Page 9 of A Totally Platonic Thing
By the time I finally fell asleep somewhere around dawn, nothing had come to mind.
Chris
Waking up sucked. I rolled over onto my back, groaned, and instantly tangled myself up into a ball because I had to piss so fucking bad, oh myGod.
Crawling out of bed to the bathroom sucked even more. Getting my jeans unfastened, especially since they’d embedded themselves into my flesh and squeezed my bladder overnight, sucked like a million times more than that…and basically it all turned into a head-pounding, staggering, moaning, zombie apocalypse-level suckfest. Only I was the zombie, and I was apparently trying to eat my own brain.
Or something. Although that thought nearly made me throw up again.
Lucas was gone, of course, because he’d had work to do in the lab.
A few hours after getting me from the bar.
I groaned again, and even though I knew I’d hate myself for it later, and Lucas would be so mad at me, I collapsed onto his bed instead of mine once I stumbled out of the bathroom.
Not that Lucas would care about me being on his bed, exactly. I spent a lot of time on Lucas’s bed, because he had a double and I had a twin, and who didn’t want to spread out when they sprawled? It’s not like we had room for a couch.
But Lucas would totally care that I’d crawled into his bed without taking a shower first. I reeked of vodka sweat and whatever that fake smoke crap was that they used in clubs, and maybe even a little bit of real smoke, since I was pretty sure I’d bummed a cigarette off of someone at some point last night. Maybe more than one. And I didn’t think I’d thrown up on my jeans at all, but who knew? And I definitely hadn’t washed my face yet.
My grubby, sweaty face, which I currently had buried in Lucas’s pillows. Man, his pillows smelled so good. Why did our laundry detergent never smell this good onmypillows? Our detergent didn’t even have much of a scent to it, since I bought the fragrance-free kind. But it really smelled good right now. Fresh and soothing and warm all at the same time.
I rubbed my face deeper into the pillow like a cat, shamelessly. Screw it. I’d change his sheets before he got home, and maybe do some other work around the apartment too. Cook dinner. I’d go to the store and splurge, get some salmon or something else he really liked.
Which reminded me that Lucas had probably taken my car, left it in the parking lot by Aeon, and picked up his own.
So I didn’t have my car, and Lucas had my keys anyway.
Fuck my life.
I yanked the pillow around my head and screamed into it, subsiding with a miserable moan a second later when the sound of my own voice spiked my headache into the stratosphere.
Coffee. Always the answer.
Extracting myself from Lucas’s bed ended up being harder than getting out of my own, but I dragged myself into the kitchen and started filling the pot, moving like an arthritic old man with vertigo.
My phone started blaring “Jailhouse Rock” right as I started to pour.
Shit. Aidan was calling me. I managed to slosh water all over my legs as I shakily put the coffee pot down, and I found my phone on my nightstand next to my wallet and a couple of condoms, where Lucas had obviously emptied my pockets when he put me to bed.
I winced at the spotty memory and at the racket from my phone. I mean, no offense to Elvis. He would always be the King. But right now…why had I thought that was funny again?
“Yeah?” I rasped.
“Hey!” Another wince. Did Aidan have to be so loud at this time of the…I pulled the phone away from my ear to take a look. It was still morning, dammit. “I dropped Sebastian off at school ’cause I need the car today to run errands. I stopped to see Lucas in his lab. I’d never really gone inside before. It's so fucking cool, they have robots! Anyway, you want a ride to your car in a couple minutes? He gave me your keys.”
A couple minutes. Shit, I could hardly focus on standing up. “Um. I don’t know if I can—”
“Rally, sunshine,” Aidan said, with only the faintest hint of sardonic sympathy. “I’ll be there in ten.”
And he hung up on me.
For a second, staring down at the flashing screen of my phone, I wanted to collapse on the floor and pull a blanket over my head and hide and die. I was all disgusting and unkempt, and I couldn’t even with the idea of climbing into Aidan’s car and letting him see me—and ugh,smellme—like this. So he was Sebastian’s fiancé, but that didn’t mean it was fun to have a really hot guy think I was gross. Talk about a self-esteem killer.
Rally, sunshine. Well, maybe it wasn’t that easy, but I had to do it anyway. If I didn’t get my car, I couldn’t cook for Lucas, who was spending the whole day working while I recovered from my hangover. I mean, technically I had a class that afternoon, but I’d only missed that particular section once or twice so far that quarter. And the TA didn’t really care. At least, he hadn’t said much about attendance that I’d noticed.
I could rally. And I could cook, and show Lucas how much I appreciated him, because I really, really, seriously did. And having Aidan give me that disapproving, amused look of his when I got in his car all bedraggled and pathetic and hungover would be my penance for fucking up.
Ten minutes later, sunglasses shoved onto my pale face, I got in Aidan’s car—well, Sebastian’s, technically, but anything of Sebastian’s was Aidan’s too at this point, and vice versa.
