Work Text:
Mike did his writing the most on Friday evenings when he knew he could make up the sleep the next day. It became a habit that he would write through the night until he passed out at his desk.
One Saturday in the earlier months of Mike and Max living together, Mike had woken up in the morning with his cheek sticking to his notebook. He had then crawled into his bed. His bed was cold.
After a moment of bleary decision making Mike left his bed, his room, walked down the landing and knocked on Nancy’s - well at this point Max’s - door. Max called him in, when he entered he saw her up and dressed and absorbed in a letter she was writing. She gave him one distracted head bob of acknowledgement in her mirror.
Mike, no longer seeing the point in hesitating, lolopped across the room and fell into Max’s still warm bed. The sheets still smelled like sleep. Max threw a ruler at him. He covered his head with her blankets.
Max said and did nothing more and Mike slept until noon.
~
A couple Saturdays later the same event occurred. Mike slunk from his own cold room to Max’s warm one and curled up, his head in her dent on her pillow.
~
It became an unspoken weekly tradition. Even if Mike had finished writing early and had slept that Friday night he would still shuffle down the hallway to Max’s room and have his Saturday lie in there. Max even started leaving the door open for him.
~
Usually Max was awake, dressed and busy doing something or other by the time the Wheeler boy had crawled into her bed. However, there was one Saturday when she was sick. Not hideously sick, just a bad cold meaning she didn’t get up from bed.
Mike shuffled in per usual, no longer bothering to knock, and paused when he realised she was still in bed. Max, surrounded by used tissues and her nose red, peered up at him.
She sighed, picked up a spare pillow and positioned it next to her in the centre of the bed as a childish barrier. She pulled open the blankets to let him in. He climbed in beside her, though he stayed on the furthest edge of the mattress.
Max sniffled and coughed. Even with the pillow barricade she also kept to her far end of the mattress.
Neither slept particularly well that morning, but it must be said that neither of them complained.