Living With Boys

eleven // hungover

I woke to a tentative knock on the door.

My throat was dry and my eyes were bleary, and the knock reverberated through my brain as if someone was trying to punch their way out. Every muscle in my body ached—had I tried to do back handsprings while intoxicated or something? Tripped and fallen flat on my...everything?—and a vague sense of nausea churned in my stomach.

Hangovers were a fucking bitch.

I missed being a teenager, when alcohol simply burned in and out of my system, never teaching me that my actions had consequences. Why did there have to be consequences?

There was another knock, a little louder this time.

I blinked groggily. "Uh huh?"

The door swung open with an almost vampirically smooth glide, to reveal Jonah encased in the doorway, looking almost vampiric himself with deeply etched dark circles like bruises beneath his eyes, and his dark hair falling over his eyes. The image was belied by the gigantic blanket with a pattern of yellow ducks wrapped like a shawl around his head. He also had little ducky slippers on his feet. The juxtaposition would have made me laugh, if I wasn't on the verge of slipping back to sleep despite the incongruity of the image before me.

"You have the master bedroom," said Jonah, his voice a sleepy croak. "With the ensuite. And if I am going to vomit everywhere, I would like to be close to a toilet when that happens."

"Are you going to vomit?" I questioned.

Jonah looked decidedly unimpressed with the very notion of his own response, as if he would report it to the manager of his own physiology if he could. "Highly likely."

I made a vague empathetic groan at his unfortunately relatable plight. "What happened to the other toilet?"

"Seb is on it. Also, I want to go back to sleep, and I don't like sleeping on bathroom tiles."

"Hm, okay," I mumbled, rolling over to make space for Jonah on the side of the bed closest to the toilet, patting the mattress next to me. "Come and bond with me."

Jonah squinted at me. "Only if your idea of bonding involves going back to sleep."

"Mhm," was all I managed. I really did want to go back to sleep. For once, Jonah and I were entirely aligned in this goal

Jonah took a tentative shuffle forward, peering at the spot beneath his ducky hood. "Just so you know, I actually just want to sleep, and this isn't a weird come on or anything."

I snorted. Jonah was a good-looking guy, but I literally could not even imagine him attempting a brazen come on like this. Our relationship had the firm platonic boundaries that I had with Seb or Zara. That innate sense of friendship without even a question of more.

Besides, he was wearing ducky pyjamas. Not exactly the choice of armour for an evil seducer. "I cannot stress enough how much I did not think that."

With that firmly established, Jonah did not hesitate to roll onto the other side of the bed. The mattress was large enough that there was practically an ocean of space between us, and Jonah immediately curled into a tiny little duck-emblazoned ball, his back to me and eyes on the toilet, and I grinned.

It was kind of nice to have company. Zara used to crash in my room all the time, when we stayed up so late talking that she would rudely fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, and I would just shrug and roll over. I had an obsessive need to be around people all the time, and even though I was a big girl, I'd practically always had a boyfriend, and part of me wondered if it was because I loved them, or I just loved that I wasn't by myself.