Bellsa is Suffering

mainfic/prequel up at: http://pastebin.com/SD5tr6aP

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Belle dragged herself out of the moor and back to the lecture. Nothing but a relatively simple equation marked the board when she had first opened her novel. Now it might as well have been covered in runes. /Well, that was fun while it lasted/, she thought, and traded her novel for her textbook. She scanned the desks around her for an idea of a page, a chapter, anything. Five? She thought they were on five. They had been on five last class, anyway.

 

A lanky boy with long blonde hair sat slumped over the desk in the row underneath her, his textbook wide open and in clear view. Belle craned her neck. /5.4/. She flipped to the section. She looked back up at the boy again. Braids were cool. He looked like a wiry, flannel-clad Viking, kind of, with the braid. Which was cool. Very cool.

 

He turned around in his chair and Belle froze. She was if he noticed her stare, he didn’t show it. The blonde glared up at the clock behind her head, and Belle’s world shrunk down to two matters of fact. One: she, not he, was wearing a form-fitting black tank top with a relatively low neckline under her unbuttoned flannel shirt. Belle had a spectacular view. Two: she had bright blue eyes, icy eyes, high cheekbones, and a neck that plunged and dipped into her collarbone.

 

“God fucking damn it,” the woman muttered, and turned back around in her seat.

 

Belle felt her face flush, Belle felt light, Belle thought, /Oh, no/.

 

 

                                                *       *       *

 

Belle knew that she liked girls since high school--not that she liked them specifically, just, everyone is beautiful in one light or another, girls and men both. But she’d never asked one out. She wasn’t sure if she had done it right. Belle played the conversation back over in her head, open novel be damned. She hadn’t babbled, and she hadn’t brought up books, which was good, nothing made the eyes of her peers glaze over quicker than when she brought up the books. Maybe she had come on too strong. But that woman, and her eyes, and her collarbone, and--it had been a couple days. How long did girls normally wait to call you back?

 

Belle’s phone buzzed. She reminded herself that she had blocked Adam, Adam was on mood stabilizers, Adam was fine and very far from her. She didn't recognize the number.

 

It was the girl, from class. The woman’s name was Elsa, and she agreed to a date. Elsa. It was a name out of a novel.

 

Belle stared at the screen of her phone. /She wants to get lunch/, she told herself. Her pulse hummed. Elsa hadn’t been repulsed. That was, well, a small miracle. The call alone was a miracle, her agreeing to a date--

 

/It was like this at first with Adam, too, and you don’t even know her yet/, a voice in the back of her head said. It sounded suspiciously like Gaston. That was horrifying, Gaston, her voice of reason. /She'll stop talking to you once she knows you better, Adam was the only one who would put up with you before. And look at him/.

 

/Maybe/, Belle thought. /But anything can happen. This could be something good/.