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Gabe’s car was too small.
“Why didn’t we bring the truck?” Jack grumbled as they pushed the back seats down, popped the trunk, tried everything they could to fit their new bookshelf into Gabe’s fucking clown car. “Why did we bring the goddamn Prius?”
Gabe shrugged, his face inscrutable behind the bone-white mask. For all Jack knew, he was grinning from ear to ear. He did love it when Jack got riled up. “You wanted to save on gas, old man.”
“Fuck,” Jack muttered, because he was right. He was fucking right, as usual.
“Turn it that way!”
“No, the other way, idiot!”
“You’ll scrape the – fuck, you’ve scraped the wall!”
Jack groaned, glad Gabe couldn’t see how hot and sweaty his face was behind the visor. His knee was aching, his lower back was threatening to pop, and a sharp pain was starting to develop behind his eyes.
“Of course today is the day the elevator’s broken,” he muttered. It had been working fine when they left, but now there was a big ‘out of order’ sign across it, and he really wished he and Gabe had picked an apartment a little closer to the ground than the seventh floor.
“There should be at least three more screws,” Gabe muttered, peering this way and that to try to find them on the cluttered floor. There was paper and wood everywhere, and Jack had already knelt on at least two screws and the corner of one of the shelves. He glowered at Gabe from his position on the couch, nursing the bruise he’d gotten when the half-built shelf decided to fall over and hit him on the shin.
“Tactical visor activating,” Jack said, and glared around. His visor pinpointed two of the missing screws – they’d rolled under the couch – and the last one was still taped to the forehead of Gabe’s mask. He was wondering when Gabe would notice. At this stage, it was the funniest thing to happen all day, so Jack was going to let it be for a little longer. He was also wondering when Gabe would notice that he’d made quite the stuff up some time back and half the shelves were now on backwards.
“We’re fucking war heroes,” Gabe said grumpily as he fumbled with the screwdriver and attached another shelf, “and it’s taken us over an hour to put together a goddamn bookshelf.”
“It’s because you’re old,” Jack pointed out, neglecting the fact that he was the one who’d had to get up off the floor because his knees were too sore.
“Fuck you,” Gabe growled. “I can’t find the last fucking screw, this’ll have to do.”
Jack was going to relish this moment. He hauled himself off the couch and, ignoring the pain in his knees, knelt down next to his husband.
“Jack–”
“You put the shelves on backwards.” He picked the screw off Gabe’s mask and handed it to him, and had approximately five seconds to get to his feet and make a run for it before Gabe figured out his mistake, swore at him, and gave chase.