Being eighteen and crushing on a girl you saw once on freshman orientation week is a very bad idea. Trust him. It is the age at which one starts to embark on silly self-discovery, usually involving a tad too much stupidity to last a lifetime. Falling in love is also, incidentally, a known amplifier to human foolishness. Not a good mix. Especially if the girl is an embodiment of everything awesome and cool and you're in denial of yourself every single day.

At least it felt like that to him.

At least that did.

What? They said love forced upon the poor initiates a pair of rose-tinted glasses, ones that were awfully difficult to remove.

And so he was relegated to the role of a pining knight watching his princess from afar, admiring her hair swishing as she jogged to her classes in the mornings and for the library in the evenings, large stacks of books tucked in her embrace or sagging down her bag. He mooned at her in the weekends as she lounged comfortably with her friends at the campus cafe, vanilla mint latte in hand, debating over the literary devices employed in yet-another-dead-man-novels.

He swore he wasn't a stalker. It was not his fault that he knew she was a Literature major, she practically acted like one and that once conversation he overheard when she picked her latte was simply an affirmation. It was not his fault he knew she was working for the school papers because said papers were distributed freely and he needed to know what was happening in his school too, not because a classmate saw where his eyes were always straying and conveniently remembered that he had seen the girl near the clubroom. And it was not his fault he knew how she spent her spare time because he was bound to stumble upon the fact while touring the campus grounds, as he currently had no affiliations with any clubs and the frat boys annoyed him so and therefore he was in need of finding something to do between classes. He wasn't intending to empty his schedules to match hers.

He swore he wasn't.

But dammit, if the situation kept up just like that, he felt like he might be sick. He was deliberating whether to give himself in to the nearest police station or not because boy, was he creepy.

He decided it was time he did something when he discovered half of his classmates had started a wager on whether he would be not too much of a chicken to initiate a conversation with her by the end of the first year. He wasn't losing his cred this way, it would be too pathetic.

Also, he was here for school, dammit. He might not be the best kind of student but he cared enough; enough to realize he had to resolve his ever-straying attention and absurd train of thought teasing him to declare a change in major before he did something drastic.

So he managed to snag a class with her the next term (which he knew she took through the grapevines. See, that was the part where being 'the cool guy' helped. Or maybe his classmate was tired of seeing him like this. He hoped the latter wasn't true). 18th century arts and culture didn't interest him much aside of the costumes, but it shouldn't be that bad and he held a strong enough ground to take it as a Drama student. If anyone would bother asking, he'd tell them he was studying period pieces. Like historical romance. Emphasis on the romance.