Archive of Our Own ^beta

Truth or Dare

***

“‘Im?”

“Too… scrawny. What about him?”

“Too brawny. ‘E seems one word away from ripping off ‘is shirt.”

“You’re right, as usual, my flower. What about…”

“Zat eez ze one.”

“Oh, he’s perfect. We’ve found him.”

“Dieu merci.”

***

Harry entered the cafeteria on his first day of ‘college’, an oddly pronounced word for the American university he’d taken an abroad placement at, and looked around at the utter chaos.

There were students strewn across the room, all in casual clothes, shouting and laughing and some were even playing loud music on their phones. Most people seemed to have energy drinks rather than food from any of the vendors set up inside the cafeteria, but Harry was starving so he went and bought a sandwich before trying to find a place to sit.

That was the part he’d been most anxious over. Not any cultural differences, not even standing out like a sore thumb with his British accent, but… but it was rather difficult to make friends. Harry never had any luck back in Little Whining Primary, and God knew people didn’t care to make friends with him at St Brutus’s. Of course, Harry hadn’t been too keen on befriending any of those blokes either, considering they terrified the hell out of him, but still, it had been a rather lonely life until then.

Inheriting a bank account full of a frankly mad amount of money from the parents he’d never known had been Harry’s ticket away from the loneliness, a ticket to something better, but then he had to do some work for himself.

“I am free to choose and I am not free from the consequences of my choices,” Harry muttered to himself as he scanned the room. It was one of many affirmations from St Brutus’s that had been, rather literally, beat in to him. It was the same affirmation Harry had chanted when he’d paid for the study abroad program and hopped on a plane for the States.

Spotting a girl sitting at one of the round tables by herself, Harry hesitantly made his way over to her. She had headphones in, a head full of frizzy blonde curls, and Harry thought she looked familiar from one of his morning classes.

The girl looked up when Harry approached and he awkwardly raised his hand.

“Er… hello,” he said politely. “May I sit here?”

Idiot, Harry berated himself when the girl popped out one of her white earphones.

Why was a task as simple as speaking with others so… so horribly uncomfortable? Harry could blame the seven years he spent at a school where you weren’t allowed to socialize except for a heavily supervised thirty minutes a day, or a lifetime spent with relatives who had no desire to hear anything Harry had to say. Truthfully though, Harry thought he had just been born awkward and uncomfortable. Harry Potter, too awkward to make mates. Harry Potter, uncomfortable in his own skin.

The girl smiled brightly at him anyway though.

“Hi!” she said warmly. “I didn’t hear you? Did you want to sit?”

“Yes, please,” Harry said. He sat down and placed his sandwich on the table in front of him.

“I’m Jessica,” the girl said. She offered Harry a tan hand with bright pink fingernails.

“Harry,” Harry said, shaking her hand briefly. “Er… I think we’re in Math 118 together?”

The girl tilted her head to the side and squeezed one eye closed as she studied Harry carefully.

“Yes!” she suddenly cried. “I remember now because I thought it was totally weird that you wore a tie to school!”

Harry’s face turned a horrible shade of red and he ducked his head in embarrassment.

He’d thought he dressed casual with just a button down shirt and tie and a pair of black trousers, much more casual than he’d had to wear on formal events at St Brutus’s. He’d been wrong though, as soon as he left his dorm he realized that blue jeans and hoodies, such as the orange and black one Jessica wore with their school logo on it, had been the more acceptable clothing.

He’d stuffed the tie in his bag after his first class, but he didn’t have time to change, didn’t have the proper clothes to wear anyway, so he’d suffered the odd looks all day.

“Thought I’d dress up for the first day,” Harry said with a weak smile.

Jessica’s responding smile was much more sure and probably ten degrees warmer than it had been before.

“Are schools really formal in… wherever you’re from?”

“Yes,” Harry said, relieved to pin his awkwardness on England and not his own inability to read a room. “England, Surrey, actually.”

“I’ve been to London once,” Jessica said.

Harry’s responding hum, a sound he’d never truly had trained out of him, had been all the reply Jessica needed before she began describing a city that Harry had only ever seen in textbooks. It was another relief to listen to Jessica talk while he ate; she didn’t seem to really require much conversation, just a listening ear.

Maybe she was lonely as well? Or, probably more likely, she just liked talking.

He’d been politely nodding his way through a story Jessica was telling about a cheerleading tournament from her high school, when a group of students walked in and immediately caught Harry’s attention.

Harry assumed the group of students caught everyone’s attention, and if they didn’t, they should, because they were stunning.

There were seven of them, each as beautiful as the next. A tall boy with thick blonde hair, lean and tense as he looked around the room before smiling kindly down at the short and fairy-like girl who waltzed by his side. She had huge round eyes, framed by lashes as dark as her short hair was.

Behind them walked a boy with bronze hair, nearly a mixture of dark red and blonde when he passed in front of the window, hand-clasped with a girl with shoulder length dark brown curls. The girl with the curls let out a musical laugh when she was shouldered playfully by a boy who looked as if he ate testosterone in the mornings and majored in athletics. He was thick and brawny, with short cropped black hair, and dimples in his cheeks when he his booming laugh filled the room.

The most breathtaking of the group were the two girls who walked silently behind the group, also hand-in-hand. The taller of the two girls had wavy blonde hair, a small beauty mark on the crevice between her cheek and her upper lip. The girl behind her, a cold mirror to the blonde’s looks, was no less beautiful. She had long white-blonde hair, perfectly straight, features so pale and flawless that she may as well have been a porcelain doll. The girl with the lighter and straighter hair was shorter than the girl she held hands with, but she carried herself so confidently that Harry doubted if the other girl felt that much taller.

He would have continued to covertly gawk at them, but he got caught.

Just before the two blondes sat with the rest of their group at an empty table by the frosted window, they simultaneously looked directly at Harry. Harry was only caught by their identical golden colored eyes for a moment before he realized how horribly rude it was to stare and he ducked his head with a harsh blush.

He really hoped the tinkling laugh he heard didn’t come from one of them.

“What are you— ooh.” Jessica had twisted her head around to look toward the group and she faced Harry with an understanding smile. “They’re like really pretty, right?”

Harry lifted his head and glanced at the group once more before nodding in agreement. They were really pretty. And, Harry bitterly noted, the bronze haired boy wore a tie.

Harry kind of doubted if anyone thought he was weird for it.

“They all came from out of state,” Jessica offered helpfully. “They’re roommates, I guess. I heard they rent a house off-campus anyway.”

A luxury Harry hadn’t considered when he enrolled at Buffalo State College. He’d thought after sharing a cell dorm with a dozen other boys for the last seven years that he’d be comfortable in the two-person dorm room he selected when he sent in his application. And he probably would eventually be comfortable, if his roommate, a short boy with dark brown hair and braces, Brock Ramsey, ever stopped staring at Harry like he was an interesting insect every time he saw him.

“Oh! And Fleur, that’s the extra pretty one, is a foreign exchange student, or whatever, like you!” Jessica said brightly.

“Er… which one is that?” Harry asked curiously. They were all ‘extra pretty’.

Jessica twisted in her seat and began pointing at them, as if that wouldn’t get a person ten whacks with a cane at St Brutus’s.

“So the blonde guy is Jasper, his girlfriend is Alice, the short one with the spiky hair. She’s super friendly, really perky though.”

Harry could see that, as Alice began laughing brightly while Jasper rolled his eyes with a slight smirk on his lips at whatever was being discussed amongst them.

“And Bella, she’s the one with the brown curls and she’s married to Edward. Isn’t that like insane? They’re our age!”

Harry looked at the two that Jessica pointed out and thought they looked truly happy as they stared in each other’s eyes, as if they were the only ones in the room. His chest ached and he silently disagreed with Jessica; if Harry found love like they seemed to have, he’d happily give the remainder of his teen years to marriage.

“And then I think Emmett’s the oldest because he’s like a teachers assistant or assistant coach or something.”

Which made sense because Emmett looked as if he could out bench any of the blokes from St Brutus’s. And some of those boys had spent all their spare time in the dreary gym filled with weight equipment, but Emmett’s thick muscles didn’t leave a lot of room for argument.

“And then the other two, who are like together,” Jessica whispered, “are Fleur and Rosalie. Fleur’s the prettier one, and Rosalie is the mean one.”

That actually cleared up nothing as they were equally gorgeous in Harry’s opinion. But then the one with the lighter coloring tossed her hair over her shoulder and her French accented voice carried through the cafeteria.

“Eet eez amazing zat some people even ‘ad enough intelligence to be accepted to university, non?”

“Okay so maybe they’re both a little mean,” Jessica laughed nervously and spun around to face Harry once more. “I don’t have any classes with them, but I’ve seen them around campus last week when I moved in. I think Edward’s dad is a teacher here, that’s what I heard anyway.”

And what she apparently planned on telling everyone, Harry thought wryly.

“I see,” is all he said though.

The two of them chatted for a while longer, Jessica mostly talking about the different sororities she hoped to join and Harry politely listening.

As eager as Harry had been to make a friend, make a single connection in the unfamiliar and uncomfortable environment, he doubted if it would be Jessica and he’d been mildly relieved when he saw it was time to head to his next class.

Public speaking- a torture that Harry hadn’t counted on, but he’d been forced to take anyway. And why a class on public speaking mattered for a degree in social work, he pretended to not know.

Torture or not, Harry settled in the back of the theatre style room that the classrooms all seem to mimic and pulled a fresh notebook and ink pen from the satchel bag he carried his supplies in. He also smiled when he pulled out his sleek red laptop, a college admission gift to himself, and powered it on to pull up the assigned textbook for the course.

Harry never got to use much technology before. He was terrible at typing, always having to hand write lessons at school and never allowed to touch his cousin’s computer at home. The bright and colorful screen of his very own, brand new, ghastly expensive, laptop still filled Harry with childlike glee.

“What’s making you smile over there, handsome?”

Harry nearly slammed his laptop shut when a low and smooth voice startled him. He looked over and saw that Rosalie, the girl he’d been gawking at not an hour ago, now sat beside him. She looked entirely at ease, with her legs crossed at the ankle, her hands folded on her lap, and a smirk on her red lips.

“Er… nothing, sorry,” Harry said, turning away quickly and fidgeting with lining his pen just perfectly next to his notepad.

Rosalie shifted toward Harry, a movement he saw out of the corner of his eyes, and laid on hand on the dividing armrest between their seats.

“You’re sorry for smiling?” she asked. Her voice was cool, but she didn’t sound angry, just mildly amused, maybe.

Admittedly, Harry didn’t spend a lot of time (or any at all) talking with girls so he wasn’t the best at interpreting their tones. A side effect of the all boy school he attended and his tendency to be locked up at home during the summers. Sitting with Jessica for thirty minutes and listening to her talk had been the longest conversation, if it could be called that, that Harry ever had with the opposite sex.

“No,” Harry knew enough to at least lift his head to look at Rosalie when he answered her question. “I… er… I’m not sure why I said sorry, habit, I guess.”

Harry sounded like an idiot, but Rosalie smiled at him anyway.

“Rosalie Hale,” she said, offering a hand to Harry. She was rather intense, the way she stared in Harry’s eyes as he shook her cold hand.

“Harry Potter,” Harry told her.

Rosalie’s responding smile was as sharp as it was beautiful.

“I know,” she said.

Harry pushed his glasses up and nodded uncertainly, grateful when the teacher began speaking and Harry didn’t have to make any further small talk.

He was bloody terrible at small talk.

He was also bloody terrible at ‘fun icebreaker games’.

Their teacher instructed them to each take a turn standing up, introducing themselves, stating what degree they hoped to gain, and add on ‘a fun fact about themselves’.

There were no fun facts about Harry.

When it was his turn, Harry panicked and clearly lost his mind.

“Hello,” he raised a hand at the two dozen other students giving him their rapt attention, “I’m Harry. I’m majoring in social work. And… er…” Harry considered the way that most of the others mentioned pets as a ‘fun fact’ and tried to copy them. “I had a hamster once, but my cousin fed it to my aunt’s bulldog.”

You complete idiot.

Harry sat down, mortified, while his classmates seemed completely horrified by his factual, and not at all fun, statement. He was inordinately grateful when Rosalie stood up, clearing her throat, and drawing all eyes to her like moths to a flame.

“Hello,” Rosalie smiled blandly at the students staring at her, “my name is Rosalie Hale. I’m majoring in auto mechanics, and I have a heart shaped birthmark on my ass.”

And nobody was interested in whispering about Harry’s poor little classroom hamster that died a horribly violent death when they were busy imagining a birth mark on Rosalie’s body.

Rosalie winked at Harry before resuming her seat and he gave her a tentative smile back.

Harry didn’t speak to Rosalie for the rest of the class, and he didn’t embarrass himself quite so spectacularly the rest of the day, but he thought perhaps Rosalie would be a nice connection to have at the college.

Not that he thought Rosalie Hale would ever want to be friends with him, but it was a nice idea to imagine when he did his homework in his dorm that night and Brock divided his time between typing furiously on his own laptop and shooting Harry wide-eyed looks.

So far, Buffalo State College was proving to be nearly as lonely as St Brutus’s.

Harry bought a school hoodie the next morning though and hoped he would fit in a little more and ease his way in to connections.

It didn’t work Tuesday, when Harry had all afternoon classes, or Wednesday, when Harry was off altogether and spent the day exploring campus and wasting a couple of hours in the gym. He saw the brawny boy, Emmett, in the gym and received a friendly nod, but that had been as much human interaction as he got that day. Thursday went the same as Tuesday, as his schedule mirrored itself on Tuesdays and Thursday and Mondays and Fridays, but Friday was a welcome surprise during Harry’s hour break between Sociology 101 and Public Speaking.

Harry arrived in the cafeteria, blending in with his peers in his orange hoodie, blue jeans, and earphones plugged in to a phone that was mostly (exclusively) used for music as Harry had precisely zero contacts saved in it. He’d hoped to see Jessica or Brock in the cafeteria; two, if not friendly, then familiar, faces, but was caught off guard when he saw Rosalie waving at him from where she sat with her friends.

And since Harry looked around and saw he was the only one she could be waving at, he moved over to their table where he hovered uncertainly while seven sets of eyes watched him.

“Join us,” Rosalie said, a simple offer that made the shortest girl in their group, Alice, giggle quietly.

“Thanks,” Harry said. He sat down in the only seat left open at their table, between Fleur and Emmett, and quickly stashed his headphones in his pocket. “I’m Harry,” he told them all. He listened politely as they all went around and introduced themselves, smiling slightly when Emmett tossed a napkin wad at each of them in turn.

“So, ‘Arry,” Fleur smiled at Harry and placed her fingertips on Harry’s hand on the table, Harry willed himself to not blush at the small contact, “‘ow do you like college?”

“It’s okay,” Harry said diplomatically. “My classes are interesting.”

“Classes are the least interesting thing about college,” Rosalie scoffed with a toss of her hair. “It’s all about extracurriculars.”

“Like… clubs?” Harry asked.

They all laughed causing Harry to feel rather dim.

“Like sports,” Emmett said with a wide smile.

“And parties,” Alice chirped out brightly.

“Clubs are interesting too,” Bella said kindly.

“It’s really what people do after classes that gives you the college experience,” Rosalie said, lowering her voice and her lashes both. “In fact, we’re having a party tonight—”

“We are?” Edward asked with a skeptical brow raised.

“We are,” Fleur said decisively. “And you should come, ‘Arry.”

“Sure,” Harry said, trying to agree without looking too eager to attend his first ever party. “Sounds fun.”

The blinding and sharp smiles of the two girls who continued to focus on Harry during his break made him uneasy, but he figured what was the worst that could happen?

Harry arrived at the address Rosalie programmed in his phone, along with her cell phone number, ‘in case he had any questions’, right on time. Or… late, maybe.

When he walked to the house that was only a few blocks away from campus, a clean and cozy looking red brick cottage style house with a wrap around porch covered in lush green ivy, it seemed as if the party was already in full swing.

There was loud music, and tons of people, spilling from the porch to the yard. All the (presumably) students had red plastic cups in their hands and were screaming at one another over the sound of the music.

The multicolored flashing lights cast odd lights on the inside of the house when Harry edged his way inside to let (his friend? friends? classmate?) Rosalie know he arrived.

He glanced at the staircase that seemed packed with people, some standing, some sitting, but had a gate across the top, barring them from going on the top floor. As difficult as it was to see, with the multicolored lights hitting what clouds of smoke to rival any morning smog, he didn’t think he saw Rosalie, Fleur, or any of their friends on the stairs.

“Rosalie!” Harry smiled and waved when he entered the kitchen doorway at the end of the entrance corridor and found Rosalie leaning against a stainless steel refrigerator with Fleur curled in her side.

It seemed as if no matter what Harry chose to wear, he always managed to stand out.

He’d once more gone with jeans and a long sleeved shirt under his newly-favorite hoodie; something casual by his fellow college students’ standards and nearly sloppy by his own. He certainly felt sloppy as he saw Fleur and Rosalie dressed up in short skirts and low cut and sparkling blouses. Rosalie had on a pair of thigh high black boots with spiked heels and Fleur wore a silver pair of heels so tall she nearly caught up to Rosalie in height.

Harry was usually Rosalie’s height, maybe an inch taller, but in heels? She towered over him.

“Sorry I’m late,” Harry said as he looked around the kitchen. It was quieter in there, the music playing from the sitting room muffled in the brick and cream colored kitchen with the stainless steel appliances and plants hanging in the windows. It might have been the warm glow of the lights hanging from the ceiling, or just the absence of people, but Harry rather like their kitchen, it felt homey.

“You are not late, mon canard,” Fleur assured Harry with a slow and lazy smile. “You are ‘ere precisely when we asked you to be.”

Harry opened his mouth to compliment their house, or comment on the ongoing party, but he was caught off guard by Fleur’s comment.

“I’m sorry, did you just call me a duck?” Harry asked her, blinking in surprise behind his glasses.

Rosalie turned her head in Fleur’s hair and laughed while Fleur gave Harry a dazzling smile.

“Parlez-vous français? Incroyable!”

“Non,” Harry answered with a rueful shake of his head. “One of my old dorm mates spoke French, I picked up a bit. I’m rubbish though.”

Pierce had been brilliant though, when he spoke anyway. He had been an intelligent bloke, a rarity in a school for criminal boys, but he hit just as hard as anyone else in the dorm. He merely trash talked in French as he did so.

“You are not rubbish, Harry Potter,” Rosalie said with a sparkle in her eyes. “Come, let’s get you a drink and give you the tour.”

Harry accepted the drink Fleur poured him from a bowl of something red on the table and then followed the girls from the kitchen back in the chaos.

“So we do not lose you,” Fleur winked when she grabbed Harry’s free hand. It was lucky Fleur’s skin was so cold to the touch or Harry would be a blushing mess from something as simple as a wink.

Rosalie led them on a tour of the bottom floor of the spacious house, and each room, aside from an office filled with bookcases and cozy looking reading chairs, were packed with people drinking, dancing, and laughing.

“It’s pretty,” Harry told Rosalie when they ended the tour on the porch. “Where are your other friends?” he asked after looking around the merry crowd in the yard and not recognizing anyone aside from a head of curls that had to be Jessica.

“Out,” Rosalie said with a secret type of smirk. “They’ll be back soon, I’m sure. Alice can never resist a good party.”

“And Jasper can never resist a good ‘appy drunk,” Fleur laughed.

Harry laughed with the girls, even though he didn’t understand the joke. An obvious thing, judging on the patiently amused look Rosalie gave him.

“Drink,” she said, nodding to Harry’s drink and ignoring the way her girlfriend continued holding Harry’s hand even while wrapping her other slender arm around Rosalie’s waist. “Fleur’s own blend, it’s good.”

Harry would have asked why neither of them were drinking if it was good, but he took a tentative sip of his first ever taste of proper alcohol (the disgusting hooch the other boys at St Brutus’s risked brewing didn’t count).

“Oh!” Harry looked down in his cup in surprise. “It’s quite good,” he told Fleur. It tasted much sweeter than Harry expected alcohol to, but explained how everyone else there seemed to be consistently drinking and refilling their cups from the bowls of drinks scattered around the property.

“Ze secret eez everclear,” Fleur said with a wicked smile.

“Sure,” Harry agreed, oblivious to what everclear was. He looked around the yard once more and smiled slightly. He never thought that he would ever get to be a part of something so loud and colorful, not when so much of his life had been ruled by monochrome uniforms, bland dorms and classrooms, and complete silence.

“I’ve never been to a party before,” he impulsively admitted to the girls who continued watching him with small smiles.

“Never?” Rosalie asked skeptically. “Birthday parties for your friends, parties with your girlfriend at school? You’ve never done that?”

“Er…” Harry dropped his eyes again and swirled his drink around. “No. None of the above, I guess.”

“A tragedy!” Fleur cried. She squeezed Harry’s hand until he lifted his eyes to her face. “We shall ‘ave to make up for it, non?”

Harry’s responding smile was shy, but he nodded.

“Okay, sure.”

Apparently Fleur meant… right then.

The girls drug Harry back inside, directly in the sitting room where people were packed wall-to-wall as they danced to the music.

“Dance with us, Harry.” Rosalie held her hand out to Harry, and as Fleur didn’t relinquish her hold on him, Harry finished his drink and sat it on the table just inside the door so he could take Rosalie’s hand.

It should have been embarrassing, having Fleur dance so gracefully, so… erotically in front of Harry with her hands roaming around his chest while Rosalie danced behind Harry, her hips moving in sensual circles while her hands held his hips and guided Harry to match her and Fleur’s synchronized rhythm.

Except it wasn’t embarrassing.

It was probably definitely the most a rousing thing Harry had ever been involved in and it became increasingly difficult to remember that Fleur and Rosalie were dating each other and not interested in plain, boring, Harry the longer they danced.

“You look flushed,” Rosalie murmured, her lips right beside Harry’s ear and her chest pressed against Harry’s back. “I’ll go get you a drink.”

Harry opened his mouth to protest, planning on insisting on retrieving drinks for the three of them, but Fleur shushed him with a finger to his lips.

“Let us take care of you, mon canard.”

It was probably a side effect of the glass of booze he’d consumed, bubbling it’s way through his veins, or the effect of a gorgeous girl whispering in his face, but Harry shrugged off the silly pet name and continued dancing with Fleur. He was more awkward without Rosalie’s guiding hands, but Fleur was less reserved in where hers went.

“You are ‘ot,” Fleur said when her hands went beneath Harry’s jumper and directly on his chest over his thin shirt. “‘Ere, let me ‘elp you.”

Harry lifted his arms when it became apparent that Fleur planned on cooling him down by removing his jumper altogether.

“Much better,” Fleur purred when she tossed Harry’s jumper toward the door. “Are you comfortable, ‘Arry?”

“Yeah,” Harry breathed, dizzy on the combination of dancing, drinking, and being the recipient of Fleur’s attention.

“Good.” Fleur put her hands back on Harry’s chest and leaned her head close to his, placing her lips on the opposite ear that her girlfriend had just been whispering in. “If you are ever not comfortable, you will tell me?”

“Sure,” Harry agreed quickly. He held back a groan that would have made Fleur the uncomfortable one when her thumb nail scraped directly across his nipple.

“See zat you do,” Fleur said with a smirk and glimmer in her endlessly golden eyes.

Rosalie returned after that, handing Harry a drink and taking his hand as Fleur wrapped an arm around his waist.

“They’re back,” Rosalie told Fleur. “And they’ve brought drinks.”

“‘Ow?”

“Alice,” Rosalie said as a vague response.

Fleur tipped her head back, the flashing lights reflecting oddly on her pale skin, and laughed loudly enough to draw attention to where they’d been dancing together.

Harry didn’t want to flatter himself, but he thought there were a few envious looks being aimed in his direction. Which made sense, in a way, as he was dancing with the two most beautiful women to ever walk the earth.

“Come, ‘Arry, let’s move our party somewhere more private.”

Harry let himself be led by the girls from the sitting room back through the hallway and up the staircase. Rosalie seemed to be a commanding presence, as all the students clogging the stairs literally parted to let the three of them move upward without any fuss.

There were a bunch of doorways branching off the long upstairs corridor, but Rosalie led them confidently toward the end on toward the right.

“Oh.” Harry blinked stupidly when Rosalie opened the door and pulled him and Fleur inside. It wasn’t a bedroom as much as it was another spacious office. The walls, the bits Harry could see, were painted a light sky blue and one wall was covered in gleaming wooden bookcase with books of all shape, size, and color stuffing the shelves. The opposite was was covered in floating glass shelves, those covered in records, discs, and even cassette tapes of what seemed to be every genre and artist imaginable.

“Edward’s room,” Rosalie explained, waving to where her friends all sat in a semi-circle on the floor, laughing and passing a flask. Bella must have had good hearing though because, despite the soft rock playing from a speaker hanging on the wall opposite the door and Emmett’s loud laughter, she looked up and stuck her tongue out at Rosalie.

“What’s his is mine,” she quipped before smiling at Harry. “Oh, they’re going to ruin you, poor boy.”

Harry thought he’d managed to get quite a bit drunker than he’d meant to, because Bella’s statement and the responding chuckles from Emmett and Jasper didn’t make any sense.

“Ignore her,” Rosalie said. She sat down on the plush grey rug and pulled Harry down to the floor with her, guiding him and then pulling him close to her while Fleur all but sat in Harry’s lap.

“Here,” Alice handed Fleur the silver flask the others had been sharing. “Careful, Emmett went overboard.”

Drunk, and more than a little confused by their conversation involving deer and vodka, Harry fell in old habits and remained quiet while he sipped his own drink.

“Harry?”

“Harry?”

“Hm? Oh, sorry.” Harry had gotten distracted trying to decipher the names on the spines of the nearby books. He smiled at Rosalie, who had been trying to get his attention. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Obviously,” Rosalie drawled with a smirk. She reached around Harry, running her hand up Harry’s arm and ending on the shoulder where Fleur’s head rested. “I said, do you want to play a game with us?”

“Of course ‘e does,” Fleur said, nuzzling her face in Harry’s neck.

“What- what game?” Harry looked around at the perfect and pale faces that all had similar colored eyes and felt his first tremor of unease. He wasn’t an expert by any means, but he thought getting drunk and playing games in a room full of strangers had been the premise of at least one of the slasher films that Dudley used to watch with his mates in the summer. And Harry never got to see the endings, not properly from inside the cupboard he’d long outgrown and suffered through during summer hols, but still.

“I- er… don’t want to die,” Harry blurted, his tongue loose from the drinks and his mind fuzzy from the way Fleur continued rubbing her nose along Harry’s neck.

The way Alice, Jasper, and Emmett laughed wasn’t exactly comforting.

“I’d never kill you,” Rosalie hummed with a sweet smile. “Not until you beg for it.”

Harry felt another tremor go through him, that one accompanied by an actual shiver down his spine at the promise in Rosalie’s low and husky voice.

“You’re scaring him,” Jasper said with his own grin.

Alice clapped her hands together and snatched the flask away from Bella before Harry could lie and say he wasn’t scared.

“It’s time to play a game!” Alice cried. “Let’s play… truth, drink, or dare!”

“I zink eet eez called truth or dare,” Fleur said before pressing her cold lips directly over Harry’s pulse point in his neck and pulling away to look at the others.

“That’s because you’re French, you don’t understand how we Americans play,” Emmett grinned. “Right, Harry?”

Harry nodded in agreement, ignoring the fact that he was both not-American and also had never played either version.

“Right,” he agreed.

When everyone laughed that time, Harry joined them.

Then they started playing a game where the rules seemed to change each round. Rules Harry could hardly track as he kept drinking from the glass Rosalie kept full.

“Liar! You were with Carlisle during the Scopes Monkey Trial! Drink, Edward!”

“I dare you to not be annoying for the next decade.”

“That’s a boring dare, Bells, try again.”

“The next century then, if you would.”

“I dare you to go downstairs, get an apple from the fridge, and take a bite.”

“You are deesgusting. I will drink.”

Fleur turned to Harry and caressed his cheek, smiling at the glazed look in his eyes.

“Mon canard, truth or dare?”

Harry blinked slowly and tried to force his tongue to work. “Dare?”

Fleur leaned so close that Harry could smell the oddly scented drink they’d been sharing on her breath and count each of the few freckles that dotted the top of her perfectly smooth nose.

“I dare you to kiss me.”

Harry didn’t even pause to think about Fleur’s girlfriend who had her hand in his hair, he just leaned forward and met Fleur halfway as she enveloped him in the most breathtaking kiss in the world. Harry’s eyes were closed and one of Fleur’s hands wrapped around the back of his neck, applying the slightest pressure when she curled her fingers over his neck. Harry gasped lightly and she took the opportunity to tilt his head to the side and deepen the kiss.

A moan escaped Harry’s throat when Fleur swept her tongue inside his mouth, doing a slow and lazy sweep in Harry’s mouth and leaving behind a tangy taste he couldn’t place, didn’t bother to try.

Just when Harry thought he might die from a lack of oxygen, when he happily planned to succumb to death, Fleur broke away from him with an embarrassingly loud gasp of air that caused his head to spin almost as much as the lack of air had.

“You are not even a bad kisser,” Fleur said before leaning in to press another kiss, soft and too short, to Harry’s lips.

“Thanks,” Harry breathed, stunned. A sharp yank of the hair on the back of his head reminded him of the presence of Fleur’s girlfriend. The apology Harry had on his lips died when Rosalie replaced it with her own deep kiss. Harry had never been snogged before, but even he recognized the difference in the two girls’ methods… Fleur had moved her lips with Harry’s, Rosalie took charge of them.

“Mm, not bad at all.” Rosalie kept a hold of Harry’s hair, scratching her nails on his scalp. “He could improve, but that’s what we’re here for, aren’t we, my flower?”

“Oui.” Fleur raised Harry’s hand to her lips, kissing it lightly as Harry looked back and forth between the two girls with what had to be a gobsmacked expression. “Zat eez what we’re ‘ere for, my Rose.”

Harry grinned rather stupidly before the alcohol, the snogging, the dancing, and all the things Harry had never gotten to experience before caught up with him all at once and he promptly passed out right in the middle of the floor.

Harry woke up comfortable, with an aching head, a body wrapped around him, warm—

A body wrapped around him?!

Harry slowly lifted his head, a difficult task as it felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds, and blinked confusedy at the blurry blonde blob resting on his chest.

“Bonjour mon canard,” the blob murmured. She reached up and cupped Harry’s face. “Oh, you look confused.”

“How often do you think he wakes up with a beautiful flower draped across him?”

Harry sat up and squinted across the room— it was bloody dark in there —and saw…

“Rosalie!” Harry yelped and tried to scramble out of the plush bed he laid in with Rosalie’s girlfriend. “I’m sorry, please, I’m so sorry.”

Rosalie cut off Harry’s panicked rant, and Fleur prevented him from leaving the bed with surprising strength.

“Harry, I’m not mad.” Rosalie gracefully stood from the red lounge chair she’d been draped across and stalked over to the bed like a ballerina impersonating a lion. An apt analogy that Harry would never be able to explain the meaning of.

Rosalie climbed in the bed, crawling over the dark red duvet, her eyes fixed on Harry’s, ending her movements when she straddled Harry’s lap in nothing more than a black lace camisole and…

Harry tried very hard not to groan as it would be the most inappropriate timing ever.

…and a pair of matching black lace panties.

“Baby, do you think I’m upset with you?” Rosalie purred, running a hand through Harry’s hair and cupping the back of his neck. She tilted her head down until her forehead touched Harry’s. “You didn’t touch a single hair on our flower’s head, you fell asleep and we brought you to our bed.”

Harry’s pulse raced so quickly he could feel it in his bloody teeth.

Fleur swung a bare leg over Harry, straddling his lap as well, directly behind Rosalie, and moved Rosalie’s hair to the side while she locked eyes with Harry and began slowly kissing up and down Rosalie’s neck. Rosalie closed her eyes and rolled her head to the side, giving Fleur more access.

“Touch ‘er,” Fleur said in a sultry whisper that seemed to shoot straight to Harry’s groin. “We want you to.”

Rosalie reached out with the hand that wasn’t curled around the back of Harry’s neck and patted the bed until she found the hand he’d been using to hold himself up.

“Touch me,” she told Harry. Her eyes opened half-way and she watched his shocked face with hooded eyes. “Do you want to?”

“Do you want us?” Fleur asked.

Harry felt like there was a hidden weight to their words, something that laced the question and made it mean something much darker, more significant, than just the words they spoke.

And Harry, Harry who never had adventures, who never had anything, who never had anyone, didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to lose the two beautiful connections in front of him.

“Yeah, I do,” he said. He felt like something shifted inside him with his admission, something clicked in place, when Rosalie and Fleur both smiled at him with warm and affectionate smiles.

“You’re sure, mon canard?”

Harry laid back on the bed, glancing once more around the soundproofed room, and nodded confidently at Rosalie and Fleur, one on either side of him.

“I want you forever,” he said.

Rosalie grabbed Harry’s left hand, Fleur grabbed his right.

“This is going to hurt,” Rosalie whispered. She laid down beside him, the girls a nearly perfect mirror of each other as the faced Harry on opposite sides of his body. “We love you, Harry.”

All Harry ever wanted in life was to be loved.

And he had it.

He could have it forever.

“I love you, Rose.” Harry turned to the left and shared a kiss with Rosalie before turning to the right and kissing Fleur just as passionately. “And I love you, flower.”

“Do not succumb to ze pain,” Fleur whispered, choked with emotion. “We will see you in a few days.”

Harry tilted his face straight up to the ceiling and closed his eyes.

“Kill me now,” he said, an ironic smile curling his lips up.

Rosalie placed her cold lips on the side of his neck while Fleur mimicked her more slowly.

“Beg me for it, baby,” Rosalie whispered.

Harry’s smile grew more indulgent.

“Please?”

With a final kiss to Harry’s neck, both girls opened their mouth wide and sank their teeth in Harry’s neck as deeply as they could.

After four days of excruciating pain, mixed with whispers of love from silky voices, Harry came to with a gasp of air his lungs no longer needed. He opened his eyes, no longer green, but a bright red, and smiled slowly as he looked at the two women before him- somehow even more stunning when Harry could see them, see everything, so clearly.

Now, finally, Harry’s life could truly begin.

Mat Alexander stepped in the quad of his college, Washington State University, with a nervous smile as he looked around for a place to sit. It was hard being a new student in an out of state college, but Mat was determined to make the best of it.

“Mat!” The friendly red haired girl from Mat’s physics class stood up and waved to him from a table in the middle of the quad.

“Thank you,” Mat said politely after he hastened to join her and the others she sat with. He recognized a few of them from his other classes and figured he found the future engineer table.

“Of course.” The girl, Samantha, maybe?, smiled warmly. “Us natives have to look out for you newbies,” she teased him.

“Especially when it’s a mad house in here,” a person Mat was fairly confident shared his mathematics course, named Charlie, he was half certain, said with a frown as they looked around the noisy quad everyone seemed to be taking their lunch break in.

Following their example, Mat looked around and studied his fellow students curiously. It was a rather normal mix of rowdy college kids until his eyes, like a magnet, were drawn to a group in the back.

“Who are they?” Mat breathed absently as he studied the group of students entirely too perfectly gorgeous to be the same fumbling and awkward teenagers the others all were.

“Who? Oh.” Samantha peeked over her shoulder and giggled when she quickly turned back to the others. “They’re such attention hogs. Which totally makes sense because, oh my god, they’re gorgeous, right? Everyone always wants to know about them.”

Providing to be no exception, Mat quickly asked who the group of pretty people were.

“That’s Edward and his wife Bella,” Charlie said, pointing at a bronze haired boy and a girl with curly brown hair. “They’re in my English class.”

“And that’s Emmett, Jasper, and Alice,” Samantha said, subtly nodding to a boy with a body like a professional body builder, a lean blonde boy, and a short girl with dark hair. “I think Alice and Jasper are together, but it’s hard to tell with them,” she whispered.

Mat crinkled his nose in confusion.

“Why’s it hard to tell?” he asked.

“Because of them.” Charlie openly pointed at the last three members of the group, the most magnetizing of the eight. “Fleur’s the one with the lighter colored hair, she’s French, then Rosalie is the other blonde, and she’s a bitch, but really funny. And the one in the middle? With the ‘just got fucked’ messy black hair? That’s Harry. And they’re like… all together,” they whispered.

As if on cue, Mat saw as Rosalie ran a hand through Harry’s hair, tugging his face toward her before kissing him with so much obvious passion that Mat blushed from his seat. He lowered his lashes, but watched enough to where he could see where Fleur lavished Harry’s neck with kisses while Harry and Rosalie were lip locked.

“Wow.” Mat laughed quietly and shifted in his seat. “They’re… um…”

“The sexiest thing you’ve ever seen?” Samantha suggested with a giggle.

“A bit inappropriate in the middle of the quad?” Charlie said with a roll of their eyes.

Stunning, was the word Mat would have used, if he could talk. But he’d been knocked breathless when Harry broke his kiss off from Rosalie and the three of them, the two stunning blondes and the most attractive boy Mat had ever seen, turned in almost a synchronized moment and smiled directly at him.