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“They’ll be the best years of your life. You’ll learn so much about yourself.”
That’s what people tell her from the day she’s admitted to college on a Division One scholarship until the day her parents load the SUV up with boxes upon boxes of her clothes, new linens, and recently purchased kitchenware and drive the four hours to her new dorm. Galadriel heard the same cliches back when Finrod left the nest; she can still see him in her mind, rolling his eyes when an uncle says that to him at Easter brunch, still dressed in his church clothes and followed from room to room by aunts that pinch his cheeks and tell him not to break too many hearts when he’s away.
Funny joke. Galadriel knows he’s still seeing the same girl he was dating in high school, a little quieter now that they don’t see each other every day, but with the same intensity as when he would climb down the roof after midnight and hop over the neighbor’s fence before coming back a few hours later. He never looked well rested those nights. She would snicker over breakfast, but keep her lips sealed tight when blue eyes snapped her way, a warning clear as day in them. He’s not breaking any hearts apart from his own when he’s stuck on campus for weeks at a time prepping for midterms and finals.
She’s lucky. Being a D1 athlete affords her more privileges than most, the best of which being the small, but single room she moves into with the help of mom and dad. The room has a bed a little wider than a twin, a desk so bare that it’s like someone purposefully took apart a much nicer looking desk, and a closet without a door. It’s what she expected. Next year, when she’s made some friends, maybe some of the other girls on the rowing team, she’ll be able to get an apartment with furniture that doesn’t feel like it was bought from a discount IKEA.
They make the best of it though. Her mom helps her make the bed with the sheets she brought from her bed at home–a little embarrassing, sure, her pillowcases still have ruffles around the edges and her duvet is a creamy pink–and her dad fights to assemble a bookshelf they purchased (actually from IKEA). He swears the pack came with one less screw, so the bookshelf is a little wobbly, but it holds her stuff just fine.
When her parents finally leave after a good half hour of hugs and tears, sitting on her bed feels a little like still being home. Comforting. She only blushes a little when she finally gets around to bringing friends over weeks into the semester.
Galadriel knows how it looks. She still sleeps in a bed with ruffled pillows and a pink, quilt duvet with plush little squares that she practically melts into at night; she still ties her hair up with a bow before heading out to class, still uses a mauve velvet scrunchie (part of a three-pack from Lululemon, since her rowing captain is a store ambassador this year and gets crazy discounts for everyone on the team) to keep her bun in place during practice. She gets it.
College is not at all what she expected. Every single teacher in her final year of high school did their best to put the fear of god into everyone moving on to college, but Galadriel hadn’t put much stalk into their words. Not when she had Finrod to talk her off a ledge, roll his eyes when she called him to stress over how intense the workload would be.
It’s actually way worse than she anticipated. Not only is she busy for hours a day pouring over chapters in her textbooks and lab assignments, but rowing practice might as well be one of the punishments in the ninth circle of hell. Five days a week, she’s up at the crack of dawn, trudging over to the boathouse in her university-branded sweatshirt and the deepest eyebags, blonde hair pulled up into a messy bun, just so she can sweat and die for three to four hours. Thank god for her parents because if she had to support herself with a part time job on top of practice and class? She’d be toast.
As it is, she’s toast. Whenever she isn’t studying or at practice, she’s sleeping. There’s even a nook in the library where Galadriel goes for a post-class power nap—never more than twenty minutes, and her bag is clutched to her stomach the entire time in case someone tries to snatch her laptop.
Elrond texts her when she’s hunched over her sociology textbook in the library. The texts bunch up on each other because he sent more than three in a row, so all she sees as first is a single question mark until she unlocks her phone and sees that he invited her to a party at some frat he’s pledging.
Galadriel contemplates saying no. She doesn’t have practice tomorrow, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world, but she just wants to sleep. Eight hours of pure, unadulterated rest. Her eyes itch just thinking about spreading out under her pink duvet at half past nine, spreading her fingers out in the soft plush and cocooning herself in its depths. Actually, the thought of scrubbing her body down in a shower hot enough to make her dermatologist scream and put on a face mask while watching Love Island? Almost makes her eyes roll right back into her head.
She types something along those lines and then hesitates, her finger hovering over the Send button. She scrolls up to find five other identical sounding messages from the past month, each a chip in her proverbial college experience. She sighs; blows a wisp of hair that falls between her eyes. What a quandary.
Elrond meets her outside her dorm around ten, more chipper than she’s ever seen him. Not because it’s the first time she’s accompanied him in recent memory—in recent ever—but because this is clearly some important step in whatever the pledging process is, though Galadriel’s reluctant to get into the details with him. He volunteers them anyway.
“There’s a few guys I’m trying to build a real rapport with,” he explains. “Like there’s this one guy—Celebrimbor—who, like, is just the absolute coolest. He’s a visionary and he’s studying to be an architect, so I just want to pick his brain.”
“Oh,” she says, smiling so tightly that only the very tops of her teeth show. “That’s very interesting.”
Elrond rolls his eyes so hard she can hear them rattle. “It’s fine, I know it’s not. You’re coming with me anyway. Maybe you’ll meet some people who aren’t rowers here.”
She spends most of the time hovering by Elrond’s side, sipping at her red solo cup like it’ll make up for her awkward attempts at conversation. She has nothing in common with most of these people. Maybe with some of the other guys pledging the same frat who are also here on a similar D1 scholarship, but their eyes go glassy the longer Galadriel chatters on about her workout routine and practice schedule.
So she refills her cup almost anxiously. Taking a sip gives her something to do with her hands. Going back and forth between the living room, the hallway, and the kitchen means that she doesn’t have to stand in the same place for too long. Half the task is running through the scenarios of how she looks to everyone around her; at least refilling her drink, draining the contents, and then filling it up again makes her look busy, purposeful, instead of stagnant and aloof at the back of the room.
Of course, that plan goes awry fast. If it were water instead of the four gin and tonics she’s had, maybe not, but when Galadriel idles up next to someone that she briefly thinks she recognizes as Elrond only to realize when the glance down that—nope, not Elrond, not even a blond, to be honest, which is doubly alarming—it's apparent that she's made a grave mistake.
“You okay?” The not-Elrond stranger asks, eyebrow quirked.
“No,” she says miserably, looking around the room. She feels wobbly on her feet. “I lost my friend.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Elr’n,” she mumbles. The room feels like it’s rising from underneath her and only concentrating on her own shoes makes her feel like she’ll be able to remain upright, not topple over onto the nearest horizontal surface.
“Can someone take her home? She’s like, proper smashed,” someone next to not-Elrond whines, and Galadriel briefly feels embarrassed, like suddenly she’s the problem. She wants to disappear right into the floor.
Someone throws their arm around her shoulders, someone a lot taller and wider in the shoulders than her.
“I’ll take her home,” she hears whoever it is say–it isn’t Elrond, she knows that much–from above her.
“Yeah, sure.” It’s said dismissively, and if she were sober, Galadriel would be horrified at how easily the guy she was talking to shrugs her off the moment another random guy claims responsibility for her.
When she glances up, her heart leaps into her throat. He might be prettier because she’s drunk, but she suspects that’s not the case–he’s scruffy and dark, older than her for sure, maybe by a couple of years. His hair is longer than she would’ve expected, tucked behind an ear except for his wispy little bangs that brush against the tops of his cheekbones.
He looks down at her. Hazel eyes. That’s the first and only thing Galadriel notices because otherwise it’s easier for her eyes to unfocus than it is for them to focus, so when she looks up at him he’s got two eyes for all of ten seconds and then he has four. She squints to refocus her vision.
“You’re kind of hot,” she says accusingly. He laughs, bright and effervescent—Galadriel’s ears perk up at the sound like Hmm that’s nice— and takes her hand in his.
“Only kind of? Maybe you’re only kind of cute.” He bops her nose. She wrinkles it up and almost sneezes. His laughter trails along behind them like an echo as he leads her out the front door, past the groups of students smoking outside near the bushes, the butts of their cigarettes glowing red in the dark.
The walk home in the early autumn wind helps clear her head a little. She’s still way more than tipsy, would be stumbling if it weren’t for the still nameless guy who holds her by the waist as they walk back to her dorm, but her vision focuses a bit more.
“I can’t believe you’re going to take me home and not even tell me your name,” she says incredulously and almost walks into a tree. The nameless boy from the frat grabs her at the last moment to pull her out of the way. She sways into him, all flailing limbs and laughter spilling out from her like a rush of wind.
“It’s not like I know yours.”
“Oh, that’s easy—it’s Galadriel, like GA–” she shouts that part, cupping her hands around her mouth and getting really close to him so that she can yell right up into his ear “LA–DREE–ELLE.”
He howls with laughter, jumping back and clapping his hands over his ears. Tells her his name is Halbrand, a funny sounding name. It makes her giggle, makes her feel funny for once, which isn’t something that she’s used to. Not Super Serious Galadriel who took only AP classes in high school, rows five days a week, never misses a lecture, and tucks her sheets in every day to a fine, crisp press when making her bed. She feels easy and breezy for once, just goofing around with a stranger while walking home in the middle of the night.
She must be drunk—she barely even blinks when Halbrand follows her past the turnstiles into the dormitory, insisting to the monitor on duty that he’s just dropping his girlfriend off for the night. She eyes him as he charms the girl sitting behind the desk, who giggles and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, buzzing him in without making him sign anything; he is quite roguish, Galadriel can see, even three sheets to the wind.
They take the elevator up to her floor—she talks about some tiff that Elrond and a good friend of his, Durin, recently had, which Halbrand takes great interest in—and giggle and stumble their way down the hall to Galadriel’s room. Everyone else must still be out or studying in the library because all of the doors are shut and none creak open even when Galadriel lets out a particularly high shriek when Halbrand pokes her between the ribs.
She struggles with unlocking the door for several minutes, giggling as Halbrand comes up behind her to better tickle her between the ribs. When she does manage to get the key in the lock, they practically fall into the room as the door explodes open. Halbrand might not be as tipsy as she is, but he’s certainly a little clumsy and in some awful hurry to get her into the room.
“Sweetie, you can’t go to bed like this,” she hears him say from somewhere behind her as she flops down onto her back on the bed, arm thrown over her face.
“What are you…why are you still here?” Galadriel mumbles, humming to herself as she snuggles into the thick duvet underneath her.
“I’m helping you get to bed, that’s all.”
She giggles when his hands dig into her sides, ticklish. The giggle abruptly cuts off when she feels him unbutton her shorts, the zipper clicking down.
“Waaiitt, stop it,” she whines, planting a foot against his chest and trying to push him away. “Can do it m’self.”
“I know you can, sweetheart,” Halbrand coos, hand coming up to circle her ankle—easily, she notes in a daze, heartbeat furious when she notices how easily his fingers overlap.
Her whole body stills when he pulls her shorts off, leaving in her just an old pair of lavender panties with a little lace trim at the top; she doesn’t meet his eyes to see if they’re still on her, foggy on whether she wants to know or not. Her shirt comes off next, pulled over her head roughly and getting caught around her ears, and it makes another peel of laughter burst out of her. Even Halbrand does that little exhale laugh that guys sometimes do.
She’s still giggling when she notices how he’s fallen silent, staring down at her with something indescribable in his eyes. Galadriel wiggles into the duvet uncomfortably. Reaches up and gives his cheek a little pat-pat, making his eyes flick up to hers to meet her gaze.
“What do you think you’re…looking at?” She says, a little teasing-like, glint in her eye like a silver flint. Like an arrow.
A single stray finger wraps into the band of her panties, tugging them just an inch down. “Do we need to get you out of these, baby?”
The breath rushes out of her with a whoosh. She chews her bottom lip rather than look him in the eye.
“Well, I gotta change into new ones,” Galadriel whispers, though a creeping doubt slinks into her head like a snake, like a snake coiling round and round her spine and hissing something indecipherable into her ear.
Rather than answer, she feels him tug at her panties, keeping eye contact with her as they start to slide down her hips and over her thighs. He doesn’t look down. The breath she holds sits like a bubble in her chest. She waits for something—a movement, a glance, a flicker of something that could be repurposed as kindling, something that could spark her to life. Halbrand gives her nothing. He simply stares into her eyes, eclipsing the whole of the world around her—green bleeding into her field of vision like it’s everywhere.
She must be drunk. The divots where his eyes are seated in his head for a moment radiate a kind of heat, like a flame.
When he finally looks down, she watches as Halbrand’s pupils dilate. “Fuuuck,” he hisses, the epithet slipping out through clenched teeth. His eyes drag up and down the length of her body, making her feel like she’s draped in splendor and light. He looks at her with such open desire, want like a feral kind of greed that covets.
“Don’t look,” Galadriel whines, trying to cover up her body. When her arms come in front of her chest, blocking her tits from his purview, Halbrand purses his lips.
He tuts and wrenches her arm to the side. “Baby, stop—I wasn’t done looking.”
She wonders if they’re back to joking and tries to flop onto her side to get away from him. That very obviously isn’t the case.
The room spun wildly as he flipped her over onto her stomach. Galadriel yelps, the breath punched out of her from the sudden movement. She lies there for a second, the room still spinning in front of her eyes a bit, and Halbrand takes the opportunity to climb off her for a second to pull his own clothes off.
A shaky breath in and out.
He climbs back on top of her and suddenly the gravity of the situation sinks in. Her brain clears just enough for her to realize what’s happening.
“Keep your hips just like this,” Halbrand rumbles from behind her, reaching to take one of the pillows from the head of her bed and stuffing it under her hips. “I want to mount you.”
Her sex clenches at his words, lust coursing through her. Whatever mount means. Whatever it means that she feels hot and achy inside at the words, squirming into the bed when he straddles her hips. She flinches when something heavy falls between her legs.
He tilts her hips a little, places her just how he likes. It’s unreal that this is happening, so much so that Galadriel briefly wonders if it’s happening to someone else. She’d always considered that this might happen, that she would go to college and lose her virginity like anyone else her age, but there’s a difference between the clumsy, fumbling attempt at sex between two virgins and the way this man behind her knows exactly how to position her hips and notches his cock into the slick opening of her pussy without any fuss.
Her pupils must be blown wide. The first push into her makes her breath hitch. Halbrand coos down at her like that’s mitigation enough for pushing into her all at once, rending her right down the middle.
“Really tight,” he notes casually, pulling out of her slowly only to snap his hips back in. She keens, high and tight. “Virgin, right? Well, uh, I guess not anymore.”
His little breathless laugh is taunting, kind of mean.
The whole world moves like a wave washing over her or like she’s washing up on some distant shore. But it’s just the too big man at her back surging into her again and again, his dick just on the side of too much. This must be why people use lube. For as wet as she, it takes an extra drive of his hips to force his cock back into her.
Her slight resistance must spur him on, excites him.
“Sorry, baby, can’t help being a bit rough. Never had a pussy this tight before.”
Any words she might say get trapped in her throat. She’s a long ways off from coherent. Blonde hair falls all around her face, blotting out the room from sight.
“Oh my god,” Galadriel gasps out, head raising off the pillow for just a second before it falls back down. “Please—please, I need it, pleas—” The word gets cut off at the quick, subsumed into Halbrand’s mocking laugh.
Halbrand pulls out from her abruptly. “Stay still. I want to taste your pussy from the back.” Her hips are still tilted up from the pillow stacked underneath them, so it’s easy for him to draw down the length of her beck, biting into the globes of her ass along the way, and spread her thighs wide so he can nestle his shoulders in between them.
The first stripe of his tongue up the length of her pussy is like being pushed underwater headfirst. Everything is reduced to the feeling of his tongue on her clit. When his hands grab onto the backs of her thighs, it’s only to push her legs open wider, pushing his face into her like sucking on her clit was the thing he was put on Earth to do. Galadriel whines into the pillow, biting down when she worries she might be too loud. She knows from past experience how thin the walls are in her dorm.
Two thick fingers are pushed up to the knuckle in her cunt, taking back the space he made for himself in there. She can feel the ring on his index fingers push into her a little, cold metal against her burning flesh. It makes her flinch. Halbrand notices and laughs into her.
Galadriel’s nearly incoherent by the time he drapes himself back over her, notching her cock back into her opening and pushing in on a single thrust. From the corner of her eye, she can see his fists on either side of her head, clenched into her sheets.
“Good girl—just let daddy take care of this little sweetheart cunt.” His voice rasps in her ear and a thick shudder rolls over her back and shoulders. “That’s what you’re good for, sweetie. Just be nice and still, and I’ll—” Whatever else he says is lost in the renewed strength in his hips as he thrusts into her.
She can only lay there and take it, let him use her like a little toy to get himself off. It’s her first time and she’s not sure if it’s supposed to go like this, but Halbrand seems to know what he’s doing. He splits her in half again and again, until her mind goes blank because she realizes that she can hear the sound of her wetness every time he thrusts into her.
He’s so heavy behind her. All-consuming. Her cheek is pressed into the pillow, so all she can do is moan and gasp for breath. Galadriel whines something again and again, maybe Give me give me give me, maybe I want it I want I want, maybe something else entirely incoherent. She knows she’s drooling onto the pillow and that briefly makes her angry enough that she harrumphs and lashes out a hand behind her, swatting at whatever part of Halbrand she can reach.
His hand leaves her hair to crawl down to her throat, gripping her there. Her whole brain goes file corrupted—blanks out, goes supernova, loses all power of deduction. Halbrand’s grip isn’t too tight, but it’s heavy like a brand. It makes her back arch, tilts her hips at an angle that makes his cock brush up against something inside of her that makes her legs flail.
The hand on her throat draws up to turn her face to his.
“Drink daddy’s spit, okay, honey?” Her mind goes blank; just white noise and her vision tunneling in on Halbrand’s face over hers until he pries her mouth open by pushing his thumb and middle finger into the hinges of her jaw and—what she doesn’t swallow leaks out the corner of her mouth.
“What if I pushed a finger in there now?” He whispers, smile lilting his voice. “Think it’d be a bit too tight? You’re already gripping me like you don’t want me to pull out.”
“You have to pull out!” She’s still with it enough to wail that, then bites back down on the pillow when he angles his hips up and drives into her faster.
He laughs. “C’mon, sweetie, isn’t it kind of nice?” The rasp of his beard against her skin suddenly, a pinprick-like feeling and she knows she’ll have a red spot there tomorrow morning. “Kinda risky?”
She can hardly bring herself to say more, breath coming out in quick, harsh pants the longer he pushes his cock into her like he can hardly bear to be apart from her for more than a second. Galadriel can feel the thought swimming in her head like No, it’s bad, it’s very very bad, but the man currently holding her down by the scruff of her neck and not-so subtly pushing her thighs wider until they burn with the strain of holding her body up is doing his best to erase any thought from her mind.
When she tries to buck him off, he moves his grip from her neck to the back of her head, pushing her face down into the pillow. Rucks her hips up higher with his free hand so he can pound better into her. Galadriel wails into the pillow—the same ruffled pillow she was lying on just yesterday watching TikToks in between study sessions—kicking her leg out to no avail.
This new angle makes him so much deeper into her; if she glanced a hand over her tummy now, she’d be surprised if she didn’t feel a little bulge. The snap of his hips against her ass is constant, ever-flowing like a sea rushing against a cliffside over and over.
“It’s okay, baby,” he whispers against the side of her head, pressing a sweet little kiss there like they do this all the time. “It’s gonna happen, so just let it. If I make you a mommy, I’ll stick around, okay?”
Galadriel comes almost accidentally, like an afterthought while he pounds into her and winds his fingers through her hair, muttering something about the softness of her cunt. It’s too much for her. The blood pounds in her temples.
She almost doesn’t realize when he comes, except for how his hips stutter into her once, twice, and then hold against her bottom, his fingers gripping her hips tight. A feeling of warmth spreads through her. She knows immediately what it is and hisses, fingers clenching into the sheets. Thank god she’s on the pill.
It takes forever for the rapacious beating of her heart to subside, for Galadriel to finally be able to take a full breath in. She whines when Halbrand pulls out of her because that makes his seed begin to drip out of her, down her thighs and onto the pillow still propped under her hips.
Maybe her brain will come back to her eventually, but for the moment, it’s still awash with thoughts of nebulae and starfire. Rather than collapsing onto her, Halbrand flops down onto the bed beside her; she can hear his panting breath gradually slow down as well.
Halbrand’s eyes are open when she rolls onto her side, staring into her own. He trails a finger out, slowly, deliberately, until he can loop it around a single strand of hair. Until he can twine it round and round his finger like a ring, then tugs it tight.
She wakes up the next morning sore all over—thighs, nipples, shoulders from where he must have held her for leverage when he was drilling into her from behind; her cunt most of all. It pulses when she rolls over, so Galadriel flops back onto her back and huffs out a noise that sounds like a sob but shakier.
The sound of someone snoring beside her jars her back to reality. When her head snaps over, she’s shocked to find Halbrand still there, languishing under her duvet. His feet hang over the edge of her too-small bed. Galadriel can admit to being floored—this is her first foray into college hookups, but she had expected him to disappear in the middle of the night after she’d fallen asleep.
He’s still deep in sleep, face smushed into her pillow and getting drool all over the floral pattern. When his face is lax in repose, there’s a certain boyishness that flees in the light of day. She just barely holds back from tracing the bridge of his nose with her finger.
The drool on her pillow makes her eye twitch though. Her hand flings out to smack him in the back of the head; Halbrand snorts into wakefulness, blinking the sleep out of his eyes and drawing up onto his elbows. He looks confused for all of a moment before his eyes find her laying beside him on the bed and that ever-present glint she recalls from the night before makes a reappearance.
“Hi, pretty girl,” he says, voice hoarse in the morning and it does not—it does not make her clench up. It does make her breath stutter out like she has a hiccup. Halbrand’s grin is just on the side of dumb, like he’s still a bit foggy from sleep but alert like a tomcat.
“What are you still doing here?” Galadriel asks, lips pursed like she’s on the verge of a pout.
He winces playfully, not taking her seriously at all. “Was I supposed to leave?”
“Don’t guys usually?” She grumbles, sitting up, not noticing how the blanket covering her chest falls away, baring her chest to him. Halbrand’s eyes glaze over.
“I don’t really know ‘bout all that,” he rasps, sitting up as well. Pulls the rest of the blankets off her until she’s bare to the daylight rays.
The next forty minutes evaporate into thin air. Like a smithing hammer that comes down and down again. Fire and embers crackling across her skin. Galadriel resurfaces when the birdsong outside her window starts up again with a vengeance, the day puttering away outside while she lounges in bed, a man’s spend leaking out of her for the second time in as many days. She feels remade in the light of day.
Halbrand is slipping back on the jeans and hoodie he’d worn the night before. It makes her feel inexplicably shy, watching a man get dressed in front of her for the first time. When he stands by the door, she wonders if that’s it, if after this she’ll only see him in passing, see the back of his light brown hair in a crowd and think, That’s who I gave it to.
His keys jangle when he tosses them into the air and catches them with the same hand. “You going to get dressed, honey? I’m driving you to class.”
She puts her bra on under the sheet, still too shy to get dressed out in the open. Halbrand probably rolls his eyes, but wisely doesn’t comment. “Drive? Thanks, but–uh, it’s just a twenty minute walk. It’s cool.”
His stare is penetrating, dead in the eyes like a thousand-year old entity. Then, suddenly wicked. Halbrand ambles over to her with a certain looseness in his hips, like floating over. When he kneels in front of her, her little legs dangling off the bed, the tips of her feet just touching the shaggy, pink carpet that she’d placed there precisely to keep her from being shocked by the cold floor early in the morning, she clutches the thin sheet closer to her.
The feeling of seeing him there is ineffable. Galadriel really did think he would’ve slunk off in the middle of the night. Her head is still woozy from the night before, but she feels looser in her skin seeing him in the light of day.
“Funny little girl,” he chuckles, running a hand over her knee. Her skin must be so smooth to him. “Like I’m going to leave you alone again. You get up to bad things on your own.”
“You are the bad thing,” Galadriel says accusingly, bopping him on the nose.
Halbrand throws his arm over her shoulder when they leave, giving her a sweet little kiss to the temple on the elevator down. Strangely domestic. She tries not to make eye contact with the monitor on duty as they leave by the same turnstiles, redness already blossoming under her cheeks.
He takes her to Starbucks, buys her a dirty chai latte with soy milk, which is like a nine dollar drink, but he doesn’t even bat an eye. She watches his face as she also orders a bagel with cream cheese. Halbrand smiles down at her, eyes crinkling at the corners as he gazes down at her with something like affection. When he lets her off in front of the lecture hall where her class is held, it's with a kiss on the nose and the promise of supper later on that evening.
When mother calls this weekend, she’s going to tell her that everyone was right.