Chapter Text
"Are you paying attention? This is important.”
Azriel glanced up from scrolling, thumb still hovering over the screen. “I thought we were ordering pizza. I distinctly remember saying I don’t like banana peppers.” It wasn’t the taste, it was the look of them. They looked wrong on pizza, like pineapple, which he knew she liked. He had also said no to the pineapple, and she had looked at him like she might cancel their lease on the spot. He had relented and said that of course she could get it on her half, if she had to have it. But pineapple and garlic did not go together, in his opinion.
Gwyn sat down on the arm of the nearby couch and set her bare feet on its worn-out cushions. That couch had traveled here from his and Cassian’s old apartment, which meant it was more beaten up than the furniture that had come from Gwyn and Nesta’s apartment. “Pizza’s great but this is a momentous occasion. It calls for something with more memorability, more oomph.”
“You’re getting the wrong kind of pizza if you can’t remember it.” Azriel half-smiled but looked back down at his phone. “Also, we’ve had dinner together before.”
“Yes, when we were third and fourth wheeling with the Happy Couple,” Gwyn countered.
“And other times.” Like when their friend groups gone out together, meshing relatively well for how prickly Nesta could be. Azriel would be lying if he said that she and her friends hadn’t grown on him over time.
Gwyn waved a hand like she was wiping away his casual demeanor. “This is our first dinner as apartment buddies.”
“Then we get expensive pizza. We can go out to eat, if that’ll help this decision-making process.”
“Azriel. No.” Gwyn flipped her phone around toward him. She was using DoorDash to look up all the surrounding options, all of which were new to both of them. Before today, she had lived with Nesta over in the artsy part of town called the Rainbow while he and Cassian had an apartment downtown. Now they were a part of the riverfront crowd. “We have to order delivery because we have to eat here to celebrate moving in. Speaking of, we owe everyone else a pizza party, so that means we have to pick something else.”
Azriel arched an eyebrow at him. “Why?”
“Why to which one?”
“Why a pizza party?”
Gwyn pulled her phone back to herself, resting it on her knee so she could scroll. “To show our appreciation for how they lugged all our stuff up here.”
“That replaced a gym workout for Cassian, he’s fine,” Azriel said. “And they owe us.”
Gwyn’s eyes glinted with humor and agreement. “Nesta and Cassian do for falling in love and leaving us almost homeless except for our own ingenious planning. But everyone else might enjoy some kind of tangible thank you, and it’d be bad manners to leave those two out.”
“Because people would notice and judge us.”
“Bingo.” Gwyn teased. “Now, what are you in the mood for?”
Azriel kept his expression neutral even as he decided to grate her nerves for the hell of it. Part of him loved the way her cheeks glowed, highlighting her freckles, when she got irritated. “Italian.”
He ducked to the side to avoid the pillow that she hurled at his head. It was one of hers, a couch pillow that said ‘So many books, so little time.’ Her cozy book goblin style was a lot warmer than his minimalist approach, but when he was younger, living with Cassian and Rhys had taught him to tolerate clutter. Rhys was the worst, especially when they were pre-teens. He had serious collector tendencies, and he had been a Lego maniac.
“Unless you want delivery lasagna, pick something else,” she said. She dropped down onto the couch, draping her legs over the side, laying back and holding her phone up over her face. “Do you want me to give you options? As in read them to you?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll assume you’re listening intently.”
Little did she know that he always listened when she was speaking. It seemed to be something he couldn’t help, like paying attention to her was coded into his DNA.
Gwyn began to describe some of the local restaurants and diners that had delivery options, and most of them sounded good to him. He wasn’t particularly picky. He hadn’t had the chance to be that way growing up, and the trait hadn’t suddenly appeared when he was older.
“I think the sushi place or Taco-bout It sound the best,” she said, “What about you?”
“Are you going to throw another pillow at me if I say surprise me?”
Gwyn threw her arm outside like an octopus tentacle, flopping it around and catching nothing. “I’m out of ammo.”
“Excellent. Surprise me.”
“Ruiner of fun,” she accused, “I’m going to order you McDonald’s just for that.”
Azriel put down his phone. “That wasn’t an option.”
“Oh, I’m still getting the nice food. You can sit there with a Happy Meal, see what not making choices gets you. Enjoy your nuggets and apple slices and teeny bottle of milk.”
“No fries?”
Her grin was bright. “I’m taking your fries as a tax.”
Azriel’s reach was farther than Gwyn’s. The pillow that she had flung at him wasn’t far, so he picked it up and lobbed it back at her as she sprang up from the couch and headed toward her room. She yelped as it hit her in the lower back.
Whirling around, she pointed her phone at him. “Happy Meals for life!”
As Gwyn shut herself in her room to order his punishment, Azriel decided to start opening some of the moving boxes. Maybe she would give him some of her sushi if he started putting away the dishes. Or she would at least give him the fries, those were his, after all. If she went through with her threat, he hoped she ordered two Happy Meals. Maybe three. One was not going to suffice, he needed food…
An hour later, when the delivery bags showed up at their apartment door, Gwyn swiped them up. She glanced at the plates and silverware and pans that were laid out on the countertops of their kitchen, which opened into the living room. Azriel set a glass dish his mother had given him for Christmas beside a wine opener shaped like a bat that Isolde, Rhys’ baby sister, had insisted he needed.
“Nice work,” Gwyn said, setting the bags down on the end of the counter. “The table is still covered, so I guess we’ll eat standing…?”
“I didn’t know you wanted to eat at the table,” he said.
“I didn’t think about it until just now,” she said. She tossed him a grin as she opened the first bag. “We’ll have to christen it later.”
“It’s already been christened,” Azriel said. It was from his and Cassian’s apartment, and it had plenty of stains from various accidental “christenings”. Honestly, they probably needed a newer, better table when they could afford it. But she was in grad school and working part-time at a bookstore while he was working random cybersecurity jobs and bartending, so it could possibly be a few months before they could afford it.
“How many nuggets did I get,” he asked as he stepped closer to her, almost brushing her elbow. "Enough to survive on, at least?"
She looked up at him with those endlessly deep teal eyes and he reached for the bag to keep himself from staring. “It looks like they only picked up the sushi, imagine that,” she said. “We’ll have to share.”
“Imagine that,” he echoed, picking up a sushi roll similar to one he had ordered the last time he and Gwyn and Emerie had gone out with Nesta and Cassian.
It looked like he wasn’t the only one paying attention.