Patrick "Dez" Kavanagh

First week of the semester at Bramford always hits the same way. Old brick climbing around manicured courtyards, bikes cutting across the paths too fast, expensive cars idling past students nursing iced coffees like a personality trait. By ten in the morning the Commons is already overflowing, every table claimed, every conversation half-performed for whoever's close enough to overhear.

Dez's at one of the outdoor tables like he owns it. Technically he doesn't. Emotionally he settled that question years ago. The oversized white graphic tee stretches tight across his chest and gut, baggy jeans bunched over sneakers under the table, a blue beaded bracelet riding his wrist and a star shaped keychain swinging every time he shifts his weight. Sunglasses shoved up into the mess of black curls, saved for outside, for later, for anyone who happens to be looking.

"I'm telling you, the valuation is completely wrong." The sentence comes out fast enough that Jeanne barely gets his coffee to his mouth before it's interrupted again. Patrick taps his phone against the table like a gavel. "They're looking at historical performance without accounting for the expansion. I wrote about it before. That's lazy analysis, Jean. You can't take three years, slap a growth percentage on it, and call yourself an investor. Boring."

Jeanne lowers the cup slowly. "You're talking about a sandwich shop, Dez."

"It's a business."

"It's a sandwich shop, Dez."

"Businesses are businesses."

"You've been on this for twenty minutes."

"Because you're not listening to me and my essay."

"I am listening."

"No, you're hearing me. Different mf thing..." He says it like it's obvious, like Jeanne should already know the distinction, and doesn't notice or doesn't care that Jeanne's version of listening involves counting the minutes until he stops.

A couple of students pass and wave; Desmond lifts a hand without breaking stride on the sentence. Someone shouts his name from across the Commons and he shouts something back, some half formed joke that lands anyway, and folds straight back into the point about margins like the interruption never happened. It's not that he's performing for the Commons. It's that he's stopped being able to tell the difference between talking to Jeanne and talking to everyone within earshot.

The black haired man stops mid word. Attention drags toward the admin building on its own, before he's decided to look. A face he doesn't know. That alone is strange enough to register, given how few faces at Bramford manage to stay unfamiliar to him past the first week. His eyes narrow, doing the math before he's aware he's doing it.

Transfer... student... mhm. Old or New money? Weird, no one posted abour her inscription online yet... Perhaps influential?

He can tell from the paperwork alone, the specific kind of lost that only comes from being handed the wrong building three times in a row and getting every recruiting thing behind your back—he's been there on his first day too.

Jeanne follows his line of sight and sighs before Desmond's said anything. "No."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking about it."

"I'm allowed to be curious."

"You're never just curious, man."

And Patrick doesn't argue the point, mostly because he knows Jeanne's right and has no interest in admitting it out loud and less in here. He finishes his coffee in one go, sets it down with more finality than the moment requires, and stands.

"I'm going over there."

"Of course you are. You goofball, sit dow—sheesh." Jeanne doesn't even look up now, already resigned to whatever the next twenty minutes are going to cost him socially.

Patrick adjusts the hoodie, drops the sunglasses onto his face with the unhurried confidence of a man who has never once considered minding his own business nor needed to actually mind it, and crosses the Commons like the distance belongs to him too. He stops a comfortable, deliberate few feet away like the gentleman he is to not crowd her, respectfully staring, too. Says nothing for a sec, just long enough to be noticed because, if you ask me, his stare is strong as it is lazy, before the crooked grin shows up, chipped tooth and all.

"Transfer student?" Casual, like they've done this before. His eyes flick to the stack of forms in her hands before coming back up. "I'm Patrick... Desmond Kavanagh. Dez is fine, everyone calls me that. Like everybody. Seriously." He tips his head toward the admin building without looking at it. "Whoever handed you those owes you an apology, by the way. Bramford's paperwork situation is a competitive sport nobody warns you about. Anyways, seems you went through all the pamphlets of the sororities and sports..."

His charming grin widens, so easy and unbothered, already halfway to enjoying himself because the new face is round and adorable, uh-huh. "Welcome to Bramford. Might I recommend myself to help?"

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Mid-afternoon at The Brewpoint always carried the flat clatter of porcelain saucers, the low hiss of the steam wand, and the sharp scent of burnt grounds fighting the cold air drafting in through the double doors. Outside, the October wind had stripped half the elms along the path toward Ferris Hall, leaving dry yellow leaves scraping across the flagstones. Inside, students hovered over open laptops, sharing power banks and comparing microeconomics problem sets while pretending not to track who was sitting with whom.

A barista with a lean, wiry build, deep mahogany skin, and a faded buzzcut set a fresh paper sleeve onto an espresso cup, the back of his hand showing a pale, milk-white patch of vitiligo across two knuckles. He slid the drink across the counter without looking up, caught in the rhythm of the afternoon rush.

Patrick, meanwhile, had been fine—entirely fine—right up until the sentence about the sorority calendar landed between them.

"No, wait." Patrick set his phone down face-up on the wooden table like the conversation had suddenly earned his complete attention, which it had. The impact made the half-empty ceramic mugs rattle. "Say that again. Say the actual thing you said... Repeat."

He leaned forward, heavy elbows planting hard on the dark wood. The movement bunched the heavy cotton of his oversized green sweatshirt across his chest and the soft, substantial shelf of his belly, his broad shoulders hunching up near his ears. His warm, freckled knuckles curled against the tabletop, thick fingers tapping an agitated beat. He watched the explanation come out, taking in the careful, measured shape of it, while internally deciding not to accept a single reasonable syllable.

"Right, no, I heard you the first time, I'm not deaf, I'm." He dragged a large, soft hand back through the thick mess of his dark curls, dislodging a stubborn wave that instantly sprang right back down against his forehead. "I'm processing. Because what I'm hearing is you've got a mixer, sorority mixer. On the exact day of my handball match. Which, coincidence, fine, I'll allow coincidence exists." His voice carried easily, thick and loud enough to turn a couple of heads two tables over. He didn't sound like he allowed coincidence at all. "But what I'm also hearing, underneath that, is that you'd rather not be sitting in those bleachers watching me get thrown around a court in shorts that don't flatter anybody, not guys who look like Trent."

He caught the expression across from him. He didn't slow down for it. The silver bands on his teeth caught the overhead track lighting as he kept steamrolling ahead, gesturing with both hands so wide that his sleeve nearly clipped the lip of his coffee mug on the follow-through.

"I'm not saying you said that. I'm saying I'm capable of reading a room, and the room is saying it's convenient timing." His round, chubby face was already heating up, faint red blooming beneath the dusting of brown freckles on his cheeks and the bridge of his crooked nose. "And look, I get it, I do, I'm not exactly the guy you put on a recruiting poster. I'm aware. I've been aware since. But I want you to know, for the record, I've never once, not one single time, taken my shirt off after a match like some frat idiot doing a victory lap for the girls in the stands. I've got dignity. I sweat through my jersey like a normal person and I go home."

Somewhere in the back of his mind, a quiet, distant voice was pointing out that absolutely nobody had accused him of taking his jersey off. He ran straight over that thought.

"If this is a whole thing where you're worried about what people think, watching your... whatever this is, your Patrick, huffing around a court looking like this—" He gestured down at his own frame, at the heavy, soft width of his waist, the roll of stomach resting against the table edge, with a bluntness that wasn't self-deprecation and wasn't quite a dare either. "—I need you to know that's not a you problem I'm letting become a me problem. I've spent my whole life being stared at. I can survive you looking at me too. And I want you to."

He finally ran out of breath.

The silence of the cafe rushed in to fill the crater he had just dug. A laptop keyboard clacked nearby. The espresso grinder roared for three seconds and died out. Patrick sat there with his mouth slightly parted, chest rising and falling beneath the thick fabric of his hoodie, the momentum draining out of him all at once.

He looked at the papers tucked into the corner of the table, the schedule packet with the academic honor society —honor sorority, uh?— crest stamped on the front, the references to GPA minimums and scheduled study-hall hours. The realization landed slow and heavy, an actual flicker of sheepish defeat twitching at the corner of his mouth before he scrambled to cover it with a crooked, lopsided grin that failed entirely to reach his eyes. I screwd it.

Patrick cleared his throat, rubbing the back of his thick neck where the hair curled down against his collar. "...Was any part of that close to what you meant, or did I fully lose my mind in front of you for no fucking reason?"

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