FIXATION

3. Luca

Lola kicked Rags' leg and he shook awake, lifting his head. "What?"

With a scoff and then a sigh, Lola sat down next to Raguel in the library. "It's one in the afternoon."

"Shit...shit, I missed my class." Raguel ran his hands over his face, fingers pinching his tear ducts and pushing up his glasses in the process. Faintly he started hearing the flipping of pages and books being stamped and someone giving a not so secret hand job behind the book shelf in the back. He made a mental note not to come back to the library when he's tired. The quiet made it too easy to fall asleep.

He flinched when a USB was dropped on the table front of him and he glanced at Lola, who sat with a thin smile. "I walked by and saw you were passed out in here, so I attended the class for you - recorder the whole thing for you and caught a nap while at it."

"You could've gotten into trouble." That was Raguel's way of saying thanks.

"You're welcome."

Raguel stuffed the USB into his bag, which had been his pillow moments before.

"I'm guessing you didn't get much sleep last night?"

"My mum needed a new asthma pump so I went out to get her one. The place I usually get it from was closed so I had to drive a million fucking miles to get one and ended up getting home at six in the morning."

"Jesus," she sighed. "Let's go get coffee."

"I have another lecture today."

"Which is exactly why you need coffee."

"I don't do caffeine."

"You do today. Come on."

His coffee had froth in the shape of a teddy bear face drifting in his cup. "Who decided bears are cute?"

"Rags, you sound drunk when you're tired, you know that? Just drink the damn coffee."

"They're big and vicious and, sure, they don't kill that many people each year, but that's because people know to stay the fuck away. So who decided they should turn a bear into a toy and stuff them in a child's hands, encouraging the idea that bears are cute and safe? Bears aren't cute."

Lola looked up from her black coffee, giving him a pout. "Did someone's mommy not give him a teddy bear when he was younger?"

"No, as a matter of fact. I had a sheep plush toy," he grumbled, killing his froth bear with his spoon and distorting the cute little face into something of a nightmarish image.

"Did he have a name?"

"McWoolly."

Lola laughed and drew a smile from Raguel.

He liked this coffee shop - not as much as his mom's - it had a relaxed atmosphere and outlets at the counter so he often came here with his laptop to work, and so did most of the other students like him. The computer programming kids who really were all just there because their asses started to hurt from sitting on their own chairs. He knew some of them, not by name, but by face. And they him.

He sometimes forgets how many students there really are at campus and the world isn't just two hundred future software developers, web designers and programmers who sat with blank expressions and listened to different music while they did the same work.

Since he first started at the university a few months ago, the first new person he's met is Luca. Not that he really knows her at all.

"Remember at that Beta party?"

"Yeah?" Lola was still looking at her phone, her eyebrows indicating that she was listening to him.

"Do you know that girl, Luca?"