Olivia Jensen is on her way to ʀᴇᴀʟʟʏ ғᴀsᴛ (sprinted) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-09-19 13:58:00 |
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Entry tags: | # past / backstory, danny kwon, olivia jensen |
Who: Olivia Jensen & Danny Kwon
Where: UT Austin
When: Backdated to March, 2015
What: Two high schoolers meet at a party and attempt to do what high schoolers do once inebriated.
Warnings: So much fail.
Olivia Jensen was only like, seven hours into Prospie Weekend -- her flight had landed in Austin at 2PM, and she'd gotten to UT's campus a little after that -- but if this was what college was going to be like? She was so ready to enroll.
The day had been a whirlwind of meeting a handful of upperclassmen on the Track/XC team, observing a (totally boring, but necessary) late afternoon class, and attending a school-sponsored athletics mixer. It seemed like most of the other sports teams were doing their Prospie Weekends, too. It was cool meeting other kids like her. But it seemed like everyone there was antsy, anticipating something she wasn't aware of yet.
A few hours later, after the mixer ended, she was told to change into 'the skimpiest thing she'd brought' -- then, ten minutes later, handed a dress to wear once she'd rummaged through her suitcase and came up empty-handed. Once she was horded with some of the other visiting students to an even bigger house down the street, she realized what everyone had been waiting for.
The house was crowded -- no, overflowing -- with student athletes, both college and high school alike. People were outside on the stoop, talking loudly on the front sidewalk, nearly hanging out the windows. Olivia had never been at something like this before. It was, much like the prospect of university-level athletics, incredibly thrilling.
She learned quickly that she didn't much like the taste of keg beer, but it was the only thing readily available. Her campus host, a junior two-miler just like her, had disappeared off into the bathroom, so Olivia decided to brave the kitchen alone just in time to see a guy step up to the keg. "Can you get me some too?" she asked him, loudly, hoping to be overheard over all the noise.
The chatter was loud and the music was a pounding in their bodies, felt more in the buzzing of their teeth and vibration of their ribcage than anything else—but it was a bit quieter in the kitchen, away from the speakers. The boy turned his head, giving a quick nod before filling up two of those stereotypical red cups, tilting them slightly in order to avoid foaming the beer too much. (A deft hand at this, apparently.)
When he stepped away from the table, he held one out for her to take. He was dressed simply: jeans with a tear at the knee, an old football jersey from Fox Grove that proclaimed where his particular sports specialty lay. It was a better way of announcing himself than the chirpy nametags they’d all been forced to wear earlier.
“This is like something out of a movie,” Danny remarked, his voice also pitched loud. His gaze had been caught by the colourful, glinting texture (and short length) of her dress like a magpie drawn to a trinket, but then he eventually looked back up and registered the girl’s face. He squinted. “Did I see you at the mixer earlier?”
She studied his face, trying to match it to one of the new ones she'd met so far, as she sipped her beer. There'd been so many new faces, and the alcohol wasn't helping one bit, but -- "Yes! I think so. At the table with the cheese and mini sausages?" Because you could take a girl out of Minnesota but you couldn't take the Minnesota out of the girl, apparently.
"I don't think I remember your name, though. I'm Olivia. I, um." The feel of the sequins against her thighs distracted her, then, and she looked down at herself as though the dress was brand new information. (It was so not her style.) "I don't usually wear things like this," she blurted out. He'd been looking at it, hadn't he?
He could feel his cheeks heating slightly, noticing that she’d noticed that he’d noticed, but the boy was slightly in luck: his face was already slightly red from the heat and the alcohol, so it wasn’t quite so noticeable. “It looks nice,” he said, “I mean. From what I know of dresses. Which isn’t a lot. My little sis doesn’t like them.”
"It does?" She winced at the words left her mouth; Olivia had meant to think them, not say them, but apparently she was rapidly losing any sort of filter she'd ever possessed. She could tell she was beginning to blush, too, and felt a weird sense of pleasure that he seemed to be experiencing the same kind of thing. "I mean. Thank you."
Flushed, he reached out an awkward hand for a handshake; the Kwons had drilled him on the importance of politeness, after all. He might have shoplifted liquor, but he wasn’t rude. “I’m Daniel. But you can call me Danny. Where are you from?”
He didn’t even consider telling her to call him DK. Once upon a time, it would have been unthinkable for him to be at this party—he didn’t have money for the school, after all, and he wouldn’t have hung out with these people besides. It felt like he was wearing someone else’s skin, drifting through the house in their shoes, a Goldilocks infiltrating a home that wasn’t his, everyone hoping to reinvent themselves as university freshmen rather than high school seniors.
Others might have been discomfited by that sensation; to Danny, it was a bit of a relief.
"I'm from Minnesota," she said, shaking his hand. "Minneapolis." Four years there and it still felt like a lie, but the people here represented a new chance for her. She could remake herself into whoever she wanted to be once she was in college. "What about you?" 'Fox Grove' wasn't ringing any bells, but she could still tell from the jersey just what he did. "What position do you play?"
“Way up north, huh?” There was an unfamiliar but melodic lilt to the footballer’s accent, a laidback sing-song that hadn’t come from the mainland. “I’m a local, sort of. My high school’s in Austin and I play wide receiver.”
It wasn’t the most glamorous of positions, and he had no captaincy credits to his name, but Danny still said it with pride: he’d been good enough at it to get the scholarship, after all. And it was a little easier to carry on the small talk with a girl when he had that much beer crowding his skull, making his movements loose and his tongue looser. “Quarterbacks get all the glory in the teen movies, but apparently I passed some kine standards for an invite tonight. And you’re…”
He tried to assess Olivia, measuring up that dress and the long legs within it. He had no idea, but he did have one guess: “Imma say not a cheerleader, but otherwise, stumped.”
Football had been bigger in Mora, more integral to a small town that needed something to rally behind, but Minneapolis was a Big Ten city. She pictured Danny in his full uniform, walking out onto the field and taking up his position. It was a mental image she couldn't help but enjoy, and it made the next look she gave him a little bit more admiring than the one before it.
"Let's just say I could run circles around you any day," she said, grinning at her stupid joke before the words even finished getting out of her mouth. After all, her high school track was set up around the football field. "I'm a runner. Cross country and track, but long distance events, like one mile and two mile?"
The day's events had already convinced Olivia to attend UT, but the prospect of getting to know boys like this solidified the deal for her.
“Track,” Danny repeated, with an approving nod and taking another large sip of his drink. He’d sometimes paused in the middle of practice to wipe sweat out of his eyes and, mostly, watch the long lean runners tearing around the curve or the cheerleaders practicing at the edge of the field. It’s like the athletics department purposefully planted them there as eye candy.
And those girls were here, too—milling around the party, hands drifting against arms, laughing merrily like windchimes, weaselling their way against boys’ sides—but there was a reason he’d taken refuge in the kitchen. Whatever his taste ran to, he knew it wasn’t exactly that.
Olivia didn’t seem like she fully fit this mold either, though.
“Soooo,” he started again, scraping for conversational topics and wondering what you were supposed to talk about at an event like this—if he’d been at home at a party with a spliff and a bunch of ragged kids, he wouldn’t have been nearly so tongue-tied, “did the school win you over? It’s gotta be more expensive, being a non-resident. UT look worth it?”
"Yes!" It was more of an exclamation than a statement in every sense of the word. Her face lit up as she considered the prospect of a real future, everything she'd worked so hard coming true at last. She wasn't used to making small talk at parties like this -- hell, wasn't used to parties like this in general -- but this was a topic she was eager to discuss.
"They recruited me, actually. Full ride." She took another sip of beer, then another, her gaze on him. Was it bragging to talk about this? Probably not. They were all there for similar reasons, weren't they? "I'm pretty fast."
Olivia looked around, eyes lighting on one of the cheerleaders Danny had just glanced at himself, and attempted to use her free hand to mimic the hair tossing gesture she'd just witnessed. It worked, sort of. It was hot at the party, after all, and some of her hair stuck to the back of her neck. But it was a move, at least.
"What about you? You must be really good at… Receiving."
“I… yes?” He said it haltingly, his head buzzing and trying to figure out what had just happened. Was that a gay joke? It sounded like a gay joke. But then there was that little head-toss, the universal symbol of a girl flailing and trying to flirt…
“I was, actually,” Danny managed to continue, after deciding to push past it and recover his composure (what little of it he had; he was not a graceful drunk). “Full ride here too. Worked my ass off for it.” And this time, his face broke into a grin: a proper one, wide and dazzling white. Finally, a piece had clicked into place: neither of them were here on daddy’s purse-strings, and that fact alone set them apart from the herd.
School hadn’t been a given for either of them: they’d clawed their way into it.
Were he anywhere less drunk, Danny might have let that go unremarked, but instead he blurted it out: “That’s cool. I mean. That you got recruited. I like that. Means you’re not…” His free hand waved aimlessly at the prospective students around them, unsure how to phrase it, before settling on, “Means you appreciate this more.”
She certainly couldn't complain about the money -- it came with the territory of having legally emancipated oneself, after all -- but for Olivia, her pride in being good enough to be recruited trumped her legitimate financial need. She wore her 'full ride' status like a gold medal: she was so good, they were willing to pay her to run. It'd been her ticket out of Mora and she'd grabbed it and held on tight. She'd done it for herself, pushed herself beyond her limits to make something out of nothing. She hadn't needed anyone else's help.
"Is it really as good if you have it given to you?" she asked him, joking mostly, but her voice held an undercurrent of seriousness that tempered it. Olivia matched his grin with one of her own, eyes bright. She wondered what he was like on the football field, what his statistics were. She liked numbers only when they were applied to sports. "It's a nice feeling, knowing you're needed."
(She'd meant to say 'wanted,' but. Silly alcohol, causing her to get ahead of herself.)
Olivia had just thought to herself that the music couldn't get any louder before they turned it up higher, playing some rap song she didn't recognize with a driving beat she could feel in her bones. She'd never been one to stay still for long, so she drained the rest of her cup and smiled up at him again. "You wanna dance?"
He paused for a moment—Danny was graceful on the field, less so while dancing—but by way of answer, he followed suit in finishing off his drink. Liquid courage indeed: it gave him the bravery to smile at this pretty brunette, say “Yeah,” and then escort her to the deafening dancefloor, his hand resting in the small of her back as he nudged her ahead of him in the tight-packed hallway.
Time passed in a blur of limbs and pounding music and movement, the dancing bleeding the night away. Teenagers were teenagers, so various pairs on the floor kept going for hips against hips, hands creeping where they could, people occasionally splintering off to disappear upstairs.
Daniel kept it to strictly dancing, however, until he and Olivia gestured exaggeratedly at each other, like sign language, and emerged onto the back porch together. Taking deep breaths of the cool night air after the stuffy and sweaty indoors, enjoying a fresh breeze on their heated skin. The stars were glinting above; nowhere near as bright as they’d be a year later, but they still caught Danny’s attention for a moment.
Olivia'd seen a handful of her future teammates leaving as she and Danny kept time on the dancefloor, her phone buzzing moments later with a text she read once they were outside. Reading it confirmed their intention to return back to the track house in '5mn or so, k.' There'd been something after that, then, but the typos had gotten in the way of her decoding the rest of the message.
She paused, considering her options, before choosing the safest one. "I should probably go," she said, regret clear in her voice. None of the boys on her team were as cute as this one. "I think everyone I came with's starting to head out. But it was really nice to meet you, Danny."
It’s been really nice hanging out with—
He shook off those words, dismissed them as ridiculous. Chided himself for a moment: You’re DK, man, so act like it.
“Hey, so—you need someone to walk you back?” he asked, his voice light, though the ulterior motive was obvious enough. “I bet I’m better company than SafeWalk.”
Olivia hadn't expected the offer. And sure, she had a few people who'd be walking with her, but. Again, none of them were as cute as this one. This was, like. A super important thing that she continued to focus on as she beamed up at him.
She swallowed back the oh-so-Minnesotan you betcha that threatened to escape her, choosing instead something a little bit more neutral: "I'd like that, if you're ready to leave. And I bet you are. Nice company. Not -- Unless you are ready?" Besides, they could walk behind the rest of her team, anyway, for a little privacy. If privacy was going to be a thing they'd need. Olivia was trying to not jump to any conclusions or anything.
“If this were a party at home, I’d probably have dozed off on a bean bag chair in front of a video game right around now,” Danny said honestly. He was more talkative than he normally would’ve been; the plentiful beers had something to do with that. “So, yeah, I’m ready to head off.”
He’d carried his light jacket out of there, but draped it over one arm; they were still in Texas, after all, and the night was cooler but not cold. The footballer took point and took the steps down to the street in a few easy bounds, but then drew to a sheepish halt almost immediately.
“I have no idea where your track house is.”
Olivia shot him a smirk, reaching for his hand and pulling him over towards the boys and girls congregating in a loose circle a few feet away. "I don't either, but they do." And sure, there were a few knowing glances sent their way from the upperclassmen, but it didn't take long before they were all on their way.
She held his hand loosely in hers as they walked, hoping he knew that if he ever wanted to break the contact she wouldn't mind. "You'll be able to make it to wherever you're staying after, too. Right?" Asking the question begged a follow-up: Unless you'd like to stay with me?
“Yeah, it’s all walking distance from here. No sweat.” Danny tried to master his expression, but in the darkness of the street, he didn’t really have to worry about her catching it. For one more bleary, confusing moment, he wasn’t sure if he was going to be kicked out onto his merry way.
But then again, there was her hand in his...
His hand twitched, fingers tightening on hers for a second.
“Uhhh. So what’s… the track house like?”
Shut up shut up brah what are you doing screeched Danny’s internal monologue, and he winced to himself again. He was never good at this even on the best of days, but it would’ve been easier when it wasn’t a near-total stranger.
"It's, you know." She gestured with her free hand, drawing an imaginary house in mid-air. "It's like, kind of like a frat house? But hopefully a little less douchey, since I think the point is to move in there once I'm done with the required campus housing year."
Olivia was oblivious to his inner turmoil, of course; her own mind was relatively free from such worries. She was used to her own babbling by this point in her life. Until her heel caught on an uneven sidewalk and she tilted sideways, breaking her fall by leaning her weight heavily onto Danny. He caught her—it wasn’t anywhere near as heavy as weathering a tackle from an opposing player, and so he braced her easily.
Her first thought, as she clung without prior invitation to his shoulder and drew circles with her foot: Ankle -- is my ankle okay? And then her next, once she'd assessed that concern: He totally thinks I don't know how to walk, doesn't he?
"Sorry," she said hastily, righting herself and standing straight. Her ankle was okay, thank God, just a little unsteady, but it'd get over itself. Her hand stayed tight on his nonetheless.
“No worries. Are you okay?”
"Yeah! I'm totally good. Just -- you know. I'm good."
Somehow, they eventually survived the walk, and followed the rest of the track team to the house that had been set aside for their rooming purposes. The others went in first, trading a crooked smile with the footballer, then leaving the two of them standing outside for a awkward, hesitant goodbye on the front porch. They didn’t seem certain what to do with their hands or feet—there was one step forward, another two back, a hemming and hawing until Olivia suddenly blurted out: “Do you want to come inside?”
Five minutes later, the two students had collided with one another at about the same time, in a somewhat sloppy but very enjoyable kiss which bumped him into the wall before he got his bearings. They would take half-steps interrupted by another drowning kiss, then another step.
They were trying to navigate the darkness of the house and failing: Danny tripped on the stairs leading up to the bedrooms, plummeting and hitting his calf on the edge of the steps. He bit back a yowl of pain and profanities, and managed to scramble back to his feet while blushing furiously, now walking with a limp. Not that he quite cared at the moment: their movements were still half-drunk, a bit too rushed, his fingers slipping on the slippery fabric of her dress.
She had a roommate for the weekend, a visiting student like her who was, presumably, already in there ready to sleep, but the relative privacy of the second floor was preferred to the still-occupied common areas downstairs. Olivia tugged on his jersey, stumbling backwards and pulling him into the bathroom. The door got kicked closed behind them before she hoisted herself up onto the counter, tugging again to pull him onto her. She leaned back to accommodate his size and weight as he bent over her, the kisses between them growing in heat and need, before she slammed her head backwards onto the mirror.
Before he could say anything, she’d already reassured him. "'S fine, I'm good." She reluctantly moved her hand out from underneath his jersey to rub at the spot she'd hit.
The mirror was distracting, offering a blurry vision of their shoulders and arms like two other people in the room, but Danny disregarded it, one hand lightly touching her head, then pressing a kiss to the side of her temple.
It was a sweet moment, fleeting, before they fell back into scrambling. They managed to pull his jersey off relatively easily and then Olivia shifted her hips on the counter, for Danny’s hands to skim her thighs and slide the already-short dress up.
They had to break their kiss to get the dress over her head—which seemed easy at first, but then the layered sparkly fabric caught on her earrings which caught on her hair, and then Olivia was left with a tangled mess trapped on her head.
“Shit,” Danny said, “I’m so sorry—”
"Zipper, there was a zipper." She wasn't panicking, per se, but it wasn't the most pleasant thing in the world. He was lucky the alcohol numbed her somewhat; instead of a sharp pain, all she felt was a dull kind of twinge all over.
Olivia laughed then, unable to help it as she pictured what they would have like if she were on the outside, looking in. She couldn't actually see anything right now, as it were, so she tugged the dress down as best as she could. The next task was to detach her earrings from the material, her hands moving with the precision of a cat pawing at its own face, and yank her hair free. She was successful in the end, but it had been slow going as her own drunken amusement sought to interrupt her every so often.
"Okay," she said, her voice bright despite their clear struggles. "We can do this. We are going to do this." Together, they pulled the dress up again, Olivia offering stray bits of positive feedback and encouragement all the while. In his haste, the dress was thrown onto a pile of things that scattered and fell off the counter, hitting the ground with a loud thud. It wasn't a dealbreaker, not compared to the things they'd already weathered together, so she started in on his jeans. They, too, fell to the floor, just as someone knocked on the door.
"Is someone in there? I really need to go!"
“Uh,” Danny said, freezing like a deer caught in the headlights, struggling to decide what to do. For one brief insensible moment, it seemed like a perfect plan to just pretend they’d never heard him.
More pounding on the door. “Look, seriously, I really really need to go. I’m lactose intolerant and I am straight-up about to shit my pants out here.”
… Welllll, that finally killed the mood.
Danny and Olivia exchanged a Look, and fell into simultaneous laughter, hysterically-suppressed giggles muffled into each others’ bare shoulders. He struggled to zip up his jeans again and gather up their bundle of discarded clothing from the floor, holding it carefully in front of him as the girl unlocked the door and the two of them emerged in their underwear, clearing their throats.
The track guy on the other side didn’t even pause to sass them, just dove through the door and slammed it shut behind him. Olivia gave the door an irritated, exasperated look, but she couldn't begrudge the boy for, well. Needing to poop so bad.
"Well. That was interesting." She bit her lip hard, trying to not laugh too loudly, lest they be overheard. Despite their current status, though -- the two of them remained as they were at first, as though it were perfectly normal for her to be there in her bra, underwear, and too-high heels, and Danny in a similar state -- the spell between them had finally broken.
There was an uncertainty then that settled between them for the first time since he had accepted her offer to dance. What did they do now?
"It was, um. Really nice meeting you." She'd aimed for seriousness, but one last giggle escaped her.
This time, there was no awkwardness when Danny said “I had a great time,” before bursting into another irrepressible laugh. Somehow, they had transcended past awkwardness, levitating up into another higher realm of mortification, to emerge on the other side strangely comfortable with each other.
“How about a rain check? Gimme your number and I’ll hit you up when we both start at UT,” he said, tugging his shirt back on over his head. A tube of toothpaste rolled out and hit the floor.
Olivia bent down to undo her heels and pick up the toothpaste, then stood back up to give him one last smile. "That sounds great."