I'd Give Up Forever To Touch You

Chapter 3

Julie's POV

The guys took a couple of trips to bring their clothes in, all of them in black plastic trash bags. "Alright, who's going first?" I clapped my hands together, looking over the bags sitting in front of me, I think we'll need a total of maybe 10 or 12 loads of laundry. "I'll do mine first." Luke volunteered, grabbing one of his bags and following me into the laundry room, Reggie and Alex trailing behind.  "Okay, super simple. Put you clothes in the drum." I ordered him, pointing to the washing machine. Luke dumped his clothes inside and I braced for the funk Alex and Reggie said was already coming from Luke's clothes. He noticed and laughed. "I wouldn't put you through helping me wash my dirty clothes, Jules. These are the clean ones, well, cleaner anyways." 

"I appreciate that." Shaking my head a little bit. I explained the differences between the load types, only Alex seemed to pay attention to the details of any of my explanations. Likely so he didn't have a repeat of the pink shirt fiasco. Once I fully explained everything and noticed Reggie and Luke looking like I had spoken the whole thing in French, I repeated simply. "If you don't care about your clothes and just want them clean, put this many clothes in, put this much detergent in and set to normal load and cold wash." They both seemed to understand that. 

"Great. Show me." I stepped back and folded my arms, watching. I fully expected Luke to somehow mess it up even though I just told him how to do it. To my surprise, he followed directions and did it right. "Perfect, it's literally that easy." I explained, Luke smiled proudly, I swore he was puffing his chest up, I just rolled my eyes at him. "How will we know when it's done?" Alex asked as the machine began to whine with the sound of the washer filling with water. "It'll sing." The guys looked at me like I was crazy. "It plays a little song when it's done." "That's fancy, the old ones just buzzed." Alex looked at the thing with mild fascination. 

"Well, now that that's done, let's get to cleaning up those rooms." I bounced on my toes and made my way upstairs to the office, since that one needed more work than the others. The office had a desk cluttered with stuff, several boxes littered the floor around the room, the couch against the far wall was a nicer pull-out couch but there were old winter coats all over it. The whole thing just looked like someone just moved in and never unpacked anything. Since mom died, no one has really used the office. 

"What is all this stuff?" Reggie asked, opening the box closest to him, pulling out a handful of papers. "I'm not really sure, the office hasn't been used much since my mom died. Some of it is probably her craft stuff, but other than that I'm not sure." I walked over to the desk and looked at the photos peeking out of the mountain of stuff. Carlos and I running in a park, one of Carlos and dad playing catch in the yard, another of mom braiding my hair. "You, okay?" Luke said under his breath, he was suddenly beside me. "Hm? Yeah, fine." I said, snapping from my memories, I could feel a couple tears on my cheek, I wiped them away with the back of my hand. 

"So, let's just start clearing stuff maybe." I cleared my throat and turned away from the desk. "Can one of you get a couple of trash bags? We're probably going to have to donate and throw some stuff away." Luke immediately answered by leaving the room to go get bags, I didn't even really try to hide my frown then, instead I just turned to the pile of coats on the couch. 

I started making separate piles for the clothes but realized they were all ones that needed to be donated. Luke reappeared with a handful of trash bags. "So, this actually looks way easier than I originally thought. If one of you wants to just toss all these coats in a bag and take them downstairs, then all of these boxes can go into the attic. I'll start one the other rooms." 

I gestured vaguely at the room as I talked before leaving the room to go look over the spare rooms. The other rooms were only really messy, I don't remember the last time they were used really. Flynn and I sometimes used them for sleepovers, Tia stayed with us for a while after mom died, sometimes Carlos has friends over I guess, any of those things could've been why the rooms were like this.