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“Reggie,” Alex begs as gently as he can. “Pleeease, stop.”
The bass player, for his part, does seem to be genuinely confused by Alex’s request. He lifts his head off the pillow and squints at him, his sleep-riddled brain trying to figure out what’s going on.
Alex sighs. He probably shouldn’t have said anything – probably should have just sucked it up and let Reggie get his sleep. Because at least he’s trying to sleep, unlike the guitarist up in the loft who keeps breaking the promise he made when he swore he wouldn’t make any noise.
Reggie’s voice is syrupy and deep with sleep as he moves closer to Alex, misinterpreting his request. “You’re warm.”
Being described as warm is almost enough to make Alex laugh. Even in California summers, he practically lives in his sweatshirts, because his circulation is about as bad as it can get, and even if he’s not wearing one, he has a jacket on standby. Luke and Reggie insist that he’s like a space-heater and that that’s why he has to be in the middle when they share the couch, which doesn’t add up. If Alex’s body creates any heat, apparently only other people can feel it. Like now, as Reggie presses closer to him in, seemingly with the sole purpose of thawing out the artic glaciers he calls his feet.
He's calculating how to make it through the rest of the night like this when the twanging of a guitar string snapping followed by a soft “Shit!” from the loft has him gently removing Reggie from his side as he stands up from the couch, barely holding it together as he makes his way across the room.
Because it’s midnight, they’re all crashing in the studio for various reasons, and all that Alex really wants is to sleep. At this rate, he might only get to rest if he murders two of his closest friends, which is not how he pictured his night going.
The sound of the garbage bag he rummages through has Luke leaning over the edge of the loft in a second, staring down at him.
“Oh, sorry. Did I wake you?”
When Alex glares at him, Luke offers a sheepish smile.
It’s so easy, sometimes, to accidentally be mean to his friends. And it is accidental, for the record. This has been the worst summer of their lives, and their all on edge, which has brought out the worst of them in different ways. If Alex thinks this summer might drive him over the edge, he can only imagine how poor Bobby feels, because he’s the one who has to deal with them living in his garage.
Alex finds himself softening his gaze as he looks up at his friend. He’s still annoyed, but there’s got to be a more constructive way to solve this problem than by causing Luke’s rejection sensitive dysphoria to act up, without making Reggie shut down, and without him pushing along on no sleep until he snaps like Luke’s guitar string.
“Just . . . give me a sec. Okay? I’m gonna fix this.”
Luke raises an eyebrow but stays firmly in the loft. Good.
Finally, Alex’s hand brushes just what he was looking for: the ugly pair of long, fuzzy socks that his grandma sent him for Christmas. They’re too small for him, not even allowing him to put his heel into the squarish part where it’s supposed to go, but hopefully they’ll do the job.
“What’re you doin’?” Reggie asks, sitting up and blinking the sleep from his eyes as Alex pulls back the blankets and starts trying to shove his friend’s feet into the socks as gently and with as much dignity as he can. He curls his legs up as soon as the socks are covering his feet, before Alex can even be sure that they fit him correctly. Either way, Reggie doesn’t seem to mind.
“Is that warm enough?” Alex asks.
“They’re soft,” Reggie replies, face half-buried in his pillow.
Taking that as a win, Alex puts the blankets back over the bass player and makes his way to the loft ladder. He’s determined to climb up there and drag Luke down to the couch if he has to, but by the time he makes it across the room, his friend has just landed at the bottom of the ladder. At least he has the decency to look halfway ashamed, even though it would be more convincing if he didn’t look so curious all the time.
“Luke,” Alex says, concentrating on making his voice gentle. “We all need to go to sleep.” Before Luke can protest that he’s not tired – just like he’s done every night this summer, only to be irritable the whole next day until he crashes at some point in the afternoon – Alex moves forward with open arms and wraps them around his friend.
Luke struggles for only a second. “What’re you doing?” The guitarist’s body relaxes, despite his halfhearted attempts at resisting, as the drummer leads him to the couch.
From a very young age, Alex realized that he and Luke came from very different families. Luke’s parents are huggers, and everyone in the Patterson household is always bumping into each other in some way to show affection. It was a sort of culture shock to Alex when he and Luke became friends, when he started going to his friend’s house and having people pat him on the shoulder or hug him for seemingly no reason – much different from the Mercer family custom of a quick side-hug on the way out the door in the mornings.
Luke likes human contact. Craves it, even. Alex remembers one of his teachers mentioning people having different love languages once, and it’s not hard to guess what Luke’s is. And ever since he ran away from home, it hasn’t been hard to notice that he’s sort of touch starved.
Somehow, Alex manages to maneuver them back to the couch without breaking their hug. He only lets go of Luke to lift the blankets so he can take his place in the middle, and his hug has calmed Luke down so much that he doesn’t even have to worry about the other boy trying to make a run for it. That would be bad, and then the night would definitely end with a few less people in their friend group.
Reggie throws an arm over Alex and presses his (now thankfully sock-clad) feet against his calves. Alex doesn’t even have to try to embrace Luke again, because the other boy has already pressed himself into Alex.
Luke starts to say something, but Alex shushes him. Once you get Luke to be still and to be quiet, he’s usually out like a light. They’ve got the still part, and Alex is so exhausted that he’s not going to risk his friend skipping the second step – because the only thing worse than Luke trying to be quiet in the loft while everyone else sleeps is a Luke who stays awake on the couch and tosses and turns, shaking the whole thing, while Reggie and Alex get kicked and elbowed around.
“Just . . . thanks,” Luke sighs, his voice having taken on that soft quality that only comes in the moments before sleep, when a person is so hazy that they can’t tell if they’re actually speaking or just dreaming. “I actually am kinda tired.”
Alex reaches up and smoothes back Luke’s bangs. “Me too.”
“Then shut up,” Reggie mumbles from beside them.
He might laugh, but sleep has already started to drape itself around Alex like a gauzy blanket, and he can’t tell if he does or not. The next thing he knows, everything is dark and quiet, and he and his friends have drifted off to sleep the way they should have hours ago, having finally found familiarity amongst the jagged edges of uncertainty that the past few weeks of summer have thrown at them.