Chapter Text
The first time Clive laid eyes on Jill Warrick, she was topless.
And no matter what she or anyone would say about it, it was an accident. He was not that kind of guy.
It was early in the morning—too early, in fact—but Dion had woken them all up to go for a run before classes. Clive, still bleary eyed, was brushing his teeth on his balcony, in hopes that the cool, morning temperature would shock his senses to a more awakened state.
He caught sight of her from across the street and had to do a double take.
Their gazes met and his jaw dropped to the floor, along with his toothbrush.
Astonishingly enough, she did not move to cover herself up.
Instead, she scowled, stuck a middle finger up at him, and sharply drew her curtains shut.
Joshua was meandering about in his older brother’s room with little purpose other than to aggravate him, as younger siblings tend to do.
He was recounting his latest antics with Dion and complaining about their overbearing mother, and Clive was hardly paying him any mind until he said, in the midst of his dictated stream of consciousness:
“Huh. You didn’t tell me you got a new neighbour?”
The occurrence was significant, because since Clive had moved into this room in his first year, the one directly opposite and across the road had remained unoccupied.
Not that Joshua made a habit of staring over at the girls dormitories often, of course. It was just that the bare window had been noticeable against the others either side of it, personalised by its occupants by the colours of their curtains and boy band posters tacked onto their walls.
Now, the room had a string of twinkling fairy lights dangling across its curtain pole and pale blue drapes. And as if on cue, they parted, and a girl emerged onto the balcony, absentmindedly plaiting her hair.
“Oh, and there’s the new tenant. I wonder why she moved in the middle of the school year—?”
“—Joshua, come away from there,” Clive startled him with an urgent tone.
He turned to his brother, now staring steadfastly down at his textbook whilst the skin on the nape of his neck boiled to an unnatural shade of red.
“Oh…?”
For a minute, the younger Rosfield glanced bewilderedly between his brother taut shoulders and the girl across the road; her pretty profile now visible to him as she tucked a strand of her silvery hair behind her ear and something clicked.
His lips stretched into a knowing smile.
“Oh…”
“Gav—”
“—Fuckin’ hell, Rosfield!” the boy leapt up from his desk, slamming his laptop shut. “You can’t just be bursting in like that! What if I—what if I had a girl in here or something?!”
Joshua took a moment to survey his friend’s adequately empty room, before placing a solemn palm over his left breast and bowing deeply.
“Then you must let me express my deepest apologies to you and your hand.”
He manages to tamper down Gav’s innately violent reaction by disclosing his urgent news: Clive was in love and was obviously in need of their help to do anything about it.
Gav folded his arms over his chest, his lips thinning in an expression of doubt.
“Ehh, are you sure about this?”
“Of course I am!” Joshua professed. “He’s pining for his pretty new neighbour who’s just moved in across the street! Come, see!”
The duo were soon clambering over each other out on his balcony to catch a glimpse but their view was obstructed, as Gav’s room was five doors down from Clive’s.
“Even if you are right, how do we get ‘im to talk to her?” he asked and Joshua shrugged. Apparently, his grand plan for action had not developed any further beyond its inception.
Collectively, they lamented, already somewhat defeated due to two, important factors:
The first, was that Clive Rosfield—despite being the most handsome motherfucker Gav has had the pleasure of having to stand next to for the past five years—had absolutely no game whatsoever.
It was as if the creator had put a hundred percent of his stats towards his attractiveness and left absolutely zero for self awareness.
And it wasn’t that Clive was dull personality-wise either: his upper class upbringing made him charming and charismatic, and he was a naturally sweet, hard working young lad who just happened to also be so utterly oblivious when it came to the opposite sex that it physically hurt to watch.
The second was their unique setting. Rosalith Boarding School was a co-educational institution, but the male and female students did not have classes or spend any significant time together at all.
The founders and faculty were of the belief that keeping the two separate during class reduced any cause for distraction, allowing only scheduled and stilted interaction between the sexes in controlled environments such as in study halls or school wide social functions.
The dormitory buildings were, of course, also segregated. They consisted of two, identical stone brick buildings on opposite sides of a narrow, private street. Surrounding each of the buildings was an eight-foot tall wall and an iron gate, accessible only by key-card and manned by campus security 24-7.
Adding barbed wire and flood lights to the scene would not have looked out of place.
Dion was on a health kick, which apparently meant that everyone else was on one too, and for about a month now he, the Rosfield brothers and occasionally Gav had been getting up at six in the morning to join him for a run before class.
They ran a route four or five times around the perimeter of campus, toward the manicured grounds and through the woods, which meant that they could not avoid passing through the private road between the student dormitories at least a couple of times.
During one particular session that Clive had complained was going on for far too long, he stopped, doubling over to catch his breath unintentionally beneath his new neighbours balcony.
He straightened up and tipped his head back to get more air into his lungs and his gaze fell directly in line with the silver haired girl from across the street, leaning on the metal railings with a mug of something hot in her hands.
She looked down at him without expression and his immediate reaction was to launch himself into a full sprint in the opposite direction.
Dion watched on as he tripped over his feet with some amusement.
“That her?” he asked, tipping his chin up at the girl as they passed at a more leisurely pace.
Joshua grinned.
“Yeah. That’s her.”
They asked around about her, figuring it would be easy enough to learn her name at the very least, what with her main-character hair colour and the usual buzz that came with the arrival of a new transfer student.
Unfortunately, between the three of them, they were not able to find out much else other than the fact that she was from the North and that she kept largely to herself. No one they asked had much to offer on her movements either: what classes she took, or what clubs or extracurriculars she had signed up for.
Convincing Clive to introduce himself to her was turning out to be near enough impossible if they couldn’t even track her down.
So, one morning, Gav arrived at their running congregation wearing a backpack, which was odd but not enough for Clive to bother questioning it.
They went about their usual route, and by the third or fourth lap that passed through the private road of the dormitory buildings, Clive chanced a look up at that balcony again and sure enough, she was there and she was laughing.
At him, apparently.
Like hysterical, clutching her sides laughing.
Confused, Clive self-consciously slowed his pace, a sense of panic settling in because—was there something on his face?—only for his friends to cannonball into the back of him at full speed.
“Hey, what the fu—?!”
And that was when he realised that Gav, who had been running directly behind him, was holding open a large notepad that said: ‘CLIVE ROSFIELD’ on it, and an arrow pointing at his head.
He contemplated skipping out on the run the next day, partially because he was so embarrassed that he could die, but mostly because he decided that it was time to find new friends.
“Aw, c’mon Clive. Don’t look so grumpy, ey.”
“Yeah, Clive, we were only trying to help.”
He cast them all a withering look and decided that they did not deserve to know the truth.
“It’s…it’s not what you guys think…”
They set off the next morning with Clive straggling behind, eyes fixed on the ground ahead of him.
Passing the girls dormitories with his head bent low, it took only Joshua’s excitable: “Clive, look! LOOK!” for him to glance up, alerted by his urgent tone.
He was pointing up at the balcony, practically bouncing rather than jogging, with Dion next to him and pondering out loud: “huh? What does she mean by that?”
That was what prompted him to finally look up, finding that the girl was holding up her own sign for him today.
‘JILL WARRICK’ it said. ‘DID YOU LIKE THE VIEW?’
There was no avoiding it: he had to tell them what happened.
And instead of understanding, sympathy or a fucking apology, he was accorded with their cackling laughter.
He grit his teeth as Gav clapped him so hard on the back that he almost spilt his drink.
“Christ alive, Clive. Only you could get yourself so worked up like this after seeing a pair of tits!”
The next morning, Clive had prepared his own sign.
As inefficient as the mode of exchange was, he needed to clear some things up, and with what little they knew about the girl so far, he saw no other way in doing so.
This time, she was reading, elbows perched over the railings with the wind blowing through her hair and ruffling at the pages.
She seemed to be an early riser, and seemed to not mind the cold because she wasn’t wearing much else but a camisole top and a pair of pyjama shorts.
His throat flashed at the sight of her.
He waited until his friend-traitors passed and were out of his line of vision to wave awkwardly to get her attention. She dropped her book away from her face to look at him with a slight tilt to her head.
‘I’M SORRY. IT WAS AN ACCIDENT,' his sign read, with a smaller message underneath that said: ‘I’M NOT A PERVERT.’
He held the sign up long enough for her to read it, before lowering it back down and smiling sheepishly.
She shook her head in amusement, trying to stop a grin from stretching across her lips and somehow, Clive knew that he was forgiven.
This carried on for about a week; simple innocent exchanges of: ‘GOOD MORNING, HAVE A GOOD RUN TODAY :)’ and: ‘WHAT ARE YOU READING?’ and: ‘OMG I LOVE THAT PLAY!’
Unlike before, Clive seemed to look forward to their morning runs and the others were genuinely happy for him.
It was progress—it was just really fucking slow—and for a man of action like Dion Lesage, it was excruciatingly painful to watch.
Even though it was obvious that Clive was infatuated with the Warrick girl beyond the fact that she had a nice pair (if you were into that kind of thing), Dion had to know if those sentiments were returned.
Most people were attracted to Clive, of course. Even people who disliked him couldn’t insult him without commenting on how handsome he was, remembering once being in PE with him when they were playing a game of dodgeball and hearing the rival team shout:
“Get Rosfield! But…try not to aim for his face…!”
With their distance, physical attraction was all they had to go on for now, and given that Clive had already gotten an eyeful of her goods, Dion thought it only fair that Warrick should be given the opportunity to see the full package too (pun very much intended).
One morning and during their usual route, Dion asked the group to stop whilst he refilled his water bottle at a drinking fountain.
Clive was conversing with Joshua, paying him no mind, when he—air quotations—‘tripped’ and spilt the entire contents of it onto Clive’s front, making no effort whatsoever for it to look like an accident.
“Oh noooo~” he said in a monotonous tone. “What have I done~?”
Clive shrieked.
“Dion, what the hell?!”
“My bad, my bad…”
Dion watched, pleased with himself, as Clive fruitlessly tried to wring out the material of his shirt to see if it was somewhat salvageable.
“…Yeah, you should probably take that off before you catch a cold.”
In reluctant agreement, Clive pulled the shirt over his head and used whatever part left of it that was dry to pat himself down.
Gav looked upon his perfectly chiselled abs with disgust.
“God, I hate you so much.”
“I should go get another shirt,” Clive went to leave, but Dion stood in front of him to block the way.
“No need, Rosfield, no need,” he insisted. “We’ve only one more lap to go, anyway.”
Finishing up, they were making their way back to the dorms when Clive couldn’t help but notice how Dion and Joshua were snickering to themselves as they passed underneath Jill’s balcony.
By the time he looked up at her himself, the girl was bright red with a hand over the lower half of her face to cover an impending nosebleed.
Joshua had his own sign the next day and the moment Jill saw it, she turned tail and ran back inside before Clive could tackle him to the ground.
‘HEY JILL,’ it said. ‘DID YOU LIKE THE VIEW?’
Gav was lacing up his running shoes as Clive prepared his daily message to his beloved.
From where he was sitting, perched on the end of Clive’s bed, he could see that the boy was writing something unbearably mundane about the recent weather.
He shook his head to himself, in a mixture of amusement and frustration.
“Clive, this is cute as hell but how do you expect to get to know her better this way?”
Dion hummed in agreement and Clive didn’t even have the decency to look up at either of them.
“What do you guys expect me to do? Scale up the side of a building, jump up onto her balcony and introduce myself?”
“That would be incredibly romantic!” Joshua gushed.
Eventually it was decided that, if the written word was his preferred method of communication, Clive should write her a letter.
They started their run a little later today, so that Clive could scribble her a quick note: beginning it with an excuse about his notepad being hard to carry whilst he runs, and then asking how her week was going; what exams was she sitting for and if she would be visiting Eastpool on the weekend.
He hesitates before signing it off, and hands it to Dion before he could change his mind. His friend scanned the letter quickly before making a bored face, but decided not to push his luck.
“This is stupid,” Clive sighed, disheartened by his reaction. “How would I even get it to her?”
But he should have known that Joshua Rosfield—warrior of love—always has a plan.
Returning from his room, his younger brother proudly presented their vessel: a plastic ball procured from one of those vending machines that spit out cheap toys and opened up in halves.
He folds the letter into the tiniest square, stuffs it in and clicks it shut, and is waving it triumphantly in Clive’s face despite the sceptical look on it.
They make for their usual route, stopping outside of the girls dormitories where Jill was already out on her balcony to greet them with a sign that said: ‘GOOD MORNING. LOVELY WEATHER TODAY :)’.
Gav groaned when he saw it.
“Fuck me, you two are made for each other.”
Joshua goes to hand his brother the ball, but Clive shied away from it.
He pressed it into his chest, “c’mon Clive,” he goaded at him. “It’s now or never.”
Clive looked up at Jill, her head tilting as she tried to make sense of their loitering longer than usual.
It was a long way up.
“I can’t,” he shook his head, in one last futile attempt to abort mission.
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t be able to throw it that far,” he reasoned, adding after they exchanged an incredulous look between them: “look, if I was good at ball sports, I wouldn't be on the fencing team!”
“I’ll do it then,” Dion announced, gallantly stepping up to the task.
For some reason, this put everyone else in a state of unease.
“Dion—”
“—Relax, Rosfield,” he said, patting him on the shoulder. “Didn’t you know? I threw javelin for my county in Sanbreque for years.”
He plucks the ball from Joshua’s hands, deftly tossing it up and catching it a couple of times as he paced backwards a few steps to assess the trajectory.
“Watch the master at work,” he winks and releases the ball with a cocky smile.
He misses, of course.
He doesn’t even make it close, only managing to get the ball as high as the floor below Jill’s, three whole windows to the left of where her balcony was and land it with a sound of shattering glass.
Jill spread her hands over her mouth to suppress a delighted kind of yelp, her eyes shining with a mischievous gleam.
Clive is struck dumb, for more reasons than one.
Oh shit. She’s so cute.
“Hmm…” Dion was, astonishingly, unperturbed. “…It appears that I did not account for the wind.”
Gav gaped at him.
“The fucking—wind?”
In his stupor, Clive didn’t seem to register a campus security officer approaching to investigate the commotion, not until Joshua was urgently tugging at the sleeve of his jersey and yelling:
“Clive, what the hell are you doing?! RUN!”
Unfortunately, Mr Murdoch, Head of Campus Security, had been witness to the entire affair and by that same afternoon, all four of them were summoned to meet with Byron Rosfield, Clive and Joshua’s paternal uncle and Headmaster of Rosalith Boarding School.
He asked them: “what in the world were you boys thinking?” and answered Joshua’s passionate proclamation of: “but he’s in love, your honour!” with a weary sigh.
Punishment was relatively light because of, well, nepotism.
In the end, all they got was one week's worth of detention and a thousand written lines between them of:
‘I will not damage school property in the pursuit of love.’
It was a free period and the group were in the senior students library, which was one of the few places on campus where the genders could mix—under the close and watchful eye of Charon the librarian, of course.
Jill Warrick was, despairingly, nowhere to be seen and they all had at this point resigned to the fact that either her class schedule did not coincide with Clive’s, or that she preferred to study in her room.
Clive was, once again, the only one doing actual school work whilst Dion, sitting next to him, was folding paper aeroplanes and testing their flight path across the room (apparently he had something to prove).
In the meanwhile, Gav and Joshua were conversing quietly with Tarja, a friend of Gav’s since primary school who had since been indoctrinated into their friendship group as a disgruntled and unwilling observer of their shenanigans.
She was caught up quickly, flipping through Clive’s notepad and reading their correspondence as Joshua relayed their failed attempt in delivering Jill a letter.
“…So now we’re just looking into other ways to get it to her that doesn’t involve breaking windows,” Joshua concluded, motioning to Dion whose latest paper aeroplane did a disappointing loop in the air rather than make any significant distance.
Tarja sighed and held up a page that Clive had written in block capitals, wishing Jill luck in her mock exams.
“I don’t understand why you won’t just ask for her number?” she said, and was met with collective silence.
“Oh…”
“Idiots.”
But, of course, Clive wasn’t going to do that.
He wasn’t going to stand underneath her balcony, holding up a sign with his number on it, expecting her to call.
He might as well turn up with a boombox above his head playing ‘In Your Eyes’ by Peter Gabriel like John Cusack did in Say Anything.
“I mean, that would be incredibly romantic—”
“—Joshua, I love you but please die.”
Clive would not budge on this, and because Joshua would not stop whining about his brother being a stubborn bastard, Tarja decided that it was about time to take matters into her own hands.
They were all hanging out in Clive’s room again, for reasons that he could not comprehend, when Joshua’s phone began to ring with an incoming call from Tarja.
He wedged the device between his cheek and his shoulder, unwilling to pause his game of Mario Kart against Gav and Dion, especially when he was in first place.
“Hey. What’s up, T?”
“I can’t find her,” came her irritated tone. “She’s an enigma. A figment of your imaginations, created by the single brain cell you all seem to share.”
Even as she said this, they could all quite clearly see Jill’s profile through her window across the road, sitting at her desk.
Joshua paused their game—Rainbow Road could wait in such circumstances—and put her on speaker phone as he, Gav and Dion crowded onto Clive’s small balcony.
The man himself glanced up from his book at the movement, but was too resigned to their overbearing interest to bother to protest anymore.
Leaning over the railings, they spotted Tarja on her own balcony on the first floor across the street, looking up at them with an exaggerated shrug.
“I can’t work it out,” she continued. “Is she on the third floor or the fourth floor?”
“Fourth, clearly,” Joshua replied, and Dion did a quick count.
“Six windows from the right.”
“Your right or my right?”
“Ours.”
“But I looked everywhere on that floor!”
“Well, look harder…!”
Joshua groaned. They were getting nowhere.
“Gav, you have a nose for this sort of thing,” he said, in a eureka kind of moment. “What do you think?”
Gav hummed as he held his chin in his hand, surveying the building with a ruminative look.
“Well, if the layout is similar to ours, those windows there—” he pointed, “—would be common areas. And I’d guess that window there’d be the stairwell too.”
Tarja craned her neck up to see where he was pointing and was silent for a drawn out minute.
“…Shit, you’re right.”
Gav snorted.
“Now who’s the idiot?”
When Tarja knocks on Jill Warrick’s door—for real this time—she is met with the girl with blonde hair, tied into a long braid that went all the way down past her waist.
“Jill…?” she peered at her.
“Nah, it’s Mid,” she replied and Tarja wanted to hit her head against a wall.
“Right,” she sighed, heavily. “Sorry for disturbing you—”
“—If you’re looking for Jill Warrick though,” the girl jerked a thumb to her left. “She’s next door.”
Less than an hour later, Clive receives a text from Tarja that says nothing else but: You’re welcome, and is instantly plunged into a state of crippling anxiety.
It doesn’t help when the four of them start flapping about in his room yelling at each other:
“Oh my GOD—!”
“—It’s happening, IT’S HAPPENING—”
“—Stay calm! Stay FUCKING CALM!”
Disappointingly, she does not call straight away, or for several hours. By the time they are told to return to their rooms for lights out, Clive has to practically push them out of his door.
As a means of a distraction, he takes to his desk to study his history books, something that he usually enjoys and can get immersed in with no issue, but finds himself having to read the same page at least twenty times to get the information to stick.
Finally, and just as he was on the verge of giving up to turn in for the night, his phone comes to life with a call from an unknown number and he almost topples out of his chair.
He tries to remember what Dion told him to do: to wait until it rang at least five times and then to sound distracted—like he had not been waiting around all afternoon and into the evening for her to call—and then to oh-so-casually mention that he had just got out of the shower to encourage the mental image.
He does none of this and answers halfway through the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Clive?”
“Jill…”
The tension in his shoulders released at the sound of her voice. He had spent weeks wondering what it would be like and it was better than anything he could have imagined.
“Um, hi,” she says, her tone a little softer, a little more bashful, and he practically melts. “Have I caught you at a bad time?”
“No, never.”
He slaps a hand over his forehead the second the words left his mouth.
Be cool be cool be cool be cool.
Jill laughs like she heard the contact. The sound is like music to his ears.
“Great. Well, can you come out onto your balcony? I want to show you something,” she said, then adding as an afterthought: “and it’s not my chest, this time.”
Clive coloured, “I wasn’t thinking—”
“—I’m just kidding around, Clive.”
The sun had long set by now and the only sources of light outside were the stars and Jill’s desk lamp, a faint gleam seeping out onto her balcony from the inside of her room outlining her in a pale, yellow light.
As he steps out, shutting the door behind him, she gives him a tentative wave in a greeting and he manages a small “hi” over the phone when he sees her.
“Hey,” she replies. Then, she tilted her chin. “Look up.”
In his shameless fixation on the girl, Clive hadn’t noticed the full moon that hung above them which, in the clear and cloudless night, looked larger than he’d ever seen it before.
“Wow,” Clive breathed. “It looks closer than usual, somehow.”
“Yes, it’s called a supermoon,” Jill explained. “It happens only when the moon’s orbit is the closest to the earth. It’s rarely at its fullest when it does, or even on this clear a night. It’s quite beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Clive said, looking straight at her. “It is…”
And if he could see a little better, he would have noticed that she was blushing.
“…It’s nice to be able to finally talk,” Jill admits, after half a minute’s silence. “I’ve wanted to ask you some things for a while.”
“Oh, like what?”
“Well, first,” he could hear the smirk in her voice. “About that broken window?”
Clive cringed and messed with the hair on the back of his head.
“Yeah, about that,” he cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about my friends. They—um, well, I was trying to get a letter to you.”
“A letter?” Jill repeated, pleasantly taken aback. “Then I’m disappointed I didn’t get to read it. It went through the window of a girl called Astra, who might be in love with you now, by the way…”
They laughed at this, whatever awkwardness melting away as they spoke, for hours it seemed, making up for lost time in their weeks of limited interactions and growing curiosities about each other.
Clive did not want the call to end—he could speak with her until morning, he thought—but eventually he heard her yawn and apologise in the midst of it: assuring him that it was because it was late, that she was more of a morning person, and not because she wasn’t enjoying their conversation.
“You're right. I guess it is getting late,” he replied, straightening up himself from where he was leaning on the railings of his balcony. “We should probably go to sleep.”
Neither of them move, however, one waiting for the other to speak again until Clive built up his resolve and swallowed down his doubts and asked:
“Can…can I call you tomorrow?”
“I’d like that,” Jill smiled. “Goodnight then, Clive.”
Art by multiakimo.
Art by puppetbomb.