Archive of Our Own

There were worse ways to spend her Tuesday evening, May thought to herself as she scratched Absol behind the ears on the new couch. The dark amber sunset stretched across the still-bare walls of the largely empty apartment, filtering in through large glass windows that led to the balcony. The February chill seeped in through the closed windows, biting through her flannel- May’s first complaint about the new apartment? Terrible heating and AC.

Her second complaint was that her best friend and rival of ten years and simultaneous new roommate of about twelve hours now apparently didn’t approve of May’s lounging.

Drew hung over the back of the couch, arms crossed, watching his pokemon curl up with May, a lighthearted but disapproving look on his face. “I thought we weren’t going to let the pokemon on the couch.”

“I don’t remember us agreeing to that,” she said innocently, looking up at him, though she knew he saw through it immediately.

He picked a tuft of Absol fur off of her flannel, fingers brushing her shoulder. “You know there’s going to be pokemon fur all over the furniture now, and you’ll be the one who vacuums it, right?”

“Worth it. Right, Absol?” She grinned as the pokemon grumbled in agreement, nestling against her. It was a nice feeling, one she basked in. Skitty was far too energetic for moments like this, and Glaceon had always been a bit more on the prickly side, and her other pokemon were too big. But Absol? The perfect size and temperament for couch snuggles. If you minded the scythe, of course.

Drew tried to hide the smile that graced his face as Absol had snuggled into May, but he failed, the corners of his lips turning up slightly as he spoke. “Is this your plan to win the Grand Festival? Make all my pokemon love you so much that they won’t want to fight against you?”

“That’s absolutely not my plan,” she started, hand running through Absol’s fur, “And if your pokemon love me more than they love you, that’s their choice. Plus, Absol’s preferred me for years now. Because I do things like letting him on the couch.”

“Whatever.” Drew’s voice held empty annoyance, but no real negativity sat behind it. “Look, are you going to help me assemble the last dining room chair before we go to sleep, or are you going to keep trying to steal my pokemon from me?”

“Ugh, there’s still another to put together?”

“Yes. We bought four chairs and put together three. That leaves one-”

“I know math,” she interrupted. She slowly sat up with a groan, trying to move her legs out from where Absol laid down on them.

“Debatable. I’ve seen you budgeting.” He paused. “Absol, come on, bud. Move. You’ve got a perfectly good bed right over there. Let her up.”

May leaned down, careful to not disturb the sleeping Absol, reaching to the floor to pick up one of the stray instruction pamphlets from one of the other three chairs they’d built. She promptly threw it at Drew, who caught it with an eye roll and tossed it towards the recycling bin.

“That’s for dissing my budgeting skills.”

“Real mature. Now, can you please help me build this other chair so we can call it a night?”

Forty five minutes later, they were nowhere close to calling it a night.

Sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, May peered under the coffee table, searching for the bag of tiny screws while Drew struggled to get one of the chair legs straight.

“This is stupid,” May muttered indignantly, the bag of screws nowhere to be found. “Some assembly required, my ass. Isn’t it stupid? They say the word ‘some’, and that makes you think it won’t be all that much, but then there’s ten thousand billion little pieces, and it’s a hell of a lot more than ‘some’ assembly.”

“It’s also a hell of a lot cheaper.” He didn’t look up from his task, intently focused as he kept talking. “Did you check under the couch cushions for the screws?”

“Oh!” Immediately, May stood up, flipping the couch cushions. Just as he’d guessed, the screws were there- she then remembered putting them in her pocket earlier in the day, and they must have fallen out when she’d taken a nap with Absol.

She’d never admit it, but it was going to be nice, having Drew around to help keep her on track. It was a routine they fell into, making up for the other’s shortcomings. She’d lose something, he’d find it. He’d start overthinking, she’d bring him out of it. She’d struggle to recall a specific word, he’d know exactly which one she searched for. He’d get something on his sandwich that he didn’t like, she’d eat it for him.

It was a balance she couldn’t find anywhere else, with anyone else.

She pushed the thought aside.

She walked back over and sat down next to him, opening the little bag and letting the screws fall out on the floor for her to sort through.

“Would you look at that, the screws were right where I thought they’d be. What would you ever do without me?” he asked, opening his hand as she dropped the screw he needed into his palm.

“I’d do absolutely fine without you, for your information. I bet you’d be the one to have a hard time without me. Need me to hold that in place?” May interrupted herself, seeing the way he struggled to screw in the chair leg while also holding it in place.

“Yeah, thanks.” He shifted to the side a bit, allowing her room to sit closer. His arm brushed hers lightly as they worked together. “And what makes you think I’d have a hard time without you?”

She resisted the urge to playfully nudge him with her shoulder. If not for his intent focus on the task at hand, she probably would have. “Well, without me, I think you’d be bored. And lonely. And without me, Solidad would make you go make other friends, which you’d absolutely hate, because every time we have to socialize, I talk for both of us. So, without me, I think you’d be lonely.” She grinned as he stuck his tongue out at her, faint amusement lighting up in his eyes. But he didn’t argue or disagree.

He turned away from her for a second and finished screwing in the last chair leg, inspecting it and making sure it was in properly. He stood up after he was satisfied with it, brushing carpet fuzz off of his pants as he stood. “Yeah, well. Without me, you’d lose everything you touch, and I don’t know who else would give you their fries every single time we get dinner after a contest.”

“You’re probably right,” she admitted with a light laugh. “But the only reason nobody else would give me their fries is because nobody else dislikes fries. You’re just weird.”

“Oh, I don’t dislike fries.”

“Hm? Then why are you always giving them to me?”

He didn’t answer, just blankly staring at her for a second with a familiar expression- like he was waiting for something to sink in, waiting for her to catch some undercurrent of what he’d said.

She blankly stared back.

But apparently, he wasn’t in the mood to clarify, opting to just leave her wondering with a shrug and a knowing smirk that he knew would annoy her. Typical. He wordlessly reached his hand down to her to help her up from where she sat on the floor, and she accepted it, being pulled back up to her feet.

He let go of her hand slowly, and she made no effort to end the slightly-prolonged touch. She could feel where his hand was a bit rougher from gardening as it slid out of hers, his thorn-scarred fingertips brushing hers. A final second of contact that lingered even after it ended.

The entire process must have taken no more or less than three seconds, but it was stuck in her mind as if it had been an hour of contact.

The entire time, emerald green eyes never left hers. “Well, if I’m probably right- if you’d be a scattered mess without me, and if I’d be a lonely hermit without you, then I guess it’s a good thing we’re moving in together, huh?”

“I guess so.” The apartment’s AC had to have been broken. An hour ago, she’d been freezing on the couch before Absol had snuggled up to her, but now, her body felt a bit too warm for itself, a fever pitch taking hold as he gazed at her.

Broken AC and heating. That’s all that was. It had absolutely nothing to do with how she just loved the idea that he felt as balanced out by her as she felt by him. Nothing to do with that at all. Nothing to do with how close he stood, close enough that she swore she could feel the heat radiating off of him.

Just a broken AC system.

After a prolonged moment, he turned away from her to put the now-finished chair where it belonged at the table, and she caught a smile break at his lips.

She felt one take its place on her face as well as she realized he’d turned away to try and hide his smile.

In an effort to hide her own, she bent down, picking up the cardboard box the chair components had been stored in, folding it up compactly as best as she could, sliding the broken-down and folded box behind the recycling bin.

The conversation comfortably fizzled into silence, the both of them falling into a natural rhythm as they cleaned up together.

His silence used to bother her, she recalled, slightly out of nowhere. She suddenly remembered being younger and dumber, when they’d first started to shift from rivals to friends. At first, she’d sworn he hated her, that one summer in Johto when they’d spent real time alone together for the first time. She remembered the frustration and fear she’d felt at his silence back then, so long ago. But his silence had never been hatred or dislike. His silence was a warm moment she’d used to mistake for a cold shoulder.

And now, that comfortable silence was one of his thousands of little traits that she’d grown to know and find soothing comfort in over the years.

Drew as a friend was far quieter than he was as a rival. No brash taunts, none of the vivid, bright, loud rivalry they’d shared. As a rival, he’d wanted to ignite her, to wind her up and watch her spin, to set off her sparks.

As a rival, he wanted her to do better because of him, and he knew exactly how to drag it out of her. As a friend, he wanted to simply exist with her, sharing the spaces between conversations.

To be able to have both at the same time meant more to May than it probably should have, and more than she was willing to look into, both then and now.

But just because she wasn’t willing to look into it didn’t mean she never did.

It was hard not to. She remembered being fifteen or so, halfway across the world from him for the Wallace Cup, getting a good-luck text from him before the contest had started. It must have been about three AM in Hoenn, but he’d stayed up- or woken up- to wish her luck.

Or, it was hard not to when she’d find roses laying around in places she never expected. Sometimes, delivered by hand. But more often than not, just lying around in places for her to find. If they would have been staying at the same pokemon center for a contest, she’d find them slid under her door. If she won a contest, it would be waiting in her locker by the time she reached it.

She couldn’t count the hours she’d spent trying to figure the roses out. She wondered if she’d start finding them around the house, now that they lived together.

She came back to attention, dragged out of her thoughts as Drew spoke. “Alright. I think I’m going to go take a shower, before you use all the hot water for yours.”

“I do not use all the hot water-”

“You absolutely do. Remember that time like, four years ago, we had to share that hotel room in Unova? The bathroom mirror was fully steamed up when I went in there to take mine after you. It was freezing.”

“I didn’t know you paid so much attention to my showers!”

Now it was his turn to indignantly refute her. “I don’t! It’s just impossible to ignore the freezing water running down my skin any time I shower after you!”

Well, now May almost wished she could be the one to take a cold shower as she let that image sink in, cold water running from the shower head, dripping from his hair, forming beads that would roll down his spine…

“Whatever. Go enjoy your hot water,” she finished casually, breaking the conversation off there. Drew shot her a curious look at the not-so-subtle ending of the conversation, but he didn’t pry, just nodding at her and going to his room to get his clothes and a towel.

As he closed the bathroom door and the shower started, May stood up from where she sat on the bar stool, stretching, twisting her back.

Part of her wanted to find something to do, or to lay out on the couch, but time awake would mean time replaying the conversation they’d just had, replaying images in her head.

That wasn’t going to lead anywhere productive. Nothing would right then. Nothing productive could come from the rush of anxiety that came from knowing that she’d signed up for living with him, for going through this every single day.

She’d managed to keep it contained and stay blissfully ignorant for this long, refusing to put names to emotions. But what if she’d only been able to because of the distance between them? They traveled together more often than not, sure. But living with him, sharing breakfast and the couch and the bills… things were about to be a hell of a lot harder to ignore. Certain emotions were demanding a name.

Not figuring it out right now. I’m not figuring that out.

With a sigh, May bit the inside of her cheek and made her way to her room and turned out the light.

Maybe some sleep would fix this.

Fifteen minutes later, May wandered back out to the living room. Sleep hadn’t come. Not that she’d tried particularly hard. She just found that she didn’t want to be in her room- it was still so blank, so devoid of anything she called her own. She far preferred being in their living room.

She really liked being able to call it their living room.

It felt nice.

It felt the same way that the dying rays of sunset stretching warm across her skin had felt earlier. It felt like the rush of comfortable exhaustion after they’d both finished carrying the boxes of furniture up the apartment stairs, finally dropping it off in the entryway and collapsing on the floor side-by-side. It felt like curling up with Absol on the couch, the pokemon nuzzled into her side as if it were her own.

It felt like home.

It felt like the start of something.

May didn’t know what it felt like the start of. She was figured on not figuring that out. If she had to figure that one thing out, then she’d have a million other things to figure out, and that was just simply too many things to figure out. It was a landmine she could dance over, delicately stepping between what everything did or didn’t mean. She knew exactly where in the metaphorical ground the danger laid. She knew that landmine like the back of her hand, like shades of green and little idiosyncrasies and his favorite song, but specifically the acoustic version because he’d always preferred that one, and the way he refused to wear glasses even though he needed them.

She knew him. And that right there was the landmine, wasn’t it? The thing she was figured on not figuring out. If she didn’t figure out how she wanted to know everything she didn’t already know about him, if she didn’t figure out spare glances in crowded rooms, pressed and dried flowers somewhere in a moving box, heart palpitations that she almost wished were a medical issue of some sort, if she didn’t figure any of those out, she could keep it at a distance.

Keep it distanced, keep it chill, keep it casual, keep it contained.

If she didn’t figure it out, she could keep it ‘roommates’.

But she didn’t have to figure it out to know that she liked whatever this felt like the start of. She liked the sound of ‘ours’. ‘Our’ house. ‘Our’ living room.

‘Ours’.

She could get used to ours.

“May?” Drew’s voice cut through her sentimental haze and she looked up, startled to find him standing right next to her. She hadn’t noticed him walk out of the bathroom, freshly showered, his hair wet and slightly plastered to his face, towel-dried and messy… He spoke again, cutting her out of that haze as well. “Deep in thought about something?”

“Hm? Oh, uh. Sort of, I guess.”

“Really?” he asked, mock surprise in his tone, but a light, teasing smile to even it out. Anyone else, she’d have missed the subtlety of the teasing in his smile. “That’s a first, isn’t it? You, being deep in thought?”

It was far from the first time she’d been deep in thought about how he looked after he showered, but May pushed that back, reminding herself that she’d sworn to not figure that out either.

“Very funny. And you’re being an ass. Not a first for you.”

“An ass you moved in with,” he retorted.

She certainly had moved in with his ass. Not that she ever spent any time looking when he wore that one pair of jeans.

Damn it, she chided herself. She wasn’t doing a particularly good job of ‘not figuring it out’.

He lightly brushed past her, walking towards the kitchen, and May followed, sitting down at the island countertops on one of the spinny bar stools she’d assembled earlier.

Crossing her arms on the cool marble countertop and laying her head in her arms, she watched him, contentedly.

She watched as he opened the cabinet to get one of his mugs out (he’d insisted on putting the fragile dishes away first, before someone or their pokemon could knock them over in the moving boxes and break them). He’d chosen the plain white one. She wondered if he always chose that one, if every single morning she’d wake up and meet him in the kitchen with the same mug, or if he was someone who liked to switch them out every day.

She watched as he searched for one of his little compostable coffee pod things. He’d complained about not getting a real coffee maker, but unfortunately they’d both decided that having money for rent was more important for now, or at least until the next contest circuit’s prize money started to come in. She wondered how he made his coffee every morning, with an actual coffee maker and not little coffee pods.

She watched the way the fabric of his shirt moved across his back as he moved, hitting buttons on the shitty keurig. Slowly, the coffee machine grumbled to life under his touch.

“Who makes coffee at eleven PM?” she asked after a moment, her voice muffled by the sleeve of her flannel.

He raised the cup to his lips, back still turned to her. “Who watches another person make coffee? I can feel you staring at me.” With that he turned around, meeting her eyes to prove his own point, eyebrows raised as if to say, see?.

May’s face flushed red, half-hidden by her chin and mouth resting in her arms. “Am I just gonna have to sit here and learn all your weird little habits now that we’re roommates?” She asked, ignoring his question entirely. “Are you someone who always has to sit in the same chair, or do you sort your laundry really weirdly? What other weird habits do you have that I have to live with now?”

“You’ll find out by living with me, won’t you?” He sat in the empty barstool next to her, spinning to the side to face her directly. “What about you? I already know you let pokemon on the furniture.” He shot a pointed glance over to the living room where Absol contentedly basked on the couch, still in the spot it and May had been in before, deeply slumbering. “What other things do I have to get used to?”

May ran through possible answers in her head, but came up with nothing. She didn’t have any weird habits, right? She shrugged. “Nothing. Nothing as weird as drinking coffee at night, anyways.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

“Please don’t.”

He just smirked, confirmation that he was absolutely going to hold her to it. The conversation lulled for a second, silence comfortably settling in the space between them. May listened to the tick of the clock against the wall, the soft thud of footsteps in the floor above them, Drew’s steady breathing.

He spoke up, breaking the near-silence. “It’s getting late. We should probably head off to bed.” He stood up, cup of coffee in hand.

May glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall- it read 11:11.

“11:11,” she muttered, half to herself. “That’s a lucky number, right?”

“Yeah, depending on who you ask.” Slowly, they both walked across the living room together, turning the lights off.

They came to stop in the hallway that led to their rooms, the amber, flickering overhead light now the only thing illuminating the house.

“Why do you ask?” Drew asked her, tilting his head at the clock- seconds ticked past, getting closer to 11:12.

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. Quietly, matching the lower volume of his voice. With all the lights out in the house, it just made sense to be quieter.

But low, quiet voices in a dimly lit hallway that wasn’t quite wide enough for the both of them… once again, it felt like the temperature was physically rising around the two of them.

“It’s 11:12 now,” Drew said, voice dipping even lower, stepping slightly closer. “I hope you didn’t need that luck for anything.”

Her next words came out before she could stop them, eyes meeting his. “I don’t think I need any luck.”

“I know you don’t.”

It was like they’d just had an entire conversation in the bylines. It was like they were writing out what laid in the subtext, scrawling notes on the left side of the red line on wide rule paper. Headers and footnotes, annotations laying under their words, everything they couldn't say in the body paragraphs being laid out bare in the margins.

His eyes, the most vibrant green she’d ever seen, read hers intently. Wordlessly, they continued the conversation in the form of eye contact.

He definitely caught the way her eyes had strayed down to his lips. There was no way he’d missed it. But she hadn’t missed the tiniest twitch of his mouth, one corner of his lips desperately trying not to skew upwards as he saw her looking at his lips.

This was one of the most engaging conversations she’d had in a long time. A silent call-and-response that only the two of them could understand.

May almost felt the need to rescind her statement about not needing any luck. She was starting to feel like she could use some if she was going to have to live with him like this, with the way he looked at her with lidded, crescent-moon eyes…

The hallway was currently filled with a tense, charged silence as they stood in it, surrounded by half empty moving boxes and an all-encompassing sense of electricity. Any fatigue from the day was long forgotten and replaced by the all-too-familiar tension, like a piece of thread that was one good tug away from snapping.

What would happen if she tugged on it?

May frowned, annoyed to find the line of thought once again at the forefront of her mind. All the things she promised she wouldn’t figure out threatened to work themselves out of their own volition, shifting and fitting together like gears in a clock, or like puzzle pieces falling into place.

May gathered her voice, which was slightly choked up. She pushed through the unwelcome lump in her throat, trying to mask the sudden rush of emotions that were rising to the forefront. “I’m going to bed, I’ll see you tomorrow. In our- um, the new house.” Her words sounded too loud to her own ears, despite the still-quiet timbre of her voice. May tripped over the word ‘our’ as soon as it fell out of her mouth.

Our.

What if he didn’t want ‘our’?

May started talking immediately with no regard for the words that scrambled out of her mouth, fumbling to overwrite her misstep. “I mean, not our house. Not ours, just… mine and yours.”

Well, that’s not any better.

“I mean, it’s not really a house,” May carried on hurriedly. “It’s an apartment, I guess.” She paused again, waiting for Drew to say something and take her out of her misery, but much to her annoyance, he just leaned back against the wall, refusing to fill the awkward silence with a slight smirk (which only made it harder for her to find the right words to fill the silence). “Um,” she started again, “It’s been nice, unpacking everything. In the apartment. Good job assembling the chairs today.”

Drew shot her an amused look at the awkward rambling. His eyes held a challenge, a question- If I just stand here silently, are you going to keep talking?

She half expected him to upkeep the silence in an attempt to see what other words would haphazardly tumble out of her mouth to fill it, but after a second, he took her cue and cut the silence for her. “I’ll see you tomorrow too, May,” Drew said after a moment’s pause, his tone quiet, his face difficult to read in the dim lighting. “In our house.”

And there that word was again. It lingered in the air like smoke, a heavy haze that clouded everything around them. Our. It was a word that held weight and intention, almost like a promise.

Blood poured in and out of May’s ever-quickening heartbeat, filling her face with heat that she hoped Drew couldn’t see in the dim hallway lighting.

Her eyes met his, and she was utterly disarmed by the softness in them. His words echoed in her head. He wanted ‘ours’. Or at least, he wanted something similar.

He put his coffee cup down on the surface of one of the moving box towers.

“I…” She trailed off before she could even start.

For all of her rambling a moment before, words now evaded her, slipping through her mind like water through a colander. She knew what she wanted to say.

She’d figured out everything she’d sworn not to.

She’d figured out that the word ‘ours’ felt right, it felt like home. That she wouldn’t have complained if this became more than just an off-season home base. That she hoped that one day, two bedrooms would feel like one too many. That she felt like everything was falling into place far too fast and not fast enough at the same time.

But she couldn’t say any of it.

She tried to start again, “Drew-”, but immediately words failed her once more.

At the sound of her saying his name, his eye contact with her intensified, with him now leaning forward intently instead of leaning back against the parallel wall. He looked at her expectantly, hopefully. Desperately, she grasped at the spare words flying through her mind, but every time she felt like she came close to something, it slipped out of her hands again. To both of their disappointment, all May could grab was a single word, a single fraction of everything she couldn’t add up.

“Drew, um…I just wanted to say-goodnight.”

Drew’s shoulders fell with the held breath he’d let go of- the only sign of emotion May had to go off of as his face remained neutral and unreadable by the single flickering light on the ceiling. “Goodnight, May.”

With a slight nod, May felt her hand drift towards the doorknob to her room, but something stopped her before her hand could grasp the cold, cheap metal. Drew watched her every move intently, like a cat Pokemon focused on a glimmer of light on the wall.

Her hand hovered over the doorknob but made no progress.

She could feel his verdant gaze on her, trying to figure her out. Figuring out why she hadn’t left yet. A useless endeavor, honestly. May was starting to realize that maybe there was nothing to figure out, just a feeling, a magnetism, gravity that kept her in place next to him.

After a moment’s worth of a silent standoff, both of them waiting for the other to retreat to their respective rooms, his voice came out quiet, delicate. “You know, your bed is that way.”

“And yours is that way.”

“Well. We should probably go to bed then.” He made no effort to move.

Neither did she. “Right.”

And so, there they stood, facing each other. That hallway was a trench and they were in a stalemate. It was like waiting for the first strike of lightning, electricity crackling in the heavy air, all caution about to be blown away in the winds of the incoming storm. Nobody wanted to be the first to leave and nobody wanted to be the last to stay.

And yet, they both stayed.

It was as if the two narrow parallel walls were closing in. Suddenly, the hallway felt far too small for the both of them, as if the parallel walls pressed the two of them together. May found that she was okay with that.

And she was very okay with the way Drew had started to look at her, slow-blinking eyes flicking down to her lips.

She was okay with the way she’d, at some point, taken a step closer to him. She was okay with the way she, her heart, her body, her entire essence, seemed to move forward entirely separately of any rational thought that would have told her to not close that distance.

Rational thought was entirely out the window by the time his hand brushed her waist, reaching around to press into the small of her back. Through her camisole and flannel, she could feel his touch as vividly and sharply as if there’d been no fabric at all between his hand and her spine.

And that specific line of thought, and any associated imagery, did absolutely nothing to retrieve any of her missing rationality.

But rationality and logic and thought could stay gone, for all she cared. She didn’t need them. All she needed was the increasingly negative space between herself and Drew.

He’d leaned in, angling his head slightly, corners of his lips tilting upwards in a smile as he saw her do the same. She broke her gaze from his lips to meet his eyes, piercingly viridescent and twinkling in a smile as her nose brushed against his.

They stayed frozen like that for a moment, faces tilted, noses side-to-side, foreheads almost touching, eyes fluttering shut.

Neither of them moved, no effort was made to close the kiss, they simply basked in the proximity of the other. They were drinking in the feeling of their faces gracing the other’s, the feeling of one’s breath hesitating against the other’s lips, all of it.

It was intoxicating, tantalizing, dizzying, breathtaking, everything.

May wanted- no, needed, more than everything.

She grasped at her bravery, or courage, or whatever was close enough, talking before she could stop herself. “Is this how you’d say goodnight to all roommates, or just me?” May breathed, feeling her hands wander of entirely their own accord, sliding up his arm, feeling the warm fabric of his sleeve gather slightly under the palm of her hand.

“I don’t have any other roommates,” he said, voice impossibly low and soft as he stated the obvious.

“But if you did?”

His face leaned in even closer for a moment, if it was even possible, and he watched the way her lips parted for him. But he pulled away at the last second, smirking as he caught her eyes narrow in disappointment at the almost-kiss. “Then it’d be just you.”

Well, if he wanted to play that game, making her wait for it, May could comply. Her hand slowly dragged higher up his arm and came to rest at his shoulder for a moment before sliding further to his neck. Oh, how she reveled in the way he pulled her closer in response. “Just me?” She asked, leaning in with the words, letting her top lip just barely touch his, only to pull away right after.

His breath hitched slightly, almost imperceivably, and his fingers twitched against the small of her back as May’s thumb ran small circles across the side of his neck, coming to a pause on his carotid artery where she could feel his heartbeat. His jaw clenched slightly as he took a controlled breath in, dangerously lurid eyes betraying him.

May remembered hearing about green flashes at sunset, some sort of trick of the light that caused an impossible green flare of light above the shimmering liquid sun.

She was pretty sure, if she ever saw one, it would be underwhelming in comparison to his irises gazing into hers.

She was obsessed with the way he looked at her. She was obsessed with the clench of his jaw and his hands on her body and each deep breath he took in response to her touching his neck.

May was obsessed with what she did to him.

The hitch of his breath, the twitch of his fingers, the light tense of his muscles at the sensation should have been too slight for her to notice, even at such a close proximity. There was no way she should have noticed.

But May could feel it, as if his body were her own. As if she was so deeply in-tune with him that every single thing he felt, she felt as well.

She wondered if he could feel the way her heart pulsed in telltale rhythms, keeping time with his own, or if he, too, felt the hazy heat seeping into every single inch of her skin.

May couldn’t tell if she wanted to stay like this forever, or if one more moment like this, with his lips apart from hers, would kill her.

As if reading her mind, his head angled a bit more to shorten the already-tiny space between their lips, but still he held back, stopping at the precise moment right before their lips touched. Was he making her wait and play on his terms, or did he want her to take control and make the first move?

He spoke again before she could act on her decision to take control and make the first move. He was as close as he possibly could be without kissing her. “Is this how you would say goodnight to other roommates?” he asked softly, lips just barely brushing against hers as he passed her own question back to her. His voice was barely audible, as if speaking anything above a whisper would break the moment they’d encapsulated themselves in. As if anything above a breathy murmur would make the dim lights flicker or the moving boxes fall over and it would shatter the moment. As if anything above that would change just how damn close he was to her.

“Just you,” May breathed, pursing her lips on the word ‘you’ so that they gently pressed Drew’s.

And with that, he gave in.

His lips fully met hers, gently at first. Short and soft, pulling away for split seconds before coming back, as if he couldn’t bear to be away for too long. He kept coming back.

Slowly.

Gently.

Rhythmically.

She met him back each and every time. He let out a low, content hum, almost a purr, and she could feel it reverberate. In response, she deepened the kiss, devoid of any thought whatsoever.

There was nothing else but him. All she felt was him.

His lips against hers, his hand pressing into her back as if close wasn’t close enough, the rumble of his voice in his throat as he’d hummed, the fibers of his sweatshirt under her hand and the pulse of his heartbeat as their chests pressed together.

There was nothing else. If Flygon had knocked over the entire kitchen cabinet in the other room, May wouldn’t have noticed. If there was a car crash on the streets below their apartment, she wouldn’t hear a thing.

All she could hear was his voice.

“May.” He spoke her name like a holy prayer, a sacred oath. He said it with such devotion; reverence.

She was addicted to the way he said her name. She wanted to hear him say it over and over and over again. She wanted to hear her name in every way his lips could twist the single syllable; in whispers and yells, laughter and moans, sighs and pleas, casually and intimately, like she was a saint and like she was a sinner.

But that could wait- to say her name, he’d need his mouth free, and May wasn’t willing to give that up yet.

She lightly, suddenly, playfully, nipped at his bottom lip, and she felt him melt into the sensation. Something in May clicked, it shifted. She wanted more.

May surged forward, taking him by the shoulders and by surprise as she kissed him again, pushing him back towards the parallel wall from the one she had just been on. She met his lips as his back hit the wall with a soft thud. Her momentum didn’t stop, though, and her body crashed into his, their hips colliding like rolling waves in the ocean. Drew damn near moaned into her mouth, and she could feel him smiling against her lips as if this was all he’d ever wanted.

And maybe it had been, looking back.

His hair was still damp from his shower as she ran her fingers through it, breathing in the scent of the soap on his skin in-between the brief pauses of their locked lips. A feverish sweat had taken its place on her skin, in her palms, on her face, across her body… god. May quickly took her hands off of him and broke apart just long enough to peel her flannel off and toss it to the ground, leaving her in a camisole, but she didn’t care. The rush of cold air on her searing skin was a blessing. She was on fire, and Drew was gasoline, alcohol, kerosene, a slow-burn blaze that smoldered across her flushed skin with every lingering touch.

But she was left burning even brighter than before as his fingertips trailed the newly bare skin across her upper back and the nape of her neck. He leaned forward, back leaving the wall. His other hand caressed the curve of her waist- May’s breath caught with a light jolt as his thumb dragged down her side, against every rib, catching a sensitive spot on her side that she didn’t know she had. In response to her light gasp, he made that low purring sound again as his lips found their way to her neck. Immediately, his hand ran down her side again, seeking out that same spot that had made her breath catch.

His mouth didn’t leave her skin for a second. May threw her head back, giving him full access and invitation to her neck. She ran her hand through his hair again, pulling his face closer to her skin. A hot shiver rushed across her body as his tongue slicked against her throat.

Somehow it was numb and vivid at the same time. The entire world was greyed out, but also in flourishing vibrant colors she’d never seen before. It was like a liminal space where nothing else existed, just the sensation of every single cell sparking alive under his touch.

His lips formed against her neck, pulling slightly, leaving his mark. She’d wear the forming bruise like a necklace, appreciating the ways that the colors adorned her skin.

He moved down, leaving another on her collarbone. Her grip on his hair tightened a bit, and he took a sharp inhale as it pulled slightly.

“Pull harder next time,” he dared her, words muffled against her skin before he started back on her neck.

“Drew…” Her voice came out dangerously close to a whimper.

Piercing eyes met hers as he pulled away at the sound of his name. Drew’s face was flushed a sinful shade of crimson that May thought went well with the cream color of the wall she’d had him against.

She wondered how that shade of red would look against every other surface in the house.

His neon eyes, gazing into hers with a sweltering intensity, confirmed what she already knew. He was giving her permission, but also a soft warning.

If they didn’t stop now, they likely wouldn’t stop at all.

Once again, it was like having an entire conversation silently.

She wanted to reach for his doorknob and see what not-stopping looked like. Felt like. Sounded like. Tasted like. But before she could follow her thoughts to where they prowled behind the closed door, that tiny thread of rationality and logic from before caught up to her. The thread of good-decision-making wrapped around her wrist, slowly dragging it away from where her fingers really wanted to play with the hem of his shirt.

As if he could read her thoughts, he slowly backed up with a lightly shuddering breath, pressing his back flat to the wall and sliding down until he sat on the floor. After a moment of hesitation, May joined him, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder.

Silence danced between them for a moment. She was out of breath, out of focus, out of sorts. She didn’t know what to think, what to feel, what to hope for, what it meant. She couldn’t gather her thoughts, or even have any at all. All she could do was relive how it felt when he’d kissed her, touched her, wanted her-

He broke the silence first. His voice, though he attempted to keep it somewhat breezy and light, still held a sultry intensity to it, as if he couldn’t shake the heat that had hit a fever pitch between them. “I think we did this out of order.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Moving in together before the first kiss.” The rest went unspoken- and the second kiss, and the third, and fourth and fifth and sixth and so many that they’d lost count. May felt the tinge of red reappear on her face.

As soon as the red tinged her face, though, the blood rushed out of her cheeks with a chill, leaving her pale with a thousand realizations at once.

With a groan, May leaned her head back, letting it hit the wall with a light thud. “Fuck, I just thought of something. The next coordinating circuit starts in a couple months, and we can’t compete together in every contest, so there’s going to be some long-distance if we go through with this, and Coordinators Weekly is gonna be so annoying when they find out-” She froze, a pit of dread opening in her stomach. “-Oh my god. Max and Harley are going to be unbearable when they find out, and I’m going to be in so much trouble if mom and dad find out from tabloids instead of from me, but…ugh.”

At that, Drew froze, shooting her a wary glance. “Wait. May. Did you ever get around to telling them that it was me you were moving in with? They at least know we were planning on living together before this, right?” He frowned, a heavy sigh leaving his lungs as he realized the answer before she confirmed it. “Not looking forward to breaking both of those things at once.”

“I know, and I was planning to get around to it, but stuff came up, and you know how they get about things-”

“Damn it, Maple, your dad’s going to kill me,” Drew mumbled, rubbing his temples- but still there was an undercurrent of fondness through his words. He shook his head, a resigned smile tugging at his lips. “That’s the May I fell for, alright. Forgetting something important so it’s a bigger problem for later. But you know what? We can figure all that out tomorrow.”

He paused for a moment, a familiar look on his face- he was deep in thought. She could see it in the way his eyes stared at nothing in particular, like he was solving a problem ahead of him that only he could see, putting together invisible puzzle pieces. “There’s a lot to figure out, but I… I guess it’s like when we were assembling the chairs earlier today,” he started slowly, eyes still focusing ahead of him. “You complained about there being too many pieces, and not all of them fit together easily at first, but we made it work, right? There was just some assembly required. This is going to be just like that.”

May felt a smile break at her lips. “Real poetic. You’re saying romance is like a chair?”

“That’s not what I said at all, and you know that.” He slowly, casually, brought his arm around her shoulders. He was trying to play it cool, but May grinned as she saw the flush of red across his cheeks. He continued. “I think that metaphor was very eloquent of me.”

“Eloquent.” May scoffed, leaning into him, resting her head on his shoulder. “What kind of person uses words like eloquent in a regular sentence?”

He turned his head, pressing his face into her hair softly. “The kind of person you’d make out with in a hallway, apparently.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“You seemed pretty ready to suffer me two seconds ago.”

“See? It’s already gotten to your head,” she said, a light laugh interspersing her words. “I’m going to have to shove you down a few pegs after this. Put you in your place.”

His lips brushed her ear all of a sudden, a darting return to the salacious heat they’d shared just moments ago. “Is that a promise?”

God. He knew exactly what he was doing. May bit her cheek, making an active effort to not put his lips to good use again, refusing to give him the satisfaction. Instead, she turned to face him, tilting her head to meet him in the eyes. “Hmm, see, we’re doing it out of order again, aren’t we?” she purred. “Shouldn’t you at least take me on a date first?”

“Tomorrow morning,” he said immediately, and May knew it wasn’t just because of the promise of putting him in his place and what that might have entailed. His face was genuine, eyes wide and hopeful, any lurid suggestion in his voice having given way to a rare keenness that she almost never saw from him. “Tomorrow. Let me take you on a real date.”

“You mean it?”

“I mean as much as you’ll let me.”

May’s hand found its way to his. “And what if I wanna let you mean a lot?” she asked softly, the weight of her words sinking between them.

His thumb traced her palm for a moment before he raised her hand to his lips, kissing the back of it. “Then I guess we’ll figure that out over coffee tomorrow.”