#lovesdives

⭒ ° . ♡ ― if you asked zoey, their apartment was ( usually ) a sanctuary of serenity and good taste in interior design. she'd sunk a lot of money into making sure each room was COZY to say the least. material comforts were a necessity due to her daily stress intake, what with all her friends liked to put her through - from late night cramming, to frat party spill-over, to their own other more annoying friends. and if you kept asking her, Cole was definitively in that final category. not close enough to be her own friend ( ew. ) and yet, way too goddamn present in her living room wayyy too often. and while things hadn't quite reached mortal enemy territory yet, he was certainly egging his way there one argument at a time. especially when there never seemed to be enough days between their run-ins to actually forget last week's petty grudges.

and, ok. thomas made sure to pencil in regular reminders over breakfast that their beef was SILLY. she could even agree, to an extent. but the thing about zoey was that she was never going to choose the high road. after all, who was she to fight the inevitable ? -- they were meant to be at odds. if Cole had wanted to fix that, he would have tried to by now. so when good-old thom pried her morning OJ from her hands to delicately wrap her fingers between his . . . she knew what it meant for the remainder of her day. ' he won't be here long. ' he'd tried to soothe her pointlessly, like it was going to stop her from doing her damnedest to inconvenience their house-guest / intruder at every opportunity.

⭒ ° . ♡ ―  haeil knew better than to expect the apartment to still be empty when he woke up. hannah wasn’t exactly a discourteous roommate -- she was in fact his favorite in a long while -- but she knew what she liked. and what she liked seemed to be waking up wrapped around strangers, be it in her own bed or theirs. on the odd occasion, the need to cuddle would eclipse her so completely that he’d even wake up to find her in HIS bed, wrapping his arms around her groggily and passing back out. because what was the sense in fighting it at 3:45 in the morning when she was good at it ? warm, soft, kind of sort of not really minding her business beside him ? but he hadn’t expected it to be kaz she tugged home from whatever party she’d found her way to last night. when he’d heard the front door click shut somewhere in the night he’d just assumed it was someone new. it usually was. 

and maybe that was stupid of him. that’s how they’d met, wasn’t it ? a half-hearted and pseudo interested morning-after run in that warmed as the universe continued to create reasons they ought to run into each other. but if kaz had been over lately, he’d missed it. haeil had only had the pleasure of catching him at work in recent weeks. 

poking his head up over the back of the couch, he eyeballed the familiar, light-footed man that slipped from hannah’s room. but the stealth was pointless, because hannah slept like the dead when she was hungover and kaz ? oh, he was 100% caught. 4k. red-handed. 

⭒ ° . ♡ ―  the thing was, it had been a few weeks ​since eve had moved into ace’s place. the spare bedroom was starting to look something like a real home, with his actual bedroom rotting away a floor below while the rent period ran to its end. but he still found himself drawn to his old place from time to time, and it was becoming an issue. or rather, the reasons were. at first it had only seemed natural -- he had things to pick up and mail to find, furniture to decide whether to keep or dump. but then a pattern had begun to form, deep in his subconscious and conveniently invisible to him until it smacked him in the face with the force of an encyclopedia that morning. 

every time he felt drawn back to his old haunts, ace was gone. and no matter what it was that drew him away or for how long, eve chased the comfort of a time before the current risks. as if some quiet part of him was worried ace might not come back at all. 

which was OBVIOUSLY absurd. it flew right in the face of his rather pressing agenda to pretend nothing he felt towards his friend was beyond the realm of sweetly and comfortably distant sex, like he hadn’t been pining for months now. like he hadn’t basically moved in the way a boyfriend might. like he hadn’t caught himself once or twice getting jealous of ace’s other endeavors, ‘ i want you to be mine ’  rising and dying on his tongue in the same mere seconds. because that was where they WERE, that was all they’d agreed to do. and who was he to tie anyone down ? 

still, they’d realized, and then they’d frozen. sat down on the carpet in a rush of defeat and wondered how to express they were grappling with something without at all expressing that when the other inevitably returned to find him still sitting there wresting with non-emotion like. and, okay, maybe he hadn’t ACTUALLY thought he’d be there that long and he was just dramatic by nature, the image a little too close to a puppy waiting by the door for his comfort. but sure enough he was pulled out of his thoughts by the sound of the front door opening.