Something was indeed different today.

Steve regularly ate lunch at the food court with Tiffani, every weekday. It was always the same order; a salad for Tiffani, and a hamburger with fries for Steve. Then out would come the papers and the computers and they would begin to work on the project. They shared three classes and Tiffani had figured out two semesters ago that the skinny geek with the OCD and the Aspergers was one hell of a student, and promptly secured him for all three classes as a study partner and lab partner. It would have been a blatant example of a beautiful girl treating the nerd boy as a thing to be used, except for one small detail.

Tiffani was actually... nice. And she also liked some of the same stuff he did. She actually liked anime! And video games; the first time he'd called out "Stand! On! The! Point!" to make a joke while describing the underlying concept of the math problems they'd been working on, she had laughingly retorted by pointing at the same graph while telling him, "we need a dispenser here!" A week later she'd shown up at a LAN party as his guest. And had been invited back the next week not because of how her cleavage looked in her shirt, but because she'd been good company and scored more kills than deaths during the majority of matches.

They were good friends. A friendship in no way diminished by the unspoken but mutual awareness that Steve regularly masturbated to thoughts of her, though Tiffani had never thought of him as more than a friend. She did often flirt with him and tease him, but never more than that. Just enough to leave him regularly frustrated even as he acknowledged the enjoyment of the torment. Just a hint of cruelty in an otherwise sweet relationship.

Steve knew a lot about Tiffani by now. He knew what shows she liked to watch, and what books she liked to read, and what her favorite strategies were when playing PvP matches. And he knew that she liked her meals to be light on the meat and heavy on the produce. "Trying something new?" he asked half jokingly, looking in bemusement at the large carton of Mongolian beef she was slight bent over.

Tiffani actually blushed deeply, looking down at her food. "I couldn't help it," she said, looking genuinely unhappy about her own choice of food. "I just couldn't resist. I'm just craving meat lately."