ethan & emma: talking with you.

The Next Level

A/N: If you're not a fan of smut, I'd suggest skipping this chapter~

Emma didn't intend to spill the coffee all over her shirt, but she had always been clumsy as shit, so she supposed it was inevitable. It was only sad that Ethan had to witness it.

She was lounging back against his couch, her focus on the computer in her lap. This was the position she ended up in most days, given the obscene amount of time it required to edit a 15 minute video out of almost an hour of footage.

The sun had set outside hours ago and almost all of the lights in the house were still on. That was one of Ethan and Grayson's bad habits. Sometimes Emma wondered how they functioned as adults, but then she reflected on how sometimes she literally forgot to lock the door when she left her apartment and resolved not to judge them too harshly.

She was editing the rough cut of her accurate school lookbook, and it wasn't turning out like she planned. It wasn't funny at all, and her dancing made her physically cringe back into her seat. She was vaguely aware of Ethan sitting on the other side of the couch, just as absorbed in his laptop, and she reached for her coffee, eyes still on her screen.

Lifting it up to her mouth, she scoffed unexpectedly at the way she looked in the video, and--

"Ouch - fuck," Emma exclaimed, jerking the coffee cup away from her body. A giant brown stain had splashed onto her white shirt and was rapidly trickling down her boobs onto her stomach. "Oh my fucking god."

Ethan looked up, pulling out his headphones. "Oh shit. You good?"

"Yeah," Emma said, setting her laptop down next to her and yanking out her AirPods in disgust. "Fuck. I'm a mess. I just ruined my shirt."

Ethan tried to look concerned, but Emma could see him biting back a smile.

"Don't laugh at me! This was one of my favorite shirts. I want to fucking die. What's the point of living any more?"

"Relax," Ethan said. "Why don't we just put it in the washer and see how it looks afterward?"

"Well..." Emma scoffed, pulling her shirt away from her body to avoid getting any of the sticky liquid onto her skin. "That'd be the smart thing to do, but since when have I ever been smart?"

"Fair point," Ethan said, and Emma scowled at him, kicking gently at his shins as she got up and walked past him.

"Here, do you just want one of my shirts?" Ethan asked as she headed into their laundry room.

"Yeah, I guess. God, my life is so fucking hard." Emma stripped off her shirt. She secretly thanked her past self that she thought to wear a nice bra before she came over.

She knew that Grayson was going to be gone tonight - he had a date scheduled, a second date in fact, with this new girl he was seeing, Lexie. She was the daughter of some producer who worked on the show Riverdale, and apparently Grayson was sort of in love with her. Yesterday Ethan had been teasing him mercilessly about it, and Emma wondered if it was in part to get him back for how much Grayson had teased them about their relationship.

So when Ethan invited Emma over to hang out and edit tonight, she made sure she showered, shaved literally everywhere, washed her hair. Emma usually came over to hang out at their house, meaning that they were almost never alone at night. So she'd put on one of her cute white shirts, a shirt that was now irrevocably ruined. Great. Just her luck.

Ethan walked into the laundry room, a gray shirt in hand. They had been getting more and more flirty over the past week, but they'd never really had the space or the time to dwell on it. Without anything distracting them, the tension that thrummed between their bodies was harder to ignore. Ethan cleared his throat before he spoke.