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Leo woke up cold. He tried to swallow the gross feeling in his mouth a couple of times, and curled onto one side. It didn’t go away.
From his new position he could see Jason curled up on a couch too short for him, one corner of his mouth glistening with drool, blonde eyelashes brushing the tops of his cheeks, and his head tucked into his chest to fit better. Leo dedicated a mental wince to him. His neck would hurt like a bitch in the morning.
The light through Piper’s translucent curtains dispersed easily into the room. Cars dragged along the road and whipped up the wind outside.
The air mattress was too inflated to comfortably give beneath him, but Leo wrapped his borrowed quilt around himself and ignored it.
He waited, on the edge of shivering, for 30 minutes before giving up. He knew it had realistically been four hours at max since they’d stopped drinking and watching old movies and actually gone to bed, and he didn’t full trust himself to magically warm himself up without setting Piper’s apartment on fire. That would be not good at best, and more likely, traumatic.
He contemplated just crawling under his boyfriend’s arm, but knew realistically that if the couch was too small for one of them, it was too small for both of them. And Leo kicked in his sleep. Jason hadn’t done anything recently to deserve that, except for maybe putting milk and sugar in his peppermint tea. Still though.
Leo leaned off his bed to reach for his phone with one outstretched arm, his stomach flattening the edge of the air mattress, and one elbow digging into into the carpeted floor. He pressed the lock button on the side. 07:13.
He threw off his quilt and sheet, stepping carefully around the mass of Piper’s clothes piled across the floor. If he was going to put effort into getting comfortable enough to sleep, he may as well start with a trip to the toilet.
The slight step up at the doorway to her bathroom caught him off guard, the way it always does, and he hissed when he stubbed his toe on it, as he always does.
“Not fucking again,” Leo grumbled, before pausing in interest at the fresh-out-of-the-grave quality his voice had taken on during sleep. “Oh, nice.”
When finished, he wasted no time in pushing Piper’s creaky old bedroom door open. Predictably, this was not a quiet manoeuvre. He shot a glance to Jason, who stayed soundly asleep. Good.
“Piper,” he whispered. There was no response. He waited an awkward thirty seconds, standing over her and feeling like a child with a nightmare. Then he grabbed her shoulder and shook her gently. “Piper.”
She grunted and flipped over to face him, tucking her blankets under her chin with her eyes still shut, so he continued. “I’m cold.”
She cracked one eye open. “Oh shit.” She whispered. One arm emerged from the quilts to pat her bed frame, and she managed to slightly pull open one of the drawers built into it. “There should be blankets in there…and my trackies are on the floor somewhere, you can wear those.”
Leo dislodged the folded blanket from under two towels and a pillow case. “Thanks Pipes,” he whispered, blanket under one arm, as he snagged her sweatpants off the floor with the other.
She rolled onto her back and tugged the blankets over his face. “Sure.”
He shut the door behind him, wriggled into her sweats in the living room, and draped the additional blanket over the mattress. Then he crawled in and fell promptly asleep.
Leo woke up warm. Voices blurred together in his right ear, and the mattress had partially deflated underneath him in the past few hours. He craned his neck to glance up at the TV, and it cracked. He just caught the logo for Wife Swap, before the program cut to ad break.
“Good morning,” and Leo could hear the smile in Jason’s voice when he spoke.
Leo rolled to his other side, to face the couch. Jason sat with his legs draped over the couch arm rest, and his head tucked into Piper’s neck. She’d looked up from her phone, to grin at Leo.
He grinned back, threw off his covers again, and stood. “Is it?”
She checked her phone again. “No, it’s 12:51.”
Leo clambered over Jason’s legs, to nestle between them and the couch backing, with his back to Jason’s chest. Jason wrapped an arm around Leo’s waist and kissed the crown of his head.
“That’s what I thought,” Leo said.