's worth of additional sleep. Not to mention, I'd also been one of the last to leave the night before, having double, triple checked every single aspect of the booth to ensure everything was in perfect order. The state of the school had resembled a graveyard by the time I'd left, so who could have gone to the extent of... of arriving after ten in the evening and before five in the morning for some silly, childish sabotage?

I was no more furious or frustrated than I was tired; exhaustion was heavy on the shoulders and for a moment, dropping my bag on the ground had not seemed to lighten my load.

With most of the plaza unfortunately empty, the only solution had been to come up with hypotheses of my own and, accordingly, map out possible routes of action and the remaining options I had. I was about to start searching for students down the lane our booth was on when, to my pleasant surprise, several male students whom I'd recognized as Leroy's classmates from yesterday began to filter into the plaza with cartons marked 'fragile' and ice boxes over their shoulders, headed for their booth.

"Hi, hello," this was the fastest I'd ever gone up to strangers for a chat. "Sorry to bother. You're the only ones here and I was wondering if—"

"Oh hey." One of them seemed particularly enthusiastic. "You're that first-year guy Cox chose to be on his team for the cross-year."

"Yes. That I am," I caught on quickly, hoping this would provide him enough incentive to converse with someone like myself. "I was wondering if you'd perhaps been here earlier than five o'clock in the morning? Or, if, by chance, you'd seen anyone wandering around our lane late last night or early this morning... something's wrong. My class had our booth decorated and all but..." I'd trailed off, turning to the stall across theirs.