when the sun came up

viii.

5. His friends are absolute sweethearts.

Though she doesn't find that out for some time, actually.

After Emma had well and truly settled in, Grayson and Olivia got into the habit of treating the loft like their second home. Emma couldn't count how many times she'd walked in from class to find them setting up camp in the lounge preparing for a movie marathon (without her knowledge or consent, of course), or the number of nights she'd passed out after long in-depth chats with the two of them in her enormous queen size bed.

It looked like Ethan only bore their presence grudgingly – he was always complaining about all the hair in the bathroom or grumbling over them hogging the television – but Emma knew he secretly lapped it up. Grayson was his darling twin brother, after all (there were normal siblings who were close, and then there were the Dolan siblings; they were on another level, honestly) and he and Olivia had always been on friendly terms (Emma tried to avoid thinking about that one time they'd apparently gotten, uh, extra friendly).

So from the get-go, the girls were always lounging around the place, whether or not Ethan or Emma were actually home. But for one reason or another, it was some time before Ethan brought his friends around, which meant that Emma didn't get to meet them until her first month or two at the loft had passed.

Grayson, ever the social planner, had suggested having a cards and board games night so that the whole gang could be introduced. It'll be nice and relaxed, he'd said, just some drinks and snacks and good company, a chance for everyone to get to know each other.

On the night, Emma, who wasn't usually a nervous person, was surprised to find herself feeling a little edgy.

"What's wrong?" Gray asked, when she caught Emma fussing over the refreshments for the third time. Ethan had just sent through a text; the boys were apparently fifteen minutes away. Elizabeth was already with them at the loft, checking out the latest basketball scores on the television. "Stop worrying, they're just Ethan's mates. And they're really cool."

Emma nodded. "Yeah, I know," she said with an discomfited smile, dropping the napkins and finally stepping away from the dining table. Even she couldn't understand why she was so caught off-balance by the whole thing. Why did she even care what Ethan's friends thought of her? God, she needed to get a grip.

But as Emma soon found out, Grayson was once again right (could he give it a rest for once? Emma was tired of being the object of Gray's smug I-told-you-so vibes). Ethan's friends were cool, though in a different way to what Emma had been expecting. She'd kind of thought his friends would be more like him: snarky, acerbic, vexing. But they were the complete opposite.

Jasper was – there were no other words for it – adorable. He fully tackled Emma into a hug the second he met her, exclaiming, "Finally! We get to meet the girl who's making Ethan such a grump!", which amused her to no end and which prompted a hilariously disgruntled sigh from Ethan.

With his ever-constant chatter and excitable nature, Jasper kind of reminded Emma of what having a younger brother would be like. He told Emma that she was already his new favourite person, before moving on to devour half the refreshments table, an action for which Grayson would later loudly rebuke him.

Mike, Jasper's best friend, was just as lovely but in a slightly less enthusiastic manner (which made sense; no one could be quite as enthusiastic as Jasper, after all). He waved shyly at Emma when he met her, and the two of them would go on to spend a good portion of the night bonding over their studies, prompting collective moans and shouts of "you boring bastards" from the rest of the group."

Mike was some kind of super genius – not that he said anything of the like, humble as he was, but Emma caught on pretty quickly – and while his major was Information Technology (or, as Jasper stage-whispered, "knowing how to code and hack into every website known to man"), he also dabbled in the sciences, particularly the various branches of Physics and Biology. Though she made sure not to tell anyone, Mike was Emma's secret favourite of the boys.

Nathan was Ethan's best friend, and though she knew that was his first name, he was probably the biggest surprise of the night; he was as quiet as Ethan was outspoken, as level-headed as Ethan was rash.

It intrigued Emma initially to think of the two of them being so close, considering how little they seemed to have in common, but then it all seemed to fall into place the longer she observed them. He and Ethan were good for each other; they balanced each other out, and sometimes it made her come over all warm and fuzzy (though she'd die before admitting it) when she saw them engaged in their brutal, if good-natured, banter.

The games night was a hit, to Gray's delight. Olivia whooped everyone's ass at poker, thanks to her superb poker face (which sent shock and awe through the group; they never even came close to guessing what her odds were each round), Nathan won Clue in an astonishingly short amount of time (Emma suspected he was a little too good at reading people, and it made her kind of nervous for some reason), and Ethan trounced them all at Scrabble – apart from Emma of course, who put up a good fight.

In fact, the two of them spent a good deal of the night fighting over pretty much everything, from the rules of different games to what they should play next to whose turn it was to get the ice out of the fridge. By the end of the night, Jasper had taken to calling them Mom and Dad, which probably would have embarrassed Emma had she been sober and in her right mind. But she wasn't – she was kind of tipsy and Ethan was just so infuriating. Ugh, just the sight of his stupid smug face and his stupid laughing eyes made her want to... want to... well. Smack that smirk right off, by any means possible.