falling for you (and into the dirt)
campe-silky (SilkyinaBottle)
“Harrison, for the last time—” Nerris reached up to snatch a pair of sparkly blue dice from the magician’s hold, but in an instant, they were gone. She groaned and frowned at him from where she was positioned on her makeshift picnic blanket (really an old Pokémon throw she’d owned since she was twelve). “I keep on telling you, my d10s are not for practicing your shitty magic tricks!”
But Harrison just stood up straight, grinning and showing her his empty, gloved hands. “Then maybe you should be a little more careful with them, hm?” Stuck-up prick.
Nerris rolled her eyes and sat back, leaning a little closer to Preston, still buried in the script he was memorizing. She’d found early on this year— her freshman year— that the expansive lawn that stretched between the language and science buildings was the best place to sit if she wanted to focus and get some campaign work done. Her dorm was too noisy; her roommate, Sasha, was always inviting her irritating friends over, blabbering on the phone for hours, or planning for some kind of party. The library was okay, and she used it as a backup in case of weather, but she still preferred the fresh air’s effect on her creativity.
Her friends weren’t always as beneficial, however. She’d met Preston during her mythology class last semester, and he proved to be enthusiastically sweet and loyal. Harrison, on the other hand… they first met in the school’s D&D club, and in spite of a long and arduous debate over the pros and cons of 4th Edition, he clung to her like some sort of awful tumor and refused to let her be. “You know how much those cost, Harrison,” she said, holding out her hand expectantly. “I want them back. Now.”
“You have, like, a thousand of them,” Harrison countered. “You can let me borrow them for just a little bit!”
“That’s not—” she started, but Preston swiftly cut in, hardly looking up from the highlighted lines on his page.
“Harrison does have a point.” Nerris glared at him. Traitor. “You’ve been awfully stingy with your possessions lately. It’s unlike you.”
Nerris made a fist in the blanket and leaned in to hiss right near his ear. “I’m only being ‘stingy’ because he keeps stealing my shit!”
“And I’m telling you, I wouldn’t have to steal your things if you would only lend them to me in the first place!”
“Preston, are you hearing him?!”
Preston set his script down (carefully, on the blanket, as not to get grass stains on it), and sighed. “My point is that you’ve been unusually high-strung.”
“No I haven’t!” Nerris cried, and almost immediately she realized just how wrong she was. Her voice had rose to an unusually high pitch when she spoke, one she was unused to, and it felt like she was being held up by taut wires, each just a sharp tug away from snapping.
The realization must have shown on her face, because Preston pointed at her and said (almost shouted), “See?! I’m right!”
Nerris huffed and tried to focus back on her campaign notes (she was planning to have her party stumble upon a halfling village and save it from being destroyed, even though none of them could remember how they got there in the first place). “I feel fine,” she lied, still hyperaware of all the tension her body was carrying.
