𝕋𝕙𝕖 ℍ𝕠𝕦𝕤𝕖

𝕀𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕝𝕦𝕕𝕖 | ᴛʜᴇ ʙᴇᴅʀᴏᴏᴍ

- a few months previously -

Dave quietly walked into the bedroom and shut the door behind him.

Ethan was already reading in bed like he usually did. He had a really routine schedule... It was Monday, so he knew Ethan would be in bed reading by nine that night.

Dave couldn't imagine living his life that way... It was so predictable. It seemed stable, sensible, and responsible. Maybe that was why it never occurred to him to live his own life that way. Sharing a bedroom with someone was so weird... It made him realize how differently people went about their day.

Nobody really raised him, nobody really transferred any life skills to Dave -- he had to figure out everything on his own, so seeing Ethan go about his days so maturely really made him feel like a hot fucking mess sometimes.

Ethan was raised right, and it showed...

Dave walked over to his bed and threw his stuff on the shelf next to it. He sat down before laying face up on the bed and looked at the ceiling for a while. With two beds in this room now, the dresser had to be moved out to the hallway. It was kind of annoying not having that much space... Dave used to always throw his stuff on the dresser before Ethan moved back in.

But at least he didn't have to pay rent anymore. It was a sweet deal. He wasn't complaining. It was just...weird.

He had been sharing a room with Ethan for about a week already. He was definitely the best option of the three when it came to rooming with someone. Dave liked Morgan and Liam a lot...in small doses. There was no way he'd survive living in a room with either of them. No way.

He hadn't learned too much about Ethan yet.

Ethan read a lot. He worked a nine to five, and it was his very first job out of college. Liam kept calling him 'mom' as a joke, but that was because he really was a little overboard on the taking care of people... Ethan's hobbies, from what Dave gathered so far, were reading and taking care of people-whether they wanted his help or not.

Dave noticed Ethan would always be the first one awake. He always made a big pot of coffee, and had breakfast ready for the rest of the roomies nearly every day. Even if you didn't want breakfast, he'd force you to eat breakfast, because he was adamant it was important... Ethan was really into cooking, too.

Ethan was just starting out in social work as a career. He still had a lot of ladders to climb, just having graduated and all, but when Dave found out what Ethan did for a living he had tried not to laugh... What a perfect job for this guy. He needed to take care of people.

Ethan was a very sweet, responsible twenty-one-year-old boy, living together with him in a tiny bedroom... That was all he really knew about Ethan.

He was still confused about why Ethan was letting him stay there for free.

He seemed like such a sucker, adopting three gay boys into his house rent-free so he could take care of them... And all they did was get the place messy and party almost every night. Ethan loved it all, none of it ever annoyed him... Dave didn't get it.

"How was your Monday?"

Ethan always asked him how his day went... It used to piss him off the first few days they shared the room. It was really none of Ethan's damn business how his day went, but he had gotten used to it.

No one in Dave's life had ever asked him something like that. Only casually, not caring to hear the answer, or using it as a greeting... Ethan wasn't just asking him to disregard his answer, or asking him for the hell of it-Ethan asked him every single damn day, and for some reason he actually fucking cared about what Dave responded with. That's what took him so long to get used to... Ethan was really intense for Dave to deal with. Ethan was everything Dave wasn't, and his upbringing was the complete opposite of Dave's.